From Revolution to Moderation: The Long Road of Political Islam

Political Islam has undergone a major evolution since the late 1970s. In most Islamist groups, the objective of creating an Islamic state governed by sharia throughout the Muslim community has given way to an acceptance of state borders, the co-option of regimes, and the championing of representative democracies. In addition, violent methods have given way to negotiation and non-violent mobilisation. In many cases, today’s public perception of Islam is associated with the jihadism of a few fundamentalist groups such as Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (IS), regardless of the fact that the mainstream Islamist groups have undergone major changes, and that the context in which they exist is also very different. As we shall see, instead of jihadism or the ideological radicalism of the last century, political Islam today is much more represented by the moderation – both ideologically and politically – of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Morocco’s Justice and Development Party (PJD), an-Nahda in Tunisia and most of the parties or large movements. To understand this evolution and its place in the framework of the democratic popular uprisings that erupted in 2011, we will be using the sociology of power as an analytical framework that will facilitate the analysis and comparison of the different case studies presented in this publication.