Islamism and social movements in North Africa, the Sahel and Beyond: transregional and local perspectives

Most of the articles of this special issue were originally presented at the international workshop, ‘L’islam politique au Grand Moyen-Orient et en Afrique de l’Ouest: violence politique, querelles théologiques et enjeux géostratégiques’ (27–28 November 2014), Laval University, Quebec City, Canada.

Islamism has emerged as a major political force in the Middle East and North Africa after the Arab uprising. The rise of Islamism came as no surprise to scholars of the region and it emerged even in authoritarian countries where Islamist movements and organizations have been embedded in societies for decades (Filiu, 2011). Since 2011, Islamist movements and parties have been in the driver’s seat in some countries (Tunisia and Egypt), albeit for a short period of time, have become the official opposition in others (Mauritania), and have been amongst the leading armed groups in countries plagued by violent insurrections (Yemen, Syria, Libya) (Bonnefoy, 2011b; Campana & Hervouet, 2012). At the same time, West African states, especially those in the Sahel, faced significant social and political challenges, some of which were directly and indirectly related to those of their neighbours to the North and East. There too social movements, political parties and armed groups have been contesting incumbent regimes by invoking Islam. The interactions between the events that unfolded in Libya and Mali best epitomize the conflation of political upheavals that have rattled both sides of the ‘Saharan sea’. In a nutshell, the fall of the Qaddafi regime and the de facto partition of Mali cannot be understood separately. Finally, on the other side of the Mediterranean, in western Europe, Islamist organizations have been flourishing in a context of growing challenges to the integration of Muslims. Movements born in and associated with Muslim countries, like the Muslim Brothers (Al-Ikhwân al-Muslimîn), Hizb ut-Tahrir and Jama’at-i Islami, have a well-established presence in several European countries, illustrating the transnational character of these organizations and the diffusion of different discourses about Islam, including radical ones (Peter & Ortega, 2014).

Although social and political conditions vary from one region to another, relatively similar developments have contributed to changing the political landscape in many countries of North Africa, the Middle East and the Sahel. Debates and struggles amongst various Islam-inspired movements, and between these movements and governments, are on the rise, challenging an already precarious political, social and religious balance (Bonnefoy, 2011a). For instance, Salafi groups pose a challenge to the Muslim Brothers, one of the main expressions of political Islam in the Middle East for decades (El-Ghobashy, 2005). Thus, in Egypt, the Salafi Nour party, founded in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution, clashed with the Muslim Brothers, especially after it decided to side with the military while the Brothers were heavily repressed (McTighe, 2014). In the Sahel, well-established Sufi orders and rising Islamist movements are engaged in a fierce battle over the demographically exploding urban youth (Gomez-Perez, 2005; Gomez-Perez & LeBlanc, 2012; Kane 2007, 2008; Miles, 2007; Soares & Otayek, 2007). Muslim organizations are facing completely different challenges in West European countries in terms of participation in public debates. The social agendas of most of them regularly raise controversies and spark sharp debates about their ideological or organizational links with groups viewed as terrorists or supportive of violence in countries on the southern bank of the Mediterranean. Although views about the integration of Muslims into Western societies and the ways Islam should develop in European countries vary extraordinarily from one organization to another (Klausen, 2007; Roy, 1994), most of them are well integrated into Western social and political institutions, and some have even become the official interlocutors of Western governments. All these developments take place in a context of growing sectarian tensions (between Sunni and Shiites; between Muslims and Christians), regional geostrategic rivalries (Saudi Arabia and Iran; Morocco and Algeria, for instance), short-sighted Western interventions (in Libya and Mali, in Iraq and Syria, for instance) (Dadush & Dunne, 2011; Dalacoura, 2012; Kamrava, 2011), and growing social tensions about the role and place of Islamist movements and parties.

Overall, scholarly interest in the multifarious forms of political Islam has surged since the 1990s. The context of the ‘War on Terror’ has largely contributed to attract the attention of scholars and policy analysts to violent forms of political Islam, represented for many by Al-Qaeda and its affiliates (Volpi, 2011) and, since 2014, by Daesh (or ISIS, or IS) (Byman, 2015; Cockburn, 2015; Jabaree, 2015). However, groups and movements that define themselves along Islamic precepts, be they Sufi, Salafi, Reformist or else, are much more diverse and heterogeneous, putting forward different ideological discourses and political activities (Torelli et al., 2012; Utvik, 2014; Wiktorowicz, 2006). In light of these general observations, this special issue seeks to achieve two major objectives.

First, it intends to transcend regional boundaries by bringing together specialists of different regions, the Middle East, North Africa, the Sahel and European countries on the Mediterranean. The countries covered in this special issue include Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Mauritania, France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium. One could argue that some of these countries, specifically the Sahelian countries and some European ones, are located at the periphery of the Mediterranean basin. But we must bear in mind that the Islamic movements and organizations found in there and the individuals (leaders and regular members) in these movements, are part of and connected to numerous transnational networks linking them to North Africa and the Middle East. To list but a few examples, Sahelian Sufi orders such as the Tijâniyya connect Fez in Morocco to holy cities in Mauritania, Senegal, Mali and Guinea; numerous trafficking routes (drugs, weapons, food stuff, cars, and much more) link up multiple nodes across the Sahel, North Africa and western Europe; Tuareg mercenaries brought part of Qaddafi’s arsenal down to Mali; and Sahelian migrants who put their life in jeopardy while crossing the two deadly seas (the Saharan ‘sea’ and the Mediterranean) invite Europeans to reconceptualize how European-ness ought to be defined. This transregional perspective thus highlights how geographically dispersed religious groups are both deeply embedded within local contexts, and connected to a larger, universal Umma which, they believe, faces the same challenges and the same enemies. They see themselves as playing the same part in a shared global script. In addition, two of the three regions under scrutiny in this special issue, the Sahel and North Africa, have experienced tremendous political, social and religious changes, ranging from massive transregional uprisings, such as the Arab Spring or the transnational Jihadist violence across the Sahel. These changes are deeply rooted in the respective history of the countries examined in the articles of this special issue, but they definitively share common features. More specifically, these regions form a geographical continuum that facilitates the circulation of actors, practices, savoir faire and discourses, in a context where states are contested, sometimes through violent means. The example of the Egyptian Muslim Brothers is a case in point: the organization has had a tremendous impact in religious, political and social developments in neighbouring countries (Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jordan, Syria) (Lefèvre, 2013) but also further South, as in Mauritania, where the leading opposition party has close ties with the Brothers in the Mashrîq (Ould Ahmed Salem, 2013), in Senegal, where the Islamist party, also with ties to the Brothers, elected its first deputy in the National Assembly in 2012, even reaching the northern shore of the Mediterranean, in West European countries (Vidino, 2010).

Though it is undeniable that political events in the three regions under study are interrelated and that transnational and transregional dynamics matter significantly, we must bear in mind that actors and movements are also embedded in their local social, economic and political environment. Consequently, the second objective of this special issue is to prioritize micro-level analyses and a bottom-up approach. Its contributors have a specific knowledge of the movements and groups they study and a fine-grained understanding of the political and social context in which they operate. Drawing, for most of them, from in-depth fieldwork research, the articles of this special issue shed light on the strong embeddedness of these religious organizations, movements and parties into pre-existing social networks. Taking seriously the political and social contexts, contributors analyse the local and regional competition for legitimacy in which these parties and movements are engaged, examining their organization, their leadership, their strategies of recruitment and the repertories of actions and discourses they use. In so doing, they study how these groups mobilize in opposition to and challenge established political institutions and sometimes religious orders at the national and local level. They also focus on the obstacles and challenges they face and how they adapt to changing conditions.

Though Islamist movements in the Levant have attracted a good deal of scholarly attention, we need more research on their counterparts in North Africa and the Sahel, as well as in western Europe; our special issue addresses this gap directly. In North Africa, our contributors analyse groups and movements in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia; in the Sahel, the focus is on Mauritania, Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso; and in western Europe on France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium. It must be said, however, that our special issue does not cover all countries of interest in each of the three regions. Pragmatic reasons explain this choice, including the lack of space to treat them all. In any case, we believe that what we lack in numerical terms is compensated for by unique in-depth and thorough analyses of the selected countries.

The articles of this special issue contribute to the analysis of three distinct but interrelated political dynamics: (1) intra-group and inter-group power relations, ranging from accommodation to competition; (2) the institutionalization of the political game and the participation of Islamic organizations in it; (3) the relationship with violence.

(1) Contributors shed light on the complex and fluid power relations within and between groups. How do groups, be they Sufi, Reformist, Jihadist or else, ensure cohesion from within? How do they prevent defectors from exiting the group? How do they mobilize their followers and recruit new ones? And who actually speaks on behalf of these groups? Do various segments of the group vie for leadership and how is the competition settled? The micro-analysis perspective enables our contributors to provide fascinating answers to these questions about the inner working of these groups. They highlight the multifarious strategies Islamist social movements, Sufi brotherhoods, and Jihadi armed groups devise to organize themselves, elaborate their social networks, recruit sympathizers and militants, and fend off and defeat their rivals. In addition, they explore the menu of metaphors, symbols, narratives and rituals these movements draw from in their attempt to define themselves, to represent their contenders and their allies, and to identify the problems they seek to correct and the solutions they wish to implement, or in the words of the framing literature, to develop their diagnoses and prognoses (Bayat, 2005, 2007a, 2007b; Brossier, 2013; Ellis & van Kessel, 2009; Snow & Byrd, 2007). These strategies depend of course on the local and national contexts in which they operate, including the degree of inequities in the distribution of economic resources, the nature of the political regime, the strength and capacity of the state, and the intensity and salience of ethnic, linguistic, tribal and sectarian identities.

In the three regions, our contributors analyse the sometimes tense relationship between groups that invoke Islam as their raison d’être (Westerlund & Rosander, 1997). In such a crowded space, the complex set of alliances and counter-alliances is often times difficult to follow. This is true not only for the well-known rivalry between groups that define themselves as Sufi and as Islamists, even if vaguely defined, but also for the innumerable tensions within these two broad categories. The competition between them may relate to theological debates, but it also concerns their insertion within pre-existing social networks that they often attempt to transform from within. For instance, they disagree about and clash over a wide range of issues, including the role of women within their movement and in society more generally, the importance that should be granted to ethnic and tribal affiliations, the proper allocation of rights, duties and privileges across generations, the appropriate ways to share scarce local and national economic resources, the type of international and transnational relations that ought to be developed, and with whom (Augis, 2012; Brossier, 2004; Haenni & Tamman, 2008; Triaud & Villalón, 2009). Thus, although they define themselves as part of a global Umma, these groups are most of the time engaged in a competition that is strongly marked by the intensity of factional and ethnic rivalries, the power and historical foundations of lineages of power-brokers and notables (Joel Migdal’s ‘strongmen’, 1988) (Jourde, 2009, 2010; Lacher 2011; Villalón, 2010), by the transformation of land tenure and rural migrations, and by the micropolitics of the ever-expanding urban shanty towns (Bayat, 2007c; Holder & Saint-Lary, 2013; Ismail, 2000; Saint-Lary & Samson, 2011).

(2) Contributors also deal with the institutionalization of the political game and relationship to the state. To participate or not to participate in formal state institutions has been a recurring question for movements and groups whose discourses criticize harshly existing political institutions and leaders, as well as the religious elites that have collaborated with and legitimized the incumbent regimes (Brown, 2012; Cammett & Luong, 2014; Chernov-Hwang, 2009; Mecham & Hwang, 2014; Ould Ahmed Salem, 2013; Schwedler, 2006, 2011). Even when they finally decide to participate, the state, or powerful factions within the state, may be opposed to it, opting for naked repression, selective cooptation, or simply ignoring the requests. Islamist movements usually face three questions/options: to participate in institutionalized political struggles, be they political parties in the transition process or social movements willing to be part of an active civil society; to join the extra-parliamentarian opposition; to mobilize or not violence as a resource and a means (Rosefsky Wickham, 2004; Schwedler, 2006, 2011, 2013; Tezcur, 2010; Werenfels, 2014). These options are also partly constrained by each national government’s decision to authorize or prohibit participation through religious affiliation, and the radicalization their prohibition has engendered in some cases. Although some scholars have paid more attention to the role of political parties in North Africa, for instance (Storm, 2013), more needs to be said about the institutionalization of Islamic organizations, which have developed strong, but often strained, relations with national governments, as seen in Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal, as well as in many European states. These debates must be understood and analysed if one is to fully decipher the role these movements and groups play in countries of our regions of interest.

(3) Finally, the contributors address the critical issue of violence. This is unavoidable in light of the traumatic events that many societies in the regions under study are experiencing, be it in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Mali or Nigeria, in which violence and Islam are evoked in various ways. From 9/11 to today’s waves of violence in North Africa and the Sahel, political Islam has been often studied ‘through the lens of security and terrorism studies’ (Fish et al., 2010; Hafez, 2003; Paz, 2013; Phillips, 2009; Volpi, 2011: 5). But it is possible to problematize further the relationships between political Islam and violence, analysing the strategic use of violence, including terrorism, by a wide range of Islamist movements or parties, the discursive justification of violence, as well as the sharp debates resorting to violence entails within these organizations. Our contributors take part in this endeavour by paying attention to the localized and more microfacets of violence, its role as a concrete means to win local struggles, but also its discursive and symbolic dimension. This includes a closer look at how violence can trigger major debates within movements, how outbidding strategies can promote the use of violence, how it can engender the internal restructuring of these movements and groups as well as the redefinition of their goals. Violence can also become a mundane political strategy in the unfolding of struggles at the local level. It also means looking at the discursive power of violence, that is, how it becomes a resource in the labelling of the self and others, a rhetorical device to delegitimize others and justify more violence.

This special issue is multidisciplinary; its contributors come from diverse disciplines. However, they share some common theoretical perspectives. In fact, many contributors delve into the social movement theory. Following the approach McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) devised, articles of this special issue purposely do not limit the analysis to social movements strictly speaking, but include lobbying groups, political parties, Sufi brotherhoods and all kind of organizations that can mobilize to challenge the state (and at times collaborate with its representatives). By the same token, the types of mobilization examined range from peaceful to violent protests, including a civil war contest. Generally speaking, the literature on social movements has not been as widely used as first expected to examine Islamist-inspired mobilization, although the promising contributions of Wiktorowicz (2004), Bayat (2005), and Moghadam (2012), to name but a few authors, offer important insights into explaining relations within and between groups. We agree with Beinin and Vairel (2013:2), who underline that North Africa and the Middle East, let alone the Sahel, have not really attracted the attention of the social movement theorists, especially when it comes to analysing religious-inspired mobilizations. The articles of this special issue contribute to the theoretical debates over the pertinence to import social movement theories, originally build to explain and understand political and social processes in Western countries, to analyse religious-inspired mobilizations in the Middle East, North Africa and West Africa. Although they do not specifically draw from the McAdam, Tarrow, Tilly political process or contentious politics approach, they all consider the conversational character of contention (Tilly, 2002: 113), taking into account the relations between the different parties in conflict, the balance of power within each collective actor, as well as the interactions between each actor and its immediate political and social environment. The relationships all these movements have developed with the state represent a key component of their strategies. In addition, many contributors insist on the key importance of discourses, identities and ideational factors more generally. In other words, institutions and material constraints cannot explain everything. Let us not forget that Islam, as a set of ideas and rituals, is the defining feature of the movements contributors study. Furthermore, in the countries under study, Islam as an identity claim intersects gender, ethnic, regional, linguistic and status identities as well. Following authors who belong to the constructivist approach (Barth, 1969; Brubaker, 2002; Mahmood, 2005), our contributors look closely at how political entrepreneurs and even lay disciples or followers draw from various social categories in the course of their social and political interactions. These religious, gender or ethnic categories are meaningful for these various actors, though their meanings are context-dependent and can vary different in time and space (across places and people). They may be summoned, called upon, evoked or invoked as both constraints (to prevent defection from a group; or to justify state repression) and opportunities (to build new social movements; to mobilize new followers; to better resist the state; etc.).

Drevon’s contribution seeks to compare the strategies and repertories of actions employed by three Egyptian Islamist movements – the Salafi, the Muslim Brothers and the Jihadi – as they were impacted by two critical junctures, the 1981 assassination of Sadat and the 2011 uprisings. Question rational choice theory, he develops an actor-centred social movement approach, which draws on historical institutionalism. He shows how path-dependency, organizational constraints and political opportunities shape the mobilization strategies and socialization patterns of the three aforementioned organizations over time. He argues that pragmatic adaptation to opportunities and constraints, be they endogenous or exogenous, is not the only factor in designing an organization’s strategies. Although structural changes do affect these movements’ strategies, each of them responds differently to these changes, according to their respective historical legacies.

Biagini’s contribution also focuses on Egypt. It analyses an understudied phenomenon: the mobilization of women-only Islamist movements in the post-2011 context. More specifically, Biagini questions the radicalization of the Muslim Sisterhood, the Muslim Brotherhood’s women-only section, and its effects on its strategies and on the gender balance within the Muslim Brotherhood. Studying Islamist women activism in Egypt through the lenses of political opportunity structures, she demonstrates that state violence has been the main factor underlying radicalization, in a context in which the Muslim Brothers went into hiding again after the al-Sissi government banned them from the public space. The pragmatism of the Muslim Sisterhood played a strong role in the process: its leadership could rely on its solid relationships with the Muslim Brotherhood social base, and was therefore in a strong position to affirm the role of women within this organization, at a time where repression was first directed towards the male leadership. In other words, the post-coup repression opened up new opportunities for the Sisters. After having been relatively politically marginalized within the movement, the Muslim Sisterhood gained legitimacy and even became a bridgehead of mobilization in post-coup Egypt. Some of the most influential leaders of the Muslim Sisterhood even entered into some important Muslim Brotherhood decision-making bodies, while many of their male counterparts were incarcerated.

Islamist movements, including the Muslim Brothers, are not operating only in the Middle East and North Africa. In western Europe, the movement has left its mark. But in a West European context where the number of various Islamist and Sufi groups and subgroups is on the rise, managing the defection of followers while also attracting new ones is a tricky task. As Amghar and Fall show, the Muslim Brothers have put in place a strategy of expansion in Europe, where they have opened chapters in an effort to recruit new members within Muslim communities. Since then, they have aspired to become a social and cultural movement (Maréchal, 2013), but have faced many challenges, including the defection of a growing number of followers. Relying on the political sociology on engagement and disengagement, Amghar and Fall show that the Muslim Brothers’ discourse has lost part of its attractiveness in a context of intense competition between Islamist organizations, including those which never ‘settled’ in Europe but reach European Muslims through the Internet. Many militants consider that the political and social agenda of the Brotherhood does not offer proper solutions to the social and religious challenges Muslims face in European countries. By leaving this organization, they also question the organization’s totalitarian mode of governance and denounce the lack of opportunities for its members. Focusing on the intra-organizational aspects of a contested transnational Islamist organization, Amghar and Fall shed light on the Muslim Brothers’ (in)capacity to adapt to changing contexts in which competition between proponents of radical Islam has become increasingly fierce.

Merone draws from the social movement approach to analyse the rise and fall of a jihâdi movement in post-Ben Ali Tunisia. The case of Ansar al-Sharia provides a fascinating example to illustrate how a jihadist movement can embark upon a process of institutionalization, and eventually fail. Drawing from in-depth fieldwork research in Tunisia, Merone sheds light on two contradictory tendencies inherent in the Ansar al-Sharia jihâdist movement; one that tilts towards integrating the political process, nurtured by notions such as consensus-building, the necessity of strategizing, and acquiring popular legitimacy, and the other that is apocalyptic and non-compromising. The evolution of this movement was strongly impacted by the contradictory interactions amongst numerous actors, both at the national and regional levels. Leaders and militants found it increasingly difficult to resolve their internal tensions; the downfall of the Ennahda-led coalition and the growing success of jihadist insurgencies in Syria, Iraq and Libya eventually signalled the end of the institutionalization attempt: the ‘new jihâdi’ project, which aimed becoming a regular Islamic jamaa, or association, officially failed. The apocalyptic tendency won out; terrorist attacks against foreign targets (mainly tourist sites) and domestic ones (security and polices forces but also civilians) have set the new agenda.

Though the cases of Egypt and Tunisia, as our previous three authors have well demonstrated, have experienced significant levels of violence, Libya has reached a greater one. Willcoxon’s article analyses the conditions under which the Libyan transition failed, following Qaddafi’s overthrow and death. More specifically, Willcoxon focuses on the interplay between the structural conditions that prevailed between 2011 and 2014 and the strategies designed by a myriad of collective actors, including various Islamist groups, local militias and factions of former Qaddafi strongmen and local notables. These groups all competed to get access to resources and to gain legitimacy, nurturing the civil war dynamic, which also has strong regional repercussions. Willcoxon identifies four necessary factors that explain why, for the first three years, these groups found themselves in a stalemate. This precarious balance, however, ended in 2014 when two of the four factors ceased to operate. This led to a renewed phase of intense fighting. His article shows the impressive degree of fragmentation that characterizes the post-Qaddafi era and the extent to which violence became a normal, even mundane political tool for personal and collective aggrandizement.

The collapse of the Qaddafi regime and Libya’s ensuing civil war is proof, if one was even needed, that North Africa and the Sahel do not constitute two mutually segregated regions. Examining the consequences of the war in Libya, Ben Chérif and Campana analyse more specifically alliance formation and disintegration of the recent war in northern Mali. They contend that the categorization of the armed groups taking part in this conflict as ‘Islamist’, ‘nationalist’ or ‘loyalist’ offers poor explanatory value. Developing a mechanism-based approach, this article turns instead to intra-organisational factors and strategies developed by armed groups’ leaders, which are first and foremost competing for legitimacy and access to resources at the local level. In so doing, it analyses how intra- and inter-organizational mechanisms strongly embedded into clan and tribal logics shape armed groups’ strategy of alliance formation. It argues that internal instability, competition and outbidding between factions and subgroups composing the main anti- and pro-Bamako armed groups affect the dynamics of this conflict that turned into a succession of personal conflicts between those who emerged as the main communities’ leaders. In such a context, violence is used both as a military and a political means to continuously (re)negotiate a position within localized political, economic and symbolic power struggles. Furthermore, the Malian government’s strategies to instrumentalize deeply rooted clan, tribal and personal rivalries only increase competition between groups.

Jourde also investigates the question of defection within Islamic groups, which has become one of the main internal challenges they have been facing in a context of mounting competition amongst them. In the Sahel, Sûfî orders and Islamist movements struggle with one another to attract the faithful. But they evolve in societies in which Islam is not the only identity marker: ethnicity intersects religion. Jourde thus takes the case of the largest ethnic minority group in both Senegal and Mauritania, the Fulbe (which are also present in almost all of the countries in West Africa), and shows how ‘Fulbe-ness,’ as an ethnic categorization, has increasingly coincided with affiliation to one Sufi order (the Tijâniyya Tall), forming an ‘ethnicized form of Islam.’ But this ethnicized Sufi order has been recently challenged, with new rival Sûfî and Islamist movements attempting to attract new Fulbe disciples and followers. However, although many young Fulbe wish to join these new movements, switching one’s Islamic affiliation has proven to be difficult: theological or religious choices are not the only factors they must take into account. When ethnicity and Islamic affiliations coincide, mechanisms of policing at the ethnic borders can inflict a high price on defectors. Jourde then constructs a typology of punishment imposed upon ethnic defectors, which include harmful accusations of betrayal and of heresy, as well as banishment from the community and lethal mystical attacks.

Brossier’s article looks at the paradoxical case of Senegal’s Arabisants, Senegalese who obtained their post-secondary education in North African or Middle Eastern countries. Although they were trained in the Arab world, which represents a much valued form of symbolic capital in a country that is more than 90 per cent Muslim, they are prevented from reaching the highest echelons of Senegal’s political, social and economic hierarchy by the Francophone elite. This elite, a product of French colonization and with the support of the Sufi orders, has until recently successfully kept the Arabisants at the margins, mostly in the education sector. But the Arabisants must also blame their own lack of internal cohesion and their incapacity to agree on their objectives and to speak with one voice. Also, Arabisants’ strong criticism of Sufi orders, which they depict as holders of un-Islamic beliefs and as the collaborators of corrupt politicians, contributes to their failure. Popular perceptions also hindered their efforts, including the belief that education in the Arab world is worthless except for religious studies, that Arabic is only the language of Islam (and not, for instance, a language with which one can learn engineering or physics). But in recent times they have been able to better organize themselves and have participated in various forms of political advocacy, making their voices heard, in part thanks to their transnational networks that connect Dakar to North Africa and the Middle East, which have given them some (financial) edge in a context of diminishing state resources.

Gomez-Perez compares how Islamist movements have tried to carve out some space in two Sahelian countries dominated by Francophone elites and established Islamic interlocutors of the state. Based on a rich and fine-grained historical analysis, her article examines the rise and evolution of Senegal’s Jamaatou Ibadou Rahmane (JIR) and Burkina Faso’s Mouvement Sunnite (MS). Despite some important differences between the two countries, namely Senegal’s uninterrupted civilian regime compared to Burkina’s series of military coups, and Senegal’s stable (if imperfect) democracy contrasted with Burkina’s authoritarian regime, both Islamist movements have opted for pragmatic strategies in a constant quest for legitimacy inside and outside the religious sphere. While the JIR eventually engaged in collaboration with the state, after a phase of confrontational relations, the MS adopted a more autonomous approach, without cutting all relationships with state officials. Both were also subjected to internal divisions. Gomez-Perez’s article examines how their respective strategies, the repertories of actions and discourses as well as their changing relationships with the state have evolved over time. She shows that these two movements eventually contributed to build and consolidate a cultural and religious form of citizenship that duplicates state citizenship. The growth of violent jihadist groups in the region, at Senegal’s borders (Mali and Mauritania) and now in Burkina Faso with the 2016 terrorist attacks in Ouagadougou, compels these movements to side with the state, though some of their young followers may not being entirely deaf to the calls of these new violent transnational groups.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council [grant number 611-2014-0096].

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the contribution of the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (grant number 611-2014-0096) for the organization of this conference and the preparation of this special issue. We would also like to thank our other generous partners: Institut québécois des hautes études internationales; Fonds Gérard Dion; Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche sur l’Afrique et le Moyen-Orient (CIRAM); Chaire de recherche du Canada sur les conflits et le terrorisme; Centre sur la sécurité internationale (CSI); Département de science politique and Faculté de théologie et des sciences religieuses de l’Université Laval. Finally, we thank the reviewers for their constructive remarks and Jean-François Létourneau for copy-editing some of the articles of the special issue.

Notes

Most of the articles of this special issue were originally presented at the international workshop, ‘L’islam politique au Grand Moyen-Orient et en Afrique de l’Ouest: violence politique, querelles théologiques et enjeux géostratégiques’ (27–28 November 2014), Laval University, Quebec City, Canada.