Islamism, secularization, secularity: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as a phenomenon of a secular age

Abstract

The paper outlines parallels between the processes of secularization and secularity in the West, as interpreted by José Casanova and Charles Taylor, and Islamism as a modern social and political phenomenon. It focuses on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s history and ideas and specifically on a number of public documents detailing its social and political vision. I argue that if we define ‘secularization’ not only as the weakening of religious belief, but as the institutional differentiation of modern state structures and the marginalization of religion, and ‘secularity’ as the process whereby faith becomes one option among others and religion becomes an identifiable set of beliefs seen as guidelines for reform, the Brotherhood, similarly to other Islamist entities, is a phenomenon of a ‘secular age’.

Keywords:

• secularity
• secularization
• Islamism
• Muslim Brotherhood
• modernity

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the editors and anonymous referees of Economy and Society for the constructive process of evaluation of the paper; and to my research assistant, Buğra Süsler, for being meticulous and forthcoming. The list of others to whom I am grateful would be too long to include here. All errors are mine.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 My paper is not an enquiry concerning secularism as a political and ideological project. A connection between secularity, secularization and secularism is suggested by Talal Asad, who questions the liberal assumption that secularism protects civil freedoms from religious tyranny and argues that secularism, far from underpinning state neutrality and rational ethics, is in fact associated with the hegemonic project of the modern state (Asad, 2003, pp. 227–228, 255; see also Agrama, 2010; Hurd, 2007; Mahmood, 2006; Scott, 2014). It is not necessary for the purposes of my argument to engage with this critique.

2 Casanova and Taylor have addressed Islam with other issues in mind in other writings. Casanova (2001) deals with Islam and democracy; Casanova (2012) is about the treatment of Muslim minorities in Europe and the United States; Casanova (2009) compares gender equality in Catholicism and Islam. Casanova (2003) discusses the Muslim world from a global perspective on secularization, albeit briefly. Taylor (2007b) is about Islam, tolerance and the clash of civilizations. I do not deal with these issues and therefore do not engage with these works.

3 Taylor explains ‘how conditions of secularity have come to shape both contemporary belief and “unbelief” alike’; the religious and the secular are not opposites but are co-constituted (Taylor, 2007a, p. 25; Warner et al., 2010, pp. 5, 8–9).

4 I place ‘Islam’ and ‘Islamic societies’ in quotation marks because I find generalizing about them problematic.

5 See also note 3, above.

6 The Brotherhood’s Charter, originally circulated in the 1930s and revised in the 1940s and 1990s, dealt with the movement’s internal organization, not its ideology (Mitchell, 1993, p. 163; Wickham, 2013, pp. 127, 130). On the documents of the 1980s see Hamid (2014, pp. 71–77). On the documents of the 1990s see Hamid (2014, pp. 94–96), Wickham (2013, pp. 69–70) and El-Ghobashy (2005, p. 383).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katerina Dalacoura

Katerina Dalacoura is an Associate Professor in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In 2015–2016, she was British Academy Mid-Career Fellow. Her work has centred on the intersection of Islamism and international human rights norms. She has worked on human rights, democracy and democracy promotion in the Middle East, and has an enduring interest in questions of secularity and secularization in the region. Her latest research focuses on the role of culture and civilization in International Relations with special reference to Turkey. Her latest book is Islamist terrorism and democracy in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2011).