The abandoned and contentious state of nationalist rituals in schools embodies the realities of everyday legitimation reflected in the striking expressions of the lack of national belonging among students across the schools. By exploring both school rituals and student narratives, this chapter is concerned with how legitimation is lived in the everyday and how citizenship is imagined from below. The first part of the chapter discusses the organization of the morning assembly (tabur) in the different schools and the performance of its nationalist components. The second part develops the key themes that emerge from observations and interviews with students and teachers relating to the narratives of national belonging and citizenship, and their classed and gendered dimensions. It tracks the influence of Islamist narratives on school activities and everyday discourses and shows how students and teachers articulate themes of Islamism and neoliberalism.

The condition of education in Egypt is driven by the management of the socioeconomic sphere by successive regimes and their ideological and strategic directions. In the late Mubarak era, the three features of crony neoliberalization, a weak informalized state and a deficit of legitimacy shape the practices of everyday governance and legitimation examined in the schools. This chapter sketches the political and economic context of the late Mubarak era and the ideological transition from Arab socialism to neoliberal Islamism. It provides essential background on tracking, quality and equity in the education sector, especially as crystalized in secondary schooling, and outlines the historical evolution of nationalist and ideological narratives as reflected in textbooks and schools and the securitization and Islamization of education. Finally, it describes the key attributes of the research sites and respondents in the two phases of research before and after the uprising, the key methodological issues involved in conducting the research in schools, the selection and analysis of textbooks and the most significant limitations of the research.

This chapter synthesizes the similarities and differences among three Islamist parties – the AKP, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Ennahda – in power and shows how internal dynamics matter more in charting their democratic commitments than do external forces. The chapter then assesses how far this theory travels to other cases of Islamist parties and regimes like Iran and discusses the implications of these findings for the relationship among Islam, Islamism, and democracy. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the rise of right-wing populism elsewhere in the world and the role of party capture in fueling such authoritarian trends.

The Introduction sets the framework for the analysis and introduces the central research question of The Politics of Religious Party Change: when and why do religious parties become less anti-system? This chapter explains the significance of the question, discussing the rising prominence of religious parties globally and the need to better understand the dynamics of change in these parties. Likewise, the Introduction details the methodology used in this book and the six empirical cases: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Tunisian Ennahdha, Turkish AKP, German Center Party, Italian PPI, and Belgian Catholic Party.

This chapter reviews the existing literature on religious party change. The scholarly literature offers three major explanations for the divergence we observe in Catholic and Islamist parties’ trajectories and for why religious parties change, or moderate: religious, political, and institutional explanations. Despite major contributions to our understanding of religious parties, the literatures on Catholic and Islamist parties grew virtually independent of each other, focusing on entirely different sets of questions or factors that explain change in these parties. Building on the existing literature, this chapter lays out the theory developed in this book to explain religious party change. First, an overview of the political economic approach to the study of religion is presented; next, the chapter outlines the effect of institutions on political behavior, and in particular how religious institutions affect political behavior and religious parties. Finally, the major actors in the theory are analyzed before concluding with a comparative assessment of how Islamist and Catholic parties fit into the theory.

The Politics of Religious Party Change addresses the timely question of ideological change and secularization of religious political parties and asks, when and why do religious parties become less anti-system? In a comparative analysis, this book traces the striking similarities in the historical origins of Islamist and Catholic parties in the Middle East and Western Europe, chronicles their conflicts with existing religious authorities, and analyzes the subsequently divergent trajectories of Islamist and Catholic parties. Religious parties are embedded in distinct religious institutional structures that shape their actions as they chart their paths in electoral politics. Counterintuitively, the book finds that centralized and hierarchical religious authority structures – such as the Vatican – incentivize religious parties to move in a more pro-system, secular, and democratic direction. By contrast, less centralized religious authority structures such as in Sunni Islam create a more permissive environment for religious parties to operate as anti-system parties hostile to democracy and secularism.

Tripoli, October 2019: Young people from various religious backgrounds and all walks of life sang and danced together in the city’s central al-Nour Square, shattering the myth of Tripoli as a ‘cradle of terrorism’ or ‘citadel of Muslims’. The Islamists who had often dominated Tripoli’s urban space retreated, and youths, families, and members of the educated middle class filled al-Nour Square during Lebanon’s revolutionary moment.

Why and how did Tripoli become the country’s prime centre of contentious politics in otherwise-peripheral Lebanon?

The introduction presents the main argument of the book, introducing the concepts of the dethronement of secondary cities, politics of autochthony, and erosion of city corporatism in Tripoli. It then discusses the broader lessons of the Tripoli case, which speak to three strands of literature: studies of Lebanon and the Levant; discussions on sectarianization in the Middle East; and debates on the ‘Sunni Crisis’ in the Middle East. Lastly, the research methods used for data collection are presented.

How did Tripoli, a medium-sized secondary city, become the centre of Lebanon’s anti-imperialist and Arab nationalist protest movement?

Anti-French mobilizations in Tripoli created a unique city corporatism that helped to unite most of the Sunni population politically until the 1970s. When Tripoli was carved out of Syria and attached to the new state of Greater Lebanon in 1920 by the French mandate, the city lost its importance and was demoted to secondary status.

This paved the way for a strong, Arab nationalist city identity in Tripoli, driven by Abdulhamid Karami, a man of religion turned politician. Tripoli’s nationalist identity subsequently morphed into various Islamist trends, involving the bourgeois Islamists, the pro-Palestinian Islamists and the Maoist-turned-Islamist urban poor.

Nationalist and Islamist ideas found a foothold in Tripoli due to the many ties between the city and prominent nationalists and Islamists in Syria. However, Tripoli’s ʿAlawites and Christians contested the Arab nationalist identity of Tripoli as formulated by its Sunni leaders.

This chapter departs from the curious Memorandum of Understanding signed between Hizbollah and some of Tripoli’s Salafis in 2008. Tripoli’s Salafis, who perceived themselves as custodians of the Sunni doctrine and identity, were known for their very antagonistic discourse vis-à-vis the Shiʿa Hizbollah movement.

This chapter shows how sectarianism and the new political polarization in Lebanon after the Syrian pull-out in 2005 caused the Islamists in Tripoli to change their strategies and divide. The more liberal, but highly conflictual, climate empowered the Islamists on the one hand, but also divided them along a variety of political issues being debated in Lebanon on the other. Some aligned themselves with the March 14 Alliance and the Future Movement, while others came closer to Hizbullah, Future’s opponent. Yet, Islamists in Tripoli also came together to collectively engage in pan-Islamist protests. This indicates that most of Tripoli’s Islamists are independent actors, and that Islamists cannot be viewed as one collective political force.

The Islamic Tawhid Movement, an Islamist militia, emerged in 1982, and seized military control of Tripoli, which lasted until 1985. This chapter explores the Islamic Tawhid’s curious alliance with its most significant sponsor, the nationalist Palestinian Fatah group, and how they failed to mobilise support from Tripoli’s conservative middle class.

The emergence of the Islamic Tawhid Movement was closely linked to regional political events. The Lebanese Left and the Palestinian commando movement in Lebanon suffered a humiliating defeat during the 1982 Israeli invasion, and nearly 15,000 Palestinian commandos were forced to flee to Tunisia.

Tripoli became the last resort in Lebanon for al-Fatah. However, Syria, with a troop presence in Lebanon since 1976, did not accept the arrival of the Palestinian commandos, and a Syrian–Palestinian war broke out in the city. Tripoli’s Sunnis were generally pro-Palestinian and fiercely opposed to the Syrian Assad regime. Many youths in Tripoli turned to Islamism after the demise of the Left. However, the conservative middle class in Tripoli loathed Tawhid’s violence against civilians and despised its weak religious foundations.

Part I is about the social origins of people who became fixers in 2010s Turkey and Syria. Some were refugees from Syria’s civil war or journalists ousted from Turkey’s domestic press as the Turkish state successively captured opposition outlets; these prospective fixers turned to work with the international media for the promise of stability. Others came from non-journalism backgrounds but, inspired by developments such as Turkey’s “Kurdish Opening” or the 2013 Gezi Park protest movement, found in fixing the opportunity to pursue adventurous and idealistic aspirations. Fixers of different backgrounds help foreign reporters in different ways: some provide insider access to local events and people, while others help their clients to make sense of phenomena from an outsider perspective.

My purpose in this chapter is to concentrate on the individual’s own remembrance of the past and how she renews memories to move history forward in accordance with her own imagination, as well as on the broader constraints and opportunities that shape her present life. The interaction that takes place between individual and collective remembrance requires further attention in the social sciences and within memory studies. This trend permits the formation of a distorted conceptualisation of how change occurs and at times results in overinvesting in a linear progression of history. I marshal various sources of evidence – including a special issue published by a Hezbollah cultural institute, some of the analysed articles from which are not publicly accessible – to argue this: at least one reading of Iranian women’s conceptualisation of their status and formation of rights, roles, and responsibilities in the post-revolutionary era is its nonlinearity and connection to individual goals and memories. I contextualise women’s own words from memoirs and other texts within long-term histories of activism in modern Iran and consider the conditions, structural spaces, and opportunities that made their acts of citizenship visible, and, at times, invisible.

This chapter examines the mechanisms through which revolutionary contention turned increasingly ethnic and violent during the second half of 2011 and early 2012. It argues that ethnicization of challenge was the indirect result of regime violence, used primarily to confront exigencies it could not address through its informal social linkages rather than as a tool to rend the social fabric. The chapter begins with a quantitative analysis of Syrian regime violence, demonstrating that the regime attempted to avoid harming many of its clients. Then it takes a deeper look into how and why the regime used violence when it did, inductively theorizing the exigencies the regime faced and how it dealt with them. The remainder of the chapter examines the second-order effects of this repression, using in-depth studies of localities that exemplify each of the types identified earlier in the chapter. State violence changed the composition of the challenger group and the content of its claims, making the challenger group more ethnically homogeneous, pushing claims to focus on ethnic demands and employ ethnic symbols.