Yemen’s current political crisis has been framed in terms of sectarian conflict and state failure. Causal arrows are said to point in both directions: either the state has so thoroughly failed in its basic functions that people have been compelled to “retreat” to prior sectarian loyalties, or else sectarian loyalties have been mobilized to undermine the state. By either account, the rise of the Huthis as Zaydi Islamists, their shift from the spatial and sociocultural periphery to Yemen’s center, and their conflict with members of the Islamist Islah party are offered as evidence of cause or effect. What both explanations fail to account for is the discursive and institutional misrecognition that undergirds the current conflict. As Islamists, both Huthis and Islahis have adopted substantively republican political commitments, but Islamist republicanism departs from existing regional and global Northern discourses regarding state-society relations in the Gulf, in particular. For members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the republican demands of both Huthis and Islahis challenge the legitimacy of monarchical regimes. For Americans and Europeans, the Islamism of both movements is in critical tension with the expectation that republicanism align with secular institutions. Together, these departures have made Islamist republicanism –particularly its cross-sectarian features – illegible. This has allowed Gulf and Northern actors to advance a transitional framework in Yemen that has undermined ideological convergence and fueled conflict. In other words, international actors have initiated a process rooted in neither sectarian animus nor state failure, but one that has been arguably productive of both. Based on interviews and participant observation among partisan and independent Yemeni youth activists, as well as analysis of texts and speeches produced by a range of relevant institutions, this paper maps the substantive ideological convergence between Ansar Allah, the political wing of the Huthi movement, and Islah. It identifies central republican precepts that help to explain the participation of large numbers of both group’s members in the 2011 Yemeni uprising. The paper then examines the key transitional institutions crafted according to the GCC framework and, using Bourdieu’s notion of misrecognition, identifies ways in which institutions (and the discourses that have framed and justified them) systematically undermined the practical ability of Islamists to act upon their shared commitments and advance the republican principles around which they converge.

In a critical contribution to contemporary discussions of rights-based discourses, Charles Blattberg argues that a major shortcoming in “human rights talk” is that it is too “thin” (2009). In particular, he argues that a consistent lapse in extant conversations is the move to abstraction: the human is insufficient precisely because it is impersonal. Blattberg lodges this criticism against a host of liberal thinkers, including Nussbaum, Berlin, and Walzer, and contends that the move to abstraction hinders calls to justice insofar as this abstraction fails to invest actors in the plights of other people. Even as Blattberg insists on the personalizing of the people to be protected, there remains the difficulty of discerning how, precisely to flesh out the people onto whom rights should be mapped. Moreover, in suggesting that the abstract human need only be personalized, Blattberg subtly elides more radical rethinkings: why not replace the human in human rights altogether? In this essay I draw on the language of Moroccan Islamists to argue that the abstract human that Blattberg calls into question is but one possible foundation for a rights-based discourse. My research suggests that Moroccan Islamists articulate and embody a rights-based discourse that does away with both the abstract human and the imminently empathetic person and instead centers God and God’s injunctions. In other words, whereas “rights” seemingly emerge from the variously constructed “human” postulated (fantasized, even) in secular arguments, for Islamists “rights” are guaranteed and circumscribed by God’s Will, as delineated in the Qur’an and hadith—and, of course, variously interpreted. In this essay I analyze ordinary language interviews with over 100 Islamists from Morocco’s two most popular groups, the Party of Justice and Development and the Group of Justice and Spirituality. I argue that my interlocutors not only displace the human from “human rights,” but, correspondingly, also revise significantly the meaning and practice of a variety of specifically instantiated human rights—reconsidering, e.g., what practices of religious freedom ought to look like. Finally, I submit that an Islamist vision of rights should be read as a pointed criticism of both the practical and abstract components of liberal articulations of rights and an expansion of the Muslim tradition.

Islamist rhetoric and writing are replete with invocations of “the humiliation of Islam," accompanied by exhortations to make the enemies of Islam “taste the humiliation” that has been inflicted on Muslims. At the same time, an array of high-profile flashpoints between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the "civilizations" they are often made to represent, are widely depicted in terms of “humiliation.” So understood, the association between humiliation and Muslims is very much a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke humiliation, and the cottage industry of publications seeking to explain and contain the violence with which it’s continually linked. Yet there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse, correspondingly minimal effort to analyze how the experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action, and virtually no attempt to identify both patterns and discontinuities in the way different rhetorics construct humiliation, the experience and the act. Analysis of the specific content and significance of humiliation in Islamist discourse in this paper yields four arguments. First, Islamist discourse defines the “humiliation of Islam” as the imposition of impotence on Islam/Muslims by those with greater and undeserved power, a condition understood to violate ‘natural’ gender and sexual norms as well as the divinely given socio-moral hierarchy upon which justice depends. Second, this definition depicts retaliatory humiliation as an enactment of a particular version of masculinity, the performance of which at once recuperates a lost sense of agency and restores the proper hierarchical ordering of men and women, Muslim and non-Muslim, the dominant and submissive. Third, humiliation discourse so understood operates on an affective register particularly central to certain experiences of masculinity, a register reflective of a gendered experience not captured by the dominant philosophical definition of humiliation in terms of the injured self-respect of a generic individual. In contrast to those who have posited and pathologized an essential Muslim or Arab masculinity, I argue that the gendered register of humiliation evident in Islamist discourse is also operative in several invocations of the “humiliation of America.” This is so despite the fact that each discourse is constructed out of a repertoire of self-images sedimented through an accumulation of specific experiences of power and powerlessness. In this sense, under certain conditions, humiliation in the 21st-century has become a kind of affective Esperanto that registers in multiple cultures and languages as an exhortation to courageous acts designed to recuperate masculine agency.

The meaning of Islam is a question of politics, theology, history, and their intersection in language. The most frequently repeated formulations today about the meaning of Islam, that “islām is related to salām” and that “Islam is peace,” reflect the way that Islam is constructed in language. Turning away from the study of the political language of Islam, this paper focuses on how Islam is constructed in political language. What does it mean to say that islām the word reflects something about Islam the religion? How does approaching Islam as either the subject or predicate of political action make possible? What philosophies of language are at play in avowals and dismissals of the linguistic fact that islām and salām are related? When and why do the meanings of the words islām and salām become windows into the “nature” of Islam? This paper is a study of the historicity of moments of definition-giving. First, it considers how politicians, journalists, academics, and civilians across the globe have repeated or rejected the statement, “Islam is peace.” it sketches the work that “Islam is peace” performs in light of anxieties about empire, secularism, and language. Second, it demonstrates that in seeking to define the word ‘islām,’ a strand of nineteenth-century European discourses opposed “Islam-islām is submission” to “Christianity is peace,” which also converged with contemporaneous racial discourses about the Smite. Thirdly, the paper turns to Islamic reformers and Islamists, to argue that when modernist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani writes “Islam is war,” and Islamist Hassan al-Banna writes “Islam is peace,” such instances are both reaction to and continuation of these European discourses. The paper thus turns to a comparison of the appearances of the words islām and salām in Quranic commentaries by Islamists to their appearances and definitions by numerous schools of classical tafsīr. I conclude by contrasting “Islam is p” to “God is p” for Hegel and for two tenth-century Islamic thinkers, and suggest some implications of these comparisons for secularism, Islamism, and the ideas of religion and peace.