On June 26, 1945, representatives from fifty nations gathered in San Francisco to sign the United Nations Charter, ushering in a new, long-lasting international order. Over the past several years, a growing body of scholarship has explored the origins and ontological nature of this international liberalism. However, less work has been done on how the United Nations was perceived in the Middle East in its earliest days, especially by actors operating outside of statist structures. This study examines the emergence of the United Nations from secret meetings in Dumbarton Oaks to its promulgation via the UN charter and the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December 1948 from the perspective of Egypt’s Muslim Brothers, who operated both outside of this new international arena and often in a degree of opposition to the Egyptian postwar statecraft. First, a careful examination of the writings of leading figures in the Ikhwan, including its founder, Hassan al-Banna, demonstrates that many of the Brothers closely followed each major development of the UN, displayed a sophisticated and accurate understanding of the nature of the inchoate system as it was being formulated, and actively reflected upon what the new world order would mean for Egypt, the broader Arab world, and Islam. Next, this study reveals that the Brothers expressed hope in the nascent international legal structures of the United Nations, and demonstrated a strident Egyptian nationalism that seemed at odds with the more transnationally-minded mission of the Brothers. Shrewd pragmatism drove the Brothers to accept the UN charter, intially denounced as a “farce of farces,” and to view the Egyptian state’s participation in the UN and repeated bids for membership on the security council as an opportunity to advance their own vision of human rights and international affairs. Al-Banna and other leaders of the Ikhwan maintained this approach even in the face of a western-dominated UN Security Council, the UN vote to partition Palestine, and the admission of Israel into the UN as a member state. Finally, this paper insists that “Islam” and even Islamic movements ought not be seen in opposition to international liberalism and its discursive progeny, “human rights.” On the contrary, the brothers remained active within the nascent framework of international liberalism and developed an “Islamist” response to the newly-articulated notion of international liberalism and human rights.

It is well-known that the famed theorist of Islamism Sayyid Qutb enjoyed a substantial career as a poet and humanist literary critic before devoting himself to an Islamist political ideology. Existing scholarship posits few continuities between the two halves of Qutb’s, career, and regards them as opposed and different in nature. Scrutiny of the development of Islamic political thought in the twentieth century, however, shows the decisive role that humanist aesthetic concepts played in its development. This is clear in the Indian Islamic thinker and poet Muhammad Iqbal, as well as in secular literary thinkers in Egypt like Qutb’s mentor Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad, who took aestheticist concepts in political as well as Islamic directions. In the Egyptian intellectual milieu of Qutb’s lifetime it can be seen that humanist aesthetic notions are pervasive in political ideologies from liberalism to socialism. Analysis of Qutb’s own literary theory reveals the same kind of relationship with his later work. Sayyid Qutb provides a major illustration of the link between aestheticism and Islamism because we can see clearly in his thought how the conceptual framework of romantic aesthetics, or adab al-wijdan, that he practiced and theorized in the first part of his career formed the basis of the Islamist system that he espoused and expounded in the second part of his career. The model of the relationship between the inner sensibility (wijdan) of human beings and the universe that Qutb deployed in his work The Method of Literary Criticism to theorize greatness in literary works served as the model first for Qutb’s analysis of the artistic genius of the Quran, still during his secular period, and finally became the basis of what he called “the Islamic vision” (al-tasawwur al-Islami) of reality. Whereas much of the actual political content of Qutb’s ideology was adopted by him from other thinkers, such as the notion of divine sovereignty (hakimiyya), the distinctive framework in which Qutb fleshed out this content was made up of concepts from his own humanist aesthetic thought. This paper focuses on Qutb’s romantic aesthetic doctrine of the formal concordance between the inner sensibility of human beings and the universe as a total form. The paper shows that this doctrine was central to Qutb’s theory of literary inspiration and composition, and later (Khasa’is al-Tasawwur al-Islami, Muqawwimat al-Tasawwur al-Islami) became central to his argument for the formal comprehensiveness and affective appeal of the Islamic vision of reality.

Literature on Islam and politics debates why Islamist parties succeed electorally, but one strand of this literature argues that it is due to service provision to economically marginalized or middle class citizens. Other research in Morocco and Tunisia shows that female citizens, who are one marginalized group, are more able to obtain services from Islamist than non-Islamist parties. Yet, the number of cases that have been examined is limited and a comparative framework is needed to understand whether, why, and under what conditions service provision to the poor supports Islamists’ electoral success. We address this question by drawing on original 2012 surveys of 40 Tunisian members and 2,422 citizens and find that electing members of the Islamist Ennahda party increases the likelihood that the poor know deputies’ names and request services. We attribute better symbolic and service responsiveness to an “Islamic mandate effect”—Islamist parties’ greater service provision institutionalization and mandate to serve marginalized communities. Our results extend literature on Islam and governance by illustrating that party institutionalization helps improve service provision to the poor and is part of the explanation for why Islamists success electorally

The early twentieth-century Egyptian feminist movement and its contemporaneous so-called modernist salafiyya movement are two relatively well-developed areas in Middle East historiography. However, despite their proximity in time and intellectual space, each of these movements has been studied separately, and the relationship between them seems to have escaped the attention of historians. By focusing on the discourses on women in the widely distributed al-Manar magazine, this paper aims at filling this lacuna. It is specifically concerned with connections between the leading Muslim “modernist” Muhammad Rashid Rida, and both Qasim Amin and Malak Hifni Nasif, two of the leading figures of the feminist movement. More specifically, the paper will shed light on al-Manar’s responses to Qasim Amin’s books Tahrir al-Mar’a and al-Mar’a al-Jadida as well as to some of Nasif’s speeches that Rida choose to publish in al-Manar. It will also juxtapose the views of the two feminist activists with those of Rida mainly on the issues of women’s education and veiling in order to demonstrate the points of similarities and differences between them. By approaching al-Manar through the lens of gender and through this juxtaposition of Rida’s views with those of Amin and Nasif, the paper argues that what came to be known as the modernist salafiyya movement, as far as women’s issues were concerned, lacked the coherence its very name suggests it possesses. It also challenges the view that Rida’s ideology changed towards the end of his life, moving more towards conservatism. The paper will demonstrate that Rida’s views on women had been largely “traditional” throughout his life. Although the paper’s main focus is the first ten years of al-Manar between 1898 and 1908, it will also make references to some articles published later that are germane to the subject matter. It will also refer to Amin’s two books in order to contextualize Rida’s responses thereto.