The 1991 fall of the Soviet Union presented an ideological and practical challenge for Salafis across the political spectrum. Those who had embraced Jihad in Afghanistan would target Muslim rulers, while their Politico (or Islamist) counterparts sought access to national politics, most notably in Saudi Arabia. Finally, Quietist Salafis –those who eschew political violence or active engagement in formal politics in favor of a local effort on “purification and cultivation” (al-tasfiyya wa'l-tarbiya) –would turn inwards as they sought to shape society in the face of an unstable political landscape. Yet, even as the story of Jihadis and Politicos is well known, that of Quietist Salafis is not. This paper therefore explores how Quietist Salafis navigated the challenge posed by Politico and Jihadi competitors, increasingly aggressive state security apparatuses, and a changing international environment from the early 1980s to mid-1990s. To do so, it focuses on the two leading Salafi centers, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. While Saudi Arabia’s religious scene has been decisively shaped by the rise of Salafi scholars, alongside their Wahhabi-Hanbali counterparts, within key religious institutions since the 1970s, Quietist Salafism in Egypt has emerged under the aegis of Ansar al-Sunna al-Muhamadiyya (e. 1926). A story of Quietist Salafism and its relationship to either political violence or formal politics, however, tells us little about the changing concerns, questions and activities of this transnational movement. Instead, this paper moves beyond these two approaches to explore how the performance of distinctly Salafi social practices responded to a changing national and regional political environment. Drawing on a broad selection of Salafi magazines, journals and pamphlets published during this period in both countries, it analyzes how Quietist Salafis sought to either emphasize or deemphasize signature practices, whether the cultivation of a distinct beard, the observance of the prohibition against full-length pants (known as Isbal), gender segregation, and the practice of praying in shoes. Based on this approach, the paper casts light on the ways in which Quietist Salafis sought to distinguish themselves from their Jihadi counterparts while navigating the increased crackdown on their Politico peers.

This paper examines competition between the Ba‘thist regime in Iraq and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the support of Islamist movements throughout the Middle East and North Africa in the 1990s. Relying on archival sources as well as conference proceedings and memoirs, it attempts to integrate the study of Islamism and geopolitics. Thus, instead of seeing Islamism as an expression of indigenous and intrinsic religious inclinations, it shows how interstate competition and shifting global order shaped and bounded Islamist movements. Shifting geopolitics after the end of the Cold War disrupted political alliances and transnational networks in the Middle East and North Africa region. Islamists were often at the center of such shifts. Most Islamist movements had coalesced in the mid-twentieth century and they positioned themselves within the global political context of the Cold War. As such, they positioned themselves as a third option between Western capitalism and Eastern communism. Moreover, in many states, secular socialists had been important rivals for Islamist political parties, and a foil for Islamic thought. The international and regional shifts at the end of the Cold War intersected with the move from a cooperative to an adversarial relationship between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. During the 1980s the two states had cooperated against the shared threat emanating from Iran. In fact, Saudi Arabia had helped Iraq to mobilize Cold War-era networks of Islamists that the Saudis had constructed to meet threats from the USSR and its allies in the Greater Middle East during the so-called Arab Cold War, and then the war in Afghanistan. With the loss of atheistic communism as an adversary, many of these Islamist networks saw their primary international interest as combating post-Cold War American hegemony. During and after the Gulf War of 1990-1, the Iraqi regime positioned itself to wean Islamist support away from the pro-Western regime in Riyadh. This paper will examine the resulting competition between Riyadh and Baghdad. In doing so, it describes the way global and regional trends intersected with state policies to affect transnational Islamist movements. As such it provides a multilevel analysis which is often lacking in the study of Islamism.

This paper examines the Iraqi branch of the Muslim Brotherhood during the period between the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars. Inter-Arab disputes, regional dynamics of the Iran-Iraq War, and Saddam Hussein’s stance in the 1990-1991 Gulf Crisis all had led Ba’thist Iraq to develop working relationships with several foreign branches of the Muslim Brotherhood and a host of Islamist groups. This dynamic did not apply to internal Iraqi affairs. Similar to the Shi’i Islamist opposition to the Ba’th party, the Sunni Islamist Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood had been targeted and severely repressed by the regime’s security services during the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, its activities were driven underground and surviving senior leadership forced into exile, where they remained until the toppling of the regime in 2003. While Islamist opposition groups remained banned and the “Salafi-Wahhabi” threat was a major security concern, the “Faith Campaign” undertaken by Saddam’s regime following 1991 Gulf War, resulted in the growing prominence of Islam in the Iraqi public sphere over the following decade. Some scholarship has suggested that the Faith Campaign may have inadvertently benefitted remaining pro-Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamist activists. This was particularly the case in and around the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a historical base of support for the group. During the 1990s, there was even a rumor inside Iraq and among opposition circles abroad that there had been a tacit agreement between the Ba’thist regime and the Muslim Brotherhood, permitting the latter to engage in activities deemed not to be politically threatening. Drawing on the Ba’th Party records, Iraqi secret police files, and several memoirs of Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood leaders from the period, this paper will address the issue in an attempt to define the extent to which repression, cooptation, and accommodation were part of the regime’s interaction with Sunni Islamist activists in Mosul during its final decade in power.

The Cold War’s end coincided with a pivotal moment for political Islam in Algeria: the outbreak of the Algerian Civil War. The enlistment of Soviet-Afghan War returnees (‘Algerian-Afghans’) into the Islamist insurgency, fueled the Algerian state’s narrative that the civil war was caused by ‘radical’ Islamists and their ‘religious immoderation,’ cast as an importation of ‘foreign’ Islam that had no basis in Algerian practice. Meanwhile, the post-Cold War global order led the Algerian regime camp to pivot to western allies for moral and diplomatic support. This was made easy by Algeria’s enlistment in the U.S.-led War on Terror a decade later, where it joined a handful of states branding as exporters and arbiters of ‘moderate Islam.’ This paper explores how the discursive hegemony of ‘moderate Algerian Islam’ has impacted political Islam in the country since the 1990s. It argues moderation (al-i'tidal) has become a social imperative that organizes and regulates local Islamist doctrine, platform, and behavior. To do this, it examines shifts and adaptations in how the Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP), today the country’s largest Islamist party, distilled and deployed its movement doctrine of 'centrism and moderation (al-wasatiyya wa'l-i'tidal). Specifically, to negotiate the post-conflict discursive space and (re)situate itself in the national fabric, the MSP articulated and performed moderation through top-down discourses of ‘Islamic indigeneity’ and ‘Algerianness’. This paper thus also illustrates how moderation was dialectically-formed through interacting claims, a dynamic evident in the broader region as well. Findings result from a year-long ethnography of the MSP, including informal conversations, semi-structured interviews, and observation of movement events, supplemented by analysis of speeches, internal movement documents, and media sources, among others. This study aims to challenge the dominant literature on (Islamist) moderation that casts the concept as an objective or traceable position or process. In studying Islamists, moderation has become more instructive as a site of polemics and political meaning-making—notable for the ways, reasons, and contexts in which it is referenced, and for the values, dispositions, and connotations it conjures—than for what it “actually means” (Starrett 2010) or is intended to demonstrate. The concept’s ambiguity and the (often intentional) imprecision with which it is invoked, subject it to the orientations and subjectivities of its user. (Ibid) In this way, moderation is an "essentially contested concept" (Gallie 1956; Starrett 2010), an object of definitional dispute and contention despite near-unanimous social agreement on its importance.

Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr bequeathed a rich political and cultural legacy that is the subject of unremitting reinterpretation and contestation until today. His disciples and diverse Shi‘i actors have struggled to arrogate his authority and articulate his views on critical political, religious, social, and economic issues while deriving their own legitimacy from him. This struggle commenced in the immediate aftermath of al-Sadr's execution, as the Iraqi Shi‘i opposition sought refuge in Iran where their extant theological differences and personal rivalries were exacerbated by leadership conflicts and the scope of fealty to the Iranian revolutionary system. This presentation focuses on the ideological evolution of two of the main contenders in the symbolic competition for the powerful capital of al-Sadr's legacy: the Islamic Da‘wa Party (IDP) and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). The presentation examines how the turbulent period of wars and shifting international alliances in the 1980s and 90s influenced these parties' positions on issues such as clerical authority and popular sovereignty. The uncritical acceptance of narratives and information from Shi‘i opposition organs, hagiographic biographies, and IDP and SCIRI activists has complicated the scholarly discourse on al-Sadr. This paper locates sources attributed to al-Sadr posthumously in their relevant political and theological contexts, in an effort to not only disentangle al-Sadr's writings from the instrumentalization of his ideas, but also demonstrate how the appropriation of his legacy evolved in tandem with the exigencies of American influence, Iraqi exile politics, and the Shi‘i milieu in the 1990s. Following the Gulf War and the 1991 Uprisings against Saddam, SCIRI understood the need to recalibrate its relationship to Iran and the United States. Similarly, the IDP abandoned its Iranian host and set up its organizational base in Damascus where it sought broader cooperation with Iraqi opposition groups. For the IDP and SCIRI, the new post-Gulf War reality necessitated policy changes influenced by their host countries and the new-found international political support for the Iraqi opposition. This presentation will show that whereas in the 1980s, Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr's ideas were utilized to legitimize loyalty to wilayat al-faqih and assert primacy in various leadership conflicts, from 1992 onward, party programs such as the IDP's Barnamijuna and SCIRI's ‘Aqidatuna reflected the new constellation of international politics vis-à-vis Iraq, which led both parties to draw upon al-Sadr in authorizing their respective reorientations and revised positions on wilayat al-faqih, democracy, and Iraqi nationalism.