The scholarship on ‘Salafi politicisation’ post-2011 focuses on new Salafi political parties or Jihadi groups. It thereby largely reduces Salafi politicisation to involvement in institutional politics or violence. (Non-Jihadi) Salafism in Algeria and Morocco has also received little scholarly attention, despite important recent evolutions. By mapping ideological (informal) political competition between prominent Salafi and Islamist networks, and also state institutions in Morocco and Algeria, I reassess the ‘politics’ of those Salafis who did not ‘politicise’ in these senses– the so-called ‘apolitical’ Salafi trend and large majority of Salafis in the MENA. I ask: How do ‘apolitical’ purist Salafi networks understand ‘politics’? Are ‘apolitical’ purist Salafis in some sense ‘political’? And what is a Salafi ‘politics’? I contend that Salafis who still reject institutional politics are ‘political’ in a distinctive way: they engage in normative boundary-drawing practices focusing on ‘the political’. This normative boundary-drawing (of ‘the political’) – in effect, the assertion of a normative discursive-ideological power with real effects that shape the ways in which actors determine certain conditions of their existence (e.g. what they think is ‘good’ and ‘possible’) – is the most important form of power for these Salafis. I thus understand ‘the political’ as something that is always in formation (via boundary-making). Drawing on a two-year political ethnography of Salafi and Islamist networks in Marrakech and Algiers and their literature, I substantiate these claims by showing how Salafis construct normative limits around ‘the political’ in ways that designate the practices that Islamists and the state variously deploy in producing (their own discrete notions of) the ‘good society’ (such as producing a compliant society via enforcing legal regulations, state-led citizenship formation through education, or involvement in institutional politics) as illegitimate political practices. These Salafis instead designate Salafi educational practices as ‘legitimate political(!) work’. These Islamist movements and state institutions also construct different normative boundaries around ‘the political’. Accordingly, one should study Salafism’s relationship to politics at the level of boundary-drawing rather than (pre-defined) quietist or activist practices. Furthermore, pace much of the (post-) Islamism scholarship, Islamists’ public categorisation of objects, behaviour, and cultural products as halal or haram is political not simply because it enforces religious morality, challenging state’s abilities to shape local ideas, but also because of the normative, ideological, and discursive power that boundary-drawing practices reveal. This approach to ideological political competition thus illuminates new ways of understanding the informal political practices of Islamic actors.

In the past decade, Islamist groups in the Arab world have evolved along sharply different trajectories. After the Arab uprisings of 2011-2012, political openings in a number of countries allowed Islamist groups to play more prominent political roles than ever before. Since that period, however, most Islamist groups have been subject to state repression and political constraints to different degrees. This study assesses the effects of differing Islamist political strategies in response to repressive state constraints across the Arab world. While Islamist groups in some countries, such as Morocco, Tunisia, and Lebanon have survived or even thrived despite state constraints, others, in places such as Egypt, Palestine, and Bahrain have lost political influence. Although the degree of state repression helps to explain part of these diverging outcomes, much of the variation is also explained by strategic interactions between Islamist groups and the state. Islamist groups that actively sought to engage and collaborate with political competitors have managed to maintain significant influence over time, while those that reinforced their ideological or strategic positions in the wake of the Arab uprisings lost significant political influence over time. This study examines recent political decision making by Islamist groups throughout the Arab world to assess the impact of those decisions on subsequent political outcomes using both a comprehensive data set of Islamist political parties, interviews with party leaders, and primary documents associated with party decision making.

This paper maps the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s (MB) internal divisions post-2013. We offer a screenshot of the contemporary currents of thought shaping the movement, and explore their significance for the MB as it attempts to exit the current state of stagnation. We assess how the members’ experiences with political participation (2011-2013), the removal from power (2013) and the fall of the MB into a new state of illegality and repression (2014-2018) affects their worldviews and position vis-a-vis the historical organisation. We argue that the divisions that permeate the MB membership have a profound identity connotation, which challenges the MB top-down approach towards the movement, while proposing a bottom-up call for change. We focus on individual members to gain an insight into the current trajectories of the movement. We rely on the analysis of 60 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2013 and 2018 with both males and female MB participants across the organisational spectrum, and currently residing in Egypt, Turkey and the UK. We employ grounded theory methodology to identify the main points of contention shaping members’ divisions, and to trace the emergence of currents of thought within the movement. The two main factors against which we identify those currents are: how the members propose to move forward, and where they position themselves vis-à-vis the historical MB organizational structure. We adopt a comparative methodology that accounts for three important elements that are often overlooked in the literature: the study of the MB form an individual perspective, the gender dimension and the transnational element. Overall, we find that the main point of contention driving divisions within the movement is members’ desire for change against the apparent immobility of the historical MB leadership. This desire clearly manifests across other issues of contention, such as the MB’s approach to repression, organizational re-building and how to bridge the gap between ideology and practice. Most importantly, our study reveals that a significant portion of members are no longer willing to subscribe to the movement’s imposed top-down identity, and attempt to imbue the organisation with diverse values and independent thinking. Mapping these currents of thoughts has become necessary to gain an insight into the ongoing and future trajectories of the movement.