Across Egypt, medical charities linked to Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood provide a valuable alternative for those unable to afford upscale private hospitals or who dread a trip to Egypt’s notoriously poor public facilities. Yet very little is known about where these services exist, what logic guides their distribution, and how these facilities relate to important sociopolitical outcomes, including government spending, health indicators, economic characteristics, and voting patterns. The literature predicts varying relationships. For instance, Clark (2004) argues that these are a largely middle class phenomenon, while Farag (2010) suggests the largest impact comes in the slums. Wickham (2002) and Cammet and Issar (2010) suggest these facilities drive in-group cohesion and facilitate mobilization, while Berman (2003) and Davis and Robinson (2012) suggest that these facilities are targeted towards the non-aligned. Meanwhile, numerous anecdotal reports suggest that these facilities are in some way tied to Islamist electoral mobilization. In order to adjudicate among these hypotheses, I use GIS software to analyze a unique dataset, comprising almost 40 years of socioeconomic and political statistics in addition to a comprehensive listing of both Islamic and governmental medical facilities in Egypt. This research provides a novel way to both capture and analyze how Islamist groups have reacted to the social, political, and economic transformations underway in the Middle East and, perhaps more importantly, to how those interactions have changed the Islamist groups themselves.

Turkey is currently at the center of a global debate over the place of religion in politics. As the most advanced Muslim democracy and a former assertively secular republic, the country’s ongoing renegotiation of its identity will inform conversations about the resurgence of religiosity from Latin America, where charismatic Catholicism and Pentecostalism have taken root, to the United States, where Evangelical Christianity influences policy, prose and the choice of presidential candidates. Unfortunately, despite growing interest in the resurgence of religiosity and the global significance of this topic, we have a difficult time understanding the role of religion because we lack a good way to capture this phenomenon across countries and across time. Moreover, by focusing on formal constitutional texts, many authors miss important informal norms and ongoing practices operating at both the state and societal levels. The case of Turkey indicates that informal rules and customs are key to understanding the role of religion in society and politics. The country’s militantly secular constitution belies growing endorsement of a more public role for Islam and a decade of support for politicians who openly promote Islamic values. Drawing on the Turkish case study, this paper shows how informal norms can be incorporated into empirical measures of religious governance, and what happens when conflicting formal and informal policies and norms are operating within the same state. I rely on qualitative case study analysis and develop and apply an original measure of political religiosity.

Theoretical explanations for the enduring strength of Islamism rest primarily on organizational and institutional variables. Structure, discipline, reputation and the provision of services, are all regularly cited as key factors for the popularity of Islamist groups. These factors readily account for the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, which captured a near majority of the seats in Egypt’s first free and fair parliamentary elections of 2011-2012. However, the strong showing of the Islamic Bloc, a grouping of three Salafi political parties which won 25 percent of the vote, presents an intriguing research puzzle. How did the Salafis, a broad religious movement which deemphasizes the authority of the traditional schools of Sunni legal theory in favor of an individualized and strictly literalist textual interpretation of the Quran and Sunnah (sayings and deeds of the Prophet), run such an impressive campaign? Their success is especially notable given that under Mubarak most Salafis fiercely opposed democracy, relentlessly criticized the Muslim Brotherhood for participating in elections, and boasted no track record in electoral politics. These facts call into question conventional explanations for Islamist electoral success. This paper combines the qualitative works on Salafism in Egypt with survey results and new sources of online data to make the case that ideology, long neglected in the political science literature and largely discounted in most explanations for the electoral accomplishments of Islamist parties, is essential for explaining the strong showing of the Islamic Bloc in Egypt’s foundational elections of 2012.

In the absence of divinely-revealed guidance on the proper system of modern forms of government, Sunni Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, have looked to the examples of the Rashidun Caliphs—in particular Abu Bakr and ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab—to provide paradigms of proper governance. Shi’ite Islamist movements, on the other hand, do possess a divinely-revealed governmental structure of power, with the Imam and the regency of the jurist at the top. While, in Sunni Islamist political discourse, the paradigms of Abu Bakr and ‘Umar occupy places of prestige and authority, it is not surprising to see the two figures, and other rivals of 'Ali, largely absent from Shi’ite treatises on governance, including Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Vilayat-i Faqih (“Governance of the Jurist”). Indeed, Khomeini argued that proper Islamic governance could be instituted without reliance on the precedents of the early Islamic community—a view in harmony with the Shi’ite notion of ‘aql (and the reluctant embracing of ijtihad after the ghayba kubra), and in opposition to the Sunni notion that bid’a is absolutely unacceptable. What role, then, does the history of early Shi’ite Islam play in developing Shi’ite notions of the “proper” governmental structure? This article will contrast the role of early Islamic history in Shi’ite Islamist governmental theory (specifically in Iran) with its role in Sunni Islamist governmental theory (specifically in Egypt). It will also demonstrate that the different versions of the history that are remembered by each group, Sunni and Shi’ite, are used in different ways in the construction of political theories of governance. This paper will draw on sources such as (from the Shi’ite side) Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Government and Islam and Revolution, Sachedina’s The Just Ruler in Shi’ite Islam, Skocpol’s “Rentier State and Shi’a Islam in the Iranian Revolution,” Zickmund’s “Constructing Political Identity: Religious Radicalism and the Rhetoric of the Iranian Revolution”, and Maghen’s “O Ali, O Husayn;" and (from the Sunni side), Qutb’s Milestones, Moussali’s Radical Islamic Fundamentalism, al-Samman’s Usus al-Hukm fi al-Islam, el-Hibri’s Parable and Politics, and, finally, Bayat’s “Revolution without Movement, Movement without Revolution.”