Filozofija i društvo/Philosophy and Society

Zlatko Hadžidedić, Nations and Capital: The Missing Link in Global Expansion, New York, NY: Routledge, 2022.

Jovica Pavlović — 2024-09-29

Review

Editors’ Note

Ivan Ejub Kostić — 2024-09-29

Editors’ Note

Islam as Method

Emin Poljarević — 2024-09-29

This essay presents “Islam as Method” as a multi-dimensional approach that serves as an academic framework, a process of engagement, and an activist strategy. It argues that Islam, in the “Islam as Method” thesis, is an ontological category rooted in a commitment to divine unity and ethical principles such as justice (‘adl), dignity (karama) and excellence (ihsan). These commitments enable Muslim activists to assert intellectual and cultural autonomy beyond Euro-American academic, political, and ideological constraints. Drawing on examples from Islamicate contexts, this multi-dimensional approach recognizes the diversity within Islamic traditions while identifying common ethical threads that guide collective action. By emphasizing shared principles and the dynamic reinterpretation of Islamic ethics, “Islam as Method” challenges the dominance of secular and (neo)liberal perspectives and fosters the development of autonomous, cross-cultural dialogue. Informed by the works of contemporary scholars like the late Shabbir Akhtar, Taha Abdurrahmane and Khaled Aboul El Fadl, this method suggests that an intense epistemological shift is underway, allowing committed Muslims to reclaim their agency and produce coherent, ethical knowledge aligned with their values and historical experiences.

Islamic Philosophy and Modern Social Science: The Need to Re-examine the Methods of Forming Social Theories in the Sphere of Religious Culture

Seid Halilović — 2024-09-29

Social theories are logically associated with a series of terms that represent their principles and consequences. When they are realized in society, they actualize the entire network of their conceptual additions in a logical order. One part of this network primarily attracts the attention of the scientific community, while the other one remains hidden and takes the form of marginal knowledge. Modern social science theories move from the margins to the center of society once their philosophical principles are actualized even in the sphere of general culture. In the context of Islamic culture, these theories appeared in the shadow of the credibility of the political and economic domination of Western societies, and their philosophical principles remained hidden on the margins of domestic knowledge. In the domestic cultural atmosphere, based on significantly different knowledge, modern social theories have caused cultural and historical disturbances, because they have not been reconstructed in accordance with the needs of the cognitive heritage of Islam. Logical principles of modern science have gradually left the marginal sphere and dominantly influenced their new and weakened cultural environment, which is facing identity challenges and crises on its way to complete transformation.

Revisiting Post-Islamism a Decade After the Arab Spring

Mohammad Affan — 2024-09-29

The Arab Spring uprisings marked a watershed moment in regional politics, significantly impacting Islamist movements in terms of strategies, ideologies, and organizational structures. Accordingly, this paper examines whether these dramatic events strengthened or weakened the post-Islamist evolution of traditional political Islam movements, focusing on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (E-MB) and the Tunisian Ennahda Movement Party (EMP) as case studies. The proposed hypothesis is that the Arab Spring has variably influenced Islamists. In Egypt, it initially weakened the post-Islamist turn of the E-MB. However, owing to the 2013 coup and subsequent repression, the E-MB was politically excluded and weakened, creating a vacuum that was filled by various forms of less political or non-ideological forms of Islamic activism. The Tunisian Islamists had a different story. The Arab Spring seems to have strengthened their transition to post-Islamism. In its tenth conference, the EMP declared its exit from political Islam, adopting the new concept of Muslim Democracy. Even after the presidential takeover in July 2021, which resulted in the political exclusion of the EMP, the Work and Achievement party that defected from it maintained clear post-Islamist features.

Ennahda’s Muslim Democracy in Post-Arab Spring Tunisia: Synthesizing Political Thought and Practice

Imad Alsoos — 2024-09-29

This article explores the interplay between political thought and practice within Tunisia’s Ennahda party, first during its period in opposition, then after it took power in 2011, and finally in the aftermath of the 2021 coup. We trace the genealogy of political thought within the party from the point of its foundation. In doing so, we explore the gradual evolution of party ideology, from a daʿwa-based belief system between 1969 and 1981, to Islamic democracy between 1981 and 2011, to ‘Muslim democracy’ after the 2011 uprising. We examine this ideological evolution through the framework of three key elements: (i) Islam, (ii) Tunisia’s changing socio-political context, and (iii) the broader universal episteme. As we show, a significant turning point came in 2016, with the separation of the daʿwa from party politics, which revealed a burgeoning state / party conceptualization of politics. However, the 2021 coup challenged Ennahda’s concept of Muslim democracy, as well as all aspects of the party’s own sense of continuity as a significant socio-political actor, such as its institutional structure, leadership, membership, social base, political strategy, and ideology. Ennahda is now confronted by an authoritarian resurgence, which aims at containing the party, and at delegitimizing its participation within nation-state structures. Empirical evidence, based on content-analytical evaluations of personal interviews as well as the media’s coverage of Ennahda, shows that the party’s representatives are increasingly focusing on organizational reform in order to deal with the ramifications of the 2021 coup. Their aim seems to be to democratize both Ennahda and the Tunisian state itself.

Religion and Politics in Morocco: Islamic, Islamist, and Post-Islamist Dynamics

Mohammed Hashas — 2024-09-29

This paper aims to map the terrain of religion and politics in modern and contemporary Morocco. Seeing the chronological and intellectual diversity within Moroccan religious thought and politics, this paper proposes three major historical periods to facilitate approaching the topic: the pre-/ colonial, the colonial, and postcolonial times. The first pre/-colonial period is hybrid; it coincides with the rise of the first generation of the Moroccan Nahda renewal, before the colonial period, although it lived into the colonial period and played important roles in it for liberation. I mark this with the “Islamic” label, since Islam was the only common identity marker for any project of renewal in an intellectually “homogeneous” society. As to the colonial period, this Islamic identity became stronger since the colonial administration tried to weaken this identity and the social fabric and its related institutions, be they religious brotherhoods, religious endowments, or Sufi orders; at a certain moment in 1930, the colonial administration played on linguistic differences to divide and rule, and in another occasion, in 1953–1955, it tried to dethrone the nationalist Sultan and replace him with a docile one. Here, again, the “Islamic” identity marker of society and politics was further emphasized as a force of unity, thus the label of Nationalist Islam in this stage, despite the variety of currents within the nationalist movement. As to the postcolonial period, it is a phase in which the modern debates over the format of the nation state, the place of religion in politics, democracy, liberalism, socialism, and secularization become part of Moroccan thought and politics. Thus, three major labels are used to describe the variety of political Islams in society: the Ultra-Orthodox Islam, the Orthodox Islam, and Critical Islam. And since they all share Islam as an identity but interpret it differently, I borrow the term from Asef Bayat to call this period the “post-Islamist” period, since the actors with the Islamic label are multiple, and no one single trend or project manages to win to enforce its Islamist interpretation on society and political stakeholders. More importantly, this diversity of interpretations is what saves the “Islamic” from rigidity and turns it into its fluidity of pre-modern times, i.e. to the “Islamic” as a lived spirituality and moral compass, as a theocentric way of life, in a forthcoming post- Islamist society, a secular world and neoliberal economies.

From ‘We Want to Destroy the Regime’ to ‘We Want to Destroy the World Order’: Russian Multipolarity and the Enlistment of the Post-Arab Spring Dār Al-islām

Dustin J. Byrd — 2024-09-29

The Arab Spring produced new optimism in the Middle East regarding the possibility of democracy at the heart of the Muslim world. However, as the years passed, such optimism abated, leaving bitterness and cynicism in its wake. During the Arab Spring, Vladimir Putin watched in horror as numerous “strong men” lost power, or nearly lost power, including his ally, Bashar al-Assad. Determined not to allow what he saw as the West’s meddling in the Middle East provide a template for his own removal from power, Putin embarked on an anti-Western campaign to create a “multipolar world,” one that would liberate the strong men rulers from the demands of the “rules-based order,” i.e., the “unipolar world.” Key to the success of this campaign was the fostering of an alliance between the Russkii Mir (Russian World) and the dār al-Islām (Abode of Islam). Together with other parts of the world, such a coalition would resist the collective power of the Western world and attempt to bring about global conditions wherein “traditional” peoples can express their cultural, political, and economic particularities without being subject to the corrosive influence of the West. Key to this anti-Occident ideology is the far-right Russian philosopher, Alexander Dugin, and his neo-Eurasianist ideology. This essay explores how Dugin’s “reactionary modernist” ideology contributes to the struggles against the unipolar world, while at the same time arguing that his philosophy will most likely not be successful within the dār al-Islām for a variety of political, social, and religious reasons. If the promises of the Arab Spring are ever to come to fruition, this article argues, it will not be through a palingenetic Russia led by Putin.

Reform and Resurgence: The Transformation of Islamic Movements in the 21st Century

Jaan Islam — 2024-09-29

This paper studies the development in the thought and praxis of Islamic movements that aim to revive a political system governed by Islamic law. Post-Caliphate Islamic movements – the subject of the current study – have undergone recent reforms in thought, approach, and even branding since the Arab Spring. Notwithstanding the movements’ legal and theological diversity, the author argues that they share common features of reform characterized by (a) appeal to public opinion and grassroots work; and (b) willingness to work with groups outside their movement. These reforms were shaped in tandem with and in reaction to the War on Terror, the Arab Spring, and the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan. The author argues that these changes gave rise to dynamic reform in the latest generation of Islamic movements, leading to substantive revisions in their approach (manhaj) to achieving Islamic change. Despite tightening proscription and censorship, the author argues that the fruit of these reforms has been a resurgence in the form of highly efficient and creative collaboration between movements. Examples studied include collaboration between the Muslim Brothers (MB) and Hizb ut Tahrir in the West, and between former-al-Qaeda and MB affiliates in Syria. The author estimates these strategies – following a period of political failure and internal skepticism – have precipitated a resurgence that makes the future of Islamic movements highly potent, despite resulting in a dilution of each group’s identity and possible decline in membership. As a result of this trajectory, this study argues for the need to theorize contemporary Islamic movements beyond historical categories that have fossilized in Western academia, and often do not capture the dynamic, fluidity and comprehensiveness of Islamic struggle. This study utilizes a mixed methodology, including archival analysis and intellectual genealogy.

A Political Empowerment: The Role of Party Politics in the Future of European Muslim

Ivan Ejub Kostić — 2024-09-29

This paper critically examines the socio-political dynamics affecting Muslims in Europe, focusing on the significant barriers that hinder their active participation in party politics. A central argument is that the internalized secular worldview has led to widespread political disengagement. This issue is further compounded by the first generation of Muslims in Europe, who developed and entrenched a minority mindset, along with certain ulema who promote socio-political passivity and quietism, severely limiting more complex and effective political engagement. To counter this situation, the paper emphasizes the urgent need for Muslims to move beyond status quo or reactionary approaches, such as supporting mainstream parties or resorting to political abstention, both of which only superficially address their concerns. Instead, it advocates establishing independent political entities rooted in Islamic principles that strive for more profound systemic change. Such an approach would empower Muslims to form strategic alliances, challenge the status quo, and tackle broader societal issues, ultimately advancing the interests of both their communities and European society as a whole.

The Transformation of the Discourse on Secularism/the Civil State in Arab Academic Writings Post Arab Spring

Sari Hanafi — 2024-09-29

Since the start of the Arab Spring, no topic has been more polarizing to elites than secularism, the civil state, and political Islam. In this article, I will analyze the academic literature written by researchers and sometimes political activists in journals published in the Arab world on this topic. I will conduct a quantitative (bibliometric) and qualitative analysis of this literature (149 articles), in order to try to answer the following questions: To which extent is there interest in these topics in academic journals? How did these writers address the topic of secularism or the civil state? How do leftist/secular/liberal trends on the one hand and Islamic trends on the other interact with the issue of secularism? What type of journals are these?

AI and/as Racialised Political Theology

Syed Mustafa Ali — 2024-09-29

Building on earlier work engaging with the entanglement of artificial intelligence (AI) and apocalypticism and both with whiteness (Ali 2019), in the present essay I explore AI through the lens of a political theology informed by critical race theory and decolonial thought. The essay begins by setting out the meaning of a few key concepts, viz. AI, political theology, ‘The World’, and the apocalyptic, before going on to consider their relationship, and concludes by briefly sketching an oppositional stance that I suggest is appropriate to adopt in relation to AI where the latter is understood as a manifestation of racialised political theology.

Ukraine, Ideology, and Arms: Coming to Terms with Just War Theory

Asger Sørensen — 2024-09-29

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has challenged the ideals of peace that I and many other left-wing critical intellectuals hold dear. By the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant argued that the realist law of peoples and the idea of just war should be superseded by the idea of perpetual peace, and, fortunately, the principled opposition to war was institutionalized in the United Nations in the 20th century. However, when the aggressor has already taken possession of huge swathes of territory, calls for peace may be suspected of ideological bias. The right to defend yourself is almost universally recognized, but a military counter-offensive to reconquer lost territory is not merely defense but itself aggression, and thus an act of war. Many of us, however, want to support such efforts in Ukraine, and what is worrying is that this places us on a slippery slope, reopening the possibility of justifying war. As I will argue, this is nevertheless the path we must take, thus accepting the possible justification of war and the possible justification of specific activities and armaments but not others. We should take more seriously the justice of war, with all the specific normative challenges that this implies.

From Secession to Submission: an Ethical Framework for Non-territorial Autonomy

Stipe Buzar — 2024-09-29

The purpose of the paper is to ascertain when non-territorial autonomy (NTA) arrangements are a morally appropriate response by states to various minority claims, given possible alternatives. As such, it is not about the relationships between minorities and majorities, but minorities and the state. The two main questions are: (1) What are the criteria of moral appropriateness? (2) When are any of the alternatives morally appropriate? Methodologically speaking, it makes sense to start from the most difficult of the alternatives to justify secession because it represents the most extreme possible claim of a minority towards a state, or even against a state. Once such a criterion or set of criteria is established, the criteria for other alternatives can only be reasonably lower, and the criteria for secession will be indicative of what these lower criteria could be.

Values, Norms and Social Dynamics

Mladen Lazić — 2024-09-29

The aim of this paper is to offer a distinct approach to the theoretical conceptualization of values and norms, as well as their relationship to one another. This approach views values as a factor that can hinder the integration of the existing order and potentially contribute to a crisis of its reproduction. The relationship between values and norms is defined as potentially asymmetrical. The concept of normative-value dissonance is derived from this asymmetry, indicating the dynamic character of relations between changes to the dominant system of social reproduction and changes to the order of values and norms. Normative-value dissonance can further be broken down into systemic normative-value dissonance, which occurs when the value and normative order are not harmonized due to changes of the system of social relations as a whole, and intrasystemic, which occurs due to changes in the dominant social order, without changes to the foundations on which it is based.