Bøger i Critical Studies on Islamism serien

Human rights abuses and violations in Saudi Arabia attract international condemnation. But within the country, an Islamic civil rights movement, 'HASM', has called for change. While its members have received international human rights awards, the Saudi authorities have persecuted and imprisoned them.This book is the first to study human rights in the kingdom from the perspective of these prominent Saudi civil rights activists, uncovering the actual ideas that motivate their activism. Based on analysis of the group's texts, the book highlights that HASM neither supports an overthrow of the government, of which they are accused, nor are they "liberal" advocates of universal human rights. Their complex thought is a contribution to contemporary Islamic discourse because they make a case for 'peaceful civil jihad' through the protection of citizens' basic rights, but within a rigid, Salafist interpretation of social affairs that imposes heavy limits on politics, human rights and democracy. Furthermore, HASM's texts use war rhetoric and anti-Semitic language, with different arguments and words for domestic or international audiences. The most comprehensive text on this Islamic civil rights movement, the book employs detailed discourse analysis and includes sources from HASM texts in both Arabic and English.

Why did Islamists respond so differently to the Arab Spring? What do these different responses tell us about Islamists' ideological commitment and resilience, or the contexts within which they were functioning? This book is based on fieldwork on Islamists in eight Middle Eastern countries: Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Morocco, Yemen, Jordan, Kuwait and Syria. The contributors trace the transformation of the Islamists' ideology, behaviour, and strategy since the beginning of the Arab Spring. The aim of the book is to show that Islamists necessarily have an interactive and dialectical relationship with the environments in which they find themselves, and that their behaviour and political calculations are based on a wide range of local, regional and global factors. They take into account the impact of the different contexts the groups found themselves in from authoritarian to open and reformist, and contexts of armed conflict and civil war. An interdisciplinary project, the book captures the ongoing transformation of Islamist parties to explain the reasons why some movements could adapt and make shifts in their discourse and strategy, maintaining organizational coherence and unity, while others fell short and suffered major splits and schisms. The robust theoretical findings update existing literature on Islamism and advance the state of the field.