This Must Be The Podcast: Mohammed Hafez

In a provocative new article in the Middle East Journal, Mohammed Hafez argues that all threads of the Islamist project have failed, a collective exhaustion as complete as the post-1967 death of the pan-Arabist project. Muslim Brotherhood style movements such as those in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia that contested elections, preached non-violence, and maintained large social service sectors have been decimated by state repression or, as in Morocco, lost popularity as they governed. Violent transnational jihadists like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State have lost their wars in Syria and Iraq and lost their popular appeal as challengers to the status quo. Entrenched non-state Islamist actors like Hamas and Hezbollah have suffered grievous losses. Islamist-led regimes such as Bashir's Sudan and Iran's Islamic Republic have been toppled or face massive domestic opposition and ideological opposition. Iran and its regional allies have suffered defeat after defeat, with the entire Axis of Resistance in shambles and Israel on the ascendent. Islamists, Hafez argues, are on a Road to Nowhere.

Hafez joins the Middle East Political Science Podcast today to talk about his provocative thesis.

Hafez, a veteran observer of the Islamist scene and author of an extremly influential book on the effects of state repression on Islamist political mobilization, certainly captures something important about the current regional political scene . It's in the air: Faisal Devji's new book, Waning Crescent, paints Islamist decline in a broad historical sweep, while countless recent essays and social media commentaries describe the emergence of post-Islamist regional politics.

Hafez is right that Islamist projects of various persuasions have indeed clearly failed on their own terms. The leading Muslim Brotherhood organizations of decades past, such as those in Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, barely exist anymore after ferocious state repression. They were socially and politically marginalized by the extreme polarization which consumed the region after 2011, a popular (and media-fueled) backlash which resulted in broad popular enthusiasm in Egypt for the August 2013 massacre of Islamist protestors at Rabaa and in Tunisia for the arrest of Ennahda leaders. The jihadist extremism of the Syrian insurgency in the early 2010s has given way upon its triumph to Ahmed Sharaa's eager efforts to cultivate foreign investment and cheerful appearances at Davos and the White House.

But Islamist movements have faced tough times before, and have proven resilient. My speculative 2022 piece on the future of Islamism similarly noted the dire circumstances of most Arab Islamist movements. But I warned about assuming a straight line from current conditions:

This is not the first time that Islamist movements have suffered catastrophic setbacks in the face of state repression or popular rejection. Islamists have proven their ability to rebound quickly from devastating conditions. Egypt in the 1970s is the prototypical example. Nasserist repression of the Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s had nearly destroyed the organization, while religious trends had been pushed to the margins of political and cultural life. It did not take long for the Brotherhood to re-emerge when Sadat brought the Islamists out of the prisons and encouraged their political return to serve as a counterweight to Nasserists and the Left. In Tunisia, the Ennahda movement had been largely destroyed by the Ben Ali regime in the 1990s and 2000s but returned to dominate elections in 2011 despite lacking social services, public presence, or robust organization (Wolf 2017; McCarthy 2018b). The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood took a leading role in the political opposition in 2011 despite having been crushed and driven into exile by the Assad regime in the early 1980s (Lefèvre 2013; Conduit 2020). Iraqi Islamists took a lead role in Sunni politics after 2003 despite having been repressed and feared by Saddam Hussein’s regime (Helfont 2018).

Where Hafez sees terminal decline, I anticipate at least the possibility of Islamist resurgence in new forms. My 2022 article outlined ten different mechanisms which allowed Islamists to recover from earlier disasters, finding that some of them are no longer operative but that others very much are. The prospects for a resurgent Islamism are rooted in the profound ongoing economic, governance and political failures of most Arab regimes. By relying ever more on upgraded forms of authoritarian repression, those regimes have closed down not just Islamists but most non-Islamist civil society and political alternatives as well. That leaves a vast pool of grievances with virtually no organizations or movements capable of channeling them into a political challenge. 2011 proved that Islamist movements are often capable of much faster regeneration than their rivals.

Meanwhile, salafi movements which have chosen political accommodation continue to operate on the ground in many places that Brotherhood Islamists have been shut down; that resembles the situation in Egypt in the 1970s, where politically-mobilized salafi cadres ended up rebuilding the ranks of the Brotherhood (see last week's podcast with Stephane Lacroix). The Saudi-Emirati split which is reshaping regional politics is not primarily about Islamism, but could ease the UAE-driven pressures on Islamists of the last fifteen years and create new opportunities for their organizational rebuilding. And as much as the conventional wisdom has consolidated that Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel was a disaster for Islamism, it's actually far too early to fully assess the long term impact of Israel's devastation of Gaza and reckless expansion across the region, and what new political trends it might inspire.

The ever worsening economic and governance failures of regimes across the region, combined with their foreign policy impotence, seems like a recipe for populism – a genre of politics much in vogue globally these days, and a genre for which Islamists are extremely well-suited. It's also a recipe for state failure and insurgencies, also arenas in which Islamists have proven quite proficient. Back in late 2021 when I wrote that article, I predicted that Ahmed Sharaa's HTS (then still governing Idlib under Turkish protection while everyone assumed Assad had won the Syrian war, now ruling Syria after overthrowing him) might represent precisely the kind of new Islamist formation optimized for the new environment. There are other possibilities. Hafez's article does a great job of detailing the grim current situation for Islamists which should open up conversation for what might open the door to their return or for what might be done to forestall such a resurgence.

Listen to the podcast here.