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CRITICAL POLITICAL THEORY AND RADICAL PRACTICE
Arab Spring
Modernity, Identity and Change
Edited by
Eid Mohamed
Dalia Fahmy
Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice
Series Editor
Stephen Eric Bronner
Department of Political Science
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
The series introduces new authors, unorthodox themes, critical interpreta-
tions of the classics and salient works by older and more established
thinkers. A new generation of academics is becoming engaged with imma-
nent critique, interdisciplinary work, actual political problems, and more
broadly the link between theory and practice. Each in this series will, after
his or her fashion, explore the ways in which political theory can enrich
our understanding of the arts and social sciences. Criminal justice, psy-
chology, sociology, theater and a host of other disciplines come into play
for a critical political theory. The series also opens new avenues by engag-
ing alternative traditions, animal rights, Islamic politics, mass movements,
sovereignty, and the institutional problems of power. Critical Political
Theory and Radical Practice thus fills an important niche. Innovatively
blending tradition and experimentation, this intellectual enterprise with a
political intent hopes to help reinvigorate what is fast becoming a petrified
field of study and to perhaps provide a bit of inspiration for future scholars
and activists.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14938
Eid Mohamed • Dalia Fahmy
Editors
Arab Spring
Modernity, Identity and Change
Editors
Eid Mohamed Dalia Fahmy
Doha Institute for Graduate Studies Department of Political Science
Doha, Qatar Long Island University
Brooklyn, NY, USA
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON, Canada
Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice

ISBN 978-3-030-24757-7 ISBN 978-3-030-24758-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24758-4
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to
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Praise for Arab Spring: Modernity,
Identity and Change
“If the Arab Spring largely lacked any systematic intellectual anchor, its
very happening has implied and spurred a new intellectual formation,
notably on religion and politics. Setting out to address the crucial ques-
tion of what the Arab spring can tell us about Arab thought, this book
begins to open up a valuable discussion about the meaning of what swept
across the Arab societies in the 2010s.”
—Asef Bayat, Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational
Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA
“While the world at large may think that the spectacular crescendo of Arab
Spring is over, understanding what has exactly happened to the Arab world
has just begun. Two seminal scholars of the Arab world, Eid Mohamed
and Dalia Fahmy, have gathered in this compendium of critical thinking—
Arab Spring: Modernity, Identity and Change—the largely uncharted
vicissitude of statecraft and governance as the locus classicus of our under-
standing of the Arab world—before and after these revolutions. What they
have produced will teach us far beyond the surface of the historical unfold-
ing of a world-historic event. They intend changing the very angle of our
visions. No serious scholar of these revolutions can afford ignoring
this book.”
—Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian
Studies and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA
“The rise and fall of the 2011 Arab revolts occasioned a crisis within politi-
cal Islam in a number of ways. Of course there was the brutal, violent
counter-revolution of the 2013 Egyptian coup and the subsequent perse-
cution of all opposition movements. But within political Islam itself, the
brief opening of the 2011 period (still partly alive in Tunisia), followed by
the anti-political backlash in much of the region has caused something of
a rupture in the historical trajectory of political Islam. Is it still possible to
orient one’s thinking in terms of an ‘Islamic state’ or an ‘Islamization of
modernity’? Or does the encounter with constituent politics in pluralist
conditions, the authoritarian-nationalist trajectory of the AKP in Turkey,
and the resurgence of anti-democratic neo-Traditionalism require a more
radical shift of political and ideological framing on the part of Islamists
themselves and scholars who study Islamist movements? This volume,
with contributions from many leading scholars of political Islam and Arab
politics (including many working and writing within the Middle East) is a
crucial resource for answering those questions.”
—Andrew F. March, Associate Professor of Political Science,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA
Contents
1 Arab Spring: Modernity, Identity, and Change 1

Dalia Fahmy and Eid Mohamed
Part I Rethinking Islamism and the State After the Arab

Spring 13
2 Whither Post-Islamism: Revisiting the Discourse/

Movement After the Arab Spring 15
Mojtaba Mahdavi
3 Islamists and Politics in Tunisia Today: Is the Foundation

of a Democratic Islamic Party Possible? 39
Mouldi Lahmar
4 The ‘Arab Spring’ and the End of Turkish Democracy 55

Pierre Hecker
5 Re-examining Hasan al-Banna’s Model of Da’wah in the

Post-Arab Spring Era 79
Khalidah Ali
vii
viii Contents
Part II People, Media, Power and the State: Civil Society in

Postrevolutionary States 97
6 Democracy Promotion 2.0: Barack Obama and the “Arab

Spring” Conundrum 99
Aziz Douai
7 The Struggle for Revolutionary Memory: Historiography

and Documentation of the January 25 Revolution119
Abdou Moussa El-Bermawy
8 Affective Encounters: Women, Hope, and Activism in

Egypt135
Nermin Allam
9 On Samir Murqus, the Narrative of Crisis and the

Triumph of Tahrir157
Isaac Friesen
10 Arab Spring and the Issue of Democracy: Where Does

Middle Eastern Studies Stand?173
Ahmed Abd Rabou
Part III Polarization, Transition and Justice in

Postrevolutionary States 205
11 Seeking New Metaphors: Gender Identities in Tunisia

and Lebanon207
Arnaud Kurze
12 Unity–Consensus–Reconciliation: The Substance

of Tunisia’s Elite Compromise—An Analysis of Post
Revolutionary Metaphors235
Julius Dihstelhoff
Contents ix
13 Constructing Civic Space: Civil Resistance, Sustainable

Citizen Empowerment, and Transitional Justice as
Pathways of Change in Contemporary Arab Politics257
Nathan C. Funk
Index279
Notes on Contributors
Ahmed Abd Rabou is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at

Cairo University, Egypt, and is a visiting assistant professor at Josef Korbel
School of International Studies, University of Denver, USA. Abd Rabou
has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals on democratization
in Egypt and other Arab nations. He is also known among Egyptian schol-
ars for his specialization in civil-military relations, political Islam, and
democratization, on which he focuses his research.
Khalidah Ali is a PhD candidate at the Department for the Study of
Religion at University of Toronto, Canada. Her main interests include
modern Islam in Egypt, Islamic Reformism, and Islamism. She holds a BA
in History and Philosophy and an MA in Near and Middle Eastern
Civilizations from University of Toronto. Her dissertation focuses
on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the Hasan al-Banna era
(1928–1949) and the model of da’wah (Islamic preaching) developed by
the organization in this period. Her research explores da’wah as the cen-
tral activity of the organization and analyzes its specific models of teaching
and outreach to fellow Egyptians, as well as modes of training of members
of the Muslim Brotherhood, within the long-term vision of achieving a
revival of Islam in Egypt along the lines of the organization’s religious and
social ideals.
Nermin Allam is Assistant Professor of Politics at Rutgers University-
Newark, USA. Before joining Rutgers, Allam held a Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship at
Princeton University. Her areas of research interest include social
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
movements; gender politics; Middle Eastern and North African stud-

ies; and political Islam. In her book, Women and the Egyptian Revolution
(2017), Allam tells the story of the 2011 uprising from the perspec-
tive of the women who participated, based on extensive interviews
with female protesters and activists. The book offers an oral history
of women’s engagement in this important historical juncture; it situ-
ates women’s experience within the socio-economic flows, political
trajectories, and historical contours of Egypt.
Julius Dihstelhoff is a research fellow in the Department of Politics at
the Center for Near and Middle Eastern Studies at Philipps-Universität
Marburg, Germany. He is author and publisher of two series: MENA
direkt—Islamism on the move and MENA direkt—Short Paper. Moreover,
his recent publications include “Coping with Frustration: A Snapshot of
the Self-Assessment of Tunisian Youth” (in Friedrich Ebert-Stiftung,
2018) and “The West” in political discourse structures of regimes and
Muslim Brotherhood in the Egyptian transformation process (in Middle
East Review, with Alexander Lohse, 2017).
Aziz Douai is Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Media
Studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada. He
is the author of Arab Media and the Politics of Terrorism: Unbecoming
News (2019) and co-editor of New Media Influence on Social and Political
Change in Africa (2013) and Mediated Identities and New Journalism in
the Arab World: Mapping the “Arab Spring” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Abdou Moussa El-Bermawy is an assistant coordinator of the Project
on the Study of Democratic Transformation and Transition in the Arab
Countries, a program within the Arab Center for Research and Policy
Studies (ACRPS), Qatar. He is a political researcher specialized in democ-
ratization and political reform in Egypt and the Middle East and North
Africa (MENA) region. He has published in a number of peer-reviewed
magazines about culture, development, and human rights issues.
Dalia Fahmy is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island
University, USA, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy in
Washington, DC, USA, and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study
of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers University, USA. She is the
author of “The Rise and Fall of The Muslim Brotherhood and the Future
of Political Islam” (forthcoming) and co-editor of Illiberal Intelligentsia
and the Future of Egyptian Democracy (2017) and International Relations
(2017).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii
Isaac Friesen is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, Canada,

in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations. His anthro-
pological and historical research focuses on intersections of religion, poli-
tics, and society in provincial Egypt—where he lived for more than four
years. His thematic interests include historicity, secularism, ethics, and
politics in the modern Middle East. His research has been supported by
the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Nathan C. Funk is associate professor and chair of Peace and Conflict
Studies at Conrad Grebel University College, University of Waterloo, in
Waterloo, ON, Canada. His publications on religious and cultural dimen-
sions of peacebuilding include Islam and Peacemaking in the Middle East
(2009), Ameen Rihani: Bridging East and West (2004), “Building on
What’s Already There: Valuing the Local in International Peacebuilding”
(International Journal, 2012), “Islam and Peace and Conflict Studies” (in
Peace on Earth: The Role of Religion in Peace and Conflict Studies, 2014),
and “Religion and Peaceful Relations: Negotiating the Sacred” (in
Routledge Companion to Peace and Conflict Studies, 2019). He has served
on the boards of Project Ploughshares and Peacebuild: The Canadian
Peacebuilding Network and is board chair of the Peace and Conflict
Studies Association of Canada.
Pierre Hecker is lecturer and research fellow at the Center for Near and
Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Marburg, Germany. He is the
author of the book Turkish Metal: Music, Meaning, and Morality in a
Muslim Society (2012) and has co-edited a special issue on “Culture” in
Middle East—Topics & Arguments (META). He is also the head of the
research team “‘Ne mutlu ateistim diyene.’ Atheism & The Politics of
Culture in Contemporary Turkey,” which is funded by Stiftung Mercator,
and is preparing an edited volume on “The Politics of Culture in ‘New
Turkey’” together with Kaya Akyıldız and Ivo Furman.
Arnaud Kurze is Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at Montclair State
University, USA. His scholarly work on transitional justice in the post-
Arab Spring world focuses particularly on youth activism, art, and collec-
tive memory. He is leading a Digital Humanities Project on political
change in the Mediterranean basin and is co-organizing the Cres
Summer School on Transitional Justice. Since 2013, he has been a
visiting scholar at New York University. His research is widely pub-
lished and he is the editor of New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice:
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Gender, Art & Memory. He has also given interviews on lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues in the Middle East and
Tunisia’s democratization process, among others. He is the recipient of
numerous awards and fellowships, including the American Council on
Learned Societies, Sciences Po, and the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Mouldi Lahmar is a professor in the Sociology and Anthropology pro-
gram at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar. He holds a PhD in
Sociology and Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en
Sciences Sociales (The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences,
Paris), and Doctorat d’Etat in Sociology (Political Studies) from the
Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Tunis. Before joining Doha
Institute for Graduate Studies, he was Professor of Sociology at the Faculty
of the Social and Human Sciences in Tunis. He is the editor-in-chief of
OMRAN for Social Sciences, a peer-review journal published by ACRPS. He
is also a member of the Editorial Committee of the Tunisian Review of
Political Sciences and a member of the Dirasset Maghribya Laboratory
(Moroccan Studies). His publications include “Italian Colonial Knowledge
and Identity-Shaping in Libya” in After Orientalism (2015), The Tunisian
Revolution: A Local Trigger Under the “Magnifier” of Social Sciences
(Multidisciplinary Research) (2014) and Social Roots of Modern State in
Libya: Individuals, Political Groupings and Zaâma (2009).
Mojtaba Mahdavi is Professor of Political Science and the Edmonton
Council of Muslim Communities (ECMC) Chair in Islamic Studies at
University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author and editor of numerous
works on post-Islamism, contemporary social movements and democrati-
zation in the MENA region, postrevolutionary Iran, and modern Islamic
political thought. His books include Towards the Dignity of Difference?
Neither End of History nor Clash of Civilizations (with A. Knight, 2012);
Rethinking China-Middle East Relations in the Age of Neoliberalism (with
T. Keskin, Brill Publishing, 2020); The Myth of “Middle East Exceptionalism”:
The Unfinished Project of MENA Social Movements (forthcoming); Under
the Shadow of Khomeinism: Problems and Prospects for Democracy in Post-
revolutionary Iran (forthcoming); and Towards a Progressive Post-Islamism:
Neo-Shariati Discourse in Postrevolutionary Iran (with S. Saffari, in prog-
ress). He is the guest editor of the special issue of Sociology of Islam on
“Contemporary Social Movements in the Middle East and Beyond.” His
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv
research lies at the intersection of critical Middle East studies, political

economy, contemporary Islamic studies, and decolonial/postcolonial
studies.
Eid Mohamed is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literary and
Cultural Studies at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar. Mohamed’s
work is located at the crossroads of several areas of inquiry in American
and Arab and Muslim studies, including comparative literary and cultural
studies, media studies, and anthropology of social change. His recent
publications include a sole-authored book on American imagery in
the Middle East (2015), a co-edited volume about the 2011 Egyptian
uprising and its aftermath (2016), and a co-edited compilation about
Arab education after the Arab Spring (2016). He is working on a
book manuscript tentatively titled From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park:
Arab-US Cultural Politics in Post Arab Spring Era, which examines the
ways in which cultural identity and collective action have been trans-
formed by the global uncertainty of both 9/11 and the Arab Spring.
Focusing on the Egyptian Revolution and the Occupy movements, he
examines how political agency, repertoires of resistance, and transna-
tional networks have been transformed in times of crisis and hope.
He considers, in particular, the significance of space in these moments,
as those “occupying” public space push back against increased efforts
to militarize, surveil, and privatize once public arenas. His work has
appeared in various academic journals including New Media & Society
and International Journal of Cultural Studies.
List of Figures
Fig. 10.1 Sample breakdown 180

Fig. 10.2 Context of analysis 184
Fig. 10.3 Is democracy possible? 185
Fig. 10.4 Were changes anticipatable (1989–2010)? 189
Fig. 10.5 Were changes anticipatable (2001–2010)? 190
Fig. 10.6 What does hinder democracy in the Middle East? 192
Fig. 10.7 Which actors will most likely bring democracy to the region? 194
Fig. 10.8 What is the most needed action to bring democracy to the
region?197
xvii
CHAPTER 1
Arab Spring: Modernity, Identity,

and Change
Dalia Fahmy and Eid Mohamed
Introduction
In the aftermath of the Arab Spring of 2011, what formative lessons can
be drawn on an epistemological level? What can these uprisings stand to
teach us about Arab thought more broadly, its historical underpinnings,
and especially, what the revolutionary rupture with the past portends for
the future of the Arab world and its politics? Indeed, much ink has been
spilled in attempting to wrestle with these existential concerns. For
instance, in his Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism, Hamid Dabashi
stresses that the Arab uprisings, in their transnational spirit, drive us to
D. Fahmy
Department of Political Science,
Long Island University, Brooklyn, NY, USA
e-mail: Dalia.Fahmy@liu.edu
E. Mohamed (*)
Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Doha, Qatar
University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada
e-mail: eahmedmo@uoguelph.ca
© The Author(s) 2020 1

E. Mohamed, D. Fahmy (eds.), Arab Spring, Critical Political Theory
and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24758-4_1
2 D. FAHMY AND E. MOHAMED
analyze the Arab consciousness, or rather the transformation of it, against

the ‘mystified consciousness’ fixated to it by colonial powers. This tran-
scendent spirit catalyzes a quest for ‘new metaphors’ beyond the world of
sheer binarism that marks the condition of postcoloniality, ‘the false dawn
of liberation from European colonialism and the decline of the Ottoman
Empire,’ and its ideological formations and structures of domination.
Under this Arab mode of defiance or protest, Dabashi’s argument would
go, national boundaries thaw and transnational connections reconfigure
accordingly. Much like socialism, nationalism and Islamism are ideological
formations inherited from colonial rule, which coalesce to produce the
hegemonic center-periphery illusion of the West and the Rest.
Indeed, Dabashi’s thesis is provocative and illuminating and proved
deeply influential in the framing of this volume. But in contradistinction
to his euphoric claim of the end of postcolonialism tout court, both as a
historical movement and as a theoretical framework, the contributions of
this collection instead seek to interrogate postcolonial epistemologies—
particularly its notion of the ‘régime du savoir,’ a construct utterly steeped
in modernity and the nation-state system—through critical engagement
with the Arab Spring and the consequent rise of political Islam. In the
aftermath of the contemporary popular uprisings in the Arab world, exist-
ing modes of production have been thoroughly critiqued as perpetuating
Eurocentric modes of production that sustain Western dominance through
purist/exclusionary discourses of nationalism, pan-Islamism, and pan-
Arabism—outdated discourses that were thoroughly debunked as effete
following the Arab nationalist revolts of the 1950s and 1960s. Seeking to
replace these anachronistic paradigms of the past, the acephalous Arab
revolutions are excavating new metaphors that could encapsulate the bur-
geoning spirit of revival/renewal. This transformative quest builds on an
umbilical link between the ‘national and the transnational’ in what Dabashi
terms as a ‘politics of hope’ or for discovery of new geographies of libera-
tion that is sufficiently radical to transcend colonial mapping, as crystal-
lized in the expanding Tahrir Square(s) over vast geographic spaces guided
by limitless stretches of imagination.
Accordingly, this volume will explore the largely uncharted historical
currents, cultural contexts, and transnational environments in relation to
the concept and function of religion in Arab governance today—particu-
larly as it pertains to the notion of the state. The concept of ‘dawla’ as a
stand-in for the modern nation-state, for instance, is a distinct product of
modernity whereby communities in the Arab world have tried to define
1 ARAB SPRING: MODERNITY, IDENTITY, AND CHANGE 3
and conceptualize the state based on the unique contours of their specific
historical and cultural experiences. More specifically, Muslim intellectuals
in the modern era, in seeking to internalize the concept of the state, have
sought to excavate prescient moments and conceptual frameworks in
Islamic history, hoping to uncover precedents of state-like entities—par-
ticularly based on constructs of the nascent Islamic community of seventh-
century Arabia. This present volume will thus examine how this projection
and travel to the past manifested itself in contemporary debates to such an
extent that it became often essentialized in present intellectual discourses.
Its contributors analyze and interrogate not only the conceptual frame-
work of the state but also the evolution of political language used in vari-
ous temporal periods throughout Islamic intellectual history to more fully
elucidate the intimate vicissitudes between governance and religion. Put
another way, this project will examine the changing definitions of ‘reli-
gion,’ and specifically the development of the relationship between reli-
gion and state throughout the history of Islam. Does religion denote, for
example, the inevitability of imposing juristic determinations, forcing cer-
tain ethical imperatives, or establishing a value system to the state struc-
ture? At a more applied level, moreover, this volume will elaborate on the
interconnection between religious figures and government authority, as
this relationship is crucial for the legitimization (or delegitimization) of
claims of having established a bona fide Islamic state.
This broader debate over the conceptualization of the modern state in
Muslim-majority societies has become more acute since the collapse of the
Ottoman Caliphate in 1914. After all, the Ottoman Empire for centuries
constituted the locus of Muslim statecraft globally—in geopolitical, cul-
tural, and ideological terms alike. Accordingly, the fall of the empire gal-
vanized a fundamental rethinking of the nature of the state in Islam and
the process by which it adapts itself to urgencies and ideologies of modern
times. The Muslim world navigated these challenges, moreover, in a
twentieth-century context in which world ideologies about the state vacil-
lated between a series of competing frameworks that largely left aside the
question of religion, be it communism, socialism, or liberal democracy.
The Arab world, in particular, wrestled with these currents, such that these
same ideological frameworks took up root in Arab governance—albeit
with the imprimatur of Islamic legitimacy as conferred by creative Muslim
scholars and intellectuals, many going so far as argue that modern ideolo-
gies like liberal democracy were Islamic in their auspices and principles.
Alternatively, though, the imposition of the competing ideologies of

statecraft also gave rise to a distinctly Islamic conception of statecraft.
Particularly in the context of independence from colonial rule and the
rapid change of political systems in the Arab world, nascent national
Arab states had to adopt a new political ideology. Often that ideology
conformed to the interests of world powers—be it in the form of liber-
alism, communism, or socialism. But ultimately, any given chosen ideol-
ogy required local buy-in from newly minted Arab citizens; accordingly,
it made natural sense that the inaugural ideological framework was
often clothed in religious garb. The posturing in al-Azhar periodicals
and journals during the 1950s and 1960s—particularly, articles pub-
lished by members of the Majallat al-Azhar during this period that went
distinctly against the otherwise politically submissive posturing of the
religious scholars during that period—is a testament to this tendency to
look for a religious basis for statecraft. Islamic discourse of statecraft
was amplified and problematized tenfold, moreover, with the advent of
modern Islamic activist movements. The advent of groups like the
Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 and the al-Jama‘a al-Islamiya and al-
Jihad groups in the latter half of the twentieth century lent support to
a religio-political worldview that was intimately tied to the nature and
content of the state—a worldview that would stand to serve as a model
for the rest of the Arab and Muslim world. In particular, these groups
gave rise to the concept of jihad as an ‘absent obligation’ as a means to
revive the idea of the caliphate. Islamization came to color competing
state ideologies such that over time the concept of a bona fide Islamic
state was confined to the imaginative space of Muslim collective mem-
ory, recalled specifically when needed to serve political and ideological
positions and projects.
And it is in precisely this context of collective memory, of reactivating
revolutionary thinking on Islamic statecraft at crucial historical junctures,
that the Arab Spring proves especially germane. Quite unexpectedly, the
Arab Spring reshaped the Arab world precisely in terms of conceptualized
ideologies and, similarly, tempered the role and function of both civil soci-
ety and religious institutions in redefining the role of religion as an ideol-
ogy and regulatory system in building a post-Arab Spring Muslim state.
This volume is thus dedicated to critically exploring that process of recon-
stitution across multiple overlapping frameworks and approaches.
Methods
The volume primarily aims to investigate and assess the latest theoretical
approaches toward the issues under discussion, in light of the formative
lessons of the Arab Spring, from a multidisciplinary, comparative perspec-
tive. It takes into account the breadth of the Arab uprisings in their total-
ity, but deliberately focuses its attention on the case of Egypt, and to a
lesser extent on Tunisia and on neighboring Turkey. The reason being the
cases under consideration deal with states that have, at least de facto,
maintained a certain degree of structural integrity in the aftermath of the
Arab Spring—with Tunisia touted as the Arab Spring’s sole success story.
The subsequent eruption into civil war as witnessed in Syria, Yemen, and
Libya indeed require scholarly scrutiny, but by focusing our attention on
cases that remain in democratic transition without having devolved into
outright civil war, we stand to more meaningfully further comparative
paradigms that can be applied elsewhere to the region, and to democratic
transitions more broadly. Under the aegis of this broader approach, sec-
tions of the book will be divided into three distinct yet overlapping meth-
odological frameworks:
History
First, the volume will examine the very idea of political Islam in historical
perspective, focusing on its early conceptualization and subsequent evo-
lution in Arab and Islamic historical discourses and developing a histori-
cal narrative drawn from rigorous textual analysis. This section will
critically deconstruct and reconstruct the very concept of political Islam,
being especially sensitive to its place in modern discourse, and to its rise
after the Arab Spring.
Culture
Second, it will investigate the changing political and social conditions in

the Arab world to extract a modern cultural portrait of what political
Islam means today. Contributions in this respect will thus rely on cul-
tural data to construct a vivid and multidimensional cultural narrative as
it pertains to Islam and politics. Such materials will provide heretofore
unimaginable access to the societal dimensions of the relationship of
Islam with the state, and they will bolster the case that putative threads
of conservativism and repression in the Arab world are ultimately driven

by ethnic and sectarian divisions. Moreover, the project will raise crucial
questions about the sources and origins of these divisions taking into
consideration a history of Western intervention and manipulation—
covert and overt alike—designed to weaken Arab-Islamic influence and
empower imperialist aspirations in the region. In the same vein, this
volume will analyze culture and civil society as a site and vehicle of pro-
test more broadly—that is, beyond the immediate scope of Islam and
politics as such. In that context, the arts and social media prove pivotal
avenues for contesting political repression through culture—particularly
on issues germane to gender and sexuality.
Politics
Finally, it will provide new insights into the experience of living within the
contours of an ‘Islamic State.’ It will identify Islamic principles and
implementations regarding governance and foreign relations. Put more
succinctly, this section of the volume will analyze Islamic views of gov-
ernance, foreign relations, and diplomacy with both Muslim and non-
Muslim actors in the light of Islamic jurisprudence and Arab
historiography.
While this volume remains distinctly interdisciplinary in its scope, what

unites the totality of our contributions is a deep commitment to the criti-
cal interrogation of primary source materials. Few studies to date have
performed a focused critical analysis of Muslim reformist narratives that
connect critical readings of form and content to the larger socio-political
concerns in which they operate. The key thrust of our volume, then, is to
bridge this lacuna by offering fresh critical perspectives that are grounded
in a new interpretation of Islamic reform in the twenty-first century, and
that shape public understanding of the appropriateness of an Islamic state
in a modern context.
This volume builds off of a major conference the co-editors organized
at the University of Guelph in Canada on 11–12 November 2017, which
focused on key internal debates emanating from within the Muslim world
today on the rise of political Islam. The discussions stimulated from the
conference brought to bear a critique of Muslim historiography and poli-
tics and contributed to ongoing debates within the global Muslim com-
munity on Islam’s relationship with statecraft by providing new perspectives
on how political Islam and theological discourse and policy might be

better reconciled with modernity. Spurned, in part, as a response to an
increased demand since the Arab Spring for a more nuanced understand-
ing of Islam and Muslim societies by civil society organizations—cultural
institutions, think tanks, elected officials, policymakers, and journalists—
the conference helped foster a genuine understanding of the role of Islam
in a Muslim state, and how it should be understood in the modern world
by analyzing the difference between the state of Islam in the modern
period, on the one hand, and a purported Islamic state, on the other hand.
In so doing, this volume will offer a unique and much-needed perspective
to the field; while focusing specifically on the Egyptian context, its analysis
will offer prescriptions and perspectives that will prove germane in a global
perspective. This volume will not only translate the views of prominent
academics and writers but also contextualize them for Western academic
audiences. Subsequently, the European and American academic commu-
nity will be able to move beyond grand theories or idealistic notions about
the Arab Spring to exposure to the practical experience of eyewitnesses
and thereby gaining practical knowledge and understanding about the
Arab Spring.
Structure of the Argument

This volume is arranged in three overlapping sections. The first section
deals more broadly with the question of Islamism in light of the Arab
Spring. Setting the stage for the volume more broadly, this section offers
a theoretical architecture of Islamism, which then comes to inform more
specific incidences of Islamist politics, from Tunisia to Turkey, to Egypt.
Mojtaba Mahdavi begins the section in Chap. 2 by investigating the socio-
intellectual status of post-Islamist discourses and movements in a post-
Arab Spring Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. By
investigating the rise of Islamism specifically in the context of the Muslim
encounter with colonial modernity, Mahdavi ultimately offers post-
Islamism as a potential alternative to both. Suggesting that post-Islamism
challenges both a hegemonic voice of a singular and superior Western
colonial modernity and an essentialist Islamist response to that modernity,
post-Islamism promotes a dialogue between tradition and modernity,
expedites the possibility of emerging Muslim modernities, and encourages
civil and public religion—all the while discarding the concept and practice
of the ‘Islamic state’ as such. That said, Mahdavi makes clear that
ost-Islamism is a diverse paradigm, neither monolithic nor necessarily

p
progressive. As such, this chapter ends by shedding light on some of the
limitations of post-Islamist discourses and movements operating in the
contemporary MENA region.
Building on these rich theoretical insights, the rest of the section offers
robust case studies of Islamists in politics. In Chap. 3, Mouldi Lahmar
questions the sociological and ideological predispositions of the Nahdha
party in Tunisia to discern how it reconstituted itself from a religious orga-
nization preaching a renewed Islamic moral order into a political party
operating in multiparty politics advocating for individual freedoms. At
face value, this is merely a technical question insofar as party membership
have conformed with the party’s founding charter bifurcating its confes-
sional activities from its political activity. But in actuality, as this chapter
shows, the sociological and ideological challenges of this transformation
prove deeply problematic and present core challenges to Nahdha leader-
ship in how to successfully manage this passage in a way that proves ame-
nable to the plurality of Tunisian civil and political society. The
anthropological-political conception of Islam as total fact, in the Maussian
sense of the term, generates salvation—both in the present and in the
hereafter—as central to the challenge of this transition.
Chapter 4 shifts geographical focus to the Turkish case. Here Pierre
Hecker critically investigates the ‘Turkish model,’ hitherto considered the
gold standard of compatibility between Islam and democracy by a plethora
of intellectuals, politicians, activists, and economists globally. In the eyes
of its admirers, the Turkish model represented the reconstitution of
Islamism into a moderate conservative democracy properly reconciled
with the principles of secularism, human rights, and a free market econ-
omy—a model, may go as far as suggest, that could inspire the Muslim
world more broadly. Needless to say, in the increasingly authoritarian
aftermath of Turkey’s attempted coup attempt on 15 July 2016, particu-
larly a 16 April constitutional referendum effectively marking the end of
Turkish parliamentary democracy, such praises for the Turkish model now
seems anachronistic. Turkey’s move toward a de facto dictatorship has
given rise to not only massive and systemic human rights violations, but
simultaneously, a resurgence of explicit Islamist rhetoric in Turkish poli-
tics. This chapter intends to diagnose this degeneration of the Turkish
experiment with Islam and democracy, arguing that the Justice and
Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP), in contradis-
tinction to claims by many commentators that it ultimately exchanged
overt Islamist ambitions for neoliberal economic ones, had at no point

abandoned pursuing an overtly Islamic ideology. Moreover, this chapter
will investigate how Turkey’s AKP government has made symbolic use of
the Arab Spring, particularly Egypt’s 3 July 2013 military coup, as a sub-
terfuge to regain discursive supremacy over its political opponents and to
re-establish popular legitimacy among its own supporters, while simulta-
neously violently suppressing all forms of democratic protest.
This section concludes with a critical investigation of the Egyptian
example. In Chap. 5, Khalidah Ali looks into Hasan al-Banna’s project of
da’wah specifically in light of the Arab Spring. Al-Banna’s project, which
began as a novel set of principles and structures in the early twentieth cen-
tury, ultimately solidified over the past 89 years into a highly defined struc-
ture of Islamic activism, including pedagogical programs implemented at
the grassroots level with the immediate intent of cultivating ideal modern
Muslim subjects, and with the long-term intent of paving the conditions
of an Islamic political order. While particular strategies of da’wah (includ-
ing preaching, training, and social outreach) and political activism have
changed over the years, essential elements of al-Banna’s model remain
central to the Muslim Brotherhood project. That said, the current crisis of
the post-Arab Spring era, particularly the immense setbacks dealt to the
Brotherhood in the aftermath of the July 2013 coup, has given rise to the
critical re-evaluation of the elements of al-Banna’s model and their viabil-
ity in the aftermath of the organization’s brief experience with political
rule under the Morsi government. This chapter investigates this process of
reconstitution of the Brotherhood in the post-Arab Spring era. Utilizing
both interviews with current and former Brotherhood membership,
alongside close readings of foundation texts, this chapter will explicate the
re-examination of the Brotherhood project as its members look back his-
torically on the foundation of the organization and its guiding ideals. In
light of its setbacks and failures, Brotherhood members are rethinking
Hasan al-Banna’s originally articulated principles of activism, exclusivity of
membership, training, political strategies—and indeed, the fundamental
structure of the organization itself. It argues that the Brotherhood’s short-
lived experience with political rule, and the rampant political suppression
of the organization following its ouster, exposed the disconnect between
its original mission of activism from below, on the one hand, and the ideal
of establishing Islamic governance in Egypt, on the other hand.
Following this broader overview on the question of Islamism and the
state, the second section shifts gears to address narrative discourses around
the Arab Spring. Here we move from casting a wide geographic net to
focus intimately on the Egyptian case, focusing on democratic discourses
both emanating from and directed toward the Egyptian Revolution and its
aftermath. Aziz Douai sets the stage for this section in Chap. 6 by focusing
specifically on the American response to the Arab Spring. By scrutinizing
the Obama administration’s response to the Arab Spring more broadly,
this chapter situates American discourse toward the Arab Spring alongside
US discourses on democracy promotion. Through a rigorous analysis of
Obama’s speeches and writing, this chapter reveals that while the Obama
administration remained incoherent and cautious in the aftermath of the
Arab Spring, the regional uprisings eventually proved the catalyst to revive
American democracy promotion discourses in the Middle East more
broadly, begun earlier under the George W. Bush administration. Despite
the Obama administration having previously eschewed Bush’s democracy
promotion rhetoric in favor of non-intervention, the Arab Spring caused
these tensions to resurface and forced Obama to grapple with how to
properly address democratic reform in the region. Regrettably, his policies
replicated the same inconsistencies associated with the democracy promo-
tion discourse under the Bush administration, which accordingly led to a
profoundly disappointing reception in Obama’s posturing in the
Arab world.
From there Chap. 7 moves on to propose a bona fide historiography of
the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Here Abdou Moussa El-Bermawy chal-
lenges the idea of the revolution as a rupture of the past—as it has been
described by a plethora of commentators—which would, in turn, render
the revolution a mythological event, which would by definition prove elusive
to scholarly inquiry. Instead, El-Bermawy proposes that historiographical
understanding of the Arab Spring can only be fully materialized through
returning to demography: generational shifts in the Arab region, particu-
larly the Arab youth bulge between the 1980s and 1990s, in fact, offered
a series of distinct values and tendencies that gave rise to revolutionary
proclivities. El-Bermawy concludes that this demographically informed
historiography of the Egyptian Revolution more robustly explicates the
centrality of class to the uprising, particularly as several state institutions
acted as representatives of specific class interests.
Subsequently, the section develops to address the narratives of mar-
ginalized voices in the Egyptian Revolution. In Chap. 8, Nermin Allam
does so through the lens of gender, analyzing discourses of feminist activ-
ists in Egypt to explore new avenues of protest. In particular, Allam relies
on new forms of discourse, such as women’s graffiti, storytelling, and

participatory theater, to explicate the development of a new affective
language of activism in an authoritarian context. In Chap. 9, Isaac Friesen
addresses the narrative discourse from the perspective of Egypt’s Coptic
community, focusing narrowly on their experiences of the revolutionary
period during 2011–2013. In contradistinction to the typical approach
of relying on official state accounts of the Coptic minority’s engagement
with the revolution and its aftermath, Friesen constructs an intimate nar-
rative from within that community, relying on ethnographic data—
including materials as rich as interviews, participant observation, texts,
and videos—to offer a more robust picture of the way Christians have
experienced the influence of political Islam since 2011, and the memory
politics that surround the Coptic experience with revolutionary upheaval.
In particular, Friesen pays close attention to the writings of Egyptian
intellectual Samir Murqus as an exemplar of the ebbs and flows of Coptic
thought during this period. Ultimately, Friesen argues that the resurgent
trope of Copts as the unadulterated victims of Islam in actuality distorts
the historical record of their experiences and stifles social change today.
This section concludes with a discussion on discourses on the Arab
Spring emanating from the scholarly community itself. In Chap. 10,
Ahmed Abd Rabou investigates the academic narratives within Middle
Eastern studies specifically on the issue of democratic transition in the
region. By scrutinizing scholarship on the region from 1989 until 2017
using interpretative content analysis, Abd Rabou seeks to discern where,
in point of actual fact, the scholarly community stands on the issue of
democracy in the region. In so doing, he sheds light on key concerns fac-
ing the field, particularly the putative role of Islamists in furthering (or
impeding) democratization efforts, on the emphasis on foreign interven-
tion and assistance as a precursor to Middle East democracy, and other
crucial paradigms and methodological frameworks.
Having critically investigated narratives and discourses specifically
around the Egyptian Revolution, the final section completes the volume
by offering a cross-regional lens, investigating transitional justice in com-
parative perspective. Building on the lengthy lessons formulated from the
Egyptian experience, this section presents additional food for thought
utilizing the Tunisian and Lebanese examples. In Chap. 11, Arnaud
Kurze examines this question from the perspective of gender and sexual-
ity, exploring the role of LGBT communities in Tunisia and Lebanon,
and their role in consolidating and marshaling human rights causes despite
the challenges they endure in the repressive political environments in

which they operate. Relying on theoretical insights from Foucault, Kurze
demonstrates how art specifically served as a medium to create innovative
spaces of deliberation in these communities; art and social media coalesce
as vehicles for LGBT activists and artists to deal with repression and to
fuel change in contemporary Tunisian and Lebanese societies. Still, while
these spaces offer an opportunity for protest and change, the author relies
on in-depth interviews with local actors and content analysis of art cam-
paigns to argue that the creation of this new fragile spatiality by the LGBT
community remains immensely challenged by the narratives and memo-
ries of secularist and sectarian traditions. While art remains a space for
protest by LGBT rights activists, it is not altogether unchallenged by
overarching state narratives.
Chapter 12 further builds on the Tunisian case, critically investigating
the postrevolutionary parliamentary skirmishes between Tunisia’s two
major elected parties, Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda. Drawing on copious
written materials as well as personal interviews from field research in
Tunisia over 2016, Julius Dihstelhoff scrutinizes the rhetoric of the found-
ing fathers of both parties, Béji Caid Essebsi and Rached Ghannouchi, to
offer an overview of the political narratives developed by each since the
upheavals of 2010–2011, and to explicate the genesis of political language
within both parties from a comparative perspective. In doing so, this chap-
ter sheds crucial light on the internal coherence of the political compro-
mises ultimately forged between both parties, and accordingly offers a
crucial perspective on the debate over Tunisia’s ongoing political
transformation.
This section, and the volume more broadly, concludes with a broader
reflection on transitional justice as a pathway of change in contemporary
Arab politics. In Chap. 13, Nathan C. Funk relies on civic space as an
organizing metaphor for Arab politics, and in doing so argues that long-
term change within Arab polities requires three key factors: committed
utilization of civil resistance to counter repressive governance and authori-
tarian (geo)politics; serious engagement with the challenges, value ten-
sions, and creative possibilities inherent in transitional justice processes;
and adoption of sustainable citizen empowerment as an organizing prin-
ciple for social change. Funk thus concludes the volume on a prescriptive
note, offering key lessons for securing the ambitions and goals that inspired
the Arab Spring in the first place.
PART I
Rethinking Islamism and the State

After the Arab Spring
CHAPTER 2
Whither Post-Islamism: Revisiting

the Discourse/Movement After
the Arab Spring
Mojtaba Mahdavi
Introduction
The contemporary new social movements in the Middle East and North
Africa (MENA), Iran’s Green Movement, the Arab Spring, and Turkey’s
Gezi Park Movement, emerged in a post-Islamist condition and are char-
acterized as post-Islamist movements.1 These movements are, however, in
deep crises and the MENA region is experiencing multidimensional
predicaments.
1
See Mojtaba Mahdavi, 2011, “Post-Islamist Trends in Post-Revolutionary Iran,”
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 31:1, pp. 94–109; Hamid
Dabashi, 2012, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (London/New York: Zed
Books); Asef Bayat, 2013, Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (Oxford:
Oxford University Press); and Asef Bayat, 2017, Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making
Sense of the Arab Spring (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
M. Mahdavi (*)
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
e-mail: mojtaba.mahdavi@ualberta.ca
© The Author(s) 2020 15

E. Mohamed, D. Fahmy (eds.), Arab Spring, Critical Political Theory
and Radical Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24758-4_2
16 M. MAHDAVI
Chief among such catastrophes were the “twin shocks”2 of the Egyptian
military coup in 2013 and the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
in 2014. ISIS as a fake and phony state is no longer in place, but much of
the socio-political conditions conducive to its emergence, and the organi-
zation itself remain intact. Moreover, the Arab secular despots such as
Bashar al-Assad in Syria, el-Sisi’s military junta in Egypt, and the populist
Mohamed bin Salam of Saudi Arabia are consolidating their power. The
so-called humanitarian intervention—a neoliberal invasion—has destroyed
Libya. Bahrain’s monarchy has suppressed the popular pro-democracy
movement, and Yemen is now home to the world’s worst humanitarian
crisis due to a regional proxy war. Iran’s Green Movement—the first
MENA post-Islamist mass social movement—could not achieve its politi-
cal goals, and the symbolic leaders of the movement are in house arrest.
Thanks to Erdogan’s iron fist, the Gezi Park Movement in Turkey has lost
its momentum; and the early post-Islamist metaphor of Turkey’s Justice
and Development Party (AKP) has vanished in the middle of regional
rivalries and the coup attempt in 2016.
It is not, therefore, surprising to get lost in the midst of such cata-
strophic conditions, dismissing what were the original quests of the MENA
social movements, chief among them the Arab Spring: the popular quest
for overthrowing the dominant regime (Ash-shaʻb yurı̄d isqā ṭ an-niẓām)—
not only the political regime, but more importantly, as Hamid Dabashi
argues, the hegemonic regime of knowledge and dominant apologetic post-
colonial paradigms of pan-Arabism and other forms of state-sponsored
nationalism, the outdated discourse of Third World socialism, and the
exhausted da’wah of Islamism.3 Equally important was the quest for
Hurriyya (freedom), ‘Adāla ijtimā‘iyya (social justice), and Karāmā (dig-
nity). Millions of ordinary people—men and women, young and old, reli-
gious and secular, Muslims and non-Muslims—chanted such popular and
post-Islamist slogans in Arab streets.
This chapter argues that a new metaphor/discourse/paradigm of post-
Islamism has been introduced by ordinary people. Post-Islamism best cap-
tures the mode and metaphor of the MENA movements. Although these
movements are in crisis, post-Islamism represents the social (though not
necessarily political) climate and conditions of the region. The memory
2
Shadi Hamid & William McCants, eds. 2017, Rethinking Political Islam (New York:
Oxford University Press), 1.
3
Dabashi, The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism.
2 WHITHER POST-ISLAMISM: REVISITING THE DISCOURSE/MOVEMENT… 17
and momentum of the MENA movements, as Bayat argues, are still alive.
Moreover, the MENA region has gone through profound structural and
social transformations, which will eventually bring new changes to
the region.4
But what is post-Islamism? Why this is a paradigm shift from dominant
discourses, and how do we characterize and problematize it in the post-
Arab Spring MENA? In this chapter, I will first briefly shed light on the
many faces of Islamism and problematize the rise of Islamism in the con-
text of Muslims’ encounter with colonial modernity. Next, I will concep-
tualize post-Islamism as a third alternative discourse to both the autocratic
secular modernity and the essentialist Islamism.
The chapter argues that post-Islamism promotes a critical dialogue
between tradition and modernity, expedites the possibility of emerging
Muslim modernities, encourages civil/public religion but discards the
concept and practice of “Islamic state.” The third section briefly demon-
strates the many faces of post-Islamism in post-Arab Spring MENA. It
suggests that post-Islamism is a significant paradigm shift from Islamism as
it rejects the concept of a divine state. Moreover, it argues that post-
Islamists are as diverse as conservative, (neo)liberal, and progressive forces.
Post-Islamism is neither monolithic nor necessarily progressive. It has its
own limitations. The conclusion sheds light on post-Islamism and its ene-
mies in the post-Arab Spring era.
The Crisis of Many Faces of Islamism

Islamism, contrary to the Orientalist literature, is neither a purely religious
phenomenon nor a natural outcome of the Islamic tradition.5 Islamists,
too, represent themselves as the singular and authentic legitimate voice of
the Islamic tradition. The reality, however, is that Islamism is a modern
phenomenon. Islamism is a form of traditionalism; it does not represent
the tradition, it reinvents the tradition. Islamism is a socio-political move-
ment. It is “a multi-layered” phenomenon. It is the “product of modern
European colonialism in the Muslim world and the failure of the modern
nation-state to accommodate protest movements in their political
4
Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, 219–227.
5
In this chapter I have used some of the arguments in the following work: Mojtaba
Mahdavi, “Muslims and Modernities: From Islamism to Post-Islamism,” Religious Studies
and Theology 32: 1 (2013) 57–71.
18 M. MAHDAVI
systems.”6 In other words, Islamism “is basically a social/political move-

ment, which adopts a religious ideology with the primary aim of bringing
the whole of society under the rule of the Sharı̄‘ah.” Hence, “Islamic
movement is primarily a social movement.”7
The Orientalist account of Islamism is deeply rooted in the discourse of
“Muslim Exceptionalism,” meaning Muslims are essentially and excep-
tionally different from others. In Postmodernism, Reason and Religion,
Ernest Gellner, the towering figure of classical Orientalism, argues that
Islam has been exceptionally immune to the forces of secularization, and
that modernization has actually increased this immunization.8 He explic-
itly argues that Muslim societies are essentially different from others in
that “no secularization has taken place in the world of Islam.”9 Likewise,
Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington argue that Western culture is
unique and essentially differs from other civilizations, in general, and
Islam, in particular.10 According to Huntington, while “in Islam, God is
Caesar,” in the West, “God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual and
temporal authority have been a prevailing dualism.”11
Interestingly, the arguments of the towering figures of mainstream
Islamism resonate with the Orientalist discourse. According to the major
figures of modern Islamism such as Abul A’la Maududi of Pakistan, Hassan
al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, and Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, the
idea of an Islamic state, or a divine polity, is a solution to the Muslim pre-
dicament and is endorsed by the Islamic tradition.
However, as Abdullahi An-Na’im argues, the idea of an Islamic state is
a “postcolonial invention based on European model of the state and total-
itarian view of law and public policy.”12 Likewise, as Edward Said put it,
6
Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’, 2004, Contemporary Arab Ought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab
Intellectual History (London: Pluto Press), 17.
7
Abu-Rabi’, Contemporary Arab Ought: Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History,
373.
8
Ernest Gellner, 1992, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion. London: Routledge.
9
Ernest Gellner, 1991, “Islam and Marxism: Some Comparisons.” International Affairs
67 (January), 1–6, p. 2. https://doi.org/10.2307/2621215.
10
Bernard Lewis, 1990. “The Roots of Muslim Rage.” Atlantic Monthly (September).
[Accessed 02/04/2018]. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/
1990/09/the-roots-of-muslim-rage/304643; Samuel P. Huntington, 1996, Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of the Modern World (New York: Simon & Schuster).
11
Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the Modern World, 70.
12
An-Na’im, Abdullahi, 2008, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of
Shari‘a (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 7.
“we need to understand the many ‘political actualities’ that the ‘return to
Islam’ embodies.”13 In this approach, Islamism is not a cultural and civili-
zational product of the Islamic tradition. Instead, “Islamism is both a
social and political movement with a clear religious worldview.”14 In other
words, one must contextualize the Islamists’ call for the establishment of
an Islamic state in the modern context. Modern Islamism
is not driven by the historical events of the distant past (i.e., early Islam) as
much as by the events taking place in the modern world, such as the creation
of the modern world system, the emergence of imperialism, and the moral
and political bankruptcy of most, if not all, of the ruling elites in the postwar
Arab world.15
Hence, Islamism must be examined “in the context of the massive

social, economic, political, and structural transformations initiated by
modernity since the inception of imperialism.” It is a major “ideological
response” to massive social and political changes in modern Muslim soci-
eties.16 More specifically, Ibrahim Abu-Rabi argues,
We cannot juxtapose Islamism and modernity or argue in binary terms.

Islamism in this sense is a product of modernity and its imposition on the
Arab world. That is to say, its presence in the modern Muslim world has
been made possible by modernity, although in the final analysis, Islamism
hopes to replace modernity as an historical and philosophical system with an
Islamic Weltanschauung.17
In sum, Islamism as a modern phenomenon is not monolithic. It has

represented itself with many diverse faces and political strategies in differ-
ent socio-political settings: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Khomeinism
in Iran, many faces of Turkish Islamism, Lebanese Hezbollah, and Hamas
in Palestine, among others. The common features of Islamist movements,
however, are twofold: first, Islamists represent modern responses to colo-
nial modernity and a top-down/autocratic process of modernization/
secularization in postcolonial MENA. Islamist discourses, therefore,
13
Quoted in Abu-Rabi’, ed. 2010. The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam, ix.
14
Abu-Rabi’, ed. 2010. The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam, xxiii.
15
Abu-Rabi’, ed. 2010. The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam, ix.
16
Abu-Rabi’, ed. 2010. The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam, xi.
17
Abu-Rabi’, ed. 2010. The Contemporary Arab Reader on Political Islam, xi.
20 M. MAHDAVI
reinvent the Islamic tradition and do not necessarily represent the tradi-
tion. Second, chief among the Islamist modern invention of tradition is
the idea of an Islamic state, meaning establishing a divine state and/or an
Islamist order sanctioned by the Sharı̄‘ah as the solution to Muslim pre-
dicaments. Islamists have adopted different approaches to achieve this goal.
The crisis and failure of two autocratic secular discourses of Arab
nationalism (and other forms of state-sponsored nationalism/moderniza-
tion) and Third World socialism in postcolonial MENA profoundly con-
tributed to the heydays of modern MENA Islamist movements in the
1970s, 1980s, and mid-1990s. “Islamists received support from different
social groups—traditional and modern, young and old, men and women,
the better-off and the lower classes.” But Islamists’ core constituency was
the “middle class poor”—“modern educated, but often impoverished
middle classes.”18 In other words,
Islamism has been the political language not simply of the marginalized but
particularly of high-achieving middle classes who saw their dream of social
equity and justice betrayed by the failure of both capitalist modernity (rep-
resented in the regional monarchies and sheikhdom) and socialist utopia
(embodied in the postcolonial modernist secular and populist states). They
aspired to an alternative social and political order rooted in “indigenous”
Islamic history, values, and thought.19
By the late 1990s, however, it was clear that Islamists were losing their
social base. The crisis of Islamists in power in Iran, Turkish Islamist parties,
and some Islamists in the Arab world was evident.20 The Islamists were
unable to respond to socio-economic and political demands of their social
base. The urban poor was not quite pleased with the Islamists’ neoliberal
economic policy/agenda, their “exclusive social order,” “patriarchal dis-
position,” and “broadly intolerant attitudes toward different ideas and
lifestyles.”21 The massive social and structural transformations in MENA
societies and the failure of all three postcolonial ideologies—state-sponsored
nationalism, Third World socialism, and Islamism—were conducive to the
rise of a new discourse in MENA. This new social and discursive paradigm
18
Bayat, ed., Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, 6.
19
Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, 73.
20
Bayat, Revolution Without Revolutionaries, 69–91.
21
Bayat, ed. Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam, 7.
shift was post-Islamism. As a mass social movement, it first manifested itself

in Iran’s Green Movement in 2009, and then in the Arab Spring in
2010–2011 followed by Turkish Gezi Park movement in 2013.
Post-Islamism as a Third Alternative

“Why exactly does the Middle East suffer from a lack of legitimate order?”
Asks Shadi Hamid in his Islamic Exceptionalism. The MENA “legitimacy
defeat,” he argues, “is tied to a continued inability to reckon with Islam’s
relationship to the state.”22 “Islam is different.” And “Islamic exceptional-
ism is neither good nor bad.” The rationale for such a difference, he argues,
is that “the relationship between Islam and politics is distinctive, [and
therefore] a replay of the Western model—Protestant Reformation fol-
lowed by an enlightenment in which religion is gradually pushed into the
private realm—is unlikely.”23
Moreover, the dramatic rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria “is
only the most striking example of how liberal determinism—the notion
that history moves with intent toward a more reasonable, secular future—
has failed to explain Middle East realities.”24 For Hamid, ISIS “draws on,
and draws strength from, ideas that have a broad resonance among
Muslim-majority populations. They may not agree with the group’s inter-
pretation of the caliphate, but the notion of a caliphate is a powerful one,
even among more secular-minded Muslims.”25 He then concludes that
“this is not to say that most Arabs or Muslims are Islamists. Most not.
However, one can sympathize with or support Islamist politics without
being an Islamist—the phenomenon of Islamism without Islamists.”26
Hamid’s rationalization and theorization of “Islamic exceptionalism”
and “Islamism without Islamists” is highly problematic and does not cap-
ture the complex reality of the contemporary MENA region. First, the
main slogans of the ordinary Muslims/people in the MENA streets in the
2010–2011 Arab Spring, as well as the 2009 Iran’s Green Movement and
the 2013 Gezi Park in Turkey, were absolutely devoid of a single reference
to concepts/ideals such as the caliphate and/or the Islamic state. As Juan
22
Shadi Hamid, 2016, Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the
World (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 6.
23
Hamid, Islamic Exceptionalism, 5.
24
25
26
22 M. MAHDAVI
Cole reminds us, during the Tamarod (Rebellion) movement “in June
2013 some 22 million Egyptians signed a petition asking Morsi to leave
office, far more than 13 million who voted for him.”27 Second, Hamid’s
concept of “Islamic exceptionalism” and/or rather a vague and essentialist
idea of “Islamism without Islamists” is an ahistorical and decontextualized
theorization of a phenomenon such as ISIS where the American-led inva-
sion of Iraq and the failure of post-invasion state-building profoundly con-
tributed to the rise of the Islamic State. The abstract historical idea of a
caliphate in the Muslim imaginary played a little role in the rise of
ISIS. Third, although Hamid correctly acknowledges the significance of
religion for the Islamist forces (and here we need to remind ourselves that
Islamism is not merely a religious phenomenon and is different from reli-
gious fundamentalism in the Christian/Protestant tradition), the over-
whelming majority of citizens in Muslim majority states are not Islamist. If
Islamism is defined by the idea of an Islamic state, the MENA social move-
ments demonstrated that most ordinary people in the region do not asso-
ciate themselves with Islamism. It is important to note that ordinary
people hold different degrees of religiosity and enjoy multiple/hybrid
identities, consisting of class, gender, race/ethnicity, and age, as well as
religious and non-religious cultural traditions. It is not clear why religion—
often with a very static and ahistorical notion—is defined as the only/
major component of people’s identity in the MENA and/or remains the
most significant driving force for the socio-political actions in the region.
Fourth, the idea of an Islamic state is a modern “postcolonial invention”
with little to no divine justification in the Islamic tradition. Like Islamism,
the idea of an Islamic state is a modern invention. Fifth, Hamid rightly
points out that liberalism, as we experience in the West, will not be the
future of Muslim majority states and that “there is no particular reason
why Islamic ‘reform’ should lead to liberalism in the way that Protestant
Reformation paved the way for the Enlightenment and, eventually mod-
ern liberalism.”28 What is problematic in his argument, however, is the way
he explains such a difference. For Hamid, all the “difference” between
Muslims and the West boils down to one word: “Islam.” Because of its
“fundamentally different relationship to politics,” Islam “was simply more
27
Juan Cole, 2014, The New Arabs: How the Millennial Generation is Changing the Middle
East (New York: Simon & Shuster), 20.
28
resistant to secularization.”29 His argument resembles Ernest Gellner and

other classical Orientalists in that “no secularization has taken place in the
world of Islam.” This is clearly an ahistorical argument, essentializing sec-
ularism as a merely progressive democratic phenomenon. It also under-
mines the predicaments of autocratic secular modernization in postcolonial
MENA, which gave rise to the rise of Islamism. Six, it is true that “for the
religious, religion can offer both meaning and legitimacy to ideas that
might otherwise seem temporal and temporary. But to exclude Islam or to
hope for—or, worse, impose—a top-down secularism requires yet more
violence.”30 What seems, however, problematic in his argument is the
characterization of Muslim majority nations in line with Islamist and/or
Islamic exceptionalism. Muslim societies are not peculiar or unique in
their religiosity; “they should not be measured by the ‘exceptionalist’
yardstick of which religio-centrism is the central core.”31 Muslim societies
hold hybrid identities shaped by various degrees of religious affiliation,
national cultures, socio-economic structure, historical experiences, and
political settings. The missing metaphor in Hamid’s argument seems to be
post-Islamism: a concept referring to a profound discursive and socio-his-
torical transformation in MENA societies where neither hegemonic uni-
versalism of colonial modernity nor cultural essentialism/particularism of
Islamism captures the complexity of the region.
Post-Islamism has emerged as a third alternative to the hegemonic
voice of a singular and superior colonial/Western-centric modernity and
an essentialist nativist vision of Islamism. Post-Islamism is a dialogical dis-
course. It promotes dialogue between tradition and modernity, faith and
freedom, religiosity and rights, transcending many false dichotomies and
constructed binaries in postcolonial MENA. It expedites the possibility of
emerging Muslim modernities by challenging a singular concept of Western
modernity and promotes the idea of alternative modernities and “multiple
modernities.”32
Equally important, post-Islamism categorically rejects the concept of
Islamic state. Like Islamism, it encourages the public role of religion in
29
30
31
Asef Bayat, 2007. Islam and Democracy: What Is the Real Question? (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press), 6.
32
Charles Taylor, 1999, A Catholic Modernity? Ed. James L. Heft, S. M. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press), 16–19.
24 M. MAHDAVI
civil society and political society. However, unlike Islamism, it challenges

the concept and legitimacy of Islamic state. The state is a secular entity and
cannot be Islamized.33 Islamic state in theory is an oxymoron; it is, to use
Wael Hallaq’s concept, “the impossible state.”34 Islamic state, as Abdullahi
An-Na’im argues, is a modern postcolonial invention.35 Islamic state is a
secular entity ruled by Islamist elites who act and speak on behalf of their
human interpretation of Islam. Hence, political leaders, not abstract dog-
mas, speak or act for the state. The concept of Islamic state, in sum, marks
a distinction between post-Islamism and Islamism.36 An-Na’im’s words
best represent the intellectual basis of post-Islamist discourse: “Instead of
sharp dichotomies between religion and secularism that relegate Islam to
the purely personal and private domain, I call for balancing the two by
separating Islam from the state and regulating the role of religion in
politics.”37
A post-Islamist discourse, as Bayat argues, is neither anti-Islamic nor
un-Islamic.38 Nonetheless, in post-Islamism, Islam is neither the solution
nor the problem. Islam actively contributes to the socio-political life of
Muslims. Post-Islamism, contrary to the conventional liberal discourse,
discards the privatization of Islam; it encourages civil/public religion at
the societal level. But, state remains a neutral/civil, urfi entity. Post-
Islamism, in this way, may echo Jürgen Habermas concept of post-
secularism, where religious and secular citizens have much to offer to
one another.39
As Talal Asad (1997, 190–191) reminds us, both Orientalists and
Islamists share “the idea that Islam was originally—and therefore essen-
tially—a theocratic state”; but, for the Islamists, “this history constituted
the betrayal of a sacred ideal that Muslims are required as believers to
restore,” and for the Orientalists, “it defines a schizophrenic compromise
that has always prevented a progressive reform of Islam.” The reality,
33
Mahdavi, “Post-Islamist Trends in Postrevolutionary Iran.”
34
Wael Hallaq, 2013, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral
Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press).
35
An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State.
36
Mahdavi, “Post-Islamist Trends in Postrevolutionary Iran.”
37
An-Na’im, Islam and the Secular State, 267.
38
Bayat, Islam and Democracy: What Is the Real Question?; Bayat, ed. Post-Islamism: The
Changing Faces of Political Islam.
39
Jürgen Habermas, 2006, Religion in the Public Sphere. European Journal of Philosophy.
14 (1): 1–25. Also see, Mahdavi, “Post-Islamist Trends in Postrevolutionary Iran.”
owever, is that the Islamic state is not that much product of some Islamic
h
essence as “it is the product of modern politics and the moderniz-
ing state.”40
Post-Islamism, in sum, is not post-Islamic. It is post-Islamism. Not all
Muslims, contrary to Hamid’s argument, are Islamist. However, for many
Muslims, Islam remains active and alive as one of their individual and col-
lective multiple identities. A post-Islamist polity is not a caliphate; it is a
modern civil/urfi democracy attentive to local culture and values includ-
ing Islam. Post-Islamism is a grassroots discourse—a “universalism from
below,”41 which has synthesized the global and local paradigms of social
justice, freedom, human rights, and Islamic values. It is a glocal paradigm!
The Many Faces of Post-Islamism in Post-Arab

Spring MENA
Post-Islamism, Asef Bayat argues, “represents both a condition and a proj-
ect.” It refers to a condition where Islamism “becomes compelled, both by
its own internal contradictions and by societal pressure, to reinvent itself.”
It is also a project, “a conscious attempt to conceptualize and strategize the
rationale and modalities of transcending Islamism in social, political, and
intellectual domains.” Post-Islamism signifies the impact of secular exi-
gencies on a religious discourse.42 Moreover, post-Islamism has been used
as historical and analytical categories in reference to diverse politico-
intellectual and social trends such as various forms of Muslim reformist
trends in postrevolutionary Iran, the Ennahda, or Hizb al-Nahda/
Renaissance Party of Tunisia, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party, as
well as the 2013 Gezi Park Movement in Turkey, Justice and Development
Party in Morocco, Imran Khan’s Movement for Justice/Tehreek-e-Insaf in
Pakistan, many faces of civil Islam in Indonesia, and the Centre Party/Hizb
40
Talal Asad, 1997, “Europe Against Islam: Islam in Europe.” e Muslim World 87(2):
183–195. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-1913.1997.tb03293.x; also see, Mojtaba
Mahdavi, 2009, “Universalism from Below: Muslims and Democracy in Context,”
International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory 2, no, 2 (December),
276–291.
41
Mahdavi, “Universalism from Below: Muslims and Democracy in Context.”
42
Bayat, Islam and Democracy: What Is the Real Question?; Bayat, ed. Post-Islamism: The
Changing Faces of Political Islam.
26 M. MAHDAVI
al-Wasat and the younger generation (not the old guards) of the Ikhwan
al-Muslimeen/the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.43
As mentioned before, the contemporary MENA social movements—
the 2009 Iran’s pro-democracy Green Movement, the Arab Spring, and
the 2013 Gezi Park Movement—symbolize a post-Islamist turn in the
region. There was no demand for a “religious government” during the
MENA mass uprisings. Popular slogans in the Arab streets were human
dignity, liberty, and social justice, not Islamic state. The popular mode,
however, was not anti-religion; the Arab Spring, “dearly upholds
religion.”44 Furthermore, the post-Islamist mode of the Arab Spring did
not reject the public role of religion; it challenged the false dichotomy of
religion and secularism. It transcended the religious-secular divide to a
social movement against authoritarianism and in the service of
democratization.
In the post-Islamist climate of the Arab Spring, even the political state-
ments of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and/or its sponsored political
arm, that is, Hizb al-Hurriya wal-Adala/the Freedom and Justice Party
did not refer to the establishment of an Islamic state. The Freedom and
Justice Party explicitly stated it does not wish to implement a theocracy,
which is characterized by a “government of the clergy or by divine right.”
The statements highlighted the party’s attitudes toward freedom of reli-
gion, “rejecting sectarian strife” and recognizing the importance of allow-
ing Christians to build churches. As is revealed alongside similar statements
however, “Sharı̄‘ah law” remained the frame of reference.45 It is beyond
the scope of this chapter to examine the intellectual flaws and strategic
mistakes of the Muslim Brotherhood and its political arm, Freedom and
Justice Party, as well as President Mohamed Morsi’s policies in post-Arab
Spring Egypt. Suffice it to say that as much as the younger generation of
the party demonstrated their commitment to a post-Islamist polity, the
old guards were often trapped in their exclusivist and patriarchal Islamist
discourse. One of the most concerning case was the Muslim Brotherhood’s
response to the “End Violence to Women” campaign. The campaign, ini-
tiated by the United Nations sought for the “elimination and prevention
43
Mahdavi, “Post-Islamist Trends in Postrevolutionary Iran”; Bayat, ed. Post-Islamism:
The Changing Faces of Political Islam.
44
45
Freedom and Justice Party, 2011, FJP 2011 Program on Freedoms and Political Reform.
[Accessed 02/04/18]. Available from: http://www.ponline.com/arti-cle.php?id=197.
of all forms of violence against women and girls.” The response of the
Muslim Brotherhood was to label this initiative “misleading and decep-
tive” and “contradicting the principles of Islam.” Among some of the
main issues were “granting equal rights to homosexuals,” “full equality in
marriage legislation,” “cancelling the need for husband’s consent with
regards to travel and work,” and “granting rights to adulterous wives and
illegitimate sons.”46 The Muslim Brotherhood’s response to the camping
clearly did not represent the egalitarian and post-Islamist principles that
initially inspired the Arab Spring. A much better example of the Egyptian
post-Islamist party was the Hizb al-Wasat/the Centre Party, which spoke
clearly of equality of religion and equality for women and men. The party
has been a perfect example of more progressive trends within a post-
Islamist turn in Egypt.47
But a much more sophisticated post-Islamist party of the Arab Spring
is the Tunisian Ennahda/al-Nahda Party or Renaissance Party. The state-
ments of the party clearly demonstrate a shift from Islamism to post-
Islamism as they highlight the citizens’ rights—including minority rights,
issues of gender, and religious freedom. They contain numerous “buzz
phrases” such as the need for a “thriving democracy with mutual respect,”
the desire for a “culture of moderation,” the guarantee of “equality for all
citizens,” and the “affirmation of political pluralism.”48
Ennahda explicitly “rejected a Khomeini type revolution and viewed a
civil and democratic state as compatible with the spirit of Islam.”49
“Religion should not be imposed,” argues the leader of Ennahda Party
Rached Ghannouchi; “All the teachings and text of religion [Islam],
emphasizes the principle of no compulsion in religion. Freedom of reli-
gion is absolutely affirmed in Islam. It is not the task of the state to impose
a doctrine on the people. Its mission is to provide services to the people
and maintain security.”50
46
IkhwanWeb, 2013, Muslim Brotherhood Statement Denouncing UN Women Declaration
for Violating Sharia Principle. [Accessed 02/04/18]. Available from: http://www.ikh-
wanweb.com/article.php?id=30731.
47
Al-Wasat Party, 2011, FAQ. [Accessed 02/04/18]. Available from: http://www.
alwasatparty.com/questions.php.
48
Ennahdha Movement, 2011, Statute of the Renaissance Movement (after the revised
Ninth Congress), [Accessed 02/04/18]. Available from: www.ennah-dha.tn.
49
50
Al-Ghannouchi “Islam Is Accepting of Secularism and Freedom of Belief.” Al-Hayat
Newspaper, May 22, 2016. Accessed May 1, 2018. Similarly, in his work, Ghannouchi dem-
28 M. MAHDAVI
Moreover, both Rached Ghannouchi and the former Prime Minister

Hamadi Jebali of the Ennahda used the concept of dowla madaniyah/civil
state instead of almaniyah/secularism (which carries anti-religious bag-
gage) to distance the postrevolutionary Tunisian state from a religious
state (Stepan 2012, 94–97). Although Ghannouchi and his party did not
use the concept of secularism, his understanding of the concept is reveal-
ing: secularism in the West, he argues, is not an atheistic ideology as some
think. Secularism is the separation of functions: separation of religious
function from political function. This does not mean that the state will be
at war on religion. Rather, the state protects all religions and stands in a
highly neutral manner toward religions. Ghannouchi argues there is no
necessary relationship between democracy and secularism. You can be
secular and a terrorist or a dictator. And you can be secular and demo-
cratic. You can be an Islamic and a terrorist, and you can be a democratic
Muslim. The necessary and inevitable link between secularism, modernity,
and democracy is an arbitrary link. Therefore, we consistently affirm that
Islam and democracy are compatible and that democracy is the modern
practice of the shura/consultation.51 In fact, many Muslim democrats often
point to the key Quranic concepts of shura/consultation, ijma’/consensus,
and adala/justice to support democracy.
In an interview, he criticizes Islamist who “chose the path of violence.”
They formulate their own “excessively strict interpretation of religious
texts … aimed at monopolizing the right of explaining it, which means for
those organizations that the text has one meaning only, and anybody who
disagrees with their exegesis and understanding of it is a disbeliever and
godless.”52
More recently, Ghannouchi explicitly argued, “no political party can or
should claim to represent religion and that the religious sphere should be
managed by independent and neutral institutions, [as] religion should be
onstrates how Islam is compatible with democracy and human rights. See Rached al-Ghan-
nouchi, 2015b, Democracy and Human Rights in Islam (Beirut, Lebanon: The Arab House
for Science).
51
Rached al-Ghannouchi, 2015a, “Al-Omq: Moqbala ma’ Rached al-Ghanocui.” Interview
by Ali al Thafiri, Aljazeera News Network, Dec. 7. Accessed April 20, 2018.
52
Noureddine Jebnoun, 2014, “Tunisia at the Crossroads: An Interview with Sheikh
Rached al-Ghannouchi.” Al-Waleed Bin Talal Centre for Muslim-Christian Understanding,
Georgetown University Occasional Papers, April. https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/
bitstream/handle/10822/1045379/Noureddine%20Jebnoun_Tunisia%20at%20the%20
Crossroads_April%202014.PDF?sequence=1&isAllowed=y.
nonpartisan.”53 Ennahda’s statements made it clear that citizen rights are

universal, regardless of their faith. Ghannouchi has explicitly argued that
“his party should embrace the historic specificity that Tunisia for more than
sixty years has had the Arab World’s most progressive and women-friendly
family code.” 54 This is shown by the Ennahda’s inclusion of women into
the constituent assembly.
As Sayida Qunissi, an Ennahda member of the parliament in Tunisia,
shows Ennahda has always considered itself “different from the Muslim
Brotherhood at both the ideological and political levels.”55 For her, the
maturity of Ennahda in the public debate is evident: “It is no longer a mat-
ter of the relationship between Islam and state any more, or traditionally
‘Islamic’ issues, but rather a commitment to finding solutions to corrup-
tion, economic development, social justice, and human rights.”56 Since
October 2011, and even before the uprisings, Ennahda’s philosophy was
based on “unity and inclusion.” More specifically, Ennahda worked with
two Tunisian secular parties, the secular-liberal Congress for the Republic
and the socialist Ettakatol in post-Arab Spring.57 Ghannouchi and Moncef
Marzouki, a secular-minded human right activist, have been able to work
together in postrevolutionary Tunisia. Furthermore, following the elections
in 2014, Ennahda conceded its loss to Nidaa Tounes, a center-right secu-
lar party, and formed a coalition government with it.
Sayida Qunissi’s argument clearly represents main conclusions reached
at Ennahda’s tenth Congress, held May 20–23, 2016, in which the party
explicitly distanced itself from Islamism and the idea of an Islamic state,
defining itself as a party of Muslim democrats. “‘Muslim democrat’ is the
most accurate term to describe what Ennahda has been trying to accom-
plish since the beginning: reconciling Islam and democracy in the Arab
world.”58 She then continues,
53
Rached Ghannouchi, 2016, “From Political Islam to Muslim Democracy: The Ennahda
Party and the Future of Tunisia.” Foreign Affairs, 95 (5), 58–67, p. 63.
54
Alfred Stepan, 2012, “Tunisia’s Transition and the Twin Tolerations.” Journal of
Democracy 23(2), (April): 94–97. https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2012.0034.
55
Sayida Qunissi, 2017, “Ennahda from Within: Islamists or ‘Muslim Democrats’?” In
Shadi Hamid & William McCants, eds. Rethinking Political Islam (New York: Oxford
University Press), 230–243, p. 232.
56
Sayida Qunissi, “Ennahda from Within: Islamists or ‘Muslim Democrats’?” 234.
57
Sayida Qunissi, “Ennahda from Within: Islamists or ‘Muslim Democrats’?” 235–236.
58
30 M. MAHDAVI
When Rached Ghannouchi first used the term “Muslim democratic,” it was
an effort to help the media understood the pitfalls of instantly and unani-
mously labeling diverse political actors as “Islamists,” despite their differ-
ences. Highlighting the parallel with Christian Democratic parties in
Europe, like Germany’s Christian Democratic Union, seemed to be the easi-
est way to signify Ennahda as a political party bringing together both demo-
cratic principles and religious values.59
Post-Islamist movements in post-Arab Spring MENA are experiencing

a setback. Tunisia has been a relative success with the recent development
in the Ennahda Party, breaking away from Islamism and branding itself a
“Muslim democrat” similar to Christian Democratic Parties in Europe.
Ghannouchi and other party leaders distanced themselves from Islamism
and its central concept of Islamic state. The call for a civil state, not a reli-
gious state, promoting human rights and citizenship is a big step forward.
The party seems, however, falling into a trap of a neoliberal elitist and
ivory tower discourse, ignoring the urgent question of social justice. As I
have argued elsewhere, democracy, particularly in the Global South, badly
needs an egalitarian pro-social justice discourse. Abstract liberal notions of
Rights need to be translated into tangible social justice policies. Otherwise,
either secular despots or populist demagogues will use the rhetoric of
social justice to mobilize the masses. Moreover, uneven development is a
common problem in the MENA region and only a grassroots egalitarian
democracy is able to protect the social and political rights of masses, and
particularly the rights of “middle class poor” who served as the main force
of the Arab Spring.60
In Egypt, the post-Islamist Wasat Party is small in number but could
have possibly been a source of greater inspiration for the younger genera-
tion of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohamed Morsi’s mistakes, the miscal-
culations of secular forces, and el-Sisi’s coup have been a setback to
post-Islamism in Egypt. Nonetheless, as Juan Cole reminds us, the
Egyptian Spring was a post-Islamist movement. The following poem enti-
tled ana ‘almani (I am secular), which was posted at a young Egyptian
website in April 2012 represents such a post-Islamist climate in the
Egyptian civil society:

59
Mojtaba Mahdavi, 2017, “Iran: Multiple Sources of Grassroots Social Democracy?” In

60
Peyman Vahabzadeh, ed. Iran’s Struggles for Social Justice (New York: Palgrave Macmillan),
271–288.
Another random document with
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CHAPTER XVIII
THE CAPITAL OF THE PUNJAB
"Hatee Aiah! Hatee aiah!"—"The elephant comes!" cried the children

running, and one small scamp danced in front and shouted, "Hatee kuta
machi bucha"—"The elephant is a dog bad beast," and fled to escape
consequences of such boldness. I was now seeing Lahore city from the back
of one of the Lieutenant-Governor's State elephants which had swelled with
pride the heart of Tambusami, my servant, when in all the bravery of scarlet
trappings it came to fetch me from the hotel. Tambusami's respect for
"Government" was almost sublime. He rarely showed the faintest interest in
shrines or temples, but invariably reflected every manifestation of official
interest in, or attention to, his master. On such occasions the whole strain of
his body seemed differently keyed, and on the back of that elephant he gave
himself the most amusing airs, tilting up his chin and appearing to bask in an
atmosphere of luxurious importance for all the world like a child playing at
chief minister to some Haroun al Raschid, who had thrown off disguise and
shown himself to the public in proper grandeur.
With me was a delightful Pundit Omaid Chand, Superintendent of the

Punjab Government Records, who accompanied me during my stay at
Lahore. "My native place," he told me, "was Saharanpur in the United
Provinces; but now I am a nationalized Punjabi because I have been here
fifty years since I was eight years old."
We entered the city by the Delhi Gate and filled the narrow street so that
there was consternation among the shopkeepers and joy among the children
all along our route. Elephants are no longer used so much as formerly, and at
Lahore even the Lieutenant-Governor only keeps two now instead of eight.
When we met a troop of buffaloes there was a mighty hubbub. The

shopkeepers squealed and jibbered much that I am sure was impolite as the
frightened beasts plunged and pressed upon their goods. Many of the taller
buildings with elaborately carved woodwork belonged to well-to-do
Mohammedans, who have their homes away from the city, and use such
houses in the intervals of business, and for friends of an evening. They do
not usually go home till after nine o'clock at night. We were, of course, on a
level with the projecting balconies and carved oriel windows. Here and there
awnings were stretched across the street between the opposite houses, and
once or twice we had to wait while these were hauled up to let us go by.
Passing through another gateway we halted before a beautiful mosque,
wondrous with exquisite tints of blue and green in the old glazed tiles that
were all about its front and minarets. Its elaborate inscriptions were in blue,
with yellow and green ornament on a white ground. Baked daily in the sun
for nigh three hundred years the beauty of this glazed inlay was only
enhanced by time, and well may it last unharmed through future centuries!
The narrow streets, in spite of all their charm, will be swept away as the
townsfolk gradually alter their standards and ideas, but the traveller of the
age to come should still find this fair mosque to please his eyes.
Out of the city at length we came to the now open space about the
crenelated walls and bastions of the fort, and the Badshahi Masjid with its
four old capless minars. Midway between the west gate of this mosque and
the walls of the Fort stands the graceful pavilion called the Baradari. The
stone is mostly red Agra sandstone, Jehangir's favourite building material,
recalling Kenilworth in colour, but the mosque has three domes of white
marble.
Descending once more to earth I walked all over the fort, with its Pearl
Mosque of white Jeypore marble (much, so much less fine than the Moti
Masjids of either Delhi or Agra) its white Nau Lakha, its Diwan-y-khas,
looking ready to tumble to pieces, though now in the restorer's hands, and its
Shish Mahal.
Near these last, to the right of the same quadrangle, is the armoury. In
Europe the traveller is often shown instruments of torture—rack or boot or
"maiden," and in England what village of tourist attractiveness is without
either stocks or pillory? In India, however, such relics are rare, and those
shown at the Lahore Armoury, including a machine for pulling off thieves'
fingers, invented by Dhuleep Singh, only remind one of the general absence
of such stepping stones to civilization.
There is a great variety among this choice collection of weapons, and

although it cannot compete with that of Turin, Valetta or Hertford House, it
would prove at least a valuable addition to any one of them. Here are
recalled the times of Ranjeet Singh, the one-eyed monarch, who had the
genius to gather under him European officers of such calibre as Avitabile,
Allard and Ventura. Here are cuirasses, imported by General Ventura for his
French legion of 8000 men, bearing on their fronts the Gallic cock with
laurels and standards on a star of steel, and beside them Sikh shields with
copper bosses. Here are swords from Iran, with ivory hilts and blades
engraved with mottoes calling on the help of "Ali." There are combination
swords and pistols, Afghan knives, old flint-lock and match-lock guns with
barrels damascened, old four-chambered match-lock revolver guns,
musquets (short carbines or blunderbusses) carried by the Gurcharahis, (Sikh
cavalry 4000 strong), tir kaman (bows and arrows), tarkash (quivers),
Abyssinian shotels made with a double curve and wielded with the point
downwards, Mahratta swords, farangs—straight swords adapted by the
Mahrattas from the Portuguese, Khandahs, those long Sikh swords made
broader near the point, a Persian mace of the time of Rustem—a gem for any
collection—tabai (battle-axes) gokru, the crowsfoot—caltrap of ancient
Europe for throwing down to stop cavalry, a Burmese Dha or Dhas, a fakir's
baraggan or short sword-stick leaning on which some "muni of the ages" has
sat in meditation in the jungle. There are Goorkha kukris and Hindoo Katars,
the iron-shod stick of a Chaukidar, a powder-flask of golden thread, back-
plates and breast-plates and helmets of steel and brass.
The armoury is certainly more interesting to-day than the Shish Mahal
opposite wherein, as in a certain chamber at Versailles, it is said that begums
and a man would shut themselves for weeks together. Here there is indeed no
armoury of love—is it because the weapons of that warfare were of a kind
inseparable from those who wielded them—the charms that vanished with
their owners? Or can it be that their enduring pattern has never been
improved upon, so that each blade and buckler of the past is still in full
demand for current wear?
I went up to the roof of the Shish Mahal for the view of Ranjeet Singh's
tomb and the Badshahi mosque, and between its minarets towards the west
could see the silver band that is the Ravi River, and then before going back
to the elephant I looked at Ranjeet Singh's tomb on which certain bosses are
carved in the marble with curious significance. Eleven of these are grouped
round a large centre, and of the eleven four are for Ranees (who are married
women) and seven for concubines, while at two of the corners of the slab are
detached smaller bosses to commemorate a pair of pigeons burned in the
funeral pyre.
What a contrast, I thought, on returning to the spacious roads of the

modern town outside the city gates, between the new order and the old! On
arriving at Lahore the first thing that the stranger notices is the fortified
railway station, then a tank and an old mosque covered with green-glazed
tiles with others about it of bright peacock-blue; and then, as he drives from
the station in a gharry, through white dust, past quite handsome modern
buildings in pale red brick, comes the "Upper Mall," a perfect road with an
ideal lay-out for a modern town—wide and trim with electric-light standards
painted a clean grey on brick-edged grass strips which separate the centre
roadway from a riding track that, in its turn, runs parallel to a footway; while
on either side stretches a line of gardens. It is all as handsome as the
Boulevard Anspach at Brussels, and as different from the more lovable
streets in old Lahore as can well be imagined.
I had seen in front of the museum Zam Zammah, the old gun with a long
history which Rudyard Kipling played round as a boy long before Kim was
written, and had watched the urchin scrambling on its back when the
policeman was not looking. Having heard that the character of Mahbub Ali
of Kim—"known as one of the best horse-dealers in the Punjab"—was
drawn from a man named Wazir Khan (not that minister of Akhbar after
whom the Chauk of Wazir Khan is named, but an old horse-dealer who is
still alive), I took some trouble to inquire for him. The old man was on the
road, however, having gone to a horse-fair at Jhelum, but I found his son and
asked him to show me the old Sarai where his father used to sleep on his
visits to Lahore. This is called the Sarai of Mahomet Sultan and belongs to
the Maharajah of Kashmir. It is a wide quadrangle, about 60 yards square,
with round-arched cloisters on all sides; and the son of Wazir Khan showed
me, shut off between pillars, the place where his father used to sleep in the
old days. The shadows of a large shisham tree flickered over the broken
white plaster of the wall. There was a well in the centre, and near it was a
group of horses from Waziristan. Out through the gateway ("the Gate of the
Harpies who paint their eyes and trap the stranger") I could see the Lunda
Bazaar and a woman squatting on the edge of the footway washing her face
with soap. Near her was a tamasha wallah, a boy with a cage of green
parrots, and a Hindoo woman cooking chupatties over a fire of dung-cakes,
and from one of the houses there was singing in Pushtu.
I returned to the old gun and entered the building of the "wonder-house"
in front of which it stands.
The Mayo School of Industrial Art, which is attached to the Lahore

Museum, was founded to revive arts now half forgotten, and generally to
develop the Industrial Art of the Province. I went thoroughly over its various
departments, its schools of modelling and design, architecture, engineering,
wood-carving and carpentry, repoussé and blacksmith's work—and I do not
think the importance of this college, as an educational institution, could be
exaggerated. Its ambition to turn out a constant succession of the best
possible craftsmen, rather than theoretic students, makes it the best means
yet arrived at of moral and mental development inseparable to my thinking
from the purely utilitarian value of handicraft training. Among the students
were pointed out to me lads from distant villages and outlying districts, some
in receipt of Government stipends, others supported by District and
Municipal Boards and others again by Independent States. A well-regulated
boarding-house is connected with the school for the accommodation of such
pupils, a large proportion of whom find immediate employment on the
completion of their course at the school and so continually add to the
popularity of its training.
The energy, talent and success of Mr Percy Brown during the many years
in which he has developed and enlarged the scheme initiated under the late
Mr Lockwood Kipling, are beyond praise, and I only hope that his recent
translation to Calcutta may bring an extension to other provinces of India of
practical application of the same educational ideas.
The museum is justly proud of its Buddhist sculptures, the best of which
is one in black hornblende schiste (from the Yusafzai country near
Peshawar), of Buddha after his forty-nine days' fast. Carved with extreme
delicacy and refinement, this wonderful sculpture seems to carry one rather
to Renaissance Italy than the North-West Provinces. Who were they, these
sculptors? How much or how little were they identified with the people
whose gods they carved? Would Alexander of Macedon have had in his train
men of sufficient eminence in their craft to account for the apparent Western
influence?
One of the latest additions under Mr Brown's curatorship is a collection

of paintings and drawings of the Moghul Emperors and people of their
times, which includes many exquisite illuminations and old water-colour
drawings of extreme fineness and delicacy and yet full of character, design
and amazing distinction. Appreciation of such things since the days of their
production is only beginning to be re-awakened, and they are still
purchasable in India at such prices as the museum can afford. Mr Brown told
me that I was the first who had yet looked at this collection with enthusiasm
to justify his own in buying them, but "who knows the spelling of Du
Guesclin?" They are as wonderful as Holbein's drawings, their detail would
have enchanted Altdorfer, and their exquisite line might have delayed the
death of Aubrey Beardsley! Such are the Mullah Do Piaza, the picture of
Akhbar's jester and his thin Rosinante, or the beautiful drawing of Humayun,
Babar's son, out a-hunting.
India is a land which changes any sympathetic traveller to a set of strings

on which its spirit plays through all the working-hours. Every day is
crowded with new wonders, and no sooner does he sink to earth, as if fallen
from the hands of one player, than he is snatched up again and every fibre
wrung by some new loveliness he knew not of.
One afternoon I drove out with the pundit to Shaddra where Jehangir is
buried and Nour Jehan. We started to the west of the city on the high road to
Peshawar, past the Mohammedan cemetery and the Hindoo burning-ground,
outside which some women in white and yellow robes sat waiting while their
men-folk burned a body within.
In the time of Ranjeet Singh, the pundit told me, the river used to flow
past the Badshahi Masjid, a large red sandstone mosque, which we next
passed: but in India the rivers are not so constant as the stars in their courses.
A little farther on we crossed the dry bed called the Ravi Nullah and
then, driving through the Ravi Forest, reached the bridge of boats that spans
the Ravi River at a little distance from the railway-bridge. A merry old Kuka
Sikh on a white donkey was waiting at the bridge toll-gate for someone from
whom to beg the money to cross. It is a long bridge and very narrow, so that
two vehicles cannot pass one another and a bullock-cart, which had just
started to cross from the opposite bank, seemed inclined to take an infinity of
time about it; but the Kuka Sikh was in no hurry, and when we had paid his
toll joked with the pundit to beguile the time. This boat-bridge has to be
dismantled in the rainy season, from June to August, when the river is
swollen.
We left the Peshawar road soon after crossing the bridge and presently
reached Shaddra and Jehangir's tomb, a large and elaborate affair with much
space about it and great entrance gateways and lines of narrow water tanks
in the gardens within. Dismounting from the gharry we walked over the
great open space of the Sarai and through the eastern gateway, with its
honeycomb vaulted ceiling and soft warm flower decoration on its pink
stucco-covered brick-work, to the water channels of the tomb garden, past
the central tank and on to the Mausoleum itself, an exquisite low building
with four tall minarets, half of white marble and half of the red Agra stone,
of which Jehangir was so fond.
We walked up the steps and crossing a pavement of badal stone entered

the inner chamber through an arch with a dado of old glazed inlay. Within, a
flat oil-lamp upon a metal stand, threw flickering light in a bright path upon
the marble floor. There was rich inlay of agate, cornelian and amethyst, the
ninety-nine names of God and the titles of Jehangir, all but the most
important title—that of husband of Nour Jehan. She is buried, the Queen
who ruled him and his people—only her own brother she could not save
from his wrath—about half a mile away and I was surprised to find the place
in a state of utter neglect. It is awkward to approach and I expect is rarely
visited.
When we reached it the sun was very low. A cow was stalled in one part
of the neglected tomb and, as I approached, a Mohammedan fakir, rising
from the ground to his full height, tall and thin, shook his hands at the sky
and cried in Persian—Al Mout! Al Mout! ("Everyone must die—everyone
must die!")
"But this is a stable," said the pundit, whose learning perhaps did not
include Bethlehem. It is true that the tomb was railed round, but the railings
were broken and the sturdy rogue of a fakir had settled himself comfortably
with his charpoy, his goat and his cow. His beard was grey and his unkempt
hair peeped out in tufts from his roughly-tied turban, once white and spotted
with dark blue. The things he continued to shout were curious, but the pundit
agreed with me it was mere wildness and no scheming for backsheesh that
prompted a reference to England. Waving his arms round and round he cried
—"The English will rule all over the world," and then—"One God to rule
over us all. He created Adam and Eve: bismillah heraai mornana heem la
ilia illillah."
I walked up some broken brick steps and passing through a series of low-
pointed arches, down on the other side of a low circular wall, I stood before
two tombs. The one nearest to me was that of Nour Jehan, who had been
called Rose of the Harem, Light of the World: its neighbour was that of her
adopted daughter.
The tombs are quite plain plaster-covered brick-work. In the outer

passages there remain some traces of painted ornament—but because she
had no children, and her stepson, Shah Jehan, was not on good terms with
her when she died, there is here no decoration, no inscription. Not for her
tomb are the ninety-nine names of God!
Through the arches on the farther side I could see the trunks of date
palms and old, old mango trees in the Begumpura, a garden Nour Jehan had
loved. I went underground to the crypt-like chamber below the tomb, and
with the help of matches made out that there was nothing upon the floor—
only in the ceiling one inset space corresponding to the cenotaph above. The
pundit thought the body was probably very deep in the ground—I know not.
When we came out above ground the last of daylight was making golden
play among the palms and mango trees. They were in flower—and next June
fruit would be upon them.
CHAPTER XIX
AT THE COURT OF HIS HIGHNESS THE RAJAH

OF NABHA
His Highness the Rajah of Nabha is a noble old Sikh chieftain,

distinguished among the native rulers of India, although his territory, one of
the Phulkian States, is but small. Through the kindness of the Punjab
Government and of His Highness, I was given an opportunity of visiting the
little court.
HIS HIGHNESS THE RAJAH OF NABHA.
To reach Nabha, my train from Lahore was the Bombay mail, and I have
rarely seen greater confusion at any railway station than reigned upon its
arrival. Every class of carriage was already full, yet there were a number of
first-class passengers waiting with title to berths booked in advance as well
as second and third-class ticket-holders. The train was already of the
maximum size permitted and, after half an hour's uncertainty, a third-class
carriage was actually emptied of its fifty or more occupants, taken off the
train and replaced by an empty first-class coach. Few more striking instances
could be found of purse privilege. It would correspond in England with the
dumping on a Crewe platform of the third-class passengers by the Scotch
express from Euston to make room for first-class passengers waiting for the
train at Crewe. It was not a case of native and foreign, or English and
Oriental,—for plenty of native gentlemen travel first-class and it simply
meant that having a seat in a third-class carriage in India does not insure
your finishing the journey by the train in which you started.
My servant was left behind on this occasion and was consequently not
forthcoming when I reached Nabha Station in the morning. Poor faithful
Tambusami had not understood whither we were bound, but for some reason
or other thought it might be Patiala, and when I returned to Lahore three
days later I found him weeping on the platform after vain endeavours to
track me.
At Nabha I was met by three of the Rajah's ministers and driven in a

luxurious victoria to a large guest-house painted red and blue and standing in
quite beautiful grounds. A pair of horses drew the victoria, but a kind of
wagonette which followed with my luggage was pulled by two camels which
always have rather a circus air in harness.
The red brick-work of the building was all picked out with white, like the
walls of a doll's house, and on each side of the wide arch at the entrance
there was a life-size painting of a turbaned soldier presenting arms.
His Highness's private secretary could not speak English, and a native
gentleman, Mr Hira Singh, who was a schoolmaster in the town, had been
deputed to attend me as interpreter during my stay.
I was taken first into the reception-hall, which was hung with small
portraits in gouache of former rajahs and famous Sikh monarchs, such as the
Rajah Bhagwan Singh (the late Rajah of Nabha), the late Rajah Ragh Bir
Singh of Sandoor and the Maharajah Ranjeet Singh, who was painted in a
green dress with a halo round his head and mounted upon a brown horse. In
large letters on one wall appeared the motto:—
"May God increase your prosperity."
Breakfast was served me in a large room adjoining the great hall. Over
the carpet a white drugget was spread and the chairs were all covered in pink
chintz.
Mr Hira Singh suggested that I must need some rest and should sleep
awhile, so I was taken to my bedroom which was another large apartment. It
was a blend of the genuinely Oriental and the Tottenham Court Road. The
washstand was humbly and yet aggressively British, while the wide bed was
gorgeously upholstered and covered with a beautiful silk coverlet of canary
yellow, and was furnished with two tiny hard cushions or pillows in the
middle, as well as an ample allowance for the head. I was certainly tired with
the journey and nothing loth to lie down. Outside one of the open doors of
the room I could see the red-and-blue lance pennon of a sentry appearing
and reappearing as he passed to and fro in the sunlight. His footsteps were
quite noiseless, and wondering whether after all it was the real sentry or one
of the painted ones from the archway wall I fell fast asleep to wake an hour
later and find that Sirdar Bishan Singh, Vakil to the political agent of the
Phulkian States, a stout, pleasant-looking little man, and Sirdar Jawala
Singh, His Highness's minister of finance, taller and darker, were patiently
waiting for me in the reception-room, sitting side by side on chairs, with
their feet primly together and silently looking before them.
His Highness had graciously consented to give me an hour's sitting the

next morning, and these gentlemen had come to drive me to the palace
where the painting was to be done to choose a position of suitable lighting.
So down I walked again by the five long steps between the blue columns and
out through the archway to the victoria, and the painted sentries were still
presenting arms and the live one stood at attention. We drove first to the
Diwan Khana by the Winter Palace, and going up a long flight of steps to an
upper quadrangle I was shown the rooms of the State Treasury and the old
heavily-bound boxes containing the wealth of Nabha.
The Diwan Khana itself is used for durbars, and the whole of the upper
part of the great room is one continuous forest of chandeliers, mostly of
green cut glass. On the walls of this Durbar Hall I noticed four beautiful old
miniature portraits of rajahs, with real pearls fitted in for necklets and
precious stones and gems on the horses' trappings as in eikons of the Greek
Church and a painting of a feast, larger, but worked in the same style as the
miniatures. The building was erected in the time of the Maharajah Jaswan
Singh of Nabha, and the very florid carpets were certainly not of any earlier
date.
As we drove away I saw many pigeons and green parrots about the walls
of the Winter Palace, and noticed that all over the building niches had been
left for the birds.
Mr Hira Singh told me that the population of Nabha town is over 15,000
and that it is "quite a busy city" with steam cotton-mills (I had seen the tall
chimneys near the railway station). The city gateways I passed through are
quite stately buildings and in an upper chamber of each gateway, with its silk
covering hanging out over the window-sill, is kept a copy of the sacred
Granth of the Sikhs.
Driving through part of the city and out again we passed a Hindoo
temple with a spacious tank, over one end of which spread the twisting
branches of a beautiful "beri" tree, and before long came to Elgin House, a
newer building than the Winter Palace, with a very large Durbar Hall, having
at one end a painting of Queen Victoria. It was here that the sitting was to
take place, and after choosing a suitable position in which His Highness's
gold chair of state might be placed ready I went over the rooms of Elgin
House and also upon the roofs of the upper storeys.
The Vakil showed me the chief treasures with great pride, but among
them all there was not a single beautiful thing of native craftsmanship.
Instead of this there were huge modern German vases—pictures sliced into
one another by a mechanical trick, so that as you moved along in front, the
Princess of Wales changed gradually into the Prince. Mechanical singing-
birds of most expensive accomplishment were made to warble for my
delectation and greatest of all wonders at the Court of Nabha, a clock-work
group of figures behaved quite like real people and a band of musicians
played operatic airs while a ballet dancer stood tiptoe on one leg. The
mechanical singing-birds had already made me think of Hans Andersen's
story of the nightingale, and here was the heroine of another of his tales re-
created after the burning she endured with her beloved tin soldier as
devotedly as any Hindoo widow of suttee days.
The formal gardens were pleasantly arranged, but managed to avoid the
beauty of an Oriental Bagh without achieving that of the European style they
sought to imitate. The proportions were good, but there was no grass and one
longed vainly for spaces of lawn or greensward to contrast with the elaborate
carpet bedding.
On leaving Elgin House we drove to the Gurdwara of Baba Ajabal

Singh. A tall and handsome black-bearded priest of thirty-two years showed
us over the building, but what most interested me was a wild-looking figure I
saw hanging about the cloisters. He was armed with a sword and dressed
entirely in black garments, with a huge black turban twisting in and out of
steel circlets and irons, and bound over and round in its turn by a metal
chain. This was an Akali, one of that still privileged sect of fighting fanatics
who became famous in Ranjeet Singh's time under the daring and
picturesque "Gardana Sahib"—Alexander Gardner (born on the shores of
Lake Superior in 1785).
I had heard that the Akalis wear blue garments to perpetuate the memory
of the blue clothes the Guru Govind Singh wore as a disguise, on the
occasion of an escape from Moghul soldiers, and part of which he gave to
one of his disciples to found a new order—that of the Akalis in question, but
this man's habiliments were as black as a crow's feathers. Like their famous
Rajah, Ranjeet Singh himself, this latter-day specimen of the bhang-drinking
cut-and-thrust "immortals" had only one eye, and I asked whether he had by
chance lost its fellow in a fight. "I have never had a chance of a fight," said
the Akali—adding consistently with the tenets of his sect—"if I did I would
never give in." While we were talking a thin old Sikh limped towards us; he
had once been taller than the average man, but was now bent and emaciated
with constant opium-eating. Mr Hira Singh told me that he took one "masha"
(equal to 16 grains) at a time and took it twice in every twenty-four hours.
The old rascal, his deep brown eyes twinkling, put to me a special petition
that the Government should grant to all real opium eaters a large quantity
gratis at regular intervals to make them happy. He said also, on my asking
him what he dreamed about—"In my dreams I think of the Creator, and I
feel very earnest to go to a better field and to fight there," which, as I was
assured the man was an abandoned scoundrel, may be taken as Oriental
humour expressed with an eye to backsheesh.
Driving back to the guest-house we passed an arena where wrestling

matches are held, with six circular tiers of high stone steps as seats for the
spectators, and a square "loge" built in the middle of one side for the
notables, and here is conducted the only physical "fighting" that takes place
at Nabha nowadays. The day of the Akalis is over, and while their brother
Sikhs make some of the best material in the Indian Army, the devotees of
this narrow sect have become wandering mendicants, privileged to carry
warlike weapons, and truculently direct in their demands for alms.
The portrait sitting was fixed for eight o'clock the next morning, and ten
minutes before his time the noble old Rajah stepped from his carriage and
walked almost jauntily up the steps of Elgin House, where I was already
installed with palette and canvas.
Gorgeously apparelled in a costume that was like a kiss between two

halves of the Arabian Nights, and wearing upon pale greenish silk a galaxy
of decorations which included the G.C.I.E. for his part in the last Afghan
War (he is now an honorary Colonel in the British Army) and stars and
medals from many great Durbars, the Chief of Nabha wore at the same time
an air of vigour and joy in life that made the years sit lightly on his
shoulders, years that a wrinkled forehead declared numerous.
One of his ministers told me through Mr Hira Singh that at the last Delhi
Durbar His Highness had delighted every one by the spirited and boyish way
in which he had galloped his horse along in front of the assembled princes.
May he appear as hale and vigorous at the Durbar of December next!
After he had shaken hands with me and beamed cordial smiles, we

walked through the Durbar hall to the room where I had set up my easel, and
the Rajah sat, as arranged, in a chair of gilded brass with lion arms, and
directed his gaze at a particular flower vase upon which we had fixed to keep
his head in correct position for the portrait. The pupils of his eyes were
brown, with a faint grey rim, and he had long waving moustaches as well as
a long yellowish white beard. He carried a sword with scabbard of pale
green and gold, a steel mace with spherical head, and a contrivance by
which, when a catch was pressed at the end of the handle, a number of short
sharp blades started out from the head, and also a steel trident of new
pattern. The old man was bent upon having as many arms about him as
possible, and sent for a large shield of black metal with four bright bosses
and a crescent, a favourite rifle and another trident sceptre, so that I had all I
could do to dispose these about him in such a way that he could sit
comfortably and keep his head still. He seemed especially proud of the mace
with the trick knives, and after explaining the mechanism to me with gusto
he continued at intervals during the sitting to manipulate it, at which the
whole court laughed heartily. They were grouped on either side in all the
glory of official costume and included the Commander-in-Chief, who came
to England for the Coronation of Edward VII., the Foreign Minister, the
Finance Minister, the Chief Justice, the Medical Adviser, and various
generals and councillors.
To paint a portrait in an hour! Well, I was not sorry that His Highness
had arrived before the arranged time, and that I had already set my palette,
and though it would have been intensely interesting to have talked with the
Chief of Nabha through the excellent interpreter, when once the weapons
were arranged to incommode him as little as possible, I went at the painting
with the fury of an Akali and contented myself with smiling appreciatively at
his occasional ejaculations.
Every now and then he made a peculiar coughing noise, which began
softly and rose to a crescendo, sounding as formidable as the traditional
catchwords of the giant of the bean-stalk. It was like "ahum, ahum, ahum—
ahhum," and kept his ministers in lively attention.
As nine o'clock struck (for there were clocks at Nabha as well as at

Elsinore) I laid down my palette and am glad to say His Highness expressed
with Eastern courtesy great delight at the sketch.
Before going he sent for his favourite grand-child, Sirdar Fateh Singh, a
boy of about twelve years of age, who shook hands frankly with me. On
hearing that I must positively leave Nabha that afternoon—in spite of his
kindly pressure to stay at least a fortnight—the Rajah gave orders for the
finest of his State elephants to be sent round to the guest-house that I might
see an ingenious device by which fountains of water from a hidden tank
played from the front of his head to lay the dust. The elephant, unlike his
vigorous old master, is weak and ailing, but I found him still a magnificent
beast and arrayed even more gorgeously than lilies in sunlight-carrying
scores of crystal lamps as well as the fountains.
Mechanical arrangements of all kinds seemed specially to delight the

Rajah and he again showed me one of the singing birds I had seen the
previous day. Just before leaving Elgin House His Highness paid me the
pretty compliment of asking if he might have permission to go.
CHAPTER XX
IN SIGHT OF AFGHANISTAN
I left Lahore soon after eight o'clock one evening and when I woke in the
train next day found myself smothered in dust and traversing the great Sind
Desert, that almost rainless tract, which depends solely for any possibility of
cultivation on irrigation from the Indus.
An important trade route from Afghanistan and Persia coming through

the Bolan Pass has its base at Shikarpur, in Upper Sind, a few miles from the
great cantilever bridge, called the Lansdowne Bridge, which joins
Baluchistan to India crossing the Indus between Sukkur and Ruk.
An engineer was waiting at Sukkur railway station to show me the great

bridge, and as I had to continue my journey the same evening we were
obliged to face the heat of the sun and started back towards the river on a
trolley worked by hand levers. We passed a kite's nest close to the railway on
the perpendicular face of a mass of limestone rock.
Sukkur is a good-sized town of more than 30,000 inhabitants, but its

buildings seemed to be all of wattle and daub, though three and even four
storeys high, and they were grey in colour, uncomfortably monotonous in the
terrific heat.
A single span of the bridge joins the Sukkur side to Bhakkur Island, a
mass of limestone rock fortified centuries ago. The keys of the gates were in
charge of a signaller at the blockhouse and a bridge inspector. While they
were being obtained I read the inscription upon the bridge—
"Erected by F. E. Robertson and M. S. N. Hecquet, 1887-

1889. Girders made by Westwood Baillie & Co., London. J.
S. R., 1887."
It is one of the great monuments of Queen Victoria's reign, one among

the many bridges, waterworks and railroads that have so far monopolized in
modern India all architectural aspiration. Splendid in its utility, an inspiring
instrument of commercial development, it looks like the creation of some
great Arachnid but stretches its iron network so far into the air that it is as
much larger than any spider's trap-net as the highest of the Himalayas
exceeds an ant-hill. I walked a little way on Bhakkur Island and stood on the
sand under some high walls looking at the Ruri end of the bridge. They were
the walls of an old nunnery called "Suttian," I think for widows who had
declined to be burned with their dead husbands. The engineer told me in
connection with "Suttian" that a man named Mosu Shah was said to have
built a minaret we could see with the object of spying upon one of the nuns
with whom he was in love.
Out in the stream in front of us two men were "pala" fishing. They had
swum out each with an immense metal chattie to keep him afloat and, resting
upon these, fished the river with nets on long slender poles, putting the fish
inside the chattie as they took them from the net. The fish come up to spawn
and the men float down stream with their nets in front of them.
They drifted through the very reflections of the vast cantilevers just as a
train was steaming over the bridge and made one more of the innumerable
contrasts of the old and new order I had seen in India.
Regaining the trolley we crossed to the Ruri shore and walked some
distance over the wide burning sand for the best view of the bridge. A
number of cattle were down upon the sand near the water-edge seemingly
well content, as I have seen great herds baking in summer heat on level sand
on the West Coast of Ireland at the edge of the Atlantic. Here at Ruri,
however, the sun beat with greater fury and a group of Sindi boatmen and
their families, who had been busy mending sails spread out on the sand, had
all stopped work till cooler hours arrived.
In the summer, that engineer assured me, the thermometer reaches 240°
and even 250° in the shade! "I have been here twelve years," he said, "and
during all that time we have had six rainfalls." He pointed out to the right of
the bridge the magazine where dynamite was stored for blasting purposes,
and, farther to the right, another small island with a very old temple on it.
This island is called Khwajah Khisah and the temple shrine, although the
building is in the form of a mosque, is frequented by both Hindoos and
Mohammedans.
There is a very important project in hand for damming the Indus just
above this temple so as to raise the water-level and so feed the canals during
the dry season as well as at periods of flood. I could make out the head of the
Begari Canal, then quite dry, in the distance between Khwajah Khisah and
the island of Bhakkur.
When I returned by the trolley to Sukkur there was a local train in the
station and the carriage in front of the waiting-room where I sat resting in the
shade seemed to contain the most obviously authentic prototypes of that
famous Asiatic "forty," more celebrated even in Europe than the French
Academy. Red faces with large mouths agrin between thick moustaches and
short bushy black beards, blue turbans and dirty finery—the very perfection
of stage villains, but Morgiana? No, I could not see her and the music of the
opera, The Barber of Baghdad, with its superb iterations of that lady's name
came drifting through my head.
The reflections of the dull red girders of the bridge were now almost
green.
I again slept in the train that night and woke up in the Bolan Pass in
British Baluchistan. At half-past nine in the morning the sky was very pale
and although the shadows of the hill-clefts were clear they were not hard. On
each side of the line there was a flat boulder-strewn plain which was stopped
abruptly a quarter of a mile away by steeply rising heights of rock. Then
suddenly the flat plain itself would be trenched and split into huge cañons,
clefts going deep down into the earth. A few grey dried plants, almost the
same colour as the stones, were the only visible signs of vegetation.
In the early morning at Sibi Junction I had branched off on the Western
(or Quetta) arm of the great loop which extends from Sibi to Bostan
Junction. By ten o'clock the train with two powerful engines was ascending a
gradient of one in twenty-five beyond Hirok. From the window I could
watch, upon the old Kandahar Road below, the old slow-creeping progress
of a camel caravan. The pass was now narrowing, closing up on each side
and the cliffs rose steeply where at a sharp turn I caught sight of a square
block-house perched on a jutting crag.
At Quetta I had the double annoyance of missing luggage and of being

taken, on account of my dark beard, for an expected French spy. The latter
misunderstanding was put right by a subdivisional officer from Chaman (the
present terminus of the railway beyond the end of the Kojak Pass) whither I
was bound and where, having left the loop at Bostan Junction, I arrived the
same evening to get a peep across the border into Afghanistan—to set foot in
the Amir's country, that land of Mohammedan freebooters, waiting and
waiting in vain for an autonomous India whereunto their co-religionists
would be able to welcome an invading army.
Going out into the sunlight from the gloom of the dak bungalow
everything seemed at first only brightness, as if the external world were like
a cup brimmed with a throbbing intensity of light. Then, as my eyes
accustomed themselves, I saw that near the bungalow were peach and
apricot trees holding sprays of blossom, rose and white against the pale blue
of the sky, and that in the distance on every side mountains rose out of the
plain, not grey and cold but warm with faint tints of amethyst and delicate
red, and that snow lay upon their higher peaks.
Chaman lies in the plain within a horseshoe of mountains, and the space
of clearly seen country is so vast that the mountains look almost as if drawn
upon a map. The little town is entirely of wattle and daub, a grey blanket
colour with just a little paint and whitewash about a Hindoo temple, and here
and there a peach tree in flush of blossom. The main street is very wide and
in front of some of the shops there are tiny enclosures, five or six feet square
like miniature front gardens. Two patriarchal looking old Pathans were
walking along in front of the shops. They wore the same kind of stout leather
boots, and from above the turban peeped the same type of conical head-
covering that I had seen worn by pedlars in Ceylon and throughout the
length and breadth of India. They were Achakzai Pathans and one, whose
name was Malik Samunder Khan, said he was eighty years old.
Seeing the entrance of a caravanserai I was going in when Tambusami

demurred. It was a long way truly from his home near Tuticorin, and he gave
these Northern folk his favourite epithet calling them "jungle people."
Seeing that I was going into the sarai in spite of his remonstrance, he said
submissively, "Where you go I come," but added, "Where you not go I not
go."
There were not many camels within, but in one corner some Afghans
were pouring raisins into heaps, and inviting me to eat, gave me larger and
finer dried grapes than I had ever seen. The raisins were called "abjush" and
the men were Popalzais (Candaharis). Alas! we could exchange no talk but
they made me welcome, and while we squatted silent in the sunlight and the
clear delicious air, one, taking up a stringed instrument called a "rahab,"
sang to its accompaniment. It was certainly not a song of fighting: there was
gladness in it—even passion now and then—but no fury—I think it was a
love-song. It was not a song of fatherland: there was pride in it but no
arrogance. Nor was it assuredly a song of religion: there was faith in it and
adoration, but no abasement. Yes, I'm sure it was a love-song.
Quetta with its gardens and orchards, its fortified lines and its command,
by reason of natural position, of both the Kojak and the Bolan Passes, is one
of the most important of Indian Frontier posts. I returned to it from Chaman
and drove and walked about its wide and well-metalled roads such as the
"High School Road," the "Agent Road," and the "Kandahar Road." Trees, as
yet bare of leaves, lined the sides, and fruit blossom looked gaily over walls
and fences.
The "Holi" festival of the Hindoos coloured these days. The throwing of
red powder or red-tinted water seemed pretty general, and hardly a white
dhoti was to be seen that was not blotched with crimson or vermilion
splashes. People danced in the streets, and one came suddenly on a crowd
watching folk wild as bacchanals, both men and women dressed in gay
finery, garlanded with flowers and dancing with strange fantastic gestures in
obedience to the universal song of spring's new advent. I went early to bed in
another dak bungalow, having somewhat of a fever about me since the
blazing hours two days before at the Lansdowne Bridge, and awoke in the
early hours. My great-coat had fallen down at one side of the charpoy, and I
felt as if a cold plaster lay upon my chest. Tambusami was crouched in front
of the fire and had fallen asleep covered in his blanket. From the blackened
broken hearth a little acrid smoke puffed fitfully into the room. On the floor
lay a torn and extremely dirty dhurrie which had once been blue. Between
the dhurrie and the damp earth mildewed matting showed here and there
through the holes. A decrepit looking-glass in a broken frame stood upon
one rickety table against the wall, and on another an iron tray of uncleaned
dinner-plates added to the general air of dirt and squalor.
Leaving Quetta by a morning train I was again passing through a region

mountainous on either side beyond a plain white with leprous-like tracts of
salt. It resembled neither frost nor snow, but was a strange blotchy
incrustation as if the earth were smitten with some fearful pestilence.
On one side the mountains were grey with violet shadows following their
clefts and scoriations, spotted in places by dark leafless shrubs, and on their
summits lay a little snow. On the other side the hills were red with only soft
warm hints of shadows, and beyond them was a band of filmy blue almost as
light as the sky. Soon, as the train raced on, the intervening plain became
strewn with small loose boulders and isolated tufts of dry dead prickly bush.
Two long tents like giant slugs hugged the ground with their black bodies,
and near them a few scattered sheep hunted the sparse nourish of aridity.
Again I passed Bostan Junction, this time, however, instead of going on

towards Chaman, turning to follow round the Eastern arm of the loop by
what is called the Harnai Route. The landscape had quite altered, but was
still strange and unhealthy looking. A veritable pigment seemed to exude
from it, varying in different parts of the same field of vision. The outlines
were noble but the colour, instead of being the effect of light and air upon
masses either of local uniformity or varied by differences as of flowers or
vegetation, was by this frequent change in the hue of the earth itself too
prismatic for majesty and too trivial for grandeur. A rugged pile of grey rock
will receive from the procession of the hours indescribable glories, but a
mass of mixed French fondants squashed into the same shape could never
capture a tithe of such beauty. In chalky half-tones the landscape ran the
entire gamut of reds, yellows, blues and greens, with an appearance of false
sweetness as if the face of earth had been smeared with pigment destroying
all natural glow.
And yet—and yet—as noon grew nearer and the hovering heat made all
things hazy and indistinct, where all merged and was lost, and nothing began
or ended, surely that was beautiful—earth mother—mother-o'-pearl.
After leaving Mangi Station the train approached the famous Chappa
Rift where a vast and sudden break in the mountain makes a wide
stupendous chasm, with steep perpendicular sides. I was permitted to ride
upon the locomotive for this part of the journey and watch this wild and
desolate magnificence of nature's architecture unfold its terrible titanic
grandeur. At one point the railway crosses the rift by an iron bridge called
after the Duchess of Connaught. Entering a tunnel in the vast wall of rock
the train emerges again at one end of the bridge, and after crossing the gulf
turns along the other side so that for some long time this narrowest part
remains in sight, the maroon red ironwork of the bridge staring dramatically
in the centre of a desolate landscape of silver grey. No patch of grass or
shrub or any other live thing is to be seen—only the immensity of the scale
is marked by one small block-house, a minute sentinel which shows against
the sky on the tallest height of cliff.
As the journey continued, the rocks took more fantastic shapes and
above a steely gleaming river and its grey beach of stones, the cliff became
like serried rows of crumbling columns as if some cyclopean Benares
uplifted by earthquake reared its line of petrified palaces against the sky.
CHAPTER XXI
RAJPUTANA
Jaipur was stricken by plague: the number of deaths had gone on

increasing and the living were thrown into a state of bewilderment. The
Rajput princesses had fled in panic to the old palace of Amber and strangers
were, for the time, asked not to visit that ancient capital. The dinner-table
that evening, spread in the open courtyard of the hotel, became heaped with
moths attracted by the lamps and dying through their ardour, and it almost
seemed as if some spiritual light were attracting in the same way human
souls to leave their bodies tenantless.
In company with the Nazim (district officer) I started out betimes in the
morning—passed the large grey bungalow of the Rajah's chief minister, the
lunatic asylum, long cactus hedges and gardens in which white-domed
cenotaphs of buried chiefs gleamed among graceful acacia-like Aru trees,
while peacocks arched their jewelled necks upon the walls,—and entered the
city by that one of its seven gateways called the Moon Door (Chand Pol),
crenelated and covered with painted decoration which included a guardian
figure on each side of the entrance, turbaned soldiers with fixed bayonets
supported on different shoulders in the artist's desire for symmetry.
The gateway was really like a large square tower with considerable open
space inside, thatched huts leaning up against its outer wall. Inside the city
the wide well-paved streets looked so clean and spacious and the pink-
coloured stucco of the houses so bright and gay, that Death seemed a cruel
intruder there without excuse. Yet three corpses were carried past us while
we stopped for a moment. "The one in yellow is a woman," said the Nazim. I
asked why a group of Mohammedans sat in the courtyard of a house near us,
and the Nazim said: "Someone has died there—these are friends met to read
some of the aphorisms of the Koran."
The day before there had been fifty-four deaths in the city, which was
some decrease as the daily toll had quite recently reached one hundred.
In the Chand Pol Bazaar there were not many people about, though to the
stranger there was no evidence of calamity beyond the occasional passing of
corpses. The sunshine was so bright and the air so pleasant, and a crowd of
pigeons fluttered and strutted with such animation round a sacred bull! Near
us a small peepul tree hung over one wall of a red sandstone temple—the
Sita Ramjika—like a fountain of green and gold.
At the famous observatory Mr Gokul Chandra Bhawan Raj Jotshi, who is

in charge of it, showed me round the strange gigantic instruments. We
examined the largest sundial in the world, with gnomon 75 feet high; and
standing in the paridhi, the circumference of the dial, I could see, above
some pink dwelling houses, the clock in the palace tower which is regulated
by the old dial.
Very curious are the twelve houses of the Zodiac (Rashi Valya) each with
a little painting of its celestial landlord upon the thickness of the wall under
its four-centred arch.
The Nazim took me on to see the Maharajah's Palace, and in its lovely
gardens, near a tree of Kachnar in full bloom, we came upon the tomb of a
pet dog whose memory had been honoured with a sculpture of his canine
incarnation carved in black marble and protected by a dome-topped marble
kiosk. The Nazim said the dog had been loved for his extreme obedience,
and there was a tale of some gold bangle lost in a billiard-room which he had
restored to a despairing owner. It was a graceful monument in beautiful
surroundings and a great contrast to the unpleasing tombstones in that
crowded little canine cemetery near the Marble Arch in London, but there
was another piece of sculpture in that garden which I was more anxious to
see, but which, alas for me! was hidden that morning.
Gobindaji, said to be one of the most beautiful of the carved figures at

Muttra, was brought here for safety by the Maharajah Mon Singh, and is
apparently treated as if the stone has quite corporeal needs, for the Nazim
said: "True he lives at the bottom of this garden. He has his hours:
sometimes he has just taken his food and sometimes he is sleeping. Just now
he sleeps, so you are not able to see him."
I love most gardens where old statues sleep, but without any wish to
disturb their slumbers possess some little of Aladdin's curiosity—or
Coventry Tom's; besides, had I known Gobindaji's hours I would have timed
my visit more opportunely. As it was, in this garden where dogs have
monuments and statues lunch, I could at least enjoy the jasmine flowers and
the blossoms of the pomegranates and the grapevines trailing over rough
stone uprights.
At the bottom of the garden we passed through a door in the wall, and
walking down a narrow flight of steps beheld the Rajah's crocodiles under
the windows of the zenana quarters. The keeper of the crocodiles was an old
white-bearded man, extremely tall and thin—so thin in fact that his charges
must have long ceased to wait with any eagerness for indiscretion in too near
approach. The spacious tank was enclosed on three sides by a wall, and on
the fourth by the palace itself. We had descended by the steps from a terrace
and stood on a small piece of muddy ground on to which the thin keeper
enticed his huge charges by throwing a bundle of rag towards them and
withdrawing it by a string. In the middle of some beautiful public gardens
close to the city stands Jaipur's "Albert Hall," a large building in white
marble, which contains a durbar hall and a fine collection of examples of
Indian art and industry. Its courts are decorated with mottoes translated from
Persian and Hindoo literature, and as maxims for guidance they are not at all
easy to reconcile with each other. From the Hitopadesa, for example, on one
wall is quoted:—
"Fortune attends the lion-hearted man

Who acts with energy; weak-minded persons
Sit idly waiting for some gift of fate."
And on another from the same source is written:—
"He has all wealth who has a mind contented.

To one whose foot is covered with a shoe
The earth appears all carpeted with leather."
After all they represent different aspirations and only mystify because
they are marshalled here as from the same authority. One man would rather
have a rough road tearing his defenceless feet as he treads it with a purpose,
while another would prefer to watch a garden sundial marking contented
hours that leave no record behind them. And the first might fall powerless on
the wayside, and the second shatter a kingdom by the report of quiet words.
There are aviaries of beautiful birds in the gardens about the museum—
rose-coloured flamingoes and Rajput parrots with heads like peaches and
pale grey "Mussulmans" from Mecca, with primrose crests and orange
cheeks.
At his bungalow not far away I had the pleasure of a chat with Sir
Swinton Jacobs, the dear old engineer and architect who has done so much
to keep alive traditions of Indian craft-work, and is one of the very few
Englishmen who has not flown from India when white hairs came.
In all India no spot has been so rapturously praised for its beauty as
Udaipur in Rajputana and its lake-reflected palaces. Travelling towards it
from Jaipur I found myself a day later in the State of Mewar, passing fields
of the white opium poppies for which the State is famous.
Udaipur is a white town and comes quite suddenly into view after you
have been watching from the train a lovely range of hills, warm and
glowing. The bright railway station is a grey stone building with a square
tower, and the lower part of it is half smothered in pale convolvulus. The
flowers are glorious at Udaipur, and I found the white house of the British
Resident bowered in magnificent bougainvillias. This gentleman kindly
promised to ask the Maharana to grant me a sitting for a painting.
Driving over a bridge past crenelated walls, a road hedged by dense

broad-leaved cactus, led me on to a forest of leafless trees softer in colour
than an olive wood. It was like a forest from a fairy-tale, with troops of wild
long-legged swine and peacocks, their bright tails rushing through the
branches like a coloured wind. Then I came out upon the waterside where
the white group of palaces with their long sloping ramps, their many flights
of steps and galleries, their towers and cupolas, rose up majestically,
unrivalled save by their own reflection in the lake. What part was plaster
looked like marble, and what was marble glowed tremulously warm like
some white mineral counterpart of flesh.
THE PALACE OF THE MAHARAJAH OF UDAIPUR. [DRYPOINT

ETCHING.]
Four rowers pulled me in a long boat to the Jag Mandar, one of two
palaces which, completely covering the small islands on which they are
built, appear to be floating upon the water. I landed at some wide steps at
one end of a terrace on which four stone elephants stand with raised trunks
saluting. A band of darker colour upon their legs and on the walls showed
that the water was at a lower level than it sometimes reached. There was a
garden within the walls of the palace from which three palms rose high
above the rounded shapes of lower growing trees.
The Maharana had consented to give me a sitting of one hour at four

o'clock in the afternoon. A two-horse carriage took me through the city to
the lake-front and then along under the white walls of the palace. More than
ever as I passed close beneath them was I struck by the similarity in general
shape of one great series of towers to those of old Baynard's Castle; but
never have the waters of the Thames reflected so white a building! And the
beauty of that vast whiteness destroyed for me forever the old argument
which tries to explain the former strong coloration of Greek architecture by
saying that large surfaces of white building would have been intolerable
under Southern sun.
After I had arranged my easel in the room, which had been fixed upon
for the painting, the Maharana entered, carrying a long sword in a green
scabbard. We bowed to each other and after moving to the chair which had
been placed for him he motioned me to be seated also.
Of all the native princes in India, the Maharana of Udaipur has the
longest pedigree, and his kingdom is the only Rajput State which can boast
that it never gave a daughter in marriage to a Moghul emperor. This tall and
dignified chieftain is High Priest of Siva as well as ruler of the State of
Mewar, and is revered for his religious office no less than for his temporal
sovereignty. He is thoroughly and proudly loyal to the British rule, but a
brother of the Englishman who did his utmost (in accordance with expressed
wishes from high quarters) to bring him to the Coronation Durbar of 1903,
once told me that on the morning of the great function "my brother found
Udaipur on the floor of his tent, stark naked and ill with fever, so that he
could not go."
His beard and moustache were brushed upwards and stained with some
dye which made them a metallic blue colour. A small turban came down
over the left temple. He wore no orders or decorations, and his only
jewellery consisted in a double row of pearls round the neck and one
diamond ring on the right hand. A long gown, with close-fitting sleeves,
made of maroon-coloured cloth, and bound at the waist by a belt and a white
sash, clothed him from the neck to the velvet-shod feet.
He had agreed to sit for me for one hour but I thought, in spite of his
gentle dignity, the first quarter was for him a long while going. During that
time no one had spoken, and I asked whether he had not in the palace some
teller of stories who might keep him from feeling the irksomeness of sitting
so long in one position. When the interpreter explained my suggestion he
smiled and asked whether it could trouble me if he talked with his ministers;
and two of these, coming forward at my acquiescence, talked with him
throughout the rest of the sitting, and as he still kept well his position for me
the change was mutually agreeable.
To my left, beyond an outer gallery, lay the beautiful lake, and, crowning
a hill immediately opposite, shone the whiteness of the Summer Palace.
On my way back from Udaipur I stopped at Chitorgarh, fifty miles away,

to drive to the famous fortress city of Chitor, the former capital of Mewar.
The hill of Chitor lies on the flat land like a long mole or hog's back. All
along its crest old tawny buildings with towers and turrets stretch in a broken
line as if they formed the ridge of some old saurian's back with many of the
spines broken. Rather beyond the centre the Tower of Victory, yellow and
tawny as the rest of the buildings, appears sharply prominent. Trees circle
the hill at its base and rising from among them the road leads steeply along
and up the side of the cliff in one long zigzag. The slopes of the hill looked
grey as I approached.
The tonga I had engaged to drive me from Chitorgarh crossed by a stone

parapeted bridge the almost empty River Ghamberi, in the bed of which the
bare rock jutted up in sloping shelves. We passed a cemetery and several
fields of green barley, and the zigzag road up the hill looked more imposing
the nearer we drew, with its eye-holed curtain wall, its bastions and towers.
Still in the plain below, we now entered through the pointed arch of a
gateway the bazaar of modern Chitor. It was full of dogs, pigeons, cattle and
people,—a narrow crowded street at right angles to the hill. We turned by the
large white Kotwali and a beautiful temple porch and passed houses with

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Arab Spring: Modernity, Identity and

Change 1st ed. 2020 Edition Eid

Islam and Muslim Resistance to Modernity in Turkey 1st

Life Imprisonment from Young Adulthood: Adaptation,

Island Thinking: Suffolk Stories of Landscape,

Environmental Sustainability in a Time of Change 1st

Post-Arab Spring Narratives: A Minor Literature in the

Hot Contention, Cool Abstention: Positive Emotions and

Improving Educational Gender Equality in Religious

Activism, Change and Sectarianism in the Free Patriotic

More information about this series at

Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice

Cover illustration: © boonchai wedmakawand / Getty Images

1 Arab Spring: Modernity, Identity, and Change 1

Part I Rethinking Islamism and the State After the Arab

2 Whither Post-Islamism: Revisiting the Discourse/

3 Islamists and Politics in Tunisia Today: Is the Foundation

4 The ‘Arab Spring’ and the End of Turkish Democracy 55

5 Re-examining Hasan al-Banna’s Model of Da’wah in the

Part II People, Media, Power and the State: Civil Society in

6 Democracy Promotion 2.0: Barack Obama and the “Arab

7 The Struggle for Revolutionary Memory: Historiography

8 Affective Encounters: Women, Hope, and Activism in

9 On Samir Murqus, the Narrative of Crisis and the

10 Arab Spring and the Issue of Democracy: Where Does

Part III Polarization, Transition and Justice in

11 Seeking New Metaphors: Gender Identities in Tunisia

12 Unity–Consensus–Reconciliation: The Substance

13 Constructing Civic Space: Civil Resistance, Sustainable

Ahmed Abd Rabou is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at

movements; gender politics; Middle Eastern and North African stud-

Isaac Friesen is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto, Canada,

research lies at the intersection of critical Middle East studies, political

Fig. 10.1 Sample breakdown 180

Arab Spring: Modernity, Identity,

Dalia Fahmy and Eid Mohamed

© The Author(s) 2020 1

analyze the Arab consciousness, or rather the transformation of it, against

Alternatively, though, the imposition of the competing ideologies of

Second, it will investigate the changing political and social conditions in

of conservativism and repression in the Arab world are ultimately driven

While this volume remains distinctly interdisciplinary in its scope, what

on how political Islam and theological discourse and policy might be

Structure of the Argument

­ ost-­Islamism is a diverse paradigm, neither monolithic nor necessarily

overt Islamist ambitions for neoliberal economic ones, had at no point

on new forms of discourse, such as women’s graffiti, storytelling, and

the challenges they endure in the repressive political environments in

Rethinking Islamism and the State

Whither Post-Islamism: Revisiting

© The Author(s) 2020 15

The Crisis of Many Faces of Islamism

systems.”6 In other words, Islamism “is basically a social/political move-

Hence, Islamism must be examined “in the context of the massive

We cannot juxtapose Islamism and modernity or argue in binary terms.

In sum, Islamism as a modern phenomenon is not monolithic. It has

shift was post-Islamism. As a mass social movement, it first manifested itself

Post-Islamism as a Third Alternative

1 Arab Spring: Modernity, Identity, and Change 1

Part I Rethinking Islamism and the State After the Arab

2 Whither Post-Islamism: Revisiting the Discourse/

3 Islamists and Politics in Tunisia Today: Is the Foundation

4 The ‘Arab Spring’ and the End of Turkish Democracy 55

5 Re-examining Hasan al-Banna’s Model of Da’wah in the

Part II People, Media, Power and the State: Civil Society in

6 Democracy Promotion 2.0: Barack Obama and the “Arab

7 The Struggle for Revolutionary Memory: Historiography

8 Affective Encounters: Women, Hope, and Activism in

9 On Samir Murqus, the Narrative of Crisis and the

10 Arab Spring and the Issue of Democracy: Where Does

Part III Polarization, Transition and Justice in

11 Seeking New Metaphors: Gender Identities in Tunisia

12 Unity–Consensus–Reconciliation: The Substance

13 Constructing Civic Space: Civil Resistance, Sustainable

Fig. 10.1 Sample breakdown 180

ost-Islamism is a diverse paradigm, neither monolithic nor necessarily