In the wake of the Arab uprisings of 2011, Islamist political parties have emerged at the forefront of formal politics in a number of countries, including Egypt, Tunisia, and Morocco. In Egypt, for example, which held the country’s freest ever electoral competition in 2011–2012, Islamist parties combined to win more than two-thirds of the parliamentary seats in an assembly elected to help design the new Egyptian constitution. The parties of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and their Salafist competitors demonstrated remarkable political dominance in the wake of a political uprising that was not in itself an Islamist revolution. Despite regime...

Islamists are participating in their political systems more than ever before. Whereas electoral participation by self-identified Islamist movements was rather novel in many parts of the Muslim world in the 1990s (with the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) in Algeria, Islamic Action Front (IAF) in Jordan, or Islamic Renaissance Party (IRP) in Tajikistan providing major challenges to their political systems), Islamist participation in elections has become the norm in a wide variety of countries, from Egypt to Indonesia, and Morocco to Pakistan. Though “participation” in these systems varies widely, and political freedom remains a concern in most Muslim-majority countries, Islamists now...

What does normalization mean in an electoral democracy with considerable majoritarian and authoritarian characteristics? This chapter examines what we learn from the Turkish case regarding how Islamist political parties behave and sometimes become normalized in response to electoral, competitive politics as well as secularist constraints. I also explore what kinds of changes their normalization might entail and how this might affect democracy. The relationship between democratization and the participation of religious actors in politics is multifaceted and contingent.¹ Thus, I will try to identify and conceptualize when and to what extent the normalization of religious politics might also contribute to...

Indonesia stands apart from the other countries examined in this book as arguably the most democratic. Since the fall of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, it has experienced three cycles of free and fair elections. Of the countries in this volume, only Indonesia was ranked by Freedom House as “Free.” In 2010, Freedom House gave Indonesia a combined score for political rights and civil liberties of 2.5, while Malaysia received a 4.0, Turkey 3.0, Pakistan and Morocco 4.5, and Yemen lowest at 5.5.¹ Indonesia is the largest Muslim nation in the world, with an estimated population of over...

The Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS; Parti Islam Se Malaysia) has been somewhat of an enigma for scholars of Islamism and Muslim political movements. On the one hand, the party leadership remains steadfast in its insistence that its ultimate objective is the formation of an Islamic state in Malaysia, complete with shari’a and its attendant penal codes. Arguably, this objective holds even for the more moderate “professionals” in their ranks. On the other hand, however, PAS is also demonstrably increasingly comfortable with discourses on democratization, justice, accountability, rights, and transparency—the benchmarks, as it were, of Western understandings of democracy....

While a number of countries in the Middle East have gone through major revolutions and social upheavals since 2011, the Moroccan regime, thanks to well-orchestrated constitutional reforms, has effectively managed to avoid some of the violent outcomes that characterized politics in other authoritarian regimes in the region. An important component of this outcome was ultimately the role the Islamist Party of Justice and Development (Hizb al-Adala wa al-Tanmiyya; PJD) was allowed to play by the regime to achieve what some Moroccan analysts called the “secondalternance.” The firstalternanceoccurred in 1998, when long-excluded political parties were allowed to form...

In words that captured well the Yemeni Islah party’s trajectory over more than two decades, a member of the party’s consultative council once explained that the typical Islamist in Yemen “does not come in any one color, but is always open to change.”¹ The notion that Yemeni Islamists affiliated with Islah vary widely in their ideologies and methods has been borne out by twenty-three years of vibrant political practice, against a backdrop of authoritarian regime encroachment and, ultimately, regime transition. This variation was made evident from the outset, in an intra-Islamist debate over whether to participate in Yemen’s post-unification political...

This chapter examines the performance of Islamist parties in elections over the past three decades and its implications for the future of democracy in Bangladesh, the world’s third most populous Muslim majority country. The chapter argues that the behavior of the Islamists in Bangladesh is different from the pattern suggested by the “inclusion-moderation” hypothesis, which asserts that “as Islamist parties participate in their political systems, their Islamist behaviour begins to moderate.”¹ It demonstrates that the behavior of Bangladeshi Islamists is different from experiences in other Muslim majority countries discussed in this volume. In most cases, Islamists have been or are...

In the aftermath of newly democratic elections in both Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, which resulted in dramatic showings for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (Al-Hurriya wa al-’Adala), Egypt’s Salafi Light (Al-Nour) Party, and the Tunisian Renaissance Party (Al-Nahda), interest in the behavior of Islamist parties has increased. Scholars and policy-makers have sought to analyze the election results in Egypt and Tunisia and address potential implications of the Islamist victories. However, electoral success by Islamist parties is not particularly new, as Islamists have regularly competed in elections for decades around the world. What is new is that...