Description
This paper looks at how prominent transnational Islamic groups, historically propagated abroad by state(-sanctioned) institutions, such as Salafi/Wahhabi actors, the Turkish Gülen, and the south-Asian Tablighi Jama‘at, and who claim they ‘don’t do politics’, actually do do politics. Scholarship on global politics and religious transnationalism typically reduces Islamic politics to running for office and political activism. It thus typically disregards these ‘quietist’ networks as ‘pre-political’. Through a first comparative and multidisciplinary study across North Africa, this paper, however, contests this. Via ethnographic data, in-depth interviews, and printed and online literature, it draws on important work within social theory by Carl Schmitt and neo-classical approaches to political friendship to contribute to global politics. Specifically, it argues that a new form of transnational Islamic politics is now unfolding, increasingly driven not so much by the aid of foreign states and institutions, but instead by local political context and the resurgent activism of a new generation of local non-elite Islamic ‘organic intellectuals’. These ‘organic intellectuals’, it contends, do a politics of intra-group solidarity-as-friendship and a politics of drawing friend/antagonist group boundaries vis-à-vis competing transnational Islamic trends and foreign state institutions, all at the level of new conceptions of Islam, democracy, and political rights.
