Description
While much has been said about Islamists as agents of violence, there is a need for nuanced attention to Islamists’ own experiences on the receiving end of state violence. Moving beyond an established concern with whether state repression incentivises radicalisation or deradicalisation, this paper instead asks: How have Islamists found meaning in encounters with state violence, particularly in the context of the prison? How has this shaped them as moral and political actors? I focus on a series of crackdowns on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood from the 1940s to the 1970s, known to its supporters as the mihna, or tribulation. Drawing on activists’ memoirs, I analyse the practices of self-care, mutual aid and ethical cultivation that they developed in prisons to foster forms of agency grounded in particular configurations of reason, affect and will in the face of the degrading effects of violence. In contrast with accounts that situate Islamist subject-formation as quite continuous with past religious traditions and quite isolated from other dimensions of social life, I consider how such practices and their meaning evolved in interaction with one salient feature of Islamists’ broader social and political experiences – that is, encounters with the violence of the modern state.
