Description
The idea of Islam as a discursive tradition has changed the debate around religion within Anthropological studies. However, this discussion in International Relations (IR) faces challenges of the Westphalian Protestant field’s upbringing and the silencing of Islam in analysis. One of the affected categories was the one of Political Islam. The general concept, created by Western academia, failed to avoid simplifying different actors and political phenomena, representing within the same abstraction political parties, such as the Ennahda Movement, and militant groups, such as al-Qaeda. Analyzing from Ennahda’s victory in the Tunisian election in 2011 until its ideological changes in 2016, the proposed paper seeks to understand how the media constructs an Islamist ethos, facing its interests and the reproduction of intersubjective knowledge. Through French Discourse Analysis, quantitative and qualitative research is developed around news pieces from France 24, Al Jazeera English, and Brazilian G1, focusing on central moments of Nahdawi political trajectory. Thus, the article aims to criticize the lack of conceptual accuracy in the media’s version of Political Islam, deeply embedded in discourses propelled by IR’s analysis, and to propose a definition derived from the notion of discursive tradition.
