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Lecturer: Assistant professor Marius LAZĂR PhD

Course start date: 01.11.2021

The course provides an understanding of the ideological, political and militant aspects that characterize the modern and contemporary re-Islamization processes in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Course duration: 01.11.2021-01.07.2022

Evaluation date: 04.09.2023

Date of granting of certificates: 25.09.2022

Course fee: 1500 lei

(50% discount for UBB staff)

Professional skills: Application of the assimilated knowledge for the analysis of historical, political and military events in the contemporary Muslim world; ability to use the acquired theoretical skills for negotiation situations, post-conflict management, field research, dissemination of knowledge in scientific circles or in the public space, continuation of research activity through integration in national or international study programmes.

Structure:

Political and militant Islam. General characteristics

  • Conceptual clarifications: Islam/Islamism, political Islam, Islamic revival, fundamentalism, post-Islamism, etc.
  • Islam and politics in historical perspective.
  • The intellectual and socio-political origins of the resuscitation of Islamic identities in the contemporary Muslim world
  • The historiography of the issue of political and militant Islam

The crisis of Islamic identity in the modern era

  • Colonial modernist policies, secularization, the emergence of Westernized elites
  • Islam as an identity support and mobilizer of anti-colonial resistance: Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Sudan
  • A nationalist model: the Arab Renaissance(al-Nahda)
  • Islah and the first reformist thinkers: Jamal el-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida
  • The dissolution of the caliphate, new nation states, secularisation and the etatisation of official Islam

Ideology, social and political activism: the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt

  • Popular Islam: the role of Sufi brotherhoods, mawlid, collective pietisms
  • The influence of Islam and Egyptian Islam in the Sunni world. The role of al-Azhar University in the universalization of an official Sunni Islam
  • Hassan al-Banna and the ideological and action programme of the Muslim Brotherhood in the classical period
  • Sayyid Qutb: radical exegesis of Tradition and justification of violent activism

The Dynamics of Egyptian Political and Militant Islam

  • Radical Islamist movements: al-Takfir wa’l Hijra, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, al-Jihad
  • The difficult history of the Egyptian Brotherhood from Nasser to Mubarak
  • New Islamist mobilisations in post-Mubarak Egypt
  1. Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist movements in the Mashreq
  • Official Islam vs. Protestant Islam: the confiscation of Islamic discourse by Arab political regimes
  • Asabiyya, Islamism and violence in Ba’thist Syria
  • Brotherhood in Palestine: Hamas and the nationalist instrumentalisation of Islamism
  • A complex ideological-political interaction with Muslim monarchies: the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan and the Persian Gulf
  1. Islam and Islamism in North Africa (1)
  • Specificities of the Islamic tradition in North Africa
  • Shurafa‘, popular Islam and political Islam in Morocco
  • The statization of Islam and Islamist challenges in Tunisia
  1. Islam and Islamism in North Africa (2)
  • Islamist movements in Algeria: political failure and violence
  • The political instrumentalisation of Islam in Gaddafi’s Libya
  • Political Islam in Sudan and the Sahel

 Wahhabism and Saudi pan-Islamic strategies

  • Wahhabi conservatism and the revival of neo-Hanabalism
  • ‘Ulama’s‘Umara: the symbiosis religion-politics in the Saudi state
  • Exporting the Wahhabi model to the Muslim world
  • Al-Sahwa and the Islamist challenge to the Saudi political-religious establishment
  • Pan-Islamic structures and policies
  1. Militant Shiism in Iran
  • Characteristics of the Shiite ethos
  • History and specificity of Iranian Shiism.
  • Politicisation of Shiite doctrine. From taqiya to velayet-e faqih
  • The Iranian Revolution and the Islamization of the Public and Political Field in Republican Iran
  • Islamisation of Iranian foreign policy. The successes and limits of revolutionary export

Shiite revival in the Muslim world

  • Shiism and resistance in modern Iraq
  • The communal rise of Lebanese Shiism: from Musa al-Sadr to Hezbollah
  • Shia communities in the Persian Gulf: between economic integration and contentious political activism
  1. Re-Islamisation of contemporary Turkey
  • Kemalist reform: secularism and the concealment of the Islamic-Ottoman heritage
  • Reviving the social and religious role of the brotherhoods
  • The failure of secularisation and the construction of a modernist Islam
  • The political rise of Islamist parties
  1. Islam in the Caucasus and Central Asia: between the recovery of historical traditions and new Islamist currents
  • The fundamental role of traditional Islam: brotherhood and the cult of saints
  • Muslim identity and national resistance in Dagestan and Chechnya
  • The ideological and sociological construction of an “official” Islam in Central Asia during the Russian-Soviet period.
  • The importation of political Islam and the radicalization of the indigenous Muslim field in the Caucasus and the former Soviet republics

 Political and militant Islam in Pakistan/India

  • Traditional structures of Islam in Indo-Pakistan: sects, schools, brotherhoods, madrasals, popular movements
  • The influence of an Islamist ideologue: al-Mawdūdī. Islamisation of the Pakistani political and public arena
  • The rise of jihadist movements in Pakistan.
  • Interfaith conflict and violence: Muslim/Hindu, Muslim/Christian, Sunni/Shia, Sunni/Islamic
  1. Afghanistan: communitarian solidarities, Islam and resistance
  • Islamic traditions in Afghan society
  • Anti-Soviet resistance and the emergence of militant Islamic parties and movements
  • The Taliban phenomenon
  • New forms of Islamist mobilisation post-2001

 Salafism and re-Islamisation “from below”

  • Salafism: the fundamental themes
  • Main directions in contemporary Salafism: sheikhs, schools, transnational networks
  • Globalisation of the Salafist ethos and pietist-conservative models in Muslim societies
  • Tabligh and Muslim missionary currents

 Al-Qaida and jihadist Salafism

  • History and doctrinal themes of al-Qaida in the classical period. Constructing a mobilising myth: global jihad
  • Post-Afghan jihadist generations and the Islamisation of regional conflicts in the Muslim world in the new decade
  • After 11 September 2001: the relocation of al-Qaida and the multiplication of jihadist structures internationally

Insurgencies, takfirism and warboi sectarian: Islamism Islamism in post-Saddam Iraq

  • The ideological and militant construction of takfirism
  • Iraqi Sunni insurgency and transnational jihadist networks
  • Shiite parties, militias and protest movements
  • Sectarian violence

Political Islam after the Arab Spring

  • The electoral success of Islamic parties and the difficulties of power
  • Counter-revolution of conservative forces and the limitation of political Islam
  • The rise of political Salafism in the Arab world
  • New forms of Islamist radicalisation : the impact of the Libyan, Syrian, Yemeni, Iraqi crises and the rise of regional and international instability

 The Syrian conflict and the sectarianisation of the regional order in the Middle East

  • Islamist discourse and violence in Syrian Sunni militant structures
  • Regional Shiite support for the Assad regime
  • Sectarianisation of the Syrian conflict and regional relations
  • Jabhat al-Nusra (Jabhat Fateh al-Sham) and the main jihadist fighting structures. Inter-Islamic rivalries
  • The rise and strategies of Daesh: the utopia of the “caliphate” and the instrumentalisation of religious imagery and Muslim identity crises

Islam and Islamism in Europe

  • The confessional and ethnic complexity of Muslim communities in Europe
  • Islam in the Balkans. Historical tradition and political modernisation
  • The establishment of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe and the strategy to build an official European Islam
  • European Salafism – between hijra and jihad

 Bibliography

  • Akbarzadeh Sharam (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Political Islam, Routledge, 2011
  • Brachman Jarret, Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice, Routledge, 2008
  • Green Nile, Afghanistan‘s Islam: From Conversion to the Taliban, University of California Press, 2017.
  • Kepel Gilles, Jihad, Gallimard, 2003
  • Lamchichi Abderahim, Geopolitics of Islamism, L’Harmattan, 2003
  • Lamchichi Abderrahim, Islam et contestation au Maghreb, L’Harmattan, 1989
  • Lazăr Marius, “Ideological and geopolitical aspects of the contemporary Islamic renaissance”, GeoPolitica, No. 9-10, 2005, pp. 219 – 254.
  • Lazăr Marius, “Islam and Islamism in Europe. Representations of Identity and Projects of Action”, in Barry Rubin (ed.), Islamic Political and Social Movements, Routledge, 2014, Vol. II, pp. 288-320
  • Lazăr Marius, “Religion and politics in Shiite Islam: from taqiyya to wilayat al-faqih“, in Vasile Boari (ed.), Religion and Politics, European Institute, 2016, pp. 169-193
  • Lister Charles, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency, Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • Luizard Pierre-Jean, Trapping Daesh. The Islamic State or the Return of History, Polirom, 2016
  • Mouline Nabil, Clerics of Islam. Religious authority and political power in Saudi Arabia (18th-21st centuries)), PUF, 2011
  • Nabil Mouline, History of Salafism, Flammarion, 2017
  • Nakash, Yithak, Reaching for Power: The Shi’a in the Modern Arab World, Princeton University Press, 2006
  • Roy Olivier, Généalogie de l’islamisme, Hachette Littératures, 2002
  • Roy Olivier, L’Islam mondialisé, Seuil, 2002
  • Rubin Barry (ed.), Guide to Islamist movements, M. E. Sharpe, 2010
  • Shahibzadeh Yadullah, Islamism and Post-Islamism in Iran: An Intellectual History, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
  • Silverstein Brian, Islam and modernity in Turkey, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
  • Zaman Muhammad Qasim, Islam in Pakistan. A History, Princeton University Press & Oxford, 2018