25
belying the myth of the inevitable fusion of religion and state in Muslim societies
44
), these same
regimes now moved to accommodate Islam in law and politics. The Egyptian case of Nasr
Hamid abu Zeid is a defining example of how a state – amid a civil war between secular
authorities and Islamist movements – simultaneously moved to accommodate Islamist demands
in the public sphere. Abu Zeid was deemed divorced (without the consent of either husband or
wife) due to his putatively “anti-Islamic” writings being held to attest to his apostasy from
Islam.
45
The accommodation of the Islamically-based legal principle of hisba by Egypt’s secular
courts (courts which at most levels are politically linked to the regime
46
) is a strong indication of
the degree to which these governments moved in response to normative pressures to recognize
Islam as integral to state law and policy.
47
The success of Islamists has been in using political,
military, legal, and normative pressures
48
to move states founded in secular nationalism – as in
much of the Arab world – to at least partially Islamicize even while they repress and demonize
the normative source of this momentum. Thus, paradoxically, the normative influence of
Islamists did not lead to an increase in direct political power; rather they saw their bids for power
increasingly marginalized as their normative impact was co-opted.
Beyond repression and co-optation, however, the actual popular resonance of Islamism
may also be doubted, as support for it appears most often to be founded in opposition to the
44
Nathan Brown, The Rule of Law in the Arab World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
45
hisba in Islamic law gives the right to any Muslim to bring a legal case against another Muslim – akin to a civil
suit in U.S. law, but standing to bring suit is based simply on religious identity. The “harm” alleged is to the
community of believers as a whole. Such a case is historically rare, and without precedent in post-colonial Egypt.
46
Tamir Moustafa, Law Versus the State: The Expansion of Constitutional Power in Egypt, 1980-2000, Ph.D.
Dissertation, Department of Political Science, University of Washington, 2002.
47
At an extreme, this was evidenced by Saddam Hussein’s rather absurd attempts to rally the Muslim world’s
support on the basis of Islamic solidarity despite the inconsistency -- to put it mildly -- of such appeals.
48
This is overly general, of course, as obviously Islamists groups not only emphasize different tools over others, but
also normatively disagree among themselves.
Convention