Ezgi Başaran on the new spirit of Islamism

Ezgi Başaran on "The New Spirit of Islamism: Interactions Between the AKP, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood" (IB Tauris)

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How did your research into this area and era start?

The research started out of curiosity about two main considerations. I wanted to look at three Islamist entities that interacted right after the Arab uprisings: The AKP in Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and Ennahda in Tunisia. The assumption among media pundits and some scholars of Islamism was that this close interaction, this political confluence, was about an Islamist ideology. It aimed to build an Ikhwani block and they had a Ummah vision. The main argument of my book is that actually the main aim of this interaction was success. The AKP were seen as a successful promoter of a model that some say is a "post-Islamist model", some say is a "Turkish model", some say is a "neo-Islamist model", and some say is "Islamic liberalism". Whatever that model is, it was sought by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood - the oldest, most traditional and biggest Islamist movement, the mother and father of all Islamist movements in the world - and Ennahda, similarly a much older Islamist entity than the AKP. They wanted to learn this model of governance, of staying alive and surviving in a "hostile" political environment.

They thought the AKP went through that experience so therefore they would like to learn the modes of surviving and being a legitimate international and domestic entity. They were not talking about how to build an Ikhwani bloc. The relationship can purely be explained by rational international relations theories of pure cost and benefit. That was my main argument. From that, I structure something called the new spirit of Islamism, which is inspired by Weber's spirit of Protestantism, and then Luc Boltanski's "The New Spirit of Capitalism". And it is actually founded on the concept put forward in the mid-1990s by Olivier Roy and Asif Bayat about the failure of political Islam or post-Islamism. It is a step further on that concept, with additions about how market forces actually shape Islamist politics and Islamist actors. That is the story I tell.