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Religion or Opposition? Urban Protest Movements in Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot
Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot
Affiliation:
University Of California, Los Angeles
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Extract

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence throughout the Muslim world of movements calling for radical social reforms and for changes in the form of government. These movements are characterised by a strong religious component. Their calls for reform are couched in the Muslim idiom — that is, in demands for social justice (adala) and the satisfaction of man's basic necessities, and are accompanied by demands for a return to an Islamic form of government, one that is ruled by the sharia. The supporters of such movements frequently are dressed differentlyfrom the rest of their compatriots, an outward manifestation of their allegiance to a Muslim-guided and a Muslim-oriented goal. It has become customary in the West to refer to such movements as Muslim fundamentalists, but the Arab world refers to them more correctly as Muslim organizations, or jamaat islamivya. This nomenclature covers a multitude of organizations with different principles and slogans, but all have one common denominator — their reformist appeals derive from religious belief and are asserted to be founded in Muslim principles.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , November 1984 , pp. 541 - 552
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

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