Jordanian Islamists and the agenda for women

Between discourse and practice

Bibliographic Data

ID10280993
AuthorsLisa Taraki (corresponding author)
Year1996
Volume32
Issue1
Pages140-158
Publication date1996-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMiddle Eastern Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0026-3206 • E-ISSN: 1743-7881
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/00263209608701095
OpenAlexW2015933707
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited3

The resurgent Islamist movement in Jordan2 presents itself as a movement with a clear vision of what constitutes a society based on Islamic principles. Islamist activism and institution-building projects are presented as part of a grand strategy for the reconstruction of an Islamic society and the repossession of an Islamic heritage long denied to the Muslims due to colonialism and the alienation of ordinary Muslims from their own religion and traditions. Can we indeed identify such a coherent Islamist project in Jordan today? An examination of Islamist discourse and practice reveals that in Jordan, as in most other Arab countries, the Islamists have yet to elucidate a consistent and coherent societal project. What we witness is the process of constructing an Islamist agenda. As can be expected from an experiment in the making, we find varying degrees of inconsistency and dissonance both at the level of discourse and practice, and more important, between discourse and practice. This lack of coherence can be attributed to several factors. First, and on the political level, the Islamist movement operates in a political field which has undergone some important changes since the launching of the state's democracy campaign at the end of the 1980s. The campaign jettisoned the Ikhwan into a political field for which they were not fully prepared. While the 'modern' political concepts such as democracy, political pluralism, and freedom of thought and expression were easily incorporated into the vocabulary of the nationalist, liberal and leftist parties, they presented a problem to the Ikhwan. How were they to reconcile these concepts, products of secular Western culture, with Islamic political principles such as shura and ta'a and with their own traditional formulations of the ideal polity? While the Ikhwan have embraced the new concepts enthusiastically in their official discourse, they have yet to resolve the many thorny questions which inevitably arise in the world of practice when the new abstract notions come up against long-held beliefs and ingrained practices. Second, the Ikhwan are faced with a range of constraints imposed upon them by interests and forces external to the movement. Primary among these is the state, which, despite the close relations between the

Political science · Sociology · Gender Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East Politics and Society · Public Administration

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