What happens to the theoretical and methodological presuppositions of researchers who have to deal with a grammar of International Relations that is more often than not different from, or even in competition with their own, and whose objective is the radical transformation of world politics? When looking at political Islam, it might first seem necessary to adopt a culturalist approach, since the defenders of this ideology to mobilize their co-religionists and seek power have promoted an essentialized conception of the Islamic legacy, reading their historical and religious heritage in an exclusivist and (initially at least) intransigent way.

The cognitive biases introduced by thinking about political Islam¹ lead to the ontology attributed to it, a current motivated at its inception by a revisionist, even revolutionary, foreign policy agenda. This understanding guided scholars to treat their subject as exceptional and, consequently relativize the sociology of these movements and their concrete practices to remain focused on their original doctrinal framework. It is in this respect that it is advisable to remain faithful to an empiricist approach, in which the conclusions are drawn from a study centered on facts and not solely on the original reference documents, although these are naturally of undoubted importance.

Calling forth this modus operandi, the article aims to shed light on two issues.

Firstly, what is the international ethic promoted within the currents of political Islam, and more specifically by the parties claiming to be the legacy of the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in Egypt in 1927)²? In their desire to regenerate “Islam” at a time when almost all societies that identified with this religion were under colonial rule, the Islamists deliberately tried to theorize a “grand policy” in order to meet a civilizational challenge represented by European colonial supremacy.

Secondly, what doctrinal and political changes have occurred within these religious-political movements, and what factors have influenced these changes? What epistemological issues do researchers encounter when examining this ideology and the political practices it generates? If the competition between currents of international thought is well known – the shortcomings of some often being the strengths of others (Elman and Elman, 2023) – it can be interesting to assess the comparative relevance of an approach to the given subject.

For this reason, the analysis of Islamist foreign policy theory and praxis would benefit from a constructivist framing (Checkel, 1998). This framing is the product of a post-positivist epistemology³ and is based on an idea-based approach to the world in which socially constructed representations are intended to be reflected in a specific discursive register and then in terms of actions. This framework gives a decisive place to the question of identity and the role of representations which produces, in a social configuration, the actor’s worldview, structuring a specific policy and interest. Despite the diversity of opposing interpretations linked to the idea that reality is socially constructed by actors whose identity, discourse, and action are often evolving (Zehfuss, 2009), constructivism seems to offer the most appropriate theoretical orientation, in that the epistemology proves fruitful in dealing with the problem of religious and cultural identity claimed by the Muslim Brotherhood currents.

Moreover, as an ideology dedicated from the outset to the seizure of national power at the summit of the states which its representatives have since planned to lead, and to the upheaval of relations of domination supposedly unfavorable to Muslims within the international system, its theorists have produced texts constituting choice material for the scholar wishing to test the hypotheses specified above. The strategy of ‘State-building’, which characterizes an important stage in the Islamist design and is itself part of a gradualist approach to political action, thus offers an ideal setting of data for analysis. This data is valuable for those wishing to determine the theoretical and practical forms taken by the international ethic and an interpretation of world politics centered on the role of inter-representational constructs espoused by these Islamist groups.

Studying the Cultural Politically or the Political Culturally? The Issue of the Restoration of the Caliphate.

Anyone who undertakes to analyze the conceptualization of International Relations originally initiated by the Muslim Brotherhood, more particularly through its founder-theorist, Hassan Al-Banna (1906-1949), can hardly deny its quest to establish and exercise religious and political sovereignty over all Muslims. There are two epistemological approaches to the question of the Caliphate as a symbolic, identity-forming, and state-forming framework, which is supposed to embody both the revival of Islam and one of the preferred means of its return to the forefront of history.

The first refers to a version of methodological culturalism in that the ideological infrastructure claimed has given birth to formations whose discourse and representations are imbued with a certain conception of internationalism and power that does not follow from a grammar dominant in International Relations. Insofar as politics is linked to religion and derives from it, it is radically different from a conception of world space in which States essentially compete to maximize their power and defend their interests, with no plans to revolutionize world politics and therefore ultimately deny this framework. However, the progressive and gradual nature of the Islamist “grand design” presupposes a “national moment” by virtue of which the organizations born of the Muslim Brotherhood will be able to redirect the course of the foreign policy of the states over who they now preside.

The second characteristic echoes the revisionist design that has been at the heart of this ideology from the outset. The reorientation of the Muslim states’ foreign policies is supposed to radically transform the structures of an international order whose logic is, in the original Islamists’ eyes, to the detriment of Islam and Muslims. The idea of seeing the Caliphate restored does not emanate primarily from Hassan Al-Banna (Pankhurst, 2013). However, his thesis that membership in Islam should give rise to a single political and religious sovereignty was the first such conscious activist project.

The Muslim Brotherhood took shape at a time when the debate on the Caliphate was intense. For example, conceptualizing the prohibition of the existence of national borders, which in their view separated them from the only legitimate level of political belonging (that which is entirely and exclusively based on identification with Islam) was key. As shown with the Supreme Guide’s lines (the title carried by Hassan Al-Banna), the existence of these separations, not only geographical but also in his view religious and political, was disqualified and the only legitimate norm that was to make it was the Caliphate. This is illustrated by his words about Palestine, which in his time came under non-Muslim domination (British Mandate and the growing Zionist presence), and links political Islam’s specific history to its European colonialism:

“Similarly, we intend to secure our Eastern borders by offering a solution to the Palestinian question that would consider the Arab point of view and prevent the predominance of the Jewish presence in the region. Egypt and the entire Arab and Islamic world are suffering because of Palestine. Egypt, which has a direct border; the Arab countries, of which Palestine is the living heart, the jewel, the heart that ensures its unity and we attach great importance to this unity, whatever the circumstances and the sacrifices to be made…We are saying this because it is a question of the security of our borders, and it is of direct interest to us. We also affirm that it is the right for two Arab nations in the East and the West; we form a single entity, and nothing will ever divide us. What God has united, no human being can separate.” (Adraoui 2017: 925)

The emergence in Palestine of a Jewish presence was perceived as an infringement of Muslim rights, which prompted the Guide to be even more explicit in calling for military combat against what he described as a new invasion of non-Muslims in Islamic lands. In one of his Epistles (1977) entitled “Commitment to Palestine”, the founder of the Brotherhood illustrates the new grammar by which “the Islamic cause” must be defended:

“Muslims everywhere, Palestine is the first line of defense, and the first strike is already half the battle. Those fighting there are only defending the future of your country, your lives, and your families as if they were defending their lives, their countries, and their families! The cause of

Palestine is not the cause of the East, nor the cause of the Arab nation alone, but it is the cause of both Islam and the people of Islam…There is no need to argue about the rights of Arabs in Palestine. There is no need to explain these rights. Nor is there any point in talking, making speeches, or writing articles. It’s time for action! Protest at every opportunity and by every means. Cut off those who oppose the Islamic cause, whatever their nationality or identity. Donate money to needy families, disaster-stricken homes, and brave fighters. Get involved if you can. No excuses. There is nothing here to prevent you from taking action except the weakness of your faith.” (Afif, 2010: 39-40)

However, there are noticeable differences between the characteristics of Jihadist movements and that of the Muslim Brotherhood. Jihadist movements are more characterized by a more immediate transnational approach that opts for revolutionary and insurrectionary action to reestablish the Caliphate without going through the “national moment.”⁴ In contrast, the objective of the Muslim Brotherhood form of political Islam is clearly to resocialize the Muslim states culturally and politically to merge them, when the time comes, into an entity that will radically change the face of the world. But the logic of the state not only implies a new level of action but also a possible break within the original doctrinal framework and major potential repercussions on the way diplomacy is practiced, among other things. For example, how will the system of alliances be shaped? Will cooperation with a Muslim state be favored for reasons of cultural and religious proximity in the expectation of the return of the Caliphate, or should the interests of the State take precedence irrespective of the partner considered? If international law is considered obsolete because it is not based on Islamic law, should it be respected?

While it is impossible to mention all of Hassan Al-Banna’s writings and speeches on his conception of international affairs, a number of principles can nevertheless be observed. These include the absolute rejection of colonialism in the name of religious authenticity. Islam is also a total system whose supreme virtue here on earth is to propose a specific state model uniting all Muslims. Violent action is legitimate against oppressors. More fundamentally, conflicts are certainly political but above all metaphysical, because they are linked to “primary” allegiances (Muslims against non-Muslims essentially), this is why a sort of civilizational anarchy is validated as the ordering principle of the international system since hostilities are above all ontological (Adiong, Mauriello, and Abdelkader 2018).

What is true at the domestic level is then verified at the international one where Islam generates a political ethic of the destruction of contemporary forms of “idolatry”, such as the modern states, in order to rebuild the Caliphate whose absence since the end of the Ottoman Empire has left the Umma (notion designating the ‘Islamic nation’ having political rights according to Islamists) in a state of ruin. This original ideological framework was thus structured around these revolutionary principles, by which the arrival at the top of a particular Muslim country could theoretically only be a transitional stage, thus offering the researcher the possibility of examining the conditions for studying an initially intransigent ideology pending its overcoming.

Putting Ideology to the Test: Persisting, Adapting, Amending, Rebuilding? The International System as a Constraint to Islamic Doctrinal Readjustment

How can one influence the nature of the international system/order while at the same time presiding over the destinies of a State that has already been socialized within it? While the debate on potentially revisionist actors in the global arena is not new (revolutionary France, Wilhelmian Germany, Soviet Russia, Khomeini’s Iran, etc.), and we generally conclude that they are forced to socialize within the system⁵, we nonetheless have to emphasize that cognitive schemas have a logic of their own. Thinking of the fact that political Islam representatives have systematically presented themselves as outsiders when they are far from power, and the translation of its ideals into action once these actors have taken up positions of responsibility, must not lead the researcher to consider exclusively the reality of a diplomatic practice. Otherwise, one would miss out on a whole area of reflection on the identity of the actors studied. In other words, Kenneth Waltz’s neo-realist argument (2010) about the constraint of the international system seems to be able to explain only in part the absence of concrete expression of the ‘revisionist grand design’ and the moderation of the diplomatic actions observed⁶. The anticipation of the cost of a drastic change in foreign policy in relation to a strategy of peaceful integration into the international game did not produce any asserted revisionism, but rather generated a phenomenon of reinforcement of an ideological readjustment that began before the Arab uprisings were set in motion.

In this regard, it is important not to ignore the reconstruction of the frame of reference of political Islam to maintain what makes this movement unique (the religious and political union of Muslims around the world) without jeopardizing the hard-won status of State builders after decades of opposition, even imprisonment and death. The result is an ideological overhaul in the shadow of an Islamist paradigm, rather than a break from it in the case of several Islamist parties today. The only exception seems to be the Tunisian party Ennahda. Its main historic leader, Rached Ghannouchi, in one of his statements, seems to have acknowledged the outdated nature of the ideology on which his movement was built, and which brought him to power. At his party’s 10^th Congress in May 2016, he declared that “one of the points on the agenda […] will be to discuss the [new] relationship between the political dimension and the religious dimension” and to validate Ennahda’s evolution towards “a political, democratic and civil party with a repository of modern Muslim civilizational values”, the leader concluded at the end of his speech that “there is no longer any justification for political Islam” (Bobin, 2016).

In short, the gradualism historically favored by its epigones was supposed to make state leadership a transitional moment; but here lies a source of major reorientation of doctrine and political practice where the structural effect (Jervis, 1999; Donnelly, 2019) induced by inclusion within an international game operating outside the Islamist design is being pursued, whereas it was the opposite shaping that was initially sought.

What are the Implications for Understanding an Islamist Vision of International Relations?

Discursively and symbolically, the horizon may seem to remain that of the Umma and the Caliphate. Yet, socialization within the international system means that the status quo is respected willy-nilly, whereas the founding presupposition was that of a revisionism capable of ensuring a transition of power (Tammen et al., 2000) in favor of Islam (conceived as religion, people, and sovereignty) once the Islamists had ensured the necessary change of perspective and scale. In other words, if ‘methodological culturalism’ (Ishikawa, 1982) or, since we are talking about a religious conception, ‘confessionalism’, is supposed to be the paradigmatic framework through which this relationship to the revolutionary world is examined, the latter presents with the dual originality of contesting ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) while returning to it when the ideology finally finds its way into the facts.

It is in this sense that it is appropriate to evoke a dialectical relationship between the idea and reality. Initially seeking to shape the world based on an ideological and representational break, this doctrine fits into a social and political game whose rules it has not defined. In doing so, the movements in question are led to produce a third discursive and diplomatic sequence in which the substance and form of religion are rethought to take account of external constraints. The challenge then becomes not to abandon what makes the supporters of political Islam unique, namely the duty to defend a Muslim identity, initially understood in a fundamentalist mode, but now to embark on a revolutionary project that international realities will try to mitigate.

While some choose to see this as a form of political realism in which the founding objective is not abandoned, the fact that it is reformulated in relation to external imperatives (the international system, international law, etc.) does not mean that it is not possible to achieve the original objectives. In the end, despite the persistence of the original content (Caliphate), this makes it possible to propose a substantially different definition and means of completing it (violent Jihad, for example, no longer features in the narrative of most legalist political Islam movements). Thus, while the founding thought characterizing this ideology is unquestionably based on a culturalist essentialization, its confrontation with reality leads us to examine the vision of international affairs by considering other variables that interact with the primary doctrinal fact to offer a new sociological subject (a political Islam which is both faithful to its original version and at the same time breaks with it) to which a change of epistemology must respond.

What is at Stake for the International Relations Scholar?

This forced adherence to methodological nationalism, when the initial project deliberately echoes a methodological culturalism, generates a cognitive conflict that realist theses find difficult to grasp. It is for this reason that the use of a constructivist grid proves more fruitful in measuring the reformulation to which the Islamist agenda is subject, once the ‘test of reality’ has begun. Constructivist approaches (Barnett,

1993; Katzenstein, 1996; Philpott, 2001; Checkel, 2004; Wendt, 2012) offer two undeniable advantages apart from the fact that they allow us to think about foreign policy actions and discourse outside the strict paradigm of objective rationality. The first concerns the links between identity and conflict, and how an ideology can be affected by changes in the international system. The second echoes the fact that an ideology is always a social construct, i.e. a set of doctrinal, social, and intellectual characteristics capable of evolving when those who set out to formulate this ideology are led to take into account internal developments in their country. This is particularly true when the proponents of this ideology are led to rework their worldview, sometimes integrating ideas and values that were initially disqualified, but which are eventually assimilated, in whole or in part, into the definition of the ideology.

Subsequently, by thinking about identity and conflict, and by postulating that the latter determines the cognitive and representational strategy that will then determine the perception of the self, of others, and of the world, based on which the diplomatic ethic will be established. It then becomes possible to think about reactions to the weight of the structure represented by the international system. In other words, if the latter weighs on the capacity of these parties to remodel the world in their image, constructivism explains that there are different ways of projecting oneself at the international level.

Thus, the reconstruction of the original frame of reference (Caliphate, civilizational anarchy, etc.) becomes the product of interaction with the global environment, and interest and identity are redefined according to a new framework of perception, as illustrated by Ennahda’s platform devoted to international politics three decades apart. The early 1980s, marked by strong opposition to Bourguiba’s authoritarian regime, emphasized the need to “promote Tunisia’s Islamic personality so that it can recover its role as the basis of Islamic civilization […] and put an end to the state of alienation and misguidance [and] renew Islamic thought in the light of the foundations of Islam and the demands of progress, and purge it of the relics of times of decadence and the influence of Westernization”⁷.

As for the post-uprising period, it seems to be redefining its relationship with the world, as shown by the work of the 9^th Congress held in 2012, where the tone is different. The aim now has shifted to “help establish a foreign policy based on the sovereignty of the country, its unity and independence from any power, establish international relations based on mutual respect, cooperation, justice, equality and the right of peoples to self-determination, and work to support weakened peoples and just causes, with the Palestinian cause at the forefront”⁸.

Strongly linked to the trajectory of Ghannouchi, Ennahda’s doctrinal evolution highlighted here in terms of international ethics must be seen as dependent on reflections of the place and content of ideology in a changing context. The integration of other frames of reference and normative sources, such as democracy, embodies a paradigm shift affecting certain forces of political Islam, which are thus forced to make a major doctrinal readjustment to continue to position themselves in the field of power that is the Nation-State.

The same evolution can be observed in Morocco, in the case of the Party for Justice and Development (PJD), whose attachment to the principles of primitive political Islam, evident until the 1990s, has gradually given way to reformulated theses on International Relations. If we look at the way the Palestinian question was perceived, the movement, during its years of opposition and even clandestinity, was adamant about the Islamic nature of this cause and the need to support it within the framework of the Umma, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict systematically interpreted in religious terms without reference to any other definitional order.

For example, an issue of The Banner, the party’s magazine, dated 9 February 1992, contains an article entitled “Zionist Defeat and Palestine Great Again”, the text of which refers to “an international conspiracy” directed against Muslims by “the West and Zionism” (Seniguer, 2018). A few years later in 2008, this party having reached the government following its electoral successes, released a brochure entitled PJD’s Foreign Policy: Principles and Orientations insisting on the need to take into account “domestic and international constraints as well as the regional and global context in which the country is evolving”. Furthermore, while reaffirming the refusal to recognize “the Zionist entity”, the document calls on the latter to “respect the decisions set out in international law”.

The case of the PJD is all the more interesting in that it provides a textbook illustration of the survival of certain fundamental theses, such as the fight led by the Western States against Islam because it is God’s chosen religion, but also the assimilation of other normative sources. While the element of political strategy is obvious, and it is very difficult to affirm that the non-Muslim moral and legal frame of reference is seen as more important than the Islamic identity of the PJD, it is nonetheless necessary to note that these declaratory acts show an undeniable shift in reference points. The shift takes into consideration a central element of the contemporary international system, namely a certain secular and liberal type of legality.

A second attraction of constructivism is the importance of the social construction of an idea, let alone an ideological system. Interrogations of the evolving nature of communism in the past, or of political Islam today, are thus well advised to make use of this grid because it gives an essential place to internal dynamics that often foreshadow changes in foreign policy. This is true of the identity of certain players in political Islam who, having had to integrate all or part of democratic principles into the domestic arena, have also produced a new foreign policy discourse. It should also be added, whether in the case of the PJD (in 1996 as part of an agreement with Hassan II) or Ennahda (accreditation obtained in March 2011, i.e. after the departure of Ben Ali), that the systems of power in which these two movements were embedded played a decisive role in giving legalist political Islam a place in the national game. Although this was done in two significantly different configurations (an opening up under close control of the Palace in Morocco, a genuine democratization process in Tunisia), these two parties clearly enjoyed some real success due to a more pluralistic political field. Illustrating the pervasiveness but also the dynamic aspect of the religious vocabulary in the field of politics, this current today embodies the main modality of “the metaphysical dimension of geopolitics” (Varikas, 2006) in the land of Islam.

Conclusion

Do studies of political Islam offer the possibility of challenging the paradigm of methodological nationalism? The answer to this question cannot be unequivocal, and empirical research has shown that the political has taken precedence over the ideological in the immediate contemporary period, while at the same time making it impossible for scholars to deny the persistence of historically mobilizing topics within this current. As an ideological construct whose historical and cognitive basis is the essentialization of the Islamic heritage, political Islam has taken up many of the themes in the field of International Relations dear to the movements that emerged at the time when Muslim societies were suffering under the yoke of European domination, further reinforcing the need to historicize any phenomenon claiming to be ahistorical, built on the presupposition that Islam is a tangible and irremovable reality.

If we take a comparative approach, we have to admit that this movement of thought (despite the obvious national disparities that we have highlighted in this article) represented the religious side of a wider dynamic of contestation of the established world order. As a sacred and radical response to a social and political demand rooted in a problematic interaction with otherness for more than a century, it would seem useful to turn the question on its head to situate the emergence of political Islam within an extra-religious infrastructure that, at a given time, largely determined the recourse to religion as a remedy for harsh political crises. In this way, the mobilization of Islamic sacrality shows the weight of ideas in historical action, validating the presuppositions of the constructivist approach, which is attentive to inter-representations, and thus offering a reading grid adapted to the content and scalability of the ideological factor in the examination of International Relations.

Footnotes

¹ I use this expression in the sense given to it by Olivier Roy (2004: 33), for whom it refers to the militant use of the religious, with Islamists conceiving the latter as “a political ideology [considering] that the Islamization of society requires the Islamic State and not just the implementation of Sharia law. From Maududi to Saïd Qotb, via Hassan Al-Banna, politics, and the State are at the heart of their thinking”. Often used interchangeably with the term “Islamism”, the concept of political Islam thus corresponds to the various forms of activism (religious preaching, charity work, syndicates, intellectual, academic, social, political, diplomatic and even military) undertaken within the framework of organized movements to conquer national power and to subsequently unify the motherland of believers (al-Umma) under a single reinstated religious-political sovereignty, namely the Caliphate (Hallaq, 2012).

² The Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1927) is characterized by an originality that underpins political Islam. The fundamentalism espoused by this preaching association, which subsequently became a fully-fledged political player in Egyptian society, like all the other countries in which its ideology has spread, cannot be considered unique. Several centuries of Islamic history have seen many clerics, political leaders, and ordinary believers initiate a movement to return to their roots. The Muslim Brotherhood is distinguished by its religious fundamentalism and its political modernity, by virtue of which the activist ethic it advocates consists in mobilizing the means of mass militancy, through the creation of a modern political party. This synthesis is the main defining feature of political Islam (Mitchell, 1993; Lia, 1999; Rosefsky-Wickham, 2013; Al-Anani, 2016).

³ According to which reality is not so much the result of the ‘objective’ structures that are supposed to make it up, as the fruit of inter-representational dispositions. As Berger and Luckmann write (1996: 7-8): “We can define ‘reality’ as a quality belonging to phenomena that we recognize as having an existence independent of our own will (we cannot ‘wish’ them) and define ‘knowledge’ as the certainty that phenomena are real and possess specific characteristics”.

⁴ In this respect, the Islamic State Organization illustrates this logic taken to its extreme with the proclamation of a Caliphate straddling Iraq and Syria in June 2014 (Gerges, 2016). ⁵ This brings us back to Raymond Aron’s distinction between the “partisan state” and the “pluralist regime” (1968), the first one being oriented towards a major redefinition of the structure and rules of the international system, often by virtue of revolutionary ideological allegiance. While the author acknowledges the undeniable revisionist tendencies of many states (at his time, essentially the USSR, and even China), he nonetheless seems to conclude that these players are integrated into a game that they continue to vilify, while socializing themselves through norms that do not derive from their doctrine. This dynamic can be summed up in a phrase: “The Partisan State is a State” (Aron 1968).

⁶ While discursive references to this “grand design” have often been observed, no major decisions along these lines have been taken. The AKP has never made Turkey leave NATO, Hamas leaders have reaffirmed their willingness to accept the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in the aftermath of the October 7-8, 2023, attacks over Israel, the Moroccan PJD has not distinguished itself by a different approach to the issue of the Western Sahara… Even the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – while constantly reminding us of the need to cut itself off from the West – has reaffirmed the peace and demilitarization agreements signed with Israel. While it is of course impossible to draw any permanent conclusions on the subject, it is safe to say that 2024 has not yet seen an “Islamist diplomatic revolution”.

⁷ Constitutive Platform of the Islamic Tendency Movement (Ennahda’s original name), June 1981.

⁸ Constitutive regulations of the Movement after revision (9^th Congress), July 2012. For a more detailed study (Ben Salem, 2018).