Abstract
It was a sweltering 130 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was standing in the middle of the desert. I was looking around for a remote building in the suburbs of Kuwait City for my next set of interviews with a group of young Islamist women, and I was a little late and a little lost. I decided to pick up my cell phone and try my contact again. “I’m sorry I think I’m lost… the taxi has just left me and I’m not really sure where I am!” My contact answered, “Hmm, okay! Don’t worry, Alessandra! I will send one of my friends out to get you! She is coming straight away!” And a few minutes later, to my surprise, a rather young girl, barely 20 years old from what I can make out behind her black veil and abaya, with two small toddlers and a nanny in the back-seat, pulls up to where I’m standing in the middle of the dusty road and calls out the window: “You must be Alessandra! Come on in!”
Islamist parties did not ignite the revolutions that have brought down four authoritarian Arab regimes since the “Arab Spring” first erupted in Tunisia in December 2010—but they reaped their political benefits. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement and other Islamist parties have won all parliamentary elections that took place in the post-revolutions Arab world. In Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco and Kuwait, Islamists won the vote. They are expected to come out on top in Libyan elections and are emerging as a formidable force in Yemen and Syria…
—Ayman Safadi, former deputy prime minister of Jordan 1
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Notes
Ayman Safadi, 2012, “After the Arab Spring,” Baylor Magazine, Spring.
For a brief treatment of their differences, see Wendy Kristianasen, 2002, “Kuwait’s Islamists, Officially Unofficial,” Le Monde Diplomatique, English edition, published online June 4, 2002.
See Fatima Mernissi, 1988, “Muslim Women and Fundamentalism,” Middle East Report, 153 (July–August): 8–11; more recently, Sherine Hafez, 2011, An Islam of Her Own: Reconsidering Religion and Secularism in Women’s Islamic Movements, New York: New York University Press.
For more details on the ideological differences between Scientific and Traditional Salafis, see Lahoud-Tatar 2011; Michael Herb, 2002, “Emirs and Parliament in the Gulf,” Journal of Democracy, 13(4) (October), Johns Hopkins University Press; pp. 41–47.
Barry Rubin, ed, 2003, Revolutionaries and Reformers: Contemporary Islamist Movements in the Middle East, Albany: State University of New York Press, 212.
See Shafeeq N. Ghabra, 2003, “Balancing State and Society: The Islamic Movement in Kuwait,” in Revolutionaries and Reformers: Contemporary Islamist Movements in the Middle East, edited by Barry Rubin, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Quoted in Kathy Lally, 2011, “Egypt Women Stand for Quality in the Square,” Washington Post, February 18, 2011.
George Washington, 1796, Farewell Addres s, September 17, 1796. Reprinted by The Avalon Project, Yale Law School at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp.
Martin E. Marty, and R. Scott Appleby, 1991, The Fundamentalism Project, Volume 3, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 620.
Taken from lecture notes from Dr. William Martin’s sociology seminar on religious fundamentalism, Rice University, Spring Semester 2002. See also Charles B. Strozier.1994. Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers.
Dakshana Bascaramurty, 2011, “The New Islam Comes with a Reluctance to Label Orthodoxy,” Globe and Mail, July 3, at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/the-new -islam-comes-with-a-reluctance-to-label-orthodoxy/article2085114/
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© 2013 Alessandra L. González
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González, A.L. (2013). Islamists Are Winning Elections. In: Islamic Feminism in Kuwait. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304742_3
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