Sunni Islamists long enjoyed a unique advantage in electoral settings across the Middle East, whether due to their ability to implement social welfare networks; their power to play on religiosity to mobilize electoral support; or their skill in attracting followers on the basis of a religious ideology, which governments of Muslim-majority states are hesitant to repress. And yet, in the decade since the 2011 Arab revolutions and uprisings, initial electoral victories in Tunisia and Egypt have given way to a seeming reversal of fortune for Sunni Islamist movements and parties across the region, especially the Muslim Brotherhood. A powerful bloc of anti-Islamist Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have labeled these movements as terrorist organizations and have repeatedly denigrated them: for example, the Emirati foreign minister famously dubbed the Muslim Brotherhood “the gateway drug” to jihadism. Such disparagement has severely diminished both the governance capacity and coherence of Islamists and their image among Arab publics. In tandem, internal divisions, fragmentations, and shortcomings within Muslim Brotherhood groups that attained power have contributed to their demise—or at least their serious loss of popularity. Further damaging the Brotherhood’s brand and showing the reach of anti-Islamist activism on the international stage, the UK and United States have considered designating it a terrorist group. And finally, historic state backers of the Brotherhood, most notably Türkiye, appear willing to deny haven and support to Brotherhood political networks and media outlets. Allegedly, Türkiye arrested thirty-four members of the Muslim Brotherhood who had encouraged protests in Egypt during the COP27 climate conference in November—notably a claim that Turkish authorities have denied but that garnered considerable media attention.
Given these misfortunes, the Brotherhood’s historic sources of appeal and comparative advantage—electoral skill, service provision, ideological guidance, and state sponsors—have now become political liabilities in the minds of many Arab citizens, particularly in Egypt and Tunisia. In those states, the Muslim Brotherhood is increasingly associated with majoritarian or illiberal practices in electoral settings and with radical Islamist movements. Given this new environment, Sunni Islamists in the post–Arab Spring era are less likely to focus solely on electoral mobilization and will become increasingly dedicated to national issues (rather than regional ones). Further, it is worth highlighting that not all Islamist groups across the region have changed their programs significantly since the Arab Spring, yet they may alter their priorities and tactics in the face of new economic challenges since the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Islamists and Electoral Power: The Cases of Tunisia and Egypt
Although the protests of the Arab Spring began as largely nonideological mass movements aimed at improving the lives of citizens by advancing economic development and political reform, Islamist groups quickly emerged as the main beneficiaries of regime changes in 2011. After twenty-eight days of mass protests broke out across Tunisia following the self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in office since 1987, resigned on January 14, 2011, and fled to Saudi Arabia. Elections for a constituent assembly were held in October 2011, and the previously banned Sunni Islamist party Ennahda won the most seats, nearly 41 percent of seats in total. In comparison, the second most successful party, the Congress for the Republic, won only 14 percent of seats. Notably, Ennahda, once elected, chose to rule in a coalition government with two secular parties that, by 2018–2019, together controlled 64 percent of seats in parliament. Over the course of the first parliamentary session, the issue of the appropriate place of Islam in public life was raised—particularly since the Ben Ali government had aggressively pursued secularism, to such an extent that the hijab had been banned in public institutions. The first government had to contend with these debates while discussing the country’s new constitution and in the context of increased violent attacks by Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia, which Ennahda had initially welcomed to join the political process.
A new constitution was passed in 2014, and the secular party Nidaa Tounes won the presidency and the most seats (eighty-five) in parliament. But its leader, president Beji Caid Essebsi, chose to rule in a coalition government that included Ennahda. The two parties were used to working together, because even at its height, Ennahda had only ever won a plurality but never a majority in the Tunisian parliament. So, its members had been forced to form coalitions with secular parties, chief among them Nidaa Tounes. Essebsi was more willing to work with Ennahda, given that, in his words, the party was “becoming Tunisified.” The formation of the coalition government, specifically between 2014 and 2019, demonstrated the “dark side of consensus,” as it in turn led to gridlock in parliament. Indeed, the coalition sought to avoid the secular-Islamist polarization that emerged in Egypt after the military overthrew the regime of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi in 2013, discussed in greater detail below. To do so, however, Tunisia’s coalition often chose to table or avoid issues that could have led to division, namely security sector reform, the place of Islam in society, and transitional justice. As veteran politicians proved unable to reach consensus on major issues in parliament, however, so-called outsiders were voted in the 2019 election, chief among them Kais Saied who won the presidency by a landslide.
Saied in July 2021 issued an emergency declaration sacking the prime minister, freezing parliament, and subsuming all executive power. In July 2022, a new constitution was passed, removing many checks on executive power that had been put in place in the 2014 document: now, the president can appoint the prime minister and cabinet, and the legislature has been weakened and divided into two houses. Despite such changes, which have spurred considerable conversation in the academic and policy worlds, there has not been a massive public uprising against these moves, although protests have emerged in 2023. Large-scale mobilization has not thus far effected change, possibly because a “trust deficit has led a majority of Tunisians to support the exceptional measures Saied took in July 2021, believing he cannot do any worse than the democratically elected governments of the last decade.”
Egypt saw a similar outcome of military-backed authoritarianism after a period of elected Islamist rule. Large protests broke out in Cairo on January 25, 2011, eventually spreading across the country. The protests coincided with an annual police holiday as a statement against police brutality, which had increased markedly in the later years of the Hosni Mubarak regime. Violence emerged, as did clashes with security forces. Protesters focused primarily on forcing the downfall of the Mubarak regime, as protesters in Tunisia had done with the Ben Ali government. On February 11, 2011, Egyptian vice president Omar Suleiman announced that Mubarak would cede power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Parliamentary elections were held between November 2011 and January 2012 under a new election law. The Muslim Brotherhood had formed the Freedom and Justice Party to contest the elections and, along with twenty-seven other parties, joined an alliance called the Democratic Alliance for Egypt. The Freedom and Justice Party dominated the eleven-party ruling coalition, however, fielding the overwhelming majority of candidates and winning 47 percent of seats; meanwhile, the Salafist Nour Party took 24 percent of seats.
Mahmoud Ezzat (blue), the former supreme guide of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, attends his sentencing during a trial session at the Tora courthouse complex in southeastern Cairo on May 29, 2022. (Photo by Khaled KAMEL / AFP) (Photo by KHALED KAMEL/AFP via Getty Images)
In the June 2012 elections, Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi became president. Over the course of his thirteen-month rule, Morsi made a series of decisions that spurred considerable contestation. For one, the Morsi administration favored its own members in political positions and decisionmaking. Further, Morsi controversially issued a presidential decree that allowed his decisions about judicial review to bypass the constitution, claiming that he was doing so to protect the revolution. Morsi also attempted to proclaim sharia as the source of legislation in the country and to introduce a requirement for legislation related to sharia to be reviewed by Al-Azhar, Egypt’s preeminent Islamic institution. Morsi’s administration made the critical mistake, in the words of Ashraf El-Sherif, of “believing its electoral victory to be an irreversible popular mandate.” Morsi’s overreach spurred protests and the eventual overthrow of his government on July 3, 2013, by then minister of defense Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who has remained in power since that time and amended the constitution to strengthen the military’s control over society and to extend his term in power.
Lessons From Islamist Experiences in Tunisia and Egypt
The experiences of Islamists in Tunisia and Egypt illustrate a number of dynamics and lessons about Islamists in institutionalized positions of political power, though these lessons are not applicable to all the countries of the region. First, these examples show that Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood strand after the Arab Spring have been willing to form coalitions with non-Islamist groups (traditionally seen as a sign of “moderation”). The results of these coalitions, however, differ greatly: Tunisia’s Ennahda was seen as too willing to set aside its own agenda to reach consensus, whereas the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was seen as too eager to push out competing political actors. The same action toward moderation, therefore, had opposite effects in the Tunisian and Egyptian political environments, although in both cases such actions resulted in a reputation for ineffective governance at best and dishonest governance at worst.
Second, many Islamists do, as suggested by their name, want to Islamize society and aim to change legislation to do so. As a result, they are sincerely and persistently committed to altering social policy even alongside a commitment to democratic principles. This tendency may create a paradox as Islamists use democratic means to put in place illiberal social policies, an arrangement that could foster a future of democracy in the Middle East that is “Islamist and illiberal.” That said, so-called secular authoritarians in the Arab world, in their bid to undercut the power of Islamists in the social realm, are themselves enacting more illiberal social policies and attempting to exert greater control over the religious sector. This dynamic is evident in Tunisia under Saied, with the government’s April 2023 arrest of Ennahda founder Rached Ghannouchi, implementation of policies targeting members of the LGBTQ community, and apparent incitement of violence against Black Africans. These steps underscore that the Tunisian president is becoming more socially illiberal than his former Islamist opponents.
Third, elected Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood strand can be pragmatists when it comes to electoral strategizing and forming coalitions, but this pragmatism appears limited in the face of ideological issues such as the implementation of sharia law. This dichotomy has fueled suspicion about the extent to which Islamists are truly committed to democratic practices and has generated substantial political and social polarization between the religious and secular segments of society.
Overall, between 1955 and 2022, Islamist parties won no more than 13 percent of parliamentary seats in the Muslim-majority world. Further, they have only been elected to single-party governments in two countries: Türkiye since 2002 and Egypt between 2012 and 2013. Otherwise, they have solely held institutionalized political power through coalitions. As such, the few cases where Islamists have gained institutionalized political power after the Arab Spring can teach limited, though important, lessons. Certainly, they only show a limited amount about Islamism as a whole, particularly since Islamist movements do far more than merely contest elections.
Weathering the Storm: Gulf Islamists During the Arab Spring
In the decade after the Arab Spring, the status quo in the Gulf largely remained intact. This is striking, particularly when considering the appearance of protest movements and of clearly articulated concerns from Gulf leaders about the rise of Sunni Islamist movements to power elsewhere in the region.
Bahrain saw the largest-scale Arab Spring–inspired protests, which were forcefully stopped with the help of the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Peninsula Shield Force in February 2011. The Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni organization, has tended to support Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy; the Brotherhood’s former leader is also the current king’s uncle and a former labor and social affairs minister. In contrast, the politically underrepresented Shia majority in Bahrain has been linked with opposition groups, although it is by no means the sole source of political opposition in the state. Notably, however, since the Arab Spring, Sunni Islamist groups in Bahrain have failed to articulate agendas independent enough of the ruling family to earn seats in parliament. Meanwhile, Shia groups have been effectively stifled, as they have become increasingly associated with opposition movements and thus subject to government surveillance and crackdowns. Opposition blocs were banned from contesting the most recent parliamentary elections, held in November 2022.
Kuwait saw the rise of a cross-ideological reform movement as early as 2010 as efforts to interpellate the prime minister on corruption charges gained momentum. Islamists did not gain substantial seats in parliament as a result of the Arab Spring, nor did they become the object of crackdowns. Instead, Kuwait’s Shia and Sunni Islamists remained capable of contesting (and winning) seats in parliament and articulating specific policy preferences. Kuwait’s most recent election, in September 2022, demonstrated the resilience of both Shia and Sunni Islamist messaging in elections: eight members of Sunni Islamist ideologies won seats, compared to nine Shias. They can work together in instances to call for reform, but the most powerful Shia Islamist political bloc in Kuwait, many of whose members are part of the urban merchant elite, have been reliably loyalist since 2008.
Qatar and the UAE did not experience protests during the Arab Spring, and yet there was a marked change in Emirati treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of protests elsewhere. The Emirati leadership became outspoken in its denunciation of the group as one that threatened the very existence of the nation-state, despite the fact that the group had not been involved in protests, and indeed no protests emerged in 2011. Some members of the UAE’s local Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, however, had signed a petition circulated among segments of the Emirati opposition that called for an expansion of the powers of the country’s only elected body, the Federal National Council (FNC). As a result, government rhetoric began to conflate political opposition with Sunni Islamism. As recently as 2019, Emirati news sources claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood was targeting the UAE due to President and Abu Dhabi leader Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s “commitment to Islamic moderation,” fueling a narrative that cracking down on the Sunni group was necessary for regime survival.
In Qatar, many observers noted a shift in the state’s treatment of Islamist groups—but in fact, the Qatari government was simply continuing the status quo prior to the Arab Spring. Indeed, the Qatari political leadership came to be associated increasingly with backing Islamist movements, largely due to its links with the Morsi government, growing ties with Türkiye, and involvement with certain Sunni militias in Syria. Despite this supposed predilection toward Sunni Islamism, however, no grassroots Islamist movement appeared to emerge in Qatar, aside from a secular call for reforms, primarily of the Qatari economy. Further, when Qatar held Shura Council elections for the first time in October 2021, platforms were associated with individuals rather than with parties, and there was no evidence of Islamist ideology at play.
Saudi Arabia experienced protests during the Arab Spring and responded by cracking down on Shia protesters primarily in Eastern Province, designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization in 2014, and moving increasingly toward secularizing reforms. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has also been embarking on a revision of Saudi Arabia’s religious history, claiming that he is returning the state to moderate Islam and questioning what Wahhabism, long referenced as the state religion, is. Since 2017, several members of the Sahwa movement, a Sunni Islamist group that emerged in the 1990s, have been arrested seemingly due to anti-government activities.
Lessons Learned by Gulf Islamists: Co-optation, Loyalism, and Adaptation
In the Gulf, Islamists have not won or even contested a plurality of parliamentary seats for a variety of reasons, whether political opportunity structures or lack of popular support. So, these cases show four additional lessons about Islamism in the post–Arab Spring era.
First, Islamists are not necessarily oppositional political actors. The Gulf provides cases in which both Shia and Sunni Islamist groups are in fact loyalists. Bahrain’s Muslim Brotherhood since the protest movement in 2011 has struggled to earn votes, as it has failed to develop an agenda sufficiently distinct from the ruling family to attract voters. Indeed, since 2011, “its agenda [has been] shaped by national context and a good relationship with the ruling Al Khalifa family, rather than ideology or any imagined connection to a transnational organization.” Kuwait’s Shia Islamists, previously oppositional in the 1990s, have been reliably pro-government voters in parliament since 2008, even before the Arab Spring.
Second, these loyalist Islamists, whether Shia or Sunni, appear to be reliably pro-regime, as evidenced again by the cases of Bahrain and Kuwait. In 2008, several Kuwaiti Shias were summoned by the Kuwaiti Public Prosecution for mourning Hezbollah militant Imad Mughniyeh; following that crackdown, Kuwait’s most organized Shia bloc, the National Islamic Alliance (NIA), has remained loyalist, even during widespread protests that emerged in 2011–2013. The NIA “gradually became a pragmatic political group that seeks the protection of Shia constituencies’ rights and political participation,” particularly as Salafists have become more active in the opposition and more anti-Shia in their rhetoric. As the NIA has in recent years become reliably politically loyalist, it has secured its political future and position.
Third, Islamists can and do work in coalition with secular groups when pushing for systemic political reform. Over the course of Arab Spring–inspired protests in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, cooperation across ideological divides was common and indeed spurred anti-opposition moves in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. As I have written elsewhere, the crackdowns that specifically targeted Islamist movements happened in states where Islamists have worked across ideological lines. When segments of the opposition are united, it is more difficult for governments to divide and rule.
Fourth, elections are only one part of the Islamist agenda, so they are less relevant in states where political parties are banned or legislative elections do not take place. Indeed, religiously motivated groups are uniquely able to operate and exert social and political influence without institutionalized political openings—a characteristic overlooked when academics and policymakers focus too intently on the Egyptian and Tunisian cases. My own work focused on Islamists in the Gulf has shown the extent to which Muslim Brotherhood groups emerged in wealthy Gulf states largely not by constructing alternate networks of social welfare or even by contesting elections, as they have elsewhere—but instead by working through state structures, such as education and awqaf ministries (which manage Islamic endowments, including financial and property assets). In so doing, Islamists can have an impact on curricula and religious practice and, consequently, on political ideology and social practice. Outside of the Gulf, Islamists in places including Jordan and the Palestinian territories sometimes focus on elections while at other times use different means of effecting political and social change. Scholarship on the Gulf and on Islamism since the Arab Spring more broadly tends to obscure or dismiss such less-formal means of political or social mobilization precisely because these are unlikely to lead to a change in leadership.
How Islamists Across the Region Are Responding to New Challenges
In many countries, the Arab Spring did not decisively change the balance of Islamist power in national legislatures. In the Gulf, for instance, the balance of power between Islamists and states largely remained the same (with the exception of Bahrain). Nonetheless, Islamist contestation has remained politically and socially relevant, showing that electoral performance alone is not the only metric for Islamist success or failure. And the bar is likely high for new challenges beyond the traditionally understood Islamist agenda—such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s war in Ukraine—to affect the balance of power.
Climate Change
While there has been some Islamic unity on combating climate change, little unity has emerged among Islamists. This is largely a consequence of the increasing processes of localization and nationalization of Islamist agendas. Urgent action on climate change has not been a sustained political priority for electoral agendas in any country, and therefore it has not been for Islamist groups, either.
The largest collective effort in the Islamic world to address climate change began in 2008. That year, twenty-eight members of various Islamic NGOs, governments, academia, and Islamic environmental groups from fourteen countries participated in a meeting convened by the UN Development Programme to create the Seven Year Plan for Islamic Action on the Environment.
A 2015 meeting was meant to revive and expand efforts begun in 2008 with a call to combat climate change from an Islamic point of view. The Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change resulted from an international symposium of academics, religious authorities, international not-for-profits, and civil society groups in advance of the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris. The 2015 meeting was hosted jointly by the several Islamic organizations and aimed to achieve “broad unity and ownership from the Islamic community around the Declaration.” The declaration, interestingly, singled out oil-producing countries, calling on them to lead the way in phasing out their greenhouse gas emissions by mid-century and invest in a green economy as a moral obligation. The oil-producing states of the Gulf have repeatedly voiced their intentions to make progress on climate change, with work ranging from the construction of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi committed to advancing renewable and clean energy to an ambitious Saudi plan to plant 10 billion trees to increase by twelve the area in the country covered by trees. Nonetheless, the announcement that the head of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company would be president of the COP28 climate conference to be hosted by the UAE in November 2023 led many to question the commitment of the UAE and other oil producers to climate initiatives and efforts to diversify away from hydrocarbon resources in an era of rising oil and gas prices. With climate change initiatives no longer seen as urgent national issues, it is unlikely that domestic Islamist groups will take steps to address them either.
Further, any Islamist unity will still be affected by the reality of global oil markets. Indeed, since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been a shift in rhetoric, reflected at the COP27 summit in Egypt, largely due to rising global concerns about energy security. In this environment, oil-wealthy states are increasingly justifying their continued reliance on hydrocarbon products, highlighting that the use of fossil fuels cannot be entirely abandoned until sustainable and viable alternatives are found. And Islamists are not broadly challenging regimes’ views, largely because they are focused on local issues rather than global issues on which opinions diverge.
The COVID-19 Pandemic
When it came to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the start of 2020, two main issues were raised for Islamists: first, the ability of Muslims to continue to practice their religion by, for instance, attending Friday prayers and pilgrimages (primarily hajj, but also pilgrimages to Shia shrines in Najaf and Karbala as well as the umra pilgrimage), and second, the appropriateness of state-backed efforts to stem the virus, including through location-enabled mobile phone applications and vaccination drives. On the first point, most if not all independent Islamist groups, whether in or out of government, supported efforts to stop the virus. Egypt’s top Islamic authority, the Council of Senior Scholars of Al-Azhar, agreed and allowed a temporary stop in Friday prayers as a means of quelling the spread of the virus. Al-Azhar and Dar al-Ifta, which can generate fatwa (or religious rulings), also stated that adhering to preventive measures from the coronavirus is “a religious obligation.” Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments went so far as to change the call to prayer to invite people to pray not in the mosque but at home.
There was initially a sectarian dimension to the virus, given that Iran was the first Middle Eastern country to experience a major outbreak, specifically in the Shia holy city and pilgrimage site of Qom. Reflecting preexisting sectarian splits, Saudi Arabia initially blamed Iran for having brought the virus to the Gulf and began by isolating its Shia population in Qatif, as some people had returned from pilgrimages despite a Saudi travel ban to Iran. After the virus spread worldwide, however, the sectarian dimension faded, and religious clerics and Islamists alike agreed about the need to adhere to advice from public health professionals, thus showing some flexibility in terms of the practice of Islam in the face of crisis.
In 2023, with the pandemic no longer considered a major public health emergency, restrictions on religious gatherings have been lifted; oil-wealthy Gulf states have managed to recoup their initial losses after oil prices decreased in 2020, and by and large, the Islamist scene was not influenced in any long-term manner.
War in Ukraine
Immediately after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood expressed its condemnation of the event but stated that “it is nothing compared with the group regime’s repressive crimes in Egypt.” Indeed, the Sisi government in Egypt, which had previously sought to strengthen ties with Russia, has sought to maintain neutrality, voting in favor of a UN resolution condemning Russian actions yet maintaining ties with the country to balance its relationship with the United States. Many local media organizations and social media users across the Arab world have called out a Western double standard in responding to war in Ukraine compared to Syria, spurring further Islamist suspicion and distrust of the West. Within Russia, the leadership appears to be exploiting fear about Islamists. In August 2022, for instance, an official in Russia-annexed Crimea said that Russia had dismantled a six-person terrorist cell linked to a banned Islamist group.
There is of course no unified Muslim or Islamist stance when it comes to Russian actions, with some states—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE—seeking to balance ties with the United States and Russia by keeping diplomatic links open with the Russian leadership. Meanwhile, Qatar has repeatedly voiced the extent to which sovereignty is a redline in discussions of Ukraine but has also had to continue conversations with Russia about global energy markets. If there is any unity from the region, whether from Islamists or governments, it is shared concerns that the Western world views the Middle East in a fundamentally different way from how it considers Europe—and from how these states view themselves, as independent actors on the global stage. Seeing the Ukrainian case as proof of Western double standards long suspected in the region, however, is unlikely to alter Islamist or government views or relationships with the West in any systemic way.
New Directions for Arab Islamist Movements and Parties
There are four major conclusions from the above. First, the future of Islamism, whether Sunni or Shia, does not necessarily lie in electoral politics or even in governance, given the post-Arab-Spring emergence of new crackdowns and suspicions of the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamist political actors more generally. Because Islamist groups are uniquely placed to work within the social sphere, they will likely place more focus on gaining support socially or changing social policy. In some countries, the move will be out of necessity due to crackdowns, and in others, it will be a means of mobilizing constituents outside of restricted political institutions. For instance, a focus on social policy issues—such as gender segregation, limits on social exposure to Western media, and dress codes—could become major issues for such groups, and they could use social media and social networks to push such agendas. Importantly, in expatriate-majority states of the Gulf, these issues may hold particular appeal: many citizens who believe in guarding what are often dubbed as traditional values can agree on them, even if they are not Islamists. Gulf governments appear to be recognizing the popularity of such stances. For instance, a Gulf Cooperation Council body released a statement calling on Netflix to ban “offensive” content that “violates Islamic and societal values and principles.”
Second, both Shia and Sunni Islamism have become increasingly localized and nationalized and are likely to continue as such. Islamist groups that do contest parliamentary elections need to put forward agendas that will mobilize local voters and therefore tend to have very country-specific aims. The process of the nationalization of Islamism is not new, since the transnational organ of the Muslim Brotherhood has become increasingly irrelevant with the rise of increasingly powerful national Brotherhood movements. But as governments across the Middle East have taken more extreme (and different) stances on Islamism since the Arab Spring, it is now very difficult to discuss one unifying Islamist position, on either the Shia or Sunni side, due to the importance of local political opportunity structures and social contexts in shaping their agendas. For instance, abandonment of large-scale regional issues (such as support for the Palestinian cause) for a focus on national-level issues (such as how government austerity measures may affect their constituents) means that fragmentation of the Islamist scene is likely to continue. As a result, it will be necessary for Western governments to engage with and study groups within their local contexts, rather than trying to position them alongside other Islamists in the region by virtue of ideological alignment.
Third, the new challenges outlined above (climate change, the pandemic, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine) have not ignited a reset on Islamist agendas writ large. Rather, they have served to demonstrate again the degree to which Islamism of varying strands has become localized, each group taking cues for its reaction from government actors rather than a shared, universal ideology. The future of Islamism depends on these actors’ relationships with their governments rather than their ideologies. This means they will become more diversified, less united, and more reactive to state policy. For instance, while Islamists across the region tend to support the Palestinian cause, they are likely to set these preferences aside if the government is not in agreement with, or likely to listen to, that agenda.
Fourth, in light of the global challenges posed by climate change, it is likely that a shift away from reliance on hydrocarbon resources will take place albeit gradually, given how lucrative these resources remain in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In this situation, traditionally oil-wealthy rentier states of the Gulf will likely delay putting in place much-needed austerity measures. This could, in turn, spur inequality and change Islamist stances if traditionally loyalist Islamist actors decide that it is no longer politically viable for them to sustain their support of the state—particularly if state support for religious actors diminishes. Further, if the state is less able to deliver services due to fiscal constraints, there could be more of a place for Islamists to restart service provision and criticize regime legitimacy on grounds of economic performance and provision of social welfare networks for citizens. Until global oil prices decrease, however, these changes remain unlikely.