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Third World Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 6, pp 891 908, 2005

Islamism and Social Movement

Theory
ASEF BAYAT

ABSTRACT There is a new, but still limited, realisation that the perspectives
developed by the social movement theory can be useful to illuminate aspects of
Islamist movements. This is a welcome development. Yet it is also pertinent to
point to some limitations of the prevailing social movement theories (those
grounded in the technologically advanced and politically open societies) to
account for the complexities of sociopolitical activism in contemporary Muslim
societies, which are often characterised by political control and limited means
for communicative action. The article argues for a more uid and fragmented
understanding of social movements, which may better explain the dierentiated
and changing disposition of such movements as Islamism. In this context, I
propose the concept of imagined solidarities, which might help illustrate modes
of solidarity building in such closed political settings as the contemporary
Muslim Middle East.

How can we write histories of Islamism? The prevailing accounts tend to

make overarching generalisations about the nature and dynamics of Islamist
movements. They tend to reify both Islam as a religion and Islamism as a
political project by overlooking variations over time in religious perceptions,
practice and institutions among dierent segments of the population within a
given society and between dierent Muslim countries. A dynamic and
changing view of the movements is often overshadowed by a static vision.
Islamist movements are often presented as highly homogenous and coherent
social units which are to be identied by the discourse of their ideologues.
There is little interest in dissecting the movements to uncover their
constituent layers and orientations. Thus, Anthony Parsons distinguishes
the Islamic revolution from other revolutions by claiming that the bulk of
the Shii population of Iran knew what they did not want (the continuation
of Pahlavi rule) and what they did want (a government controlled by
religious leadership, the historical guardians of the Islamic tradition).1
Others make similar overarching conclusions.
Many narratives of Islamism either treat it simply in terms of religious
revivalism, an expression of primordial loyalties, or as something peculiar
and unique which cannot be analysed by the conventional social science

Asef Bayat is at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) and Leiden
University, PO Box 11089, 2301 EB Leiden, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected].

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/05/06089118 2005 Third World Quarterly

DOI: 10.1080/01436590500089240 891
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perspectives. In fact, until recently Islamism had been excluded from the
mode of inquiry developed by social movement theorists in the West. It is
thus a credit to scholars who have lately attempted to bring Islamic activism
into the realm of social movement theory, even though they tend largely to
borrow from rather than critically and productively engage with and thus
contribute to social movement theories.2 It is still debatable how far the
prevailing social movement theories are able to account for the complexities
of socio-religious movements in contemporary Muslim societies, in particular
when these perspectives are rooted in the highly dierentiated and politically
open Western societies, presenting a highly structured and over-homogenis-
ing picture of social movements. In particular, to what extent can they help
us understand the process of solidarity building in these politically closed and
technologically limited settings? In view of both collective behaviour and
resource mobilisation paradigms, collective identity in the sense of
commonality and solidarity predates collective action. Social structure, in a
sense, selects people with a common identity, bringing them together to act
collectively. The collective behaviour approach extensively emphasises
generalised belief and shared values as the central axis around which
mobilisation takes place.3 Crowd theory, by proposing the notion of
collective mind, oers perhaps an extreme version of the pre-existing
identity and belongingness. Here actors simply submerge into the group,
becoming identical with it.4 Implicit in this paradigm is the assumption that
the sense of commonness gets formed spontaneously, motivated by a strong
psychological impulse, often without the actors rationalising their orienta-
tions.
Operating in a structuralist paradigm, resource mobilisation theory, in line
with other rationalist models, emphasises actors rational motives for being
part of a collective. Yet, like collective behaviour, it also presupposes the
existence of somewhat metaphysical commonness among social movement
actors, with the dierence that it bases this commonness on actors
understanding of their shared interests. Authors working in this model place
particular emphasis on collectivities based upon complex and structured
organisations in which movement leaders play a decisive role. Disarray or
dierences might appear, but these often result from external factors, for
instance, repressive conditions. Otherwise, cohesion, concerted ideas and
actions are what in a sense dene a movement.5
Perceived in this fashion, social movements come to characterise
Bourdieus real groupness, whose existence depends on its capacity to be
represented, and to be identied by its leadership. The image of Marcos, the
leader of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, or Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran
as the embodiment of mass mobilisation, reects a vision of social movement
which dominates the narratives not only of the mass media but also of much
scholarly work.
Based upon my understanding of socio-religious movements in the Middle
East, this article discards monolithic and totalising narratives, because they
ignore and even suppress other narratives which may come to give dierent
understanding of things. To this end, I make the case for a more uid and
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fragmented vision of social movements, attempting to present an angle which

might help account for complexities of such contemporary movements as
Islamism. Methodologically this requires one to go beyond mere discourse,
language and symbols, especially those of the leadership, taking both
multiple discourses and meanings as tools for writing histories of such
activities. Although such culturalists as Jasper, Johnston and Klandermans,
and notably Alberto Melucci, productively perceive social movements as
resulting from processes of negotiation and communicative actions,6 none-
theless their models, like those of others, are rooted in and orientated
towards the highly dierentiated, technologically advanced, and politically
open societies. Their Westocentric orientation undermines their ability to
account adequately for the dynamics of social activisms in the societies of the
global South. I suggest that the analysis of diverse activisms in contemporary
Muslim societies, for instance those associated with Islamism, can oer a
useful empirical basis for rethinking the way in which we conceptualise social
activism. To this end I introduce the concept of imagined solidarity, which I
think might be useful to explain the way in which solidarities are formed and
actions followed.7

Representing Islamism
Islamism has seen many kinds of representations. The numerous terms used
to describe the phenomenon point to its complexity. The term Islamic
fundamentalism has now been superseded by others, including Islamic
movements, political Islam, Islamic activism, Islamic revivalism or
resurgence, and new religious politics. The term Islamism is only the
latest invention. The notion of fundamentalism emphasises the scripturist
essentialism, pointing to the traditionalism of the movements. In a dierent
version, it points, in Gellners view, to a belief in the exclusive possession of a
unique truth.8 While Martin Riesebrodts careful redenition, radical
traditionalism wants to rescue the term,9 Keddie proposes new religious
politics as an alternative to fundamentalism, because it is neutral, making
clear both the political content of the movements, and their contemporary
nature.10 Revivalism or resurgence emphasise the religious at the expense
of the political content of these movements. In turn, political Islam places
emphasis on their political nature. This is cast o by some scholars (as well as
Islamists themselves) who argue that, given the overarching state control over
peoples lives, almost every Islamic practice (in the family, school, and the
like) becomes political. So, the term political Islam is simply irrelevant.11
The convergence of Ernest Gellner, suggesting Islam as being the state from
the very start,12 and many Islamists is ironic and understandable. Finally,
Islamic activism is intended to account for the inclusion of various types of
activities, political, social and cultural, that emerge under the rubric of
Islamic movement. The concept, however, lacks specicity to point to the
recent upsurge of action.
Notwithstanding their dierences, these terms point to aspects of religious
activism. By activism, I mean extra-ordinary, extra-usual practices which
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aim, collectively or individually, institutionally or informally, to cause social

change. When those practices cease to become extra-ordinary, when they
become usual practices of every day life, they no longer constitute activism.
So, in a sense, the above terms refer to a phenomenon which is equivalent to
active religiosity. It is commonly agreed that most Egyptians, both Muslim
and Christian, are pious. But theirs is a passive piety. That is, as believers
they go along ordinarily practising their religion. However, active piety refers
to those who not only practice their religion, but also preach it, wanting
others to think and practise like them. It is this extra-ordinary religiosity
which is often involved in missionary orientation and intolerance. Islamic
activism, therefore, is about this extra-ordinary religiosity of the Muslim
population in modern times. It may be involved explicitly in politics, which I
would call Islamism, or restricted to apolitical but active piety, as
exemplied in trends and movements which centre on individual self-
enhancement and identity.
Beyond the perspectives of the Islamist ideologues, in general, two types of
interpretations have attempted to explain the spread of religious politics in
modern times. The modernist interpretations portray Islamism as reactive
movements carried by traditional people, the intellectuals, and the urban
poor, against Western-style modernisation. These movements are said to be
anti-democratic and regressive by character. On the right, the clash of
civilizations, proposed by Bernard Lewis and popularised by Samuel
Huntington, manifests the framework within which the anti-modern
character of such movements in their encounter with the Western modernity
is assessed.13 On the left, one can point to Albert Melucci and Alain
Touraine, among others, who express concern about religious revivalism.
Regressive utopianism and anti-movement are how they refer to religious,
including the Islamic, movements. According to Melucci a religious
movement denes its identity in terms of the past drawing on a totalizing
myth of rebirth which is often at least quasi-religious in content. Totalizing
monism, he declares, is the central distinguishing feature of regressive
Utopianism. In turn, Touraines normative notion of social movements as
positive and progressive leads to the characterisation of Islamism as anti-
movement.14
The second type of interpretations view Islamism as the manifestation of,
and a reaction to, postmodernity. In this framework the movements
represent a quest for dierence, cultural autonomy, alternative polity and
morality vs the universalising secular modernity. Foucault described the
Iranian revolution as the rst post-modern revolution of our time, as the
spirit of a world without spirit.15 For Giddens it signalled the crisis of
modernity.16 Castells formulated it in terms of the exclusion of the excluders
by the excluded, and for Esposito it signied a quest for identity,
authenticity, and community, and a desire to establish meaning and order
in both personal life and society.17 On the other hand, Islamism in this
approach manifests a search for certainty in this uncertain world, attempts to
restore to the post-modern world meaning, an ethic and an order which, it
is claimed, have vanished in the collapse of all its certainties.18 Burgat and
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Dowell, among others, go further to describe Islamist movements in the

Middle East and North Africa as the third (after political and economic)
phase of anti-colonial strugglesdiscursive struggles against Western
modernity, struggles for cultural identity and independence.19
There seems to be a good deal of plausibility in such representations. The
global conditions in which most of these movements emerged and the
discourses of such Islamist leaders as Abul-ala Mawdudi, Ayatollah
Khomeini, Ali Shariati, Musa Sadre, Sayed Qutb, Rachid Qanoushi, and
others attest to this tendency. Mawdudis concept of Jahiliya, a society
characterised by the worship of man by man and the sovereignty of man over
man, had been taken up by Sayyed Qutb in Egypt, Abdul Salaam Yassin in
Morcco and Ali Shariati in Iran, among others, in order to lash out at
Western liberalism, secular nationalism and imperialism, which come, in
Yassins view, in the name of enlightenment, reform, nationalism and
rationality.20 Shariats notion of return to self reected Islamists choice of
Islam as an indigenous and all-embracing human alternative. While
Mawdudi proposed some kind of Islamic cosmopolitanism to be governed
by theo-democracy or a divine democratic government, Shariati oered
divine classless society, and Sayyed Qutb, Islamic state and economy.
Ayatollah Khomeini called for Islamic government but went along with an
Islamic Republic.21
I do not wish to discuss or dispute the validity of these non-native
interpretations of Islamism here.22 In many ways they oer important
vantage points from which to view the phenomenon. My main purpose,
rather, is to pose a methodological question about how these authors have
come to such conclusions. I would like to suggest that a number of taken-for-
granted assumptions inform the analyses and ultimately the methodologies of
such interpreters. To begin with, there is a strong tendency for the
commentators to rely overwhelmingly on symbols, language and ideology.
Indeed, discourse analysis of texts, words and symbols can account for the
prevailing methodological orientation to discover the nature of the Islamist
movements. And much of the fundamentalism arguments obtain their raw
materials from these sorts of data. In a methodological statement, Manuel
Castells emphasises that social movements should be seen by their own
discourse. 23 When presenting and analyzing the movements, I will follow
very closely their own words, not just ideas, as recorded in documents on
which I have worked, since, as Castells argues, the identity of movements is
spoken by those who speak it.24 Castells method usefully transcends the
structuralist position (to which he once adhered) of deducing the movements
nature from the class location of actors, by looking, instead, at what they
actually say they want. However, discourse analysis of this sort has its own
drawbacks, raising some dicult questions. Given the fragmented nature of
contemporary movements, who speaks for the movements? The ideologues,
leaders, the multiple layers of constituencies? Most accounts are limited by
relying exclusively on the language of the ideologues. The other problem is
how to discern what the speakers mean by what they utter, in particular at
times of transition and uncertainty when words can assume multiple
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meanings. These issues and questions constituted the core of the debate
between British historians Gareth Stedman Jones and John Foster in the
early 1980s on the nature of 19th century Chartist movement.25 While some
(neo)Marxian interpretations focus, instead of discourse, on the material
processes which generate conditions for the emergence of Islamism, their
concept of social movements often remains overarching.26
On the other hand, it is only the perspective and discourse articulated by
leaders which inform the major bulk of the analyses. Examining the authority
of the Islamist leader in Morocco, a political scientist refers to Abd al-Salam
Yassin as one voice that eectively articulates the Islamic discontent.27
Here, one detects the strong inuence of Weberian elitist views regarding
social change. For Weber the activities of groups derive primarily from their
adherence to a particular belief system. Ideas and symbols, therefore, play a
fundamental role in social change; and groups are activated principally by
charismatic leaders who are able to galvanise people committed to a
particular idea. However, Webers concept of charisma, as Melucci notes,
implies a notion of an anonymous crowd vulnerable to irrational impulse
instigated by the emotional guidance of leaders.28
In short, most commentators tend to assume a unitary image of social
movements as homogeneous and harmonious entities, ones which are
identied with and represented primarily by leaders. In this view the
leadership manifests the personication of the emotion, energy and desire of
the participants. The expressed ideas of the leaders are assumed to be
internalised by the constituencies, thus making up the ideology of the
movement. Interestingly, such an approach converges fairly well with that of
the movements leaders themselves who often insist on presenting a coherent
picture of their movements. In the view of Abdullh Nouri, a reformist
Interior Minister of Iran, A leader of a revolution is one with whom the
revolution is identied; without whom revolutionary movement and its
victory is unimaginable; he is the creator of revolution.29 In a critical tone
Ayatollah Khameneii, the current supreme jurist of Iran, rejects the claims of
those analysts who suggest that the Iranian people during the Islamic
revolution were not sure what they wanted. At that time, people did know
exactly what they wanted, he emphasises, and so do they at the present.
They wanted the implementation of Islamic values in society, which
constitute the basis of the Islamic system.30 Indeed, a major task of a leader
is to ensure and even impose unity and homogeneity. The public and with
them the interpreters often hear the voice of the leadership at the cost of
those of the rest, the hidden transcripts. Finally, authors often study
movements in static form, in a frozen structure and discourse, rather than in
practice, in constant shift and motion.
It is clear that these assumptions, which have inuenced the historio-
graphies of Islamism, are based upon a problematic reading of social
movements in general and the Islamist movements in particular. The
empirical realities of Islamism demand that we adopt a more complex and
multifaceted approach to prepare our narratives. Thus to study the Islamic
education movement, one must go beyond simple content analysis of Islamic
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textbooks, but rather take account of how these texts are transmitted, how
they are perceived, what classroom dynamics are like, and what happens to
teachers and pupils outside schools. Such an approach considers social
movements as dynamic entities, as uid and fragmented collectives,
transcending merely discursive representation by focusing instead on power
and practice.

Islamism is very dynamic

Social movements are in reality highly dynamic entities, being in constant
ow and motion. Like EP Thompsons notion of social class, a social
movement is not just a thing; it is primarily a process, and should be studied
as a historical phenomenon in a span of time.31 A narrative of a movement,
which perceives it as a process, oers a more comprehensive idea about its
particular character. One cannot discern much about Iranian Islamism, for
instance, if one does not recognise its historical dynamics. As I have discussed
elsewhere, most scholars writing on post-revolutionary Iran have over-
estimated the strength of Islamism before the revolution.32 In fact, when
compared with Egypt, there was not a strong Islamist movement in Iran.
Indeed, an Islamic movement was in the making when it was interrupted by
an Islamic revolution. Thus, a nascent movement (articulated largely around
the writings of Ali Shariati and some clerical gures) was in a sense
transformed by becoming a state form. One could argue then that, in
comparison with Egypt, the lack of a strong Islamist social movement in Iran
contributed to the occurrence of an Islamic revolution (led by the radical
clergy and carried out by the popular mobilisation of various sectors of the
population). The Islamisation process was augmented largely after the
revolution by the Islamic state from above. In contrast, the relative success of
a strong Islamist movement in Egypt contributed to its reformist outcome,
and thus prevented the incidence of an Islamic revolution of the Iranian
type.33
Considering social movements in motion is a crucial issue. For it
emphasises that the concerns, focus and even the direction of movements
may change over time as a result of both internal and, especially, external
factors. Factors such as the demonstration eect, repression, internal rifts
and a change in economic or political conditions are likely to inuence the
direction of social movements. These observations in some ways reect
Tarrows notion of cycles of protest as the process in which protest actions
create opportunities for new movement organisations to appear, eventually
entailing reform or suppression.34 Yet I like to emphasise the contradictory
dynamics of social movements in this respect. It is true that social movements
encourage further waves of collective action, yet, by doing so, they also
undermine opportunities for the late comers. They may do so by reforming
material conditions, by institutionalisation, and also by making their
opponents more vigilant.
More importantly, social movements, aside from aecting others, may also
change their own pace and direction. The very dynamics of the movements
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may alter the conditions which gave rise to their emergence in the rst place.
The success of movements to meet all or part of the concerns of their
constituencies often leads to a change in strategy and tactics, or to their
dilution. This is so not simply because certain external forces (such as the
demonstration eect, social control or international factors) inuence them.
Equally important is the internal dynamics of movements themselves. Social
movements transform their own environment, their relationships with
surrounding social and political forces and institutions, society, their
constituency, and the state, which in turn aects their own existence. This,
I would suggest, provides a clue to the slowdown of political Islam in Egypt
in the late 1990s and in particular to the failure of Islamism in that country
to launch an Islamic revolution in the Iranian sense. The downturn of
political Islam in Egypt (including among radical groups as well as the
Muslim Brotherhood) is attributable not only to the regimes often repressive
counter-attacks through legislation or in the streets. It also has to do with a
decline in its popular support: the partial success of the movement in general
in Islamising Egyptian society allowed many people to believe that things
could change for the better within the context of the existing arrangements,
without altering the political system. Providing a social safety net through
Islamic welfare associations, and creating a moral community (in associa-
tions, mosques, alternative dress code, schooling, health centres, even Islamic
weddings) where believers felt safe and secure from cultural invasion and
moral decadence were some of these accomplishments.35
Much of the writing on social movement dynamics analyses it almost
entirely in terms of the eect the external factors have on a social
movement, notably the structure of political opportunity. Gamson views
the movement outcome in terms of either receiving new advantages or
gaining acceptance.36 Tarrow sees movement outcome, its decline for
instance, primarily in terms only of the structure of political opportunity.
It is the changing structure of opportunity emerging from a protest cycle
that determines who wins and who loses, and when struggle will lead to
reform, he argues.37 They rarely look at the impact of a movement itself on
changing its own constituency and environment, or at the fact that
movement dynamics also changes social opportunity. This is because the
prevailing tradition of social movement theory looks at it in terms of the
collectivity of contenders who challenge political power. Therefore, move-
ments are considered successful when they challenge and bring disruption
against the state.38 To be sure challenging political power is crucial.
However, I am suggesting that social movements may also succeed in terms
of changing civil societies, behaviour, attitudes, cultural symbols and value
systems which, in the long run, may confront political power, as in the US
womens movement.
These observations are directly related to the continuity, success or failure
of social movements. The weakening of or even a halt in a social movement
activity does not necessarily mean its failure, if all or part of its objectives are
met. For instance, the unemployed movement in post-revolutionary Iran was
seriously undermined, that is, it became diluted, not only because of external
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pressure but partly because it was to a large extent successful in fullling

some of the demands of the jobless population.39

Islamism is dierentiated
There is a strong tendency in the dominant interpretations to deduce the
character of Islamist movements from Islam, which they often regard as a
xed and unique doctrine. Interestingly but not surprisingly, such a totalising
depiction by outsiders is shared by most Islamist leaders themselves. The
proposition of the idea of a unitary Muslim umma in modern times by such
Islamists as Mawdudi, Abdul-Salam Yassin or the Iranian traditional
Islamists, in a sense, ignores the inuence of national cultures on the
perception and practice of Islam across dierent national boundaries.40 By
now it has been established that there is not one but many Islams.
It is crucial to note that the term Islamism is often taken to describe not
the same but many dierent things in dierent national settings, of which
only a few maybe characterised in terms of social movements. In the Iranian
context the term refers to the revolutionary movement of 1979 and
subsequently to the Islamic state. During the countrys civil war the
Lebanese Hizbullah was indeed a quasi-state in its Islamisation policies.
Turkish Islamists were organised in legal political parties (Rifah and the
Virtue Party). The term Islamism has also been associated with guerrilla
organisations (eg militant Islamist groups in Egypt such as El-Jihad or al-
Gammaa al-Islmiyya) as well as with certain clerical groupings (eg the
Iranian radical ulema, or Jebhat Ulema in Egypt). It was mainly in Egypt that
a pervasive Islamic social movement developed to demand and to some
extent bring about change in various aspects of social and cultural life.
Yet the Egyptian Islamic movement was not as uniform as it appeared or is
described. It is indeed a question of theory and methodology as to what we
mean exactly when we speak of the Egyptian Islamism. Do we mean the
radical Islamists who had taken up armed struggle against the tourist
industry, foreign visitors and the state? The reformist and moderate Muslim
Brothers who disagreed with the radicals on violent confrontation against the
state? The segment of the state-controlled al-Azhar clergy (the Ulema Front,
for instance) who have shown a religious conservatism equal to that of the
Muslim Botherhood on such issues as books and publications, gender,
cultural matters and artistic creation? Are we referring to the massive Islamic
welfare associations, many of them linked to mosques, but with little
relationship to political Islam? What about the upsurge in the 1990s of
religious conservatism in certain state institutions such as the courts,
entertainment industry, media, book publishers and universities? Or the
expanding evening gatherings (halaqat) for religious education and
socialisation among women with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds
women who seem to have little interest in political and social matters that
other Islamic activists espouse, but appear to seek personal piety and virtue?
Where to place certain religious intellectual currents and personalities such as
Mustafa Mahmoud, Salim el-Awa, Hasan Hana or Mohammad Emara?
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I regard the entirety of these diverse and dispersed emotions, ideas and
activities, what Meyer Zald would probably call the social movement sector,
as constituting the Egyptian Islamic movement of the past two decades.
These activities, actors and constituencies were quite dierent in character
and function, and detached from one another, although they often followed
each others news and inuenced one another. Yet what made them a part of
this pervasive social movement was their salience at a particular historical
juncture (roughly the 1980s and 1990s), sharing general religious language
and codes, advocating Islam as part of public life, and expressing a desire for
some sort of religio-political change. However, the actors biographies,
socioeconomic milieu, image of their society, and the kind of change they
pursued seemed to diverge. While the core of the movement was Islamist,
that is, it sought some kind of Islamic state, the margins exhibited greater
ambiguity in what they aspired to.
In general contemporary social movements by their very nature carry a
multiplicity of discourses espoused by diverse fragments and constituencies,
although they may be dominated by one. Shaped in a complex set of
concentric circles (like the whole set of circled waves on a calm water
surface), social movements possess various layers of activism and constitu-
ency (leaders, cadres, members, sympathizers, free riders, and so on) who are
likely to exhibit dierent perceptions about the aims and objectives of their
activities. At the same time, social movements usually possess an animating
eect in that they inspire and unintentionally activate fragmented
sentiments, sympathies and collectives outside, often on the periphery, of
social movement organisations, usually with little or no structural linkage
between them. The animation results, on the one hand, from demonstrating
the vulnerability of adversaries, and showing how things can be done. On the
other hand, it is caused by the outrage of people outside the movement at the
adversaries (regimes) repressive measures, which they may consider morally
unacceptable. Thus, in the mid-1990s some schoolgirls in Egypt took on
wearing the hijab (veil) not in a slow conversion process, but as a reaction to
the governments decision to ban veiling in schools for fear of Islamic
fundamentalism there.41
Thus, numerous kinds of actors, such as womens groups, cultural actors,
writers, journalists, workers, students and religious groups, tend to emerge
on the periphery of social movement organizations (SMOs) with little or no
networking among them, or between them and the SMOs. Where
opportunity allows, these actors may express views on prevalent issues, yet
they may not necessarily internalise the aims and objectives of the movement
leadership or each other. This characterised the diverse constituencies of
Irans Reform Movement (Jonbesh-e Eslah-talabi) under President Muham-
mad Khatami since 1997. All the segments of the Reform Movement spoke
of reform, perhaps, in the same fashion that the participants in the Islamic
revolution of 1979 talked about revolution. Both in 1997 and 1979,
however, the movements were infused with fragmentation and unarticulated
discord, with each segment often espousing dierent projections about
reform and change. However, for the reason I shall discuss below, while
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disagreements were more transparent in the 1990s Reform Movement, they

were largely hidden during the revolution.

Imagined solidarities
If, as shown above, the Islamist movements are internally uid, fragmented
and dierentiated, then what binds these fragments together? What makes
them a movement dened as a co-operative unit, in terms of the collective
activities of many people to bring about social change? After all, unity of
purpose and action is the hallmark, indeed a dening feature, of a social
movement. And shared interests and values are invariably proposed to
account for the elements which bring actors together for a united purpose. In
what way, then, is commonality assured, consensus built and solidarity
achieved among dierentiated actors? I would like to propose that consensus
may be achieved not simply by actors real understanding of their shared
interests, but also by their imagining commonality with othersby imagined
solidarities.
To illustrate, let me begin with the other end of commonality and unity, by
asking why people disagree and disunite. I suggest that dissension and
discord among individuals may originate from at least two sources:
divergence of interests and/or in interpretations. Along with Isaac Balbus,
I take the idea of interests to mean having a stake in something, or being
aected by something.42 Of course, interests are not only material or
economic; we may also speak of political, social or moral (eg honour)
interests. Some interests are objective, that is, they exist beyond our
awareness and perceptions, as in the example of everyone having an interest
in clean air irrespective of whether one is aware of it or not. However,
interests attached to social, political and economic realms often have
subjective bases in that they are socially or culturally constructed. It is in
this sense that sociologist Nicos Poulantzas, among others, has argued that
interests do not exist beyond our consciousness, but they are in fact part of it.
Reconciling objective and subjective interests remains a theoretical
problem. Yet, irrespective of ones position on this, the fact remains that
dierence in interests accounts for the major source of discord and dissension
between individuals.
Apart from interests, social movement actors may also disagree because
they hold dierent perceptions, interpretations of things. The question of
why people understand things dierently is a complex one. But this may lie in
individuals distinct experiences, their specic biographies (according to
Japser), or their inner complexity (in Meluccis terminology).43 Prejudice, or
blind attitudes for or against certain values, represents the extreme moment
of divergent perceptions. It is crucial to emphasise, however, that perceptions
and interpretations should not be seen as being totally independent variables.
Peoples distinct interests may, and often do, inuence and even shape the
way they look at and interpret the world. So the concept of interests is
indeed a signicant variable, despite the fact that currently it is often
dismissed as either insignicant or unproblematic.
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Scholars who have discussed the issue of interests often point to the
conceptual diculties relating to the contradiction between objective and
subjective, or individual and group interests. For them peoples total
interests seem either to converge, in which case they facilitate collective
action, or to diverge, which impedes it. In other words, individuals are seen
as either carrying aggregate common interests or as lacking them.44 There
seems to be nothing in between. But in reality, individuals often carry
various elds of interests in various domains of lifeat the individual,
family or national levels, in economic, political, intellectual or moral
terrains. Groups interests may converge in some domains but diverge and
contradict in others. I would suggest that participants in a social movement
often espouse not totally shared, but partially shared interests. Unlike the
19th century working class movements which enjoyed, according to Laclau
and Moue, the synchronic unity of subject positions (that is, convergence
of total interests), participants in the contemporary social movements come
from diverse backgrounds and experiences, and do not in that sense form a
coherent unit.45 Yet certain elds of their interests and values may converge
over a particular issue or grievance. And it is these partially shared
interests or values (in addition to other requisites) that ensure collectivity.46
Egyptian Islamism exhibited such a convergence, based upon partially
shared interests and values on the part of its diverse constituencies,
including the modern middle classes, some businessmen, the farmers of
Upper Egypt, students, youth and women, who all seemed to be interested
in some kind of change. The same was true of the Hizbullah movement, a
Shii Muslim political group, in Lebanon before the Israeli withdrawal from
southern Lebanon. Some Christians and Sunni Muslims, in addition to
Shiites, supported (nancially and otherwise) Hizbullahs resistance eorts
in the south against the Israeli occupation, but refused to support the
movements Islamisation programme.47 Sharing partial interests also
characterised Irans Reform Movement of the late 1990s. This movement
consisted of a broad coalition of some 18 political groupings, professional
associations, student organisations, womens groups and intellectual gures
with diverse ideological religious tendencies ranging from socially con-
servative clerics, to moderates, liberals and secularists. Included among
them were the Moshareket Front, a pro-Khatami clerical association
(Majmas Rouhanioun Mobarez), students Daftar-e Tahkim Vahadat, the
Workers Party and the Hambastegui Party. They all seemed to agree on
the movements general ideals: an emphasis on democracy, the rule of law,
civil society and tolerance.
But do these social movement participants rationally and squarely identify
their partial commonalities and then decide to act together? This is certainly
the case with deliberate coalition building, as in Irans Reform Movement.
The incidence of coalition building is not uncommon. United fronts typify
the organisational form of such deliberate but ad hoc alliances. Here, the
parties, aware of their dierences, come to work together on certain
perceived common objectives. Beyond this, frame alignment, or consensus
mobilisation, represents another common strategy. Through frame alignment
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social movement organisations attempt to reach out to people with similar

grievances, to clarify ambiguities and to make larger recruits.48 Although the
concept seems to have been over-stretched from its original meaning to
include any and all cultural dimensions of social movements, nevertheless it
signies conscious strategic eorts by groups of people to fashion shared
understandings of the world and of themselves that legitimate and motivate
collective action.49
Like coalition building, the concept of framing also points to deliberate
measures by movement leaders to fashion consensus (in both cognitive and
normative terms) by utilising existing resources, techniques, means of
communication and networking. Thus, Islamist leaders in the Middle East
frame their movements in mainly religious terms utilising Islamic codes and
concepts as well as resources, such as concepts of shahada (martyrdom), the
sovereignty of God, haram/halal (religiously forbidden or allowed), or the use
of mosques, ceremonies, or zakat committees for mobilisation purposes. In
Iran leaders of the Reform Movement used the language of democracy,
accountability, transparency and tolerance. This is not to say that leaders
fake religiosity or democratic tendencies, although some might indeed use
moral issues for political purposes.50 Rather, the point is to emphasise their
conscious use of religious or democratic symbols and resources for the cause
of mobilisation.
Both in coalition building and in frame alignment the focus is thus on
deliberate initiatives that originate from social movement leaders aiming at
building or broadening consensus. However, the receiving end of the process,
the constituencies, are often ignored. How do they perceive the deployed
symbols and messages? Do these messages actually reach the people? What I
am trying to underline is that an eective framing strategy would require,
rst, a political opportunity to allow eective communication and, second,
the means to carry out such communication. It seems that these types of
opportunities and resources (such as a structured organisation, ecient
means of social contact like private TV channels, a high literacy rate, lack of
censorship, fax, phone, internet, and so on) are more pertinent to the
Western, indeed American, model of social movements. It is not surprising
that studying organisation, resources and opportunity constitutes the major
preoccupation of the Western social movement paradigms, notably American
social movement theory. Here social movement organisations appear like
business enterprises, with an emphasis on a clear-cut division of labour,
professionalisation, strategic planning, fund raising and an infrastructure of
communication and networking.51 These resources are invaluable in
constructing, identifying and extending points of commonality and thus
solidarity, not to mention maintaining and sustaining collective action. But
what about those conditions and countries where such opportunities and
resources for dialogue, debate, dissent and clarifying elds of common
interests and dierences are absent or inadequate?
Restricted political opportunity (because of repression) and lack of
resources are likely to limit the eectiveness of consensus mobilisation. This
might explain why frame alignment in countries like Iran until recently and
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Egypt today is far less eective than that in the West. It is true, in most
Middle Eastern countries, that Islamist movements have utilised mosques to
assemble and communicate, cassettes to get messages across and agitate,
and Islamic symbols to frame their ideas. However, while such opportu-
nities and resources are just enough to deploy a general master frame, to
oer a broad message (such as, Islam Huwa al-Hall, Islam is the solution,
or Jomhuri-ye Islami, the Islamic Republic), they are not enough to discuss
details and clarify ambiguities. The result is that the diverse participants
tend to converge on the generalities, but are left to imagine the specics, to
envision commonalities. I am, in short, proposing the possibility of
projecting imagined solidarities between heterogeneous social movement
actors, in the same way that people of a territory imagine their communities
as nations.52 An imagined solidarity is, thus, one which is forged
spontaneously among dierent actors who come to a consensus by
imagining, subjectively constructing, common interests and shared values
between themselves. But such imagining by the dierent fragments is by no
means carried out in homogeneous fashion. Just as in the case of the nation
which is imagined dierently by its fragments53, social movements actors
also imagine common aims and objectives not in the same fashion, but
dierentially. Fragmented actors therefore render imagined solidarity, the
social movement, a negotiated entity. Theirs is a contested imagining.
Imagined solidarities are usually the characteristic of societies with an
authoritarian polity, where the eective exchange of ideas and commu-
nicative action in the public sphere are lacking. This characterises the
revolutionary movement, such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.
Although the Iranian Revolution was led by radical clergy and liberal
Islamic leaders, it was carried out by very diverse social groups, including
the secular middle class, workers, students, urban lower classes, ethnic
minorities and women. It became clear only later that dierent social
clusters and constituencies had dierent purposes, prospects and expecta-
tions of the change. Indeed, the dierences and divergence came to the
surface no more than few weeks after the regime change in April 1979. At
the time when Ayatollah Khomeini, reacting to various economic demands
made just after the revolution, commented that We have not made the
revolution for cheap melons; we have made it for Islam, a factory worker
reacted: They say we have not made revolution for economic betterment!
What have we made it for, then? They say, for Islam! What does Islam
mean then? 54 In a letter to a daily in Tehran a young women from a
provincial village stated in July 1980:
[During the revolution], I used to think revolution meant clothing and covering
bare feet of the poor. I thought it meant feeding the hungry. Now I know how
optimistic I was. . .Because neither my bare feet are covered, nor my hunger is
satised. . .55

No other group felt the wide gap between their expectations of the revolution
and its actual outcome more than the religious minorities and the secular
unveiled women. They poured on to the streets en masse crying this is not
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what we had expected, referring to the imposition of Islamic codes on public

morality, womens appearance and family law.56 The dierences with the
ethnic minorities ended in armed clashes in the provinces of Iranian
Kurdistan, Turkman Sahra, and Khouzestan, a southern oil province
populated mainly by people of Arab origin.57 In short, the political
repression under the Shah, the remarkable generality and ambiguity of the
message of the revolutionary leaders, the speedy unfolding of events, and the
lack of time and opportunity for debate and clarity caused the participants to
imagine a consensus of interests and values within the broad revolutionary
movement.
Whereas generality, imagined solidarity and thus unity, are features of
autocratic polities and movements, democratic conditions and movements
often breed internal dierence and dissent, since the availability of both
means and opportunities allows for an open, clear and dissenting exchange of
ideas. Consequently, people are allowed to see, reect on and accord their
individual interests and sentiments with those of the other actors. But, at the
same time, the clarity of ideas also means the disclosure of dierences and
disagreements. Thus, unlike the revolutionary movement of 1979, the
Reform Movement, which enjoyed adequate resources (a massive rise in
literacy and relative freedom of the press and of assembly) and political
opportunity (support from the Khatami government) was aicted by
dierence and fragmentation. To bridge the divergent views in this broad
fragmented movement, activists deliberately forged the Reformists Front
(Jebhe-ye Eslah-talaban) which came to represent the core organisation of
the reform movement in Iran in the late 1990s.

Conclusion
Given the fragmented nature of contemporary social movements, including
Islamism, a plausible narrative would take account of the heterogeneous
layers of perceptions, discourses and practices within a given movement. A
totalising discourse suppresses the variations in peoples perceptions about
change, diversity is screened, conicts belittled, and instead a grand united
language is emphasised. This suppression of dierence by the dominant voice
of the leadershipor opposition for that matterusually works against the
concern of the ordinary, the powerless, the poor, minorities, women and
other subaltern elements. Writing a history of social movements by taking
account of the multiple discourses is by no means an easy task. Not long ago
a breed of historians entertained the idea that the subaltern can write its own
history without needing the professionals. They were prepared to drop the
privileged position of the historian vis a` vis their subjects. The idea was that
narration, or the stories of the subjects, is as historically valid as the
narratives, or historiographies, of historians. There were even those who
wondered if academic historians kill history. However intriguing these
propositions may be, they do not seem to salvage much. Serious questions
still remain. How can we get the stories of the ordinary people when many of
them cannot read or write, when they are not easily accessible, are suspicious,
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do not understand our elitist language? These technical diculties apart, the
crucial challenge is how to construct a narrative of a social movement when
its constituent multiple narratives diverge from or contradict each other? This
seems to suggest at least that depending merely on discourse may not take
us very far, and that we need to bring context, structure and practice into
play. But this is easier said than done.

Notes
1 Anthony Parsons, The Iranian Revolution, Middle East Review, Spring 1988, pp 3 9.
2 A very useful recent publication is Quintan Wiktorowicz (ed), Islamic Activism: A Social Movement
Theory Approach, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004.
3 Niel Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior, New York: Free Press, 1963; and R Turner & L Killian,
Collective Behavior, Englewood Clis, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1987.
4 Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, New York: Viking, 1960.
5 Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, London: Addison-Wesley,1978; and Meyer Zald & D
McCarthy (eds), Social Movements in an Organizational Society, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
1987.
6 James Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; Hank Johnston &
Bert Klandemans (eds), Social Movements and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1995; and Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996.
7 Elsewhere I have attempted to conceptualise what, for instance, youth and womens movements mean
in the context of contemporary Muslim societies. See Asef Bayat, Post-Islamism: Social Movements,
Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming.
8 E Gellner, Post-Modernism, Reason and Religion, London and New York: Routledge, 1992.
9 M Riesebrodt, Pious Passion, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993.
10 Keddie, New Religious Politics: Where, When and Why Fundamentalism Appear? in Comparative
Studies in Society and History, 40, 1998.
11 Charles Hirschkind, What is Political Islam?, Middle East Report, No. 205, October December 1997,
pp 12 14.
12 Gellner, p 9.
13 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations; Bernard Lewis, Roots of Muslim rage, Atlantic
Monthly, September 1990; and Lewis, What Went Wrong, London: Phoenix, 2002.
14 Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes, p 104; A Touraine, The Return of the Actor, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988, p 64. See also Touraine, Do social movements exist?, paper
presented to the World Congress of Sociology, Montreal, 26 July 1 August 1988.
15 M. Foucault, An interview with Michele Foucault, Akhtar, 4, 1987, p 43.
16 A Giddens, Social Theory and Modern Society, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987, p 50.
17 Manuel Castells, The Power of Identity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p 9; and John Esposito, Religion and
political aairs: political challenges, SAIS Review: A Journal for International Aairs, 18(2), 1998, p 20.
18 Gille Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity and Judaism in the Modern
World, State College, PA: Penn State Press, 1994, p 3.
19 Francois Burgat & William Dowell, The Islamic Movements in North Africa, Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1993.
20 Emad Eldin Shahin, Secularism and nationalism: the political discourse of Abd al-Salam Yassin, in
John Ruedy (ed), Islamism and Secularism in North Africa, New York: St Martins Press, 1994, pp
167 186.
21 Here I have cited only sources in English which are accessible to non-native readers. See Ali Shariati,
Return to self, in John Donohue & John Esposito (eds), Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp 305 307; Abul-ala Mawdudi, Nationalism and Islam, in
Donohue & Esposito, Islam in Transition, pp 94 97; 1983, p 54; Abdulaziz Sachedina, Ali Shariati:
ideologue of the Iranian Revolution, in John Esposito (ed), Voices of Resurgent Islam, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1983, pp 191 214; and Yvonne Haddad, Sayyid Qutb: ideologue of Islamic revival,
in Esposito, Voices of Resurgent Islam, pp 67 98.
22 I would like, however, to point to a curious convergence between the often totalising discourse of the
Islamists and the post-structuralist framework of these authors. This probably results from their
essentialism of dierence, a notion which says that, whatever they are, Islamists are dierent from the
West.
23 See Castells, The Power of Identity, p 71.

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24 Ibid (emphasis in original).

25 Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832 1982,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; and John Foster, The declassing of language, New
Left Review, 150, 1985.
26 For instance, Castells account of Islamism and the Chiapas movement is informed by this type of
envisioning.
27 Shahin, Secularism and nationalism, p 169.
28 See Melucci, Challenging Codes, p 336.
29 Abdullah Nouri, Shoukaran-e Eslaah (Proceedings of Nouris Trial), Tehran: Tarh-e Nou, 1378/1999,
pp 51 52.
30 Ayatollah Ali Khameneii, Friday sermon, May 2000, available at http://www.iran-emrooz.de/khabar/
khamenei.html#top.
31 EP Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin, 1963.
32 See Asef Bayat, Revolution without movement, movement without revolution: Islamic activism in
Iran and Egypt, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42(1), 1998, pp 136 169.
33 Ibid.
34 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action, and Politics, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.
36 See Bayat, Revolution without movement.
36 Gamson, Strategy of Social Protest, 1990, ch 1.
37 Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p 177.
38 Ibid, ch 10.
39 Asef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran, London: Zed Books, 1997.
40 See Abul-ala Mawdudi, Political theory of Islam, in Donohue & Esposito, Islam in Transition, pp
252 260. For Abdul-Salam Yassin, see Shahin, Secularism and nationalism, 1994, p 173.
41 Linda Herrera, The sanctity of the school: new Islamic education in modern Egypt, PhD dissertation,
Columbia University, 2000.
42 Issac Balbus, The concept of interest in pluralist and Marxist analysis, in I Katznelson, G Adams, P
Brenner & A Wolfe (eds), The Politics and Society Reader, New York: David McKay, 1973.
43 Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest; and Melucci, Challenging Codes.
44 See, for example, Balbus, Concept of interest, 1973; and Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution.
45 Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Moue, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London: Verso, 1985.
46 This perception of fragmented interests is a useful way to assess the position of women under the
Islamic Republic of Iran today. Are they oppressed or empowered? The answer is both, depending on
what domains and interests one is speaking about. For instance, women are more literate, assertive and
publicly active, but their individual freedom and modes of expression are more limited.
47 I am grateful to Emma Naughton for bringing the case of Hizbullah to my attention.
48 D Snow, EB Rochford, SK Worden & RD Benford, Frame alignment processes, micromobilization,
and movement participation, American Sociological Review, 51, 1986, pp 464 481.
49 D McAdam, J McCarthy & M Zald (eds), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements: Political
Opportunities, Mobilizing Structures, and Cultural Framings, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996, p 6
50 An example is Hizb al-Amal in Egypt, which slandered the allegedly immoral novel, A Banquet for
Seaweeds, by the Syrian author, Haydar Haydar, to instigate religious outrage among ordinary
Muslims. The conservative Islamists in Iran also apply similar methods of characterising the discourse
and behaviour of their adversaries as un-Islamic. For instance, in their struggle against the reform
government of President Khatami, they have ruled that dialogue with the USA is haram, or religiously
forbidden. See Iran Farda, 44, July 1998, p 29.
51 Hanspeter Kriesi, The organizational structure of new social movements in a political context, in
McAdam et al, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements.
52 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, London: Verso, 1983.
53 Asef Bayat, Does class ever opt out of the nation? Notes on identity politics in Iran, in Willem
Schendel & Eric Zurcher (eds), Opting Out of the Nation: Identity Politics in Central, South and West
Asia, London: IB Tauris, 2000; and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and
Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.
54 Bayat, Workers and Revolution, p 48.
55 Ayandegan, 24 Tir 1358, cited in Nimeye Digar, No. 11, 1990, pp 114 115.
56 For some useful documentation on womens activism during the revolution and in the aftermath, see
Nimeye Digar, 10, 1989 and 11, 1990. These are special issues on womens experiences during the
revolution.
57 Indeed, one should look at these ethnic movements with the same de-totalising scrutiny as at the
revolution itself.

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