In this thesis I examine how and why political Islam has come to occupy the position of ontological "other" for the United States, in particular in the period after September 11th and in the context of the "war on terror". In order to do this, I argue that much of the language employed in analyses of political Islam within the various genres of academic writing, political statements, opinion pieces and think-tank reports during this period can be seen to constitute a "discourse" in the Foucaudian sense. In considering its epistemological, historical and ideological roots and manifold contemporary expressions, I demonstrate how this discourse has come to perform both an identity-constructing/affirming role, as well as a politically expedient, rhetorical justificatory function in mainstream political thought and action vis-a-vis the Muslim world. Despite its seemingly hegemonic hold on mainstream perspectives on political Islam, I examine the increasing body of literature that attempts to subvert the discourse on political Islam through critical reflection on issues of U.S./western identity, deconstruction of the discourse's central assumptions and paradigms and, finally, the development of a counter-discourse in its place. These critical endeavours, as well as my own contributions to the counter-discourse, are also discussed in this thesis.

This PhD explores the strategic decision-making processes of violent Islamist movements in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The primary aim of this research is to investigate how these organisations formulate and select strategy. The research constructs an interdisciplinary approach to decision-making based on strategic scripts, which are viewed as cognitive structures that allow strategists to form expectations about how a sequence of events might unfold, enabling a potentially successful course of action to be selected. The research argues that there are a limited number of scripts available to violent Islamists: survival, power play, mobilisation, provocation, de-legitimisation, attrition, co-operation and de-mobilisation. The case study chapters are devoted to establishing the existence and nature of the eight scripts and to investigating how they unfold when operationalised, focusing on the interplay between terrorist action and government counter-terrorism reaction. The major conclusion is that while scripts govern decision-making by fostering expectations about the outcome of strategic options, there is a pervasive disparity between the way in which scripts, as theoretical visions, should unfold and the way in which strategies actually unfold. The final chapter argues that this disparity is a consequence of ‘narrative delusion’. It argues that strategic scripts are not simply cognitive structures, but also stories about the future, describing how situations evolve and conclude. The problem for strategists is that even credible stories can mislead by smothering the role played by luck, shortening the distance between cause and effect or oversimplifying the impact of human agency. But because scripts are persuasive stories, violent Islamists often remain blind to their inherent fallacies. The research concludes by arguing that, for the violent Islamists under study, narrative fallacies very often render scripts inadequate as well as making some more general observations about strategic decision-making outside the world of violent Islamism.

There has long been a perceived binary opposition between democracy and Islamism, whereby a number of influential scholars suggest that the presence of the former threatens the latter and vice versa. Based on indepth fieldwork in Cianjur, Indonesia, from 2011-2012, I found that the development of democracy in post- Suharto Indonesia from 1998-2013 was simultaneous with a growth in Islamism as manifest in the expansion of various Islamist political parties and civic associations. Islamism and democratic politics had come to work in conjunction whereby Islamism was not always in conflict or constantly supportive of the democratic processes. The development of democracy and democratisation in post-Suharto Cianjur brought an enhanced spirit to revitalise the local religious/transcendental identity that was contingent with the percieved threats of modernisation to local cultures, traditions, and religious values. My thesis argues that the employment of Islamist symbolism reflected in the shariatisation of local policies i.e. the Gerbang Marhamah and the zakat policy, was a manifestation of the 'discursive tradition' of Islam as well as a product of local democratic politics. I found that contestation and compromise over sharia-associated policies did not eliminate the spiritual and transcendental dimension of the policies. Rather, the policies were rooted in the current Islamists' practice and interpretations related to shariatisation and knowledge over religious texts (Quran, Hadith, and Islamic jurisprudence) and traditions based in the classical era of Islam. Sharia-associated policies were, in addition, a product of democratic processes in which the Islamists and the nationalists took part in contestation and compromise over the open-ended processes. In this regard, Islamists engagement with democratic politics in Cianjur had indeed developed into a form of 'democratic Islamism' whereby neither democracy nor Islamism were fixed but, through ongoing contestation and compromise within and between the Islamists and the nationalists, came to take on multiple and dynamic forms that puts into question many influential assumptions about the incompatability of Islam and democracy.

In this research project, news reporting of four Turkish dailies (Cumhuriyet, Hurriyet, Vakit and Zaman) on two significant political events is analysed. By doing so, the objective will be to understand how and what roles newspapers play in an ongoing conflict caused by the ideologies of Islam ism and Secularism in Turkey. The historical significance of the social problem under investigation, and the context of the events, therefore, will be delineated at the outset. The data, which consist of images of pertinent news articles, is digitalised and assembled into a corpus. Using a quantitative method, i.e., Corpus Linguistics, the news corpus is analysed and used to select representative texts for a qualitative analysis, which draws on a specific Critical Discourse Analysis approach, namely the Discourse-Historical Approach. The representation of each event and the social actors involved in is the focus of the whole analysis. The analysis findings have shown that the lexical selection and discourse formation of each newspaper is not independent of the agency's attitude towards the events in question. As a result the newspapers are found to be too acquiescent to challenge the definition of the problem independent of the powerful groups. More importantly, the conflict seems to rage not in between two separate ideologies but over different understandings of the same religion, i.e. Islam. Declaration I hereby declare that this thesis is my own work, and has not been submitted in substantially the same form for the award of a higher degree elsewhere.

This thesis attempts to answer the following overarching question: How has Wahhabi Islam been ideologically recontextualized across post-9/11 opposing discourses via collocation? Drawing on a methodological synergy of corpus linguistics and CDA (Baker et al. 2008; 8alama 2011 1 ), I propose a linguistic model for explicating the ideological nature of collocation between two clashing books: Stephen Schwartz's (2002) The Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa'ud from Tradition to Terror and Natana DeLong-Bas's (2004) Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. The two books, produced post-91l1, take diametrically opposing stances towards the same socio-religious practice of Wahhabi IslarnlWahhabism. First, using WorSmith5, keywords were used to identify the different semantic foci in the two texts, along with their relevant 'macropropositions' (Van Dijk 1980, 1995, 2009b). A small number of keywords were selected for further analysis, and their functions in contributing towards ideologies were investigated by examining their collocates, relying on the concepts of textual synonymy, oppositional paradigms and argumentative fallacies. Second, the meta-Wahhabi discourses underlying the two texts are analysed by focusing on the discourse processes of producing, intelpreting and explaining the patterns of collocations in the texts. Contextual information, such as relevant biographical information relating to the text producers, was taken into account. Additionally, a socio-cognitive approach was used to consider ideological coherence and socio-religious schernas which motivated the ideological use of collocations in both texts. Finally, from a social-semiotic perspective, interdiscursive meanings and the symbolic power invested with the collocating words as religious or political signs are queried. The findings offered in the present thesis cover methodological and theoretical aspects. First, on a theoretical level, there are findings that relate to how collocation as a micro textual resource can closely interface with other macro discourse and language processes, e.g. ideology, (social) cognition, semiotics and interdiscursivity. Second, on a methodological level, this study has contributed to the presently well-established 'methodological synergy' of corpus linguistics and CDA in a symbiotic fashion. This can be recognized in two respects: I) compared to pure CDA research, the methodological procedure followed in this study (which goes from the quantitative to the qualitative methods) rcnders the identification of the linguistic phenomenon - collocation - studied in this research far lcss subjectively identified; 2) the possibility of contextualizing the keywords extracted from onc text by conducting a macropropositional analysis (i.e. identifying the topics and themes) in this text.

Islamist terrorism has, in academic and lay discourse, been misunderstood in the register of 'extremism,' 'radicalism' and 'fundamentalism.' The concepts of 'terrorism' and 'ideology' have frequently been misused as pejoratives to prevent understanding of Islamist terrorism. This does not mean that they are beyond repair and we attempt to re-establish the terms as useful critical concepts for understanding the Islamist movement. This study takes the Islamist ideology seriously it is comprehensive, complex and internally coherent. We claim that Islamist movements and the terrorism they engage in can be usefully understood by examining the historical evolution of the ideology. In particular we examine the dynamic interplay between the theory and practice of Islamist movements. Using the tools of social and political philosophy the study critically examines the historical and intellectual evolution of the Islamist ideology and movement from the inception of the Society of Muslim Brothers in 1920s Egypt, the radical philosophy of Sayyid Qutb in the 1950s and 60s through to al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks.

Traditionally the concept of society was in practice bound by state or tribal boundaries. However, the aspiration to move beyond the boundaries and establish a global society has been present in mankind’s history. Roland Robertson calls this kind of aspiration “global consciousness”. One such aspiration can be found in Islam. Islam encourages the believers to spread the religion and establish a global society, which in Islamic vocabulary is called the umma. In this thesis, I seek to explore how early Islamic society developed global consciousness and how the concept of the umma developed in relation to the concept of global consciousness and to the concept and historical formation of a global society. I argue that the early Islamic society developed global consciousness through reflecting the spiritual teaching of Islam and through several networks. In order to trace the development of global consciousness in early Islamic society, I follow Clifford Geertz’s assertion that religion is a cultural system and discuss how basic doctrines and religious rituals in Islam cultivate the development of global consciousness in the minds of the believers. Subsequently, in order to understand the global characteristics of the umma, I observe the historical development of several instruments fundamental to the emergence of translocal networks in the Muslim world, namely the intellectual networks of Muslim scholars, the caliphates, and Sufi brotherhoods. The presence of networks of intellectuals, integration under the caliphates, and the spreading Sufi brotherhoods are invoked as indicators that the umma was a social reality and had the characteristics of translocal society. Yet, while the aspiration to establish a global society is strong within Muslim society, I argue that historical data show that the umma is a translocal, rather than a global, society.

The research presented in this thesis explores the governance within Islamic thought in the case of the institution of hisbah as well as exploring the episteme that is the cause of the recognised and unrecognised incoherencies and inconsistencies in the theories, regulations, and laws associated to the institution of hisbah. The analysis is based on conducting an epistemological examination in moral philosophical dialect in relation to the historical regulative institution of hisbah. Institution of hisbah constitutes the focus of this research, because this institution was politically structured, theologically positioned and theoretically entrusted to maintain public law and order, with the objective of supervising the behaviour in society and market from an Islamic perspective by using Islamic legal theories within its own theoretical framework with the aim of subscribing good and forbidding evil. The analysis presented found that the institution of hisbah was subject to continuous institutional failures throughout its history. In advancing the analysis, the research deconstructs the theoretical framework upon which the institution of hisbah located its operations for the moral governance of the market and the society. The deconstruction of theoretical frameworks point to the use of Islamic legal theory and juristic subjectivity for judging the moral conduct of activities as the root cause of the problem. The study further deconstructed the Islamic legal theory along side exploring for the alternative episteme within the broader view of Islamic thought, given the diversity of philosophical standpoints on good and evil within Islamic discourse. However, the result of this exploration suggests that epistemological crisis embodies the whole of Islamic tradition, which pave the way to a rise in crisis in morality and crisis in legitimacy within the tradition, which resulted in institutional failures, such as the ones witnessed in the operations of institution of hisbah. The study further discovers that consequent to the crisis in the Islamic tradition, the key questions on good and evil, within the realm of governance can no longer be settled by using the historically established tradition’s epistemological sources, because within the current settings of tradition, there is insufficient or no method of enquiry, form of argumentation and episteme that can address the crises, or through which a solution for the crises can be derived. By using MacIntyre’s work as a conceptual structure, this research attempts to construct a new epistemological source that may address the crises by specifying a model justified through model-dependent realism with the objective of creating a new point of orientation through which reality and dichotomy of good and evil can be objectively understood, whilst safeguarding the life form of the fabric of belief that is central to the traditional Islamic thought. Such episteme can then be used as an ethical theory by the institution of hisbah for judging the moral conduct of activities in the market and society. The new episteme is constructed, while preserving the tradition’s consequential essence. The consequential essence is inferred down to morality based on objectiveness and universality, and away from public choice, along with the notion of survival as episteme for philosophical perspective and theological stance. The consequential essence of tradition is maintained by using objectivist ethics and environmental sustainability within the outlines of classic theories on sovereignty of internal and external realm, as a foundational framework to construct the proposed model of ‘objective subjectivism’ as a theory of normative ethics. This proposed episteme as an Islamic ethical theory asserts that standard of value is life and measure of value and purpose of life is sustainability, and through this notion good and evil can be objectively distinguished for each realm, and therefore institutionally subscribed or prohibited for that realm, thus providing a workable framework for the operations of hisbah. As a research methodology and model construction process, the research presented in this research utilises discursive reasoning to conduct an epistemological enquiry based on critical discourse analysis, which is ontologically justified by model-dependent realism and epistemologically framed under consequentialism.

This dissertation critically argues that the dominant representation of the dominated groups can mirror its way into the self-representation of those groups. Moreover, a fetishism for politics (i.e., a repression and denial of engagement in the political arena) deflects the interaction between the dominant and the dominated groups (in this case, the UK Government and Islamist parties in the UK) and ultimately disempowers them both. This research is an analysis of the discourses and practices of a large number of Islamist parties in the UK over a period of nearly 20 years (1989-2007); a period when they gained public attention during the debates over multiculturalism and the supposed threats to security from the rise of radical Islam. By ʻIslamist partiesʼ, I mean political groups who place their Muslim identity at the centre of their political practices and who see their political future in Islam. Such political groups are not just Muslims, but Islamists. In asserting this, I argue against the commonplace culturalist-orientalist approach that denies and rejects any ʻpoliticalʼ in relation to Islamists. As part of a dominant discourse, this culturalist-orientalist approach consists of a binary view whereby Islam is either a matter of private professed belief or a matter of a terrorist disruption into the Western democratic systems. In response to this stark dichotomy, I adopt a constructionist theoretical approach that sees ʻculturesʼ and ʻreligionsʼ as political acts within the terms of a power-relationship. Practically, I approach the issue based on two years of fieldwork amongst the British Islamists. I have interviewed a large number of Islamists from different parties. For practical and epistemological reasons, I divide them into two groups: the Participationists and the Rejectionists. Participationists are those who are willing to take part in British political life, for instance, by taking part in elections, while the Rejectionists are those who reject the British political system as illegitimate and plan to subvert it. The participationist parties act politically but show a strong reticence in adopting any political label themselves.The explanation for this lies in their fetishism for politics. Taking a collaborative and non-confrontational approach, they choose to remain in the category of the ʻfaith-groupsʼ. Ultimately, this delegitimizes their Islamist quest because it mirrors the dominant culturalist-orientalist discourse that depoliticizes and disempowers them. The rejectionist groups are those with a confrontational approach toward the dominant discourse; they promote an Islamic system as the alternative. They declare that their struggle is aimed at instituting a ʻKhilafahʼ so that the ʻPoliticalʼ is at the service of the ʻSpiritualʼ. My findings indicate that, paradoxically, the exact reverse is true. Their efforts promote a ʻsecularizationʼ of Islam; this is denied (repressed) by the Islamists themselves, and exorcized by the dominant discourse under the label of religious fundamentalism. The ʻfetishismʼ for politics from both the dominant and the dominated distorts their interaction, and is ultimately responsible, both for the political ʻfailureʼ of Islamist parties, and for the string of past and future terrorist attacks. The novelty of my approach has been to analyze the hiatus between the two parties -- the political stalemate and the security threat -- through the convex mirror of repression and exorcism; politics, as discoursed and practiced through the emotional, the visceral, and the de-sacralization of the secular and the religious at the same time. The novelty also lies in providing a new ethnography of a political actor -- the British Islamist -- whose politics has been underemphasized, and who has been much maligned and commented upon from a dominant culturalist-orientalist framework. The new ethnography acknowledges the agency of British Islamists as political actors and argues that they should be represented and recognized as such by the dominant discourse and by the Government. The Manichean representation of these political actors (British Islamists) as either faith groups or terrorists, debilitates the very democratic process and reproduces a recurrent security threat.

This research is about Islam and democracy and the political theory of ‘democratic religious government’ of Dr Abdulkarim Soroush, an Iranian scholar and one of the leading figures in the debate on Islam and democracy in the Islamic world. The research endeavours to answer several questions: How far has the debate on Islam and democracy developed? Was the Islamic revolution in Iran an Islamic revolution and has it been a step forward for democracy there and an example of the compatibility of Islam and democracy? What are the specificities of Soroush’s political theory and how far are they sustainable? Is he successful in offering, at least in theory, a political model that can accommodate Islam and democracy? The research puts Soroush’s political theory into context and begins by exploring the background of the debate on Islam and democracy and the debate concerning Shia political thought and the legacy of the Iranian revolution. My research finding in the first chapter is that the political challenges posed by democracy as a political system based on the rule of people, regardless of their faith or gender, have been the most serious challenges Islam and Muslims have faced, especially in the past few decades. It also demonstrates how immature the debate is. The second chapter reveals how the Iranian revolution puts Shia Islam on a new track so that it can neither go back to its isolationist position nor resist the trend of secularisation and democratisation. A religion that, I will argue, was an impediment for democracy and open society, has become a force for reconciliation of the faithful’s spiritual needs and their human rights. In the third chapter I explore Soroush’s religious beliefs and development in his religious thoughts. I will try to establish in this chapter how he has found Islam to be exposed to scholarly debate and an easy target for modern Muslim scholars and intellectuals equipped with modern methodology to rehearse it, adjust it and rationalise it in order for it to become compatible with modern forms of life and human rights. I also demonstrate in this chapter that whatever the contents of Soroush’s political theory, he is a faithful Muslim and his religious beliefs do not support a democratic political system. Soroush’s political theory is the topic of the fourth chapter. In this chapter I have discovered how Soroush removes religious hurdles through his religious theory in order to present his political theory. It appears that Soroush believes what we have in the name of religion is nothing more than our knowledge and interpretations of religion. Since these are human understandings, they are like other human knowledge and, therefore, they are historical products that are timely and open to critical analysis and adjustable to humans’ socially evolving demands. I also explain in the fourth chapter why Soroush feels the existence of religion in public life is under threat and therefore endeavours to reconcile religion with the realities of the modern era to secure a space for religion. In doing this, Soroush loses theoretical consistency because he makes every effort, though unsuccessfully, to become the champion of all across the political spectrum, whether religious or liberal. Soroush’s contribution to the debate on Islam and democracy is significant, but he fails, as it will be argued, to offer a viable political theory on the compatibility of Islam and democracy. The research concludes with an assessment of the prospects and possibilities of the ideas of compatibility of Islam and democracy and highlights the contradictions and challenges of the idea. The conclusion sets the steps and prerequisites for a serious debate on Islam and democracy and illuminates the tenability of the debate by raising serious doubts about the authenticity of the debate on Islam and democracy.