Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

68 Philosophical Frames


with popular cultures in a manner that allows non-elites to challenge and
shape hegemonic public discourses.^9
e public sphere and its underlying, competing cultures open a Th
space for various actors, including those mobilized by religious discourses
and symbols, to challenge or negotiate with elites at various levels of
access to state power. Grounding the public sphere on the interests, rights
and duties of the “private citizen” is just one—albeit historically powerful
and largely hegemonic—practiced and theorized approach to the correct
functioning of the public sphere. But in contemporary Muslim majority
societies this approach—and the historic experience on which it is based:
those of former colonial powers, not of colonized peoples—clearly fails
to capture the range of expressions and activities involved in the public
sphere, while also failing to account for the increasing frailty of some state
structures, Iraq and Palestine key among them.
n Muslim majority societies, several socioreligious movements I
construct alternative models of the relationship between state institutions
and the interests of grassroots communities, starting in particular from
their educational and welfare projects. Backed up by discourses of social
justice, these projects have a strong impact on views of political commu-
nity, citizenship, and legitimate authority among their constituencies. We
see this dynamic in groups as diverse as Hizbullah in Lebanon or Hamas
in Palestine, where the constitution of an “Islamic state” means a “just
social order” as much as if not more than a “religious,” i.e., shari‘a-based
state.^10 Such a paradigm can be defined as articulating a sort of paral-
lel or alternative civil society-cum-public sphere with its own distinctive
forms of social control, political deliberation, and techniques of power
and governance.
n such approaches, the discourse of justice is more central than I
the desire and move to take over, appropriate, and reshape state power.
Whether providing social services^11 or coordinating insurgency, socio-
religious movements in Islamic contexts (whether such movements are
classified as “Islamist” or not) chart their social environment through
active social knowledge, produced through the creation and mobilization
of dense social networks and communal frameworks that depend largely
on voluntary action. Unlike the secular abstractions of NGOs that tar-
get a society that is fundamentally different from the way the actors see

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