Political Islam in the Age of Democratization.

• Author: Altuntas-Cakir, Ravza
• Position: Book review

Political Islam in the Age of Democratization

By Kamran Bokhari and Farid Senzai

NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 277 pages, 21.00 [pounds sterling], ISBN 9781137008046.

In Political Islam in the Age of Democratization, Kamran Bokhari and Farid Senzai explain the complex and diverse nature of Islamism by underscoring the primary role it plays in the context of democratization in the wider Middle East region. This work starts by offering a corrective view of Islamism in the first two chapters, which establishes the basis for the theoretical framework in the third chapter, which is then applied to several Islamist case studies. A major accomplishment is the authors' convincing and systematic challenge to two monolithic biases within academia: Islamic exceptionalism and Islamist universalism. This review will focus on how Bokhari and Senzai present their opposing narrative in the first three chapters and the ways they validate it through the conceptual framework, as evidenced in the empirical studies.

In the initial chapters, the authors explain their theoretical position that offer a more nuanced and cognizant understanding of the relationship between democracy, Islam, and Islamism in challenging the notions of Islamic exceptionalism and Islamist universalism. The former notion refers to the idea that Islam is resistant to secularization and is therefore incompatible with democracy, which in turn makes democratization of Muslim societies improbable. Antithetically, the possibility of creating new and genuine ways of thinking about democracy that are specific to Muslim contexts in view of the significant role of religion in politics within Muslim societies is illustrated in this work. The second assumption challenged by the authors addresses the definition of Islamism in a way that simplifies a complex and varied movement with multiple dimensions and assigns universal qualities to actors that, in fact, do not necessarily share them. Bokhari and Senzai go to great lengths to defy this sweeping notion by presenting the Islamist image in many forms, which hardly amounts to a singular or indeed uniform depiction.

In their theoretical framework, the authors classify Islamist movements based on their attitude with respect to democracy and offer a three-layered typology, namely participators, conditionalists, and rejectors. Participators are defined as the mainstream Islamist actors, such as the Muslim Brotherhood--who view Islamic political principles...