The Foreign Policy of Islamist Political Parties: Ideology in Practice.

• Author: Koc, Hasim

Edited by Mohamed-Ali Adraoui

Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 200 pages, [pounds sterling]19.99, ISBN: 9781474426664

This book provides a comprehensive study of how Islamist forces in the Middle East seek to redefine power relationships within the international system post-2010. Furthermore, it sheds light on how Islamist ideology has emerged in the face of reality (e.g., opening up to democratic principles or cooperating with non-Muslim states) and examines how political Islam players put their ideology into action concerning foreign policy and international relations. After a foreword by Olivier Roy, the book has seven chapters. Mohamed-Ali Adraoui, the book's editor and author of its first chapter, is currently a political and social scientist at Georgetown University. The author specializes in the Islamist movements and parties within the Islamic world and their exercises in the political sphere, of which this book is an outcome.

In the first chapter, Adraoui discusses the interaction of the Islamist parties with international relations. The subtitle of the chapter, which labels this relationship a "dialectical relationship," deals with the difficulties that arise due to this conceptual framework. Hence, the concepts of foreign policy, Islamism, and political parties, and trying to bring them together in the context of different nations became possible during the early 21st century after "Islamist" parties came to power in Muslim-majority countries. This edition seeks to accomplish this task by analyzing political parties in Morocco, Tunisia, and Turkiye, as well as social movements in Egypt, Palestine, and Lebanon, with each country covered in a single chapter, respectively. Thus, the book tries to shed light on the stance of Islamist-rooted politics within the international arena. The challenges of modernism caused reactions against it in the political arena in different forms, one of which appeared as Islamism with a peculiar discursive focus on returning to Islam's roots. A dreamed global "imagined solidarity" (p. 7) has been used as a tool for Islamist designs throughout the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century.

Islamism transformed values and religious norms into a political program in the form of a distinctly modern entity: the mass political party. The first instance of this was seen in Egypt in the 1920s with the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood. As an outcome of the nation-stateera, Islamist parties have...