In the West the claim is often made that Palestine is an issue that Arab or Muslim governments manipulate to stay in power by appealing to a populist cause. The deeper truth is that Palestine has become a subversive issue in the Middle East: the liberation of Palestinians through a South Africa-style dismantling of an inequitable system implies the dismantling of repressive regional systems that have managed to perfect Panopticon surveillance (with the help of Israeli technologies) and returning to the unfinished business of the Arab Spring.
It has become a commonplace in Western public discourse in recent years to argue that the Middle East, or even the Islamic world more broadly, is becoming on the one hand less Islamic and on the other less Islamist. While the first pertains purely to religiosity and would be hard to quantify, that claim is often made in order to justify the second, more important statement which alleges that Islam had become less politicised. This judgement of a less politicised Islam is usually made by looking at the electoral strength of political parties claiming the Islamist mantle or analysing religion’s role as an incentive for the individual Muslim to behave in any manner deemed political, from voting for the Islamist parties to taking part in a public protest over a political issue such as Gaza.
This view sees the Arab Spring uprisings as the high point of such an appeal to Muslim sentiment. The Muslim Brotherhood won Egyptian parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011 and 2012, their Tunisian peers Ennahda formed the first elected government in Tunisia following the collapse of the Ben Ali regime, and the Syrian civil war was characterised by the rise of a myriad of Islamic military factions who dominated the fight against the Damascus government, including the Islamic State group (ISIS). But the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted from power in a coup then violently crushed by the Sisi regime, Ennahda and its leaders are now being targeted by President Kais Saied with possible United Arab Emirates backing, and the various Gulf-backed Islamic groups in Syria – including some backed by Qatar and Turkey and others backed by Saudi Arabia – failed collectively to topple the Assad regime.
The failure of these various projects is taken in turn to signify the demise of what is often called political Islam, ‘Islamism’, or what we could call the politicality of Islam. The term Islamist is usually intended to refer to political movements that adopt Islam in some fashion as their ideology. For historians, the term Islamist captures the response to colonial-era destruction of the premodern Islamic juridical system and other elements of Westernisation. The Islamists were a new social class of political players, laymen who operated in a different political and legal environment to that of the clerics who dominated social and legal life in the premodern era but whose role gradually diminished across the Islamic world. But the suggestion that any Muslim – regardless of their attachment to any of these political movements – has become “Islamist” through engaging in the most basic right of public dissent is an innovation of the Gaza war.
Nothing has quite highlighted the elusive and fickle nature of modern religious politics like Gaza. In an effort to demonise protests against Western governments’ increasingly unpopular stance on Gaza and its implication in Israeli war crimes, the UK government for example elaborated a new definition of “Islamist” in March 2024 that separated it off from Islam as a faith “peacefully practiced” by millions of Muslims, in then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s words. He even linked this Islamism to critique of historical colonialism, claiming Islamists “want us to accept a moral equivalence between Britain and some of the most despicable regimes in the world”. It will be news to many historians who study empire and its effects that they are allies of political Islam. What is striking here is not only the attempt to separate a Muslim’s “faith self” from a Muslim’s “political self” but the fact that it was sparked by Gaza.
Britain’s effort to brand protest as the wrong kind of Islamic is just one example of how the Gaza war is changing perceptions and the boundaries of public debate and political mobilisation across the world. Turkey under Erdogan has been more subdued as a leading voice among Muslim states than it has been during previous Israeli assaults on Gaza. The UAE and Saudi Arabia have gone to greater lengths than ever to suppress public expressions of support for Palestinians – in the UAE’s case, to protect its normalisation agreement (the Abraham Accords), and in Saudi Arabia’s case, to rigidly fix domestic and international attention on its trillion-dollar economic plans, including vast tourist projects and futuristic cities intended to change global perceptions of a once-closed Islamic Utopia for puritans. During the Gaza assault, Saudi Arabia launched a months-long entertainment extravaganza called the Riyadh Season featuring world champions from sports as far afield as snooker and mixed martial arts, brought to the kingdom to mesmerise the public and divert their gaze.
At the same time there has been close coordination between Iran, Saudi Arabia and other Muslim governments on political positions, and a refusal by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states (bar Bahrain) to be seen aiding the US-British military operation against Yemen’s Houthis for their attacks on Israel-linked Red Sea shipping. The risk for these governments is that the lid they have tried to keep on public anger spills over at some point. This is a concern for Jordan if it intercepts more Iranian missiles for Israel’s sake, and Egypt if the Israeli government succeeds in forcing Palestinians to flee en masse into Sinai, never to return if Israel gets its way. A wild card is the possibility of Jewish extremists storming the Aqsa Mosque as they have often threatened to do in the past.
One possible consequence of Gaza and government inaction would be to stir the familiar Sunni jihadist groups to action. One theory for the genesis of 9/11 is that it was in observing Israeli destruction during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and US destruction during the invasion that Al-Qa’ida leaders conceived of the attacks as a spectacular act of revenge. The potential for these kinds of actions certainly increases, but along the same path as before seems unlikely. The new model for resistance is being created by the Iran-linked groups in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen, and winning plaudits across the Global South for their efforts. Sunni groups such as al-Qa’ida and the Islamic State have been preoccupied with managing fragmentation and defeat, and for whatever reasons neither have had targeting Israel high on their agenda. Where Gaza takes these groups, or new groups that evolve is now an open question.
In the West, the claim is often made that Palestine is an issue that Arab or Muslim governments manipulate to stay in power by appealing to a populist cause. The deeper truth is that Palestine has become a subversive issue in the Middle East: the liberation of Palestinians through a South Africa-style dismantling of an inequitable system implies the dismantling of repressive regional systems that have managed to perfect Panopticon surveillance (with the help of Israeli technologies) and returning to the unfinished business of the Arab Spring. The semblance of liberation that would obtain via upgrading the Palestinian Authority into a UN-recognised state entity is far more palatable to the US-backed regional governments. The fact of unprecedented restrictions on pro-Palestinian sentiment speaks of regimes in fear.
At this stage, Gaza is a cause that has transcended the Islamic. It has brought countries of the Global South to the forefront as leaders in international fora, bringing more and more Western countries outside the US-British orbit on board, and driving a groundswell of opinion among young people around the world but especially in the United States and Britain. Countries like South Africa, with its extraordinary achievement in pulling together the case for genocide at the International Court of Justice, have shown Muslim states what effective organisation is all about.
Andrew Hammond
Andrew Hammond is a historian at the University of Oxford and visiting fellow at the Centre of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. He is the author Late Ottoman Origins of Modern Islamic Thought, Popular Culture in North Africa and the Middle East, and The Islamic Utopia: The Illusion of Reform in Saudi Arabia.