Islamic Activism: A Social Movement Theory Approach

Foreword

Foreword Charles Tilly Suppose you wanted to appropriate insights from some visibly vigorous body of theory for description and explanation of some phenomenon to which that body of theory had not yet been systematically applied. You might, for example, think that chaos theory had something valuable to say about corporate corruption or that evolutionary theory could contribute usefully to explanations of changes in family structure. You would have a choice among several forms of appropriation: 1. Subsuming the phenomenon of interest directly under the theory, for example , by claiming that corporate corruption is indeed a kind of chaos—a pushing of normal corporate dynamics beyond the limits within which they operate normally. 2. Borrowing an informative metaphor without insisting on strict correspondence : for example, by saying that family structures evolve through some variety of competitive selection but probably not through genetically transmitted mutations. 3. Using the well-developed theory to pose telling questions about your phenomenon , but not supposing that the answers would remain the same: for example, by asking whether conventional corporate brakes on corruption stop working beyond some identi¤able limit of size, wealth, or heterogeneity. 4. Extracting certain mechanisms and processes from the existing theory, rather than adopting the theory as a whole, in the hope that those same mechanisms and processes work in the same way within the new domain: for example, by singling out sexual selection as a mechanism by which family structures change. In reaching for something called “social movement theory,” the outstanding authors whom Quintan Wiktorowicz has brought together in this volume cannot be following strategy 1, for no suf¤ciently coherent body of theory concerning social movements exists. Instead, the ideas about mobilizing structures, political opportunities, framing, and repertoires on which they draw repeatedly offer them and other students of contentious politics two main services. First, the ideas incorporate a standard set of concepts for the description and comparison of contentious episodes: to the extent, for example, that political opportunities have common properties over a wide variety of circumstances, the concept calls attention to those common properties. Second , they constitute a questionnaire to discipline the explanation of contentious episodes. For example, which mobilizing structures are important? How do participants respond to threats and opportunities? And what kinds of frames are employed to mobilize contention? But the explanations themselves involve speci¤cations of how and why those elements—mobilizing structures, political opportunities, and so on—behave and interact as they do. At least for the moment, no available theory provides general speci¤cations of the how and why. For the most part, this volume’s authors pursue strategies 2 and 3. They treat Islamic activism as something like a social movement and/or they adopt the standard social movement questionnaire to ask telling questions about Islamic activism. The two strategies have merits both in what they prevent and in what they facilitate. On the side of prevention, they make it easier to avoid the reduction of Islamic activism to a straightforward product of distinctive Islamic mentalities or of a peculiar social milieu. They lead away from explaining activism as a solo performance in which the doctrine or biography of one actor at a time causes that actor’s behavior. On the side of facilitation, they make it easier to grasp interactions between groups of activists (as well as between activists and governments) that shape and reshape the locus, intensity , and form of Islamic activism. As I read the book, its contributions gain most from theories about social movements by thinking of Islamic activisms (plural) as a changing family of interactive political episodes. On the whole, the book’s authors generally avoid the greatest risk of strategies 2 and 3: to imagine that Islamic politics should resemble Western social movements down to such details as what sorts of programs they espouse and how they broadcast their claims, with the implication that if such resemblances fail, either the theory is defective or the movements themselves lack essential features. We who study Western social movements can only applaud the effort. So long as it helps students of Islamic activism to exploit their special knowledge of Muslim countries more effectively rather than suppressing their knowledge in the service of false analogies, informed comparison of Islamic and nonForeword x Islamic activism can only enrich our knowledge of contentious politics at large. Moreover, close analysis and comparison will contribute to the solution of problems that Western specialists...