Sumita Pahwa, Ph.D.

spahwa@scrippscollege.edu

Scripps College

Country: United States (California)

Research Interests

Middle East & North African Politics

Religion & Politics

Political Islam

Arab Uprisings

Contentious Politics

Hindu Nationalism

Secularism

Religious Movements

Countries of Interest

Egypt

India

Morocco

Publications:

Journal Articles:

(2017) Pathways of Islamist Adaptation, Democratization

The Muslim Brothers’ transition from religious movement to majority-seeking party in Egypt’s post 2011 democratic experiment offered a key test of the inclusion-moderation hypothesis. While the MB’s increasing religious and organizational conservatism at new electoral thresholds appears to challenge the hypothesis, I argue that it was the result of strategic adaptation based on functional alternative interpretations of political opportunity that did not require a trade-off between power-seeking and expressive goals, constrained by prior pathways of electoral adaptation, and shaped by the ambiguous political incentives of democratic transition. This article shows that the MB, like other religious parties, has alternated between strategies for electoral adaptation, challenging expectations of linear evolution; that majority-seeking sometimes encourages intra-movement dynamics that are radicalizing as well as moderating; and shows that expressive goals and identity remain important to religious parties even in office, and make some paths of adaptation more attractive while precluding others. While the case affirms the relevance of political learning mechanisms predicted by inclusion-moderation theory, the divergent outcomes of this learning suggest the need to focus on the contexts and motivations that set movements along one of multiple possible adaptive pathways.

(2013) Secularizing Islamism and Islamizing Democracy, Mediterranean Politics

The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) emerged in Egypt in the early twentieth century to resist secularism and political pluralism in favour of religious revival and a unitary Islamic state. After three decades of political participation culminating in its formation of a government in Egypt, the MB has prioritized electoral paths to power, while claiming to defend individual rights, popular majorities and a civil state. Nevertheless, the MB's discourse continues to straddle religious and secular terrain: in recent election campaigns, MB leaders promised to build an ‘Islamic state’ and a ‘caliphate’, all the while insisting that the people, not God are the source of all power. What explains these contradictions, and what do they tell us about the Brotherhood's apparent adoption of political and ideational pluralism and democratic values? The article contends that the MB's ambivalence about democracy is not a sign of dissimulation or lack of ideological evolution. Instead, it has its roots in a 30-year process of partially adapting to democratic and ‘secular’ political ideas by reframing them in religious terms which, however, resulted in creating what the article discusses as a hybrid ‘secularized’ Islamism. This hybridization has both enabled and constrained the Brothers' adaptation to democracy in the post-Mubarak period.