Rentier Islamism by Courtney Freer

Author:Courtney Freer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

The reform movement, tacitly supported by Islah for years, became stronger and more active during the Arab Spring, as the government continued to promise (yet failed to deliver on) greater political participation to citizens. As in Qatar, though, Emirati citizens have only been able to use uninstitutionalized means to voice political concerns.

By couching the Brotherhood’s goals in terms of a security threat, the government has justified its crackdown against the organization. The super-rentier government was unable to stem the tide of Islamist sentiment with payouts in 2011 and thus inflated the movement’s political strength as a means of justifying its actions. As historian and former French diplomat Jean-Pierre Filiu put it, in the broader context of the Arab Spring,

“rulers became well versed in their routine of no alternative argumentation: towards the West, they posed as the only ones able to deter an Islamist takeover.” Moreover, it was argued that there is a now a “. . . sad irony that the powers in place have ended up believing their own fantasies about the Islamist threat; they not only displayed that card for external consumption, but they also fed their own masses with gory stories about the inevitability of . . . ruin.”249

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