The political crisis of contemporary democratic social movements in the post-Arab Spring Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has revived the discourse of Muslim Exceptionalism, which claims that Muslim culture is inherently incompatible with democracy and pluralism. This perspective presents a false dichotomy: Muslim-majority societies are forced to choose between militant Islamist autocrats and modernizing secular despots. Both Orientalist and reverse-Orientalist views reinforce this narrative, tying authoritarianism to Muslim culture and contributing to the crisis of secular democracy in Muslim-majority contexts.
This presentation critiques these essentialist assumptions by exploring “post-Islamism” as an authentic, homegrown alternative. Post-Islamism reflects the aspirations of marginalized/subaltern Muslims who seek a democratic polity beyond the failures of autocratic secularism and militant Islamism. It conceptualizes a path that reconciles the sacred and the secular, offering a progressive response to the myth of Muslim Exceptionalism.
The presentation is divided into three sections. The first examines the intellectual roots and political implications of Muslim Exceptionalism, highlighting its shared assumptions across Orientalism, reverse Orientalism, and specific readings of cultural relativism. The second explores the concept of a post-Islamist democratic polity, which challenges both Western hegemonic universalism and cultural particularism. It offers a third way: a pluralistic, decolonial “pluriversalism” from below that envisions multiple modernities and democracies rooted in local contexts. The final section grounds these ideas in concrete examples of post-Islamist discourses and social movements, analyzing the post-Islamist condition at societal, structural, and discursive levels in Muslim-majority contexts.
In conclusion, by addressing the challenges and resilience of post-Islamist movements/discourses in local and global contexts, this lecture demonstrates their potential to reshape the socio-political landscape of Muslim-majority societies, undermining the hegemonic myth of Muslim Exceptionalism. It highlights how progressive post-Islamist discourses/movements may challenge religious and market fundamentalism while providing a promising alternative for cultivating a pluralistic and justice-oriented society rooted in indigenous values in the age of post-Islamism and post-secularism.
