<論考>中東政治研究におけるイスラーム主義の位相 --「方法論的セキュラリズム」を超えて--

Abstract

The post Arab Spring period has witnessed the fall of Islamism, ontologically and epistemologically; i.e. the mainstream Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Nahda Party failed to remain in power, and thus their academic significance seemed to decline among Middle East politics researchers. Accordingly, the discourse of the ‘end of Islamism’ became prominent in recent years. Yet, it is widely acknowledged that the politicsreligion relation is one of the most important research agendas of the study of Middle East politics and that Islamism or various ideas urged to reflect religious values and doctrine to everyday politics are still effective in the region. This paper aims to reconsider the significance of Islamism or political Islam in the study of Middle East politics. It firstly discusses the problem of the so-called ‘methodological secularism, ’ which considers the politics-religion relations as if they are settled issues, has been the premise of the study of Middle East politics, and hence Islamism has been often ‘secularwashed’ or otherwise dismissed as a deviant case or a paradox in varying ‘scientific’ analyses. This paper, then, tries to explore a new analytical framework of how Islamism can be studied in a way that it does not simply become a deviant case or a paradox particularly in the study of Middle East politics by maintaining a cautious stance addressing the reality of ‘not all but parts of politics are driven by religion’ -- rather than the traditional essentialist’s mode of “politics is driven by religion” in the Middle East. For this to be effective, this paper suggests overcoming the traditional polarization of Islamist studies: “cultural” vs. “structural”; “text” vs. “context”; “doctrine, ideology, and sociology” vs. “political process, ” and more broadly, to reconsider the common analytical gap between ‘what’ and ‘why’ questions, between the humanities and the social sciences. This paper concludes that the upgrading of Islamist studies may provide an opportunity to reconfigure academic knowledge in a way that cuts across political science and religious studies, as well as social sciences and humanities, to accurately analyze the ‘intersection’ of politics and religion in the Middle East today.