Popular Protest in the New Middle East

The region of the Middle East and North African (MENA) has recently encountered some unforeseen and disconcerting events. These events resulted in the end of dictatorship in some regions, and opened some space for the political participation of Islamic movements that were for long suppressed. With the unfolding of the Arab Spring, attention is now focused on analysing what has happened, what is unfolding right now and what will likely happen in the future. The book under review, a collection of high quality research papers by leading scholars and intellectuals, explores, among others, the aforementioned questions. These articles provide a comprehensive and nuanced representation of the socio-political transition and transformation in MENA and of the resurgence of the Islamic Movements and their ideology. In his foreword, Asef Bayat highlights the emergence of a new ideological orientation of the Islamists: “Post-Islamism”. According to him, this new orientation is neither anti-Islamic nor secular, but ‘envisions a society in which religiosity is merged with rights, faith with freedom, [and] Islam with democracy’ (p. xvii).