Are Islamists Still Islamists?

This book offers an ontological study of Islamism and its transformation with a specific focus on Türkiye, Bangladesh, and Senegal.
The dominant reading of the transformation of Islamism from a discernibly Islamist, then anti-systemic discourse to a more systemic one has been through the arguments of post-Islamism, which claim the failure and end of Islamism. However, this assumes that Islamists are still Islamists, which is an oxymoron. This book suggests that this scholarship fails to recognise the political, ontological nature of Islamism. It argues that under-theorisation of the political, accompanied by Eurocentrism and positivism, hinders a proper understanding of Islamism by engendering methodological nationalism and state-centrism and obstructing Islamists as political actors by denying them political agency to undertake transformation. This shows the need for an ontological analysis to surmount the mentioned problems and comprehend Islamists as political actors by disarticulating any necessary relationship between the political and any fixed entity, such as the state, a specific rhetoric or form. The book, as an exercise in political theory, offers such an analysis, articulated through the tools provided by post-foundationalist political theory, particularly the works of Martin Heidegger, Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, and Salman Sayyid, who mobilises Carl Schmitt and post-Marxist discourse theory to read Islamism.
This book will appeal to scholars and students of Politics, International Relations, Area Studies, and Sociology, especially those specialising in Islam and Islamism.

Sümeyye Sakarya is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration in the Faculty of Political Sciences at Ankara University, Türkiye.