Islamic Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Ba'thist Secularism (Routledge Studies in Political Islam)

Contemporary studies on Syria assume that the country’s Ba’thist regime has been effective in subduing its Islamic opposition, placing Syria at odds with the Middle East’s larger trends of rising Islamic activism and the eclipse of secular ideologies as the primary source of political activism. Yet this assumption founders when confronted with the clear resurgence in Islamic militantism in the country since 2004.

This book examines Syria’s current political reality as regards its Islamic movement, describing the country’s present day Islamic groups – particularly their social profile and ideology – and offering an explanation of their resurgence. The analysis focuses on:

• Who are today’s Syrian Islamic groups?
• Why and how are they re-emerging after 22 years of relative silence as an important socio-economic and political force?
• How is the Syrian state dealing with their re-emergence in light of Syria’s secularism and ideologically diverse society?

Bridging area studies, Islamic studies, and political science, this book will be an important reference for those working within the fields of Comparative Politics, Political Economy, and Middle Eastern Studies.

Line Khatib is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University of Sharjah. She earned a PhD in Islamic Studies from McGill University, MA in Political Science from University of Montreal and a BA in Political Science from McGill University. She is a senior research fellow at ICAMES (the Inter-University Consortium for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies), McGill University, and a fellow at the Center for Syrian Studies, University of St Andrews. She is the author of a number of works including "Islamic Revivalism in Syria: the Rise and Fall of Ba´thist Secularism" (Routledge, 2011), and "Islamic Renewal and the Promotion of Moderate Islam from Above" (the University of St Andrews, 2012). Her research and teaching interests lie within the fields of comparative politics, religion and politics, and authoritarianism and democratization in the Arab World, with a particular focus on Islamic groups as social and political movements.