Religion and Politics: A Troubled Relationship in a Volatile World

This chapter pertains to exploring the political resurgence of religion, seeking to answer the pressing question of first, what accounts for religious revival in the age of globalization and second, what accounts for the political success or failure of religious movements, mostly in terms of exerting political influence on their domestic spheres and arenas. In order to answer these questions, this chapter delineates the conditions under which the needs and imperatives of both religious movements and the political establishment of the state are conflictual or reconcilable. To this end, the intriguing case of the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood will be analyzed, illustrating the shifting boundaries of Islam from its traditional civil realm to the political order of the state and distilling movement’s trajectories in its quest for political prominence in the age of globalization. The theoretical and empirical sections of this chapter, then, proffer an interesting prism to the study of the broader linkage between religion and politics in the developing world, especially among non-democratic, or quasi-democracies countries, as found in the Arab Middle East, where religion has experienced recurrent revivals in presence and significance in states’ social and political domains Keren Sasson The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Religion and Politics