Islamic political parties: Secularists or opportunists?
Mohamed Salih, Special to Addis Standard
Three distinct notions of politicized Islam dominate the landscape of the Islamic World. The first is political Islam, which underpins the conceptual edifice, ethos, norms and messages as well as meanings of Islam as a political ideology. The second is Islamic political parties that represent the institutional manifestation, the vehicle or an instrument through which political Islam expresses itself. Here political Islam exhibits the institutional and practical manifestation of diverse strands of political parties which can be radical or moderate. And third, Islamic political parties which are extremist or radical Jihadist in nature such as ISIS (operating in Syria and Iraq), Al Shabab (Somalia and Kenya), Al-Qaeda (in the Islamic Maghreb (AGIM) and the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iraq) and Boko Haram, in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger.
