Islam & Politics:Thinking Past Ideology the Case of the Moroccan PJD

This book is an endeavor to explore how context shapes the political identity of the Moroccan party of justice and Development through an investigation of the party members’discourse. The driving force of the research was the investigation of the contextual implications for the Islamist phenomenon from a Social Movement perspective. The aim of the book is twofold then, it sought both to provide a multi-perspectival approach for revisiting as well as redefining such key concepts as context, identity and language often neglected in the study of Islamism, and also to approach these issues from the prism of the Moroccan context. This was possible through a close analysis of the discourse of the Moroccan Islamist party of Justice and Development on the issue of the new Mudawwana implementation. Exploration of the PJD’s speeches was based on discourse analysis of the different ways in which the party framed the Mudawwana reform issue in three different time frames to provide empirical grounds for discussing ways in which language and context provide the possibility for grasping the Islamist experience beyond the boundaries of ideology.