R. Woltering

The roots of Islamist popularity

In this article I will answer the question why, in the Islamic world, Islamist activism finds the support that it apparently does among segments of the general public of the various countries. In particular, the initial elements and circumstances that induce a person to support or even join an Islamist group are the subject of this study. After defining the notion of Islamism in the first section, I shall give an assessment of the popularity of Islamism. Following upon this, the third section will show that the conditionalities which drive a person towards an Islamist inclination or conviction cannot in the main have anything to do with the Islamic religion per se. Lastly it will be argued that these conditionalities are rather to be found in a wide array of interacting political, social, historical and economic factors.

Protest leadership in the age of social media

ABSTRACT This article challenges the idea that social media protest mobilization and communication are primarily propelled by the self-motivated sharing of ideas, plans, images, and resources. It shows that leadership plays a vital role in steering popular contention on key social platforms. This argument is developed through a detailed case study on the interaction between the administrators and users of the Kullena Khaled Said Facebook page, the most popular online platform during the Egyptian revolution of early 2011. The analysis specifically focuses on the period from 1 January until 15 February 2011. It draws from 1629 admin posts and 1,465,696 user comments, extracted via a customized version of Netvizz. For each day during this period, the three most engaged with posts, as well as the 10 most engaged with comments, have been translated and coded, making it possible to systematically examine how the administrators tried to shape the communication on the page, and how users responded to these efforts. This analysis is pursued from a sociotechnical perspective. It traces how the exchanges on the page are simultaneously shaped by the admins’ marketing strategies and the technological architecture of the Facebook page. On the basis of this exploration, we argue that the page administrators should be understood as ‘connective leaders’. Rather than directing protest activity through formal organizations and collective identity frames, as social movement leaders have traditionally done, connective leaders invite and steer user participation by employing sophisticated marketing strategies to connect users in online communication streams and networks.

Data critique and analytical opportunities for very large Facebook Pages: Lessons learned from exploring “We are all Khaled Said”

This paper discusses the empirical, Application Programming Interface (API)-based analysis of very large Facebook Pages. Looking in detail at the technical characteristics, conventions, and peculiarities of Facebook’s architecture and data interface, we argue that such technical fieldwork is essential to data-driven research, both as a crucial form of data critique and as a way to identify analytical opportunities. Using the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Page, which hosted the activities of nearly 1.9 million users during the Egyptian Revolution and beyond, as empirical example, we show how Facebook’s API raises important questions about data detail, completeness, consistency over time, and architectural complexity. We then outline an exploratory approach and a number of analytical techniques that take the API and its idiosyncrasies as a starting point for the concrete investigation of a large dataset. Our goal is to close the gap between Big Data research and research about Big Data by showing that the critical investigation of technicity is essential for empirical research and that attention to the particularities of empirical work can provide a deeper understanding of the various issues Big Data research is entangled with.

Post-Islamism in Distress? A Critical Evaluation of the Theory in Islamist-Dominated Egypt (11 February 2011-3 July 2013)

The developments in the Arab world since the outbreak of the Tunisian revolution not only open up new horizons for Arab citizens, they also allow for scholars of Middle Eastern studies to test certain theories in ways heretofore impossible. One such theory is that of post-Islamism. This paper discusses a number of recent publications by former members of the Muslim Brotherhood, in light of recent developments in and analysis of Egypt’s Islamist politics, with the aim of determining whether it is possible (and useful) to speak of a ‘post-Islamist condition’ in the post-Mubarak period wherein the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power.

Facebook polls as proto-democratic instruments in the Egyptian revolution: The ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ Facebook page:

This article examines the dynamics of political participation on the ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ Facebook page, which hosted the call for Egypt’s 25 January 2011 revolution. It shows that the page served as a proto-democratic instrument by introducing both qualitative and quantitative polls and following up with actions based on majority opinion. This argument is developed through an analysis of discussion threads and polls from the page, selected from a data set of 14,072 posts, 6,810,357 comments and 32,030,731 likes made by 1,892,118 users, extracted via a customized version of Netvizz. The analysis demonstrates that the page provided a basic lesson in democratic participation to its users. ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ constituted an unprecedented public space for active discussions on fighting corruption, torture and police brutality. Moreover, it served as a practical example of shared governance and political participation, which became a model for its users to strive to apply to their country.

Zenobia or al-Zabbāʾ: The Modern Arab Literary Reception of the Palmyran Protagonist

Abstract Historical sources present us with two Zenobia of Palmyra characters. In the Greco-Latin sources she is the leader of a great rebellion against the Roman Empire. That is the most commonly known version. There is, however, a second historiography of Zenobia. This Arab version presents us with a very different tale, in which Zenobia (al-Zabbāʾ) struggles in the context of Arab tribal warfare. This article is concerned with the way modern Arab authors have revived the memory of Zenobia. A key question will be which version of history was adopted by modern Arab authors, and why. This will involve a close reading of texts that will bring into play discussion of ideology, (anti-)colonialism and gender equality.

[Review of: N. Rabbat (2010) Mamluk history through architecture: monuments, culture and politics in medieval Egypt and Syria]

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