Political Islam in a New Regional Order: From Transnational Actor to Constrained Local Player

In one of its most consequential modern configurations, political Islam emerged as a twofold critique: a critique of the postcolonial nation-state for failing to integrate society and to produce justice and dignity; and a critique of the international and regional arrangements that have kept the region in a condition of dependency, violence, and inequality. Its rise was therefore not merely partisan or proselytic; it was also the ascent of a political language claiming to articulate the ethical with the political, the local with the universal, the religious with the protestational, and identity with justice.⁽²⁾ Yet this ascent carried its own contradiction from the outset: the closer political Islam drew to the state, the more it had to nationalize the translation of its discourse; the deeper it entered the institutional game, the more it lost a share of its transnational symbolic surplus; and the more it wagered on society, the more it discovered that society was not a homogeneous religious bloc, but a space fractured by class, region, generation, interest, and the accumulated weariness of politics.⁽³⁾

It is precisely here that the full significance of the Arab Spring comes into view—not merely as a moment of Islamist ascent, but as the moment in which political Islam was subjected to its most exacting historical test. The 2011 uprisings offered these movements a rare opportunity: to move from moral opposition to governmental action, from social mobilization to state management, from protest discourse to compromise. This transition, however, did not only produce technical difficulties of governance, coalition-building, and economic policy; it laid bare a structural paradox. Movements that had accumulated their legitimacy by criticizing the state found themselves called upon to defend it; movements that had invested in identity discourse were overtaken by questions of employment, redistribution, and public finance; and movements that had built part of their strength on transnational capital found themselves circumscribed by the limits of political nationality and by regional and international balances of power.⁽⁴⁾ From this angle, the failure or faltering of these experiences cannot be reduced to counter-revolutionary plots or to disjointed internal errors: they express the very limits of transition itself—namely, the impossibility of seamlessly reconciling the activist Islamic imaginary with the logic of the contemporary state in a turbulent regional moment.

In the Maghreb, this transformation took on a still more complex form. Here, political Islam was constituted not only within a relationship of confrontation with the state, but also within long trajectories of regulation, co-optation, and negotiation, which made it less revolutionary than some of its Mashriq counterparts and more closely tethered to the calculus of local adaptation.⁽¹⁸⁾ But this adaptability, which at one moment appeared as a source of strength and plasticity, later turned into a constraint. To the extent that these movements accepted the rules of the national game, they gradually lost their stature as great historical actors and came to be read as one partisan formation among others—at times even as part of the very crisis of representation. The shift from a transnational actor to a constrained local one therefore does not signify only a move from the regional to the national; it also marks the shift from promise to management, from mobilization to justification, from civilizational ambition to organizational survival.

In this context, the Tunisian case stands out as the most dense in significance. Since 2011, Tunisia has served, for a large body of scholarship, as the most important laboratory in which to test the hypothesis of an "Islamist democratization"—or a "Tunisification" of political Islam—that is, its passage from the logic of a doctrinal community to the logic of a civil party with an Islamic referent.⁽⁶⁾ The trajectory of Ennahdha appeared, in many respects, to embody this shift: acceptance of pluralism, a relative separation between the preaching and the political, pragmatic positioning within the state, and a willingness to compromise with adversaries. Yet this relative success in turn concealed another paradox: the closer Ennahdha came to the model of an "ordinary party," the more it lost the singularity that had constituted its strength; the more integrable it became, the more it could be saddled with the cost of the system as a whole. It thus ceased to be perceived merely as an identitarian threat and came to be seen as one face of general political failure, one component of the social crisis that had struck the middle classes, the youth, and the marginalized regions.

After 25 July 2021, and with the reconfiguration of Tunisia's political and constitutional system—which intensified the concentration of presidential power and weakened both parties and the parliament—the country entered a new phase in which the central question is no longer: are the Islamists participating in power? but rather: does any political space still exist that allows for meaningful partisan agency? The available data indicate that Tunisia has shifted, in recent years, toward a more presidentialized structure, and that the balances that had shaped its brief democratic exception have visibly eroded, while opinion polling reveals a Tunisian public sharply divided between democratic preference and attraction to the strong-leader figure. In this context, the retreat of Tunisian political Islam appears not as the mere consequence of a decline in its popularity or of its adversaries' success, but as the result of a wider transformation affecting the political field itself: a contraction of mediation, an erosion of trust in parties, the rise of an ethic of authoritarian salvation, and the transformation of the state from an object of negotiation into the apparatus of a renewed monopoly over sovereignty and legitimacy.

The post-Gaza moment, however, has lifted this question onto another plane. While Arab regimes have been seeking to recompose the region on the basis of security, stability, and pragmatism, the war has demonstrated that Palestine still possesses the capacity to recharge the Arab symbolic field—not necessarily to the benefit of the Islamists, but against the narratives that had heralded the closure of the Palestinian question within normalization arrangements or within the chill of the security state. Here lies the central paradox: the war that has restored substance to the historical lexicon long invested in by political Islam comes at the very moment when this same political Islam is organizationally weaker, socially narrower, and more institutionally besieged than at any prior point. In other words, the cause that gives it meaning no longer necessarily endows it with strength. The symbol has recovered its density, but the actor who built part of his legitimacy upon that symbol no longer possesses the social and political conditions that would allow him to convert it into a sustainable mobilizational project.⁽¹⁴⁾

From this emerges the implicit problematic that frames the present essay: are we facing a genuine twilight of political Islam, or a mutation of its form, function, and scope? Does its current weakness lie in the rupture of its project, or in the fact that the new region no longer permits, in itself, political actors with a societal foundation autonomous from the state? Does the Tunisian case reveal the failure of the Islamists, or rather the failure of the entire transitional field, including the forces that presented themselves as their alternative?

In the Tunisian experience, "consensus" was not a circumstantial political choice; it constituted a deep structure for organizing the political field after 2011, a mechanism for recomposing the relationship between state and society in a context of fragile transition. This consensus, forged primarily between Ennahdha and its adversaries, operated as a means of managing the tension between two antagonistic logics: the logic of revolution, demanding a redistribution of power and resources, and the logic of the state, seeking to restore stability and control. Within this framework, political Islam—Ennahdha foremost among its avatars—emerged as a central actor in the production of this mediation, not merely as a political party but as a bridge between distant worlds: between the religious and the political fields, between popular constituencies and the state, between the Islamic referent and the requirements of the modern state.⁽¹⁾

This mediating role, however, carried within it a structural paradox: the deeper political Islam integrated into state institutions, the more its capacity to represent social protest diminished; the more it accepted the rules of the political game, the more its legitimacy as an alternative actor eroded. Ennahdha moved, within a relatively short span, from the position of a movement drawing strength from opposition and its social networks, to that of a party shouldering the costs of power without possessing its full instruments—against a backdrop of destabilized economic and social balances and mounting regional and international pressures. This shift was not merely a tactical choice; it expressed deeper limits—the limits of any possible reconciliation between an activist Islamic discourse and the requirements of the nation-state.⁽⁵⁾

In this light, "consensus" can be understood not as a solution, but as a mechanism for postponing crisis. The arrangement secured a minimum of political stability, but it also contributed to blurring lines of responsibility, weakening the boundaries between government and opposition, and draining political action of its representative substance. Over time, the consensus turned into a burden on all its parties, and especially on political Islam, which found itself in a position of permanent defensiveness—compelled to justify policies it did not fully control and accused, in the same breath, of impotence or collusion. Thus it eroded gradually as an actor of mediation, not solely because it failed to govern, but because it lost the position that had given it the capacity to link state and society.⁽¹¹⁾

To this must be added a decisive factor: the profound social transformations that Tunisian society underwent after the revolution, particularly the erosion of the middle class, the rise in unemployment, and the widening gap between the center and the interior regions. These transformations did not merely generate a new social demand; they reshaped the patterns of political representation, so that parties—including the Islamists—could no longer monopolize the expression of social grievances. Political Islam thereby lost a significant share of its social base, not because of a radical ideological turn, but as a result of its inability to respond to rising material expectations and to translate its ethical discourse into concrete policy.⁽⁷⁾

With the 2019 elections, this decomposition became plainly visible. Trust in parties broadly receded, and new forms of political expression arose, based not on the reconstitution of mediation but on its outright rejection. In that climate, political Islam was no longer seen as part of the solution, but as part of the problem—that is, as one element of the system to be transcended. This shift in collective perception was decisive, for it targeted not only the performance of the Islamists but their very position as mediating actor, as the channel through which society was represented inside the state.

This dynamic sharpened markedly after 25 July 2021, when Tunisia entered a new phase of state reconfiguration, premised on curtailing the role of parties, concentrating power in the presidency, and redefining political legitimacy outside traditional representative frameworks. In this context, the retreat of political Islam is no exception; rather, it is its most visible expression, given the centrality of its position in the preceding phase. A substantial portion of its institutional infrastructure has been dismantled, its political presence restricted, and it has been reframed within a narrative that ties it to the general failure of the system.⁽⁸⁾

This transformation cannot be reduced to its political dimension alone; it must also be read as a reconfiguration of the relationship between state and society. As the political space contracted and a discourse focused on sovereignty and centralized decision-making rose to prominence, the demand for intermediary actors—parties and trade unions included—diminished. Political Islam thereby loses one of its most precious resources: its ability to play the role of mediator between different levels of social action. There is no longer a strong demand for this kind of mediation; on the contrary, it has come to be perceived as an obstacle to the state's direct action.

The most striking paradox emerges, however, when the post-Gaza element is brought into the analysis. The war revived a host of symbols and meanings that had formed part of political Islam's discourse: solidarity, the Umma, victimhood, justice. Yet this symbolic recovery did not translate into a political comeback for the Islamists. On the contrary, new forms of mobilization emerged—largely outside partisan frameworks, more fluid, less tied to traditional organizational structures. In the Tunisian case, this manifested in youth and civic movements and in a powerful digital presence, without political Islam playing any identifiable leading role.

The paradox thus appears in its most distilled form: political Islam recovers its language but not its position; the symbols return, but the actor who built part of his legitimacy upon them loses the capacity to mobilize them. This compels us to rethink the nature of the unfolding transformation: are we facing a definitive twilight, or a redistribution of roles within a reconfigured political field? Has political Islam lost the conditions of mediation because it failed, or because the field itself no longer admits this type of agency?

Reading what has happened in Tunisia after 25 July as a mere redistribution of power within the political field is no longer tenable; it must be grasped as a mutation of the very logic of the state—a reconfiguration of the conditions for producing power and legitimacy, which necessarily entails a redefinition of the position of actors, with political Islam foremost among them. In this new phase, the state is not only re-centralizing decision-making; it is also redrawing the contours of the political field, reducing mediations, recalibrating channels of expression, and turning its relationship with society into a more direct one—but also more vertical and less negotiated.⁽⁹⁾ Within this shift, the fundamental question is no longer whether the Islamists participate in government, but whether they can survive as meaningful political actors in a field being reshaped in ways that constrict the possibilities of mediating agency.

In the phase that followed 2011, political Islam constituted one of the foundational pillars of Tunisia's structure of political mediation. Ennahdha was not merely a party; it was an actor that mediated across multiple registers: between state and society, between religious reference and the demands of politics, between the domestic and the external. This intermediate position enabled it to play a central role in managing equilibria, but it also made it more vulnerable to erosion once the rules of the game changed. With the retreat of negotiated pluralism and the contraction of the political field, the effective demand for this kind of mediation dissipated; indeed, it came to be seen as part of the crisis rather than as part of the solution.⁽¹⁰⁾

The retreat of political Islam thus belongs to a broader dynamic of what may be called authoritarian reconfiguration, in which the aim is not merely to curtail the influence of a particular actor, but to reorder the political field in ways that diminish the agency of all intermediary actors. The specificity of political Islam, however, lies in its having been the actor most closely associated with the prior phase and most heavily invested in the logic of consensus, which made it the prime target of the "rectification-of-course" discourse. Its constraint, in this sense, is not merely a political measure; it is a component of a wider rewriting of the period's narrative, in which it is reframed as a symbol of failure and as one of the causes of the impasse that must now be overcome.⁽¹⁰⁾

This disciplining does not operate only at the level of discourse or institutions; it extends to the social and political fabric within which political Islam used to move. As the public sphere contracts, as parties recede, and as traditional patterns of mobilization break apart, this actor loses one of its most essential functions: the capacity to translate social demands into organized political discourse. It can no longer serve as the channel that links protest to institution, or that converts social tensions into negotiable political positions. Here surfaces one of the deepest dimensions of the transformation: not merely the exclusion of Islamists from decision-making, but the stripping away of the mediating function that had given them meaning within the political order.⁽¹²⁾

This trajectory intersects with broader transformations in the relationship between state and society: the state moves toward an expanding monopoly over the registers of definition and interpretation, while society drifts toward more fragmented forms of expression, less amenable to organization and more disconnected from partisan frameworks. Political Islam thus finds itself caught between two levels: from above, a state rebuilding its authority at the expense of mediation; from below, a society no longer producing the same collective forms that can be politically articulated. This situation leaves it in a fragile position, unable either to reproduce its former role or to easily transform itself into a new form of agency.⁽¹³⁾

The most striking paradox, however, appears at the symbolic level. While political Islam is being constrained organizationally and politically, certain causes that once formed part of its symbolic capital—the Palestinian question above all—are forcefully returning to center stage, particularly in the post-Gaza moment. Yet this return does not translate into a political revival of this actor; it takes the form of new modalities of mobilization, often outside partisan frameworks, more fluid and less tethered to traditional organizational structures. Here, a sharp paradox surfaces: political Islam reclaims its language, but not its position; the symbols return, but the actor who had built part of his legitimacy upon them loses the capacity to mobilize them.

The condition of political Islam in Tunisia today therefore cannot be read as a simple twilight; it is a displacement of its position within a field undergoing recomposition. It has not been wholly excluded, but it has lost the conditions that conferred upon it the capacity to influence: mediation, social reach, and the ability to articulate different levels of political action. This makes it a condensed model for understanding the broader transformation in the region, in which it is not only Islamists who are being constrained, but politics itself that is being redefined—in ways that compress the role of intermediary actors in favor of a more centralized state.

The post-Gaza moment, in the Tunisian context, lays bare a fine-grained analytical paradox that goes beyond the immediate reading of the Palestinian cause's return to the forefront, raising a deeper question about the very nature of the relationship between symbol and actor in the contemporary political field. It is plain that the war has recharged the public sphere with a lexicon of solidarity, justice, and victimhood—vocabulary that has historically been part of political Islam's symbolic capital, since the latter built much of its legitimacy on its capacity to embody transnational causes and bind them to local space.⁽¹⁴⁾ Yet this intense return of the symbol has not translated into a corresponding return of the actor who long claimed a monopoly over it; on the contrary, it has revealed a deep displacement in the structure of the political field, where the symbol no longer automatically reproduces the actor that invests in it.

In this perspective, the solidarity mobilizations witnessed in Tunisia cannot be read as a direct extension of traditional mobilizational patterns; they are the expression of a transformation in the forms of collective action, where mobilization takes on networked, supple configurations, less anchored in partisan structures. The protest field is no longer necessarily governed by a logic of centralized organization; it is composed through multiple interactions, in which digital spaces intersect with on-the-ground presence, generating forms of expression that resist containment within classical frameworks.⁽¹⁵⁾ This shift places political Islam before a twofold dilemma: on the one hand, it recovers the discourse that nourishes its symbolic charge; on the other, it loses the ability to convert that discourse into a sustainable mobilizational resource, because the very conditions of mobilization have changed.

This paradox deepens once one observes the transformations of the public sphere, which is no longer a domain in which causes are monopolized by determined actors, but a space open to ceaseless reinterpretation, where voices proliferate and compete to define the meaning of the event. The Palestinian cause, in this context, is no longer merely a political cause; it has become a symbolic frame through which multiple grievances are voiced—grievances that extend beyond the geopolitical to social and ethical registers.⁽¹⁶⁾ Yet this expansion of meaning does not automatically benefit the actors who had built their project on monopolizing the symbol; on the contrary, it may undo that monopoly by embedding the cause within broader webs of meanings and experiences.

In the Tunisian case, this shift manifests itself clearly in the disjunction between the protest field and partisan organizations, with mobilization assuming forms closer to what might be called unframed collective action—action that does not necessarily seek to institutionalize itself or to crystallize into an organized political force. This pattern of action, fed by digital dynamics and transnational solidarity networks, reflects a passage from a logic of mobilization to a logic of presence—from the pursuit of direct influence on political decision-making to the production of dense moments of symbolic expression.⁽¹³⁾ It is precisely here that political Islam forfeits one of its most decisive assets: its capacity to convert symbol into organization and to bind political affect to an institutional infrastructure.

This transformation does not mean that political Islam has vanished from the public sphere; it means that its position within that sphere has been redefined. It is no longer the central actor that monopolizes the expression of major causes; it has become one actor among many in a more pluralistic, less monopolizable space. This retreat is not merely the product of organizational weakness or political missteps; it inscribes itself in a deeper mutation of the nature of political action, in which legitimacy is no longer built solely through representation, but also through the capacity to engage with complex networks of meanings and symbols. In this context, political Islam appears to face a twofold crisis: a crisis of representation, as it can no longer monopolize the expression of transnational causes; and a crisis of organization, as it no longer possesses the instruments that would allow it to convert these causes into effective political force.

This crisis intersects with the transformations of the Tunisian political field after 25 July, in which the contraction of the institutional space has constricted the possibilities of partisan action, political Islam included. The absence of effective channels of representation, together with the decline in the role of parties, accelerates the migration of political action toward less institutional spaces, in which traditional actors find it difficult to reproduce their role.⁽¹⁷⁾ Political Islam thus finds itself in a complex position: constrained from above by the reconfiguration of the state, and outpaced from below by the transformation of mobilizational patterns.

The paradox, however, is not complete unless one factors in the possibility that the symbol's return does not necessarily imply the actor's return, but may, on the contrary, signal the unraveling of the bond between the two. The Palestinian cause, despite its renewed centrality, no longer translates automatically into political support for its historic standard-bearers; it has become a shared symbolic resource, susceptible to multiple—and at times contradictory—reinvestments. This dissociation between symbol and actor reveals a transformation of the structure of the political field: it is no longer possible to build a sustainable political project on symbolic capital alone, without the capacity to adapt to the mutations of organization and representation.

From this perspective, the post-Gaza moment is not merely a moment of restoration of meaning; it is also a test of the actors' ability to adapt to new conditions of political action. Political Islam, in the Tunisian case, appears to face this test from a fragile position, since the conditions for reproducing its role are no longer in place—neither at the institutional level nor at the level of patterns of social mobilization. The paradox that this moment lays bare is not only about the retreat of a particular actor; it is about the redefinition of the relationship between symbol and politics, between expression and organization, in a context marked by rising fluidity and the shrinking of mediations. This brings us back to the article's general problematic: not only how political Islam has retreated, but why it is no longer able to convert dense moments of meaning into sustained political force.