ABSTRACT
This chapter represents the last in a series of three thematically organized accounts of contemporary Muslim politics under various political circumstances. We have looked already at the evolution of Islamism as a political strategy where groups and parties seek to enter the political system ( Chapter 4 ). We then went on to examine how Muslim politics play out in three countries where the state is, to some degree, defined in terms of Islam. In this chapter we look at several cases of Islam and politics in settings where a state has collapsed or, due to ongoing military occupation and violent conflict, is functionally absent or, at best, very weak. As we will see, many of the same discursive and mobilizing mechanisms are at work in these situations. The political environment of a weak or absent state, however, often presents Muslim actors with a very different set of opportunity structures.
