ABSTRACT
In the unincorporated polities of Egypt, Syria and Iraq, any individual, organisation, or belief system that can lay claim to some mass support, whether ostensibly political or not, is a force to be reckoned with by those seeking leverage and legitimacy in politics. With respect to Egypt, Syria and Iraq, the structural characteristic most important for determining the local variant of the various political movements which periodically sweep through the Arab world, is the relative fragmentation of the populations into different ethnic, religious and regional sub-communities. Resurgent Islam in Egypt will most probably be contained within the frameworks of the religious establishment, the popular Islamic political organisation of the Muslim Brotherhood, and even within the more volatile, semi-clandestine organisations composed of the truest believers. Finally, the politics of resurgent Islam can be seen to take widely differing forms depending on the political system within which that resurgence is occurring.
