ABSTRACT
Chapter One delineates the historical conditions associated with the rise of Islamism and the move to post-Islamism. Drawing from Bayat's analysis, a ‘binary opposition’ stood among the most significant characteristics of the political discourse of Islamism (Bayat, 2007a, p. 54). I hereby argue that the shift from Islamism to post-Islam is associated with the framing of Islam in the Muslim world as encompassing an array of duals rather than binaries; including the universal and the local, traditionalism and modernity, the Islamic and the Secular, as a springboard to understanding the ‘reconciling’ worldviews espoused by the women under study in the next chapters. The chapter unpacks these duals then gives more focus to the interplay between the Islamic and the secular in the history of Muslim societies as in my contention it provides the backbone of the move from Islamism to post-Islamism. Within the analysis, Chapter One serves to articulate how previous research has failed to spot the paradigm shift witnessed in Islamism during the last two decades which has become more evident within the 2011 Arab Uprisings and their after events.
