ABSTRACT
It is argued here that Islamic variations of populism, in their contemporary manifestations, have been shaped by the profound social transformations that have occurred in the Muslim world in the last several decades. These have been associated with new social tensions and contradictions brought about by the pressures of neoliberal globalisation. Such pressures have given rise to, or reinforced, widespread ideas about masses that are systematically peripheralised, or disenfranchised, by small groups of economically rapacious and culturally remote elites. In many Middle Eastern and North African cases, for example, the retreat of the state from delivery of social services and welfare roles in the face of fiscal crises opened up space for (largely middle class-led) Islamic groupings to gain access to teeming urban poor populations through civil society-based charitable activities (Clarke, 2004). As recently suggested (Hadiz, 2016), a distinctive feature of Islamic populism is its key concept of the ummah (community of believers), which effectively substitutes for the concept of the ‘people’ that permeates through more conventional kinds of populism.
