Islamic movements change fundamentally across time and place despite shared names
Evidence
Mahdism as an ideology in nineteenth-century Sudan was not the same thing as Mahdism there today. Similarly, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood during the late 1940s to the mid-1950s was a considerably more powerful ideological movement than today’s Brotherhood; and both of those are different in organization and objectives from what is called the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, which Hafez al-Assad in 1982 tried brutally to eradicate in Hama: his soldiers massacred several thousand reported members of the Brotherhood. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 193
Categorization
- SHARE: The Hama massacre number and the warning against treating ‘Mahdism’ or ‘Brotherhood’ as stable referents — good for a Middle East scholar friend.
- XREF: connects to: Islam’s internal practice varies by region, branch, and historical era
Related
- Islam’s internal practice varies by region, branch, and historical era (similarity 0.85)
- Islamism spans violent and peaceful movements rather than one uniform threat. (similarity 0.79)
- Islam has varied regionally and adapted to historical transformations. (similarity 0.79)
- Islamic history resists any single coherent characterization (similarity 0.78)