Over a not inconsiderable period, the Arab world has witnessed two interconnected phenomena. The first is the rapid growth of religious propaganda and preaching, calling for the re-organisation of state and society around a decidedly rigid, literalist, and exclusivist template, claiming to be a salutary return to the textual and mythic authorities invoked by this propaganda. This call is emblematised visually by symbols of commitment, such as ostentatious displays of devotion and piety. The second, correlative phenomenon is assiduous attempts to compel others to comply with what Islamic propagandists consider to be the necessary desiderata for remodelling society on bases pleasing to God and to themselves. These include the veil, called for on every possible occasion, however inappropriate, and the deployment of violence to impose the declamations of a single, clamorous voice in these matters: violence against individuals – particularly women – in Algeria, for example, against a whole society on which Islamic legislation was imposed, as in Sudan, violence against state, intellectuals, and Christians in Egypt in the 1980s, and against the Syrian state in the late 1970s. It is clear that these developments were only possible because of the increased organisational, political, and logistical capacities of the Islamic groups and the growth of their cultural and political influence. These developments would not have occurred had it not been for the increased attention given to religious discourse in general, and the expansion of the field of social, political, and cultural action labelled religious. The resulting self-confidence, and the attrition, by repetition, of any sense of embarrassment were manifest, for example, in the announcement by a professor in the University of Abhā in south-western Saudi Arabia that it is polygamy that is the fundamental form of marriage, monogamy being the resort of necessity only. Similarly, the Egyptian Muslim Brother clerical grandee Muhammad al-Ghazali expressed surprise that any embarrassment should be felt about polygamy, which was, as he said, a salutary Muhammadan practice.

These developments taking place from the 1970s and 1980s are connected to the reluctance of Arab national states – secular in character as previously shown – to assume their responsibilities towards their citizens as private actors to set up parallel sources of authority, and the tendency of the state to display various degrees of shaykhification and only timidly warding off Islamist propaganda.