AMR KHALED IS one of the most popular religious preachers in the Arab world. In 2007, Time magazine even counted the televangelist among the hundred most influential people in the world. Earlier this summer, Khaled issued a public apology due to outrage at his endorsement of a brand of poultry on an Egyptian cooking show. In an episode now known as “chicken-gate,” Khaled contended that consuming “al-Wataniyyah” chicken had spiritual benefits, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. Khaled had been criticized before for his embrace of corporate Islam. This time, however, the Egyptian public had simply had enough of religion put to such crude use. Could it be that Islam is no longer so usable?
Such anger at the peddling of religious piety in the Arab world is linked to a much broader decline in both mainstream and radical currents of political Islamism. Since the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and the end of the Muslim Brotherhood's first and last government in Egypt, mainstream Islamists command a mere fraction of the mobilizing strength they enjoyed during their high noon in the 1990s. In fact, all varieties of Islamism in Arab politics are now on the defensive. Even jihadi militants have begun a metamorphosis into something altogether different since the rise and fall of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). While the traditional critique of religious political parties has come from the left, the attack on Islamism now largely proceeds from the right. This invites the question: what does conservatism look like in the Arab world if it is anti-Islamist?
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