Book Review: Islamists After October 7 — The Question of Identity and Destiny
In a region marked by persistent crises and accelerating transformations-where distinguishing between immediate developments and pivotal historical turning points often becomes increasingly difficult-most changes are portrayed as “strategic” in nature and as possessing the capacity to reshape the region and alter its balance of power.
Yet two defining moments in contemporary Arab history since the turn of the millennium continue to generate repercussions that are still unfolding and reshaping reality itself: the Arab Spring/Arab uprisings on the one hand, and October 7 on the other. Despite the differences in context and outcome between the two events-particularly given that the consequences of October 7 remain incomplete and still in formation-both moments fundamentally reopened the region’s major questions: the state, citizenship, freedoms, and the place of political and social actors, foremost among them Islamist movements in their various formations, schools, and affiliations, as well as their positioning within the state and the public sphere. October 7 also revived questions surrounding resistance, the utility of normalization, identity, popular agency and capacity, the future of the Palestinian cause, and the “Axis of Resistance” as a central determinant in reshaping the region once again. It represents another historical moment of profound significance and long-term repercussions, even if its outcomes and transformations remain unsettled.
The Arab Spring, and the subsequent rise of Islamist movements to power in several Arab states-particularly in Egypt and Tunisia-marked a decisive turning point in the history of these movements. It also transformed the political trajectories of these countries and others. After decades spent in opposition or semi-opposition, Islamist movements suddenly found themselves confronted with the test of governing, only for those experiences, to varying degrees, to face failure, exclusion, or outright reversal. What followed was a broader phase of repression, political retreat, and organizational erosion that affected both these movements and the wider public sphere alike. Islamist movements were thus pushed back into opposition, exile, imprisonment, or marginal political relevance in other states, albeit through new forms and methods. Over the course of more than a decade, political Islam appeared to be experiencing one of its most disoriented historical moments, especially amid the declining appeal of the grand narratives that had long structured its discourse.
Then came the moment of October 7, once again reshuffling the regional landscape. Beginning with October 7 itself, and continuing through Israel’s war of annihilation on the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian question returned to the center of regional and international attention. At the same time, old yet renewed questions concerning Islamist movements and their position within the political and regional order resurfaced. One of the most striking paradoxes is that this historical moment did not necessarily restore Islamists to the political scene as much as it restored debate about them: about their intellectual and political projects, their organizational and ideological transformations, their relationship with the state, their position on resistance, and their ability to reinvent themselves and their projects beyond the language of mobilization, emotion, and spontaneous popular outbursts, within a regional environment increasingly hostile to them in absolute terms.
From this perspective, the first two decades of the twenty-first century can be understood as structured around two foundational moments in the modern history of the region: the Arab Spring on one side and October 7 on the other. If the first moment reopened questions of authority, democracy, and the state, the second revived questions of identity, resistance, hegemony, and the role of non-state actors. At the same time, current transformations also suggest the reemergence of supra-national imaginaries alongside the reconstruction of the territorial nation-state in new forms within what may be described as a “post–October 7 world.”
It is within this context that the book Islamists after October 7: The Question of Identity and Destiny, published in early 2026, emerges as a collective scholarly contribution jointly produced by the Forum for the East in Istanbul and the Politics and Society Institute in Amman. The volume was edited by Dr. Mohammed Affan, with research assistance from Mariam Al-Batoush, and includes a foreword by Dr. Mohammed Abu Rumman. The book is the outcome of a workshop held in Istanbul, Turkey, in September 2025 under the title “The Future of Political Islam in Light of Regional Transformations.”
The volume consists of seven medium-sized chapters and includes twelve research papers in addition to a concluding chapter that presents the most significant discussions and commentaries that emerged during the workshop sessions. The volume moves across a broad geographical landscape extending from Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq to Yemen, seeking to trace the impact of the seventh of October on Islamist movements, as well as on prevailing perceptions regarding the future of these movements and the broader field as a whole.
Book Overview
The volume is organized into seven chapters that combine scholarly analysis with collective discussion, with its contributions revolving around one central question: how did October 7 reopen debate surrounding Islamist movements, their political positioning, and their capacity to adapt to a rapidly transforming regional environment?
The book opens with a chapter examining political Islam between the Arab uprisings and the events of the seventh of October. In Mohammad Abu Rumman’s paper, the rise of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham to power in Syria is presented as a new test for the trajectory of localized jihadism and for the ability of former Islamist actors to transition from the logic of factions and الثورة to the logic of statehood. Meanwhile, Mohammad Affan’s paper explores the impact of the seventh of October on Islamist movements in the frontline states, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, through the paradox between a moment that was expected to represent the “qibla of political Islam” for these movements and a reality that instead intensified the political and security pressures imposed upon them.
The second chapter shifts its focus to Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement. Tareq Hammoud’s paper discusses the future of Hamas through three interconnected levels: the restructuring of the movement’s internal organization through new leadership elections; the repositioning of the movement within its regional alliance networks, stretching from the Axis of Resistance to mediator states; and the evolving relationship between its political and military wings. The paper argues that Hamas’s ability to adapt to post-war arrangements in Gaza will remain a decisive factor in shaping its future and its relationship with its social constituency. Khaled al-Zawawi’s paper, by contrast, examines the distinctiveness of the Islamic Jihad movement as a resistance movement that has avoided formal political engagement since its establishment, rendering its post-war options considerably more complex, particularly under ceasefire conditions and amid declining military capabilities resulting from sustained attrition in confrontations with the Israeli occupation both before and after the seventh of October.
The third chapter is devoted to Hezbollah through two approaches examining transformations in its domestic and regional position after the seventh of October. Muhannad al-Hajj Ali analyzes the party in light of its leadership and military losses and the erosion of its status from a major regional actor to a force primarily concerned with preserving what remains of its role and weapons within Lebanon’s internal political equation. From another perspective, Bashar al-Laqis interprets Hezbollah as a complex phenomenon shaped by the interaction of two foundational determinants: its role as a resistance actor established to confront Israel, and its identity as a Shi‘i Islamist party. The interaction between these two dimensions, he argues, has also produced Hezbollah’s function as an advanced extension of Iranian regional influence, a defining factor that will continue to shape the party’s identity, role, and future balances of power.
The fourth chapter addresses the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen within a broader inquiry into the future of the Axis of Resistance. Firas Elias highlights the ambiguity surrounding interpretations of the PMF and the tendency to reduce it solely to its Iranian reference point without adequately accounting for its internally fragmented and composite nature, including tensions between factions seeking full integration into the Iraqi state and ideologically aligned groups that view themselves as part of the Axis of Resistance. Ateq Jarallah’s paper demonstrates how the seventh of October granted the Houthi movement significant political and popular momentum, temporarily postponing many domestic pressures and crises associated with its political and economic conduct. At the same time, the paper stresses that this development did not eliminate the movement’s structural economic and internal crises or the growing social resentment directed toward it; rather, these tensions have merely been deferred or opened onto new possibilities.
The fifth chapter focuses on Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and the Syrian transformations. The papers collectively reveal a broader shift within the Islamist sphere from the fragmentation of the caliphate as a transnational political imaginary toward more localized and pragmatic national approaches. Through the contributions of Abd al-Rahman al-Hajj and Fadel Khanji, the chapter further examines the challenges confronting the new Syrian state, the stakes of regional and international openness, and the difficulties involved in constructing stable political legitimacy within a deeply fragmented domestic environment.
The sixth chapter investigates the future of global jihadism in ISIS and al-Qaeda in light of ongoing regional transformations. The papers argue that the decline in international attention to terrorism does not signify the disappearance of the jihadist phenomenon so long as the political, security, and structural crises that sustain it remain unresolved.
The book concludes with a chapter summarizing the discussions that took place among the participating researchers. Here, major conceptual questions return to the forefront, including the meaning of political Islam and the limits of the relationship between ideology and pragmatism, the local and the transnational, and the political and the military. Through this broad analytical map, the book does not seek to provide a definitive answer regarding the future of Islamist movements as much as it attempts to reopen debate and encourage a reconsideration of this field in the aftermath of the seventh of October.
Through these multiple thematic axes, the volume does not aim to offer a singular or conclusive answer concerning the future of Islamist actors. Rather, it seeks to sketch a preliminary map of the questions and transformations imposed by the seventh of October upon the diverse currents of political Islam, whether resistance movements, classical Islamist organizations, armed jihadist actors, or groups linked to the regional Axis of Resistance.
At the level of recommendations and proposals, the concluding chapter stresses the need to develop cumulative and methodologically grounded indicators for monitoring transformations within Islamist movements in ways that would allow researchers to track their trajectories, understand their future directions with greater precision, and anticipate their transformations in real time rather than merely documenting them retrospectively. The book also advances the need for a major project of historical reconciliation in the region among its principal components-Arabs, Kurds, Turks, and Persians-as well as between Sunnis and Shi‘a, as a structural prerequisite for transcending the logic of civil conflict and external manipulation. Such a project, the authors argue, would require intellectual elites capable of redefining the relationship between history and contemporary political reality.
Yet the importance of the book does not lie solely in the breadth of cases it examines, but also in its ability to gather them within a single regional moment. It is precisely here that the critical value of the review begins: the volume succeeds in capturing the essential questions, yet leaves many of them open at the conceptual, methodological, and predictive levels. Consequently, reading the book should not stop at the descriptive presentation of its chapters, but rather move toward interrogating the broader framework that brings together these highly diverse actors under a single conceptual title.
Strengths and Scholarly Contribution of the Book
The significance of this volume lies not only in its subject matter, timing, or thematic focus, but also in the nature of the questions it raises. On one level, the book attempts to engage with questions more directly connected to political realities and their implications for the future of Islamist movements. In doing so, it moves beyond narrowly security-centered or military-focused approaches-despite the importance of such perspectives-by treating October 7 as a critical historical moment that reopened debate surrounding Islamists and their future after years of stagnation and political decline. The volume thus represents an early attempt to capture emerging transformations and to reconstruct a new research agenda capable of understanding the shifts imposed by October 7 on the Islamic political sphere and on the future of the region more broadly.
Perhaps the book’s most important contribution lies in its effort to produce Arab-centered knowledge on Islamist movements grounded in the experiences, debates, and realities of the region itself. In a field long dominated either by security-oriented approaches or by Western academic literature, such collective works constitute a serious attempt to build a more locally rooted Arab research agenda, one more closely connected to ongoing regional transformations and to the lived political realities of the Middle East. From this perspective, the book can be regarded as an important step within a broader intellectual trajectory that moves beyond studying Islamist movements merely as ideological organizations, toward understanding them as complex social and historical phenomena requiring more diverse and multidimensional analytical tools.
The volume also deserves credit for successfully identifying an important transformation within the field of political Islam itself: the shift from the question of the “civilizational project” to the question of “political survival.” After decades dominated by discussions surrounding the “Islamic state” or the restoration of the caliphate, many Islamist movements today appear increasingly preoccupied with narrower national contexts, organizational survival, and adaptation to fluctuating regional balances and constraints.
Yet despite the strength of this observation across several contributions, the book does not fully develop this transformation at the theoretical level. It remains unclear whether this shift reflects deep strategic revisions within these movements or merely temporary adaptations imposed by current political realities. Here, the volume reveals a noticeable disparity among its chapters in terms of analytical depth and their ability to generate conclusions that transcend the immediacy of current events.
The papers vary in terms of analytical depth and their ability to interpret structural transformations over the medium and long term. While some studies succeed in presenting indicators and scenarios that help explain the trajectories of these developments, others remain closer to political assessment or commentary on immediate events. Although such variation is relatively common in collective academic works, it nevertheless affects the overall coherence of the volume, particularly with respect to the existence of a unifying conceptual thread and the level of consistency across its different chapters.
Across the book’s chapters, three principal observations emerge that together constitute the underlying thread connecting the transformations under discussion. The first concerns the rise of localized jihadism and its functional transformations as the outcome of an accumulated trajectory of change within the broader jihadist current itself. The second relates to the state of disorientation experienced by traditional Islamist movements following the transformations initiated by the Arab uprisings and further intensified after the seventh of October. The third observation concerns the decline of the regional influence of Shi‘i political Islam, particularly in the aftermath of the blows sustained by Hezbollah and the wider regional repercussions of the Israeli–Iranian war.
Critical and Methodological Observations
Despite the cognitive and scholarly value offered by the book – and despite the fact that it deserves recognition once again as a “laboratory of questions” for the important inquiries it raises regarding the ongoing transformations within the sphere of political Islam – this does not prevent the recording of a number of critical observations related to its conceptual structure and general methodology, if we move beyond some of the technical and formal details of its production. These observations do not detract from the importance of the work as much as they open the way for its further development and expansion in revised and enlarged editions or in future research projects.
The most important observation lies in the fact that the book deals with October 7 as a unifying moment, yet it requires a more precise distinction between the event as a political and symbolic shock and its actual consequences for each Islamist actor individually. The event did not produce one unified effect on all actors; rather, it granted some movements symbolic momentum, imposed high security and political costs on others, and pushed a third group of actors toward redefining their roles. Thus, October 7 appears in the book more as a revealing moment exposing the divergence of Islamist trajectories than constituting a turning point that converges toward a single outcome.
The first of these observations concerns the conceptual problem related to the definition of the “Islamists” themselves. The book places within a single analytical space actors that differ profoundly in terms of origins, organizational structures, intellectual references, and political objectives: from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, to the Muslim Brotherhood, passing through Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces, and the Houthis, and extending to Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Although common denominators exist among these actors – represented in ideology, the employment of Islamic identity, or their presence within the broader field of Islamic politics, and even in some of their objectives – they nevertheless differ fundamentally and extensively at the structural level, whether in terms of ideology, national particularities, local contexts of formation and emergence, their relationship with states and social bases, the nature of the projects they adopt, or even the paths of action and tools they have employed.
Here, the need becomes evident for a more rigorous conceptual framework that clearly defines what is meant by “Islamists,” and whether it is possible for all these highly divergent actors to be placed within the same analytical category. It also raises the question of where conservative official religious discourse and state religious policies stand within this definition. This makes the concept somewhat fluid and insufficiently disciplined in both meaning and intent within the book and within the broader research field itself, thereby necessitating further reconsideration and redefine it..
With regard to the theoretical framework as well, although the question of the future constitutes the organizing thread across most of the book’s chapters, the reader does not encounter a coherent or unified theoretical framework governing the process of foresight itself. The papers vary in their definitions of the future, in the tools they rely upon to estimate possible trajectories, and in their use of specific forecasting methodologies or clear cumulative indicators that could later be tested or built upon. Consequently, the transition from analysis to foresight remains uneven from one chapter to another. Some papers perhaps rely more heavily on the researcher’s subjective estimations than on recognized methodological models or tools within futures studies. This makes some scenarios closer to political assessment than to systematic scholarly forecasting. The book could have achieved a greater degree of coherence had it dedicated a methodological introduction clarifying the adopted approach to futures analysis and the indicators used in constructing scenarios concerning these movements and their transformations.
Related to this issue as well is that, despite the editors’ effort to move beyond purely historical and ideological contexts, some papers become deeply immersed in them. While such historical engagement is important in certain respects, excessive immersion in it deprives many chapters of the analytical space needed for genuine future-oriented exploration.
The second observation concerns the concluding chapter. Despite its importance and distinctiveness in collecting the discussions and debates raised throughout the workshop, the ongoing debate still does not resolve or adequately frame the research problematics that have long dominated this field, particularly concerning “political Islam,” “post-Islamism,” and the relationship between the local and the transnational. Nor does it offer a decisive attempt to redefine these concepts or establish clearer theoretical boundaries for them. Perhaps this reflects the nature of the field itself as one still undergoing formation and redefinition. Nevertheless, it leaves broad space for further conceptual engagement in future works.
The third observation concerns the prevalence of a number of assumptions-many of which have increasingly taken on the character of analytical “clichés”-in interpretations of Islamist movements and their transformations. These linear assumptions now require substantial reconsideration. Although the book deserves credit for moving beyond some of these assumptions in the contributions of Abd al-Rahman al-Hajj and Shafiq Shqair, as well as in a collective observation presented in the concluding chapter, where the authors argue that the Islamist sphere will continue to evolve, interact, and generate new and diverse forms, and that the decline of these movements does not signify the disappearance of the enduring debate over the relationship between religion and politics in the contemporary world.
Nevertheless, many of these assumptions remain present and in need of critical reassessment, particularly in the Syrian context. Among them is the assumption that every split within jihadist organizations necessarily produces greater radicalization, or that pragmatic transformations inevitably lead to the dismantling of the ideological identity of these movements, whether at the level of vertical or horizontal divisions and fractures within their organizational structures.
Similarly, some interpretations treated the seventh of October as a deterministic and unified turning point for all Islamist movements, an assumption that itself requires reconsideration. Although the event undeniably returned these movements to the forefront of political and intellectual debate, its effects were far from uniform. While it strengthened the position of certain actors and granted them renewed political or popular momentum-such as Hamas and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-it simultaneously subjected other actors to greater pressure, attrition, or the redefinition of their roles and functions, including Hezbollah, the Popular Mobilization Forces, the Islamic Jihad movement, and even the Muslim Brotherhood, both in the present moment and, perhaps more urgently, in the future.
Accordingly, it may be more accurate to understand the seventh of October as a moment that exposed the divergence of Islamist trajectories rather than unified them, instead of viewing its consequences as producing a single, shared outcome for all Islamist actors. These observations, perhaps, call today for deeper reflection, broader debate, and renewed reassessment.
The fourth observation concerns the absence of discussion regarding what may be termed the rise of the “new Islamist actors” – a younger generation fundamentally different from previous generations in its detachment from traditional organizational frameworks, its networked religiosity, and related patterns of engagement. Taken collectively, these actors constitute an interactive sphere that both engages with and critiques the behavior, discourse, and projects of existing Islamist movements. These transformations still require further study and theoretical framing, particularly as one of the more promising future research trajectories. Part of the current transformation is therefore linked not only to classical Islamist movements, but also to the transformation of the digital religious sphere and the rise of new actors who are less connected to organizational structures and more connected to transnational media spaces.
The book also overlooks an important question concerning whether October 7 contributed to restoring the centrality of the nation-state, or whether it instead revived the idea of the “ummah” and strengthened the role of transnational actors. Likewise, some of the readings within the volume do not sufficiently distinguish between the immediate impact of the event and its long-term strategic repercussions.
The fifth observation concerns what may be described as an overly condensed treatment of the experiences of some Islamist movements, foremost among them the Muslim Brotherhood as the largest and oldest actor within this sphere. The significant differences in the size of the Brotherhood’s social bases across countries, the varying pressures it has faced, and the national, local, and social particularities characterizing each case make it difficult to study its trajectories through a single analytical lens.
For example, the banning of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan emerged within a context different from that of other states, as it represented the culmination of a long legal trajectory whose outcome had become inevitable sooner or later. Likewise, the repercussions of October 7 and the official and popular transformations that followed were not identical across the various national contexts, particularly given that the movement still retains varying margins for maneuver and repositioning in some cases. The book could have gained greater analytical depth had it devoted broader space to examining and analyzing these differences.
Finally, there remains a substantial difference between the restoration of “symbolism” and the restoration of a “project” or “social constituency.” Islamist movements may succeed in regaining part of their emotional or moral presence within the public sphere, but this does not necessarily mean that they have regained their capacity for political action, organizational reconstruction, mobilization, recruitment, or the ability to present a coherent political project capable of rebuilding and expanding its social base. This is perhaps one of the most important ideas that the book could have developed in a clearer and more coherent manner, especially given that this assumption dominated much of the writing that accompanied October 7 as a supposed “gateway for the return” of these movements to the political arena.
From this perspective, the crisis confronting Islamists today appears deeper than merely a crisis of organization or political authority. It is a crisis related to their historical function and political role within the public sphere itself. What do Islamists actually seek today? What project do they genuinely carry? And where exactly lies the dividing line between the “political” and the “Islamic” within their contemporary project?
Despite these observations, the book deserves recognition for the serious questions it raises and for its preliminary attempts to engage with them during a regional moment characterized by fluidity and uncertainty. The value of this effort becomes even greater when one considers the limited volume of collective Arab scholarly production specializing in the study of Islamist movements and their contemporary transformations, alongside the growing need to develop analytical and methodological tools more capable of understanding these transformations and anticipating their future trajectories.
Conclusion
At a moment marked by renewed crises and conflicts, theoretical debate may appear to some as a form of intellectual luxury. This perception has accompanied many of our defining regional crises under the argument that there is a need to move beyond both political and academic theory in favor of direct action and immediate engagement with unfolding events, often at the expense of thought, knowledge, and critical debate. Yet the experiences of the region over the past two decades – and perhaps even longer – have demonstrated the urgent necessity of developing our debates and analytical approaches. Understanding major transformations and historical turning points remains fundamentally dependent on our ability to develop approaches that move beyond ideological biases and that follow ongoing transformations without becoming imprisoned either by the immediacy of the present moment or by the weight of the past.
From this perspective, research works of this kind acquire particular importance, not because they provide definitive answers, but because they may constitute a necessary and serious step toward reviving and reconstructing our theoretical debates, which have long remained marginalized amid political polarization and struggles for power. Such efforts create the possibility for rebuilding a more substantial intellectual discussion capable of understanding the transformations taking place across the region, while preserving the continuous ability to reassess assumptions and reexamine hypotheses in light of changing realities.
At a historical stage in which ideas and visions increasingly transcend the boundaries of geography and language, the need remains for the construction of a knowledge community capable of studying its own social and political movements from within its own intellectual frameworks, and of producing a deeper understanding of its reality, transformations, and future trajectories. This necessarily requires the further development of this book through a revised and expanded second edition grounded in a more rigorous methodological and academic framework.
In a historical era where ideas and visions continue to move beyond the limits of geography and language, the need persists for the development of a knowledge community capable of examining its social and political movements through its own perspectives and of producing a deeper understanding of its reality, transformations, and future.
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