The transformation of the discourse on secularism/the civil state in arab academic writings post arab spring

Abstract

Since the start of the Arab Spring, no topic has been more polarizing to elites than secularism, the civil state, and political Islam. In this article, I will analyze the academic literature written by researchers and sometimes political activists in journals published in the Arab world on this topic. I will conduct a quantitative (bibliometric) and qualitative analysis of this literature (149 articles), in order to try to answer the following questions: To which extent is there interest in these topics in academic journals? How did these writers address the topic of secularism or the civil state? How do leftist/secular/liberal trends on the one hand and Islamic trends on the other interact with the issue of secularism? What type of journals are these?