‘I’m with the movement, not the party’: Islamists navigating politics, piety and the Ḥizb-Ḥaraka dilemma in Algeria

This article examines how members of Algeria’s largest Islamist movement, Movement for a Society of Peace (MSP), negotiate the tension between partisan activity and moral-spiritual activism. Using discourse analysis, it traces the competing ways activists in the MSP’s divisions and programmes understand and frame the boundaries between electoral politics (the domain of the ḥizb) and spiritual activism (the domain of the ḥaraka) – particularly as they reconcile their individual and collective identity against the ever-declining credibility of formal parties and of the Algerian political system more broadly, and their own ambivalences regarding the political. The article focuses on how such divisions are experienced by ordinary activists, moving beyond the extant focus on Islamist leadership. The findings reveal views which are not internally coherent but rather multivocal and contradictory: members seek to square their own discomfort with partisanship and, through this, make meaning around their place, in the movement, as well as in their social world.