Remaking Muslim Politics:
Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization
Edited by
Robert W. Hefner (Princeton
University Press)
BOOK:
Paper | 2004 | $19.95 / £12.95 | ISBN: 0-691-12093-5; 408 pp. | 6 x
9
Chapter 1
(In
PDF Format)
INTRODUCTION
MODERNITY
AND THE REMAKING OF MUSLIM POLITICS
ROBERT W.
HEFNER
THE
TERRORIST ATTACKS of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent military
campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq placed the question of Islam and Muslim
politics squarely in the American public's mind. In bookshops and
classrooms, and on radio and television talk shows, Americans were treated
to crash courses on the history of Islam, Muslim attitudes toward
democracy, the reasons (some) Muslim women veil, and the question of
whether the Western and Muslim worlds are indeed fated to a "clash of
civilizations."
The
impact of this heady media brew was decidedly mixed. In February 2002, a
half year after the 9-11 attacks, the liberal-minded leader (imam)
of one of Washington D.C.'s largest mosques told me that the number of
invitations he had received to speak at churches and synagogues had
increased twentyfold from the year before, and the number of American
citizens whom he had helped to convert to Islam had quadrupled. "Never in
my eighteen years of living in the United States have I encountered such
an outpouring of interest in Islam, most of it quite sympathetic!" On the
other hand, in the months following the 9-11 attacks, there were dozens of
unprovoked assaults on Americans of Muslim and Middle Eastern background.
Several prominent conservative evangelists blamed the 9-11 attacks not
just on individual extremists, but on Islam itself, which they decried as
worship of a false god (Cooperman 2003). More alarming yet, surveys
conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life revealed that, two
years after the terrorist attacks, growing numbers of Americans believed
that Islam encourages violence among its followers (Pew Forum 2003).
In a
society as culturally diverse as the United States, it was inevitable that
there would be contrary pushes-and-pulls to the post 9-11 reaction. With
the passage of time, it was not surprising too that the events of
September 11 came to be seen against the backdrop of other events: the
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the conflict in Chechnya, border skirmishes
between India and Pakistan, the war in Iraq, and continuing strife between
Israelis and Palestinians, among others. Other than the fact that,
somehow, they all involved Muslims, there was no agreement on the
narrative thread with which to tie these events together. What was
clear was that the question of Muslim politics loomed larger than at any
time in modern American history.
As public
discussion continued, two broadly opposed positions emerged concerning
Islam's compatibility with democracy and civic pluralism,1 one
pessimistic, the other cautiously optimistic. Prominent in the former camp
was the distinguished senior historian of the
Middle East,
Bernard Lewis. Written just prior to the September 11 attacks, Lewis's
best-selling What Went Wrong? attributed the Muslim world's
turbulence to the fact that, in the course of its encounter with Western
modernity, "[t]he Muslim attitude was different from that of other
civilizations that suffered the impact of the expanding West" (Lewis 2002,
36). In particular, Lewis argued, the premodern history of Muslim
confrontation with Europe insured that in the modern era Muslims showed a
defensive or even hostile attitude toward things Western. Muslims were
"willing enough to accept the products of infidel science in warfare and
medicine, where they could make the difference between victory and defeat
. . . However, the underlying philosophy and sociopolitical context of
these scientific achievements proved more difficult to accept or even to
recognize." This rejection, Lewis concluded, "is one of the more striking
differences between the Middle East and other parts of the non-Western
world that have in one way or another endured the impact of Western
civilization" (Lewis 2002, 81). The difference ensures that it is unlikely
that Muslim societies will embrace democracy and pluralism any time soon.
Certainly
there is no dearth of jihadi militants willing and able to
enunciate the starkly anti-Western rhetoric Lewis has in mind.2
But other observers wonder whether it is fair to take such individuals as
representative of Muslim opinion as a whole. There is compelling evidence
that many among the world's Muslims endorse no such rejection of modernity
and democracy. To take just one example, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa
Norris's recent World Values Survey compared opinion in eleven
Muslim-majority societies with several Western countries and found in all
but one of the Muslim countries (Pakistan) public support for democracy
was equal to or even greater than in Western countries (Inglehart and
Norris 2003). Where Muslim and Western attitudes diverged was not on
matters of democracy, but in relation to "self-expression values" only
recently ascendant in the West, such as gay rights and full gender
equality.
Recent
developments in
Turkey,
Iran, and Indonesia offer an even more striking indication of Muslim
interest in democracy and civic pluralism. On November 3, 2002, voters in
Turkey
gave their overwhelming support to a new, Islam-oriented party, known as
the Justice and Development Party (JDP). The JDP is a reformist party that
traces its origins back to a series of Islamist parties banned by secular
Turkish authorities in previous decades (White 2002). Despite rumblings
from the country's secular-minded Constitutional Court, the JDP managed to
escape the wrath of authorities while broadening its appeal among Turkish
voters, many of whom had previously been skeptical of Islamic parties. It
did so in large part by tapping voter resentment over corruption and the
country's continuing economic crisis, while distancing itself from the
Islamist rhetoric of its predecessors. More significant yet, as Jenny
White explains in chapter 4 in this volume, the party leadership made
clear its commitment to principles of human rights, the rule of law, and
pluralist democracy. The leadership explained that rather than providing
an alternative to democratic institutions, Islam should deepen the values
of justice, equality, and human dignity on which those institutions
depend.
The
terrorist attacks on synagogues and British-owned buildings in Istanbul in
November 2003, in which dozens died and more than five hundred were
injured (Smith 2003), showed that not all Turkish Muslims agree with
Justice and Development's democratic commitments. But the Turkish public's
horrified reaction to the bloodshed showed just where most citizens'
sympathies lay. In this sense, events in Istanbul were illustrative of a
struggle for the hearts and minds of Muslims taking place not just in
Turkey but around the world. The contest pits those who believe in the
compatibility of Islam with democracy and pluralist freedom against those
who insist that such values and institutions are antithetical to Islam.
Events in
Iran since 1997 offer a second example of a similar pluralization and
contestation of the forms and meanings of Muslim politics. Iran is
especially interesting because it is the only country in the Muslim world
to have undergone the political metamorphosis from an Islamic revolution
to the establishment of an Islamic Republic and, finally, the emergence of
a postrevolutionary society (Brumberg 2001; Hooglund 2002). During its
first quarter-century, the republic was seen by Islamist activists around
the world as proof of their religion's ability to provide an alternative
to Western-style democracy. As Bahman Baktiari explains in chapter 5,
however, the third, or postrevolutionary, phase of the Islamic Republic's
evolution has yielded some surprises. Events since the election of the
reform-minded President Khatami in May 1997 show that the youth, women,
and professional wings of Iran's new middle class have grown disenchanted
with the reigning repressive interpretation of Muslim politics. They seem
more interested in the creation of a civil society with genuine pluralism
and freedoms than they are the shibboleth of velayat-e faqih (lit.,
"rule by the religiously learned," i.e., clerics; see Arjomand 1988,
148-59). As yet the dream of a democratic spring in Iran remains
unfulfilled, and, as in
Turkey,
the long-term success of efforts to remake Muslim politics is far from
guaranteed. But what is clear is that, in
Iran
as in Turkey, a growing number of faithful have concluded that there is no
contradiction between their great religion and civil-democratic decency.
The
Southeast Asian nation of
Indonesia
offers a third example of a Muslim politics as plural and contested as its
counterparts in Turkey and Iran. Although often overlooked in discussions
of Muslim societies, Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in
the world. In the final years of the Soeharto dictatorship (1966-98), a
powerful movement for a democratic Muslim politics took shape. In alliance
with secular Muslims and non-Muslims, the movement succeeded in May 1998
in toppling the long-ruling Soeharto. No less remarkable, Muslim
participants in the democracy campaign dedicated themselves to devising
religious arguments in support of pluralism, democracy, women's rights,
and civil society (Abdillah 1997; Barton 2002; Hefner 2000).
Unfortunately, as I discuss in chapter 11, in the months following
Soeharto's overthrow, Indonesia was rocked by outbreaks of fierce
ethnoreligious violence. Some of the violence showed the telltale signs of
ancien regime provocation. But other acts were linked to independent
extremists, including one group with ties to al-Qa'ida. The violence
slowed the reform movement and put the Muslim community's pluralist
experiment in question.
Notwithstanding these and other setbacks, events in Turkey, Iran, and
Indonesia have proved that Muslim politics is not monolithic, and that
there is more to its contemporary ferment than the bleak alternatives of
secularist authoritarianism or extremist violence. Less widely noted but
no less important, there is an effort underway in many countries to give
Muslim politics a civic, pluralist, and even democratic face. In some
nations, perhaps the majority, the initiative is still so preliminary or
disorganized as to hardly merit the label "movement." Elsewhere, as in
Saudi Arabia (chapter 8), the reformers are not clamoring for full-fledged
party democracy, but greater pluralism and citizen participation. In these
and other Muslim countries, however, there are hints of change in the air,
and hope of better things to come.
THE
MODERN MAELSTROM
It was
with an eye toward exploring these changes that the Institute on Culture,
Religion, and World Affairs at
Boston
University, with the generous support of the Pew Charitable Trusts,
brought together fourteen specialists of Muslim politics for three
meetings, in May 2002 and in January and September 2003. The meetings were
part of an eighteen-month program of research and analysis on social
supports for, and obstacles to, pluralism and democratization in the
Muslim world. The project was not intended to address the September 11
violence as such. Having directed a small program on Islam and Civil
Society for the previous nine years, I had submitted the project proposal
to the Pew Trusts in August 2001, a few weeks prior to the events of
September 11. The aim of the "Working Group on Civic-Pluralist Islam," as
our project came to be known, was to look at Muslim politics from within,
examining the local roots for a pluralist public sphere and a democratic
politics. In undertaking this program, we also hoped to bridge the gap
between, on one hand, academic scholars and, on the other, policy makers
and a general public increasingly concerned about developments in the
Muslim world.
The
contributors to this volume are first and foremost scholars of Islam and
Muslim politics. But all share the conviction that policy-oriented public
scholarship is intellectually important in its own right. Some of our
colleagues in academia may not share this conviction; even those who do
often regard public scholarship as a lesser intellectual genre. What this
viewpoint forgets is that most of the great Western social theorists of
the nineteenth and early-twentieth century were public intellectuals as
well as or even more than they were academics. They understood well the
rhetorical demands and intellectual benefits of having to communicate
specialized insights to general audiences. What this perspective also
overlooks is one of the most impressive aspects of cultural life in the
contemporary Muslim world: its proud legacy of public intellectualism (see
Abaza 2002, 55-74; Eickelman and Anderson 1999). All this said, the main
motive for bringing together the authors who contributed to this volume
was our shared conviction that efforts to understand events in the Muslim
world can succeed only if we move beyond sound bites and stereotypes and
acknowledge the plurality and contest of modern Muslim politics.
To begin
to appreciate this variety, and to understand the background to the essays
in this volume, we need to look beyond the categories of Western liberal
history and recognize several distinctive concerns of Muslim politics.
Three are particularly relevant to the chapters that follow. First, far
more than is the case in contemporary Western democracies (but not unlike
some Western subcultures; see Casanova 1994; Wuthnow 1988, 173-214),
Muslim politics is informed by the conviction that religious scholars, the
ulama (literally, "those who know," sing., alim), have the
right and duty to make sure that all major developments in politics and
society are in conformity with God's commands. Notwithstanding a few
radical experiments like revolutionary
Iran
or Afghanistan's Taliban, this first feature of Muslim politics is not
typically understood as an imperative for theocratic rule. Religious
scholars do not govern and, again, notwithstanding certain utopian
Islamisms to the contrary, real-and-existing Muslim polities are not
characterized by a seamless fusion of religion and state or a dictatorship
of "clerics" over a supine civil society (see Arjomand 1988, 147-63; Brown
2000; Zubaida 2003). Indeed, in a manner that may at first appear
paradoxical, most Muslim societies are marked by deep disagreements over
just who is qualified to speak as a religious authority and over just how
seriously ordinary Muslims should take the pronouncements of individual
scholars.
Rather
than an all-powerful theocracy, then, the more general effect of this
first principle of Muslim politics is diffusely cultural. The principle
makes it difficult for public political deliberation to lapse into
laissez-faireism, leaving urgent ethical questions to individual choice or
the marketplace of public opinion alone. As Muhammad Qasim Zaman (chapter
3) and John Bowen (chapter 13) illustrate in their discussions of "normativity"
in this volume, social and political initiatives are in principle subject
to ethical assessment by scholars whose charge is to assure that the
developments are consistent with God's commands. The latter are in turn
understood in relation to the body of revealed regulations or Islamic
"law" known as shari'a (lit., "the path," "the way," as in divine
regulations or law; see Murata and Chittick 1994, 25-27). In this sense,
contemporary Muslim politics operates on two levels: a generalized or mass
level driven by the actions and concerns of ordinary Muslims, and a
restricted or specialized track involving the efforts of religious
scholars to respond to modern problems within the normative horizons of
the shari'a and Islamic tradition as a whole.3 Much of
the fevered argument of contemporary Muslim politics centers on questions
as to how these two tracks are to be harmonized.
Although
this first concern informs Muslim political ideals today just as it did
during Islam's classical age, its social urgency has varied over time. As
occurred with the rise of secular nationalism in the middle decades of the
twentieth century, there are times in Muslim history when popular culture
drifts away from normative-mindedness, and the public appears less
concerned with justifying its political choices with reference to
religious ideals. However, when, as in much of the Muslim world after the
1960s, a society experiences a period of deepening Islamization, the
concern for religious legitimation will rebound into public awareness,
unleashing a torrent of debate on what is and what is not in accord with
God's commands.
This
social fact points to a second feature of Muslim politics, this one
related to contemporary efforts to remake that politics in a pluralist and
democratic mold. A key requirement for such a reorientation will be the
emergence of public intellectuals backed by mass organizations with the
social and discursive resources to convince fellow Muslims of the
compatibility of Islam with pluralism and democracy. It goes without
saying that the formulation of such religious rationales would have been
unnecessary had Muslim societies undergone the process of radical
secularization Western theorists had predicted back in the 1950s. But the
resurgence of the 1970s and 1980s ensured that contemporary politics in
most Muslim societies shows a deep concern with religious powers and
discourses.
Viewed
from another perspective, this second concern of Muslim politics might
seem like a particular example of a general theme in contemporary
democratic studies. In recent years "democracy in the vernacular" has been
a new and welcome focus of attention in political studies, in large part
as a result of efforts to extend that theory's cultural horizons beyond
the Atlantic-liberal West (see, for example, Bhargava, Bagchi, and
Sudershan 1999; Hansen 1999; Kymlicka 2001). As with Kay Warren's (1998)
examination of Mayan activist intellectuals in contemporary Guatemala, or
Robert Weller's (1999) study of village temples and women's networks in
Taiwan, vernacular approaches emphasize that democratization needs local
roots if it is to grow. While recognizing that there are, in the
Wittgensteinian sense, "family resemblances" to democratization across
cultures, vernacular studies insist that such resemblances are not proof
of an end of history or a culturally homogeneous modernity.
Notwithstanding certain family resemblances, modernity is multiple in its
organizations and meanings (Eisenstadt 2000; Hefner 1998c; Knauft 2002).
Democracy and democratization will be as well.
In the
case of Muslim societies, there is a distinctive organizational tension to
the requirement that pluralism and democratization have vernacular roots.
Although Islam has jurists and religious scholars, it has no pope,
sacerdotal priesthood, or ecclesiastical hierarchy to coordinate their
actions. In most times and places, religious scholars (ulama)
claimed the main responsibility for fulfilling Islam's prime ethical
imperative, "commanding what is right and forbidding what is wrong" (al-amr
bi'l-ma'ruf wa'l-nahy 'an al-munkar; see Cook 2000). They did so on
the grounds that they were most knowledgeable in the sciences of the
Qur'an and the traditions of the Prophet.
Even in
premodern times, however, just how scholars carried out this duty and who
among them was most qualified to do so were questions on which consensus
was often difficult. The ulama might recognize an informal
hierarchy in their ranks, and, in the Shi'a Muslim world in particular, at
times the hierarchy's behavior bore a passing resemblance to the
ecclesiastical disciplines of Western Christianity (see Arjomand 1988,
177-188; Cole 2002, 189-211). In many countries, however, Muslims
recognized more than one school of religious law (madhhab). Even
where a community adhered to just one school, individual jurists (fuqaha)
could reach different conclusions on matters of social importance, and the
most expert reserved the right to issue opinions of their own. Although
they usually shied away from interfering directly in debates on the
shari'a, rulers, too, did not hesitate to meddle in religious affairs
indirectly. They patronized scholars and mystics who voiced opinions on
shari'a similar to their own. They supported shrines to Sufi saints
and sponsored religious festivals that, while avoiding comment on the
details of the law, nonetheless enacted a visual model of the way
religion, politics, and the social were to be imagined (see Eaton 1984,
334; Hammoudi 1997, 68-80; Woodward 1989, 199-214). Rulers also appointed
court jurists to serve as spokespersons before the scholarly community. It
is telling, however, that the latter experts were viewed as having "no
monopoly of giving fatwas [religious opinions], and the practice of
consulting private scholars of high reputation has never ceased" (Schacht
1964, 74). Stories of holy men resisting rulers' interference were a
classic theme in the popular religious imagination (Messick 1993, 143;
Munson 1993, 27). Not the centralized Church of Roman Christendom,
religious authority in the Muslim community as a whole tended toward a
fissiparous pluricentrism.4
As Zaman
illustrates in his discussion of modern Pakistan (chapter 3; see also
Zaman 2002), in most contemporary Muslim societies the ulama still
play a role in public ethical discussion. However, modern pressures for
pluralism and popular participation are increasingly apparent as well.
They can be seen in the fact that the precise influence of ulama on
public discussion varies widely, as do local understandings of just who is
and who is not qualified to provide informed religious opinion. In recent
years, then, the long established pluricentrism of religious authority has
been compounded by a participatory revolution transforming Muslim culture
and politics as a whole.
As Dale
F. Eickelman and James Piscatori have observed (1996, 13; cf. Abaza 2002;
Esposito and Voll 2001, 3-22), one of the most significant elements in
this transformation has been the emergence of "new Muslim intellectuals"
across the Muslim world.5 Although some are graduates of
religious schools (madrasa) and are familiar with classical
commentaries, the majority of new Muslim intellectuals are alumni of
national educational systems who acquired their religious knowledge
through self-study or participation in small discussion groups (halaqah).
As recent events in Zaman's Pakistan, White's Turkey, Eickelman's Morocco
(chapter 2), and Michael Peletz's Malaysia (chapter 10) all illustrate,
one characteristic of their autodidactic education is that the new Muslim
intellectuals tend to be more interested than their classical predecessors
in linking their religious studies to nontraditional concerns. Some of
these are of a loosely populist nature, touching on questions of how to
raise one's children, how to live a good life, or how to make household
ends meet. At the elite end of the public spectrum, however, others among
the new intellectuals grapple with the question of Islam's relation to
science, democracy, human rights, and globalization (cf. Abdillah 1997;
Eisenstadt 2002; Esposito and Voll 2001; Meeker 1991). Religious
conservatives may reject such reflexive extensions of the tradition as
"innovations" (bid'a) incompatible with God's law. But other Muslim
thinkers, as well as masses of ordinary believers, will beg to differ.
There is
an additional organizational feature to these efforts to press public
culture and politics into a more participatory mold. The Islamic
resurgence took place in the aftermath of a great social and cultural
transformation across most of the Muslim world. Urbanization, migration,
and growing socioeconomic differentiation combined to undermine received
and often village-centered religious disciplines. The state's inability to
meet all but a portion of the needs of the new urban masses also created a
demand for alternative providers of public services in the fields of
health, education, and public security. Finally, mass education, literacy,
and a growing network of mosques and Islamic schools combined to
strengthen the determination of ordinary Muslims to exercise choice and
take charge of their faith (Eickelman 1992). Together, these developments
generated a great popular appetite for a more participatory practice of
public life and religion. Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori (1996) have
rightly seen these events as a potential foundation for a democratic
reformation of Muslim politics.
This
democratic potential is real enough. However, its realization will depend
upon more than the mere fact of heightened popular participation. As
events in Europe during the first half of the twentieth century showed all
too tragically, mass participation under conditions of ethnoreligious
pluralism can generate enormous social tensions, the effects of which may
be anything but democratic. As with European fascism and communism, if
popular participation and social competition are not embedded in cultures
and powers of a civic-pluralist sort, the result may be more polarizing
and violent than it is democratic. There is no dearth of such examples in
today's world (Brass 2003; Hansen 1999; Hefner 2000; Mamdani 2001).
Whether the mass participation that so marks the modern age is
democratizing, then, depends on not just participation or associations in
civil society, but the higher-level cultures and organizations to which
ground-level mobilizations are linked.
In the
case of Muslim societies, in particular, the outcome of the new pluralist
participation will depend upon a third feature of contemporary Muslim
politics: the efforts of rival groupings to "scale up" their influence by
strengthening their organizations in society and forging pacts or
alliances with influential actors and agencies in the state.
Mobilizational initiatives like these usually begin at the local level,
with efforts to bring together like-minded actors in associations
dedicated to some social, religious, or welfare task. It is activities
like these that recent studies of civil society have tended to privilege
as the spring from which democratic cultures flow. However, if they are to
have a lasting influence in society as a whole, at some point these
activities and networks must be drawn into what the sociologist Peter
Evans (1996) has described as collaborations "across the state-society
divide." As Theda Skocpol has also observed (arguing against Durkheimian
portrayals of civil society as entirely independent of the state), civic
groups in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America were not merely
local and not always nonpolitical. Many were linked to translocal
organizational networks that sought to forge ties with national leaders
and associations so as to influence state policies (Skocpol 1999, 33).6
There are myriad reasons for civic groups in modern Muslim societies
to want to do the same. From the perspective of prodemocracy groupings in
particular, it is clear that without some measure of coordinate support
from the state and the legal system, democratic elements in society remain
vulnerable to attack by uncivil elements in state and society (Hefner
2001; Keane 1996).
It goes
without saying, of course, that collaborations across the state-society
divide can be put to nondemocratic ends as well. As in Zia ul-Haq's
Pakistan (chapter 3), post-Nasser
Egypt
(chapter 6), modern Saudi Arabia (chapter 8), and post-Soeharto
Indonesia
(chapter 11), some state officials may conclude that it is in their
interest to make common cause with ultraconservative Islamists, rather
than Muslim democrats. At other times or in other places, however, ruling
elites may choose to lend a hand to the reformist cause. Whatever the
political establishment's tack, the prevalence of such mobilizations and
alliances in countries across the Islamic world shows that contemporary
Muslim politics has changed. It is no longer restricted to a handful of
elites, religious dignitaries, and representatives of the privileged
classes. The age of mass mobilization has dawned, and with it has come not
merely a pluralization of the political field, but a contestive
pluralization centered on rival interpretations of Muslim politics, and
rival efforts to organize in society and across the state-society divide.
In the
competitions that ensue, Muslim parties and organizations sometimes enjoy
a distinctive advantage over their secular rivals. As Jenny White (2002)
has demonstrated for
Turkey
and Carrie Rosefsky Wickham (2002) in
Egypt,
some of the most successful of today's Islamic mobilizations owe their
success not to formal ideology or top-down party organizations, but to the
local networks and relationships from which they draw their membership.
Muslim mobilizations often take preexisting religious networks built
around neighborhood mosques and religious schools and weave them together
into a parallel Islamic sector. As in the Egyptian case (Wickham 2002,
93-118), some Islamic organizations do so by offering educational and
health services the state is unable or unwilling to provide. However, the
really decisive advantage enjoyed by these mobilizations is their ability
to organize their constituencies "on an individual level through known,
trusted neighbors, building on sustained, face-to-face relationships, and
by situating its political message within the community's cultural codes
and norms" (White 2002, 7). While government parties show a preference for
a top-down and bureaucratic organization, the new Islamist mobilizations
are a politics in the vernacular par excellence.
Again,
whether this participation in the vernacular is democratizing is another,
more complex question. The contrast between the Egyptian and Turkish
examples on this point indicates that the political outcome of the effort
can be varied, to say the least.
Egypt's
Islamists have tended to be conservative on matters of democracy,
pluralism, and women's rights, although there are signs this may be
changing. Turkey's Islamic parties have tended to look more favorably on
democracy and pluralist freedoms. The difference reflects not merely basic
cultural differences between these two societies, but, as Richard Norton
shows in his chapter, the Egyptian state's unfortunate habit of combining
the repression of democracy activists with mobilization of conservative
Islamic clients (cf. Sullivan and Abed-Kotob 1999, 126; Wickham 2002,
21-35).
These and
other examples illustrate once more that there is no uniform Muslim
modernity, nor a monolithic Muslim politics. What Muslim-majority
societies do have in common, however, is a new dynamic of popular
participation and contestive pluralism. In a growing number of nations,
this condition is not merely challenging the old ways of doing things; it
is inspiring dreams of a Muslim politics that is civil and democratic.7
REMAKING
MUSLIM POLITICS
Against
the backdrop of these three features of contemporary Muslim politics, it
is perhaps easier to understand the distinctive aims and methods of the
groups discussed in this volume, most of whom hope to bring about a
civic-pluralist reformation of Muslim politics. In light of the first
concern of Muslim politics, the concern for religious legitimation, we
should not be surprised to see that reformers devote what is, from a
Western utilitarian perspective, an inordinate amount of time and energy
to coming together to read, write, and formulate the terms for a new
practice of Muslim politics. Some reformers do little more than share
their reflections with a handful of like-minded intellectuals; others may
have access to public platforms in institutions like universities and
research institutes. Some, too, may take advantage of new publishing
technologies and the Internet to disseminate their writings to larger and
more anonymous publics. As Dale F. Eickelman and Peter Mandaville show in
their essays on media and transnational Islam (chapters 2 and 12; see also
Anderson 2003; Eickelman and
Anderson
1999), modern print and electronic media have allowed for the transmission
of new ideas even into communities once walled off by established
guardians of the faith.8
Where
conservatives still command a significant mass following, these tentative
probes toward pluralist reform may often display a "nonpolitical" guise.
As in Diane Singerman's discussion of legal reform in contemporary Egypt
(chapter 7) or Gwenn Okruhlik's analysis of pluralism in Saudi Arabia
(chapter 8), proponents of reform in such circumstances may choose to
focus their efforts not on formal politics, but on educational programs,
incremental legal reforms, and public discussions that offer ordinary
Muslims an element of choice and participation. Sometimes they also do so
because, as Okruhlik makes clear, the reformers are not clamoring for a
full-fledged party democracy as much as they are simple pluralist
freedoms. Not public spheres of citizen participation in the modern sense
of the phrase (see Calhoun 1992; Habermas 1989), the limited-access nature
of these activities may also be intended to reduce the risk of conflict
with conservative opponents. If and when these "non-political" initiatives
begin to make headway, however, the effort almost always goes public, and,
as with Singerman's legal activists, is accompanied by attempts to forge
alliances with sympathetic actors in state and society.
But going
public has its risks. It may only galvanize the ultraconservative
opposition and increase the likelihood of confrontation. Committed as they
are to a less state-centric practice of their faith, civic-pluralist
Muslims may feel torn when confronted by conservative violence and
intimidation. Some are willing to, and do, give their lives for the
pluralist cause. Recognizing that the success of their efforts depends on
long-term changes and the demobilization of "uncivil" groupings, others
may quietly retreat to the security of private life and friendships, away
from the threat of state repression or public confrontation, praying the
storm will pass. Satellite dishes, Internet connections, and the quiet
circulation of pamphlets and books may be the only signs of a profession
of the faith at odds with those in the commanding heights of religious
society.
In the
best of circumstances, however, the reformists may succeed at building
social coalitions and even creating collaborations across the
state-society divide. If and when they achieve the latter, they may get
access to the legal and educational resources needed to scale up their
influence well beyond the limited-access groupings of society (Eickelman
and Anderson 1999, 14; Bowen 2003, 258-68; Hefner 1997). A process of this
sort is already underway in countries like
Turkey,
Iran, Morocco, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In these countries, the movement
for a civic-pluralist Islam is no longer just a matter of limited-group
discussions, Internet chat groups, or tacit pacts with sympathetic
government officials; it has become a powerful stream in public politics
and culture. The setbacks that have occurred in several of these countries
cannot hide the fact that the struggle to remake Muslim politics is here
to stay, and that the circumstances and desires to which it responds are
widespread across the Muslim world.
With some
1.3 billion of the world's 6 billion people professing Islam, the outcome
of this struggle to reorient Muslim politics is likely to be one of the
defining political events of the twenty-first century. As a result of
globalization and immigration, the contest will also impact Western
societies directly. As John Bowen and Peter Mandaville's essays make
especially clear, several Western countries are themselves in the midst of
a great Muslim immigration, and their strategies for accommodating the new
immigrants vary. Already there are 5 million to 7 million Muslims in the
U.S., and no fewer than 30 million in Western Europe, where their numbers
are growing more rapidly than the general population (Cesari 1994; Nielsen
1992). As Bowen and Mandaville both show, many among the new population
are grappling with the question of what it means to be European or
American and Muslim (see AlSayyad and Castells 2002; Ramadan 1999).
Although, as Mandaville's essay also illustrates, a few have lent their
support to international jihadi causes, the more prominent have
begun to play a central role in the pluralist stream of transnational
Islam (see Mandaville 2001). Their ability to do so effectively over the
long run, however, will depend on the willingness of Western societies to
accord Muslims full rights of citizenship. This will demonstrate more
effectively than any media campaign that there is no clash of
civilizations between Islam and the West, but a convergence of interests
among people of civil-democratic conviction.
CONDITIONS OF A MODERN POSSIBILITY
There is
a broader background to this volume's examination of contemporary efforts
to remake Muslim politics. It bears on the question of how we are to
understand that politics in relation to processes of participation,
pluralization, and democratization seen in other parts of the world. In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, the collapse of communism in
Eastern
Europe
and the successful transitions from authoritarianism in Korea and Taiwan
inspired optimism about the prospects for transitions of a similar nature
in other non-Western societies, including Muslim ones. A host of political
scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists threw themselves into the
task of determining just why authoritarian regimes collapse and what their
fate says about the conditions that might allow for transitions elsewhere.
As is not
uncommon in such high-stakes endeavors, the academic community never
reached a consensus on most of these questions. Pressed by real-world
problems, however, Western policy analysts had no such luxury. They were
compelled by force of circumstances to come up with actionable guidelines
for democratic transitions. Unlike their obstreperous academic
counterparts, then, policy circles soon settled on a few rival models,
each with a very different view of the cross-cultural prospects for
democracy.
The first
model emphasized that the key to democracy and sustainable prosperity lay
with the bedrock institutions emphasized by Western Cold Warriors during
their half-century of battle with Soviet totalitarianism: free markets and
fair elections. In 1993, the historian and policy analyst Francis Fukuyama
presented one of the more celebrated versions of this argument. He
suggested that the modern world had arrived at "the end of history," in
the sense that it was no longer possible for any serious person to believe
that there were weighty alternatives to liberal democracy and capitalism.
Each time Fukuyama voiced his views, of course, one could hear the sighs
of British social democrats, Christian conservatives, deliberative
democrats, and American communitarians, all of whom (from different
perspectives) lamented what they regarded as a slighting of their
recommendations for amendments to liberalism's orthodoxy.
For
several years in the early 1990s, however, the Fukuyama formula had an air
of commonsense inevitability about it, at least in American policy
circles. This was the case not so much because policy makers subscribed to
the Hegelian claim that history had ended, but because in anxious
circumstances like those of postcommunist Europe, Fukuyama's model was one
of the few that seemed to offer a workable guide for the future. The key
to sustainable democracy was, simply enough, free elections and "getting
markets right."
It was
not long, however, before the din of real-world events began to raise
questions about the adequacy of the markets-and-elections model. It was
not that free elections and equitably competitive markets are not useful
things. The problem was that knowing that they are useful is not quite the
same as understanding what is required to get them up and running and
sustainable. As a series of setbacks in Eastern Europe and Russia during
the 1990s showed (Gray 1993), free markets are not "free" in the sense
that they are the spontaneous product of unconstrained social exchange.
Their free and fair operation depends upon a host of resources in state
and society that together "embed" the marketplace (Granovetter 1985;
Hefner 1998b; Hollingsworth and Boyer 1997). To build trust, enforce
contracts, control crime, and, in a word, make a modern market work, a
good deal more is needed than self-interested exchange among so many
Robinson Crusoes (Clegg and Redding 1990; Hamilton 1998).
This same
qualifying note is all the more relevant when it comes to understanding
what is required to make pluralist democracy work. Ethno-religious
violence in Yugoslavia, the genocide in Rwanda, Hindu-Muslim strife in
India, racial attacks on immigrants in Germany--these and other
developments during the 1990s demonstrated that, at least outside of
Washington's Beltway, there were a fair number of people who had yet to
learn that history had ended. Indeed, rather than the end of history,
outbreaks of communal violence in the 1990s seemed to indicate that, with
the Cold War over, "local" histories and cultures had reasserted
themselves with a vengeance.
One
response to this disturbing realization was to throw up one's hands and
conclude that democracy is, above all, a Western institution that depends
on Judeo-Christian values; as such, it can take root only in societies of
Judeo-Christian background. The most influential statement of this
position was that of the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington,
first in a widely read article (Huntington
1993) and then in a later book, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order (1996). Whereas
Fukuyama
had implied that Muslim societies were unlikely to resist the great wave
of democratization (Fukuyama 1993, 45-46),
Huntington
argued that democracy depends on a complex of values and institutions
lacking in many non-Western societies, not least of all Muslim ones. The
list of requisite values and institutions included "individualism,
liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule
of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state"
(Huntington 1993, 40).
Huntington's pessimism represented a departure from his earlier views on
the "third wave" of democratization (Huntington 1991). In writings
subsequent to his 1993 article, as well as a two-year monthly seminar on
cultural globalization at Harvard University that I was invited to attend,
he softened the argument somewhat, recognizing that its strict cultural
assumptions might be taken as a counsel of relativist despair. European
and American policy analysts shared this reservation. In these and other
circles, pressure mounted for an alternative to the clash-of-civilizations
model.
The
alternative was forthcoming soon enough. Setting aside generalizations
about civilization and top-down emphases on markets and elections, the new
paradigm stressed the importance of grassroots initiatives for building
democracy. There were many variations on this model, but perhaps the most
influential was Robert Putnam's Making Democracy Work: Civic
Institutions in Modern Italy (1993). In this engagingly well written
book, Putnam took a page from Alexis de Tocqueville's nineteenth-century
Democracy in America (1969) and argued that civil society and
social capital are "the key to making democracy work" (1993, 185). Drawing
on, but also narrowing, a theoretical concept earlier developed by the
sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman, Putnam defined social
capital as "features of social organization, such as trust, norms, and
networks, that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating
coordinated actions" (Putnam 1993, 167). Putnam's main thesis was that it
was in these voluntary, "horizontal" networks that citizens develop the
trust, cooperative skills, and egalitarian attitudes required for
democracy. Within these analytic horizons, it was hard to resist Putnam's
bold conclusion: "Membership in horizontally ordered groups (like sports
clubs, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, cultural associations, and
voluntary unions)" is "positively associated with good government," while
"membership rates in hierarchically ordered organizations" are "negatively
associated with good government" (Putnam 1993, 176). For one brief shining
moment, it seemed as if the long-sought recipe for democracy had been
found.
The press
of real-world events made the concepts of civil society and social capital
all the more appealing in policy circles. With several post-communist
states teetering on the edge of collapse, and with the awful evidence that
rulers in some countries had deliberately provoked acts of ethnoreligious
violence to neutralize rivals, the state in some post-Cold War countries
had begun to look like a part of the problem rather than the solution. The
idea of civil society provided policy makers with the license they needed
to look beyond the halls of state for partners in society.
However
beneficial its program impact, the idea of civil society was just not
strong enough to stand up under the weight of the theoretical burden it
had been assigned. Irrigation associations, small-credit cooperatives, and
women's crisis centers are one thing, but what about racially based secret
societies, civilian militias, or fundamentalist cults? Sociologically
speaking, the latter are all voluntary organizations situated in the space
between the family and the state. As such, they qualify for membership in
civil society, at least according to the definitions most widely used
during the 1990s (see Hall 1995; Hann 1996; Hefner 1998a; Rotberg 2001;
Skocpol and Fiorina 1999). However, as with Hindu nationalists in India
mobilizing their networks to attack Muslims (Brass 2002, 6; Hansen 1999,
203-14), or Rwandan priests using their leadership capital to goad
parishioners to kill Tutsis (Mamdani 2001, 226), the idea that all civil
society associations and all social capital are "good" for democracy runs
up against one unnerving complication: social capital can be used for all
manner of ends, including antidemocratic ones.9
All this
is to say that associations that are, locationally speaking, part of civil
society are not always "civil" in terms of the attitudes they inspire or
the political culture they promote (Hefner 2001; Keane 1996, 10). Some
forms of social capital and some civic organizations are
democracy-friendly, but others--Hutu death squads, the Ku Klux Klan--are
not. Robert Putnam's 1993 work attempted to anticipate this objection by
emphasizing that it is horizontally organized civic associations that are
democracy-friendly, while vertically controlled ones are not. Associations
of a horizontal sort, he argued, foster "robust forms of reciprocity" and
communicate mutual expectations in "reinforcing encounters," thereby
enhancing trust and increasing the flow of communication (1993, 173-4).
But many of America's extreme right-wing militias, as well as religious
extremists in many parts of the world (Juergensmeyer 2000), show these
same robustly reciprocal qualities. And, unfortunately, they do so without
producing habits of the democratic heart.
In a
subsequent study of social capital in the United States (Putnam 2000),
Putnam introduced a useful qualification on his earlier argument, one
broadly consistent with the lessons from several essays in this volume.
Recognizing that not all social capital is democracy- or
pluralism-friendly, Putnam distinguished what he called an exclusive or
"bonding" social capital from an inclusive or "bridging" variant. Bonding
organizations, he observed, are "inward looking and tend to reinforce
exclusive identities and homogeneous groups" (Putnam 2000, 22). By
contrast, bridging social capital tends to "generate broader identities
and reciprocity" (23). The latter may be well suited for mediating ethnic
and religious divisions.
Another
way of saying this is that real-and-existing civil societies are always
rife with social tensions, not least of all because, rather than being
blissfully homogeneous, they are crosscut by divisions of religion,
ideology, ethnicity, gender, and class (Hefner 2001; Keane 1996; Stolle
and Rochon 2001). Unless counteracted by more encompassing organizations
and discourses that extend participatory rights beyond the in-group, these
divisions can generate social tensions that are anything but democratic.
Moreover, notwithstanding the romantic view of civil society as entirely
independent of the state, the development of these stabilizing
arrangements depends not only on forces in society, but on symbiotic
collaborations across the state-society divide (Evans 1996; Hefner 2001;
Skocpol 1999).
Here,
then, are a few lessons from recent discussions in democratic theory
relevant for understanding events in the Muslim world. They provide
important clues as to when the participatory revolution transforming
contemporary Muslim politics may be democratizing, and when it may not.
RESURGENCE AND DEMOCRATIZATION
As noted
above, during the 1970s and 1980s, the Muslim world witnessed a resurgence
of piety and public religious activity unprecedented in modern history.
The physical signs of this change were ubiquitous: in mosque construction,
the proliferation of religious studies circles, crowded Friday worship,
pilgrimages to Mecca, bearded men, veiled women, and the growth of Islamic
publishing. Earlier, during the heyday of modernization theory in the
1950s, Western analysts had forecast that Muslim societies would
inevitably experience the same processes of privatization and decline
that, it was assumed (too simplistically), religion in the modern West had
undergone. Muslims might be latecomers to the secularization process, the
argument went, but they too would succumb to the secularist juggernaut
(Lerner 1958). By the time the Islamic revolution swept Iran in 1978-79,
this forecast had begun to look jejune. By the early 1990s, it seemed
simply absurd.
Ironically, part of the foundation for the resurgence had been laid back
in the 1950s and early 1960s not by pious Muslims, but by the secular
nationalist leaders who governed most of the newly independent countries
of the Muslim world. However meager their achievements in economic policy,
the nationalists made headway in the field of general education.
Certainly, their record was still modest by comparison with educational
programs in East Asia, not least of all because in some Muslim societies
women's education lagged significantly behind that of men. In addition, in
a few poor countries, like Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Sudan, rates of
education even for males remained stubbornly low (UNDP 2002).
Notwithstanding these qualifications, nationalist governments in the
majority of countries succeeded in creating the first generation of Muslim
youth with general literacy and educational skills (see Eickelman 1992).
During
these early years, most among the newly educated applied their skills to
more or less secular ends, exactly as nationalist leaders had hoped. From
Morocco to Indonesia, socialist and secular nationalist slogans
predominated among the educated middle class. With the notable exception
of Saudi Arabia, where the state was officially based on shari'a
law, Islamist issues and parties seemed to have been outflanked by their
secular rivals, and seemed marginal to the central currents of
postcolonial Muslim politics.
Although
their specific views varied from country to country, nationalist
ideologues agreed in asserting that folk culture was to blame for the
Muslim world's backwardness, and popular culture would have to be
aggressively recast if society were to progress. In this regard, the
nationalists shared an elite-modernist impulse with Mustafa Kemal, the
secularizing founder of modern Turkey (see Berkes 1998). However, with the
exception of Kemalist Turkey, nationalist leaders hesitated to launch a
too-direct attack on religious institutions. Recognizing Islam's crowd
appeal, leaders instead cloaked their secularist programs in a nationalist
garb that "retained a modest Islamic façade, incorporating some reference
to Islam in their constitutions such as the ruler must be a Muslim or that
the shariah was a source of law, even when it was not" (Esposito
2000, 2).
Soon,
however, the nationalist edifice began to weaken. Having raised popular
expectations to such unrealistic heights, the nationalists only insured
the population's greater disappointment as it became clear that the state
was unable to deliver on its promises. The sense of crisis was exacerbated
by a demographic transition taking place across the Muslim world. From
1950 to 1990, the proportion of the population living in urban areas
swelled, as a result of rural-to-urban migration and, especially in Africa
and the Middle East, some of the world's highest fertility rates. In forty
years, urban populations grew 200 to 300 percent, without a corresponding
expansion in urban infrastructures. Still predominantly rural in 1950, by
1990 all but a handful of Muslim countries saw 35 to 55 percent of their
population residing in cities and towns. There residents suffered the
usual ill effects of pollution, crime, unemployment, and poor state
services (see Brown 2000, 123-30).
By the
early 1970s, then, the secular, socialist, and nationalist stars that had
once shone so brightly had begun to lose their luster. Yet the need for
some kind of public ethical compass was more compelling than ever. With
masses of people from different ethnic and regional backgrounds packed
into slums, the old ways of village and town had become obsolescent. The
impersonal and often corrupt bureaucracies of state and party inspired
even less confidence.
It was
during this period, then, that neighborhoods across the Muslim world
witnessed a steady expansion in the number of mosques and madrasas.
Americans familiar with the role played by urban churches in their own
country during the late-nineteenth century, when ethnically based
congregations helped to integrate foreign immigrants into American
society, should find little startling in this phenomenon (Finke and Stark
1992; Wuthnow 1988). Researchers who have examined the wave of Protestant
conversion in urban Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s (Martin 1990;
Stoll 1990) will also recognize parallels. For the urban poor and
lower-middle class, mosques and religious schools offered islands of
civility and moral clarity in a turbulent sea. In the face of growing
class- and status-differentiation, these institutions provided avenues of
participation for believers otherwise consigned to society's margins. As
in the late-nineteenth-century United States, the pervasiveness of
religious associations gave a deeply religious hue to interactions in
civil society. That society was not made up of modern liberalism's
individuals freed from ethnoreligious bonds, but individuals and groups
bound by crosscutting ties of kinship, ethnicity, and religion.
One
telling indicator of the public's heightened interest in religion was the
rapid development of a market for inexpensive Islamic books and magazines.
The literature provided a means for people who had never had an
opportunity to study in religious schools to familiarize themselves with
the fundaments of their faith (Gonzalez-Quijano 1998; Eickelman and
Anderson 1999). The opportunity also stimulated the emergence of a new
class of teachers and preachers, with target audiences different from
those of the classically trained ulama (Eickelman and Piscatori
1996). Most of the preachers had only a vague familiarity with classical
religious scholarship, although, as in Egypt, a few were unemployed
graduates of religious colleges (Gaffney 1994). More important yet, the
new preachers made their message relevant in ways different from the
scholastic preaching of mainstream ulama, adapting their topics to
the concerns of urban publics. Such were the demands of entrepreneurial
success in an increasingly competitive religious market.
Here then
was the background to the great religious resurgence seen across the
Muslim world in the 1970s and 1980s. Described in the language of modern
political theory, the resurgence was primarily an affair of civil society,
not the state.10 Equally important, notwithstanding its impact
on rural society, its leading lights and organizations were urban in ethos
and organization. The resurgence created a great reservoir of social
capital, comprised of networks and solidarities dedicated above all else
to public piety and expressions of Islamic identity. As with
denominational Christianity in America in the nineteenth century (Finke
and Stark 1992; Hatch 1989), the heightened religiosity was accompanied by
fierce competition among purveyors of different religious messages. Among
the case studies offered in this book, only Afghanistan stood apart from
the general pattern of a public Islam redefined by the interests and
choices of urban consumers (see Barfield's chapter 9).
Although
the cultural temperament of the Islamic resurgence varied from country to
country, the process as a whole shared three basic characteristics. The
first was that, in scope and density, the resurgence represented a
historically unprecedented mobilization of civil society, one that created
vast new reserves of social capital--"features of social organization,
such as trust, norms, and networks" for "facilitating coordinated actions"
(Putnam 1993, 167). In the first instance, the networks and energies of
this Islamic social capital were primarily dedicated to public religious
activities. Mosques and madrasas became the anchors for new forms
of public association. The call to prayer marked the rhythms of the day.
More women began to veil. Greetings and other everyday commensalities were
peppered with Islamic gestures and phrases.
A second
observation is equally important, although it is sometimes overlooked in
commentaries that overemphasize the politics of the resurgence or, worse
yet, confuse it with radical Islamism. In its early years, the resurgence
was a profoundly public event, but not one that was especially
political in any formal sense of the term. Most of the newly pious
were primarily interested in just what they claimed to be: religious
study, heightened public devotion, expressing a Muslim identity, and
insuring that public arenas were subject to ethical regulation. The key
symbols of the resurgence were similarly pietistic: reciting the Qur'an,
keeping the fast, wearing the veil, avoiding alcohol, giving alms. The
Muslim world was not alone in witnessing a resurgence of public religion
in these years. As José Casanova has noted, a similar "deprivatization" of
religion took place among Hindus in India, evangelicals in Africa and the
Americas, and in many other countries (Casanova 1994; cf. Berger 1999,
Martin 1990; van der Veer 1994). Many of the faithful in these settings
were as much concerned with creating islands of civility and piety as they
were anything strictly political.
The third
feature of the resurgence, however, raises a more sobering question
concerning its long-term political impact. In light of its scale and the
competition among its promoters, it was inevitable that at some point
religious entrepreneurs would move to channel the resurgence's social
capital into political ends. The process was made all the more likely in
that religious associations were among the few public arenas in which
ordinary people could make their voices heard.
Again,
however, it is important to emphasize that the range of political ideals
voiced varied enormously. Some believers insisted on the compatibility of
Islam with pluralism and democracy. Others called for a totalizing
transformation of the social order according to an unchanging plan,
modeled on an ideal of pristine unity identified with the first generation
of Muslim believers (see Voll 1991). Nowhere was the tension between these
two visions of Muslim politics more apparent than in matters of women's
rights and personal status law. In some countries, conservative Islamists
tried to mobilize their membership to reverse legislation on women's
rights dating from the earlier nationalist period, on the grounds that it
was un-Islamic (Keddie 1991; Kandiyoti 1995). At the same time,
developments in education and employment continued to draw growing numbers
of women, even from conservative Islamist families, into public life. The
result has been an ambiguous and unfinished remaking of women's roles. In
all but the most conservative organizations, women today are more
prominent than ever in the workforce, public religious life, and even
political parties (see Abu-Lughod 1998; White 2002, 52). At the same time,
in many societies conservative Islamists militate in support of polygyny,
gender segregation, and mandatory veiling. In short, women's participation
in public life has increased in most of the Muslim world. Whether that
participation is to take place on the basis of equality and democratic
dignity is a question that has yet to be resolved.
Whatever
its social ambiguities, the resurgence has clearly acquired a new and, in
at least some circles, more political tack. The question now is which
among the variety of Muslim politics is to prevail.
AT THE
CROSSROADS
To
understand why some resurgents would turn to an undemocratic
interpretation of Muslim politics, it is helpful to recall that although
the radicals' ideas represented a break with mainstream Muslim politics,
they did not emerge from a cultural vacuum. Most radical Islamists justify
their actions with reference to the ideas of a few seminal thinkers who
rose to international prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. The most
influential of these are the Egyptian literary critic turned Islamist,
Sayyid Qutb (1906-66; see Moussalli 1992), and the Pakistani theorist
Mawlana Sayyid Abu'l-A'la Mawdudi (1903-79; see Nasr 1996). Both of these
writers were in turn influenced by the earlier, ultraconservative
reformism of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab in what is today Saudi Arabia (Voll 1991,
345-52).
A key
theme in these writers' works is that God alone has sovereignty (hakimiyya)
over the world, and that he has provided Muslims with what amounts to a
complete (kaffah) ethical model for social and political life. This
guidance, these authors claim, is contained in a religious law for all
times, the shari'a. Whereas classically trained scholars regarded
the law as complex, subtle, and always in need of expert exegesis (Zubaida
2003, 24-27), modern Islamists tend to insist that the law's meaning is
transparent to all willing to submit to its commands. The fact that even
radical Islamists cannot agree on the law's myriad details does not
diminish this faith in the clarity and singularity of divine command.
Inasmuch as God's law is clear, those who refuse its implementation are
seen as having allied themselves with the forces of godlessness (jahiliyya).
Muslims, even the masses of ordinary Muslims, are to be shunned if and
when they fall into such error. Through injunctions like these, radical
thinkers provide a cultural rationale for a "bonding capital" that is
"inward looking and tend[s] to reinforce exclusive identities and
homogeneous groups" (Putnam 2000, 22). At the limit, where rulers and
publics are deemed in violation of God's command, armed struggle against
both may be required.
According
to these same writers, a key feature of Islam's comprehensiveness is that
Islam does not recognize a separation of religion and state, but demands
their unitary fusion in an "Islamic" state. This formula is said to be
based on the model of the Prophet and his rightly guided successors. As a
number of writers have observed (Brown 2000; Roy 1994; Zubaida 1993), this
alleged precedent actually neglects as much as it claims to recall. It
forgets that, historically, the great majority of Muslim jurists believed
that "the law is God's law, not to be harnessed to the needs and the
interests of the state" (Tucker 1998, 37). The conservative formula also
fails to recognize that a richly differentiated political landscape took
shape even during the Prophet's lifetime, and developed all the more after
his death, as the Muslim community evolved from a small charismatic
movement to a great world civilization (Lapidus 1975; Zubaida 1993, 2).
For it to have been otherwise, for Muslim society and politics to have
remained an undifferentiated totality, would have meant the impoverishment
and inevitable collapse of Muslim civilization. Muslim societies thrived
precisely because their leaders adopted a flexible and differentiated
approach in matters of governance, culture, and society.
Rather
than fidelity to prophetic precedents, then, the Islamist dream of an
all-encompassing religious governance bespeaks a modern bias, one all too
familiar in the twentieth-century West. It is the dream of using the
leviathan powers of the modern state to push citizens toward a pristine
political purity. As the author of an excellent biography of Mawdudi has
remarked, there is little in this vision that is specifically Islamic:
Mawdudi's assimilation of
Western ideas in his discourse flowed without interruption. The Islamic
state duplicated, assimilated, and reproduced Western political concepts,
structures, and operations, producing a theory of statecraft that, save
for its name and its use of Islamic terms and symbols, showed little
indigenous influence. (Nasr 1996, 90)
Another
stream in modern Muslim politics, however, has spoken out against an
étatist and essentializing interpretation of politics, calling instead for
a pluralistic organization of state and society. Whether with Ab-dolkarim
Soroush and the reformists in postrevolutionary Iran (Soroush 2000),
Nurcholish Madjid and the "renewal" (pembaruan) movement in
Indonesia (Hefner 2000), or Rachid Ghannouchi in Tunisia (Tamimi 2001; cf.
Kurzman 1998, 19), a central theme of civil Islam has been the insistence
that some degree of separation of state and religious authority is
necessary to protect the integrity of Islam itself. The point is not that
religion should be a purely private matter, but that its values are more
susceptible to corruption if responsibility for religious affairs is
surrendered to state elites.
"Religion
forbids us from assuming a God-like character," writes the Iranian
dissident (and former anti-American militant) Abdolkarim Soroush (Soroush
2000, 64). He goes on: "This is especially true in politics and government
where limiting the power of the state, division of powers, and the
doctrine of checks and balances are established in order to prevent
accumulation of power that might lead to such Godly claims" (64). Like
many Muslim reformers, Soroush's formula borrows some of its vocabulary
from Western democratic theory. But it also speaks in a movingly evocative
vernacular, invoking the example of Islam's great jurists, who protected
Islam's ideals by refusing to grant rulers a monopoly over religious
truth. Rather than a pristine fusion, then, civil Islamists relocate the
center of public religion to the associations and dialogue of civil
society, while also pressing for a system of pluralist government subject
to effective checks and balances.
Whether
the civic-pluralist stream in contemporary Muslim political culture will
spread and become the model for a broader, pluralistic reformation of
Muslim politics will depend upon more than the cogency of a few
intellectuals' arguments. Since September 11, 2001, in particular, Muslim
and Western scholars alike have realized that the civil Islamic effort
faces a new and unexpected challenge. The September attacks showed that an
armed fringe in the radical Islamist community is attempting to overcome
its disadvantage in numbers by pressing its one comparative advantage.
Groups like the al-Qa'ida and the Jema'ah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia have
taken advantage of globalization to link their finances and military
resources to local conflicts to which Muslims are party (see Gunaratna
2002; ICG 2002; see chapter 11 below). Prior to the overthrow of the
Taliban in late 2001, the arms, training, and ideological guidance
provided at al-Qa'ida camps in Afghanistan added fuel to some of the
Muslim world's most flammable conflicts. As Barfield's essay illustrates
(chapter 9), the Taliban and al-Qa'ida made an odd couple indeed. Al-Qa'ida
is an internationalist organization led by well-heeled dissidents from the
ranks of the Muslim upper-middle class, while the Taliban were a ragtag
gang of parochial ethnics who emerged from the ruins of the most backward
state in the Muslim world.
Unfortunately, as recent attacks in Indonesia, the Philippines, Turkey,
Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia have shown, al-Qa'ida and like-minded groupings
seem intent on extending odd-couple collaborations like these to other
parts of the world. They have made their methods clear. They channel
transnational flows of money, arms, and fighters into local conflicts. In
so doing, they also portray these conflicts not as local, but as part of a
global clash of civilizations pitting Christians, Jews, Hindus, and other
"crusaders" against Muslims. Having described the struggle in these
Manichaean terms, the radicals provide a moral rationale for attacking the
enemies of Islam everywhere they are to be found. For Western readers of
the present book, it is essential to realize that the violence is targeted
not only at Western interests, but at pluralist and moderate Muslims. The
violence aims to polarize local conflicts and, in so doing, destroy the
political center.
In a few
instances, these tactics have succeeded in giving local jihadis an
influence greatly out of proportion with their actual numbers in local
society (see chapter 11). In all but the most desperate circumstances,
however, most Muslim publics have been repelled by these actions. They
recognize that the threat to the West posed by the globalization of
jihadi adventurism is minor compared to the threat such violence poses
to Muslims and Islam.
CONCLUSION
The
long-term outcome of this struggle for the heart and soul of Muslim
politics will depend on not only the clarity of rival visions, but
concrete balances of power in state and society. The strengthening of the
civil democratic stream in Muslim politics will also depend on a long-term
collaborative effort by governmental and nongovernmental agencies in the
Muslim and Western worlds.
Owing to,
perhaps, an unfamiliarity with the nuances of Muslim politics, as well as
regrettably short-term policies, governments in the West have not been as
consistent as they should be in their policies toward the Muslim world (Gerges
1999; Hinter 1998). One especially unhelpful factor has been a concern in
Western policy circles that if the democratic dam is opened wide, the
groups most likely to rush in will be authoritarian Islamists little
interested in pluralism or democracy. "One vote, one time," was the phrase
that summarized this anxiety in Western circles at the time of the
Algerian elections in 1991. The fear led French and American officials to
side with the forces of military repression in Algeria, after the
electoral triumph of an (admittedly complex) alliance of moderate and
militant Islamists (Willis 1996).
It does
little good simply to wave this anxiety aside. As in the
early-twentieth-century West, there are political radicals eager to
take advantage of democratic openings so as to pursue undemocratic ends.
However, it is helpful to remember that rulers in most Muslim societies
have not gone so far as the Algerian authorities to repress moderate
opponents and, in so doing, paint the political process into a corner. The
essays in this book provide numerous examples of societies in which a
vigorous measure of grassroots pluralism is still available for, so to
speak, scaling up. Equally important, as noted above, there is a wealth of
evidence indicating that most Muslims yearn for democracy and civic
decency. They do so not because these ideals were "made in the West," but
because they are the most effective and just response to problems of
pluralism and participation widespread in our age.
If Muslim
governments and their Western friends do not take the steps needed to
promote civic pluralism and democracy, the result will likely be only more
radicalism and popular disenchantment with the West. The main reason
reform must not be delayed is that Muslim societies are already
sociologically modern. They are modern in the sense that they are well
on the way to developing the characteristics distinctive to the condition
of modernity: a pluralization of life-worlds, heightened pressures for
participation, and a growing popular demand that the script for
coordinating roles on the public stage be, in some vernacularized sense,
civil and democratic.
This is
not to say that democratization is inevitable or that efforts to support
Muslim democratization have to be all or nothing. The history of
democratization in the modern West shows that the process is enduringly
incremental, always incomplete, and, alas, reversible even where it is
achieved (Keane 1996). The process typically unfolds in a piecemeal and
domain-specific manner, its course specified not just by the brilliance of
its ideals, but by concrete balances of power and participatory struggles.
The most effective way for Western agencies to support the process in
Muslim societies, then, is to invest in those spheres where local actors
are already pressing for heightened participation and civic decency. In
efforts like these, civil society groupings will be crucial. But programs
in civil society will remain vulnerable and incomplete unless complemented
by democratic reforms in the state. Democratization is sustainable only
when based on leveraged collaborations between state and society that
scale up the democratic powers of each.
In light
of the centrality of education and public discussion in the Islamic
resurgence, investment in general education represents a second and no
less critical support for a pluralizing Muslim politics. Skeptics might
point out that some of the more violent radicals in recent years have come
from the ranks of well-educated youth. The militants who carried out the
attacks of September 11, 2001, were not the illiterate offspring of an
impoverished underclass. But it is far more noteworthy that some of the
most gifted proponents of Muslim pluralism come from the ranks of public
intellectuals and religious scholars with a great knowledge of the law,
and a habit of enriching its insights by juxtaposing it to other
traditions of knowledge (see Abou El Fadl 2001; An-Na'im 1990; Safi 2003).
More, not less, education is the key. And education has a greater
democratic benefit when it conveys a spirit of intellectual "bridging"
rather than exclusive "bonding."
There are
two additional reasons for focusing investments in education, including,
especially, women's education and higher education. First and most
important, this is what the great majority of modern Muslims yearn for.
Studies like the recent Arab Human Development Report 2003 provide
vivid demonstrations of the depth of this desire, and the calamity its
nonfulfillment has created. The deficit is no more tragically apparent
than in the continuing exclusion of women and girls from equal access to
education (UNDP 2003, 31).
A second
reason for highlighting investment in education is that education is the
most paradigmatic of modern cultural institutions. Today no society can
compete even in the lower rungs of the global order without a well-run
educational system. In its diverse specializations, its encouragement of
innovation, its (relative) gender equality, and its culture of
civility-in-plurality, higher education is a shimmering example of all
that is best about modern freedom and civic decency.
The
recent revolutionary experiments in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan
demonstrate that attempts to use the state to deny modern pluralism, and
to implement a totalizing (kaffah) practice of the faith, run
contrary to the demands of modern education and society as a whole. Again,
in sociological fact, Muslim societies are already modern. The growth of
the professions, the expansion of the press, the fascination with the
Internet, the demand for women's education--these and other pluralizing
developments are well under way in all but the poorest Muslim nations.
Religious radicals may deny the public's hunger for pluralist fruits. No
doubt the Taliban in Afghanistan went to the greatest lengths to deny this
interest and press society back toward a pristine, undifferentiated whole.
But this only reminds us that Taliban programs bore a more striking
resemblance to Pol Pot's Cambodia than they did the model of the Prophet.
Here,
then, is the strongest support for democracy and civic decency in the
Muslim world. The support is especially significant because it comes from
Muslims themselves, not from a West that, unfortunately, has been less
than consistent in its attitudes on Islam. The support originates in
Muslims' recognition that efforts to impose a repressive homogeneity on a
diverse society only damages their faith and consigns believers to
backwardness. This latter conclusion will be rejected, of course, by those
who insist that Islam has unchanging instructions for everyone and all
aspects of social life. Just as was the case with totalitarian schemes in
the modern West, efforts to implement such totalizing programs will do
great harm to society. Even more serious from believers' perspective, the
more radicals press for a fusion of religion and state, the more they
remove the checks and balances necessary for maintaining the integrity of
not only the political process, but of religion itself. The urge for
absolutist union creates the conditions for religion's abuse. Power
corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. And nothing more certainly
degrades religion than human absolutism in God's name.
These are
the lessons that give the civil Islamic project its historic urgency and
relevance. Recent events have demonstrated that it is in the best interest
of Islam itself that Muslim politics be plural and democratic. In an age
of mass participation and powerful states, to do otherwise is to guarantee
religion's subordination to the powerful and corrupt. "The modern world
has also undermined a right that has always been a source of evil and
corruption," writes Abdolkarim Soroush (2000, 64), "that is, the right to
act as a God-like potentate with unlimited powers." This is the
conviction, so historic and deep, from which civil democratic Islam flows.
Originating at the heart of the Muslim experience of modernity, the
conviction is becoming more, not less, widespread in our world. Its
diffusion ensures that the struggle for a civic-pluralist politics will
remain a central stream in Muslim civilization for years to come.
Robert W. Hefner is Professor of Anthropology
and Associate Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World
Affairs, Boston University. His recent books include Civil Islam:
Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton).
http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/chapters/s7881.html |