(1)
TO TAKE JOY IN A MASSACRE
Something went wrong, but what was it? I was standing in Tahrir Square on February 11, 2011. Around me, hundreds of thousands of Egyptians filled the streets of downtown Cairo. On this, the eighteenth night of the revolution, the crowd buzzed with the news that President Hosni Mubarak was stepping down after nearly thirty years of autocratic rule. The murmurs erupted into deafening cheers. This, whatever this was, was what they were waiting for. One of the revolution’s young activists, a Muslim Brotherhood blogger named Abdelrahman Ayyash, sent me a simple text message: “We did it.” But the euphoria was short-lived; the intervening four years featured a military coup, a succession of mass killings, and the return of dictatorship. Today, Abdelrahman, like so many others, bides his time in exile, longing for an Egypt that may never come back.
If this new phase of the “Arab Spring” was really about anything, it was about a collective loss of faith in politics. I remember how, before the uprisings began in 2011, Egyptians would take pride in the fact that they, unlike some of their neighbors, had little history of political violence. The July 3, 2013 military coup that ousted the country’s first democratically elected president would irrevocably change that. The most populous Arab country, long a bellwether for the region, had willfully aborted its democratic process, however flawed it may have been. A military coup, though, is one thing; a massacre is another.
In the weeks that followed the overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi, a longtime Muslim Brotherhood figure, tens of thousands of his supporters gathered by Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya mosque in a massive sit-in. The Egyptian military announced that it was ready to use force. The country was on edge. No one quite knew when the army would make its move. There were false alarms nearly daily, sometimes hourly.
It is an odd thing to wait for a massacre. As American and European diplomats scurried in a last-ditch effort to persuade the Egyptians to back down, I spent some time in Rabaa, meeting with Brotherhood activists and leaders. One of those leaders was Essam el-Erian, then the vice chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party, the Brotherhood’s political arm. As we sat down in early August, the last of our many meetings spanning nearly a decade, he refused to give any ground. Peppering his Arabic with English for emphasis, he insisted that Brotherhood members were prepared for the ultimate sacrifice. Another Brotherhood official, Gehad El-Haddad, who had given up a successful business career in England to return to Egypt after the revolution, recounted the story of a friend who had just been gunned down by security forces. In his final moments, the young man could barely speak, but he managed to utter the Islamic profession of faith: There is no god but God and Mohamed is his messenger. “Don’t let my blood go to waste,” the man told those gathered around him. They, too, were ready to die, and many of them did. Just days later, on August 14, 2013, over eight hundred Egyptians perished as security forces made good on their threat. Foot soldiers, bulldozers, and armored personnel carriers moved in at dawn with teargas, pellet guns, and live ammunition, forcibly clearing the encampment in what Human Rights Watch called “the worst mass killing in [Egypt’s] modern history.”1
Less than three years earlier, Egypt had shown the world what was possible. Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab uprisings, was a strategically and geographically remote nation of ten million. It was blessed with higher levels of economic growth and educational attainment than most other Arab countries. If the uprisings had begun and ended there, then the possibility of peaceful protest and regime change could have easily been dismissed. Egypt changed the calculus, trumping the narrative that Tunisia was the region’s exception. Buoyed by Mubarak’s fall, mass protests soon spread to two other countries, Syria and Libya, which were seen as unlikely candidates for political upheaval. On August 14, 2013, Egypt was once again leading the way, but this time Egyptians—turning against one another—showed us something much darker but just as real.
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THERE WAS A TIME when only a few Americans had heard of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, soon to be rechristened as simply the Islamic State. That changed in the summer of 2014, first with the fall of Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul—when a first wave of around a thousand fighters overtook an Iraqi force that was some thirty thousand strong. The horrifying beheadings of American journalists and the November 2015 killings of 130 civilians in Paris—the worst such attack in France since World War II—anchored the Islamic State’s reputation for ostentatious acts of savagery. Seemingly overnight, the Sunni extremist group had emerged as a terrifying new enemy.
It was easy to condemn the Islamic State as evil, because it was. The indifference to death and the eagerness to kill permeated so much of what the group did. But what made the post–Arab Spring era so disturbing was that a more banal kind of evil seemed to be just about everywhere: The evil of otherwise good people turning against one another, sometimes not only accepting bloodshed as the inevitable price of conflict but also embracing it and even taking pleasure in it.
This is the story of a region’s descent into madness. There is a temptation to see it as inexplicable, to look the other way as Arabs and Muslims fight and kill each other. Some of it, though, can be explained. Or at least we have to try. The impulse to understand what might appear beyond comprehension is a vital one, especially now. “The peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real” is how the journalist Philip Gourevitch memorably put it.2
This book—based on over a decade of research, including more than six years living, traveling, and studying in the Middle East—is an attempt to make sense not just of sad, terrifying events but of the power of ideas and their role in the existential battles that have shaken the foundations of the Middle Eastern order.
Over the course of this book, I will return to a number of recurring themes and questions which I have made my best effort to grapple with. For instance, when trying to understand the wars of the Middle East, the rise of the Islamic State, and cultural divides over something as seemingly trivial as cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, how much does Islam really matter? Is it about “religion” or “politics”? And can we even separate the two, when they have become so intertwined in the minds, and hearts, of believers?
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TO UNDERSTAND TODAY’S SEEMINGLY INTRACTABLE conflicts, we need to go back to at least 1924, the year the last caliphate was formally abolished. Animating the caliphate—the historical political entity governed by Islamic law and tradition—was the idea that the “spiritual unity of the Muslim community requires political expression.”3 Since the caliphate’s dissolution, the struggle to establish a legitimate political order has raged on, with varying levels of intensity. At the center of the struggle is the problem of religion and its role in politics. In this sense, the turmoil of the Arab Spring and its aftermath is the latest iteration of the inability to resolve the most basic questions over what it means to be a citizen and what it means to be a state.
The year 1924 might seem like ancient history, but I’ll have to go back even further—to the founding of Islam in the seventh century. Two related arguments form the core of the first half of this book. The first is that Islam is, in fact, distinctive in how it relates to politics. Islam is different. This difference has profound implications for the future of the Middle East and, by extension, for the world in which we all live. This admittedly is a controversial, even troubling claim, especially in the context of rising anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and Europe. “Islamic exceptionalism,” however, is neither good nor bad. It just is, and we need to understand it and respect it, even if it runs counter to our own hopes and preferences.
Second, because the relationship between Islam and politics is distinctive, a replay of the Western model—Protestant Reformation followed by an enlightenment in which religion is gradually pushed into the private realm—is unlikely. That Islam—a completely different religion with a completely different founding and evolution—should follow a similar course as Christianity is itself an odd presumption. We aren’t all the same, but, more important, why should we be?
If Muslims, and particularly Islamists, take scripture more “seriously” than their Christian counterparts, then how does this manifest itself in everyday politics? When observers discuss the root causes of Middle East conflict, they often speak of a crisis of governance or legitimacy, or both. But if we go down the causal chain, the question remains unanswered: Why exactly does the Middle East suffer from a lack of legitimate order? This legitimacy defeat, I argue, is tied to a continued inability to reckon with Islam’s relationship to the state.
This is not for a lack of trying. The second half of this book is about the different, contrasting models of how to resolve the dilemma of the once and future Islamic state. I have chosen the word “exceptionalism” in part to avoid casting judgment. Exceptionalism, as I see it, has no intrinsic value in and of itself. It depends on how the problem of Islam and the state actually plays out in practice. In searching for solutions, mainstream Islamist movements, adopting a wide variety of approaches and strategies, may have seemed promising, but they all, in their own ways, fell short.
Mainstream Islamists are defined here as the affiliates or descendants of the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother of all Islamist movements, founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna. They hoped to blend the premodern with the modern and East with West. In this sense, contrary to popular imagination, Islamists do not necessarily harken back to seventh-century Arabia. As we will see, they are distinctly modern, perhaps too modern. Their distinguishing features are their gradualism (historically eschewing revolution), embrace of parliamentary politics, and willingness to work within existing state structures, even secular ones. Islamist movements are those that believe Islam or Islamic law should play a central role in political life and explicitly organize around those goals in the public arena. Though they now find themselves eclipsed by radicals, the most politically influential Islamist groups have generally been of the mainstream and nonviolent variety, so it’s worth focusing considerable attention on them, even if they may not be the ones who, today, attract the most headlines.
I first consider the foundational Brotherhood model, relevant to dozens of countries throughout the world that have their own Muslim Brotherhood–inspired organizations. I then focus on the more localized approaches of Islamists in secularized contexts, namely those in Turkey and Tunisia who have had to contend with decades of forced secularization. These two countries have been touted as models of reconciling Islam and democracy. Interestingly, despite their secularized contexts, they are also two of the only Middle Eastern countries where Islamist parties have come to power. For a variety of reasons, however, these “mild,” more secular-friendly Islamists have failed to advance a successful Islamic synthesis. They have even, at times, exacerbated the very tensions they hoped to address. I will consider these fascinating cases in detail, focusing attention on some of the most interesting and important figures shaping internal debates over Islam and politics.
The Arab Spring’s failure to produce a legitimate, stable political order opened up space for more radical approaches, forged in violence and absolutism. The “countermodel” of the Islamic State, or ISIS, is the focus of chapter 7. The extremist group’s rapid rise in the summer of 2014 may have caught observers off guard, but that something like the Islamic State could thrive in this century, as history’s arc was supposedly bending toward justice, was surprisingly appropriate. There had never been a serious, sustained attempt to reestablish the caliphate since its demise in 1924. Now the Islamic State—with its far-flung operational branches, or “provinces”—could claim to have been the first. Not only that, the Islamic State was one of the most successful examples of recognizably Islamist governance in recent decades (even if the bar here was relatively low). The Islamic State took governance and institution building relatively seriously and was better at it than one might expect. Rather than terrorism, this was perhaps the defining characteristic of the group, making it a worthier—and more dangerous—foe. Its governance model might have been horrifying in any number of ways, but it was a distinctive model nonetheless. The Islamic State, in stark contrast to the Brotherhood and other mainstream Islamist movements, had little interest in the Middle East’s existing state structures.
For Islamic State partisans, the last caliphate was the Ottoman caliphate, but the last model caliphate was that of the Prophet Mohamed’s four righteously guided companions, each of whom would briefly reign as caliph of an ever-expanding empire (three of the four were assassinated). That, however, didn’t keep the Islamic State from viewing the breakup of the Ottoman caliphate and its portioning off into artificial, arbitrary states as the modern era’s original sin. To the extent that modern states depended on some secular notion of citizenship and on parliaments that legislated law other than God’s, they were anathema to the Islamic State’s totalizing view of God’s sovereignty. God, and no one else, was the sole lawgiver. Where the Brotherhood and its compatriots in countries as diverse as Turkey, Tunisia, and Jordan sought to reconcile premodern Islamic law with modern notions of pluralism and democracy, the Islamic State ostentatiously basked in its rejection of them, with results that could be both terrifying and effective. Sometimes they were effective because they were terrifying.
Amid all the brutality and chaos, Muslims and non-Muslims alike are trying to understand the role that Islam plays—and the role that it should play. In discussing models and countermodels of Islam in the democratic process, I hope to offer a framework for thinking about Islam and Islamism and their relationship to politics and, perhaps most controversially, the modern nation-state.
If Islam is likely to play an outsized role in Middle East politics for the foreseeable future—and it is my contention that it will—then this has significant implications. It means that, instead of hoping for a reformation that will likely never come, we have to address Islamic exceptionalism and, to the extent we are able and willing, come to terms with it. This is no easy task. As Mark Lilla writes, “Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible.”4 It is more than possible. The language that Islam has used throughout its history to relate to and give meaning to politics—and the language that hundreds of millions still hold to—may, at first, sound foreign, but that only means that outsiders must make an extra effort to understand it. And that, in some ways, is the most challenging, and ultimately rewarding, aspect of my work: to be exposed to something fundamentally different.
Religion Matters
Political scientists, myself included, have tended to see religion, ideology, and identity as “epiphenomenal”—products of a given set of material factors. These factors are the things we can touch, grasp, and measure. For example, when explaining the motivations of suicide bombers, we assume that these young men (and sometimes women) are depressed about their accumulated failures, frustrated with a dire economic situation, or humiliated by domestic repression and foreign occupation. While these are all undoubtedly factors, they are not—and cannot be—the whole story.
In a September 2014 statement, the Islamic State’s spokesman Abu Mohamed al-Adnani expounded on the group’s inherent advantages: “Being killed … is a victory,” he said. “You fight a people who can never be defeated. They either gain victory or are killed.”5 In this sense, religion matters, and it matters a great deal. As individuals, most (although not necessarily all) Islamic State fighters on the front line are not only willing to die in a blaze of religious ecstasy, they welcome it. It doesn’t particularly matter if this sounds absurd to us. It’s what they believe. But this basic point about intention and motivation applies not only to extremist groups but also to mainstream Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood that, in stark contrast to the Islamic State, contest elections and work within the democratic process. As one Brotherhood official would often remind me, many join the movement so they can “get into heaven.” Discussing his own reasons for joining, he told me, “I was far from religion and this was unsettling. Islamists resolved it for me.”6
We might be tempted to dismiss such pronouncements as irrational bouts of fancy. But, if you look at it another way, what could be more rational than wanting eternal salvation?
It would be a mistake, then, to view Islamist groups as traditional political parties. Muslim Brotherhood branches and affiliates are acting both for this world and for the next. They aim to strengthen the religious character of individuals through a multitiered membership system and an extensive educational process with a structured curriculum. Each brother is part of a “family,” usually consisting of five to ten members, which meets on a weekly basis to read and discuss religious texts. For many members, it is simple and straightforward. Being a part of the Brotherhood helps them obey God and become better Muslims, which, in turn, increases their likelihood of entry into paradise. More spiritually focused members still care about politics, but they may see political action—whether running for a municipal council seat or joining a mass protest—as just another way of serving God and seeking his pleasure.
The tendency to see religion through the prism of politics or economics (rather than the other way around) isn’t necessarily incorrect, but it can sometimes obscure the independent power of ideas that seem, to much of the Western world, quaint and archaic. For those who no longer experience the power and relevance of religion in everyday life, it can be difficult to understand why people do seemingly irrational things in the service of seemingly irrational ends. The forces of reason and rationality, if they hadn’t already prevailed, were, after all, supposed to prevail eventually. As Robert Kagan writes, “For a quarter-century, Americans have been told that at the end of history lies boredom rather than great conflict.”7 Francis Fukuyama, the very scholar who first proclaimed the “end of history” in 1989, seemed almost wistful by that famous essay’s final paragraph. “I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945,” he wrote. “Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.”8 The increasingly apparent influence of religion on politics suggests that Fukuyama was more prescient than his critics give him credit for.
The dramatic rise of the Islamic State is only the most striking example of how liberal determinism—the notion that history moves with intent toward a more reasonable, secular future—has failed to explain Middle East realities. Of course, the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not share the Islamic State’s interpretation of religion, but that’s not the most interesting or relevant question. The Islamic State, after all, draws on, and draws strength from, ideas that have a broad resonance among Muslim-majority populations. They may not agree with the group’s interpretation of the caliphate, but the notion of a caliphate is a powerful one, even among more secular-minded Muslims. One of the few surveys on attitudes toward a caliphate found that an average of 65 percent of respondents in Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, and Indonesia agreed with the objective of “unify[ing] all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or caliphate.”9 This transcended ideology, with even a majority of nationalists saying they supported the idea of a caliphate.10
Even in 2015, well after the Islamic State’s murderous methods became impossible to deny, the anthropologist Scott Atran and a team of researchers found qualified support for what the extremist group had managed to do even among those who otherwise detested it. Atran cites a Barcelona imam involved in interfaith work with Jews and Christians. “I am against the violence of al-Qaeda and ISIS, but they have put our predicament in Europe and elsewhere on the map,” the imam says. “And the Caliphate … We dream of it like the Jews long dreamed of Zion. Maybe it can be a federation, like the European Union, of Muslim peoples. The Caliphate is here, in our hearts, even if we don’t know what real form it will finally take.”11
The caliphate—dissolved unceremoniously only last century—is a reminder of how one of the world’s great civilizations endured one of the most precipitous declines in human history. The gap between what Muslims once were and where they now find themselves is at the center of the anger and humiliation driving political violence across the Middle East. There is a sense of loss and longing for an organic legal and political order that flourished for centuries before its slow but decisive dismantling. Since then, Muslims, and particularly Arab Muslims, have been struggling to define the contours of the postcaliphate order. The Islamic State is only the latest but perhaps the most frightening manifestation of this ongoing struggle.
Because of the role that religion has played in the Middle East, trying to draw parallels with other regions has its limitations. For instance, some try to compare the role of Islam in the Arab world today to the role Christianity played in medieval Europe. But here the differences, drawn out over centuries, make themselves apparent. As the historian of religions Michael Cook notes in his groundbreaking book Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, the early Christian community “lacked a conception of an intrinsically Christian state” and was willing to coexist with and recognize Roman law.12 For this reason, among others, the equivalent of the Islamic State simply couldn’t exist in Christian-majority societies. Neither would the pragmatic, mainstream Islamist movements that oppose the Islamic State and its idiosyncratic, totalitarian take on the Islamic polity. While it has little in common with Islamist extremists, in either means or ends, the Muslim Brotherhood does have a particular vision for society that puts Islam and Islamic law at the center of public life. The vast majority of Christians in the West—including committed conservatives—cannot conceive of a comprehensive legal order anchored in religion. However, the vast majority of Egyptians and Jordanians, for example, can and do. This is not to say that most Arabs or Muslims are Islamists. Most are not. However, one can sympathize with or support Islamist policies without being an Islamist—the phenomenon of Islamism without Islamists.
This is why the well-intentioned discourse of “they bleed just like us; they want to eat sandwiches and raise their children just like we do” is a red herring.* After all, one can like sandwiches and want peace, or whatever else, while also supporting the death penalty for apostasy, as 88 percent of Egyptian Muslims and 83 percent of Jordanian Muslims did in a 2011 Pew poll.13 In the same survey, 80 percent of Egyptian respondents said they favored stoning adulterers, while 70 percent supported cutting off the hands of thieves. Polling is an inexact science, particularly in the Arab world. But even if we assume that these results significantly overstate support for religiously derived criminal punishments—let’s say support was closer to 65 or even 45 percent instead—that number would still probably give us pause.
It is worth noting that the Brotherhood and other mainstream Islamist movements in the Arab world no longer include the so-called hudud punishments for theft, adultery, and apostasy in their political platforms and rarely discuss them in public. In this respect, the median Egyptian or Jordanian voter is to the right of the main Islamist parties in their respective countries. (Many Muslims say they believe in the hudud because the punishments are in the Quran or in the sayings of the Prophet, known as hadith; whether they would actually be comfortable with the state—a state they may not like much—cutting off someone’s hand for stealing is a rather different question. It’s also easy to forget that the application of these punishments was historically rare, requiring numerous preconditions and often prohibitively high evidentiary standards to be met. The primary purpose of the hudud was to deter rather than to punish.14)
These are only, in any case, the most extreme examples, and it would be problematic to take the hudud as somehow emblematic of the sharia, or Islamic law. The sharia has much to say beyond punishments. How, then, do Arabs view the relevance of sharia, including on such issues as gender equality, minority rights, and the role of clerics in drafting national legislation? Why, for example, do only 24 percent of Egyptian women, according to an April 2011 YouGov poll, say they would support a female president?15 What some might call “culture,” and not necessarily Islam, is a major factor, but it would be difficult to pretend that religion has nothing to do with these attitudes. And, presumably, Islam has at least something to do with why 51 percent of Jordanians, according to the 2010 Arab Barometer, say that “a parliamentary system that allows for free competition, but only between Islamic parties” is somewhat appropriate, appropriate, or very appropriate.16
It has become unfashionable to suggest that Islam is in any way unique, and understandably so. This slippery slope of overgeneralization can all too easily lead to the demonization of more than 1.6 billion Muslims. At the same time, the fear of being tarred with the brush of cultural essentialism prevents us from fully appreciating the role that religion plays in the politics of the Middle East. We need to take ideas seriously, especially when they’re not our own. It is time to “bring religion back,” but with care and caution, taking into account the historical richness and diversity that have long been a staple of the Islamic tradition.
Foundational Divides
It is difficult to imagine anyone today writing what the British scholar Elie Kedouri wrote in 1992:
To hold simultaneously ideas which are not easily reconcilable argues, then, a deep confusion in the Arab public mind, at least about the meaning of democracy. The confusion is, however, understandable since the idea of democracy is quite alien to the mind-set of Islam.17
A new kind of universalism took the place of Kedouri’s mind-set in the early 2000s, drawing from the energy and promise of the first (and forgotten) Arab spring. That Arab spring was buoyed by President George W. Bush and the neoconservatives’ “freedom agenda,” which affirmed that democracy was for all peoples and for all times.
In the tense buildup to the 2011 uprisings, an endless barrage of books and articles argued that Arabs were “just like us.” Such sentiments, however well-intentioned, suggested their own kind of exceptionalism, that others would come to follow the path the West had apparently settled on decades or even centuries prior. Poll after poll showed that more Egyptians, Jordanians, and Moroccans believed democracy was the best form of government than did Americans or, say, Poles. But “democracy,” in the abstract, could mean just about anything, as long it was positive. It is one thing to believe in democracy and another to practice it.
As it turns out, we were spoiled by democratic transitions in Eastern Europe and Latin America. It was easy to think back to “roundtable talks” of enlightened leaders and dissident playwrights becoming presidents. Why should the Middle East be any different? A whirlwind eighteen days of protest pushed Mubarak out of power and showed, or at least seemed to show, that the Arab world could follow a similar path. Here, after all, were young, tech-savvy activists, speaking fluent English and saying all the right things. President Barack Obama captured the feelings of millions of Americans who watched in rapt attention. “What I want is for the kids on the street to win and for the Google guy to become president,” Obama told his aides, referring to Wael Ghonim, a Google executive and one of the young, charismatic faces of the Egyptian revolution.18
The things that didn’t fit the Western-friendly narrative garnered less attention. The Muslim Brotherhood, with its committed following and organizational discipline, played a pivotal role in Tahrir Square, providing food and medical services and protecting protesters from regime thugs. Fearing a backlash, the Brotherhood played it carefully, downplaying their participation in the court of public opinion and prohibiting their members from raising the banner of sharia. Meanwhile, in the final days of the uprising, the number of ultraconservative Salafis—with their distinctive full beards—surged. In a remarkably diverse movement, liberals, socialists, Muslim Brotherhood members, Salafis, and even hardcore soccer fans were drawn together by what they opposed. But if this was the opposition’s most impressive moment of unity, it would also prove to be one of its last. This wasn’t the end of ideology but the beginning of a protracted cold—and sometimes hot—war, with questions of religion and identity at its center.
More than five decades of dictatorship had kept the lid on the most vexing questions facing Egypt. That was sort of the point, after all. The region’s autocrats were fond of reminding America that despite their brutality—or perhaps because of it—they were the ones keeping the peace and ensuring stability. As Mubarak said in a televised address just ten days before he was ousted, “The events of the last few days require us all as a people and as a leadership to choose between chaos and stability.”19 In a sense, he and his fellow autocrats were right—there was, indeed, a trade-off. These were brittle states, divided by religion, sect, or clan. With little warning, the 2011 uprisings pushed these tensions and conflicts, always simmering in the background, to the fore. Arab strongmen had governed unwieldy countries with arbitrary borders and uncertain identities. What they promised was stability at the expense of liberty. Now, without an iron fist holding them together, they were falling apart.
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BRITTLE STATES AND DEEPLY divided societies aren’t necessarily unique to the Middle East. There had to be something else. How, after all, could those who claimed to support democracy so quickly turn against it? How could so-called liberals embrace not just a military coup but the mass killings that followed as well? This part of it made less sense. Of course, “liberals” have backed the overthrow of democratically elected leaders in Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. But, even in the most polarized contexts, liberals have been divided. In Chile, for example, many backed the 1973 coup against socialist president Salvador Allende, but many didn’t. Even those who initially backed the army’s move, such as the Christian Democrats, quickly grasped the gravity of their error and recanted, joining the ranks of the opposition against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Yet in Egypt, the near unanimity of liberal enthusiasm for the military’s intervention was remarkable, as is the fact that so few, even at the time of writing, have admitted fault with their original decision to back the coup. Egypt, in this respect, was exceptional.
When observers imply that Arabs or Muslims are prone to violence, they’re usually thinking of groups like the Islamic State or al-Qaeda. But the preponderance of Arab violence has come at the hands of ostensibly secular regimes that claim to be reacting against Islamist movements. This, though, does not absolve religion or ideology. To be sure, secular autocrats are guarding privilege and power, but the liberal elites upon whose support they depend are well aware that there is more at stake. It is only in such a context that the near unanimous embrace of the overthrow of a democratically elected president—one who was unabashedly Islamist—begins to make sense. The anti-Islamists who lined up behind the military in Egypt and those in Tunisia who threatened to dissolve the democratically elected government and constituent assembly had decided that some things took precedence over any presumed commitment to democracy. They feared that Islamist rule, however “democratic” it might be, would alter the very nature of their countries beyond recognition. And it wouldn’t just affect their governments or their laws—though that would be bad enough—but also how they lived, what they wore, how they raised their sons and daughters, maybe even what they could and couldn’t drink. This was personal.
Islamists Are Islamists for a Reason
When I would talk to friends and colleagues in the region about the importance of respecting democratic outcomes even if you disagreed with them, there was a gap. As a Tunisian journalist once told me, “This is something you study; this is something we live.” They were the ones who had to live with the consequences of elections. They were the ones who were protagonists in a raw, existential struggle over the very meaning, nature, and purpose of the modern nation-state. In conservative societies such as Egypt, even liberals believe (or feel compelled to say they believe) that Islam has a role to play in public life. But what kind of role and to what end? This is where the various sides diverged considerably.
In those early days of the Arab Spring, the endless, obsessive public debate over identity and religion struck some as odd. Why did anyone have to tell Egyptians, Tunisians, or Libyans what they already knew—that they were, and always had been, Muslim? The battle over religion and state might have seemed removed from the more prosaic concerns and needs of ordinary citizens, and in a way it was. With the fall of Mubarak and Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali—dictators who were excoriated for heartless economic policies, corruption, and cronyism—Egypt and Tunisia seemed ripe for economic, class-based appeals. But it was not to be. Western countries are, by now, used to a politics consumed by, in Fukuyama’s words, “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”20 To arrive, though, at such a utopian state of economic tinkering, it helps to get the fundamental questions answered first.
Islamists are Islamists for a reason. They have a distinctive ideological project, even if they themselves struggle to articulate what exactly it entails. Some Islamist parties, as in Tunisia, are more willing to come to terms with liberal democracy than others. But all Islamist parties, by definition, are at least somewhat illiberal, something that I discuss at length in my previous book, Temptations of Power.21 There has long been a presumption that, over time, mainstream Islamists—embracing a pragmatic politics—will continue moderating and adapting, just as Christian Democrats and Socialists in Western Europe and Latin America did before them. Perhaps, one day, they will cease to be what they are and become “post-Islamists” or even proper liberals. But if they became liberals, then what would be the point exactly?
Another possibility is that Islamist parties might be “forced” into giving up their Islamism as a kind of concession. This was more or less what happened in Tunisia, the lone bright spot of a now-faded Arab Spring. Ennahda, the country’s main Islamist party, deserves credit for voluntarily stepping down from power in the face of opposition protests. But what if Ennahda, at some later point, recovered support, won a string of electoral contests, and became emboldened to pursue the Islamist agenda its conservative base wants it to?
Tunisia’s 2014 parliamentary and presidential elections were rightly hailed as a success. Here were free elections resulting in the peaceful transfer of power with the losers, in this case Ennahda, accepting an unfavorable electoral verdict. But there were darker undercurrents for those willing to look. During the campaign, Ennahda had very consciously deemphasized its ideological distinctiveness and portrayed itself as the party of national consensus. But this “big trip to the center,” as Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi described it to me, does not appear to have worked, with Ennahda losing to the secular Nidaa Tounes party, a coalition of liberal, leftist, and old regime elements.22 Nidaa Tounes ran an ideologically driven campaign arguing that the Islamists were an existential threat and that “state prestige” and “state authority” needed to be restored, an unsubtle nod to the continuing appeal of strongman politics. In a society that remained as polarized as Tunisia’s, there simply weren’t enough voters to be found in the center. Playing nice might have been the right, honorable thing to do, but it didn’t necessarily pay, at least not electorally.
Then there are normative considerations. If Islamist parties, once elected, have to give up their Islamism (even though one of the reasons people presumably vote for them is their Islamism), then this runs counter to the essence of democracy—the notion that governments should be responsive to, or at least accommodate, public preferences. More practically, asking Islamists to concede who they are and what they believe is unsustainable. This was essentially the bargain struck in Turkey: The Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) would concede its Islamism in return for full participation and even the opportunity to govern. The bargain, however, did not hold. Once the threat of military intervention—a predecessor Islamist party was ousted from power and banned as recently as 1997—is removed, Islamists have little incentive to stick to an unfair, undemocratic deal struck under duress. Their most ardent supporters are patient, understanding the limitations of politics in a militantly secular state, but, at some point, they expect their leaders to reflect their ideological preferences. The case of Turkey is especially striking: Turkey, unlike Tunisia, can claim more than sixty years of off-and-on democratic experience. But, sixty years later, a strong center has failed to materialize and, if anything, the center has grown weaker in the post–Arab Spring era. While economic, class, and ethnic cleavages all factor in Turkey, the primary divide remains an Islamist-secular one.
Can Liberalism Still Prevail in the Middle East?
Too often, we look at conflicts abroad and assume that they are, at their core, about politics, power, and the distribution of resources—things that are easily relatable to our own American experience. Religion, to the extent that it matters, is the garb in which to dress the more base human impulses of money, ego, power, and domination. Accordingly, religion is a mode and a means—to be used, abused, and manipulated—but it is not the (or even a) prime mover. Even when faith is expressed with seeming sincerity, the individuals who express it may be under the grip of false consciousness, thinking that they are doing things for the noble cause of religion when what’s really driving them is something altogether more simple and considerably less romantic. Or so the thinking goes.
When religion is less relevant in our own lives, it can be difficult to make that jump, to not just understand—but to relate to—its meaning and power for believers, and for those, in particular, who believe they have a cause beyond this life. Over the past decade, I have tried to immerse myself in the world of political Islam, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, in an attempt to understand what inspires its adherents as individuals and what animates them as a movement. Despite my best efforts, however, the one element I continue to struggle with is what might be called the willingness to die.
If I had joined a protest in a not-so-democratic country and the army was moving in with live fire, there would be little debate: I’d run for the hills. And that’s why my time interviewing Brotherhood activists in Rabaa—just days before the massacre took place—was, at once, fascinating and frightening. It forced me to at least try to transcend my own limitations as an analyst. Gehad El-Haddad, the young Brotherhood spokesman, told me that he was “very much at peace.”23 He was ready to die, and I knew that he, and so many others, weren’t just saying it. Because many of them—more than eight hundred—did, in fact, die.
Where does this willingness to die come from? One Brotherhood activist, now unable to return to Egypt, told me the story of an activist who was standing on the front lines when the military began “dispersing” the Rabaa sit-in. A bullet grazed his shoulder. Behind him, a young man fell to the ground. The man had been shot to death. The activist looked over to see what had happened and began to cry. He could have died a martyr. He knew the man behind him had gone to heaven in God’s glory. This is what he longed for, and it had been denied him. Aspects of the story were, I assume, apocryphal, but the basic point is an important one. This wasn’t politics in the normal sense of the word. This was the language of purity and absolution. Just as it was for the secularists who insisted on bringing them down at any cost, the battle, for the Islamists, was existential.
* * *
THE NEW YORK TIMES columnist David Brooks once defined a moderate as “someone who sees politics as a competition between two partial truths.”24 Political society doesn’t necessarily need moderates; citizens can believe in absolute truths as long as they agree to pursue them through politics rather than violence. But the difficult question—one that the Middle East has so far failed to answer—is how exactly to do this when there is much, perhaps too much, at stake.
This book is, admittedly, colored by a post–Arab Spring pessimism and a basic recognition that, at their core, people are neither the same nor do they necessarily want the same things. Faith that better, more reasonable minds will prevail is a hope that the region simply can’t afford. Every society must grapple with the question of violence. As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre once remarked, “Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.”25 He was referring to Western societies lacking in a common conception of public morality and ethics, something that he more succinctly calls “virtue.” MacIntyre argues that, with the rise of relativism and hyperpluralism, our societies lack “genuine moral consensus.”26 This is true of the West, particularly Europe, but it is no accident: There are simply fewer people willing to fight for and, for that matter, believe in a state entrusted with the promotion of virtue. In this sense, the secularization that has consumed Western societies has been a blessing, but at a price.
The temptation, then, is to assume that a similar process will take hold in the Muslim world—and if it won’t take hold, that it should. These assumptions about history’s inexorable movement toward a more liberal future aren’t necessarily made explicit, but they color much of our discourse about the Middle East. We believe, or want to believe, that things have to get better. Drawing on our experiences as Americans, we find it difficult to envision social progress, or even democracy, without liberalism. In our own context, good things went together, so why shouldn’t they for everyone else?
Even those, like the political scientist Sheri Berman, who acknowledge liberalism and democracy often don’t go together, still hold to the idea of a general historical trajectory. Berman argues that there is nothing exceptional about the Middle East and that the turmoil and violence of the region are “not a bug in political development but a feature of it” and, more generally, that “history shows that illiberal democracy is often a precursor to liberal democracy.”27 The implication is that if this is the way progress happens, then let’s not get too worried about it.
Similarly, with the terrifying rise of the Islamic State and the attendant collapse of regional order, a growing number of analysts have envisioned a process of violence and ideological conflict followed by the triumph of something resembling liberalism. The Egyptian author Tarek Osman envisions a decades-long “cathartic period” and a “tortuous journey” that will reach its conclusion with “the secular current overpower[ing] the religious.”28 The former Belgian official and EU representative Koert Debeuf argues that the failure of political Islam, in its various guises, has undermined the religious certainty of more and more young Arabs.29 This, too, is presented as the prelude to a liberal sensibility. Even Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta, the official government body entrusted with issuing fatwas, or religious edicts, has made a similar argument, albeit with rather different intent. According to Dar al-Ifta, the apparent increase in “atheists”—whom it defines not only as actual atheists but also as converts to other religions and Egyptians who support a “secular” state—is due to extremists pushing people away from religion.30
Not surprisingly, many of these accounts of how Islam might evolve sound awfully similar to the narrative of how Europe came to shed its religious demons. A period of intense religious passion and religiously inspired violence gave way to a slow but relentless process of secularization. Europe by the early twentieth century had secularized considerably, with its insistence on pushing religion as far outside everyday politics as possible. Yet the most precipitous decline in individual religious practice took place, interestingly, after the Second World War, during the 1960s. It was a deepening, and in some ways a final, consolidation of what had been building over centuries. This was, in Henry Kissinger’s words, “a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight.”31 There had been too much blood shed for idealistic dreams or profound moral insights. According to this reading, violence unleashes the possibilities for a secular political order. Violence on such a scale hastens history’s end.
This standard narrative of European enlightenment is convenient not just for the West but also for Muslim liberals, who, understandably from their vantage point, see Islamists and Islamism as a problem, sometimes the problem, to be solved. For the still relatively small minority of liberals in the Middle East, believing that liberal ideas will eventually win out offers purpose and, more important, hope. With the exception of the short-lived “liberal” era during the 1930s and ’40s, liberals have simply been incapable of winning national elections in the Arab world. Their failures aside, liberals, by definition, believe that liberalism is the best foundation for political order and an especially appropriate response for deeply divided, violence-ridden societies. Liberalism, in the classical (rather than the American political) sense of the word, does something very simple: It allows each individual to pursue his or her own conception of the good as long as no one is harmed in the process.
But believing that liberalism is the best way to manage society and believing that it will inevitably come to be are two different things. There is no particular reason why Islamic “reform” should lead to liberalism in the way that the Protestant Reformation paved the way for the Enlightenment and, eventually, modern liberalism. The Reformation was a response to the Catholic Church’s clerical stranglehold over Christian doctrine and practice. What would become Protestantism was inextricably linked to the advent of mass literacy, as a growing number of believers were no longer dependent on the intercession of the church. With the New Testament translated for the first time into German and other European languages, the faithful could directly access the text on their own.
The historical sequencing in the Middle East, as we shall see, has differed in a number of fundamental ways. For starters, Islam has already had a “reformation” of sorts. Late-nineteenth-century “Islamic modernism” was an attempt to make Islam, and premodern Islamic law, safe for modernity (and to make modernity safe for Islam). Islamic modernism, rather than a response to clerical domination, was an attempt to rise to the challenges of secularization, European colonialism, and the creeping authoritarianism of the late Ottoman era.
As for the clerics, they had already been weakened considerably. Co-opted by the state, they fell into disrepute. The sidelining of the clerical class, as it turned out, was not necessarily a positive development. Scholars of Islam such as Noah Feldman, Wael Hallaq, and Mohammad Fadel have documented how a self-regulating clerical class provided a crucial check on the sultan’s executive power and authority. As keepers of God-given law, the clerics ensured that the caliph was bound by something beyond himself.* They were granted at least some degree of autonomy, and, in return, they were to grant legitimacy to leaders who they may have otherwise disagreed with or even opposed. As Feldman notes in The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, “To see the [sharia-based system] as containing the balance of powers so necessary for a functioning, sustainable legal state is to emphasize not why it failed but why it succeeded so spectacularly for as long as it did.”32
If the Reformation was specific to Christianity’s experience with clerical despotism—something with no real corollary in the Islamic context—then it would be odd to expect something similar to take hold in the Muslim world. There are more intangible considerations as well: Islam, because of its fundamentally different relationship to politics, was simply more resistant to secularization.
* * *
OF COURSE, ISLAM, LIKE anything else, can become something other than what it is and what it was. But the point here is not that such a scenario is impossible, but that it is unlikely. Analysts and policy makers can continue to hope for unlikely outcomes, but they should not base their long-term assessments of the region on an improbable succession of events. Even if I am wrong and a secular-liberal order does in fact win out, it will take such a long time, dependent on so many “ifs,” that it makes little sense to incorporate these expectations into our analysis of the region or the making of policy. Even the relative optimists, like Tarek Osman, emphasize that the journey toward liberalism will be “tortuous.” Osman writes, for instance, that the Arab world “will likely disintegrate. Some countries will drift away from the Arab system; others will be divided along tribal, sectarian, and entrenched loyalties.” And that’s just the first phase. This period of collapse will then produce competing Islamist and secular trends. “A war of ideas will ensue,” Osman writes, but “both will fail to ascend to their envisaged ideals.”33 And that’s just the second phase.
A deterministic view of history doesn’t just lead us to hope in the improbable; it can sap the will to act as well. If we believe that history moves with intent—that the forces of reason and modernity will inevitably prevail—then there is a limited role for outside actors. Why do “more” when there’s a risk that Western intervention could backfire and undermine what would otherwise be a natural, evolutionary process? If Arabs are to become exhausted by violence, it is something that they must become exhausted by.
While it isn’t always obvious, perhaps not even to those who imply it, this liberal faith in natural, historical progress pops up repeatedly in the statements of Western officials. This isn’t surprising: It is part of our American faith. The Obama administration seemed to take refuge in the notion that the Islamic State and its ilk would ultimately “be defeated”—in the passive tense—because they didn’t “have a vision that appeals to ordinary people.”34 It was almost as if the arc of history would intervene against them, even if we couldn’t be bothered to muster the effort. In a speech responding to the beheading of the journalist James Foley, Obama said that “one thing we can all agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the twenty-first century.”35 Except it would be nearly impossible to imagine a group like the Islamic State in any century but the twenty-first. The group is a distinctly modern product of a struggle that began in earnest with the decline of the Ottoman caliphate and intensified with the rise of the nation-state. The Islamic State is providing an answer to a question, just as others, like the Muslim Brotherhood, Ennahda in Tunisia, and the AKP in Turkey, are offering their own answers. To the extent that religion figures prominently in any debate over the regional order, each of these groups is making an argument about the role of religion in public life, arguments that I will explore in greater detail in the coming chapters.
Religion and State Building
The issues I discuss throughout this book deal not only with how people practice politics today but also with who they are and what comes “naturally” to them. These are age-old debates. In the near entirety of recorded history, humans, animated by biological imperatives and the will to survive, inclined toward family, tribe, and clan. Yet to establish a state, or something like it, was to ask subjects to transcend these narrow loyalties and believe in something greater. The city-states of ancient Greece, the political community that the Prophet Mohamed established in the seventh century, and the great empires of the medieval era all grappled with this tension. What did it mean to forge a well-ordered state? Was it even possible?
As Plato records in The Republic, Socrates took such concerns to their logical extreme, advocating communal ownership of all property, including women and children. In sharing women and children, says Socrates, the guardians “will not tear the city in pieces by differing about ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’.”36 Socrates is arguing not that his proposals are ideal but, rather, that they’re necessary for the survival and success of the state. Here, we hear early echoes of authoritarian statecraft: The state above all else, whatever the cost. In Socrates’s modest proposal, the cost, apparently, is the dehumanization of the populace. If man naturally inclines toward family, then the solution was, in effect, to make the state into a kind of larger, all-encompassing family.
To prioritize one’s tribe or “family” to the exclusion of others, even if that meant to kill, is—or at least was—our universal condition. As Atran notes: “Across most of human history and cultures, violence against other groups was considered a moral virtue, a classification necessary for killing masses of people innocent of harming others.”37 Today, it may seem like the West has moved well beyond such sentiments through a successful (though often violent) centuries-long process of state building. All states require some unifying set of norms and ideas that bind citizens together. In our own Western context, liberalism and nationalism, or more likely some combination of the two, have provided this societal glue. “That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior,” writes Fukuyama, “is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts.”38 A predominantly secular nationalism, however, isn’t the only solution to the dilemmas of state building. As events in the Middle East have demonstrated, liberalism and secular nationalism are unlikely candidates for the provision of stable, legitimate order in the region.
In the broader sweep of history, the heyday of Arab nationalism, peaking in the 1960s, stands as an aberration.39 Nationalism entered into decline when it couldn’t deliver on Arab unity or real economic development. As an ideology, it had little intrinsic value beyond its ability to offer something temporal. After the trials of colonialism, it could offer pride and self-esteem, but those sentiments would erode under the weight of accumulated failure. While Islamism is not immune to some of these same concerns, it is more resilient. Islamists might fail, but Islamism, broadly understood, is an argument about the centrality of religion in public life, an argument that is difficult to discredit. As Fukuyama writes in The Origins of Political Order, “Religious beliefs are never held by their adherents to be simple theories that can be discarded if proved wrong; they are held to be unconditionally true, and there are usually heavy social and psychological penalties attached to asserting their falsehood.”40 This, I will argue, is even more so the case for Islam.
States need asabiyah, to use the fourteenth-century historian Ibn Khaldun’s term, to bind together. Asabiyah, roughly translated as social solidarity or group consciousness, provides cohesion and shared purpose.41 It can take many forms, but the form that has proved most powerful and lasting in the Muslim world is intimately tied to and shaped by Islam. This does not mean that Islam has to be the overarching raison d’être of the modern state. My proposition is more modest: Islam will need to play a significant role in the forging of political community, particularly where political community is weak. Given Islam’s inherent flexibility—scholars and ideologues alike have proposed “Islamic socialism,” “Islamic capitalism,” “Islamic democracy”—the faith can, perhaps counterintuitively, accommodate much that is “modern.” For the religious, religion can offer both meaning and legitimacy to ideas that might otherwise seem temporal and temporary. But to exclude Islam or to hope for—or, worse, impose—a top-down secularism requires yet more violence. Excluding religion undermines the social fabric of conservative societies, as in Egypt, and more secular ones, as in Turkey, because it forces those who do believe that Islam should play a central role in political life—and there are many—to make a choice. And it’s not a choice one can reasonably expect millions of people to make without provoking considerable disaffection, a disaffection that can often provoke a spiraling of political violence.
Is There an Arab Problem?
A book that claims to make an argument about Islam cannot ignore examples outside the Arab world. The Islamic Republic of Iran, the product of the Iranian revolution of 1979, is one of the longest-running experiments in fusing religion with the constitutional and democratic trappings of the modern state. Iran, however, is outside the scope of this study, since its theological orientation—one based on the innovative and relatively new Shiite doctrine of “guardianship of the clerics”—has not been seriously attempted anywhere else and is anathema to the Sunni Islamists who are the focus of this book. Sunni Islam simply has no comparable notion of clerical rule.
More relevant for our purposes are the South and Southeast Asian nations that together comprise hundreds of millions of the world’s approximately 1.6 billion Muslims. Here, too, as in the Arab world, Islam plays an outsized role in political life. Hailed as “models” of pluralism and democratic success, Indonesia and Malaysia feature significantly more sharia ordinances than Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Algeria, Morocco, or Lebanon, to name only a few. What’s perhaps most interesting about these two cases, however, is how demands for sharia legislation have spread well beyond the usual Islamist suspects, enjoying the sanction and support of ostensibly secular ruling parties. As Joseph Liow, the leading scholar of Islamism in Southeast Asia, notes, most Malaysian states have laws on the books regarding sharia criminal offenses, backed by government-sanctioned religious bodies. In some cases, he writes, “a large segment” of the secular ruling party has been “actively involved in agitating for the implementation of sharia.”42 This is all the more striking considering that Malaysia is more religiously diverse than most Arab countries, with Muslims representing only around 60 percent of the population.
Unlike Malaysia, which still has authoritarian features, Indonesia is a thriving pluralistic democracy. Democratization has gone hand in hand with decentralization, which has allowed more conservative provinces and localities to experiment with religiously inspired legislation. In one article, the Indonesia scholar Robin Bush documents sharia bylaws implemented in South Sulawesi, West Java, and other regions. They include requiring civil servants and students to wear “Muslim clothing,” requiring women to wear the head scarf to receive local government services, and requiring demonstrations of Quranic reading ability for admission to university or receipt of a marriage license.43 But there’s a catch. According to a study by the Jakarta-based Wahid Institute, most of these regulations have come from officials of secular parties like Golkar.44 How is this possible? The implementation of sharia law is part of a mainstream discourse that cuts across ideological and party lines, again suggesting that Islamism is not necessarily about Islamists but is about a broader population that is open to Islam playing a central role in law and governance. As Liow writes, “the piecemeal implementation of sharia by-laws across Indonesia has not elicited widespread opposition from local populations.”45 It is very difficult to have liberalism without liberals. Islamism, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily require Islamists.
Democracy is about respecting and reflecting popular sentiment, and Malaysia and Indonesia are still conservative countries, in some ways deeply so. According to Pew surveys conducted in 2011–12, 93 percent of both Malaysian and Indonesian Muslims say religion is “very important” in their lives, easily surpassing the percentage who say so in Egypt, Turkey, and Tunisia.46 Religiosity, of course, does not necessarily translate into support for Islamic legislation, but in Southeast Asia it apparently does: 86 percent of Malaysian Muslims and 72 percent of Indonesian Muslims favor making Islamic law the official law of the land in their countries.47
In sum, it wasn’t that religion was less of a “problem” in Malaysia and Indonesia; it’s that solutions were more readily available. Islam might have been exceptional, but the political system in both countries was more interested in accommodating this reality than in suppressing it. There wasn’t an entrenched secular elite in the same way there was in many Arab countries. Meanwhile, Islamist parties were not as strong, so polarization wasn’t as deep and destabilizing. Islamism was the province not of one party but of most. In a sense, Islamists need secularists and secularists need Islamists. But in Malaysia and Indonesia, there was a stronger “middle,” and that middle had settled around a relatively uncontroversial conservative consensus.
As we can see, in such a diverse range of countries, Islam has proved remarkably resilient despite the decades-long pressures of modernization and secularization. This popular desire for Islam to be at the center of public life expresses itself in different and complex ways—either as support for Islamist parties, support for Islam, support for Islamic law, or all of the above. My point here, though, is simple enough: Islam’s distinctive relationship to politics goes well beyond the Arab world or the Middle East. In the chapters that follow, however, I have chosen to focus on several cases, which are representative of the problems of religion and state in contexts where the role of Islam has not yet been “normalized.” Two countries in particular, Turkey and Tunisia, are “hard cases” for my argument. They experienced some of the most vigorous and long-lasting suppression of religious expression, to the extent that societies were permanently rerendered. These were, are, and will remain secularized societies, at least compared with their neighbors. Yet even here—particularly here—Islamist parties have enjoyed unusual success, rising to the halls of government.
The fact that the most democratic countries mentioned here—Tunisia, Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia—are the ones where Islamism or Islamists, or both, have fared better is no accident. Democracy went hand in hand with Islamization. To put it differently, where many assume that democracy can’t exist with Islamism, the opposite is more likely true. What distinguishes Indonesia and Malaysia, or their electorates, isn’t some readiness to embrace liberalism or secularism. The difference is that their brand of Islamic politics garners much less attention in the West, in part because these two countries aren’t seen as strategically vital and, perhaps more important, because the passage of Islamic legislation is simply less controversial domestically. In Indonesia and Malaysia, there has been a coming to terms with Islam’s role in public life, whereas in much of the Middle East, there hasn’t—at least not yet.
A Way Out?
A handful of European countries grappled with similar, though perhaps less existential, questions as recently as the 1950s. As centralized, cohesive states such as Germany and France coalesced around them, countries like Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands struggled to address deep divisions among subcultures in their own societies. These countries soon became models of “consensual democracy,” where the subcultures agreed to creative power-sharing arrangements. For example, in Austria a “coalition committee,” in which socialist and Catholic leaders were equally represented, made the most sensitive decisions, while in Switzerland the four largest parties were guaranteed representation in the executive branch.
But the Middle East’s divides are of a different nature. Countries like Egypt or Tunisia may seem homogenous—the vast majority of the population, after all, belong to one ethnicity, one sect, and one religion—but in some ways this makes the problem all the more vexing. Consensual democracy works best when there are multiple centers of power in society, none of which is strong enough to dominate on its own. In much of the Middle East, however, both Islamists and non-Islamists believe they represent the “true” majority of citizens. Unlike in Belgium, where there are distinct groups of Flemish and Walloon that can be clearly identified, Islamists and non-Islamists are different, but not different enough.
With Shia and Sunni or Muslims and Christians, there is little doubt about who is what. The lines are drawn quite clearly for those who wish to see them. But what about when the enemy is a brother, daughter, sister, or son? An optimist might see this as proof that it can only get so bad: It’s within the family, after all. But friends and family can turn on each other, and in Egypt they have. As Egypt’s former minister of interior Osama Heikal put it, “The enemy can be our own neighbor. The enemy is in our own homes.”48 In this sense, both sides in the Egyptian conflict, Islamists and their opponents, are historical determinists of a sort. They each think they can persuade their countrymen to join their side and win the war of ideas—if only the conditions are right and they have enough time.
As Arend Lijphart, the leading scholar of consensual democracy, wrote in a classic 1969 article, competing subcultures in countries like the Netherlands and Switzerland were minority groups that had little, if any hope, of becoming majorities. Rather than imposing their will on the nation, they were more interested in autonomy and promoting their own communal interests. Each subculture had its own schools, institutions, hospitals, and businesses and was, to an extent, geographically segmented. It helped that Catholics could, for the most part, avoid interacting with Socialists. According to Lijphart, “subcultures with widely divergent outlooks and interests may coexist without necessarily being in conflict. Conflict arises only when they are in contact with each other.”49 Lijphart refers to this as “a kind of voluntary apartheid policy.”50 But separation, voluntary or forced, requires separate parts. And those separate parts simply do not exist in, for example, the Egyptian context.
This not particularly inspiring idea—that the more people interact, the more they dislike each other—undermines a core tenet of the liberal faith: If only opposing sides talked to each other in good faith, then reason would prevail. This idea inspires our rounds of diplomacy and our educational-exchange programs. This faith in our better angels is commendable (and probably a good way to lead a happier life), but that doesn’t necessarily make it an accurate reflection of life as it’s lived and politics as it’s practiced. Sometimes, reducing contact between opposing sides and allowing for autonomous communities are ways of accepting that some differences cannot be bridged. The best that can be done is to manage them. This is more difficult in mixed communities. But, even here, recognizing foundational divides and taking that as a starting point is probably a more fruitful approach to perhaps one day transcending them. To put it a little bit differently, people can hate each other all they want—as long as they agree to hate each other within the political process, rather than outside it.
* * *
HOW DOES ONE SHARE power or, at least, make the battle over it less totalizing? Lessons from successful consensual democracies, even if they don’t fit perfectly, offer crucial insights on modifying the winner-takes-all nature of Middle East politics. The basic principles are simple enough: do as much as possible to share, disperse, restrain, and decentralize power. Extra care must be given to ensure electoral minorities have a stake in the system so that, when they lose, they have less incentive to renege on the democratic process.
Where the role of religion proves too divisive, opposing parties, at the start of a transition, could agree to “postpone” debates on divisive ideological issues—such as on Islamizing the legal or educational systems—for a set period of time. Such an interim period would regularize democratic competition to the extent that it becomes the “only game in town.” At the conclusion of this period, the democratic process would be better equipped to withstand ideological polarization. Ultimately, though, foundational questions over the role of Islam and Islamic law cannot be forever placed gently to the side. They will have to be addressed, and democratic outcomes will have to be respected. In conservative societies—and even in less conservative ones—a prominent role for religion may be unavoidable. If there is enough of a demand for Islamization, someone will have to supply it.
To come to terms with these realities requires a leap of faith from an international community that continues to look skeptically at expressions of religion in everyday politics. In the light of the Islamic State’s success as well as the Muslim Brotherhood’s many failures, questions that should have been answered long ago are now being asked once again in Western capitals. Are Islamism and democracy compatible? Or even, are Islam and democracy compatible?
While any number of Islamist groups failed to meet the challenge of the Arab Spring, there is a different, deeper failure, one that is likely to plague the region for decades to come: the fundamental inability of secular state systems to accommodate Islamist participation in the democratic process. The illusion that Islamists—and even Islamism—can be eliminated through brute force is a long-standing one. It’s also a fool’s errand. You can try to kill an organization, but killing an idea—one deeply rooted in society—is a different matter entirely.
In the coming critical years and decades, no party, movement, or ideological current will be able to claim “victory,” at least not in any definitive sense. Too much blood has been shed for that. But if the people of the Middle East are to establish—after a long period of violent struggle—a more stable and legitimate order, Islam will have to have its place. It’s only really a question of what kind of “Islam,” when, and at what cost.
Copyright © 2016 by Shadi Hamid