Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Helfont Reviews Lacroix’s “Awakening Islam”

A superb review at The New Republic’s on-line book review, The Book, by Samuel Helfont (a Ph.D. student at Princeton) of Stéfane Lacroix’s Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Saudi Arabia (HUP 2011).  After noting that Saudi Arabia has always posed something of a “blind spot” to scholars of Islamic societies, Helfont gives a very good summary of this book and concludes with this:

In the era of the Arab Spring, it is enticing to see Arab history as moving steadily toward a more democratic and less authoritarian future: the will of the people has finally challenged and even overthrown entrenched dictatorial regimes. But again the kingdom of Saudi Arabia seems like a holdover from a past era, and in the surge of scholarship that is beginning to appear on popular movements and democracy in the Arab World, Saudi Arabia may again seem passé and unimportant. This would be a mistake. If the history of Saudi Arabia teaches anything, it is that Western social scientists often miss the mark when assessing where the Middle East is headed. While it would be tempting to assume that the Saudi monarchy will fade into the ancient sands of the Arabian Peninsula, destined to be replaced by a more modern and democratic state, it would be incredibly dangerous to do so.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: A propos of this review, see also this dreadful news story about the execution of a woman in Saudi Arabia for practicing sorcery.  (h/t Volokh).

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Egyptian Military Forces the Issue

This is a disconcerting development.  The conflict seems to be one between democracy and liberalism.  If the democratically elected majority is not permitted to assume power because the military forces an unwanted diversity of representation down the throats of the electorate, one possible outcome is backlash and further polarization.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Beliefs of the Muslim Brotherhood

It is increasingly difficult to get an accurate sense  from the media of what the Muslim Brotherhood, which has won the largest portion of the vote in Egypt, actually believes about the relationship of religion and politics.  The NY Times tends to make comparative assessments only — more moderate than the Salafis (who won roughly 30% of the vote), less democratic than the protesters in Tahrir Square, and so on — leading a reader to believe that the Brotherhood stands in a kind of moderate position.

Here is another data point about the beliefs of the Muslim Brotherhood — taken in large measure from a translation of a book, “Jihad is the Way,” by the former leader of the Brotherhood in Egypt (until 2002), Mustafa Mashhur.  The story reports that the organizing principles of the book are these:

  1. Muslims are “masters of the world”
  2. Islamic nation’s “rightful position… the teachers of humanity”
  3. “There is no other option but Jihad for Allah”
  4. Fighting Israel is “Jihad against the criminal, thieving gangs of Zion”
  5. Has the [Muslim] Brotherhood grown weary of the challenges, thrown down their guns and abandoned Jihad?!! No!”
Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Who’s Sick Now?

Here is an interesting story at the intersection of geo-politics, economics, and religion, about Turkey’s increasing skepticism about becoming part of the EU.  From the story:

A century ago when the Ottoman Empire was crumbling, Turkey acquired the unwelcome nickname “the sick man of Europe.” Now many Turks cannot help but gloat that Turkey’s economy is forecast to grow at a 7.5 percent rate this year while Europe is sputtering.

“Those who called us ‘sick’ in the past are now ‘sick’ themselves,” Zafer Caglayan, Turkey’s minister of economy, said recently. “May God grant them recovery.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

More on the Egyptian Election

From the excellent FaithWorld news source, it looks like the Salafi bloc may have won as much as 30% of the vote.  A bit:

The Salafi movement wants to model Egypt’s future on Islam’s past. If the first results of the country’s parliamentary elections are anything to go by, many Egyptians agree with them.

Ultra-conservative Islamists may have won 20 to 30 percent of the vote in the first leg of Egypt’s three-stage parliamentary vote, an outcome that has surprised and alarmed many Egyptians. They are worried about what this might mean for freedoms and tolerance in the Arab world’s most populous nation.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Grote & Roder eds., “Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries”

Here is a very substantial and extremely timely book edited by Rainer Grote and Tilmann Röder (both of the Max Planck Institute), Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity (OUP 2011).  The publisher’s description follows.

Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity examines the question of whether something similar to an “Islamic constitutionalism” has emerged out of the political and constitutional upheaval witnessed in many parts of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and Southern Asia. In order to identify its defining features and to assess the challenges that Islamic constitutionalism poses to established concepts of constitutionalism, this book offers an integrated analysis of the complex frameworks in Islamic countries, drawing on the methods and insights of comparative constitutional law, Islamic law, international law and legal history. European and North American experiences are used as points of reference against which the peculiar challenges, and the specific answers given to those challenges in the countries surveyed, can be assessed. The book also examines ways in which the key concepts of constitutionalism, including fundamental rights, separation of powers, democracy and rule of law, may be adapted to an Islamic context, thus providing valuable new insights on the prospects for a genuine renaissance of constitutionalism in the Islamic world in the wake of the “Arab spring.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Bayart on the Secular and the Laic in France and Turkey

An interesting piece in Le Monde by Jean-François Bayart (Centre Nationale de la Récherche Scientifique) on the meanings of laïcité, more (as with the Pera book) as a piece of cultural anthropology than for the substance of the views expressed.  The author’s sense and description of the differences between French and Turkish laïcité are particularly worth reading in this respect.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Tunisia: Second Republic or Sixth Caliphate?

Of all the revolutions of the Arab Spring, the overthrow of Ben Ali in Tunisia gave western observers the most reason for optimism. Tunisia, they said, is a secular place with strong cultural ties to Europe; one can legitimately hope that a moderate democracy will take root there, now that the dictator is gone. Maybe that’s a reasonable prediction. This week, however, a  leader of the moderate Islamist party that took first place in last month’s elections for a new national assembly raised eyebrows by invoking the revival of the caliphate, the Islamic superstate that  Ataturk abolished in 1923. Hamadi Jbeli,  likely to be Tunisia’s next Prime Minister, told supporters at a rally that they were living in “a new cycle of civilization,” a “sixth caliphate, God willing.” A party spokesman says Jbeli was merely referring to an end to government corruption, but a secularist party that has been working with the Islamists to form a coalition government has suspended cooperation in protest.  “We thought we were going to build a second republic,” a representative of the secular Ettakatol party told Reuters, “not a sixth caliphate.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Does Democracy Reduce Religious/Political Terrorism?

Here is a well-written and acute review by Samuel Helfant of Katerina Dalacoura’s (LSE) interesting book, Islamist Terrorism and Democracy in the Middle East (CUP 2011).  As Helfant notes, the book was written before the upheaval in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, etc., but its themes and thesis are more relevant now than ever.  Here’s a bit from the review.  — MOD

The link between repressive political systems and terrorism seems obvious. It is not difficult to imagine why some people without the means to express their political will peacefully would eventually turn to violence. Add to this the findings of the democratic peace theory, which highlight the fact that no democratic state has ever gone to war with another democratic state, and democracy would appear to be an apt remedy for the political violence, including terrorism, that has plagued the Islamic world in recent decades. Thus, countless studies since September 11 have argued that democracy in the Middle East could “drain the swamps” of Islamic terrorism. Indeed, this idea formed the theoretical foundation for the Bush administration’s adoption of its “freedom agenda” as a central tenet in its war on terrorism.

In practice, however, the link between political systems and political violence has never been as strong as some would suggest. The unfortunate truth is that authoritarian regimes are rather good at preventing terrorism. There were only a few reported incidents of political terrorism in the Soviet Union, and in 2003 the London-based World Terrorism Index classified North Korea as the state “least exposed to international terrorism.” In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that democracy, and especially the process of democratization, can actually encourage terrorism. It should not be surprising that the Middle East is no exception to these trends, and empirical studies on the links between political participation and moderation among Islamists, such as Jillian Schwedler’s important book Faith in Moderation, have come to similar conclusions about the questionable link between political systems and extremism.

Yet books such as Schwedler’s have been limited to studies focusing on one or two groups over a specific period of time. Dalacoura’s work, by contrast, offers an analytical tour of the major Islamist movements in the Middle East. Through a plethora of case studies, Dalacoura covers a wide geographical and political range, and with a social-scientific methodology that separates her work from that of pundits and journalists, she challenges hypotheses instead of simply searching for evidence to reinforce received wisdom. What she finds, across the board, is that the links between political freedom and political violence are unsubstantiated.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Not spring-time for everyone

A column by Ross Douthat about the ravages of democracy and the plight of the Coptic Christians that is well-worth reading.  — MOD