Political Islam in the Mediterranean: the view from democratization studies

Abstract

Contemporary perceptions of, and responses to, the growth of political Islam on the southern shores of the Mediterranean are still heavily influenced by traditional orientalist views on ‘Islam’ and by realist notions of regional security. This situation contributes to the formation of predominantly state-centric responses to what is perceived to be a monolithic Islamist threat. The issues of democratization and democracy promotion are downplayed in the face of security concerns. When addressed, liberal-inspired views of democracy and civil society are nonetheless problematically deployed in a social and political context that does not duplicate well the conditions met in previous ‘waves’ of successful democratization elsewhere. The prospects for democratization are linked to a situation where moderate Islamist movements are expected to endorse liberal-democratic values – albeit reluctantly and by default – and where state-imposed constraints on political liberalization can only slow down the process of implementation of electoral democracy. Far too little attention is paid to the alternative forms of participation that are devised locally by Islamists, as well as to the relevance of standard electoral processes in the context of refined authoritarian systems.

Keywords:

• democracy
• orientalism
• Islamism
• international relations
• security
• Middle East politics

Notes

Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers.

See for example Salamé, Democracy without Democrats?; Ayubi, Political Islam; Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State; Arjomand, From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam.

See Diamond and Plattner, The Global Resurgence of Democracy; Esposito and Voll, Islam and Democracy.

Fish, ‘Islam and Authoritarianism’; Tessler, ‘Islam and Democracy in the Middle East’.

Eickelman and Piscatori, Muslim Politics.

For an interesting postcolonial perspective on this theme, see Sayyid, A Fundamental Fear.

Halpern, The Politics of Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa.

Halpern, ‘Middle Eastern Studies’, 111.

See Binder, The Ideological Revolution in the Middle East; Rustow, ‘Turkey: The Modernity of Tradition’.

Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture; Lewis, The Political Language of Islam.

Bill and Leiden, Politics in the Middle East, 133.

Ibid.

Hudson, Arab Politics.

In the modern context asabiyya is a solidarity group founded on personal allegiances that derives directly or indirectly from clan-based or tribal solidarity networks and that displays a distinct ‘group-spirit’ or esprit-de-corps. See Khoury and Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East; Roy, ‘Patronage and Solidarity Groups: Survival or Reformation’.

Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society in the Middle East.

Abu-Lughod, ‘Retreat from the Secular Path?’.

For an early (and not altogether committed) illustration of this trend see Binder, Islamic Liberalism.

This is despite many attempts to introduce more fully regional specialisms in the larger social science debates. See for example, Tessler, Nachtwey, and Banda, Area Studies and Social Science.

Huntington, ‘Will More Countries Become Democratic’; Huntington, The Third Wave.

In his 1984 article, the only Islamic studies specialist that Huntington refers to in order to back his argument that Islamic political culture is an obstacle to democratic principles is the orientalist and political activist Daniel Pipes.

For a trenchant critique see Sadowski, ‘The New Orientalism and the Democracy Debate’.

See Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World.

Compare Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ with Huntington, The Third Wave.

Karatnycky, ‘The 2001 Freedom House Survey’.

This is not to say that notions of ‘political culture’ cannot be deployed usefully in the region – particularly to provide accounts of political change that avoid various forms of socio-economic determinism. See Hudson, ‘The Political Culture Approach to Arab Democratization’.

See Perthes, ‘America's “Greater Middle East” and Europe’, and compare Bilgin, ‘Whose “Middle East”?’

See Adler et al., The Convergence of Civilizations; Pace, The Politics of Regional Identity.

See Emerson and Youngs, Political Islam and European Foreign Policy.

Halliday, ‘The Politics of Islam’.

O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule.

Roy, The Failure of Political Islam; Kepel, The Revenge of God. Both Kepel and Roy would later add a corrective to their earlier narratives on the development of Islamism.

Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey; Lewis, The Political Language of Islam.

On Turkey see, Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey. More generally see Terence Ball, James Farr, and Russell L. Hanson, Political Innovation and Conceptual Change.

See for example the online outputs of the Pew Global Attitudes Project, http://pewglobal.org and World Values Survey, http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org. See also Tessler, ‘Islam and Democracy in the Middle East’; Fattah, Democratic Values in the Muslim World.

Gellner, Conditions of Liberty.

Norton, Civil Society in the Middle East.

See Hawthorne, ‘Middle Eastern Democracy’; Eickelman and Salvatore, ‘The Public Sphere and Muslim Identities’.

O'Donnell, Counterpoints.

Yom, ‘Civil Society and Democratization’.

Hefner, Civil Islam.

See Adler et al., The Convergence of Civilizations.

See Volpi, ‘Pseudo-Democracy in the Muslim World’.

Carothers, Critical Mission, 164.

Diamond, ‘Thinking about Hybrid Regimes’, 24.

Posusney, ‘Enduring Authoritarianism’; Bellin, ‘The Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East’.

See Roy, ‘Patronage and Solidarity Groups’; Collins, ‘The Political Role of Clans in Central Asia’.

Ahmed, Islam under Siege.

Perthes, Arab Elites; Lust-Okar, Structuring Conflict in the Arab World.

Brumberg, ‘The Trap of Liberalized Autocracy’; Volpi, ‘Algeria's Pseudo-Democratic Politics’.

Hinnebusch, ‘Authoritarian Persistence, Democratization Theory and the Middle East’.

Salvatore and Eickelman, Public Islam and the Common Good; Esposito and Voll, Islam and Democracy.

Zakaria, The Future of Freedom.

See Brown, Hamzawy, and Ottaway, ‘Islamist Movements and the Democratic Process in the Arab World’.

For some interesting recent works doing just that, see Yavuz, Islamic Political Identity in Turkey; Mahmood, Politics of Piety.

Hirschkind, ‘Civic Virtue and Religious Reason’.

See Volpi, ‘Pseudo-Democracy in the Muslim World’.

This situation evidently contributes to fostering of a mutual lack of recognition. See Emerson and Youngs, Political Islam and European Foreign Policy.

Asad, Formations of the Secular.

See Tully, Strange Multiplicity.

The case of Shi'a governance in Iraq might prove to be an interesting case in point. See Gleave, ‘Conceptions of Authority in Iraqi Shi'ism’; Cole, ‘The Ayatollahs and Democracy in Iraq’.

Stepan, ‘Religion, Democracy and the “Twin Tolerations”’, 42.