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Maurizio Geri. PhD student Final Paper. Religious foundations of identity and conflict The evolution of political Islam in the Middle East and the democratization processes of the Arab Spring In this paper, I analyze the historical evolution of political Islam and its insertion in the events of the Arab Spring. My main question is: is political Islam compatible with the so called ‘modernity’ and with democratic values? Specifically the final research focus is to understand if today, after the revolutions of the Arab Spring, political Islam is closer or farther from a democratic system and a modern state. I examine in particular the cases of Tunisia and Egypt, the former that seems to have succeed, at least for now, in the transition from authoritarian regime to a democracy, and the latter that seems to have failed. The paper starts with an introduction on the relationship between the concepts of ‘religious and secular’, and ‘tradition and modernity’. Then, with a brief philosophical and historical excursus of Islamic thinking and Islamic politics in the Middle East, it explains how modern political Islam was born. In particular through specific Islamic thinkers, from Abduh to Al-Afghani, from Maududi to Qutb, the paper shows how Islamic thinking evolved from a ‘modernist’ form to an ‘Islamist’ one, creating the moral basis for the future political Islam. Through the evolution of Islamic politics in the Middle East, from the Ottoman Empire to the post-Ottoman Empire order, we see how the process of secularization, modernization and the Islamic revival, created the historical basis of the contemporary political Islam. The paper goes on trying to understand if political Islam is compatible with democracy, analyzing in particular how the Arab Spring opened space for a new development of political Islam, and how other examples, like Indonesia, show that Islam can be a fundamental inspiration for the policies without becoming a straightjacket through Islamist parties. The Arab Spring phenomenon is examined through the lens of American scholar Jocelyn Cesari, who recently made a breakthrough argument about “unsecular democracies”. The paper finally analyzes the results of Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, to see if the two different Islamist parties were more or less inclusive and so more or less able to fit in a modern and democratic state, even as “unsecular democracies”. Introduction. Religious versus secular: is ‘tradition against modernity’ or is the issue more complex than that? As Micklethwait and Wooldridge argue in their recent book, “God is back” in our societies. Two centuries after the French and American revolutions that separated the church from the state, religion is back in building the identities of our societies and in the definition of our politics. We just need to look at recent events around the world, from the religious terrorism to the religious influence in public affairs and governments (from India to the US, from Israel to Sri Lanka) to see how everywhere there is a resurgence of religion in the life of the citizens and in the policies of states and non-state actors. But this phenomena started already some decades ago. As José Casanova argued, since the 1980s, religious traditions around the world, from Islamic fundamentalism to Catholic liberation theology, started to come out of the private sphere, going back into the public life, causing the "deprivatization" of religion in contemporary life. Today this has been empowered by many elements, from globalization to the technological revolution, that made the distinction between private and public sphere faded. And at a scholar level, also in international studies, we have increased the interest in studying the relationship between religion and politics, in particular since Habermas popularized the term of “post-secular society”. So how did we arrived at this point? Had God really left in our modern history and today returned to our societies? If so how did it happen, when and where? In Europe after the Holy Roman Empire and the rule of Cuius regio, eius religio ("whose realm, his religion") the religious wars of the XVII century, the “Thirty years” war, ended with the Peace of Westphalia and the creation of sovereign national states. Since then, the continent started a process of “privatization of religions”, that made faith gradually become part of the private sphere and not anymore of the public one, culminating with the “awakening” movement of the Enlightenment, between the XVII and the XVIII century. Later, the French revolution, created the basis of modern states, with the separation between church and state, which became the fundamental part of secularism and modernity, at least in continental Europe. On the other side in the American continent, this separation had arrived already with the settlers’ experience of religious persecution, and later the American Revolution reinforced that separation together with religious tolerance and ‘free choice’ among different creeds. This created a difference between the two continents that is still present today. In Europe the important element was the secularization of societies and the centrality of state rules (with the marginalization of religion) In the United States instead, the religion was an important element of society, as the principles of freedom in the American Constitution also protected religious diversity, including the Islamic religion even if not present in the country yet. Nevertheless, outside the Western world, the process of modernization didn’t happen in the same way. The question then become: why? We could argue that the Christians belief of “give to Caesar what belong to Caesar and give to God what belongs to God”, represented the basic prescription of a separation between church and state in Christian societies differently from the rest. But it took almost two millennia before to realize it with the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment movement in Europe. Therefore even in Christian societies there was not an inherent predisposition towards secularism. We can argue that it had been the peculiar development of those societies, toward individual freedom and emancipation of citizens, that made the distinction between religion and public life as the fundamental definition of the modern state. On the other side of the Mediterranean, according to the main scholars of Islam, the Muslims always believed that the primary act of their faith was “to implement God’s will in private and public life”, and so they have always seen in Islam a total way of life. This doesn’t mean though that religion in Muslim countries has never been separated from the politics. The case of Indonesia for example, the current biggest Islamic country in the world, with a clear separation between the two spheres (also thanks to the official philosophy of ‘Pancasila’ comprising in its five principles the one of democracy) is there to demonstrate it. But the case of not separation between religion and politics, private and public life, has been mostly the norm in the Middle East, where the Islamic religion was the fundamental identity of the Caliphates, from the Rashidun to the Ottoman one. Religion and state have been very much interrelated in the region until the WWI, when the Ottoman Empire was destroyed and substituted by states built on the model of the European ones (with the colonization and the division in spheres of influence started with the Sykes Picot agreements).Secularization and modernization in the Middle East therefore became synonymous of “Westernization”, as they arrived in the Middle East through the colonization of European powers imposing their models. Actually leading historians like Bernard Lewis argue that the ‘modern’ (and Western) history in the Middle East started already with the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt and Syria at the turn of XIX century, when it became clear that a European power started to play a major role in the area. Among many in particular two countries were built on the secular European model, that confined religion to private space: Turkey and Tunisia. But also in these two countries the religion was not completely blocked from influencing politics. Both the countries for example required Muslim education and put Islamic institutions under state control, without creating a state equidistance with all religions, besides the fact that Tunisia, as many other countries in the Middle east maintained Islam as religion of the state in the Constitution. As Picard argues “in these ‘secular’ states, religious institutions are not autonomous from the state, and Islam remains a constant reference, implicit or explicit, for the regime (Webb 2008)”. Therefore, as we can see, the interrelation between religion and politics in the Middle East remained also during the modernization/Westernization times. But this in reality has been the case of Italy too until recently. Italy had Catholicism as a ‘state religion’ until 1984, with special laws for blasphemy against Catholic religion only and compulsory teaching of Catholic religion in the schools. And today in Italy there is still religious inequality as teaching of only Catholic religion remains in place (even if not compulsory anymore) as well as Christian symbols like the crucifix are still present in the school buildings (even if the European Court of Human Rights defined it a violation of religious freedom already in 2009). Therefore also the so called ‘secular state’ in the Western world has never been something homogenous, and if Islam in one of most secular Muslim country like Turkey can be defined a ‘hegemonic religion’ still today, the same could have been said of Catholicism in Italy until not long time ago. Besides this Western secular countries like Britain, Germany or Canada, had a state religion until recently and still provide support for recognized religions. France instead, that has been anticlerical in its foundations, have a different approach respect to the treatment of religions (arriving today to ban the wearing of Muslim headscarves for security reasons). As we can see therefore there has not been only one model for modernization and secularization neither in Europe, where countries with strong religious identities took different paths respect to countries with a less strong one, without a clear contraposition between more traditional ‘religious’ states and more modern ‘secular’ states. Even if the distinction between religious and political institutions has not been common in the Islamic countries, in the Islamic jurisprudence instead religious and political authority sometimes have been considered in different spheres. According to Islamic jurists of the Middle Age as Al-Mawardi or Ibn Taymiyya for example “the state was not a direct expression of Islam but a secular institution whose duty was to uphold Islam; the real community of Muslim was the community of scholars and holy men who carried the legacy of the Prophet in the daily life”. So, even if there was not a complete distinction of the two spheres, as the state identity was based on the state’s duty in upholding Islam, there was neither a complete identification. So how we arrived today, in the Middle East to the Islamic revival and the creation of the so called “political Islam”? According to some scholars, as we will see later, this has been exactly the effect of the Western imposed secularization process itself. Olivier Roy for example, argues that instead of freeing the world from religion, secularization has encouraged a kind of ‘holy ignorance’, an anti-intellectualism that promised immediate emotional access to the sacred element of life. The secularization process, dividing religion from culture, gave religion a new autonomy and so the possibility of expansion going back to its traditions. The religious revivalism consequently would not be a reaction against secularization but a product of it. This has been also the position of other scholars, like Jocelyn Cesari, according to whom political Islam is also a product of the secularization. I will be back on this theme later but for now is important to understand that, as Talal Asad, Shmuel Eisenstadt and Jurgen Habermass among others argued, we need to question the dyad of modernization-secularization if we really want to analyze the current situation of religious revival in both non secular and secular states. Modernity cannot be considered a monolithic concept, given the fact that its meaning changed with the space and with the time. And we need to divide the modernization theory from the secularization theory because the two things don’t go necessarily together. Secularization in the Middle East has not been only a product of modernity but also of ‘Westernization’ and it is not a homogenous concept, there are different cases in which secular means something different. This affects also how we should analyze Arab Spring and its impact on the historical evolution of political Islam. If there is no such black and white division between modernity and tradition or secular and religious, then a new space opens for different type of states and democracies, like ‘unsecular democracies’. In these type of democracies political Islam is not necessary a traditional Islamism based on Sharia law, but a more dynamic force that can adapt to different circumstances and periods. Finally scholars often try to understand the relationship between Islam and modernity just through historical lenses, but we also need to understand the sociological aspect of this issue. Muslim societies evolved and transformed not only through history but thorough their social structure based on the relationship among religion, economy and politics and the emergence of the globalization affected this structure more than what we think as some recent studies argue. But let’s see now how the actual Islamic thought evolved during the XIX and XX century, contemporarily to the ‘modernization’ and ‘Westernization’ of the societies in the Middle East, before and during the colonization periods, shifting between reformism and conservatism. A short excursus of the main thinkers since XIX century will help to understand how they may have affected the relationship between religion and politics, between Islam and the building of the nation state until today. The philosophical basis of political Islam: the Islamic thought from the modernists of XIX century to the Islamists of the XX One of the first Islamic movements that emerged in the XIX century, in reaction to the perceived attack of the West on the Muslim world and values with colonization and Westernization, was the Islamic modernism or ‘modernist Salafism’ (to not confuse with the current Salafism of the Jihadist groups). The ‘modernist Salafism’ focus was to maintain an authentic Islam in the context of modernity and it had anti-colonal sentiments. The founders included Muhammad Abduh from Egypt, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani from Iran, and Muhammad Rashid Rida from Lebanon. These thinkers wanted a modernization of Islam and so proposed reforms with a certain type of secularization, adopting the ‘reason’ as criteria to shape the relationship between religion and society. Al-Afghani, for example, argued that modern Western virtues had to be found in Islam, in order to get Muslim acceptance of those modern ideas and make Islam stronger. He was critical of Western imperialism and didn’t support European democracy or parliamentarianism, and he even advocate violent resistance against British imperialism. But he believed that Islam was compatible with rationality and, thus, Muslims could become politically unified while still maintaining their faith based on social morality. He considered also that Muslim public affairs were too narrowly constructed, while Islam needed to bring large masses of people to public life. The problem therefore was the state and the solution would have been the society, the Ummah, according to him. Abduh also argued that Muslims could not simply rely on the interpretations of texts provided by medieval clerics, they needed to use reason to do an informed analysis (ijtihad) of the sources of Islam, in order to keep up with changing times. According to him, there was no contradiction between Islam and Western modernity, science and secularism, so Muslims had to modernize on the notion of using rationality. As we can see these early modernists saw modernity as a monolithic identity and not as a complex and diversified reality as we would say today. Rashid Rida on the other side didn’t see it as a monolithic identity, he thought that imitating the West would not help to approach and emulate them, so the point for Islam was to ‘become modern’ it its way, not to copying the West. He believed that if there was no contradiction between Islam and the West, as Abduh and Al-Afghani had said, than there was no need to transform or distort Islam. With Rashid Rida an Islamic revival started and his ideas actually later influenced also new Islamist thinkers in XX century, who developed a political philosophy of an “Islamic state”. These news thinkers, in particular Abul Ala Maududi from India and Sayyid Qutb from Egypt, reacted to the modernist Islam with a revival of a more traditional Islam, arguing first of all that the notion of popular sovereignty in democracy was contradictory to the ideal of Islam, that is the sovereignty of God. According to Maududi the society was the problem blocking the perfection of Islam, not the state as Al Afghani had argued, and so Muslims needed a top-down guide from the state. The intelligentsia had to implement an ideological project on the masses, that should have been the application of Shari’a law to the people. Qutb also believed that Muslims lived in the state of Jahiliya (ignorance) as before the advent of the Prophet, because the Islamic law was not applied anymore in Muslim societies. They had lost all the spiritual values in the modern state with man-made laws, and so the solution was to create a state based on Islamic values, with the supremacy of the Shari’a. The foundation of the state should have be the ummah, the community of believers, not the ethnic nation like in the West. As we can see from the analysis of all these Islamic thinkers we have generally speaking two interpretations of the relationship between the religion and the state in Islam. One vision is based on a reformist/incrementalist approach and one on a conservative/revolutionary view. Scholars like Tibi Bassam argue for example that the so called radical or conservative Islamic thinkers, like Maududi and Qutb, reinvented Islamic traditions to produce the modern Islamism, that is based “not on the religious faith of Islam but on an ideological use of religions within the political realm.” There have been therefore, and there still are, these two souls in the Islamic thought, that affected not only the philosophy and intellectual sphere of Islam but also its practical and “organizational” sphere. And these two souls not necessarily excluded each other, on the contrary they could and did coexist in a same organization. During the XX century for example the more conservative/revolutionary approach of Islam facilitated the creation of two large modern Muslim organizations, the Muslim Brotherhood/MB in Egypt and the Jamaat-e Islami in India. The MB is very important still today, and I will talk about that later to understand the development of the new political Islam in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Both these organizations actually can be considered bridges between Islamic modernism and Islamic revival, because they have been able to reformulate modernism in postmodern forms. The MB in particular reflected this duality of interpretation as Hasan al-Banna, who founded it in 1928, was a followers of Islamic modernism but at the same time wanted to return to Islam as moral and social renewal. When Qutb started to lead the MB, in the 1950s and 1960s, it became an organization that called to a complete return to traditional Islamism. And after him MB started a new reformist approach. According to authors like Wickham therefore, we cannot generalize seeing today MB, and also more broadly political Islam, either against or pro-modernity (or defined just as moderate or extremist). Reality is much more complex, as the Islamist movements change, in particular with the participation in the domain of formal politics with elections and governments, and the change has not been linear or without contradictions in large umbrella organizations as the MB.Going back to the Islamic thought, the last thing to remember to conclude this excursus is that during the 1960s/70s some Muslim thinkers, who studied in France and other Western countries, tried to bring innovations beyond both the modernist and Islamist approaches, with an approach that can be defined ‘postmodernist’. Algerian Mohammed Arkoun, Egyptian Hasan Hanafi and Iranian Ali Shariati in particular saw modernity as something to be analyzed not anymore as a goal to reach, and so they started to deconstruct it. Arkoun for example tried to challenge the dualistic view of rationality versus faith, Hanafi proposed to transform Islam from a creed into a revolution and Shariati examined Islam as a force for social justice and equity (he was the intellectual father of democratic Iranian revolution, later hijacked by Khomeini). These new thinkers didn’t change anyway the Islamic revival as an answer to modernization, also because this modernization was often imposed as Westernization, with the creation of nation states on the European model, as we will see later. Concluding we can say that today, in the XXI century, in our glocalized and liquid modernity (to use the words of scholars like Roland Robertson and Zygmunt Bauman) the Islamic organizations, after following the centralization of governments and political party systems of the past, have a new structure based on decentralized networks and social media that created what has been defined by some scholar ‘cyber-Islam’ (in particular with the ‘internet revolutions’ of the Arab Spring and the destructive video propaganda of ISIS). Actually since some years a group of scholars started to talk also about a phase of “post-Islamism” of Muslim politics in the globalization era, related with the of individualization of religious activism instead of its organization in political membership. Groups like the Turkish Gulen movement that looks for Islamic ethic but cultural globalization, could really make a case of post-Islamism, but we are still in an early stage to make a clear analysis and draw conclusions. It seems that today we still have two main faces of political Islam, that coexist in this post-modern, post-secular world: a modernized face based on more freedom and democratic aspirations and a traditional face, related with a revival of traditional religious identity, even if at the expenses of rights and freedoms. This creates tensions and contradictions that are one of the causes of the failure of some democratization processes after Arab Spring revolutions. But before to talk about the dynamics between political Islam and democracy let’s see more in details the historical evolution of the relationship between the state and Islam in the Middle East, since the Ottoman Empire until today. The historical basis of political Islam: the Middle East from religious pluralism to imposed secularization and back to Islamic revival Non-Muslims, mainly Christians and Jews, lived integrated with Muslims in the Middle East in a peaceful coexistence that lasted for fourteen centuries, as scholars like Karabell and Mazower masterly recount. Since the middle of the XV century, under the Ottoman Empire, the so called “Millet system” (from Arabic millah: nation) even allowed every confessional community to rule itself under its own system through a separate legal court. Every religious group therefore could use its own laws, in a national identity based on “group rights”, in what could be define a sort of pre-modern ‘religious pluralism’. At the same time this tolerance and pluralism were characterized by some limitations in the rights of non-Muslims citizens, as the state was an Islamic state based on the Sha’ria law. The Pact of Umar for example was a list of rights but also restrictions and prohibitions for non-Muslims, mostly the People of the Book, considered in some way ‘second class’ citizens (so called dhimmis). Stipulated during the 7th century in Syria the pact granted Christians, Jews and other minorities the security of their persons, families, and possessions but also limited their freedom of building new churches or synagogues, show their religion in public etc. Furthermore non-Muslims had to pay a special tax, the jizya, that from the point of view of the Muslim rulers, was a material proof of the non-Muslims’ acceptance of subjection to the Islamic state. In return, non-Muslim citizens were permitted to practice their faith, to enjoy some communal autonomy, to be protected from outside aggression, and to be exempted from military service. This system therefore again was a pluralistic system even if based on inequality of rights and some discrimination, as religion played an important role in separating the rights for first or second class citizens. Later, during the XIX century, the Tanzimat reforms (influenced by the French revolution) tried to modernize the Ottoman Empire, giving equality to all citizens under the law: individual rights started therefore to become important instead of group and religious rights. The effect was that Ottoman Empire begun to secularize and modernize, with a Westernization that increased when the Ottoman Empire fell, starting the European colonization and the imposition of nationalism. From the Sykes Picot agreements and the League of Nations mandates to the artificial creation of nation states and the authoritarian regimes with dictators supported by the West, the Middle East experienced a secularization based not on autochthonous systems but more on Western values and structures. This would have had an enormous impact on the revival of Islamic identity and creation of political Islam in the second part of XX century. As Joselyne Cesari, among other scholars argues, it is exactly because of this type of forced modernization and secularization that Islam started to politicize and became what we call today a ‘political Islam’. The modernization of Muslim societies, differently from Western ones, brought not to privatization of religion but to the politicization of it. Islam, in its identity based on ‘believing, belonging and behaving’, became entangled with the nation state building both during and after the decolonization process. Therefore we should not talk of one type of ‘secularism’ but many types of ‘secularity’, based on institutional, social and individual levels that interact to produce different institutional forms for each country. Cesari in particular criticizes the ideas that Islamism is a set of religious believes instrumentalized today by politicians to bring down the secular state. This peculiar vision of religion, as other scholars also argue, comes from the historical evolution of Christianity in the West, with the Reform, the separation of church and state and the privatization of religious identity with the expansion of political and civil rights. But outside Europe modernization didn’t go necessarily together with secularization and democratization, as we explained. Therefore again questioning both the dichotomies between state and religion and modernization and Islamization, we could say with Cesari that the creation of state has been one of the principal reasons of the politicizing of Islam. The nation state building integrated Islamic tradition in politics, and it created what has been call ‘hegemonic Islam’, as the religion not only entered inside the institutions but also melted with the national identity. This also explain why political Islam became the principal political opposition under autocratic regimes and the only organized group to take the lead after the Arab Springs. I will be back on this topic later in the paper, when I speak about post-Arab Spring democratizations, but here is important to say that at a certain point in history of last century the secularization process and the appeal to modernity started to end in the Middle East and Islamism started to retake support. The fact that secularization was synonymous of Westernization made many Muslims of the Middle East feel that either with colony or with independence the reason of their social, spiritual, political or economic failure was caused by Western models imposed from outside. And at least in part this was true, even if academics like Lewis remember that the final responsibility rest on the people of the Arab countries. This process was accompanied by several social and political events in the region, which changed the perspective of majority of Arabs toward the ‘Western style’ secularization. These events started with the Six days war between Israel and his Arab neighbors in 1967. Gamal Nasser, president of Egypt, with his Panarabism and secular nationalism had failed both militarily and politically in front of Israel and the West, and so Egypt and the Islamic world in general started to think that secularism was inadequate for them. Later, in the 1970s, with the Arab oil embargo and the Iranian revolution, the Middle Eastern population regained the pride of being Muslim and the Islamic revival, but also Islamism and Jihadism, got a new input. This went on for at least two decades, even if the West didn’t care much about it, having the dictators repressing every possibility of power for any form of political Islam, like in Algeria in 1991. Then, with the attacks of 9/11, Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda woke the world to the new threat of the “Islamist terrorism”. As we can see therefore the Middle East passed from a period of strong religious identity and at the same time religious pluralism (even if without citizens’ equality) to a Western-type secularization that finally gave space to a politicization of Islam and an Islamic revival in politics, that became evident today, in particular in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. In a situation in which political Islam grew as an important force in the Middle East the question therefore become: can political Islam be considered compatible with modern democracy or is something that is unfit for modern societies? After this philosophical and historical excursus to explain the birth of political Islam, let’s try to answer this question looking at how the relationship between political Islam and democracy (often related with secularization and Westernization) has been developed in recent times. Is political Islam compatible with democracy? The case for “unsecular democracies” As Casanova has shown in many places the religion revival in the public sphere appears compatible with democracy and political civility, and public religion can even work as a compensation to the risk of hegemonic role of the market and the modern state. But can we say that there are some societies, cultures or religions that fit better democratic systems? Can we say for example that societies with higher levels of social capital are more adapt (to say it with a famous scholar) in ‘making democracy work’? Or that some religions are more conducive of democratization processes, in a culturalist approach, arguing with another famous scholar that “culture matters”? Can we affirm specifically that Islam is compatible or incompatible with democracy? There is no consensus among academics on this issue, as the question is a complex one, but many scholars today claims that Islam and democracy should not be considered mutually exclusive and that Islam is not incompatible with democracy at all. This is contrary to what two American authorities argued last century, in their famous theories after the end of the Cold War, that Islam is an obstacle if not a threat to the democratic values, at least the one proper to the West. Recent history also confirms that Islam is not incompatible with democratic institutions, in particular if we look at the experiences in the Asian continent (especially Turkey and Indonesia, but also in some way Malaysia and Bangladesh). Neither can political Islam be considered unfit for the democratic system, at least if we look at some cases after the Arab Spring, like Morocco and moreover Tunisia. What we could argue though is that there are some particular versions of political Islam that make the democratization processes more difficult and that may result finally in an incompatibility with many of the elements of democracy. This paper therefore argues that the success of the democratization process in a Muslim country depends on the type of political Islam used by the leadership in charge, more than on Islam itself. If the political Islam is a ‘moderate’ one, like in Morocco or Tunisia, then the democratization process has hopes of success. On the contrary, if it is based more on radical views, with the application of a strict and radical Sha’ria law (a type of political Islam that we could define Islamism) the possibilities of success for the democratization are lower as it may limit the inclusion and pluralism necessary for democracy. If the Sha’ria law is applied in a moderate way, for example with some censorship to ensure that the media do not publish material denigrating Islam or with a traditional Islamic views of marriage, with divorce and inheritance that favor men over women, we are not necessarily against a democracy. We can talk about an “Islamocracy”, by definition of Amitai Etzioni, a system that combines some rules of sharia with elements of democracy. But still other scholars, like Tibi Bassam, believes that an Islamocracy is already incompatible with a democracy. So the debate is still open. As the scholar Ben Mei claims, the problem of Islamism in politics is to consider the religion a ‘perfect way of life and social and political organization’. When ideologies and dogmas are in power troubles start for democracies, being our pluralistic human societies in need of inclusiveness, balance and equality. But before to come to conclusions on which type of political Islam may be more compatible with a substantial democracy, let’s start with some general definitions: how can we define political Islam and what it takes for a democracy to be considered really a democracy? It is difficult to define both political Islam and democracy as they are fluid concepts that change through histories and cultures. For political Islam in particular, there is still missing today a longer-term understanding of what it is and what it is not. Nevertheless, many scholars today make a distinction between political Islam and Islamism. Oliver Roy defines Islamism as “the brand of modern political Islamic fundamentalism that claims to re-create a true Islamic society, not simply by imposing sharia, but establishing first an Islamic state through political action. Islamists see Islam not as a mere religion but as a political ideology that should reshape all aspects of society.” Basam Tibi, as I mentioned earlier, distinguishes between fundamentalism (principally a religious activity) and Islamism (a political one) that is an interpretation of Islam for political purposes. But, as Volpi argues, scholars of political Islam might also have invented the notion of “Islamism” as orientalist scholars framed the idea of the Orient. Ayoob actually claims that the re-invention of the tradition stays at the heart of the instrumentalization of Islam even if Volpi again remembers that also the notion of a democratic state is a re-appropriation of the past, of a romanticized notion of classic Greek democracy. Finally Graham Fuller, another important scholar on political Islam, affirms that Islamism principles can be defined as a form of identity politics or “support for Muslim identity, authenticity, broader regionalism, revivalism, and revitalization of the community”. So also this paper distinguishes between Islamism and political Islam, as the first represents only one part of the second, the “Shari’atization of politics” inside a political culture that is political Islam. Regarding the definition of democracy we can give it a minimalist definition, requiring only contestation (free and fair elections) and autonomy of the government, or a much broader and substantial definition. Larry Diamond, a leading scholar in the democracy studies, speaks about four key elements: a political system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections; the active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life; the protection of the human rights of all citizens; a rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens”. Therefore we can add three main requirements for a real democracy to exist, in addition to the elections and the autonomy of the government. First of all, democracy requires that the citizens participate, in one way or another, to politics and civil life, and so to the discussion and creation of the laws. If we consider the law of God as superior to the law of men, as Qutb argued, and if the sovereignty of God is superior to the sovereignty of the state, as in the ideal Islamic state, there will be no space for people to be sovereign and participate to the Res-pubblica (the government of the “public affair”). We can define this requirement as “citizens’ participation”. Second, democracy requires protection of human rights of all citizens, freedom of opinion, of speech, of organization, of religion (including freedom “from religion”, as no one can be accused of ‘apostasy’ in a democracy). We can define this requirement as “freedom of diversity”. Finally all the citizens have to be included in their diversity in the institutions and the daily life of the society. This means that people and minorities cannot be discriminated on the basis of their gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or any other element that defines their identity. This is the rule of law in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens. We can define this requirement as “inclusiveness of pluralism”. As we can also see, the definition of democracy is not easily done as it is a fluid concept and a never ending process that changes with time and space. However, at least we can say that both political Islam and democracy have some clear elements of definition, that allow us to evaluate a possible interrelation between them, specifically in the Middle East. After the recent Arab Spring, we could argue with Roy that actually “neither [of them] can now survive without the other”. Since the revolutions of 2011 political Islam and democracy have become increasingly interdependent as political Islam has been forced to redefine itself inside the new electoral and democratic system. Sometimes this process has been successful and sometimes not. But for the purpose of this paper, I consider again the definition of Cesari for the democracies of the Middle East and in general Muslim modern democracies, which have a different history respect to the secularization of the West as we have seen. Cesari uses the term of “unsecular democracy” (that could be similar to the definition of Islamocracy) that together with the acceptance of free and fair elections don’t reject all civil liberties, but just some that are seen as a threat to the national community. The cases of Indonesia and Senegal for example, and also Tunisia and Egypt, demonstrate that the basic domains of democratic governance for a minimalist definition of democracy are respected: free and fair elections with all adults right to vote, elected representatives with the authority to govern (with an independent government and without the control of militaries or clerics), and some political rights and civil liberties (including free of the press to a certain extent, freedom of association, criticize the government etc.). However, “unsecular democracies” are limiting specific rights, that Cesari defines the “rights of the self”, in the sexual sphere and the spiritual sphere. The sexual sphere is referred especially to the monitoring of the female body. Islam, as a code of public morality, made of women’s bodies a ‘contested political site’, as the women represent the morality and can guarantee familial, national and religious values in the possible chaos of social change. Regarding the spiritual sphere there is a preeminence of the community over the religious self, with social obligations like ritual actions and public behaviors more important than the rights of the self. This presence of religion in the regulation of the sexual and spiritual sphere can be seen also in the types of punishments for crimes in Muslim countries. In Islam the punishments are divided in the hudud and the tazir: the first refers to the prohibitions of God and are related in particular with the sexual and spiritual spheres, like sexual activity outside marriage, homosexuality and also apostasy. These crimes, together with theft or the consumption of alcohol, are considered attacks against the social order, threatening the cohesion and morality of the Muslim community, and this is the reason, besides being against God, of why they require harsh punishment. Thus, we can argue that political Islam is compatible with some limited definitions of democracy, but for a broad and substantial definition could have more difficulties, creating what have been called “unsecular democracies” or Islamocracies. However, another possibility to look at this dynamics between Islam and democracy is to see Islam as an inspiration, more than a straitjacket, for politics. Some modern Muslim thinkers, like Khaled Abou El Fadl or Muqtedar Khan, believe in the possibility of a complete integration between political Islam and a ‘secular democracy’, even if this is a process that has yet to be completed. Abou El Fadl in particular remembers how the Qur’an doesn’t address a specific form of government for the Muslims but addresses just three social and political values important to a Muslim nation: justice through social cooperation, consultative method of governance and institutionalization of compassion in social interaction. Therefore the system of democracy, according to El Fadl, is the most adaptable form of government to promote these values, as it “shows how popular sovereignty – with its idea that citizens have rights and a correlative responsibility to pursue justice with mercy – expresses God's authority, properly understood”. Islam represents submission to God and there is no place for submission to human authority typical of authoritarian states. A constitutional democracy that protects individual rights, according to El Fadl, is the form of government best suited to promote social and political values central to Islam. On the other hand Khan, together with other scholars, claims that Islam can represent a basis for ethical values to inspire democratic laws, and this should be the role of Muslims in the future state building – incorporating Islam in the public sphere. Actually there are cases of Muslim countries outside the Middle East that are already able to ‘use’ Islam as ethical inspiration rather than just as a strict law, even if they have a situation of “hegemonic Islam”. In Indonesia for example, Islam influences the ethics of the majority of the political parties, but the real Islamist parties are very small and never able to enter in the government. There is no such possibility of application of Sharia law in the country (a part in the autonomous region of Aceh, that uses the Sharia law mostly as symbol of his identity repressed for decades) for a main reason: Indonesia has been a secular state since its foundation in 1945. Indonesian constitution provides “all persons the right to worship according to their own religion or belief”, declares that “the nation is based upon belief in one supreme God” but doesn’t speak about Islam as state religion recognizing instead six official religions. The official philosophical foundation of Indonesia, the ‘Pancasila’, comprise in its five principles the ones of democracy and social justice. Finally Muslims in Indonesia are defined as ‘nondenominational Muslims’, Muslims who adhere to a form of Islam not restricted to a specific denomination as they identify themselves ‘just as Muslims’. This also reduces the risk of radicalization and integralism, as there are no sectarian cleavages, besides the fact that many Indonesian Muslims still practice a syncretistic mix of beliefs and rituals coming from other religions. However, in Indonesian politics Islam matters, as it is the spiritual, cultural and intellectual force of the nation. Since the repression of the powerful Communist popular movement in the 1960s, Islamic identity became the culture of moral and ethical principles, such as justice, equality, freedom and common good. The Indonesian “civil Islam”, as Hefner defined it, repudiated the goal of an Islamic state and instead championed the democratic ideals. Therefore, Indonesia may represent a ‘paradigmatic Muslim democracy’, one of the best examples on how Islam can shape the principles of the politics towards ethical values without necessarily having Islamism ruling the country. Indonesia maintained that inclusiveness of pluralism and freedom of diversity fundamental for a substantial democracy. This case could be one of the “best practices” that the Middle Eastern fledgling democracies should follow to create a stable path toward a future of democratization. Also because of its gradualism in the democratic transition, that as I will explain later, didn’t do a tabula rasa of the old regime but implemented reforms that gradually improved its democracy. In conclusion, political Islam has still to work to become completely compatible with a substantial democracy, but there are cases in which Islam has been integrated in the government of a state without risk of reducing democratic principles and maintaining a “secular democracy”. Now I am going to analyze the progress of democratization of “unsecular democracies” in the Middle East after the Arab Spring, to see if a conclusion can be made about political Islam and its compatibility with democracy. Did the Arab Spring open space for new ‘Islamic unsecular democracies’? The element of inclusiveness as reason for success or failure in Tunisia and Egypt The Arab Spring, in its beginning, seemed to realize the empowerment of political Islam, in both the two countries that had been the starters of the revolutions in January 2011: Tunisia and Egypt. Both countries had elections won by the Islamist parties (Muslim Brotherhood/MB in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia) and the first Constitutions drafted by them had clear Islamist features, in particular in Egypt, even if not a complete Sharia law. After 4 years, things are quite different. In Tunisia, there is a secular-Islamist coalition government and a new moderate and more pluralist Constitutions. In Egypt, the elected government of MB was ousted with a coup d’état in 2013 and today a very different Constitution is in place and an ex general is Prime Minister. What went wrong, even if with different results, in the government of political Islam? I argue that even if the Islamist parties were the only political actors ready to take the lead of the newly born democracies, their political actions resulted in deep missteps, regarding particularly one of the three elements of democracy that I listed earlier: the inclusiveness of pluralism. This, together with the economic failure of those initial Islamist governments and the fact that their religious and political ideas were too detached from a big part of the population, in particular the youth, contributed to the failure of political Islam after the great expectations of post-Arab Spring. This doesn’t mean that the experiment of political Islam in the Middle East has ended today, as in Tunisia it is still alive, but it means that it will have to transform itself again in the future, as it already did in the past. Political Islam has to avoid to fall again in the excess of ‘Islamism’, at least in the form that we have seen it in the post-Arab Spring. But how did the experiments of political Islam have different outcomes after the Arab Spring? First of all we need to restate a definitional factor of Islam that I expressed earlier, that is Islam is not only as a series of ‘beliefs’ but also a social fabric and a style of life, a religion of ‘belonging’ and a ‘behaving’. This made of Islamism the preeminent political and social force pre and post-Arab Spring, because religious places were the only free spaces during authoritarian regimes where political discourse could have been done. But this political force was not necessarily the force able to answer the requests of ‘dignity and freedom’ (karama and hurria, the words of revolutions) of the population. In the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions for example Islamism had a centrality in the phase of political transitions from authoritarianism, but secular forces of political Islam (forces that refused the Shari’atization of politics) were stronger during the phase of rebellion. This made the Arab Spring different from the classical (colonial and postcolonial) Islamist positions, as it opposed both the secular authoritarian state and the Islamism perspective, making part of the population feel betrayed in the post-revolution by the excessive Islamist policies. The Islamists in power did not realize that polarization, exclusion and majoritarianism, a political agenda that asserts that a majority of the population is entitled to make decisions for all the society, were not good paths for democratization. For democratization we need, as we said among other things, the ‘inclusiveness of pluralism’, because without inclusiveness there is no possible support of the populations, that is always diverse and plural. Both Egypt and Tunisia didn’t do well at the beginning on the element of inclusiveness, not only of the different sector of the society but also of the past regimes and institutions, including the past Constitution. But while Tunisia recuperated and changed the course of its transition, Egypt was not able to do it. The first reason is related with the type of political Islam in Tunisia, different from Egypt. Ennahda represented a more moderate political Islam respect to MB, because it reflected a society that is less religious, more educated and more “Westernized” than Egypt. This “Westernization” happened through the French secular model imposed on the society and we could argue that, differently from what we would expect, to force secularization didn’t bring radicalism, at least in the case of Tunisian political Islam, but on the opposite, moderation and liberalization. This is actually the thesis of Shadi Hamid, in his recent book, and probably is true for Tunisia at least, even if, as Hamid argues too, Islamist parties are party-movements, and so they can go towards more conservative or more liberal positions depending also on the decisions and feelings of their electorate. Going back to the transitions, following the argument of Cesari, usually there are three main ways to finish a revolution: make a tabula rasa of the old regime and start from zero, marginalize the actors of the former regime, or destroy the former regime from within. Among Muslim countries the first path has been followed by the Islamic revolution in Iran and the post Saddam Hussein era in Iraq. While the first resulted in a theocracy, the second failed completely in its democratization, exactly for the lack of inclusiveness of the old regime and system (besides the disasters of American war). The second way instead has been followed by Turkey, with the Justice and Development Party since 2000 in power, building alliances among the excluded forces in order to marginalize the old regime. This seems to be a path that gives more fruits, in examining the stability of the current Turkish democracy. Finally the third type, has been followed by Indonesia after its Reformasi (reforms) in 1998, with a gradualism that democratized the structures but kept the old political cadres and the constitution. Also this path seemed to work quite well if we look at Indonesia today. Tunisia and Egypt instead didn’t follow any of the three paths. In Egypt the MB was unable to build alliances with different political forces, while in Tunisia the Ennahda party, was forced to do it after protests and political assassinations. Both cases did not have an important socio-economic basis, as big parts of the middle class had resisted Islamist policies. During the dictatorships, Egypt was not able to create opportunities for economic development, like Turkey did, while Tunisia did it but the middle class remained loyal to former dictator Ben Ali. Therefore, what we have today, as again Cesari argues, is a praetorian regime in Egypt and a hybrid regime in Tunisia that is still in transformation, between an unsecular democracy and a secular one. In Tunisia currently, there is a secular-Islamist coalition government that if successful could represent real progress in leading Islamism towards more moderate and democratic values, making of Islam an ethical inspiration to policies, as it did in Indonesia. But how Tunisian society specifically challenged the goals of its Islamist party, making it to re-dimension its power and expectations of change, avoiding the same failure as MB in Egypt? Here we arrive to the second element that helped Tunisia transition to succeed, besides its more moderate political Islam: the Tunisian civil society and state. The Tunisian transition government was not very inclusive. The Ennahda party won the first free elections held in Tunisia in October 2011 for a transitioning parliament and government (with 41% of the votes but with a 51% of turnout). Instead of building a shared government with other parties, Ennahda made a government by themselves. Besides this they drafted a first Constitution that had controversial clauses towards a Shari’atization of the society: one on blasphemy (prohibiting “attacks on the sacred”), one on gender (“their [men’s and women’s] souls complement one another within the family”), and one on sharia as “a source among sources” of legislation. The response of secular parties and civil society forced Ennahda to withdraw the clauses. Complaints against the government increased after the political killings, in 2013, of two opposition leaders who spoke out against the risk of Islamization of Tunisia: Chockri Belaid, the leader of the Unified Democratic Nationalist party and Mohamed Brahmi, the leader of the Movement of People. Since then, Ennahda had to step down because of the massive protests, allowing a technocratic government to take power in January 2014. A new constitution was also adopted by the National Constituent Assembly the same month, with more power given to the parliament than to the president and less Islamist features inside the constitution. Finally new Parliamentary and Presidential elections were held in October 2014, this time with a 90% turnout. The results were quite different from the first elections as the secular party Nidaa Tounes won the 40% while Ennahda got only 30%, and the leader of Nidaa Tounes, Beji Caid Essebsi, was elected President of the country in November. Therefore one of the main reasons the transition in Tunisia was more successful in respect to Egypt has been the maturity and democratic identity of a more articulated civil society in Tunisia. In Tunisia there is a strong presence of Salafist groups, as the recent ISIS recruitment of thousands of people demonstrates, but at the same time Tunisian population is the closest population among Arab countries to European identity. Tunisians enjoy one of the highest level of education in Maghreb and the Arab World, with a high number of civil society organization (including an important trade union) and many NGOs that work for civil rights that have been either reconstituted after the revolution or born new. Also, Tunisia has a diverse and mixed ethnic identity (between Berber, Arabs, Europeans, Jews, Central African/Nilotic etc.) and a diverse and mixed cultural identity, with outside influence during its history from many populations such as Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, Italians, Spaniards and finally French. This gave the country a custom of diversity and openness to external views of political institutions and state forms that was useful during the moment of transition towards democracy. Also Tarek Masoud, an expert of political Islam in the aftermath of Arab Spring, confirms that Tunisia has a more diverse civil society than Egypt, with stronger labor union, civic associations and professional groups. This made a relative parity between Islamists and their opponent non-Islamist secular parties, while in Egypt the MB had no such adversaries. The secular forces in Tunisia didn’t want to bring down the democratic institutions because they thought they could reach success within the democratic structure. Secular parties in Egypt did not think they had the same possibility and turned to the Army to end the Islamist rule. Therefore another important element for the success of Tunisian transition was that the Tunisian military is a small army. It is composed by less than thirty thousand people, with an apolitical role, under a civilian authority and accounts for just 1.6% of the GDP. That means a very different situation from Egypt. The role of the Army in Egypt was the real decisive factor of the post-revolution, as Mubarak left because the army abandoned him and the Army accepted a MB government only with the guarantee that foreign policy and security would remain the Army’s prerogatives. When the MB altered the Constitution towards Islamization and pushed government policies towards too much Shari’atization, the people reacted and the Army supported the population as a consequence. So in 2014 the Army realized a coup and took over for a new transition. In conclusion while in Egypt the experiment of political Islam in an unsecular democracy failed, in Tunisia the first experiment of political Islam at the beginning didn’t work well. In the beginning, Tunisia made a mistake by avoiding inclusive institutions, but later the civil society and political forces saved the democratization process, creating a balance between the Islamist forces and the secular ones. Today it will be hard to predict if the final result will be really an unsecular democracy or a secular one, given the recent developments but the decline of Islamism is evident both in Tunisia and Egypt. Nevertheless this decline will not end political Islam, that will evolve again as it did during all its history. Islamism, as I explained with this paper, is just a part of political Islam that represents a national political culture that will continue for long time with new transformations, to play a role in the Middle East and farther. But to give a real chance to democracy the Arab World will need a new dialectic between these two elements of political Islam and secular state, ‘religious authenticity’ and ‘democratic politics’, and should look at the Southeast Asian examples, in addition to its own history and society, to find balance and equilibrium.Conclusions: the Middle East from backwardness to empowerment With this paper I tried to understand the nature of contemporary Muslim politics and in particular political Islam. I began arguing that if we want to analyze the complexity of the Muslim politics, both in history and today, we need to avoid the spurious dichotomy between the ‘religious’ versus the ‘secular’ as a reflection of ‘tradition against modernity’. Later I traced the philosophical and historical roots of modern political Islam in the context of both the intellectual formation and the state formation. I then asked if Islam and democracy can be compatible, trying to give evidence that they are and making the case for “unsecular democracies”, democracies that make a limitation of specific individual rights. Finally I analyzed the post-Arab spring situation, asking if the Arab Spring opened space for new ‘Islamic unsecular democracies’ and answering that while Tunisia had the ‘inclusiveness of pluralism’ as fundamental element for the success of its transition. Egypt failed in that process. So, following Tariq Ramadan argument, I will conclude this paper by saying that it is possible for people to be both modern and authentic Muslims believers, both democratic and Islamic, globalized but not homologated or assimilated, looking at the future without forgetting the past. The clash among modernity and tradition, secular and religious, West and Islam, is more a political construction than a reality. There is no clash but gap of culture and experiences, and this gap should be filled with the empowerment of societies. When we speak about Islam and democracy, in particular in the Middle East, we have to remember that modern Muslim states are only few decades old in respect to the more established and developed states in the Western world. These states have been carved out by European powers, with arbitrary borders that fed local conflicts, from Pakistan to Morocco, creating authoritarian regimes that limited the social and political development of those countries, and making today’s democratization much more difficult. Therefore we will need time for a more stable, democratic and developed Middle East to emerge, as opposed to others transitions, like Eastern Europe, whose democratization didn’t last long. The real problems that Muslim communities of the Middle East face today lies not in the theological debate if Islam is compatible with democracy or in the religious foundations of terrorist groups, but in dealing with the root causes of social conflict, economic backwardness and lack of freedom that, together with doomed foreign interventions in the Middle East, caused the growth of violent Salafists movements. As Abu-Nimer argues, the root causes of underdevelopment to address in the Middle East are several: the economic deprivation, the global cultural invasion in communities unable to integrate it, the authoritarian states with a legitimacy based on Western support and internal acceptance, the theology of stagnation, with lack of space for reinterpretation of Islamic history and traditions, the patriarchal structures and tribal loyalties, that limit the freedom of individuals, especially women, and finally a disempowering educational system, without emphasis in critical debate, self-examination, and openings to the world (a part probably only Tunisia). Hopefully the West will help the Middle East come to terms with these problems instead of perpetuating narratives of a clash of civilizations, useful just for imperialistic interests, a la divide et impera. Even the threat of ISIS should be treated in these terms, clearly identifying it as Salafist Jihadist terrorism and not ‘Islamic terrorism’. To speak about Islamic terrorism is an oxymoron, as the word Islamic has to do with the ideals of Muslim religion (like to say Christian or Judaic) and the criminal actions of a group cannot be identified with the ideals of a religion. That is why even President Obama refused to speak of ‘Islamic terrorism’, in order not to fuel the wrong idea that a religious tradition authorizes the deployment of terrorism. In reality there is no religion that encourage violence, it all depends on political and social constructions. The risk in the “West” is to follow the narrative of Islamophobia, facilitated by the masses that have no time to think or reflect deeply on how words are used and identities are constructed for political reasons. As Juan Cole remembered in a recent article, when a sectarian religious group start doing crimes or using violence (either it be the Ku Klux Klan or ISIS) we have to speak of “destructive cults”. Destructive cults appeal to people on the basis of religious symbols, as they go at the core of the identity of the people. But the real reason behind their action, whatever religion they have, is power and control. Therefore we need to deconstruct realities to understand the development of these issues, instead of following rhetoric generalizations and essentialist ideas. Finally history is made of men and women, not just institutions and policies, and the people can make it and remake it. Therefore we need to turn to the wish of the people to understand the future of regions like the Middle East. The Arab Spring brought many hopes, even if obviously it was not easy to respond to such high expectations as democracy takes time, is always a long transition, a ‘never ending’ process. But it demonstrated that people can change regimes and ask for what they believe not what their leaders or the foreign countries want. Today we can say that the Arab Spring practically failed everywhere, from Syria to Yemen, from Libya to Egypt, apart only from Tunisia. In the Arab world the answer to a very common current question in international studies, “is democracy in decline?”, is unfortunately yes. The reasons for the decline of democracy may be many: from the weakness of local political institutions, to the ‘winner take all’ mentality, from the type of ‘political culture’ as Lipset would have said (and type of political Islam, as this paper tried to argue) to indicators of the modernization of the society, like the rates of education and the female emancipation. But we cannot say that the possibility of democracy and also the experiment of political Islam failed. In Tunisia they are both still very alive and keen to learn how to integrate itself in a more democratic state in the future. The hope is that sudden events like the Arab Spring and social trends like the ‘modernization’ processes in the Muslim world, are signals that also the Middle East will be able to free itself sooner or later from conflicts and disempowerment, that kept it going backward instead of forward. Maybe one day in the future this region will also enjoy the stability, security and prosperity that many other parts live in our post-modern post-secular post-global world. BIBLIOGRAPHY -Abou El Fadl, Khaled, Islam and the challenge of democracy, Princeton UP, 2004 -Ayoob, Mohammed, Political Islam: image and reality, World Policy Journal, 21 (3) 2004-Ben Meir, Alon Is Islam compatible with democracy? American Thinker, 13 of July 2013-Brownlee, Jason, Tarek Masoud, and Andrew Reynolds, The Arab Spring. 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