The Battle for the Soul of Islam

The battle for the soul of Islam is about much more than countering political violence and suppressing political Islam. It is a long-drawn-out, decades-long battle for religious soft power in which multiple Middle Eastern and Asian states compete for recognition as leader of the Muslim world and to be drivers of a largely undefined “moderate,” tolerant, and pluralistic interpretation of an Islam that at a minimum engages in interfaith dialogue. The rivals employ religion to garner favor, empathy, and goodwill in the corridors of power in the United States and Europe as well as among influential Jewish and Christian communities. At the same time, the battle for the soul of Islam is also a struggle to redefine what Islam represents in a 21st-century world.

Religion and Politics in Contemporary Turkey

Religion and secularism have been central threads in Turkish politics throughout the history of the republic. This chapter focuses on three important aspects of the relationship between religion and politics in contemporary Turkey. First, it explores the political functions of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), a government agency that has served as the primary means for the implementation of the religious policies of the Turkish state. Second, it investigates the relations between Islamic communities, political parties, and the state and argues that the distinction between official and unofficial Islam that has informed much of the work on the Turkish religious field must be strongly qualified. Finally, the author focuses on the trajectory of political Islam in Turkey, critically reviewing the literature on the rise, political incorporation, and authoritarian turn of Islamic parties. The conclusion emphasizes the need for studies investigating the impact of politics on religiosity in Turkish society.

History and State Coercion in the Arab Spring

In this chapter, the author proposes the need to study the colonial and postcolonial nexus of coercion in Arab states in order to explore how the coercive apparatus in the region was tied to a colonial formation, through postcolonial configurations of states. In doing so, the author argues against the dominance of presentism and methodological nationalism in the study of Arab states. While focusing on the cases of Egypt, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, the author demonstrates that one cannot understand the role coercion played in the Arab Spring and its trajectory or the new wave of repression after the Arab Spring as an insulated contemporary problem. The author interrogates the existence of paramilitary groups and the entanglements of coercion with regional and international postcolonial politics. The analysis reveals that understanding the central problems related to the coercive apparatus of Arab states necessitates situating them within their foundation—that is, within the colonial and postcolonial contexts out of which they emerged.

No Bread, No Freedom, No Social Justice

Conventional approaches to democratization in the Middle East take for granted the priority of some civil–political rights (e.g., voting) over others (e.g., rights of association or protest, socioeconomic rights). The discursive structure of these approaches has framed both the promotion of democracy by the European Union and regional governments’ counter-conductive reframing against that effort. But this pas de deux is part of a broader dynamic in which the common ground shared by these two efforts frames democracy so as to deny and delegitimize both the conception of democracy held by Middle Eastern and North African populations themselves and the political and socioeconomic demands of those same populations. Governments, in short, are engaged in “counter-conducting” their own populations. Drawing on critical discourse analysis of key documents, public opinion survey data, and activist interviews, an analysis of the Egyptian case shows that the discursive competition between governments is (also) a dance around democracy which seeks to avoid the more radical, egalitarian demands by populations

The Palestine Question: From the Balfour Declaration to the Deal of the Century

The colonial framework introduced a central perspective into Palestinian studies in the context of addressing Zionism, Zionist relations with the Palestinian entity, and the creation of the question of Palestine. This chapter explores the rise and shifts of the Palestinian question from the Balfour Declaration to the “deal of the century.” Informed by a sociohistorical approach, the chapter goes through historical shifts and analyzes the Palestine question within relations of interplay and entanglement with the Zionist project and, later, with the state of Israel. It focuses on the sociological dimensions of the Palestine question at the intersection of settler colonialism, theology, and state-making, on the one hand, and indigenous resistance, national struggle, and pragmatism, on the other.

The End of the Ottoman Empire and the Emergence of Nation-States

This chapter discusses the end of the Ottoman Empire, looking at three case studies which illustrate the pattern of change seen in the transition from the Ottoman Empire to nation-states. Greece, the first Ottoman territory to gain independence (1830), set precedents in establishing government by non-natives, introducing religious and legal institutions based on European models and working single-mindedly to instill national identity in its population. Almost a century later, King Faysal I (r. 1921–1933) of Iraq followed a similar path, albeit under British direction. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1922 and offered a slight variation on the pattern in that it built on selected legacies from the late Ottoman Empire. It was the only post-Ottoman country founded primarily by internal effort rather than by European intervention, and the national identity it worked to entrench in the population drew upon the political ideas of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which had dominated Ottoman government from 1908 to 1918. Despite that continuity, the republican government pursued the agenda of tearing down Ottoman institutions and rebuilding state and society as national projects. Such nation-building ultimately succeeded, producing its own instabilities; in new post-Ottoman countries such as Greece, Iraq, and Turkey, social and political re-engineering aroused resistance within the population.

Social Media and Contentious Politics

This chapter aims to re-examine the complex relationship between social media and contentious politics following the 2011 uprisings in Egypt and Syria. The chapter explores the contingent, differentiated, and contradictory roles social media played in each of these cases. The authors combine critical theoretical approaches to the internet and situated ethnographic accounts to make sense of this issue along the different phases of mobilization and its aftermath. They argue that the alternative hierarchies of power and visibility engendered by digital activism and facilitated by social media are an essential vehicle when it comes to establishing an effective connection between the street and the networked public sphere in the mobilization phase. In the post-mobilization phase, however, the logics of social media begin to hinder the ability of social movements to coalesce and transform the energy of the street into political decisions or leverage. Finally, they also argue that in the aftermath of mobilization these alternative online hierarchies of power and visibility tend to quickly lose their legitimizing function, which rested upon their, now severed, connection with the street.

The Idea of the “Islamic Intellectuals”

The concept of an “Islamic intellectual” poses many problems of intelligibility, validity and relevance. It is rejected by the secular mainstream sees the intellectual as, by definition, secular, and by conservative and radical Islamic trends as an illegitimate usurper of religious authority. However, historical and present realities demonstrate the existence and pivotal modernizing and bridging role of this supposedly impossible figure. leading “Islamic” intellectuals like Iqbal, Shariati, Bennabi, etc., have played decisive intellectual, social, spiritual roles, including launching revolutions or creating new countries. This paper seeks to unravel the paradoxes of this at once impossible and indispensable figure.

Varieties of Secularity

Modern societies in the Middle East have been shaped by processes of secularization, leading to a state of secularity on two levels: structural differentiations and conceptual distinctions between religion and the secular. Overt promotion of secularism failed to gain wider societal acceptance, especially among those who perceive a tension or contradiction between secularity and Islam. While some scholars share this view, recent works point out conceptual distinctions between the religious and the secular in Islam. After a snapshot of scholarly approaches, this chapter attends first to structural differentiations and then to conceptual distinctions of secularity. It largely focuses on the formative period of modernity but also adds a historical and contemporary dimension. Acknowledging the hegemony of colonial powers in configuring secularity both historically and conceptually, but highlighting Islamic variations and precolonial resources of secularity in the Middle East, this chapter furthers a research perspective on the varieties of secularity in global modernity and their plural genealogies.

Excluded Generations in Non-Inclusive Nations

This chapter offers an interpretation of the political link in Arab societies through the lens of demography. The first section shows how young generations today do not resemble those of earlier times. Rising education has raised expectations, and the reduction of fertility and postponement of family building have provided young adults with unprecedented individual freedom of movement. If expectations are not met by opportunities and young people have a feeling of exclusion, freedom of movement becomes a driver of emigration and rebellion. The second part focuses on specific patterns of reproduction among Arab populations and the obstacles they put to building inclusive nations. On one side, the uniquely high prevalence of kinship endogamy means that marriage does not help unrelated population groups to integrate so that blood bonds remain stronger than national bonds. On the other side, while the circulation of people is the most significant form of exchange between Arab countries, nationality laws based on exclusive jus sanguinis do not provide newcomers with pathways to full membership; and therefore, non-citizens have emerged as a category in Arab countries. Excluded generations in non-inclusive nations set the stage for prolonged political crises.