Islam and the Politics of Development

This chapter studies the role of religious elites in shaping the politics of development. It argues that the impact of Islam on economic development can be strongly conditioned by history and expressed through an interplay with formal institutional structures. Using insights from an ongoing project on the political economy of shrines in Pakistan (Malik and Mirza 2018), we show how regions with a greater presence of historically significant Muslim shrines experienced a more retarded growth of literacy after General Zia-ul-Haq’s military coup in 1977. These empirical patterns are explained by the historical aversion of shrine-based religious elites to education and their greater ability to suppress education in the wake of the 1977 military coup, which brought shrine elites to greater political prominence and gave elected politicians direct control over public goods provision. The chapter concludes by discussing the entry and persistence of shrine elites in electoral politics and drawing out its implications for the study of Islam and development.

Religion and Party Politics in India and Pakistan

Until the 1990s, religious influence on party politics in India and Pakistan was primarily through street protests and pressure on mainstream nonreligious parties rather than by religious parties winning power directly. In India, such influence was constrained by the secular constitutional structure and the dominant role of the Congress Party. In Pakistan, however, politically deinstitutionalized parties, weakened by military interference, have never been strong enough to take on the clerics. Instead, party leaders and military regimes have increasingly tried to co-opt or accommodate Islamist parties and pressure groups to strengthen their own positions. Civilian and military governments in the 1970s and 1980s institutionalized much of the Islamist agenda within the state in a way that now seems impossible to reverse. Ironically, the very fact that much of the Islamist agenda is now institutionalized, makes it difficult for Islamist parties to expand much beyond the 10–20% of the votes they now receive. India’s secular consensus, which many observers saw as its greatest achievement, has been profoundly disrupted by the decline of the Congress Party over the past three decades and the rise of the BJP, headed by the dominant figure of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has deep roots in the Hindu Nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its Hindu nationalist family (Sangh Parivar) of organizations. Modi, especially in his second term (2019–), has used his majority in parliament to try to radically remake India along Hindu nationalist lines, even though that was not central to his campaign platform, nor the reason why most development- and governance-minded voters elected him to office.

Religion and Electoral Competition in Senegal

This chapter explores the role that religion plays in political competition in Senegal. It shows that since Senegal’s independence, religious parties have been few and rather marginal. On the other hand, religious leaders (marabouts) from different Muslim brotherhoods, especially the Mourides, have played an important role in assisting politicians in voter mobilization, acting as vote brokers, and occasionally issuing vote orders. Yet the analysis of electoral data over several decades shows that this type of mobilization has not resulted in sectarian electoral cleavages and religion is not a strong predictor of vote choice. Starting with the country’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, who was a Catholic, Muslim religious leaders have supported politicians across religious and brotherhood lines, creating fluid political competition. The chapter attributes this absence of sectarian cleavages to the role of religious leaders on the eve of independence and the existing incentive structures that made alliances with politicians across sectarian lines more beneficial.

Islamist Parties and Women’s Representation in Morocco

Does electing Islamists help or hurt women? Due to the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) obtaining 13% of seats in the 2002–2007 legislature and the implementation of an electoral gender quota that resulted in thirty-five women winning seats in 2002, Morocco offers a rare opportunity to explore the intersectional impact of parliamentarians’ gender and party affiliation on women’s symbolic and service representation. Using visits to parliamentary offices in Tangiers, a city in northern Morocco, and an original survey of 112 Moroccan Members of Parliament (MPs) conducted in 2008, this chapter finds that responsiveness for female citizens depends on parliamentarians’ party and gender. Female legislators and Islamist deputies (including male Islamists) are also more likely to interact with female citizens than male parliamentarians from non-Islamist parties. It argues that the PJD’s stronger party institutionalization enhances legislators’ incentives to work in mixed-gender teams, leading to more frequent legislator interactions with female citizens. By offering novel evidence that developing a strong party system—in addition to electing women—is crucial for improving women’s representation in clientelistic settings, the results extend the literature on Islam, gender, and governance and offer insights into Islamist electoral success in clientelistic settings.

State-Formation, Statist Islam, and Regime Instability

Religion, and particularly the forces of political Islam and state secularism, have been central to discussions of regime stability in the Turkish case. Intense polarization, political instability, and military interventions have propelled Turkey into crisis about once a decade, preventing strong democratic or authoritarian consolidation. To explore why both democracy and authoritarianism have “failed to stick,” this chapter advocates for a historical assessment of the relationship between religion and regime, making two interlocking arguments. First, using evidence from the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, it argues that processes of state formation shaped the subsequent trajectory of Islamist politics, which came to be dominated by statist or state-centric political Islamist currents. Second, and relatedly, although Turkey’s political Islamists have indeed used grass-roots strategies to inspire and mobilize the masses, legacies of state-building have contributed to another set of strategies at the elite level: State-centric Islamists in Turkey have wielded their moral authority to homogenize and nationalize society, as well as to build and reorient the state in their own image. They have steadily gained influence through a patient strategy of temporary bargains with the anti-democratic forces of Kemalist secularism against mutual enemies (leftists, minority groups, etc.). Finally, they have aspired for institutional capture rather than protracted power sharing—much like their Kemalist counterparts. In this context, many big political battles are fought within the critical institutional corridors of the Turkish state and are thereby destabilizing to it, whether in democratic or autocratic form.

Party Systems in Muslim Societies

Are party systems in Muslim-majority societies different from those in non-Muslim-majority societies? If so, how—and more importantly, why? Cross-national time-series data demonstrate that party systems in Muslim-majority countries are consistently less competitive, less open, and less institutionalized than party systems in non-Muslim-majority countries. This chapter synthesizes existing theories of party system formation to argue that the traits of party systems in Muslim-majority countries are best explained by both shared experiences and systematic variation in historical developments related to colonialism and the path dependence of institutions, rather than by the political institutions prescribed by Islamic tenets. The chapter concludes by outlining a series of unanswered questions about the differences between party systems in Muslim-majority and non-Muslim-majority societies.

The Islamic State as a Revolutionary Rebel Group: IS’s Governance and Violence in Historical Context

What role, if any, does religious ideology play in the Islamic State’s (IS) violence and governance strategies? Given the organization’s name alone, the role of religious ideology in the group’s behavior—from challenging its enemies through a combination of violent tactics to undertaking intensive state-building projects—has seemed paramount. This essay, however, argues that the Islamic State’s governance and warmaking strategies are neither unique to the Islamic State nor are they particularly Islamic, as these behaviors are part of revolutionary warfare strategy that crystallized under, and were predominantly implemented by, leftist rebel groups during the Cold War. The Islamic State’s approach is thus a jihadist interpretation of this revolutionary warfare strategy with origins in leftist rebel groups. This essay describes the nature and origins of revolutionary warfare, as well as its spread from leftist and anticolonial movements across ideological categories to jihadist groups. It then demonstrates the parallels in both violence and governance between the Islamic State and Cold War leftist revolutionaries. The essay concludes with a discussion of the role of a religious ideology in terms of the Islamic State’s strategic approach, as well as the implications for jihadist warfare in the future.

Regime Types, Regime Transitions, and Religion in Pakistan

How does religion shape regime types, and regime transitions, in Muslim-majority states? Focusing on Pakistan, this chapter examines the limited role of religious groups and religious ideas in driving political transitions between military and civilian-led regimes. Since the partition of India and the formation of Pakistan in 1947, civilian-led regimes have been removed in three military coups (1958, 1977, 1999); only one of these (1977) was framed in religious terms. Protesters later helped to oust Pakistan’s military regimes in 1969–1970, 1988, and 2007–2008. Again, these protests stressed nonreligious more than religious demands. Within Pakistan, ostensibly “democratizing” transitions have typically preserved separate domains (e.g., the security sector) for military decision-making; these reserved domains have limited the scope of democracy. This chapter, however, moves beyond military to ostensibly religious limitations on democracy, noting that, while nonreligious protests often figure in transitions away from authoritarian rule, religious constitutional provisions diminishing the rights of non-Muslims have produced what scholars of hybrid regimes call an “exclusionary” or “illiberal” democracy.

Islam and Economic Development: The Case of Non-Muslim Minorities in the Middle East and North Africa

This chapter investigates a long-standing puzzle in the economic history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region: why do MENA’s native non-Muslim minorities have better socioeconomic (SES) outcomes than the Muslim majority, both historically and today? Focusing on the case of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the largest non-Muslim minority in absolute number in the region, and employing a wide range of novel archival data sources, the chapter argues that Copts’ superior SES can be explained neither by Islam’s negative impact on Muslims’ SES (where Islam is defined as a set of beliefs or institutions) nor by colonization’s preferential treatment of Copts. Instead, the chapter traces the phenomenon to self-selection on SES during Egypt’s historical conversion from Coptic Christianity to Islam in the aftermath of the Arab Conquest of the then-Coptic Egypt in 641 CE. The argument is that the regressivity-in-income of the poll tax on non-Muslims (initially all Egyptians) that was imposed continuously from 641 to 1856 led to the shrinkage of (non-convert) Copts into a better-off minority. The Coptic-Muslim SES gap then persisted due to group restrictions on access to white-collar and artisanal skills. The chapter opens new areas of research on non-Muslim minorities in the MENA region and beyond.

The Rise and Impact of Muslim Women Preaching Online

Female Muslim preachers are on the rise online, including in some conservative Islamic traditions such as the Salafi movement. The prevailing wisdom is that religion is the key factor explaining the increase and impact of women’s preaching. In this view, religious ideas about gender segregation create a need for female preachers who preach about “women’s issues” to exclusively female audiences. This chapter argues instead for a social movement logic: female preachers help Islamic social movements reach new audiences of both women and men. In this view, religious ideas prohibiting gender mixing are not the cause of women’s preaching, but rather a normative constraint that female preachers circumvent by preaching online. Data from a large Islamic website show that female preachers are reaching mixed gender audiences and eliciting positive reactions, especially from men, supporting the social movement logic.