In response to: Do the electoral results in Egypt and Tunisia post-2011 support a claim
that people are particularly religious in the MENA region? Has Edward
Said, who once said he felt the “predominant mood of the Arab world is
very secular,” been proven wrong?
I'm not sure in what context Edward Said was speaking, but unless he made that statement back in the 1960s, he would have been quite mistaken. The predominant mood of the Arab world is a long way from secular, and probably has been so since at least the 60s, if not always. Survey results confirm what anecdotal experience suggests: religion is very strong in the MENA region and has a powerful influence over society and politics.
The Pew Research Center's 2013 survey on Muslim attitudes towards religion, politics and society found that support across the Middle East and North Africa for making sharia the official law of the country was 74%. In some states, such as Iraq, it was much higher. The only surveyed state with less than 50% support was Lebanon, at 29%. Support for democracy was very high, at leas three quarters of respondents in the surveyed MENA states preferred democracy to having a powerful leader. However strong majorities also supported a role, sometimes a large role, for religious leaders in politics (except in Lebanon).
There's a couple of caveats to make with those results however. For one thing, support for application of sharia to family and property matters was much stronger than support for applying sharia across the board. Additionally, to some extend saying you "support applying sharia" in the MENA region is akin to an American observing that he or she believes the country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and the laws should reflect that. A debatable position, perhaps, but hardly radical and not without historical basis. The devil is in the details of exactly how people believe sharia should be applied.
Additionally, making a claim that people are highly religious in the MENA region would be accurate, but I'm not sure it's correct to claim that people are particularly religious there. This would suggest that they are observably more religious than in other regions, which seems doubtful on the face of it. A different Pew survey from last year found that although strong majorities in most of the MENA states believed that belief in god was essential to being a moral person, these majorities were echoed in Africa, south and southeast Asia, and large parts of Latin America. This suggests that it is not the level of religiosity that explains the peculiarities of the MENA region.
Finally, there are simpler, structural, explanations for the electoral victories in Egypt and Tunisia that might be more explanatory. After decades of suppression, both secular and Islamist parties were weak in these states, but Islamists had succeeded in building a far stronger organizational capacity and were well placed to succeed. As established above, Islam has a far stronger resonance in the region than does secularism, so this is probably not surprising. Additionally, the ousted authoritarian governments were devoutly secular, so in some sense we might say that the people in these states have tried out secularism and found it wanting (at least, at it was applied locally) and now large segments of the population would like to try something else, notably Islamism.
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ReplyDeleteI would agree that Edward Said's statement is not entirely accurate today, but the political landscape of the Middle East has changed significantly since Said's writing of Orientalism in 1978. Since he wrote, many of the secular, socialist governments of the Middle East have fallen or faced significant challenges-often from Islamist movements. Iran, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Libya have all seen largely secular regimes challenged or toppled since Said's most famous work.
ReplyDeleteSaid spoke those words in the late 1990s and I don't think he was wrong. Certainly, the term 'secularism' has been tainted by the association with autocratic regime across the region, but not by default - that has been a conscious movement frame employed by Islamists, the activities of whom have had an enormous impact on MENA societies in the past few decades. It's also easy to forget that the September 11 attacks in 2001 not only impacted the American sense of self, but that the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions that followed had a huge polarizing effect on identities across the MENA region. I can offer some anecdotal evidence to this effect from Lebanon (where the Pew results were not quite as dramatic), where I lived at the time of the attacks. The sympathy for the US and horror over the attacks people around me expressed on the eve of the attacks, turned to fear and, for some, a retreat to a more 'genuine' identity, readily offered by various Islamist movements, who could point to how right they had been about America's imperialist ambitions when first Afghanistan and then Iraq was invaded. The shift in my Muslim majority neighborhood of Beirut was quite tangible over the next few years, with more women starting to cover and my local gym displaying the Quoran at the check in desk and offering special workout hours for women. As I said, this is purely anecdotal, I haven't done any proper research on the subject, but if we trust the Pew polls (there are always semantic problems with these types of polls, but I have no reason to believe they are more flawed than any other polls), I do believe it is erroneous to think that the MENA region has always had the same attitudes towards religion and politics, and the shift has been much more recent and dramatic than we think.
ReplyDeleteEvan, the Pew Research Center polls you cited in your post are very interesting and offer a compelling argument to rebut the notion that secularism is predominant among Muslims in MENA states. The fact that such a large percentage (more than 75%) of the Iraqi population prefers Sharia law is especially intriguing. The reason I find this stat to be so surprising is because Iraq is a diverse state with divergent interpretations of Islam among their multi-sectarian Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish Muslim population. I would have guessed that fears of unpopular interpretations of Islamic governance being imposed by a different sect would make them hesitant to embrace a theocracy or sharia law enforcement.
ReplyDeleteI also think the fact that the poll only questions Muslims skews the reality of a few MENA states that have large Christian and non-religious populations. For example, Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine (the Levant) all have multi-religious and relatively secular populations when compared to other MENA states. Also, many MENA states already have instituted sharia law and religious authoritarian states and they may have voted in favor of these systems because they do not know any other type of governance and are skeptical, or are conditioned to be non-critical of such governments through the suppression of political dissent. Those are just a few ideas I had with regards to what I thought was a really thought-provoking public poll.