Chris Bennett

Worlds of Islam 5B Final Exam

TF: Danielle Abraham
12 June 2007
(Word Count: 2220)

With the collapse of European colonialism, the period since World War II initially

appears chaotically global; a swirling maelstrom of different pressures, events, and

circumstances have affected the fledgling Islamic nation-states around the world in a

seemingly indecipherable fashion. However, when analyzing the social and cultural

context of Islam in Egypt, Nigeria, and Iran, initial similarities and contrasts reveal more

subtle trends in how Muslims came to understand themselves, politically, legally, and

ideologically. In adapting to international politics and the effects of colonialism

domestically, Muslim communities have attempted to reclaim a truly Islamic society

while successfully integrating into the modern world. Caught in between modern

secularism and religious revival, the last fifty years have brought militant and factional

strife in Nigeria, dictatorial and radical violence in Egypt, and repression and revolution

in Iran. Participating in the postcolonial global arena has made the nation state and

secularism at least partially inevitable and pluralism more difficult than ever, and this fact

is at the heart of the turmoil and factional division found in the Islamic nations of the past

fifty years. Therefore, the context of international pressures and post colonialism is

mostly if not wholly responsible for the very way in which Muslims are articulating new

understandings since these contexts have posed an ambiguous cultural dilemma. Egypt’s

administrative and political changes illustrate a severe divide between a secular

government and a reformist Islamic community, while Nigeria represents a state divided

by regional and ethnic as well as competing secular and religious legal and educational

institutions. Iran’s ideological and political evolution calls into question whether

secularism may be thwarted by a truly Islamic state, but ultimately confirms the parallel
inevitability of postcolonial secularization and popular tension.

Egypt was the first Islamic player to significantly alter power politics after World

War II, and so the development of the Egyptian nation presents a useful springboard in

analyzing the development of Islamic administrative institutions. After the fall of a

moderate regime in the 1940’s, the Free Officers established a military authoritarian

regime in 1952 headed by President Nasser. From the outset, the government shifted

emphasis form “collaboration to anti-imperialism, and from nationalism to pan-

Arabism,” (Lapidus 524). The early 1950s defined a watershed in the administrative

institutions and ideology of the Nasser Regime. Nasser quickly emerged as the most

prominent Middle Eastern player in diplomacy, negotiating with the United States and

Soviet Unions as the competing global superpowers in a post-colonial world; he refused

to sign the Baghdad pact and negotiated security and arms deals with Czechoslovakia and

Russia (525). However, it was Nasser’s steadiness in the face of the Suez crisis that

reformed the way Islamic nations came to understand themselves as international players

after Britain, France, and Israel were forced to capitulate to the United States and Egypt.

Rashid Khalidi argues in “Consequences of the Suez Crisis in the Arab World” that the

Suez Crisis was the first post-colonial encounter in great power politics as it “gave a final

push to the tottering hegemony over the Arab world had sometimes shared and turned…

instead towards Cairo, Washington, and Moscow,” (Khalidi 377). Most importantly, the

nationalist drive of Nasser’s resistance and rhetoric became a powerful pan-Arab symbol,

an “Egyptian interpretation of Arab nationalism” which guaranteed the ascendancy of an

oppositional, anti-colonial approach to power politics that would reshape much of Islamic

political ideology (Khalidi 384). Nasserite parties were founded in many other countries,
and Khalidi argues that the event was pivotal in toppling the Iraqi colonial monarchy and

the Syrian Ba’th party and shifting control in Lebanon and Jordan (385). Thus, a secular

and anti-imperial ideology and politics emerged and spread from Egypt as colonial

international power dwindled.

Egypt’s leadership also led it to experience factional strife sooner than most other

Islamic states, as its secular administrative development conflicted with the stymied

conditions for the average Muslim. Even as Nasser and later Sadat became symbols of

the conservative and pro-Western possibilities of a secular Islamic nation, massive

popular backlash and religious revival had been brewing from the time that the Muslim

Brothers had been ousted in the early 1950s. A powerful secular regime required

authoritarian control in which the ulama and official Islamic community was strictly

regulated, oppositional movements were silenced, and private churches, land and

organizations were controlled by the state (Lapidus 529). Islamic revivalism was

immensely powerful for those who had been left behind in the drive to modernization,

including white-collar workers, the urban and rural poor, and a new emerging generation

of conservative urban students. Sadat’s acquiescence to the West and even Israel brought

the aggravations of the religious populace to a head; riots and Islamic propaganda grew

out of the jam’at al-islamiya student association as well as the Muslim Brotherhood

(531). By the 1980’s radical groups encouraged direct violence against the state, and

terrorism against government officials and Western targets. While these revival

movements have “ambiguous political implications”, it is clear that state secularization

has produced abundant popular strife and tension (533).

Nigeria experienced a parallel conflict between reform and secular modernization

that generated tension between regional and religious aspects of the Islamic community.

Regional and ethnic divides complicate the political and cultural qualities of the Nigerian

state. Northern Nigeria is almost entirely Islamic, following in the tradition of state

Islamic elites and local rulers or mallams that had been in place for hundreds of years and

ruled from Kano (746). Islamic identity is united under a joint Hausa-Fulani ethnic group

and the Hausa language. The rest of the country, however, is defined more by ethnicity

and region than religion; the east of the country is primarily Ibo, while the South and

West are a piecemeal Yoruba majority. Under these originally pluralistic conditions, the

formation of a Nigerian national state in the 1960’s “profoundly altered the political

meaning of Islam”, giving rise to the pervasive tensions which would unite the competing

state and popularly ethnic or religious forces over the next forty years (750). While the

power vacuum and regional tensions gave rise to a succession of military governments

between 1966-1979 and an oscillation between dictatorial control and unstable civilian

governance, Islamic popular reform molded cultural institutions in response to the

tensions of secularism. As insecurity proliferated, new and often militant reform

movements emphasized a shared Islamic identity tied to the north and a conservative

Islam based on Shari’a law. These tensions have become acute in the legal and

educational institutions of the country.

Both the educational and legal institutions of Nigeria have witnessed competing

secular and religious justifications of Islam in an unsteady social context. From the

1960’s, the North utilized a compilation of locally applicable Shari’a Maliki law and

colonial law that gave almost total precedence to Islamic law, while the south’s more

secular high courts emphasized the precedence of British colonial law. In Yunusa v.
Adesubokun (1968), for example, the northern local Shari’a local court’s ruling was

overturned by a higher southern court based on whether British Statue, the Wills Act of

1837, should take precedence over competing Maliki provisions. The high court ruled in

an appeal in 1971 that British Case Law mandated that any competing Islamic Law is

“undoubtedly incompatible,” (Mahmood 32). More recently, the militant reform

pressures of the last decade have led many northern states to directly adopt Shari’a law;

in 1999, Zamfara became the first Nigerian state to adopt Shari’a law as northern states

began to buck secular federalism (Lapidus 753). The Amina Lawal case of 2003 has

highlighted the cultural and colonial implications of this extreme reform; while the return

to traditional Islamic law represents the goal of the most radical activists, it bring up yet

another encounter with the power of the international community and colonialism. The

types of criminal punishments allowed by Shari’a, such as Amina Lawal’s sentence of

stoning, have provoked international outrage and intervention. The conflict between

“native” culture and “universal human rights” is once again in play; this interaction is

vaguely colonial since justice and oppression is framed in Western instead of cultural

perspective (Harvard Law Review 2373). Likewise, education has been torn between

opposite poles. While militant and civilian governments have emphasized Western style

education, such as the successful Universal Primary Education scheme of the 1970s, in

northern Nigeria smaller-scale communal education directly emphasized the teaching of

Islam (Lapidus 752). Movements, such as the Wahhabiya of nearby Bamako, abhorred

the remnants of colonial-style education and attempted to reinstate traditional religious

teachings. These past and current tensions reflect the ambiguous question of how legal

and social institutions should be influenced by the pervasive pressures of colonial and
international influence.

Iran represents the greatest transition in political, cultural, and legal institutions,

as the battle between religious reform and the state gave way to the concrete ideological

and bureaucratic institutions of an ostensibly modern Islamic government. The Pahlavi

regime of the 1970’s was an enormously centralized and secular institution in the

tradition of Nasser, and it generated massive popular discontent through its brutal land

laws and secret police (481). The Iranian Revolution of 1979 represented a singular

event, as the powerful Iranian ‘ulama came to directly oppose the state. For once, the

religious reform movement had enough power to overcome the state; under the financial

and rural support bases of the religious elite, massive popular discontent, and the

rhetorical and theological force of Ayatollah Khomeini, the influence of the ulama

equivalent to the power of the Islamic community as a whole. This event was the

culmination of distaste for decades of “state efforts at modernization and European

penetration,” and Khomeini’s rhetoric carries the weight of anti-Western Shi’a religious

fervor (484). In “The Necessity of Islamic Government,” Khomeini argues that in order

to re-establish the ummah they must “liberate the Islamic homeland from occupation and

penetration by the imperialists” and that the true path of establishing government lies in

the “sunna and the path of the Prophet,” (Khomeini 257). Under this ambitious Shi’a

framework, the revolution gave rise to an virulently anti-Western Islamic Republic, one

in which religious jurisprudence, or wilayat al-faqih, is granted to the Ayatollah and

supreme religious councils monitor such as Maslaha monitor public welfare (Lapidus

485). In the face of all colonial and Western influence, the Iranian revolution seems to

represent the first post-colonial Islamic state.

 This is not an aberration from the powers of the state and secularism, however;

Iran is evocative of the same popular and political tensions as in other communities and is

ultimately inapplicable as a true Islamic state. As Sami Zubaida contextualizes in “Is Iran

an Islamic State?” Islamic reform presupposes that the state and its notion of a secular

public sphere is a wholly alien concept to the Islamic community, one imposed by the

West and incompatible with the higher unity of the ummah (Zubaida 103). Even though

Iran claims to escape the Western post-colonial state through a truly Islamic state, upon

closer examination “secularization has not been reversed, but disguised behind imposed

symbols and empty rhetoric” (105). While the government is Islamic in “its personnel,”

the fact remains that the organizations and institutions of the state have no unique Islamic

features or models for administration (118). To be specific, the Shari’a has not become

the official law or Constitution of Iran, and the state, instead of the Qur’an, remains the

ultimate executor of the law; moreover, non-Muslims are still citizens of the ‘Islamic

state’ (Lapidus 487). Moreover, internal tension in administrative and popular contexts is

just as prevalent, if not more so. The current wings of the Iranian government once again

pit a progressive Islamic democracy against authoritarianism, and popular and student

discontent has soared since “Islamic totalitarianism is no more popular than any other

kind,” (Zubaida 118). Ultimately, the force of a true Islamic revolution could only hold if

Islam held an inherent religious opposition to modern state authority. This opposition is

not innate, but instead a product of the context of colonialism and power politics.

While Islam itself has not changed significantly since World War II, its cultural

and communal evolution has been enormously pivotal. Muslims around the world have

articulated understandings of what their religion means – in political, ideological, and

social terms – in a global environment in which there is no unified ummah or Islamic

rule. The postcolonial condition characterizes all international affairs with the great

powers and much of the internal affairs that encounter the legacy of imperialism, so it is

no surprise that Muslims have come to understand who they are within the force of these

contexts. Although they represent entirely different geographical and cultural contexts,

development in Nigeria, Iran, and Egypt all bear unmistakably similar patterns: a conflict

between religious reform and secular institutions, state and popular divergence, and

ultimately a capitulation to the basic institutions of the secular nation state. While the

failure of either a stable secular Islamic nation state or a true Islamic republic implies a

cultural dilemma at the heart of the current global context, it is not necessarily permanent

and not necessarily negative. The consistent patterns between these different countries

speak to the power of the Islamic community to dynamically adapt as well as the hope

that these changes may soon give rise to truly pluralistic Islamic government.