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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRSTPROOFS, Fri May 15 2015, NEWGEN
Islam
and
Democracy
after the
Arab Spring
z
JOHN L. ESPOSITO,
TAMAR A SONN,
AND
JOHN O. VOLL
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of
Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research,
scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide.
With offices in
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Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1. Introduction 1
2. Islam, Democracy, and Turkey’s Secular State 26
3. Iran: Classical Themes and Contemporary Challenges 50
4. Pakistan: A Work in Progress 79
5. Indonesia: From Military Rule to Democracy 115
6. Senegal: Democracy and the Postcolonial State 149
7. Tunisia: From Revolution to Republic 174
8. Egypt: From Democratization to the Restoration of
Authoritarianism 202
9. Conclusion 237
Notes 255
Index 293
Acknowledgments
Introduction
potent force, especially in the context of the new social media technolo-
gies most commonly associated with younger generations. Digital social
media have allowed the creation of a new, virtual public sphere that allows
activists to bypass authoritarian governments’ prohibition of freedom of
speech, press, and association. As the work of Jon Anderson and Dale
Eickleman demonstrates, the virtual public sphere neutralizes class, gen-
der, and even sectarian distinctions, allowing for the creation of a new
kind of social activism, one that does not require a charismatic leader
or vanguard, just numbers. In the first decade of the 21st century, par-
ticipation in this virtual public sphere was approaching critical mass. All
that was needed to see the effectiveness of online social/community orga-
nizing was a “tipping point”—to borrow Malcolm Gladwell’s term. Just
what would serve as that tipping point was the only aspect of the Arab
Spring that was unpredictable. In the case of Tunisia, it was fruit vendor
Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation; for Egypt, it was the killing of com-
puter programmer Khaled Said in Alexandria. For Libya and Yemen, it
was Tunisia and Egypt. For Syria, it was the torture of teenage antigovern-
ment graffiti artists in Daraa. One way or another, the new cyber social
sphere was going to be the means to release pent-up demand for democ-
racy, especially among the “cognoscenti youth bulge.”
Others suggested, more traditionally, that Muslim countries were at
last catching up to the rest of the world. In 1991, the year that the Soviet
Union imploded, political scientist Samuel Huntington had described the
history of democratic transitions since the American and French revolu-
tions as a series of long “waves.”4 The first wave, lasting from 1828 to 1926,
saw the United States, Argentina, Chile, Britain, France, Switzerland,
Italy, and Spain extending democratic participation beyond the elites
who dominated earlier governments. The results were not perfect, but at
least half of the adult males achieved the right to participate in competi-
tive elections. By Huntington’s count, this “long” wave involved perhaps
thirty countries. Military coups and the rise of fascist governments in
Latin America and Europe ended that wave and resulted in World War II.
The defeat of the fascists in that war then gave rise to the second wave of
democratization. It lasted from 1943 to 1962 and comprised the restora-
tion of democracies destroyed by fascists and the addition of a few more
countries to the roster of democracies, thanks to decolonization. But by
the late 1950s authoritarianism was on the rise again in Latin America,
Asia, Greece, and Portugal. What had been a democratic Portuguese
republic, for example, was replaced by the authoritarian Estado Novo in
Introduction 3
But what about the “fourth wave” hypothesis? Was it overly optimis-
tic? Is the overall failure of the Arab Spring uprisings evidence that the
“fourth wave” hypothesis was ill founded? As Ahmet T. Kuru points out,
in the wake of the apparently failed Arab Spring, there is a temptation
to revive the hypothesis that there will be no “wave” in Muslim-majority
countries because Islam is indeed the insurmountable object in the way
of democratization.7 That hypothesis is associated with the same Samuel
Huntington who came up with the wave theory of democratization but
also claimed that Muslim countries would never have their own wave
because of inherent contradictions between Islam and democracy. In
1996, John L. Esposito and John O. Voll tackled these issues in Islam and
Democracy (Oxford University Press). Based on six case studies—Algeria,
Egypt, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Sudan—they demonstrated that
Islam and democratic governance are far from incompatible but that dif-
ferent sociocultural and historical experiences result in diverse approaches
to democratization and its relationship to Islamic ideologies. In light of
the Arab Spring uprisings and their apparent failures, we will revisit the
question of Islamic approaches to democracy. In case studies—including
Arab-majority and non-Arab states, we will trace the trajectory of strug-
gles for good governance. We will examine the current state of democ-
ratization efforts in the subject states, taking into consideration critical
factors such as the impact of colonialism, the Cold War, and changing
demographics. We will argue that the Arab Spring uprisings represent
only the most recent developments in struggles for good governance and
popular sovereignty in Muslim-majority countries, struggles that have
been ongoing for well over a century. They were driven by long-standing
grievances against authoritarian governments, both colonial and postco-
lonial. The only people who were surprised by them are those who, in
ignorance of that history, looked at non-democratic post-independence
governments in Arab countries and generalized that they represented the
preferred or perhaps even requisite form of governance for Arabs or even
for Muslims. As Ziad el-Elaimy, one of the leaders of Egypt’s 2011 upris-
ings, put it, “The Egyptian Revolution had begun long before 2011, and
[will] continue long after.”8 The same is true of democratization efforts in
other Muslim-majority countries. We will therefore argue that, although
the Arab Spring did not result—domino-style—in the end of authoritari-
anism in Muslim-majority countries, democratization did not begin with
the Arab Spring and, judging from its history, is bound to continue long
after its “winter.”
Introduction 5
theory, he simply excludes societies that are not secular from the ranks of
the modern and therefore democratic (or “democratizing”).
It is this alleged rejection of democracy that became the focus of
Huntington’s assumed “clash” between “the West and the rest,” as he put
it, because embedded in his notion of democracy is secularism and the
attendant religious freedom (pluralism) that developed in Europe only
with democratization. For Huntington and all those bound by traditional
modernization theory, if religion is involved in public life, it will preclude
both pluralism and democracy.
These observations reflect Huntington’s earlier work on the processes
of democratization in which he explained the “democracy deficit” in
Muslim-majority countries as due to Islamic societies’ lack of the prereq-
uisites for development of democracy. Perhaps not all religions are inimi-
cal to religious freedom/pluralism and democracy, Huntington argued,
but Islam is. Western Christian societies were able to develop democracy,
but Islamic societies would not be able to.
Huntington explained Islamic societies’ “democracy deficit” in the
context of late-20th-century discussions of evolving global democ-
racy. Following the implosion of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama
(Huntington’s student) wrote The End of History and the Last Man
(Free Press, 1992), in which he claimed that history would never again
be viewed the same. For nearly half of the 20th century, the conflict
between capitalist and communist groups of countries (“blocs”)—
known as the East-West conflict or the Cold War—had dominated
global politics, and those of the United States in particular. It was a
“death match” between two archenemies of relatively equal strength;
the “Reds” could at any moment take over the “Free World” and end
life as we know it. Readiness to deter potential military threats from
the Soviet bloc therefore drove US policy and military buildup from the
end of World War II until the USSR disbanded in 1991. In the immedi-
ate aftermath of that paradigm-shattering development, then-President
George H. W. Bush spoke of a “peace dividend”; now that the Soviet
Union had been dismantled, Western countries could decrease mili-
tary spending and use their resources more constructively. Fukuyama
attempted to capture the drama of this turn of events. “What we may
be witnessing,” he said, “is not just the end of the Cold War … but the
end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological
evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the
final form of human government.”13 In brief, Fukuyama believed that
Introduction 7
all peoples want the kind of governments in place in Europe and the
Americas.14
But Huntington disagreed. He singled out as unlikely candidates for
democratization Marxist-Leninist regimes, those where Confucianism
dominates—and countries influenced by Islam. Why? Because, says
Huntington, modern civilization and therefore democracy can only
come from a set of values that he describes as uniquely Western: “indi-
vidualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, lib-
erty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, [and] the separation of
church and state.”15
Huntington acknowledges that many of his “democracy-resistant”
countries were savaged by Western imperialism and that fascism and
communism are also “products of Western civilization.” But this does
not impact Huntington’s characterization of Western values. Regardless
of actions by Western powers that defy them, in Huntington’s view
respect for democracy and human rights remain defining Western
values.16
Huntington does note a direct correlation between the colonially
created states with their non-representative, corrupt postcolonial gov-
ernments, and the modern revival of Islam as a focus of oppositional
discourse. But because he has already assumed that Islam is un- or anti-
democratic, he describes Islamist opposition to authoritarianism not as
similar to the kind of populist opposition developed in Christian societies
but as a substitute for it.17 Huntington argues that the “general failure of
liberal democracy to take hold in Muslim societies … has its source at
least in part in the inhospitable nature of Islamic culture and society to
Western liberal concepts.”18 But failing to take into account the content of
Islamist demands, he simply concludes that, unlike Christian societies in
post-communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (his third wave of
democratization) who “are making progress towards economic develop-
ment and democratic politics; … the prospects in the Muslim republics
are bleak.”19
In fact, the 2002 report ranks Arab countries in the late 1990s at the
very bottom in terms of freedom among seven regions (North America,
Oceania, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, South and East Asia,
and Sub-Saharan Africa).
The 2004 report—“Towards Freedom in the Arab World”—focuses on
ways “to stimulate a dialogue in Arab societies on how to expand freedom
and establish good governance.”21 But unlike Huntington-esque analyses,
the AHDR reports avoid essentializing Islam and indeed observe that
there are “fundamental principles in Islam which dictate good gover-
nance, includ[ing] the realization of justice and equality, the assurance
of public freedoms, the right of the nation to appoint and dismiss rul-
ers, and guarantees of all public and private rights for non-Muslims and
Muslims alike.” Further, the report cites a recent World Values Survey
(WVS) in which nine regions were surveyed, including advanced Western
countries. Arab respondents were the most likely to agree with the state-
ment that “democracy is better than any other form of governance.” Thus,
the report states specifically that the democracy deficit “is not cultural in
origin.” It is not Islam that stands in the way of freedom or democracy, but
“political rulers, in power and in opposition, [who] have selectively appro-
priated Islam to support and perpetuate their oppressive rule.”22 Included
in that category are those who attempt to keep Islamists from political
Introduction 9
Introduction 11
Introduction 13
Introduction 15
Introduction 17
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