Islam as a political force

1. Islam as a political force • Relative importance • Most significant social organization outside of the family is through Islamic institutions • Islamic institutions include: mosque (Friday sermon); religious schools (madrasas) • Key concepts in political Islam • Role of the Qur’an • Apostasy • Shari’a • Jihad • Hakamiyya • Importance of piety, social justice, and order • Why does Islam become politicized? • Religious view • Protest view • Institutional view

2. Manifestations of political Islam • Early developments • Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt • Key ideologue: Sayyid Qutb • States often supported Islamists • Key events • Arab defeat in 1967 • Iranian revolution in 1979 • Assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981 • War against the Soviets in Afghanistan • Sudanese formulation of an Islamic state in late 1990s • Attack in New York and DC in 2001 • Iraq as the new Afghanistan • Welfare and social service provision • Education, scholarships, food, sanitation • As a protest movement • Key leaders of street protests against regimes • Use of cassettes/Friday sermon; headscarf as a political symbol • As political violence • Assassination of government officials, judges, intellectuals; killing tourists (Egypt) • Suicide bombings of police/military (esp. Palestine/Lebanon/Iraq)

3. Islamists and the state • The Islamist threat • State-led Islamism vs. opposition Islamisms • Islamists as a competitor to the state • Attempts to co-opt Islamic institutions • Why are Islamists considered a threat to the state? • Participatory Islamist movements • Formation of Islamic political parties where available • Strategic decisions about participation vs. opposition • Increasing numbers of participatory movements • What are the effects of participation on Islamist movements? • Splits in Islamist movements • Movements often split over whether or not participation is the right way to go • Is Islamism on the rise or in decline?

4. Waves of liberal reform • Economic liberalization vs. political liberalization • Liberal economic experiments were started in the late 1970s and 1980s • Can you economically liberalize without political liberalization? • Characteristics of liberal reform • Reconvening old national assemblies • Increasing the number of people who can vote • Letting up on the media • Allowing for freedom to organize and legalizing parties • Wave 1: 1985-1992 • Characteristics • Examples • Closing down of reform projects by the mid-1990s • Reasons • Examples • Wave 2: 1999-2005 • Characteristics • Examples • How has the Iraqi example affected broader trends in democracy in Wave 2?

5. Why reform? • Reform as a response to protest • Diversion theory: liberal reform protects the state from popular pressures • Reform as a response to international pressures • International pressure matters, but it can be dealt with without serious costs • Reform as a tool to divide and manage the opposition • Split or discredit the opposition to make them weaker • The emergence of young dynastic leaders • Their opportunity for reform • Constraints on their reform efforts

6. The limits to reform • When reform becomes too risky • Importance of democratizing examples • Electoral rules as a tool to limit the opposition • Design a system that effectively constrains the opposition • Institutional powers as a tool to limit the opposition • Design constraints on parliamentary authority • Islam as a constraining factor • Major opposition groups are usually Islamist in character, but their commitment to democratic turnover is sometimes open to question • Under-institutionalized states with no horizontal accountability • State power tends to be centralized, with little horizontal accountability • Vertical accountability would not effectively reign in new leaders

7. Lecture terms Shari’a Madrasa Ulema Jihad Shura Muslim Brotherhood SayyidQutb Crisis-based reform Generational reform 1991 Algerian elections Electoral management Arab Spring Mohammed Bouazizi Zine el Abidine Ben Ali Hosni Mubarak Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) Tahrir square Al-Nahda Freedom and Justice Party Al-Nour party