What motivates the restive Muslim youth from Tunis to Tehran, what political positions Islamists from Mali to Chechnya are fighting for, where the seeming obsession with Islamic law comes from, where the secularists have vanished to, and whether it makes sense to speak of an Islamic state.
Since 2009 there has been a renewed wave of popular unrest sweeping throughout much of the Muslim world. Secular, but generally repressive and inefficient autocracies have come under pressure or been swept aside entirely. At the same, the various Islamic Republics have not fared much better, but been convulsed by internal unrest, economic and social decline. Throughout the Muslim lands, existing constitutional arrangements are being challenged, often very violently.
This course is a survey of the constitutional ideas and institutions that have developed since the mid 19th century throughout predominantly Muslim countries, but its focus will lie on the actors that have dominated this discourse and shaped its outcomes. We will look at the large body of classical writings on the Islamic state only in so far as it is necessary to understand the contemporary debate, but concentrate on the legal and political developments of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Three common themes:
We privilege the study of the legal and social reality and seek to highlight where it is at odds with dogmatic stipulations, be they religious or constitutional.
We seek to illustrate the practical tensions posed by limited administrative capabilities and political legitimacy that resulted from the incomplete reception of modern bureaucratic statehood.
We seek to examine how popular dissatisfaction with the practical performance of Muslim governments has fuelled demands for greater accountability under the guise of cultural authenticity.
Ultimately, the course aims to equip participants to better understand Muslim contemporary discourse about the res publica, better contextualise the demands for religious law in public life, and to better ascertain the theoretical and practical feasibility of postulated religious alternatives to the still-dominant secular model of governance.
Constitutional struggles in the Muslim world. an overview of all Muslim majority countries, the historic developments, the cultural developments, the legal developments that are currently determining the political struggles that we see currently unfolding in the Muslim world. We are aware of the very ambitious scope in terms of geography and in terms of population and cultural scope of this course. So, in terms of expectation management, we will not be able to provide you with very detailed information about any one particular country or region. But what we can do is to give you an overview. Allow you to make connections between time and space to find interesting markers that will commit you to go on and study further on your own. role of a tour guide who takes you on to a trip and who provides you markers for further study. A little bit like a friend who's been there before and who says check this out. This is a cool thing. This is important because it refers back to somewhere where we've been before. So don't look at me necessarily as the expert knowing everything about the particular country or region that we will explore rather than somebody who is providing you the overview. Allowing you make connections and draw conclusions and draw. these very diverse regions together.
We look at insights from political science and some other disciplines and part of the things that I would like you to take out of this course is to focus not strictly on the legal text, but try to find an appreciation for the wider cultural political social context in which constitutional developments appear in the countries here. And as we will look at a very broad range of countries, I would like you to keep three common themes in mind that will guide our exploration of this very diverse subject area. The first is that we will try to focus in this course on the legal and social reality, not on the dogmatic text, be it religious or constitutional. What we mean here is that we will like to see the law and the politics as they are actually played out, not as its proponents claim they should be. This is a first departure from some of you who do Islamic studies, for example, at universities, which often have a very philological, textual approach. So this is the not approach you will take here. We focus on the legal and social reality. The second theme that we like to focus here is the practical tensions that's derived from the limited administrative capability that many of the states that we will look at have and that in my view, derive from the incomplete reception of modern statehood. So, statehood and administrative capabilities, and a whole package of the modern state is one of the things that we will look at in each and every country and region of this course. And last but not least, the third common theme that will guide us here is the popular dissatisfaction that we will see played out right now in many of these constitutional struggles that are ongoing at the moment. And the driving force for these popular upheaval is often normative. They're struggles about values. But they're often quite mundane things. It's dissatisfaction with public transport, dissatisfaction with the ability of the government to provide clean water, good housing, good education. So these are some of the things that we will look at. Apart from these three common themes, there's one basic approach I'd like you to remember as we go through this course. Look at this photo, what do you think is wrong with this photo? It reduces normal happy child to one of his many attributes, sitting in a wheelchair. It objectifies him and it removes him from his peers. And it seems to be based on the belief that there's a set of attributes that are necessary for an individual or group to understand their identity, their function. And in this example, of course it's important that this child sits in a wheelchair. If you were to discuss a school trip that might involve hiking in the woods. But is it truly the one and only necessary attribute that defines and sets him apart from his peers when we discuss, for example, student's abilities to learn languages or drawing? And I believe this photo shows a better approach. Here it's the same boy in the striped shirt in the front. But now it commits us to see commonalities without creating artificially rigid boundaries. Likewise there's a tendency to create Islam as a total civilization. Not just a religion but a political and social system. With divinely revealed law at its core that explains the totality of the Muslims thoughts, actions, way of being and it is held that this religious law constitutes the essence of what a Muslim is and it allows us to determine how this Muslim will act or think. And this is not just the way that westerners have looked at the east. There's a kind of ideological symbiosis between Western Orientalists looking like this at the east and Eastern Islamists who have a very similar view about themselves. In this course I do not believe this essentialist approach is either empirically sustainable, analytically helpful, or normatively defensible. So we will try to avoid this approach. In the next video, you will be presented with the region and its people and we will give you a rough overview of what are we actually gonna look at in this course. And then we will follow with the challenge that modernity, the modern period has posed for this group of nations and its peoples, and how they have reacted and responded to it.
Today, we look at the region that is the focus of the course. Both the geographical scope and the people who live there. So the most striking part about the Islamic history is the extremely rapid expansion at the beginning. And this is necessarily, it's gonna be a very short overview here. And I invite you to read up in some of the literature that we will point you to in the additional materials. But if you take the flight of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina which is normally the beginning of the Islamic time. The Hijra in 622, until the death of the Prophet in ten years later, already the entire Arab peninsula is unified and under the next four caliphs. The caliph is the word for successor, the so called righteous caliphs, properly selected caliphs. You already see the expansion very dramatically to large parts of the Sasanian Empire and large parts of the Byzantine Empire and into North Africa. And then the caliphate that follows after the Umayyads from 661 til 750, you see a dramatic expansion from the Hispanic Peninsula right up to present day Pakistan and parts of India. So this expansion within the span of 130 years is one of the things you should remember. It's dramatic and it's a source of pride. And it's seen as a symbol of this strength of this new religion and its ability to organize people. And then from 750, you have the Abbasid Caliphate that begins the so-called Golden Age of Islam. They moved the capital to Baghdad which they founded in 762. And this new city quickly becomes a metropolis of attracting scholars, artist, writers, tradesmen from all over the known world then. And it's characterized by great tolerance, great administrative efficiency. And this period of then the next roughly 4, 500 years is probably the best period for Islamic civilization or one of the great periods. And this is one of the areas to which current Muslims refer back when they describe for example, their religion as a religion of tolerance. And that's something that you should remember. All this comes to an end in 1258 when the Mongols who had have left their homeland in Central Asia and swept across the world, they come and destroy Baghdad. The Abbasid Caliphate is forced to flee to Cairo. And it continues to exist but in much reduced form and now, you have rival caliphate springs up in Cordoba in present day Spain. So this unity has been broken. And we now enter after this period of the heroic period of expansion, the golden period of consolidation, we now enter a period of fragmentation. And the Abbasid Caliphate falls to the Ottomans in 1517, and that continues in existence til 1924 when it's abolished by Ataturk. But now we have, and that's the other thing I would like you to remember a situation where the caliph who is nominally the head of government and the head of the religious community has become dependent on military soldiers, often slaves. And you now have this institution of the slave soldier on which the security of the ruler depends. You now have a bifurcation. You have the caliph, who's nominally the ruler and the spiritual head but de facto the ruler is the sultan who is dependent on and is often drawn from these slave soldiers. And this we will come back later. But this a point the division, you should remember. And by and large, the office of the caliph continues to instill among the faithful the loyalty that the prophet had naturally commanded. But in reality, he becomes an evermore powerless person. And this is one of the continuing characteristics of Muslim public lore or government which follows us right up to contemporary areas. Is the basic failure of Islamic political thought to come up with a realistic theory of government that takes account of the reality of divided authorities between the spiritual head and the nominal head. And you see a problematic and a consistently problematic approach towards the state. And the dogmatic ideal continues to draw on the early model of the prophet but increasingly, it has ever less connection to reality. So its ability to actually structure and guide actual governance, diminishes over time. And that's one of the problems that we will keep coming back in this course. And it's only in the 20th century that you now have new attempts to come up with a coherent theory of Islamic governance. Let's briefly talk about the populations that inhabit these Muslim lands that are now coming under the control. And one of the things to be remembered is the relative disinterest. Let's call it, of the Arab conquerors in turning the people that are now coming under their rulership and forcing them to become Muslims immediately. So there's a recognition that local customs can and should continue. And so we have for very long periods, you have large percentages of the populations remain non-Muslim. And this in turn explains the diversity of the people that are now Muslim, because later on they become Muslim but they continue to carry their own local traditions. Both in terms of customs but certainly in language, but in ethnicity, etc. And a very important element is also that the Arab conquerors, they took over existing administrative traditions particularly from the Persian empire but also elsewhere. That they for example, when much later when they moved into India. So local administrative traditions continued and were incorporated into what now becomes Islamic form of governance. And the flowering of the the cultural golden age that we just described is to a strong part, is a result of this symbiosis of different cultures that are now coming together. For the contemporary period, the thing that you should remember now is the sheer diversity in the populations that we will be looking at. So you have on the one hand the traditional Arabs that live in the Arab peninsula, but you have Somalis, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Bosnians, all sorts of people who are now Muslims. They're recognized as Muslim, they see themselves as Muslim but they are very, very different in the way they structure their lives. The other thing that is also to be remembered is the linguistic diversity that has always existed throughout the Muslim period. You might have heard that Arabic as the language of the Koran, as the language of the prophet, obviously plays a large and important role. And we see this in the imposition of the Arabic script that has been adopted throughout large parts of the Muslim lands. But let's not forget that the use of this script does not necessarily mean that these people speak Arabic. So if you look at this firman which is an Ottoman, governmental order and law. It's written in Arabic, in the Arabic script but it's clearly Turkish. If you look at the next one, this is a Persian firman written again in the Arabic script. And so the script has displaced previous scripts that might have existed but it's written in Persian. So the thing to remember is that Arabic as a lingua franca exists as an ideal, particularly when it's in the annual Hajj, it's an ideal that comes to the fore. But it doesn't really work in practice because the command of most people to speak Arabic has always been and continues to be limited. And this is the point I'd like you to remember, we cannot look at this area as one unified common cultural field. It's a very diverse field both an ethnicity, and language, and in culture. And this diversity is also reflected in the economy. So if you look at the income distribution, you have some of the richest places in the world, like Qatar which is in most rankings right now. It's number one, with annual income of more than $100,000. And you have some of the poorest places, like Somalia with an annual income of $600 or Afghanistan with roughly $1,000. So this incredible range exist within the group that we look at and that's to be remembered. We have in the group also some countries like Turkey or Malaysia with very impressive economic performances, while most others have stagnated. So if you look at this graph now, it shows the absolute GDP in current dollars from a period from the 1960s to today. And the graph that you see on top, this is Kuwait and indicated by the period where the graph is broken when Kuwait was occupied. And its income reflects the rise in oil prices. So it's not a truly domestically generated income. And the two other graphs that are going up is Malaysia and Turkey. Two countries that have had relatively impressive economic performances. But all of the others are almost stagnant in their income. And that's a point and a problem that we'll keep encountering as we go through this course. The other element is the cultural diversity, the domination of existing culture. So if you see here you have women in Afghanistan who traditionally wear burka full covering of the entire body and face, same in the Arab Peninsula. And you have people here in Indonesia who don't cover themselves at all. Perhaps most important is the variation that we see over time. In foreignpolicy. com, the newspaper they have a good series that I invite you to go and look out, check out there the website and the photos that they have placed there. And it's a very interesting juxtaposition of how life used to be in some important parts of the Muslim world. And how for example women use to dress here in Tehran or in this photo, in Egypt. And you all know how the dominance rules are today with respect to female covering in both of these countries. But apart from Ethnicity, language, wealth or social customs that we've just seen perhaps the greatest divergence within this group exists between well established or imperial powers like Turkey, Iran, or Egypt, which have strong governmental traditions, reasonably well functioning institutions. And countries that might have an old tradition but have very young state traditions like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Somalia, and which ensuingly often have very weak state institutions. Here for example you see the palace of the Ottoman sultan that he built for himself. And here is contrasted with the palace that the Germans built for the Afghan kings. So it's not something that Afghanistan could produce itself, and that's reflected in this mosque that the Ottomans built for themselves in Istanbul. And they exported pretty much exactly the same mosque to Kabul. This is the mosque Shah Doshamshera in Kabul that survived the war better than the palace but you can see this is not something indigenous of Afghanistan. It has been imported by and given as a gift from outsiders. This divergence in state capabilities somehow contradicts the basis of international law ever since the Treaty of Australia in 1648. Which stipulates sovereign equality as the basis of that system. You have a conceptual package consisting of sovereign equality, domestic jurisdiction, territorial integrity which treats all states as legally equal. And there are good reasons for this in International Law, and that's what I teach my students in International Law. But it's important for us to remember there is a fictitious element in this equality. Obviously states are not the same, and their capabilities are very different. And when we look at Afghanistan, the model that we just described, this problem of assuming an existing fully functioning sovereignty becomes problematic and that's something we'll refer to later. So if you look for example at the Bonn Agreement when the international community tried to rebuild Afghanistan. It started off from the basic idea taken from general International law that's and I quote now from the Bonn Agreement, it's reaffirming the independence, national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Afghanistan. That is a good normative basis to start from. But in practical terms as you see now, the list annex to the Bonn Agreement of 29 ministries that Afghanistan was ostensibly supposed to have that enabled it to govern. These ministries only existed on paper. This country had no functioning governmental traditions. And that is a problem in a fair number of the countries that we will look at in this course, particularly Somalia and Afghanistan obviously, the most extreme in this respect. The last point I tried to make which explains the divergency and commonality in our group is the whole problem of law and power. But calls it the oriental patrimonial states, something we just discussed, the particular form of authoritarian governments that existed in history. And here you have a painting of a Mamaluk warrior, one of the slave soldiers we just described. And but there's a failure to develop the system into a legally formulated feudal system that then could form as a basis of proper legal relations. And as with the slave soldiers, you now have the problem of praetorianism. You have those people in charge of the military and the defense function who simply assume power against the civilians. Here you have a painting of General Zia-ul-Haq from Pakistan and this is a problem that is endemic to not just to the Muslim world but its particularly prominent in the Muslim world. And it's something that has been described as an authoritarian bargain. There's an Arab social contract, where the populations would keep quiet and the ruler would just as a pater familias take care of them in economic terms. And you see here, there are right to work stipulations in virtually all Arab constitutions but the state assumes the responsibility to take care of the economic well being of its populations. Obviously as we all know, this is a responsibility, a promise that most of these governments have not been able to fulfill. And that's part of the story we see now in the current upheavals. But note already now that this is not just an economic bargain as we will come to in some of the later videos of this week. It's also a psychological bargain. It's the population seeking security and certainty in an age dominated by the force of modernity that sweep aside old certainties and traditional ways of life. And so they looked to the state and the ruler to provide this authoritarian home. And that's what Erich Fromm calls the fear of freedom, something we will discuss later on. And that's this psychological and economic component of the authoritarian bargain is something we will discuss in the next video.
Constitutional struggles in the Muslim world. an overview of all Muslim majority countries, the historic developments, the cultural developments, the legal developments that are currently determining the political struggles that we see currently unfolding in the Muslim world. We are aware of the very ambitious scope in terms of geography and in terms of population and cultural scope of this course. So, in terms of expectation management, we will not be able to provide you with very detailed information about any one particular country or region. But what we can do is to give you an overview. Allow you to make connections between time and space to find interesting markers that will commit you to go on and study further on your own. role of a tour guide who takes you on to a trip and who provides you markers for further study. A little bit like a friend who's been there before and who says check this out. This is a cool thing. This is important because it refers back to somewhere where we've been before. So don't look at me necessarily as the expert knowing everything about the particular country or region that we will explore rather than somebody who is providing you the overview. Allowing you make connections and draw conclusions and draw. these very diverse regions together.
We look at insights from political science and some other disciplines and part of the things that I would like you to take out of this course is to focus not strictly on the legal text, but try to find an appreciation for the wider cultural political social context in which constitutional developments appear in the countries here. And as we will look at a very broad range of countries, I would like you to keep three common themes in mind that will guide our exploration of this very diverse subject area. The first is that we will try to focus in this course on the legal and social reality, not on the dogmatic text, be it religious or constitutional. What we mean here is that we will like to see the law and the politics as they are actually played out, not as its proponents claim they should be. This is a first departure from some of you who do Islamic studies, for example, at universities, which often have a very philological, textual approach. So this is the not approach you will take here. We focus on the legal and social reality. The second theme that we like to focus here is the practical tensions that's derived from the limited administrative capability that many of the states that we will look at have and that in my view, derive from the incomplete reception of modern statehood. So, statehood and administrative capabilities, and a whole package of the modern state is one of the things that we will look at in each and every country and region of this course. And last but not least, the third common theme that will guide us here is the popular dissatisfaction that we will see played out right now in many of these constitutional struggles that are ongoing at the moment. And the driving force for these popular upheaval is often normative. They're struggles about values. But they're often quite mundane things. It's dissatisfaction with public transport, dissatisfaction with the ability of the government to provide clean water, good housing, good education. So these are some of the things that we will look at. Apart from these three common themes, there's one basic approach I'd like you to remember as we go through this course. Look at this photo, what do you think is wrong with this photo? It reduces normal happy child to one of his many attributes, sitting in a wheelchair. It objectifies him and it removes him from his peers. And it seems to be based on the belief that there's a set of attributes that are necessary for an individual or group to understand their identity, their function. And in this example, of course it's important that this child sits in a wheelchair. If you were to discuss a school trip that might involve hiking in the woods. But is it truly the one and only necessary attribute that defines and sets him apart from his peers when we discuss, for example, student's abilities to learn languages or drawing? And I believe this photo shows a better approach. Here it's the same boy in the striped shirt in the front. But now it commits us to see commonalities without creating artificially rigid boundaries. Likewise there's a tendency to create Islam as a total civilization. Not just a religion but a political and social system. With divinely revealed law at its core that explains the totality of the Muslims thoughts, actions, way of being and it is held that this religious law constitutes the essence of what a Muslim is and it allows us to determine how this Muslim will act or think. And this is not just the way that westerners have looked at the east. There's a kind of ideological symbiosis between Western Orientalists looking like this at the east and Eastern Islamists who have a very similar view about themselves. In this course I do not believe this essentialist approach is either empirically sustainable, analytically helpful, or normatively defensible. So we will try to avoid this approach. In the next video, you will be presented with the region and its people and we will give you a rough overview of what are we actually gonna look at in this course. And then we will follow with the challenge that modernity, the modern period has posed for this group of nations and its peoples, and how they have reacted and responded to it.
Today, we look at the region that is the focus of the course. Both the geographical scope and the people who live there. So the most striking part about the Islamic history is the extremely rapid expansion at the beginning. And this is necessarily, it's gonna be a very short overview here. And I invite you to read up in some of the literature that we will point you to in the additional materials. But if you take the flight of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina which is normally the beginning of the Islamic time. The Hijra in 622, until the death of the Prophet in ten years later, already the entire Arab peninsula is unified and under the next four caliphs. The caliph is the word for successor, the so called righteous caliphs, properly selected caliphs. You already see the expansion very dramatically to large parts of the Sasanian Empire and large parts of the Byzantine Empire and into North Africa. And then the caliphate that follows after the Umayyads from 661 til 750, you see a dramatic expansion from the Hispanic Peninsula right up to present day Pakistan and parts of India. So this expansion within the span of 130 years is one of the things you should remember. It's dramatic and it's a source of pride. And it's seen as a symbol of this strength of this new religion and its ability to organize people. And then from 750, you have the Abbasid Caliphate that begins the so-called Golden Age of Islam. They moved the capital to Baghdad which they founded in 762. And this new city quickly becomes a metropolis of attracting scholars, artist, writers, tradesmen from all over the known world then. And it's characterized by great tolerance, great administrative efficiency. And this period of then the next roughly 4, 500 years is probably the best period for Islamic civilization or one of the great periods. And this is one of the areas to which current Muslims refer back when they describe for example, their religion as a religion of tolerance. And that's something that you should remember. All this comes to an end in 1258 when the Mongols who had have left their homeland in Central Asia and swept across the world, they come and destroy Baghdad. The Abbasid Caliphate is forced to flee to Cairo. And it continues to exist but in much reduced form and now, you have rival caliphate springs up in Cordoba in present day Spain. So this unity has been broken. And we now enter after this period of the heroic period of expansion, the golden period of consolidation, we now enter a period of fragmentation. And the Abbasid Caliphate falls to the Ottomans in 1517, and that continues in existence til 1924 when it's abolished by Ataturk. But now we have, and that's the other thing I would like you to remember a situation where the caliph who is nominally the head of government and the head of the religious community has become dependent on military soldiers, often slaves. And you now have this institution of the slave soldier on which the security of the ruler depends. You now have a bifurcation. You have the caliph, who's nominally the ruler and the spiritual head but de facto the ruler is the sultan who is dependent on and is often drawn from these slave soldiers. And this we will come back later. But this a point the division, you should remember. And by and large, the office of the caliph continues to instill among the faithful the loyalty that the prophet had naturally commanded. But in reality, he becomes an evermore powerless person. And this is one of the continuing characteristics of Muslim public lore or government which follows us right up to contemporary areas. Is the basic failure of Islamic political thought to come up with a realistic theory of government that takes account of the reality of divided authorities between the spiritual head and the nominal head. And you see a problematic and a consistently problematic approach towards the state. And the dogmatic ideal continues to draw on the early model of the prophet but increasingly, it has ever less connection to reality. So its ability to actually structure and guide actual governance, diminishes over time. And that's one of the problems that we will keep coming back in this course. And it's only in the 20th century that you now have new attempts to come up with a coherent theory of Islamic governance. Let's briefly talk about the populations that inhabit these Muslim lands that are now coming under the control. And one of the things to be remembered is the relative disinterest. Let's call it, of the Arab conquerors in turning the people that are now coming under their rulership and forcing them to become Muslims immediately. So there's a recognition that local customs can and should continue. And so we have for very long periods, you have large percentages of the populations remain non-Muslim. And this in turn explains the diversity of the people that are now Muslim, because later on they become Muslim but they continue to carry their own local traditions. Both in terms of customs but certainly in language, but in ethnicity, etc. And a very important element is also that the Arab conquerors, they took over existing administrative traditions particularly from the Persian empire but also elsewhere. That they for example, when much later when they moved into India. So local administrative traditions continued and were incorporated into what now becomes Islamic form of governance. And the flowering of the the cultural golden age that we just described is to a strong part, is a result of this symbiosis of different cultures that are now coming together. For the contemporary period, the thing that you should remember now is the sheer diversity in the populations that we will be looking at. So you have on the one hand the traditional Arabs that live in the Arab peninsula, but you have Somalis, Afghans, Iranians, Chinese, Bosnians, all sorts of people who are now Muslims. They're recognized as Muslim, they see themselves as Muslim but they are very, very different in the way they structure their lives. The other thing that is also to be remembered is the linguistic diversity that has always existed throughout the Muslim period. You might have heard that Arabic as the language of the Koran, as the language of the prophet, obviously plays a large and important role. And we see this in the imposition of the Arabic script that has been adopted throughout large parts of the Muslim lands. But let's not forget that the use of this script does not necessarily mean that these people speak Arabic. So if you look at this firman which is an Ottoman, governmental order and law. It's written in Arabic, in the Arabic script but it's clearly Turkish. If you look at the next one, this is a Persian firman written again in the Arabic script. And so the script has displaced previous scripts that might have existed but it's written in Persian. So the thing to remember is that Arabic as a lingua franca exists as an ideal, particularly when it's in the annual Hajj, it's an ideal that comes to the fore. But it doesn't really work in practice because the command of most people to speak Arabic has always been and continues to be limited. And this is the point I'd like you to remember, we cannot look at this area as one unified common cultural field. It's a very diverse field both an ethnicity, and language, and in culture. And this diversity is also reflected in the economy. So if you look at the income distribution, you have some of the richest places in the world, like Qatar which is in most rankings right now. It's number one, with annual income of more than $100,000. And you have some of the poorest places, like Somalia with an annual income of $600 or Afghanistan with roughly $1,000. So this incredible range exist within the group that we look at and that's to be remembered. We have in the group also some countries like Turkey or Malaysia with very impressive economic performances, while most others have stagnated. So if you look at this graph now, it shows the absolute GDP in current dollars from a period from the 1960s to today. And the graph that you see on top, this is Kuwait and indicated by the period where the graph is broken when Kuwait was occupied. And its income reflects the rise in oil prices. So it's not a truly domestically generated income. And the two other graphs that are going up is Malaysia and Turkey. Two countries that have had relatively impressive economic performances. But all of the others are almost stagnant in their income. And that's a point and a problem that we'll keep encountering as we go through this course. The other element is the cultural diversity, the domination of existing culture. So if you see here you have women in Afghanistan who traditionally wear burka full covering of the entire body and face, same in the Arab Peninsula. And you have people here in Indonesia who don't cover themselves at all. Perhaps most important is the variation that we see over time. In foreignpolicy. com, the newspaper they have a good series that I invite you to go and look out, check out there the website and the photos that they have placed there. And it's a very interesting juxtaposition of how life used to be in some important parts of the Muslim world. And how for example women use to dress here in Tehran or in this photo, in Egypt. And you all know how the dominance rules are today with respect to female covering in both of these countries. But apart from Ethnicity, language, wealth or social customs that we've just seen perhaps the greatest divergence within this group exists between well established or imperial powers like Turkey, Iran, or Egypt, which have strong governmental traditions, reasonably well functioning institutions. And countries that might have an old tradition but have very young state traditions like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Somalia, and which ensuingly often have very weak state institutions. Here for example you see the palace of the Ottoman sultan that he built for himself. And here is contrasted with the palace that the Germans built for the Afghan kings. So it's not something that Afghanistan could produce itself, and that's reflected in this mosque that the Ottomans built for themselves in Istanbul. And they exported pretty much exactly the same mosque to Kabul. This is the mosque Shah Doshamshera in Kabul that survived the war better than the palace but you can see this is not something indigenous of Afghanistan. It has been imported by and given as a gift from outsiders. This divergence in state capabilities somehow contradicts the basis of international law ever since the Treaty of Australia in 1648. Which stipulates sovereign equality as the basis of that system. You have a conceptual package consisting of sovereign equality, domestic jurisdiction, territorial integrity which treats all states as legally equal. And there are good reasons for this in International Law, and that's what I teach my students in International Law. But it's important for us to remember there is a fictitious element in this equality. Obviously states are not the same, and their capabilities are very different. And when we look at Afghanistan, the model that we just described, this problem of assuming an existing fully functioning sovereignty becomes problematic and that's something we'll refer to later. So if you look for example at the Bonn Agreement when the international community tried to rebuild Afghanistan. It started off from the basic idea taken from general International law that's and I quote now from the Bonn Agreement, it's reaffirming the independence, national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Afghanistan. That is a good normative basis to start from. But in practical terms as you see now, the list annex to the Bonn Agreement of 29 ministries that Afghanistan was ostensibly supposed to have that enabled it to govern. These ministries only existed on paper. This country had no functioning governmental traditions. And that is a problem in a fair number of the countries that we will look at in this course, particularly Somalia and Afghanistan obviously, the most extreme in this respect. The last point I tried to make which explains the divergency and commonality in our group is the whole problem of law and power. But calls it the oriental patrimonial states, something we just discussed, the particular form of authoritarian governments that existed in history. And here you have a painting of a Mamaluk warrior, one of the slave soldiers we just described. And but there's a failure to develop the system into a legally formulated feudal system that then could form as a basis of proper legal relations. And as with the slave soldiers, you now have the problem of praetorianism. You have those people in charge of the military and the defense function who simply assume power against the civilians. Here you have a painting of General Zia-ul-Haq from Pakistan and this is a problem that is endemic to not just to the Muslim world but its particularly prominent in the Muslim world. And it's something that has been described as an authoritarian bargain. There's an Arab social contract, where the populations would keep quiet and the ruler would just as a pater familias take care of them in economic terms. And you see here, there are right to work stipulations in virtually all Arab constitutions but the state assumes the responsibility to take care of the economic well being of its populations. Obviously as we all know, this is a responsibility, a promise that most of these governments have not been able to fulfill. And that's part of the story we see now in the current upheavals. But note already now that this is not just an economic bargain as we will come to in some of the later videos of this week. It's also a psychological bargain. It's the population seeking security and certainty in an age dominated by the force of modernity that sweep aside old certainties and traditional ways of life. And so they looked to the state and the ruler to provide this authoritarian home. And that's what Erich Fromm calls the fear of freedom, something we will discuss later on. And that's this psychological and economic component of the authoritarian bargain is something we will discuss in the next video.
1.3 Early Modern History
We saw the wide variety of different countries that we will look at in this course. And you might have been wondering why we chose to take such a diverse group of countries and treat them in one common course, simply on the mere fact that they share, what the majority of the population share, a common faith. And, you might have been wondering about yourself and saying, well, I might be a Muslim, I might be a Christian, I might be a woman, I might be a man, I might be rich, I might be poor. So, why do I focus here, in this course on religion, as the one characteristic that justifies us to treat these countries together? And I'd like you to remember that reality is complex and we are not trying here to simplify it unduly, but any analysis is based on disaggregating relatively complex reality, into chunks that are easier to understand. So there is something here, that unifies these countries, which is the common faith. And the reason we think it is acceptable to treat them together is because they treat themselves as one common community that has something in common that distinguishes them from others and that is the focus of their identity. And if you look at the countries that we will look at in this course, most of them are, all of them actually, are majority Muslim. And all of them attach particular importance to this fact of the shared history of religious, of allegiance to a common religious faith. And you might be wondering where this strong attachment to religion as a cultural force, as a focus of identity, comes from. And here it is important to remember the very rapid expansion of Islam as a religion, but also as a political force that we discussed last time. And the enormous achievement that Islamic civilization created in the lands that became Muslim. And if you look at this photo, it's a photo from Bukhara, that I took mysel, f last year. It shows something distinctly central Asian, but at the same time, no one would be questioning this is a Muslim city. And if you look at this photo for example, which is from David Samling here in Copenhagen, it shows the wealth and the strengths of Muslim governmental traditions. Here it's a court scene, where a Muslim ruler in Mughal India is receiving a guest. And this history of cultural and civilizational achievement is something that is very prevalent and a source of considerable pride among virtually all Muslims today. Which might explain why there's such a strong attachment to it. Now, the problem we are looking at in the modern period and this is the focus on this course, is how this history of greatness contrasts with the history of domination during roughly the last 200 years. And it is this discrepancy of the self image of historical greatness and the contemporary experience of domination and subjugation, that explains a large part of the idiosyncrasies that we see in contemporary Muslim societies. For example, this is a picture of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, the first Qajar king of modern Iran. And he is still depicted very much in a traditional garb, as a traditional Oriental ruler, but already the background is inspired by European painting traditions. And if you look here, the photo of one of his successors now, Nelsvardin Shockvajar, here already you see the strong influence of European traditions. For example in the uniform that he's wearing, but also in the way that the miniature is painted. So in principle, you could now expect a period of cross fertilization. The Muslim nations learning from the technology and the sciences now being developed in the modern period, in the North and, to the mutual benefit of both. We do not really see this development. Instead we see the beginning of a Long and ongoing period of domination of Muslim lands by the ever stronger European forces. As you can see on this painting here, which shows French revolutionary troops under Napoleon, which in 1798 decide to invade Egypt. And this decision is not really been triggered by anything the Egyptians have done. It is, as you can see in the next painting, it is triggered by a confrontation revolutionary France has in Europe, with the other conservative powers. Here in this painting you see French and British naval forces fighting it out off the Egyptian coast, which is indicative of a problem we see now ongoing for the Muslim lands. In this photo, you see Australian troops being based in Egypt during World War I- Symbolizing the reduction of most Muslim lands. Having become the object of history or decisions being taken elsewhere. And this sentiment is strongly resented, a resentment aptly described by the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal Al-Azm in the following quote. In the marrow of our bones we still perceive ourselves as the subjects of history, not its object. As its agents and not its victims. We've never acknowledged, let alone reconciled ourselves, to the marginality passivity of our position in modern times. In fact, deep in our collective souls we find it intolerable that our supposedly great nation must stand helplessly on the margins not only of modern history in general, but even of our local and particular histories. This experience of colonial domination, was by no means limited to the Muslim world. Most other southern societies went through a similar process of humiliating imposition of foreign domination. One country's experience is particularly instructive, both on its own right, and also because it was closely followed throughout the Muslim world. Japan had lived in self-imposed isolation for several centuries. But then, in 1853 it was presented with an ultimatum sent by a Naval detachment of the United States, presenting its government with one clear choice, to open it's borders to trade or face military attack. The Japanese government quickly realized that it had not much of an option, but to accede to these demands. But what Japan then did, as you can see in this painting here, it studied the military superiority of the West, that had presented it with this unwelcoming position. And, as you can see in this painting, the Japanese looked carefully at the sources of military dominance. And then, they embarked on a self-conscious process of emulation, in order to catch up in most of the important factors with the West. And as you can see here, in this painting, it shows the funeral of the Meiji Emperor of the time. And it shows a Japanese dignitary in a Western military uniform. And what Japan managed, and this is something for which the, the Muslim world continues to be very, very impressed by, it managed to maintain it's tradition while emulating the West. And it, this emulation was focused in the military, in the bureaucracy, in law, and in the economic structure of the country. And Japan within a very short period, managed to be able to compete with the West effectively. As you can see in this painting, in 1894 it fought a major war with China and defeated it easily. And then five years later, when China itself was resisting colonial encroachment by the European powers, Japan was now fighting alongside, as you can see in this painting, fighting alongside British forces against Chinese forces. And as you can see in this painting, Japan was then admitted so to say, into the colonial club. It is here shown, here, you see a Japanese soldier next to his European compatriots. And I'm not, now, condoning the history of Japanese expansion, particularly as it played out in the 20th century. But, the point to remember, is that Japan was, in 40 years, managed to bridge this enormous gap and being now recognized as a great power on a par with Europe. And four years later, in 1904-1905, Japan fought a major war against a European white great power. Here you see a French depiction of the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-1905, which Japan decisively won, it annihilated the Russian far eastern fleet. And as you can see in this painting, showing a Japanese wood frame mocking the Russian emperor seeing his returning troops being completely defeated and wounded. And it is this experience of managing to catch up and to compete and ultimately stand up to the European forces, that left a lasting impression on Muslim intellectuals at the time. And this fascination with a Asian society maintaining its traditions, while being able to compete effectively in the modern world, that fascination continues in the 21st century. As you can see in this video of Ahmad Alshugairi, a Saudi, very popular television preacher, who went for his Ramadan program of 2009, he went to Japan and showed ordinary scenes of Japanese society. Showing how come that they are traditional Japanese people, maintaining their traditions while doing all the things that we claim to do? Being clean, being polite, being efficient, etcetera and, always asking his viewers how come we are not like the Japanese. And this process of successful modernization and reform and emulation. This is a process that continues in the Muslim world, and has so far been largely unsuccessful. But the challenge remains and this challenge is something that people see in the course as it unfolds, and we will explore it further.1.4 Unresolved Challenge of Modernity
The challenge of modernity, this is what we're gonna talk about in this video. And there are roughly four parts to it, the experience of modernity, the fear of freedom, the socializing effect of the international system, and the failure to compete in that system by most Arab societies. And look, let's start with a book of literary criticism, not law, Marshall Berman's book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air. And in this book, Berman describes modernity as the attempt by modern men and women to make themselves at home in this process to become subject as well as objects of modernization. And he describes the experience as a life of paradox and contradiction. Because modernity brings, at the same time, enormously powerful tools for Industrial production, scientific insights, bureaucratic innovations, cultural change. But with this opportunity come, With this power to control comes the fear of destruction of old communities values and even individuals. And so this control that is now possible by particularly the state wreaks anxiety and resentment. But modern life transforms the living environment of people very dramatically from the old static lives to as you see in this photo, it's a street scene from Cairo. You already see the dynamism of modernity. And the pressure and charm of modernity lies in this dynamism. This is what makes it attractive. People want to live it. And this dynamism is premised on a process of constant and never-ending cycle of creative destruction. As you see here this is an Egyptian horse drawn carriage, public transport as it began in Egypt. But as you can see now how quickly they move on. Modernity bring new things in. This is a new tramway station in Alexandria that was built in the 1930s. And this is Tahrir Square in Cairo in the 1950s roughly. So you see the lives of the people there, is within a very short span, is transformed. And it's transformed to the better. This dynamism is tangible, you can almost feel it. And the key driver of this process is money and profits, and you'll see, later in this video, there's a strong resentment against this dematerialistic aspect of modernity. But before we turn to this. This photo, for example, shows the production processes that are now being exported into the third world, including the Muslim world, too. Before we come to this material aspect of production and their search for profits Let's go back, briefly, to Berman's book. It deals heavily with the figure of Faust, Goethe's Faust. Which is the embodiment of someone who is now part of this modernization process but is held down by his traditional stagnant society. And, in a sense, Faust represents the classical intellectual from an under- developed country that looks towards most advanced societies with a volatile mixture of shame and pride. Pride in his old culture, but shame of being under-developed. And just as Germany developed after France, and that again after England, you see in the Third World, and particularly in the Muslim countries, modernity is now coming very, very fast. It's coming from the outside. Here in this photo, you see the headquarters of the Suez Canal company. It's a foreign financed and a foreign run operation in Egypt. And, This external aspect of modernity and its product makes the process not just faster but also a lot harder to accept and to come to grips with this larger
population because it's now physically symbolized in ethnically different white colonialists. As you see in this photo from French colonialists in Tunisia, the people are ethnically different and identifiably other and the process is faster. So, the costs that this process of modernization always imposes, are out weighted with the wealth of opportunities, but the threats are considerable, and the stronger the faster the process happens. And it is going fast in the under developed world particularly in the Muslim world. And this is a process that has, it's not unique to the Muslim world. It has been experienced, for example, by Russia and the In the 19th century. And Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel the Brothers Karamazov and in that novel there's a parable of The Grand Inquisitor. It deals exactly with this process of Individuals who cannot come to grips with the turmoil of modernity. And in the Grand Inquisitor, it's a parable of the second coming of Christ. He comes at the height of the Inquisition, he does wonders, people recognize him, start to adore him, and then the church comes in, and arrests him, and orders him to be burned at the stake the next day. And in the night in the prison the grand inquisitor comes and talks to Christ and he tells him that he and the church have realized that this is indeed Christ. So it's not a question of mistaken identity, but he tells Christ that his coming would now endanger the mission of the church. And he describes the mission of the church in the following terms, and it's exactly this problem of freedom that we will discuss. And I'm quoting, says man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good evil? Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering. So it says man is weighted down by this fearful burden of free choice. And in exchange and he's willing to give up this freedom, in exchange for spiritual even more than material certainty and that is something that we discussed already, and I encourage you to read this text which is freely available online and the link is provided in the materials. So the fear of uncertainty, both in material terms but also in spiritual terms, creates a very powerful force for everybody who is undergoing the modernization process. So it's a universal sentiment that is not at all unique to the developing world and certainly not unique to the Muslim world. And it's something that the German Jewish psychologist Erich Fromm has described in his book, The Fear of Freedom. And here he describes it, it says freedom it's two parts. It's freedom from a negative freedom from restrictions of a traditional authority, want, etc. And this is what the language of rights normally addresses, where you resist the imposition of strictures on you. But he says modernity
takes away these negative, you know, it creates a negative freedom. It takes these restrictions away. But it simultaneously creates what Durkheim called anomie, a sense of emptiness. The loss of the certainty of past. And therefore according to Fromm, this freedom, the negative freedom from restrictions must be counterbalanced by positive freedom to realize one's self in creative act and to build meaningful relationships with others and, This search for authenticity is particularly strong in society's on the go very rapid change. And they're here, as he describes and I think he's correct, is that this normative uncertainty creates a propensity to fall for authoritarian solutions that substitute for the uncertainty. Something that replaces the old community with a new authoritarian body, which tells people what to think, and what to act, and, therefore, gives them back the certainty that they need. And I think this psychological aspect is a strong element In what we have described earlier on, the Arab social contract, the authoritarian bargain. So it's not just the populations that keep quiet in return for material goods, it's also that they crave psychological whole, which again is not something that is unique to Muslim societies. So if modernity's such a mixed bag, its offerings come with such heavy costs, why not simply opt out? Preserve your stable socioeconomic arrangement, and just leave the external world to its own devices. After all, if you remember, this is exactly the arrangement
that Japan took for many centuries. The ruling summarized closed off the country precisely to protect the peculiar social and political arrangement that they country had, because they knew once they engaged with foreigners there would be an irresistible pressure for change. And this element of competitiveness is what Kenneth Waltz in his book The Theory of International Politics, describe that the socialization effect of the international system. And he says any units placed in a competitive environment, be it states in an anarchical system. Of firms and open-markets, or students at meritocratic universities. They will be forced to adapt any innovation that another act in that system has brought because otherwise they will face the consequences of that other actor now deriving the benefits from that innovation. And they not being able to use these benefits to defend themselves. So, over time, actors in competitive environments will become alike. They are socialized into looking the same. And the key driver here are material factors. So innovations in production, innovations in organizing your government, organizing your armies and the rejection of such materialist thinking lies at the heart of much of romantic opposition to modernity. In the arts and we have described it before one strong element in Faust. But also, it's a powerful component in the anti-modernist political movements that we see throughout the world, but particularly in the 20th century in the Islamic context. So if you look, for example, here at this extract from the very long and peculiar preamble of the 1979 Iranian Revolutionary Constitution which is very long, which makes an explicit rejection of this materialist thinking in the economy. And I'm quoting. This principle contrasts with other economic systems, where the aim is concentration and accumulation of wealth and maximization of profit. In materialist schools of thought, the economy represents an end in itself so that it comes to be subversive and corrupting factor in the course of man's development. In Islam, the economy is a means, and all that is required of a means is that it should be an efficient factor contributing to the attainment of the ultimate goal. Don't forget this is the actual Constitutional Preamble. Which is the longest of any constitutional preambles that we have. So here we have an explicit rejection that's saying, by charismatic fiat, the constitution drafted decides we will not be part of the competitive economy that is governing everybody else's lives. We are opting out. And the question is whether that's possible. You all know the answer. It has not been possible for the Islamic Republic to really create an alternative economic system. So which brings us to the last point of today's lecture which is the failure to compete effectively in this international system. And perhaps nothing more is powerful as a symbol of the competitiveness of the international system is the military performance of Muslim societies that has been generally quite weak. And the most dramatic instance of this failure to compete effectively happened in the 1967 war against Israel. Which led to the virtual annihilation of many Muslim armies and the total delegitimization of their the governments that had been in power until that point. The failure of most, if not all, Muslim nations to compete effectively in the 20th century in the international system is manifested across virtually all important socioeconomic indicators, be it literacy, being infant mortality, longevity, economic productions, patents, scientific productions, etc. And we will in the next video, we will look at some of these indicators as they reflect on the abilities of governments to compete.
1.5 Four Models of Adaptation
We now look at the four models of adaptation that exist to the challenge of modernity that we just discussed in the last video. If you remember the quote of the Syrian
philosopher Al-Azm that we had last time about the discrepancy that exists between the self image of the Arab and Muslim people, of looking back at the great history, and the perception of contemporary life that falls short of this grand expectation that these people have of themselves. You see the problem that the challenge of modernity poses for the identity and self image of the Arab and Muslim nation, and by the way, this is a common problem throughout the developing world. And it's this unwilling recognition that formally peripheral nations in Western Europe and elsewhere, have in the course of the 19th century passed them by it now relegated them to a peripheral position in history in turn. And those of you who might have followed Professor Zelikow's course here on Coursera about modern history, might have learned that there's something distinct about the modern period, something that sets it qualitatively apart from earlier historical epochs. And that qualitative difference is primarily defined through the exponential rise in industrial production and scientific innovation, that exists in the modern period. And, these changes wrought by modernity that we discussed in the last video, they are now transforming lives of people in a very rapid pace, and you yourselves right now are probably the best manifestation of this change. You're now sitting somewhere in your homes, literally spread around the world. You're listening to an Iranian guy speaking with a German accent from a Danish University, teaching to a broad, literally global audience, and we're all here in a common endeavor. You will, in the forums of this course, you might reach out, make friends, argue, struggle with people you have never met, but who now are possibly becoming your friends, or at least your acquaintances. So, you are right now the manifestation of the modern move from particularistic local live, to ever broader range of experiences, and that is, in a sense, the essence of modernity. In this move from the premodern local particularistic lives to what we experience today, there's a tremendous opportunity for personal growth, advancement, emancipation, but the implications are equally terrible for all certainties. The stability that premodern life encompassed, that is now gone. To give you an example, at my grandfather's tomb, by the way, this photo is not my grandfather's tomb, but at my grandfather's tomb, there is an elaborate inscription in calligraphy on the wall. That states in heavy prose his lineage, how the family moved from what's present day Saudi Arabia and Iraq, moved to Iran. How him and his forbears, the centers where they were trained as Islamic clergy, the names of the Ayatollah's under whom he studied, and on whose, his reputation and standing in the local community in which he now existed were based. So, knowledge which was the basis of his social standing, used to be static, traditional, hierarchical and closely linked to social position and lineage and that's something that is now changing in the modern period. The old certainties that existed and that defined human beings and kept them in place are now gone. You are yourself, right now, the best example. You are listening to me, in the premodern times, you would not have had access to that kind of information, and you will with that information, you will go and challenge your parents, your teachers, your, me eventually in the forums. So the barriers to engagement, to knowledge, are dramatically reduced now, and this is not something that the Internet has brought. What I'd like you to remember, that this is the continuation of a two centuries long process of modernity. And, two rather well known German philosophers have 150 years ago, already quite well expressed this phenomenon. This photo, you'll see the building of the first Aswan Dam in Egypt. And Marx and Engels in their manifesto described the process as follows, all fixed fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at least compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. These locations of this modernization
process, were already extremely destabilizing in the societies where the Industrial Revolution originated. So now imagine how much more destabilizing and overpowering it must feel in societies that did not produce this development on their own, but where it was imposed by foreigners. In this photo you see New York City, and it's a settler colony of white European settlers, who are building a city in their own image as they knew it from Europe. And in this painting from the early 19th century, the city is still distinctly European, distinctly premodern, but it's already a developed city. And I'll compare this photo from the late 19th century, roughly 70 years later, the whole city is transformed. You have now traffic on several levels. You have large scale immigration. You have large industrial production in the city, poverty and extreme wealth. All the symptoms of an extremely rapid modernization process, but don't forget this is in a white city of European settlers in a place that they control, and we would see similar things in London, or Paris, or Berlin. And now imagine the same process happening much faster in Karachi, in Tehran, in Cairo, faster and imposed from the outside. So you can now get a sense of the dislocations, the psychological alienation, that is felt by people in the so called third world, as they undergo this
overwhelming process of modernization. The sentiment to remember is that the dislocation and alienation felt by modern man is the same in The western european countries where this process originated, as is it is in the so called third world where the process is now imposed. However it is, you now have the added complication of the process being much faster, and it's being imposed by ethnically different outsiders. So you now have the whole colonial aspect to it, as you see in this photo for example. It shows French white colonial officers and their, white, in this case they're, they're mostly Russian Foreign Legion soldiers, commanded by French officers. During the capture of Tunisia and the turning of Tunisia into a protectorate of France. So now imagine how this, and with their arrival in Tunisia, the whole modernization process, industrialization, the whole thing that we just discussed with New York and other places is now happening in Tunisia. So imagine how this process now must have been perceived by the average Tunisian. Who is now not just feeling the objectivation of general modern man, but on top of this, the subjugation and disempowerment of being a colonial subject being in a white run place. And one of the most powerful literary descriptions of the devastating effect of modernity in the guise of colonialism. In my view is by the Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, in his first book he wrote as a very young man, Things Fall Apart, which is exactly the story of a young, actually in the book he's not young. It's a chieftain, a traditional African dignitary, who cannot come to grips with the transformation of the economy, the turning of subsistence agriculture to cash crops that have to be delivered to the colonial authorities. And how his whole life and the social system on which his position, his feeling of self worth, his identity was based, is literally falling apart as the title of the book refers to. So, try to keep this feeling of loss of control in mind. And, in a Muslim context, we have similar writers who describe the impact of modernity on their societies. And, in the Iranian context, and I'll just take two randomly selected. They're not that randomly, but. Two examples from the Iranian context that we have similar examples obviously from the Arab literary world. Here we have Sadegh Hedayat, who is the quintessential modernist writer of Iranian literature, often compared to Kafka, who transformed literature in the modernist times trying to adapt the style of writing to what life as modern man encompasses. And his view of modernity is by and large positive. He understands and he himself, he ultimately committed suicide because he could not find a position in this changed life. But he saw it ultimately as an inescapable and ultimately positive development. And he saw traditional life as certainly not something worth returning to. His problem was precisely the, as we discussed earlier on with Faust of modern man being stuck in a traditional society that is not moving as fast as the external life conditions are. And in contrast you look at Jalal Al-e-Ahmad whose best known book is Gharbzadegi, which means, variously translated as toxification of being struck by the west, where he accuses his fellow intellectuals of being ensnared by Western ideas, western modes of living. And there's a sense of almost romantic longing to going back to pre-modern times. And his view, for example, of the clergy is dramatically more positive than Sadegh Hedayat. And this tension that we see throughout the developing world and particularly in the Muslim context, where on the one hand traditional life is held as a model worth returning to. And on the other hand writers try to embrace the changes of modernity and try to find their own interpretation of it. And that continues to be a problem as we will see as we go along. So let's restate, the experience of modernity is one of an overwhelming force that reduces individuals and groups to mere objects of history. And therefore, there have been various attempts to regain subjectivity, to regain agency. To try to mold your own fate and your own history, both in the West where this process originated and certainly in the developing world where this process is now coming as an outside force. And faced in a society who's traditional Idea of culture, whose traditional idea of identity, is closely tied up to religious notions. It's clear that the engagement of religion is going to now play a strong role in these various attempts to come to grips with modernity. And there've been, roughly speaking four broad approaches, in the Muslim world, to deal with the challenge of modernity in ideational terms. And remember that these four approaches that I'm going to lay out in a few seconds, are ideal types in the Weberian sense. So, you will find that they are deliberately purified concepts and for analytical reasons, we focus on certain aspects of them. In reality, you will find elements of all four approaches in the various
countries you will see. But, try to keep them for a moment, analytically separate. So, just to make clear what the difference between them are. And the first approach is the complete emulation of the West. Which then, with it, comes a strong tendency toward secularism. And similar to the Japanese tradition, or the Japanese reaction to the foreign intervention, you now have in the 19th century in Muslim countries, particularly in Turkey and Iran, but also elsewhere. Intellectuals and government officials
who now argue that we need to copy what the West has done. And what is the source of the West's power and strength. So you now see, as in this photo here. The development of modern institutions dedicated to, in this case, this is the University of Cairo. So, you now have universities being founded. Not in the tradition of Muslim learning, but modeled on Western science-oriented rationale learning. You have, as in this photo, which shows the Autumn in Ministry of Defense is now the, both in architecture and in organizational structures the attempt to Copy what has made the West powerful. And here for example, you see the Ottoman sultan passing by an honor guard of Ottoman soldiers that are at this time trained by German officers. So they are now trying to copy what is happening elsewhere. And in the Ottoman tradition and we will come to this later on, this whole process of copying of the west is known as
Tanzimat, the reform movement. And in this contemporary photograph,
postcard, you see Turkey is this woman in the front who is not coincidentally, not wearing a hijab, not wearing a veil. And she has just been liberated from the chains of tradition that held her back. And the people who have liberated her is the sultan and his dignitaries who are the embodiments of this reform movements. Trying to move into modernity and you see in the back the different flags of the Ottoman Nations, the Turks, the Greeks, the Armenians, etc. So doing this, I mean at the end
of the Ottoman period you have one Turkish officer who then reacts. You know, you have the Young Turk
movements who say this is not going enough. We need to go even further, and the remnants of religion that was still strongly felt in the Tanzimat are now cast aside. by the Young Turks and as then in the wake of the First World War. Turkey becomes a republic based on national principles under Mustafa Kemal, who's then known as Atatürk, the father of the Turks. Here you see a contemporary photo of him with his military medals. He strongly embraces not just reform, but complete secularization on the French model. And this something that you see right now
in the contemporary debates in Turkey. This is exactly the debate about the people in the streets are adherence of. Kemalism, secularism against the current government that is more attuned and has successfully argued from during the last ten years for a stronger role or reintroduction of religion into public life. So, that's the first approach to modernity. It's the secularists based on complete emulation of the West. The second group is religious modernism. These are people who are a little bit like Jalal al-e-Ahmad who was one of the that we just discussed. One of the forefathers of other religious modernism. He says, no, we need to stay close to our traditions which are religion. So, we can not cast away, aside Islam, but we need to reform it. And the countries most closely associated with this approach are probably Morocco and Tunisia nowadays and we will discuss them later on in the course. But keep in mind that this is by far the most prevalent response to modernity. There is a desire to keep Islam in the public life and not just in the private life and trying to reform it too, and there's this general assumption that Islam is compatible with modernity and therefore it needs reinterpretation but based on traditional concepts particularly of Islamic law. Empirically this has been the most dominant response in the Muslim world. Obviously life has changed. That was a clear and simple empirical observation. And as you see here, modernity had arrived. You have now modern forms of transport one of ways to productions, so there is this understanding that old norms and customs must change as well. But the reforms that are deemed necessary are painstakingly defended in Islamic terms, particularly in terms of Islamic law. And the prime example of this approach towards change that is deemed necessary for practical reason but defended on Islamic religious grounds Is perhaps the 1958 Tunisian family law. And you see the same approach in the Moroccan of roughly same period 1957-58 and even more dramatic in the 2004 overhaul of the Moroccan family law. And in both cases you have the approach is that yes, we need to change our customs. We need to change the way we regulate things, particularly the role of women in In a modern economy. But we do this on the basis of existing religiously defined norms. So there is dramatic change in objective terms, but the change is defended religiously. And In terms of political ideas that's been a very rich tradition of various Muslim reformists who try to come up with a coherent theory of government that takes into account the needs of modern life but defends at the same time the necessity to stay close and true to your culture's rules, which are religious. And the chief aim has been, and continues to be, that Islam, as a religion and as a culture, is fully compatible with modern life. The third, basic approach to modernity has been the traditionalists, perhaps best symbolized by Saudi Arabia and the other gulf monarchies. And their approach has been that there is no need to change, that Islamic governance and Islamic societies are not just okay, but they're actually superior to the decadent ways of the West. And they seem to focus on the negative aspects of modern life. One of the things, for example, that I often see. The high divorce rates, the negative impact on family life, prostitution etc. And as our societies are actually much more stable, they're based on Islam and there's a particular notion of Islamic
law as being already all encompassing and sufficient to regulate all aspects of life traditional or modern. And therefore there is this, belief that we actually don't need to change. It's important now to realize that these societies are not adverse to the technical innovations that modernity brings. So as you can, anybody who visits the gulf countries you would readily see that they're very open towards technology. Particularly as consumer goods that are produced in the West. And also they import people who operate this elements of modernity for them, but their own societies they think they can keep separate from the insidious impacts of modernity. So, these are the traditionalists, the conservationists. And the fourth, and perhaps most important group, Most important in terms of the space they occupy on the political agenda and on the minds, the imagination, of both Muslims and non-Muslims alike, are what I now loosely refer to as the fundamentalists. And this is a very active, very diverse group of people theoretically very productive. Who do accept that modernity is posing a challenge. Fundamentalist reacting to the failure of both secularist and religious modernists to come up with a workable theory of government in the modern world are now positing the confrontation with the west in terms of an irreconcilable difference. They present Islam as inherently superior to both capitalist and socialist approaches from the west and they, Look at the practical failures of Arab government or Muslim government that has been based on the emulation of western models. And I think we need to go back to the sources, that's where the word fundamentalism comes from. So we need to go back to the foundations and recreate Islam as it was envisioned by the prophet. And they posit Islam as the only moral order with themselves as exclusive interpretus of the divine will. And see, in Khomeini's famous words, Islam is a third way. As the superior way of arranging the societies. And this school of thought in the wake of then 1967 defeat by Israel has grown in dramatically in importance and in the capture of the popular mind both in the West, in the master world and outside. So, to briefly recapitulate, there are four approaches that you have, the
emulators, the secularists, first group. Second group are the religious modernists, the third group are the traditionalist who try to conserve Islamic society as it is, and the fourth group, the fundamentalists who want to dramatically and radically change Muslim societies. And one of the key points of contention between them is the role of Islamic law in the public and that's what we will turn to in the next video. And overall try to keep these four groups in mind, because we will structure the outline of the course as it follows according to the groupings of the countries into these respective four groups.
1.6 Indicators of Relative Failure
We have talked about the challenge that the modern period has posed for the Arab and Muslim nations in terms of economic development, social development, and
military competition. This is a challenge that has been on going for the last 200 years. So it's not a new phenomenon, but the challenge is becoming particularly acute in the wake of the recent upheavals and transformations that have been on going particularly in the Arab world. And one of the elements that is not, in my view, is not sufficiently being paid attention to is the necessity to dramatically improve the economic performance of their societies and their states. And in the wake of the problems, faced with the transformation processes. In this book by a prominent group of economists brought together by the Brookings Institution, the authors tried to focus on the particular challenge posed by the transformation system. So if you look at this graph, they identified a group of 103 countries that in the recent decades have undergone dramatic political transformations. And this group of 103 countries, it can be roughly divided into two groups. One group, which is represented by this top graph 57 countries whose economy represented here by the gross domestic product has continued to increase after the transformation. So the transformation might have been traumatic, rapid, radical but the economy continued to grow. And as you can easily imagine, this will create a positive situation for the stabilization of the new political order. However, an almost equally sized group, represented by the lower graph here, 46 countries. They've experienced sometimes dramatic decreases in the gross domestic product after the transformation, something that can again be easily imagined. Once the old political order changes, old certainties fall down, the production might decrease or actually collapse. And with that income collapses, and you can easily imagine that this will have a negative impact on the likelihood of stabilization of the polity. And what the authors in this book are now warning the new governments that came to power after the spring in the Arab countries are now alerting us to this that once your economy goes into decline, the likelihood of the transformation ending peacefully and safely dramatically increases. So that is the backdrop. Now, look at the following graph which shows value added per worker, and divided by region, which is a fairly good approximation of the relative economic
performance of different regions. And if you can see here, the two top graphs, they are represented by so called Asian tigers, the China, Vietnam, Korea. And they have in the last 20 plus years, seen a very dramatic increase in the productivity per worker. And that always leads and transforms increase in wages, increase in wealth overall. And you can easily see that the overall economy of these countries is doing rather well as we all know with respect to China for example. And now, look in the middle you have. You have Eastern Europe and Central Asia that have done moderately well, well enough. You have in they yellow line the high income OECD countries, the already established developed industrial countries. And they have increased their GDP about 20% in the last 20 years, which is decent enough performance. But now, look at the two lower. This is an interesting phenomenon. The red line represents Sub-Saharan Africa, which has been for many years, right up to the millennium has been quite stagnant. And then in the last 10, 15 years, you'll see that they have dramatically increased their productivity. And that transforms to greater GDP. And with a greater GDP, you will have greater likelihood of stabilization of the political system. And what is now somewhat important for us to see is the green line, which are the Arab countries. And you see that over period of 20 years, not only have they remained stagnant in terms of the productivity of the worker, it's by far the worst performing region in the world. And if the productivity per worker does not increase, there is less wealth to be shared. So there's less potential for increased wages. But this keep it in mind, against the expectation of rising living standards that people have. And another graph that shows the relative poverty of the Arab
economic performance in this graph you see, the trade that they do with other countries. So you see here at the bottom. This is inner Arab trade, it's almost insignificant with respect to global trade, as you see. So they're not producing very much, and they're not producing very much that the rest of the world wants to buy, and they're not trading very much with themselves. So here you have the ingredients of a problematic economic story. And now, look at the demographic development that is happening at the same time. And together you have the recipe for a problem. If you look at this graph which shows population growth in percentage over the last 50 years. You have here at the bottom. The EU countries, the rich industrial countries in Western Europe, and their population has remained more or less stagnant. And we which poses its own problems that are not the problems that we have to deal with here. But by and large their populations are stagnant. You have a population growth between 0 and 1%. And if you look at the rest of the world, it has hovered between 1 and 2%, which is a reasonable population growth that is not causing too many problems. But if you now look at the Arab countries here at the top. They have had very, very large population increases between roughly around 3% per year. And some of the countries in the Arab world have had even higher. And this is the average for all of the Arab world. So some of them have had higher population growth than 3%, and this together transforms you can easily imagine, into what has been described as a youth bulge. We have a very young population that is now entering the labor market, and so that the percentage of young people throughout the Arab and Muslim world is very, very large. In some parts, you have two-thirds of the population below the age of 30. And against this background, look at the following chart now. We have all of the Arab countries throughout the last 30 years have invested heavily in education, which primarily is a good thing. So you see here, average years of schooling for selected Arab countries, but its the same for the other Arab countries that we don't have in this chart. And you can see that on the left hand side it's years of schooling and it started here in the 1970s with between one and three years of schooling on average for the working age population. And this is in 1970. And if you now look in 2010, we have for Jordan now the average is nine years of schooling. And for Morocco, which is the least well performing, it's still more than four years of out schooling for the average population, which is a primarily good thing. But now, keep in mind that the years of schooling corresponds to an expectation of the person who went to school and to university. That he will now reap the benefits of a university education that historically has accrued to people. And that is where we now see the challenge, because the state had historically has offered in the what we called the Arab social contract, the authoritarian bargain which had offered to its population the promise of stable secure government jobs, if you had a certain type of education. That is the promise that these young people are now trying to claim, and that the state is no longer able to fulfill. So you have now a very large, young, reasonably well-educated population entering the labor market, looking for good, well-paid, stable government jobs that the government no longer can provide. And that creates the backdrop of the very considerable unrest, dissatisfaction, particularly in the young population that you see. And if you look at this graph, it super imposes unemployment rates for different social groups and the overall labor force growth. So labor force growth is represented here by this pink line. And you see that overall here, it is between 2% and 5% annual labor force growth. So there are between 2 and 5% every year new people entering the labor market for whom jobs need to be created. And that is a challenge for any economy, and it's particularly a challenge that here now we have a select group of Arab nations that they have been very, very unequally able to fulfill for different population groups. And if you look at the light blue columns, which represent youth unemployment, so the people between 15 and 24, you've here for Algeria unemployment rates of 45% in the young groups. For Bahrain, it's 20%. For Egypt, it's 30%. For Jordan, it's close to 40%. And this gives you an indication of the social dynamite that is waiting there. Young people, reasonably well educated with an expectation of stability, people who you, who want to start families, who cannot start families because they can't find jobs. So you have young people who are sexual frustrated, who are economically frustrated and who are domestically you know live in domestically repressive system. That is the backdrop to the Arab revolution. And you need to keep this in mind, because that's the paradox to the overall relatively positive economic indicators that were seen before. So if you look now at this graph, which shows the results of an opinion poll that was held in 2007 and 2010, and shows the response of people to the question, how well are you doing. How do you ascertain your present economic position and your outlook onto the immediate future? You see, dramatically different responses in the span of three years. And the responses people give give you an indication for the political stability that we see then in the so called Arab Spring. So if you look, for example, at a country like Jordan here, People are actually describing themselves as doing better. In 2010 they are more optimistic. More people are describing themselves as thriving. The same here for Lebanon. More people are describing
themselves as thriving. We are doing well, my situation right now is good, and my hope for the future is even better. And the same here for the Palestinian territories and the United Arab Emirates. Not incidentally, these are also the countries that have remained relatively stable in the transformation. If you now look at the other countries. If you look at Egypt and Tunisia for example, people were reasonably happy in 2007, but dramatically fewer people are now describing the economic position as good. They described themselves as thriving in the span of three years. And the same story continues for Bahrain and for Morocco. For Syria obviously. And to some extent for Saudi Arabia. And this is the backdrop. This is the expectation that motivated people at the beginning of the Arab transformations. So people are unhappy with their economic situation, and that motivates them to do something about it in the political field. And that is the novelty in the Arab rebellion now that people are actually doing something. But the backdrop, and that's what I would like you to remember, is the economic performance of these governments and the societies. Now if you look at two important countries in the context of the Arab revolt, Egypt and Tunisia, where the revolts respectively started. Here again we have the responses over a span of one year. To people's satisfaction with key public services. It's a slightly different group depending on the importance attached into different countries to the different public services. So if you see here, in Egypt, people were asked, how happy are you with public transportation, the environment. IE, probably rubbish collection, affordable housing, the educational system. And here again you see, within the span of one year, the responses have fallen precipitously. Particularly with respect to public
transportation, but also with respect to garbage collection, affordable housing or the educational system. And the same story we can now observe in Tunisia with respect to housing, healthcare, roads, and schools. Now obviously people are particularly unhappy with the way government had dealt with the housing problem and
healthcare, but still also unhappy with roads and schools. And these were things that motivated many of the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. So, it comes back to the inability of the governments to live up to the traditional Arab social contract of the government providing for its people. Because, that was the basis of the social contract, people were relatively docile as long as the government provided. Now the government seems to be unable to provide due to its inability to manage an economy efficiently, and that has motivated the transformations. This is obviously a relatively superficial, relatively cursory glance over a very complex data-driven story. I invite you to look at the book, After the Spring, that I showed, from which all this data is derived. And as similar reports mentioned, among others in that book, but elsewhere, to understand the economic background to the political transformations we see. And keep in mind the graph that we showed in the beginning. The potential for destabilization, if the new governments that have now come to power are not able to transform not just the constitutional political system and legal system. But also, to transform the economies towards a more efficient, less corrupt way of producing enough wealth so that the legitimate expectations of a growing population, particularly a young population are met. Because if they're not met, we will see more destabilization and more insecurity.
1.7 Role of Religion and Islamic Law
As we saw some while ago, the four approaches that have developed in the Muslim world towards modernity are premised on the different role accorded to religious law in the public sphere. And it is quite impossible to give you, in the short span of time that we have available here, even a rough overview of Islamic law. As Roy Mottahedeh, in his great novel, The Mantle of the Prophet, showed, the training required to become a scholar of Islamic law is exceedingly long. Generally around 20 years is normally considered to be normal before you then leave the educational institution and then practice it. I do not claim that sort of expertise. And I certainly cannot claim to bring across anything resembling a complete overview within the short time we have available. So all that we can do in this format is to point out a few common misperceptions about the nature of Islamic law as it pertains to the constitutional order of a state. So let's start with one of the common misperceptions that you will often encounter in political discourse in the Muslim world, as well as in political discourse outside, as it refers to the Muslim world. And that is a common misperception that there is such thing as the Islamic law. You hear of the word sharia as if it was a homogenous, clearly identifiable body. That is not the case. One of the things that you need to remember is that, from the recognized sources in the early centuries of the development of the Islamic empire that we had covered earlier on, you have within the Sunni world, four equally orthodox, equally valid schools of Islamic law are developing. You have the Hanbaliyya, the Hanafiyya, the Malikiyya, and the Shafiyya schools. They then come to dominate certain regions and for right now, we don't need to concern which regions belong to one of these groups. But what you should remember now is that there are these four distinct schools of Islamic law and they do have developed quite distinct rules. And rules that are often at variance with each other concerning fairly important functional areas of the law. That is the first thing that you need to remember, so there's a great degree of diversity within Islamic law. These were the Sunni schools. Then you have at least two schools of Islamic law within the Shia sect. So that's at least six schools, and then there are numerous subsects, so that is, keep this in mind for the moment, that there is a broad variety of equally orthodox views about what Islamic law makes, what it constitutes. That's the first common misperception. The other misperception is, and that goes back again to the early period of the Islamic world, as you heard to the beginning,
there was a unification of religious rulership and secular political leadership. And this unification is also reflected in the in the religious law, which has led some commentators to describe it as a deontology, a normative system. And they have therefore denied it the characteristic of a proper legal system because they say it mixes internal duties, duties that only the believer himself or herself can control. So whether for example you are a good person, whether you're living up to the religious stipulations of belief, for example, things that another human being cannot know and therefore cannot control. There's no distinction, these people claim, between internal duties and external duties, duties that are owed to other human beings and therefore can be controlled by other human beings, and are subject to be observed by others. And they say that Islamic law does not make this distinction, because if you open a handbook on Islamic law, it will, you will have rules about contracts, rules about marriage, rules about inheritance. But at the same time, rules about prayer, rules about fasting, rules about the pilgrimage, things that really only concern the individual, and, It's a correct observation, but this does not mean that we cannot distill the distinct legal elements within Islamic law. So I would like you to remember that the common misperception that there is no such thing as a legal system within Islam is probably problematic. So yes, let's assume for the moment that there is a legal system that is susceptible to be analyzed with the legal methodological tools that we use, also, to analyze any other legal system. Now the problem is that the modern legal systems that we have in, that have developed in the West, they obviously developed in a Christian context, and that holds particularly true for
international law. And there's now the tendency to describe the modern legal system as being derived from Christianity. And you hear this claim again from both sides of the aisle. I would like you to consider the the option, or the possibility, that the divide lies not so much between the Christian-inspired laws that developed in the modern age in western Europe, but more that the divide lies between rational, formally organized law, and religious law on the other. And that is a distinction that Max Weber
developed and proposed for the first time. And I think it's a very useful distinction. So the distinction is religious law. And he says then, there are common characteristics between Islamic law, Jewish law, Hindu law, medieval canon law. Basically, all legal systems that are based on revelation and are administered by priests as the interpreters of this revelation. So, he groups them as one group, religious law as he calls it, sacred law, and he opposes this with modern formally organized rational law, as it developed in the modern bureaucratic state. And I think that this distinction is more useful and analytically more helpful, And he suggests that any sacred law, whether it's Islamic, Jewish, Hindu, Christian, will share certain characteristics that sets it apart from formally organized law. And its reliance on revelation makes it, as what he calls, formally, procedurally irrational because it's outside the scope of rational critique. Because it's based on revelation. And therefore, there is no easily identifiable source, for example, for new law. There is a tendency towards tradition, and towards maintaining the status quo. And then he also says that any sacred law will have a tendency to what he calls material irrationality. So it's focused on ethical norms, political expediency, the outcome of a particular case. And he describes it as becoming particularly clear in the way cases are administered and that is particularly in the traditional Islamic sense. Quite apparent what he called khadi-justice, so that each case is looked at on its own merits for trying to achieve justice in this particular case. And he contrasts this sacred law with formally rational law, as it develops in a bureaucratic system, that aims to apply abstract general principles to individual cases. And you see the implications this has for the government and for the way society is structured. Now let's, in the few minutes that I have, let's move to the constitutional order. First of all, when we speak about constitutional law, any law that governs the relationship between the different organs of the state can be termed constitutional law. So we will be able to identify the constitutional law of the Abassid Caliphate. But in the modern iteration of constitutional, we normally refer to a covenant that is written or unwritten, as for example in the British case, that sets apart and delineates the respective mandates and respective powers of the organs of the state. And it does so in an abstract, predictable manner. And it's administered in courts that follow abstract, predictable procedures. And it is here where, according to Weber, and I think he is correct there, that sacred laws, societies that adhere to sacred laws, will find the biggest obstacle to enter and embrace the modernization process fully. Because they will not be able to rationalize or to structure according to rational principles, that's more correctly, the way the different organs of the state are arranged. So this is his suggestion, and I'd like you to ponder this for awhile. Whether you would agree that the existence of a sacred law rather than the particular character of the particular religion is what makes it hard for the states that we will
look at in this course, to fully embrace the challenge of the modern period. And I think, to some extent, it explains the relative failure, for example, of the Tanzimat period
in the Ottoman area. Because they were not able to really follow what for example the Japanese did, to embark on this process of defensive modernization in order to be able to stand up to the challenge of other states in a competitive system. Because they were held back by a legal system that is both formally and materially irrational.
No comments:
Post a Comment