After the Arab Spring

I

When the first signs of the Arab Spring appeared in Tunisia and Egypt, the crowds in the streets, the ‘kids’ on Facebook, all of us, watching from a distance, were excited and, with whatever degree of caution, enthusiastic: here were defenders of freedom and democracy challenging tyrannical regimes. But since I believe that one of the central tasks of political theorists is to worry, I worried. And my worry took the form of a question, which I still think is the crucial question that we need to address: Can there be a democratic revolution and a religious revival at the same time, in the same place? In the Arab Spring case, the revival had begun before the uprising: how would the two coexist?

That is the question that I want to reflect on here, as a political theorist, speculatively, without pretending to be what I am not – an expert on any of the Arab countries now in upheaval. In fact, I will begin by looking at other countries where I know enough at least to tell a story about the interaction of revolution and religion. I have just finished writing a little book about national liberation and religion, in which I compare India, Israel and Algeria. In these three countries, in the years after the Second World War, national liberation movements committed to establishing secular and democratic states succeeded in doing just that (democratic in only two of my cases, but secular in all three) – and then, some 25 or 30 years after independence was won, these states were challenged by a militant, politicized, revivalist religion. Three very different religions, three very different countries, but the timetable of the challenge was roughly the same.

These are not cases of simultaneity, which is what I want to get to later in this article. In these three cases, religious forces figured only marginally in the liberation movement. The three religions were in what we might think of as a relatively apolitical phase in the 1940s and 1950s; they had (mostly) been accommodationist in the years of colonial rule and in the years of Jewish exile, and now, faced with secular nationalists, their leaders were (mostly, again) passive, as if they were getting ready to accommodate a new set of rulers. By contrast, the leaders of the secular nationalists were politically active and remarkably self-confident. They all believed in the doctrine of inevitable secularization. Consider these words of Jawaharlal Nehru from his book, The Discovery of India, written in the 1930s: ‘Some Hindus dream of going back to the Vedas, some Muslins dream of an Islamic theocracy. Idle fancies, for there is no going back to the past … There is only one-way traffic in Time.’ The Zionist prospective was strikingly similar, as the historian Ehud Luz writes: ‘The assumption that the Jewish religion … was destined to pass from the scene sooner or later, because it contradicted the needs of modern life, was accepted by practically all the Zionist intelligentsia.’ When Ben-Gurion made his deal with the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) leadership, he was sure that the Haredim were going to be, in the new Jewish state, a sect like the Mennonites or the Amish in the United States. Ahmed Ben Bella, the future first president of Algeria, had views on this issue much like those of the Indian National Congress and the Labor Zionists. Sitting in a French prison, he read the works of Malraux and Sartre; it would never have occurred to him to read or even to acquaint himself with the writings of Muslim theologians and preachers; from his perspective, they were irrelevant to the liberation struggle. One might say that national liberation succeeded because it was secular work carried out by secular militants. Could it have been carried out by secular militants working alongside religious militants?

I want to say something about how things stand in these three countries today, but first it will be useful to consider two major revolutions, in one of which religion was hostile to revolutionary aspiration, while in the other it was an ally.

Consider first the French Revolution, which was like the three national liberation movements in that it was made possible by – or, better, one of its preconditions was – the absence or relative weakness of religious forces. Still, religion in France was the recognized opponent of the revolutionaries, who clashed repeatedly with the Roman Catholic Church. Luckily for them, this was not the revived, aggressive and militantly orthodox Church of the Counter-Reformation. That Church had been undercut by more than half a century of philosophical and popular enlightenment and by the steady erosion of theological conviction, even among the Roman Catholic clergy. So the revolutionaries won, though, as it turned out, only for a time. Catholicism came back just as the kings came back, and it is worth remembering that the final triumph of secular politics in France, the definitive separation of church and state, did not happen until 1905 – 116 years after the revolution.

Why did it take so long? The best way to answer that question is to think about the Catholicism of everyday life. The revolutionaries tried to create a new civic culture, replacing Catholic ceremonies and liturgies with ceremonies and liturgies of their own – a new calendar, new holidays, a festival of Reason, secular pageantry, civic oaths, and much else. But it didn’t take, not after 1789 or ’93 and not after 1830 or ’48 either. It required more than a century of republican effort to establish a civic culture that could stand independently and resist the political influence of the Catholicism of everyday life. And this Catholicism was not a militant, revivalist religion; it was just, so to speak, a steady religion – steady in its hostility to secularism and steady in its opposition to democratic aspiration.

But consider now a very different case: the American Revolution was quite radically secular and at least quasi-democratic, and it came fairly soon after the first Great Awakening of evangelical Protestantism in the colonies and shortly before the second Great Awakening, whose preachers were most active in the 1820s. In America, in colonial times and in the early republic, Protestant revivalism mostly supported revolutionary and democratic politics (it also provided a base for the anti-slavery campaign). But this was the revivalism of a reformed and, what is probably more important, a radically fragmented religion, where every new orthodoxy was immediately challenged: Anglicans by Presbyterians, Presbyterians by Congregationalists, Congregationalists by Baptists, Baptists by Methodists, Baptists by more radical Baptists, radical Baptists by Universalists, and every church and sect by Separatists of seemingly infinite varieties. The earliest Protestant Churches attempted to capture and use state power; they tried to make themselves ‘established’ Churches, supported by the civil authorities – in Geneva, in Scotland, in England in the 1640s, in Massachusetts early on. But the Churches and the sects that came later challenged all the establishments and demanded and then defended a secular state, disengaged entirely from religion. So the American republic thrived on what Edmund Burke, in his ‘Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies’, called ‘the dissidence of dissent and the protestantism of the Protestant religion’.

II

Religious revivalism around the world today is very different from the two Great Awakenings. Except in the USA, where Protestantism is still dominant though no longer revolutionary, revivalist religion is radically unwelcoming to dissent and unchallenged by new denominations; its protagonists seem eager to seize and use state power against heretics, apostates and infidels. Let us look again at my three cases of national liberation confronted by religious revival.

In India, Hindutva, Hindu nationalism, whose leaders seem on the verge of taking power by winning a national election, is a threat to liberal democracy if not to democracy itself – and to religious toleration (crucially, for Muslims), to social equality and to women’s rights. All these are guaranteed in the Indian constitution; national liberation, as I have already suggested, came at a time when Hinduism was relatively weak and the liberationists had free rein in writing the constitution. Gandhi had appealed to religious emotions and succeeded in making Hinduism into a force for non-violent resistance. But he did not set the agenda of the new state (not only because of his assassination in the immediate aftermath of independence). The political leaders of the liberation movement, like Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar (the Untouchable lawyer who was the first Justice Minister and who was largely responsible for the Indian constitution) were committed secularists, often uncomfortable with Gandhi’s pronouncements, and they were the ones who determined the program of the Indian National Congress. It is easy to imagine Hindutva as the ideology of a nationalist movement against British rule. But Hindutva is unimaginable as the ideology of a national liberation movement – aiming not only to end British rule but also to transform Indian society: abolishing Untouchability, freeing women from patriarchal restraints, allowing inter-caste marriage, giving equal civil rights to Hindus and Muslims, and establishing a secular, democratic state. Of course, what the liberationists accomplished in law, they did not necessarily accomplish in fact; their work is still incomplete and precarious. Secularism survives in India today in part because caste-based parties, promoting the material interests of their members, stand in the way of any large-scale religious mobilization. But the ideologists of Hindutva still hope to defeat Nehruvian liberalism and secularism, and their success is not unimaginable.

In Israel today, settler Zionism, a hard, religiously infused nationalist doctrine, and ultra-Orthodox Judaism threaten both democracy and equality. These two are religiously dissimilar, but the appearance of the two together may be a feature also of my other cases: a militant, highly politicized, often nationalistic and right-wing religious movement coming along with, and perhaps feeding off of, a more generalized revival of traditional piety and orthodox practice. In any case, the appeal of each of these is similarly surprising to the aging militants of Labor Zionism (and also to the old Indian Congressmen and the veterans of the original FLN). In opposing any kind of decent peace with the Palestinians, the Jewish zealots of the settler movement have become the partners of Islamic zealots in Hamas, who oppose any decent peace with Israel. The political future suggested by Jewish zealotry is a single state between the sea and the river, with a disenfranchised Arab minority (which may not be a minority for long).

Algeria today is a secular but strongly authoritarian state; the secularism depends on the authoritarianism, and it is nowhere near as radical (especially with regard to the treatment of women) as the secularism envisaged, say, by Frantz Fanon in the days when the National Liberation Front (the FLN) was a revolutionary organization. An Islamist movement that won an election in 1991, and was set to win another, has been brutally repressed. It probably could win a (free) election again, though it has been weakened by its own brutality – and I hope also by its extremism. One tract of the Islamic Salvation Front warned women against using ‘the Jewish word “emancipation” to attack the Islamic values of your ancestors’. Emancipation was, of course, one of the central aims of the early FLN radicals. There still are democratic and secular forces in the country today, strongest, I believe, in the Berber districts. But it is likely that any national uprising against authoritarian rule would be dominated by Islamists. Would it produce a political regime like that of Iran today, or are there other possible outcomes?

So, consider Iran, where an authoritarian clerical elite rules the country and has, so far, managed to repress secular liberals and to repress or incorporate Muslim reformers. There were people who thought that the Iranian revolutionaries would replace the authoritarianism of the shah with a democratic republic – Michel Foucault was one of them. And there were men and women among the revolutionaries who hoped for an outcome of that sort, though obviously nowhere near enough of them. In Iran today elections are held on a regular schedule, and there is an assembly in which debates, even fierce debates, take place. But the electoral lists are purged of candidates that the ayatollahs don’t like or trust, and the powers of the assembly are constrained by the council of guardian sages and by the chief sage. At this moment, the economic crisis and the surprisingly effective sanctions regime have led the guardians to allow the formation of a moderate government and to loosen their grip on civil society. The moderate reformers in power have a great deal of popular support, but they don’t have a mobilized base. Power still lies with the guardians (and with their military arm: the Revolutionary Guard).

Iran is the first of my cases in which we can see how simultaneity works. So let me ask again: Can there be a democratic revolution in a time of religious revival, religious enthusiasm, religious militancy? The answer is, apparently not, though things will be different if Iranian Islam is reformed and/or fragmented. In Iran, secularism was a top-down creation, sustained by the shah; it did not survive the revolution, and the association of authoritarianism and secularism may have made the triumph of religious zealots easier.

There are other instances of authoritarian secularization, Turkey and Russia, for example, and perhaps also the Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq. I don’t see a clear pattern in these cases. We don’t know how far Islamic forces in Turkey will go in their transformation of Ataturk’s radical secularism. In Russia, the Orthodox Church has made a comeback, but Orthodoxy was never, and is not now, a militant religion; it remains politically accommodationist (as all these religions once were), a bulwark of Putin’s state. But we might speculate that in challenging and overcoming authoritarian secularism, religious faith is likely to be a more powerful force than liberal and democratic ideology.

That speculative claim is now being tested across North Africa and the Middle East. In a country like Egypt, which I will take as the key example, secular liberals and democrats, on the one hand, and Islamic militants and zealots, on the other, worked together, or seemed to work together, to overthrow the tyrannical regime. But once that was accomplished, these two groups became fierce and sometimes violent opponents. They are not equal opponents, however, and the force that the religious militants have to reckon with is not the secular left, which is actually very weak; it is the army or, better, the army and the police (themselves often competitors for power in the old regime).

The army and the police are secular but, obviously, not liberal or democratic. So the stark conflict in Egypt right now is not between liberalism and authoritarianism, as we were invited to believe in the early days of the Arab Spring, but between secularism and religious revival – two different ideologies, each aiming at an authoritarian state. There are undoubtedly a lot of people who live, so to speak, in the middle, between these two, though it is hard to make out their numbers or their actual commitments. Presumably there are secularists who would like to reach out to and compromise with religious men and women, and there are pious Muslims who are committed to full rights for religious minorities. But the daily news reports point to a concentration of people on each side of the middle: religious zeal matched or probably not matched by secular conviction – but overmatched by the secularist army. How would the religious and the secular forces rule if either one of them won a definitive victory? The secularists fear the imposition of Islamic law, as in Iran; the zealots fear, what may be happening now in Egypt, an Algerian-style repression. It is possible that both of them are right in what they expect from their opponents.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt claimed to have moderated its zeal and to be ready for democratic participation – that is, its leaders said that they were ready to give up power if they lost an election, so long as they were allowed to exercise power when they won an election. This claim was not believed by what turned out to be too many Egyptians. And so Egypt fit itself into what seems to be an established pattern. In Algeria, the Islamic Salvation Front was not allowed to exercise power; in Iran, the ayatollahs are not prepared to give it up. The pattern is: all or nothing. In Turkey, for many years, Islamic parties were not allowed even to compete for, let alone to exercise, power; it is not clear today if Erdogan and his friends are willing to give up the power they currently hold. For the moment, Turkey does not fit the pattern: it is ruled by Muslim democrats – the analogy with Christian Democracy has often been suggested, and it has sometimes seemed appropriate. But the large-scale incarceration of Turkish journalists and the prosecutions of intellectuals for ‘insulting’ Islam do not bode well for secularism, liberalism, or democracy.

It is almost certainly true that religious zealots are a minority everywhere; they always are, even in moments of revivalist fierceness. In 11th- and 12th-century Christendom, crusaders were a minority. The great majority of Christians did not express and I assume did not feel a passion for holy war. They listened to sermons proclaiming a crusade, calling for a march to Jerusalem, and they sat still; they stayed home. Surely Islam today is no different. Jihad is not a mass movement, even when its excitement seems to spread across neighborhoods and social classes. Only a small number of people actually become religious warriors or political warriors claiming to defend religion. But the minority of zealots, now as in the past, is disciplined and militant, and it can dominate a country. In Syria, it is at least possible that it can win a civil war. It can probably win elections, too.

Free elections in most parts of the Arab world would probably produce victories for Muslim parties that are loose coalitions of religious militants and people who are, some of them, religious moderates, and others go-along, get-along types, ready to compromise for the sake of peace and power. If these parties were permitted to rule peacefully, I would expect to see sharp internal conflicts that the militants are more likely to win than the moderates and compromisers. What seems clear is that secular liberals and democrats, like the Facebook ‘kids’ in Egypt, will not win anywhere. And that probably means that the militants will determine the course of political events in most places, unless or until the army intervenes. The drift will be toward a repressive state, religious or not, and the struggle between theocrats and secularists will make it difficult to bring other political issues to the fore – most importantly issues having to do with economic equality and inequality.

III

Let me pause here and ask what it is about the revival of orthodox or fundamentalist religion that works against liberal and democratic politics. It is not traditionalist religion that I mean to talk about now but the revivalist version – modern, militant and fiercely ideological. The hostility to liberalism and democracy has two reasons (probably more, but two for now). First, the certainty that there is a singular Truth makes it difficult to compromise with, or share power with, or yield power to, people who reject this Truth. It is indeed hard to imagine a political party committed to the establishment of the one true religion rotating in office with a party committed to the disestablishment of the same religion. And, second, the belief that the singular Truth is known to a defined set of learned men (so far, it’s only men) and that it mandates a hierarchical organization of society makes it difficult to accept anything like liberal democracy. Absolute Truth and hierarchy – though I have to recognize variations among the major religions, these two are obstacles everywhere to democratic development. Let me focus here on hierarchy, central to all the religions, though also complex and diverse in its forms.

The caste system of Hinduism is the most striking example. While the defenders of Hindutva, who hope to win democratic elections in India, cannot talk openly about their commitment to social inequality, it is true nonetheless, as the Indian political theorist, V. P. Varma, has written, that their long-term goal is ‘the restoration of the Vedic principles [that require] the functional organization of society’. They are defenders of the caste system and of Brahmin supremacy, though they would undoubtedly claim that they are ready to accept modernist modifications of one sort or another.

Catholic Christianity is rigidly hierarchical in its ecclesiology, its doctrine of church government, and though the hierarchs today coexist comfortably with democratically elected state officials, this is a fairly recent coexistence, dating mostly from the years after the Second World War, when Christian Democracy was born (coexistence came earlier in the USA). For many decades before that, the European Church was hostile to democratic politics, which it saw, perhaps rightly, as more favorable to Protestant religious forms. Indeed, Protestantism was egalitarian from the beginning: the priesthood of all believers comes many years before the equality of all citizens.

In Judaism, the division of Jewry into priests, Levites, and everyone else has little meaning today – though it is worth remembering that in Second Temple Judea, there were 24 priestly ranks and orders, a hierarchy from which only the Romans delivered the Jews. Today the gap between the learned and the ignorant is a fundamental feature of rabbinic Judaism and of Orthodox society, and the authority of the learned, the rabbinic sages, is pretty much unquestioned in the various Haredi communities. One would not expect this to be true among the settler Zionists, whose religious militancy has a modernist edge, but it probably is true. There are certainly lay militants among the settlers, but their rabbis are powerful, without having to win elections.

Islam is, so we are often told, a radically egalitarian religion. But the Iranian case suggests that a similar division between the learned and the ignorant prevails, at least among the Shi’ites, and, again, the learned ayatollahs do not have to win elections in order to rule – and when they rule, they rule absolutely. In Sunni Arab states, we do not yet know how Islamic parties will govern or who will make the critical decisions – democratically elected political leaders (as in Turkey today) or religious leaders behind the scenes. Nor do we know whether or to what extent Islamic law will prevail in the courts.

The hierarchies of rulers and ruled, clerical superiors and ordinary believers, internal to the different religions don’t make an accommodation to democratic politics impossible, as the Catholic case demonstrates, but they do raise difficulties. The gender hierarchy, common to all orthodox religions (Protestantism is again a partial exception), raises greater difficulties. I think that it is the freedom and equality that women have achieved in modern, secular societies, and also the commercial exploitation of their sexuality in these same societies, that most upsets and frightens pious Hindus, Jews and Muslims (it causes similar fears in many parts of Christendom) and pushes some of them toward zealotry. The zealotry is different in each case. But it looks much the same with regard to the ‘woman question’ – at least from an outsider’s perspective.

It probably is not possible to deny women the vote anywhere in the world today where voting is an established practice. But it is possible to subject women to patriarchal rule in ways that greatly reduce the influence that their votes might bring them. The character of their education, the jobs available to them, the mobility allowed them, the dress code imposed upon them, the character of marriage and the organization of family life, their exclusion from public roles, the toleration of sexual violence – all this works to undermine democratic politics. Wherever orthodox or fundamentalist religion is dominant, women are counted as part of the demos, but they are not equal citizens; they have little say – at any rate, less say than they should have – in shaping the life of their own communities.

And wherever orthodox or fundamentalist religion is not dominant, the desire to subordinate women, to control their sexual lives and their working lives, is probably the driving force of religious zealotry (and also, in many places, of right-wing politics). But I have to stop here and acknowledge that there are many women among the zealots. I cannot explain that; I don’t like the easy slide by secular commentators to the old Marxist idea of false consciousness. There must be attractions to clearly defined sex roles and even to subordination, especially when these are conceived as a central part of God’s plan for humankind. Someone on the secular side should be trying to figure that out.

At the same time, there are feminists, militant feminists, hard at work within all the major religions – religiously committed women reinterpreting the authoritative texts, rewriting the history of their faith, challenging male domination. One organization is especially relevant to any discussion of the Arab Spring – that is the group called Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), whose members have been active across North Africa and have established at least a presence among Muslims in India. The use of the plural in their name, ‘Laws’, is important: they insist that shariah law has taken many forms across time and space, and that some of these are consistent or at least compatible with gender equality. The women of WLUML are doing what you might call, with secular irony, ‘the work of the Lord’, but it is important to note that their central offices are in London, not in any of the countries where they are working, where they might not have the freedom that their work requires.

WLUML is actually a coalition of secular and religious women, working to transform religious traditions and at the same time to oppose untransformed religious hierarchies and practices. These cannot be easy tasks to combine, and I have no sense of what the long-term prospects are for organizations like this one. But for now, it is enough to say that wherever women are subordinated, whether the subordination is willing or unwilling – and even if there is feminist opposition from within – the practice of democracy is diminished in radical ways. For subordinated women are not active or independent participants in political arguments and policy deliberations.

IV

Let me conclude today with some speculations about the prospects for religious reform and fragmentation – about the possibility of ‘dissidence’ in contemporary non-Protestant religions.

Among American Jews, denominationalism has triumphed – some would say that American Judaism has been effectively Protestantized. Partly as a result of that, and also as a result of the character of the new denominations, especially Reform and Reconstruction, Jews are generally strong defenders of the secular state and supporters of liberal and left government policies. Obviously, denominationalism has not triumphed in Israel, where the secular/religious divide is also a secular/orthodox divide, with very few Israelis occupying middle ground – or rather the middle ground is not marked by the kind of religious organizations that might promote a liberal and secular politics.

In the Muslim world, there have obviously been major reform movements. Wahabi Islam, the most important of them, bears some resemblance to early Protestantism in its hatred of religious corruption, its rejection of shrines and saints, and its commitment to the enforcement of morality. But for reasons I do not understand, but many of my readers probably do, Muslim reform movements have not yet produced anything quite like the dissidence of dissent. There certainly are serious and sustained theological arguments, not only between Sunnis and Shi’ites but within both groups. There are significantly different schools of legal interpretation. And there have been many sectarian breakaways, like the Alawites and the Druse. And yet there isn’t in the Islamic world today anything that resembles denominational pluralism. The reformers and the sectarians have not created new religious organizations that demand recognition, toleration and state disengagement. Indeed, what we see in Iraq and Syria, right now, is an ongoing effort to use state power for sectarian purposes. Until that changes, I think that Islam will be, as Catholicism was for so many years, mostly (not necessarily and not everywhere but mostly) hostile to democratic politics.

The examples I have canvassed seem to suggest that secular democrats can succeed only in the absence of religious forces or when they are supported by a plurality of reformed religions or religious denominations. Absence or plurality: that’s what defenders of democracy around the world should hope for and insofar as we can we should try to make contact with and support – not militarily or politically, that’s not my subject here, but academically, intellectually – the people who are trying to advance democracy either through secular advocacy or religious reform. There is a kind of intellectual internationalism, the solidarity of scholars, that I think it is permissible to talk about in colleges and universities and at academic conferences. When we defend intellectual and academic freedom, we are also, implicitly, hoping for something like the dissidence of dissent, that is, for wide-ranging discussions and debates, which are bound to produce political and religious disagreements and to help normalize that kind of disagreement in the world of orthodox or fundamentalist religion.

I will finish by addressing a very difficult question, which many of us hoped would not arise, though we should have known that it would. In Egypt and possibly in other Arab Spring countries, the army has turned out to be the most powerful secular (but also, obviously, anti-democratic) force – as the Turkish army was for many decades and as the Algerian army, closely allied with the FLN, is today. Academic freedom does not flourish in military regimes, and it would be a mistake for academics to cooperate with such regimes, as a number of prominent American and British professors notoriously did with the Qaddafi regime in Libya. Nor, however, would academic freedom flourish in a country ruled by jihadi militants, and there are also, notoriously, left-wing academics eager to defend radical Islam because it supposedly is an enemy of American imperialism and of Israel – which is another mistake. Liberal democracy and social democracy are the only political regimes that provide real security for academic and intellectual freedom, and regimes of that sort do not seem likely to arise in the Arab world today or anytime soon. But we can hope for political formations that at least leave room for the development and articulation of liberal, pluralist, egalitarian and feminist dissent, and we can reach out to and try to protect the dissenters. That is what we should do.