The new legitimation crises of Arab states and Turkey

This issue of Philosophy & Social Criticism containing papers presented at the 6th Annual Meeting of the İstanbul Seminars is dedicated to the memory of our colleague Massimo Rosati (1969–2014). An enthusiastic participant in the seminars and a vital collaborator of Reset DOC, Massimo touched us all with his humanity and honored us with his friendship.

Massimo took more than a casual interest in İstanbul. For him the city was not just the intellectual backdrop of the seminars. He chose to spend long months there, trying to understand more deeply the Turkish path to modernity and secularism. At the time of his death he was working on monograph based on 5 years of research under the title, The Making of a Post-Secular Society: The Turkish Laboratory, which will appear posthumously in 2014.

In ‘The Archaic and Us: Ritual, Myth, the Sacred and Modernity’, Massimo Rosati writes: ‘my view is that the difficulties of a self-reflective Enlightenment culture in reaching a better understanding of religions and the sacred have a main root and cause – a Protestant-like understanding of religion.’ This ‘Protestant-like understanding of religion’, which Massimo sees also to be the reason for the inadequacies (in his view) of Habermas’ discussions of religion, leads to a neglect of the plurality and diversity of religious experiences and of concrete religious communities. The Weberian thesis of Entzauberung, the disenchantment of the world through modernity, may not be textured enough to analyse what Emile Durkheim called the ‘sacred’. Siding with Durkheim, whose work he had translated into Italian, Massimo writes:

…the sacred seems to be a universal historical structure of human consciousness (Eliade); finally, when it comes to religions and the sacred, we have to be ready to think about those myths that think us, in order to play our part, as citizens and human beings, in making those new and more humane myths that are needed to replace the old ones.

This ‘Protestant-like understanding of religion’ is characterized by two principal features, neither of which can be applicable to other Abrahamic religions such as Islam and Judaism: first and foremost, the tenet that faith is the relationship of the individual and her or his conscience to a divine being in front of whom she or he stands alone; and second, the migration of religious symbols, rituals and practices away from the public-political into the private and associational realms of civil society – a process that has sometimes been described as the ‘emptying out of the public square’. This ideal-typical model of Protestant secularization was just as little true historically of the experience of religion in the development of the West (compare Alexis de Tocqueville’s reflections on the role of religion in American democracy), as it was when applied to the variety of church–state religions in central, eastern and southern Europe – not to mention the rest of the world. Along with our growing understanding of the multiple paths to modernity as well as of multiple modernities, the paradigmatic hold of this model upon our theories and politics has lost its power.

Nevertheless, defining and delimiting the place of religion in the public square –whether along the Protestant model or not – remains a fundamental challenge in political modernity insofar as modern states have a structure of authority based on the rule of law and are thus in potential conflict with the legitimizing power of religion. This territorially bounded state structure, protected by a standing army, administered by a civic or military bureaucracy, basing its legitimacy upon a written constitutional document, and accepting more or less varied forms of political representation, has become the generalized model of the modern state as such. All over the Muslim Arab world, however, as erstwhile secularizing and modernizing authoritarian military or civilian regimes in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and Iraq have collapsed under the power of their own contradictions or through foreign intervention, this model is experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. Caught between the waning logic of top-down modernization and secularization rhetorics, on the one hand, and the rise of Islamist movements for whom not the state but the ‘ummah’ of the faithful is the point of reference, on the other, the Arab Middle East is in the throes of a new legitimation crisis.

Lisa Anderson devotes her article to a careful dissection of the rise and fall of this state-form. In her view what makes the Arab Spring unique is that it ‘marks the beginning of the end of the state system introduced into the Middle East by the 20th-century imperial order’. Emerging out of the demise of the Ottoman Empire, still caught in the imperial games of their erstwhile colonial masters such as the British, the French, the Italian and the German powers in the inter-war period, these states were nurtured during the cold war by the competing logic of superpower interests. But, as Anderson notes: ‘In the absence of public institutions that respond to and represent local interests, people organized around those still vibrant alternative forms of community that exist – the exchange networks of informal economies or the kinship systems of extended families and the ethnic and religious communities of language, sect and confession.’ None other than Osama bin Laden was a sharp observer of the failures of this system and based his rhetoric of the Islamic ummah on its observable failures (well documented by the UN’s ‘Arab Development Report’), to deliver economically, socially and through institutions of education for their growing population of the young. (By the mid-1990s nearly half of the population of the region was under 15 years old, according to Anderson.) Anderson sees the attraction of Islamist political parties, as well as the rise of extra-territorial ethnic and tribal politics, evidenced by the increasing polarization between Sunni and Shi’ite populations within countries and across borders, to be caused by the failures of this state structure to deliver.

The crisis of political legitimacy after the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, leading to cycles of parliamentary overhaul, constitutional instability and, in some cases, military intervention, is the topic of Hamadi Redissi’s, Amel Grami's and Amr Hamzawy’s contributions. Taking issue with defenders of ‘post-Islamism’, Redissi argues against Olivier Roy and Asaf Bayat that political Islam has not been able to translate its ‘negative legitimacy’, based on the failures of modernizing and secularizing ideologies, into electoral legitimacy and has not cut off its ties with jihadism and terrorism. Focusing his analysis on Tunisia and the En-Nahda Party’s political maneuverings, Redissi sees the rise of a new kind of neo-authoritarian politics on the part of Islamists and a growing religious anti-liberal zeal. Redissi ends on a hopeful, although inconclusive, note since Tunisian civil society has so far been able to negotiate En-Nahda’s and Gannouchi’s departure from government.

In “The Debate on Religion, Law and Gender in Post-Revolution Tunisia,” Amel Grami also focuses on the role of Islamic law in the new constitution, currently being drafted by the Constitutional Assembly. Noting that since 2011, when the ex-President Ben Ali fled the country, Tunisian civil society has mobilized both for and against constitutionalizing shariah law, Grami focuses in particular on the role of gender in this debate. The Salafists, conservative Muslims as well as some women's groups, such as the “Union des Femmes Libres,” “Haouwa” (Eve), “Femmes Tunisiennes,” “Tounissiet” (Tunisian Women), “Femmes et Complémentarité” (Women and Complementarity) campaign against CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women), defending instead a form of “complementarity” of male and female roles, rather than legal equality. Many issues such as men's right to polygamy, arranged marriages, women's right to inheritance, the right of single women to give their offspring their family name, women's equality in public life, are on the agenda. Grami, like Redissi and Hamzawy is disheartened by the unprincipled compromises of the ruling Islamist parties when it comes to gender issues but notes that “Tunisians are using civil society and party politics to create some conditions for active participation, and building new strategies for resistance.”

Hamzawy shares Redissi’s and Grami's negative assessment of the political achievements of Islamist parties but states that the inability to disentangle religion and politics in Egypt, and particularly to remove the constitutional clause declaring Islam the religion of the state, is common to Islamists and their opponents (article 2 of the Egyptian Constitution). The 2012 Egyptian constitution in its article 4 stipulated that legislative questions related to shariah law should be addressed in consultation with the official religious institution, al-Azhar, thus diminishing the power of the legislative branch; in violation of international law, it guaranteed freedom of religion only to the followers of the three monotheistic religions, and, above all, ‘New laws on the exercise of political rights, election procedures and political parties have not stipulated a ban on the use of religion for political, electoral, or partisan purposes. This has provided a legal loophole for the use of religious slogans in politics and prevented the imposition of penalties on groups exploiting religious spaces for electoral campaigning and other political purposes.’ Hamzawy sees prospects of equal and democratic citizenship in contemporary Egypt to have been shattered.

In ‘Shariah after the Arab Spring’, Harun Karčić gives a detailed account of the meaning of shariah law in the constitutions of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya before and after the ‘Arab Spring’. Karčič observes:

Some 39 per cent of the world’s Muslims live in 22 countries whose constitutions declare shariah, either its principles or its jurisprudence, as a source of law. The constitutions of countries whose constitutions provide that shariah is, in part at least, a source of law are Afghanistan, Iran, Malaysia, the Maldives, Pakistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Mauritania, Gambia, Nigeria, and Sudan. There are also some constitutions that are ‘‘inspired’’ by shariah but do not explicitly state it as a source of law.

Yet he refrains from drawing strong conclusions from this account. The general point though seems to be that either there is more continuity in these countries’ constitutions before and after the Arab Spring or in cases where there have been discontinuities, as with Egypt’s 2012 constitution, they are not so crucial. Karčić’s deflationary tone contrasts with the anxieties expressed by Redissi and Hamzawy.

Michael Walzer forcefully articulates the theoretical question running like a red thread through many of the contributions in this issue: ‘Can there be a democratic revolution and a religious revival in the same place, at the same time?’ (‘After the Arab Spring’ in this issue). Walzer broadens the range of comparisons that can help answer this question by considering the national liberation movements of India, Israel and Algeria. He observes:

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.

Given their militantly secular leaders who had been confident in the project of nation-building without the glue of religion, these countries now face anti-secular and anti-liberal backlash movements. What went wrong? The larger story would likely involve the kinds of failures in the economic, educational and social realms which Lisa Anderson’s article has documented to have affected Arab states as well. In the case of Israel, of course, it is hard to disentangle the rise of the religious-right and the religious-settler movements, from the continuing crises of borders and identity in that country. Walzer asks if there is some element in the revival of religious fundamentalist movements that works against democracy, in particular liberal democracy. He identifies the certainty that there is a single Truth as a factor that makes it difficult for these parties to share power with others. Furthermore, if there is indeed a single authoritative Truth, then there are some who are knowledgeable about it and others who are not. This leads to an authoritarian and hierarchical mode of organizing society. He concludes that: ‘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.’ The goal is to counter these trends and to reach out for formations that permit liberal, pluralist, egalitarian and feminist dissent even while acknowledging the force of religion in public life.

Crises of legitimacy cannot be dissociated from the interrelationships of the national and the international, the regional and the transnational, the local and the global. Modern states coexist with one another in systems of functional interdependencies in areas of the economy, armament, communication and tourism; ideologically, they borrow from one another, refer to one another, compete with one another in a complex game of legitimacy and rivalry. The contributions by Faisal Devji, Nader Hashemi, Jonathan Laurence and Meyda Yegenoglu explore these moves of interdependency and rivalry.

Faisal Devji’s contribution is a wide-sweeping meditation on the transformations of the international realm in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States. His main thesis is that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s politics became chess pieces in the United States’ domestic policy and G. W. Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ precisely because neither actor could transform the international into the global arena of a new politics of humanity. Devji writes:

Like a human race under threat from the environmental catastrophe that had replaced the cold war’s nuclear apocalypse, the Muslim community both existed and yet could not be said to exist. So it is no accident that Bin Laden referred very frequently to the Muslim ummah at risk of western violence in the same breath as he bemoaned the threat that global warming posed for the human race. And the equivocal existence of both ummah and species not only in Osama bin Laden’s rhetoric, but also in our everyday world more generally, serves to foreground the fact that the globe possesses neither political actors nor any institutions of its own.

Not only the absence of credible ‘global’ politics that would concern itself with issues such as human rights, climate change, global poverty and hunger, global diseases, terrorism as well as the threat of nuclear, chemical and cyber warfare become thereby visible; but Osama bin Laden’s capture and demise also pointed to a dangerous fissure in the US legal system.

After all, Bin Laden could not have been captured alive and handed over to an international court without compromising US sovereignty in the global arena. But neither could he be put on trial in the United States without entirely dismantling the legal procedures regarding enemy combatants and secret evidence that are so central to the War on Terror. And so with neither an institution of national justice available to try Osama bin Laden, nor an international court as an alternative, Al-Qaeda’s founder had to be killed in an action that could not even draw its justification from combat.

Since the United States is not a member of the International Criminal Court and since the legal and constitutional status of detainees in Guantanamo remains a vexed issue to this day, the killing of Osama bin Laden certainly caused fewer headaches than his having been brought in front of a court of law would have. This suggests that the crisis of the modern state form is not confined only to the Arab Middle East but reaches into the deepest recesses of our current global order, which generates disasters and dysfunctionalities without creating solutions.

Nader Hashemi’s philosophical and historical article complicates the relationship between religion and political legitimacy by reminding us of some paradoxes that extend across the Islam–West divide. Hashemi cites the following: ‘Based on 6 years of polling in 35 countries that represent more than 90% of the world’s Muslim population, it found widespread compatibility of values between western and Muslim societies in terms of support for human rights, basic freedoms, democracy and yes, even gender equality.’ However: ‘Poll data show that large majorities of respondents in the countries surveyed cite the equal importance of Islam and democracy as essential to the quality of their lives and the future progress of the Muslim world.’ The various contributions to this issue, admittedly from intellectuals and academics in the Muslim world, show that contrary to the rather harmonious findings of the Gallup poll, the place of religion and of Islamic law in these societies and its compatibility with democracy and gender equality remain a highly contested issue. Walzer, Redissi and Hamzawy all establish that the practices, as opposed to the ideologies, of fundamentalist religious movements, including Islamists, have been authoritarian rather than liberal, exclusionary rather than inclusive. But Hashemi is reminding us of paradoxes; he is not defending existing practices. He is asking us to consider why from the standpoint of western liberals there seems to be too much religion in public life of the Arab countries, while neglecting that in democratic-liberal societies religious questions touching on ethical issues such as abortion, homosexuality, gender roles, women’s wearing of the hijab still remain deeply divisive issues, undermining political legitimacy. This is a difficult question to answer, and like Walzer, Hashemi is interested in raising questions that force us to think across local and national boundaries, rather than provide ready-packaged answers. He writes:

Religion–state relations in the Muslim world have thus bequeathed different historical lessons and memories, where believers view religion (properly understood and interpreted) not as an ally of political tyranny and a cause of conflict, but as a possible constraint on political despotism, a source of social cohesion and stability, and a potential ally in promoting social justice.

These historical memories remained alive in view of the repressions suffered by Muslim believers in the hands of secularizing elites such as Iran under the shah, Tunisia under Ben Ali, Egypt under Mubarak, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria under Assad and many others. Secularism, according to Hashemi, never lost its touch of complicity with the colonizing powers who introduced the modern state structure into the Middle East.

Whether secularism and colonialism may be so closely identified and whether there may not have been indigenous developments toward Enlightenment and secularism in the Middle East remains an open question. (I personally believe that the Enlightenment, the pull of scientific reason and secularism exercised more power on and had more attraction for the local intellectuals of these countries than we are inclined to think.) Today we are dealing with another dynamic that is complicating the Islam–West divide: the very large number of migrants from Muslim countries to Europe, and second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants born in these countries, are now experiencing the challenge of a ‘Protestant-like understanding of religion’. In breath-taking occurrences of looping-back effects, these migrants are then bringing their experiences of the diaspora to bear on developments in their home countries. Laurence introduces the concept of an ‘Islam state’, by which he means ‘the hundreds of thousands of public servants of state Islam across the region, the tens of thousands of mosques and thousands of religious schools’, extending from Turkey all across the Middle East and North Africa. He suggests that Islamist parties and state authorities in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Morocco, rather than dismantling the Islam state, in the direction of a more transnational form of the Islamic ummah, have in fact strengthened their control by ‘closing bookstores, dismissing disobedient imams, arresting unlicensed preachers, shutting down illegal Qur’an courses and opening state-run courses’. Laurence’s argument is that the survival of the Islam state cannot be explained through the story of Muslim ‘exceptionalism’, regarding the role of religion in politics, nor will theories of ‘institutional stickiness’ do. Rather, one has to think of the

…practical features of state Islam as the ‘hard edge’ of the state at home and a tool of ‘soft power’ abroad…Externally, the export of state Islam has traditionally allowed governments to enhance their geo-political status and influence abroad. It serves an international mission by way of its religious leadership and soft power: think of Diyanet’s traditional role in Central Asia and the Balkans; the role of the Moroccan Emir al Mouamine and Habous ministry’s role among neighboring Malakite populations in Africa; or Al Azhar’s training of Sunni religious scholars worldwide.

The Islam state practises ‘hard power’ at home over irredentist forces while propagating ‘soft power’ over the diasporic population. Laurence, therefore, does not believe that democratization in these countries will be coupled with the ‘disestablishment’ of this state form.

Yegenoglu addresses the conflictual political and cultural relationship between Europe and Islam. She writes that ‘With secularism achieving a sacrosanct status, Islam started signifying the status of a regressive, belated and therefore dangerous religiosity. Islam’s religiousness was made possible with the sacralization of European secularism.’ From the Muhammad caricature controversy that ignited the European public sphere to the banning of the building of mosques in Switzerland, from restrictions on the wearing of the hijab in public schools in France to attempts to criminalize the circumcision of Muslim young men in Germany, one has witnessed the incendiary and mobilizing effect of such controversies. For Yegenoglu, Islam seems to function as an enemy against which Europe must defend its own identity. ‘If Islam’s inability to separate the religious and the political was historically the dominant motif through which Islam was registered as the enemy, the post-secular, post-Enlightenment Europe registers Islam as an enemy through a gesture that I call cultural’, she writes. Borrowing insights from Derrida’s analysis of ‘the dangerous supplement’ and ‘spectrality’, Yegenoglu argues that ‘the specter is part of identity, non-life is part of life, and death is part of the living auto identity’. Europe’s ‘auto-immunity’ should result not from excising the other but from recognizing that the other is part of one’s identity and that Islam, as the other, only stands for the unresolved relationship of Europe to its own secularity, indeed to the dominance of ‘the Protestant understanding of religion’.

Since the electoral triumph of the AK Party in Turkey in 2002, and its successive victory in three electoral cycles, the Turkish case has become the paradigm for showcasing the compatibility of moderate Islam, a multi-party democracy and economic prosperity. But as Ilay Romain Örs observes: ‘Leaving İstanbul Bilgi University on 22 May 2013, conveners of the İstanbul Seminars could not have guessed that less than a week later the arguments they had debated would be revisited under a new light.’ With the eruption of Gezi Park protests at the end of May 2013 first in İstanbul and then in over 20 other localities throughout Turkey, a new phase of democratization has started in the country. However, the fall of 2013 also brought to light unprecedented cases of political corruption in the country, as the two erstwhile allies of the Islamist movement, the Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan and the leader of the ‘Gulenist’ movement Fetullah Gulen, and his followers, have started washing each other’s dirty laundry in public by disclosing cases of financial and judicial corruption on each side. Turkey’s own legitimation crisis has arrived.

In ‘Political Legitimacy and Islam in the Ottoman Empire’, Karen Barky examines some of the historical roots of the Turkish model in reconciling Islam and political legitimacy. Arguing that ‘[t]here is therefore a long history of the separation of state and religion in Islamic societies’, Barkey focuses on how in fact Islamic law functioned in the Ottoman Empire. Particularly after the consolidation of the rule of the Ottomans in Asia Minor and the east and west expansion of the empire from the 16th to the 18th centuries,

…religion was subordinated to the administrative needs of the state. The resulting Ottoman form of political legitimacy was much more expansive; it appealed as much to the Muslim as the non-Muslim peoples of the empire, refraining from the imposition of an absolute creed or understanding of one religion, one completely unified and cohesive system.

This ‘state pragmatism’, long recognized by historians, was based upon the doctrine of ‘istimalet [accommodation for all, Christians and Muslims alike], making a single Islamic framework less likely’. This empire drew as much from the customs and practices of the local populations it brought under its rule as it did from the Mongolian and Central-East Asian origins of law that Ottomans brought with them – the ‘yasa’. Barkey is not reluctant to draw ‘usable conclusions’ from this historical past and writes:

The Ottoman empire demonstrates that there is a usable past, an example of a traditional Muslim culture – an example of a society in the past where although religion was very important, it nonetheless did not operate single-handedly to regulate every aspect of life; it was maintained within a balance of forces that produced both sultanic, non-religious legislation and religious law.

In contemporary Turkey this famous state pragmatism is put to the test not only by the growing voices of democratic protest, and the never-ending Kurdish question, but also by the re-emergence of conflicts between a state-defined form of Sunni Islam and Alevism. As Murat Borovali and Cemil Boyraz explain in their article, Alevis, a Muslim sect synthesizing elements of Shi’ite Islam and Suffi mysticism, constitute 15 million people out of a population of 75 million in today’s Turkey. Mostly secular in orientation and with significant followings among the Kurdish population, in the 1970s Alevis came to embrace social justice and leftist causes and to be seen as an irridentist force within the state. Borovali and Boyraz trace the history of the antagonistic developments throughout the 1980s and 1990s leading to an ‘Alevi renaissance’ or ‘revival’, which the AK Party finds increasingly hard to ignore. In a series of workshops dedicated to dialogue with the Alevis, the government tried to address their demands but discussions got bogged down around theological issues and produced no concrete results. The accommodation of the Alevis within the context of Turkish Sunni Islam, however, is part of the larger story of what Jonathan Laurence called above ‘the Islam state’. The Alevis, who were able to operate in relative ease and anonymity throughout the ‘laiklik’ period of modern Turkey, now find themselves thrust into the light of the public precisely because their heterodox practices – no ban on alcohol; acceptance of mixed gender company in religious rites; Suffi traditions practised in the so-called ‘Cem evleri’ – and left-leaning politics challenge the Sunni hegemony of the AK Party.

This issue concludes with an insightful account by Ilay Romain Örs of the significance of the Gezi Park protests in the summer of 2013 for the future of Turkish democracy. Combining historical and ethnographic analysis with anthropological detail, she explains the significance of Gezi Park and its surroundings for Turkish political life. The government’s plans to destroy the park and create in its stead an Ottoman-style army barracks, which would also house a shopping mall, took aim at the heart of a symbolic public sphere that combined memories of Ottoman cosmopolitanism with civic republican principles. Prime Minister Erdogan’s ‘neo-Islamist’ fantasies and mega-building projects were intended to transform the ‘face’ of contemporary Turkey in accordance with his vision of a revived Islamist-Ottoman grandeur. ‘If the concept of democracy is intimately connected with the concept of the public, then public space, as the physical subset of public sphere, becomes reinstated as the site for democratic performance to a surprising extent even in the allegedly digital world today’, writes Romain Örs.

Indeed, contemporary protest movements are often named after the places they occupied: Tahrir Square; Gezi Park; Wall Street. These protest movements transform these public squares into utopian projections of societies to come in that they build institutions such as medical clinics, libraries, communal kitchens, art and entertainment centers, collective gardens and the like. These urban uprisings revive a ‘right to the city’ (Henri Lefebvre), countering the city’s privatization, commodification and gentrification for the sake of global capital chains and speculative real estate developers. The Gezi Park protests gave rise to a new form of public conversation through the free public forums organized throughout neighborhoods in İstanbul and elsewhere. The participants developed mini ‘deliberative assemblies’. Although by now the park has been cleared and the government’s construction plans have been temporarily stalled, Romain Örs believes that ‘the genie’ of democracy is out of the bottle and that Turkish democracy can never be the same. ‘The street proved to be the only force that could cause the government to stumble in its self-confident style of ruling the people. The ruled would stop them short of converting the square into a display of their own controversial vision, thereby claiming their right to the city, and their right for a redefinition of democracy.’

Situated between disappointments with Islamist parties’ performance when in government and the continuing effervescence of popular political movements, extending from the Arab to the Turkish street, from Tahrir Square to Gezi Park, we can see that the legitimation crises in the region are far from over. As we await the results of the upcoming Turkish municipal, regional and presidential elections in the spring and summer of 2014, İstanbul Seminars testify to the significance of our continuous engagement and dialogue with this region of the world.