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Access Provided by University of Kent at Canterbury at 07/16/12 3:52PM GMT the Transformation of the Arab World Access Provided by University of Kent at Canterbury at 07/16/12 3:52PM GMT The TransformaTion of The arab World Olivier Roy Olivier Roy is a professor at the European University Institute in Florence. His latest book is Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways (2009). The present essay is based on a Ray- mond Aron Lecture given at the Brookings Institution in December 2011, and includes material from his “The Paradoxes of the Re- Islamization of Muslim Societies,” published on the Social Science Research Council’s blog, The Immanent Frame, and “The Islamic Counter-Revolt,” which appeared in the 23 January 2012 issue of the New Statesman. The “Arab Spring” at first had nothing about it that was specifically “Arab” or “Muslim.” The demonstrators were calling for dignity, elec- tions, democracy, good governance, and human rights. Unlike any Arab revolutionary movements of the past sixty years, they were concerned with individual citizenship and not with some holistic entity such as “the people,” the Muslim umma, or the Arab nation. The demonstrators referred to no Middle Eastern geopolitical conflicts, burned no U.S. or Israeli flags, offered no chants in favor of the main (that is to say, Is- lamist) opposition parties, and expressed no wish for the establishment of an Islamic state or the implementation of shari‘a. Moreover, despite the Western media’s frantic quest to put a face on events by talking up some of the protests’ astonishingly young and modern spokespersons, the demonstrators produced no charismatic leaders. In short, the Arab Spring belied the “Arab predicament”: It simply would not follow the script which holds that the centrality of the Arab-Israeli conflict is fos- tering an ever-growing Islamization within Arab societies, a search for charismatic leaders, and an identification with supranational causes. But the demonstrators did not take power—indeed, they did not even try. Instead, they merely wanted to establish a new political scene. Pre- dictably, the Egyptian and Tunisian elections brought ballot-box triumphs for Islamist parties. With deep roots in society, enjoying a legitimacy con- Journal of Democracy Volume 23, Number 3 July 2012 © 2012 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press 6 Journal of Democracy ferred by decades of political opposition, and defending conservative and religious values shared by most of the populace, Egypt’s Muslim Broth- erhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda party were able to attract votes from well beyond their respective hardcore bases because they looked like credible parties of government. More surprising was the strong showing of the Salafist al-Nur Party in Egypt. Even allowing Religious tolerance was for Salafism’s rise in that country, the not the fruit of liberalism sudden transformation of an apolitical and the Enlightenment. and informal school of thought into a Rather, it was the prod- successful political movement shows uct of grudging truces in that no single Islamist party can claim a savage wars of religion, monopoly over the expression of Islam from the Peace of Augs- in the political sphere. burg in 1555 to the Treaty In any case, the actors who have of Westphalia in 1648. taken to the electoral stage and bene- fited from the Arab Spring, whether fa- miliar like the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood or newcomers like the Salafists, are not known for their at- tachment to democracy. Even if they have given up talk of the “Islamic revolution,” they still put religion at the heart of their agenda. Islamists and Salafists alike deplore secularization, the influence of Western val- ues, and the excesses of individualism. Everywhere, they seek to affirm the centrality of religion to national identity, and they are conservative in all areas except the economy. And in Egypt, as commonly happens with parties that are swept into power by landslide margins, they are tempted to think that they can dispense with the grubby business of hav- ing to form alliances and hand out government posts equitably. And why should Islamists, with no democratic culture to speak of, behave like good democrats who believe in pluralism? Once the election results came in, the Western media’s enthusiasm faded, and headlines celebrating a democracy-friendly Arab Spring gave way to coverage worrying about the onset of a neoauthoritarian “Arab Winter.” Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Taliban were casting long shadows over Tunis and Cairo. Was there any obstacle to Islamization in the last other than the Egyptian army, whose aversion to democracy is well known? Was the Arab Middle East hopelessly trapped, with no better choices than “secular” dictatorship or “Islamic” totalitarianism? The answer to that last question is no. Something irreversible did happen in the Arab Spring. Whatever ups and downs may follow, we are witnessing the beginning of a process by which democratization is becoming rooted in Arab societies. Democratization is very much a pro- cess in this case—not a program of government implemented by deep- dyed democrats. Comparisons with other world regions (such as Latin America) are difficult, since the Middle East is the only place where Olivier Roy 7 the dominant opposition consists of strongly centralized and ideological parties with a religious agenda. A possible comparison might be with the Spanish and Portuguese communist parties of the late 1970s: Like the Islamists of Egypt and Tunisia, they too benefited from a democratiza- tion process that they did not trigger. Yet the Iberian communists never achieved the control over elected parliaments that Islamists now enjoy in Cairo and Tunis. Whatever their own agendas, the communist parties had no choice but to negotiate. The Islamist parties may have more power and freedom to maneuver, but they too will find themselves being pushed to adjust to the democ- ratization process. The pushing will be done by the constraints and dy- namics characteristic of the social, religious, political, and geostrategic fields in which these parties must operate. They may accept the demands of the democratization process more willingly (Ennahda) or less will- ingly (the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood), but accept them they will, or they will find themselves sidelined. This is not a question of who has or does not have a hidden agenda, or of whether Islam and democracy can or cannot be reconciled. In order to grasp what is happening in the Middle East, we must set aside a number of deep-rooted prejudices. First among them is the as- sumption that democracy presupposes secularization: The democratiza- tion movement in the Arab world came precisely after thirty years of what has been called the “return of the sacred,” an obvious process of re-Islamization of everyday life, coupled with the rise of Islamist par- ties. The second is the idea that a democrat must also, by definition, be a liberal. There was no flowering of “liberal Islam” preceding the spread of democratic ideas in the Middle East. There are a few reformist religious thinkers who are lauded here and there in the West, but none has ever had much popular appeal in any Arab country. Conversely, many staunch secularists, in Tunisia for instance, are not democrats. They would like to repress Islamists much as the Algerian secularist intellectuals known as les éradicateurs did during their own country’s civil war in the 1990s. Moreover, fundamentalist religious actors such as the Islamists of Tunisia or even the Salafists of Egypt, could become reluctant agents of a form of specifically political secularization that should in no way be confused with a secularization of society. The history of the West does not contradict these theses. Religious tolerance was not the fruit of liberalism and the Enlightenment. Rather, it was the product of grudging truces in savage wars of religion, from the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Politics played a bigger role than philosophy or theology. The greatest Western religious reformer, Martin Luther, was far from a model of democracy, tolerance, or liberalism (to say nothing of his anti-Semitism). The link between Protestantism and democratization is not a matter of theological propositions, but of complex political and social processes. The Founding 8 Journal of Democracy Fathers of the United States were not secularists; for them, the separation of church and state was a way of protecting religion from government, not the reverse. The French Third Republic was established in 1871 by a predo minantly conservative, Catholic, and monarchist parliament that had just crushed the Paris Commune. Christian democracy developed in Eu- rope not because the Catholic Church wanted to promote secular values, but because that was the only way for it to maintain political influence. Finally, let us not forget that populist movements in Europe today align themselves with Christian democracy in calling for the continent’s Chris- tian identity to be inscribed in the EU constitution, but few would see this expression of “identity politics” as an omen of Europe’s re-Christianiza- tion. All the talk of “Islamic identity” in the wake of the Arab Spring does not mean that mosques will henceforth become more crowded. Religious identity and faith are two different (and possibly opposed) concepts in politics. Identity might be a way to bury faith beneath secular politics. The Islamists as well as the Salafists are entering into a political space formatted by certain constraints. These constraints will not only limit their supposed “hidden agenda” of establishing an Islamic state, but will push them toward a more open and democratic way of gover- nance, because therein lies their only chance to remain at the center of political life. Thus the Islamists, and even the Salafists, will become reluctant agents of democratization.
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