1 ISLAM-2014/05/21 THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION SABAN CENTER AT BROOKINGS PROJECT ON U.S. RELATIONS WITH THE ISLAMIC WORLD ANCIENT RELIGIONS, MODERN POLITICS: A COMPARATIVE DISCUSSION OF ISLAMIC TRADITION AND REVIVALISM Washington, D.C. Wednesday, May 21, 2014 ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 2 ISLAM-2014/05/21 PARTICIPANTS: Introduction: WILLIAM McCANTS Project Director, Project on U.S. Relations With the Islamic World The Brookings Institution Moderator: MICHAEL DORAN Roger Hertog Senior Fellow The Saban Center at Brookings Featured Speaker: MICHAEL COOK University Professor of Near Eastern Studies Princeton University * * * * * ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 3 ISLAM-2014/05/21 P R O C E E D I N G S MR. McCANTS: Okay, everyone. We'll go ahead and get started. Welcome. I have the great pleasure today to introduce Professor Michael Cook, a Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Aside from his career highlights of being my Dissertation Advisor, and sharing a faculty lounge with Mike Doran, Professor Cook is this year's recipient of the prestigious Holberg Prize, which is a major academic prize given out by the Norwegian Parliament. And he's the past recipient of the Andrew Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award. I've asked Professor Cook to come and speak with us today about his new book, Ancient Religions, Modern Politics, in which he argues that the Medieval Islamic heritage shapes modern Muslim politics in some unique ways. Professor Cook will speak for about 10 to 15 minutes, and then Michael Doran, who is Robert Hertog Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, will act ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 4 ISLAM-2014/05/21 as discussant, and then we'll open it up to questions and answers. Please join me in welcoming Professor Michael Cook. (Applause) MR. COOK: Thank you very much for being here. I know what it -- I don't know what it's like in Washington, I just assumed it's a whole lot busier than being in Princeton, so I really appreciate the fact that you’ve come. The book that I'm going to say a few words about, actually, sort of, has its origin in a course that Mike and I taught at Princeton, back in 2002, and we gave it the name, something like, The Historical Roots of the Bin Laden Phenomenon, does that sound right, Michael? MR. DORAN: Yeah. MR. COOK: And we divided things up, and I was basically responsible for the heritage, and he was responsible for the current events. And at a certain point, I gave a -- I attempted to give a comparative lecture, in which I ran the Islamists against the Hindu Nationalists, and the Latin American ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 5 ISLAM-2014/05/21 Liberationists, you know, to see if I could come up with anything of interest or significance. And I would hate to think that any of the students who heard that lecture remembered any of it. And I think I would find it extremely embarrassing if they did. But nevertheless, I got sufficiently interested in that comparative venture, that I had one of those thoughts that academics often have that, you know, this could be an interesting book, but I'm also, as well as being an academic, I'm a realist. And I therefore said to myself, but not in this life. But then something unexpected happened, I got that Mellon Award, and the freed up a lot of research time for me, unexpected research time, and that’s how I came to be able to write that book in this life, and finally, there it is. Okay. In kind of introducing the book, and I don't want to try and give you a summary of a sort of -- a summary of the outlines, because I think that would be, sort of, kind of, boring. What I want to do, rather, is pull out some bits of it, and highlight ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 6 ISLAM-2014/05/21 them. And I'm going to start by going to the conclusion, and I think it's a conclusion, where I have a kind of anatomy of the Islamic revival, and all that goes with it. And basically what I do there is to say that you can think of the Islamic revival as a kind of a pyramid. I mean, at the bottom of the pyramid, where it involves the largest number of people, and what you have is, by all accounts, a tremendous increase in party and observance over the last few decades. Then in the middle of the pyramid, you have Islamist politics of one kind or another, and there's at least three major kinds, I would say, and there's Muslim identity politics, where, what you're trying to do is to persuade Muslims to identify politically as Muslims. There is the politics of Islamic values, where, what you're trying to do is to use the state apparatus, if you can get a hold of it, in order to establish some kind of moral policing. And, thirdly, there's the politics of the Islamic State, which, in ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 7 ISLAM-2014/05/21 its most obvious form, seeks a restoration of the Caliphate, and those are three very different political registers. And then, finally at top of the pyramid, we have of course, and this is where, relatively speaking, the smallest number of people are involved; we have the Jihadis. So I mean, that’s the pyramid; and if you take that, sort of, rather crude pyramid, you know, one obvious question you might want to ask is, is this pyramid something distinctively, uniquely Islamic? Or is it something that is part of the course, all over the world, in this day and age? And my answer to that is basically, sort of in two parts: the first part says that each component of the pyramid, each element in the pyramid that I've identified, you can find a parallel to somewhere else. I mean like in this rise of party and observance, well that could easily remind you of rise of Pentecostalism in Latin America, and the sort of politics of Muslim identity, well that could very easily remind you of the politics of Hindu identity in India. ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 8 ISLAM-2014/05/21 The politics of Islamic values, well that certainly reminds me coming from the old world, from Western Europe of the Christian right in this country and, you know, there's the same aspiration to get a hold of the state apparatus; you do that a bit -- that a bit differently here than, you know, you may do it in the Middle East, and to get a hold of the state apparatus and use it to enforce Christian norms on a society that may not -- that might not otherwise be very enthusiastic about them. And then, finally, the politics of the Islamic State, well there it -- and what I mean by that is establishing a specifically Islamic State, a State that is sort of -- Islamic from the ground up. Finding a parallel to that is not particularly easy, but I do have one, mainly if we stay in the Christian right in this country, and we go to the sort of far fringes of this -- of the Christian Right. We have the Christian Reconstructionist, and they have very much a conception of what the Christian state has to look like, how it would be built. ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 9 ISLAM-2014/05/21 And then finally, with the Jihadis and when I'm thinking about when I -- and when I talk about Jihadis, it's not simply the fact that they are violent that interests me, it's the fact that the violence -- and it's not simply the fact that the violence is on behalf of a religion, pursuing the interest of a religious community -- it's the fact that is the enactment of a religious duty. If you're looking for a parallel to that in the modern world, I guess -- well one I can -- we can quite easily find is the militancy of the Sikhs in India. Not right now, but a generation ago, it was very pronounced and it has been pronounced also in the past. So, I mean, every single component of this pyramid, you can parallel somewhere else; but on the other hand, if you want the pyramid as a whole that, as far as I can see, is unique in the world today. I mean I really had to run around the globe putting those parallels together. And I think in this -- you know, the situation I described, fits fairly well with, certainly, my intuitive sense of the present ANDERSON COURT REPORTING 706 Duke Street, Suite 100 Alexandria, VA 22314 Phone (703) 519-7180 Fax (703) 519-7190 10 ISLAM-2014/05/21 state of the world with regard to religion and politics.