/* Written 10:24 am  Nov 17, 1998 by ggs2@jambo.cc.columbia.edu in jambo:gulf2000 */
Speech given by Richard W. Bulliet at the
Middle East Institute Annual Conference
Washington, D.C., October 16, 1998

 
TWENTY YEARS OF ISLAMIC POLITICS
 
Twenty years ago today I was impatiently waiting to find out if Harper &
Row would publish the novel I had written over the summer describing a
religious revolution against the Shah of Iran led by a personage not
dissimilar from Ayatollah Khomeini.  After long delay prompted by a
concern that what I had imagined was actually taking place, they said yes.
After a longer delay, The Tomb of the Twelfth Imam was published.  By that
time, the American embassy had been seized and my work was, as a reviewer
put it, "destined for a quick and unheralded demise."  Why?  Because,
according to the same reviewer, "for reasons all to painfully clear, the
current crisis hasn't prompted a great movement to plumb the Moslem mind.
How often do you hear, for example, someone saying:  'You know, I'd really
like to take an Iranian to lunch to understand how they really think?'"
 
The reviewer was right.  Despite the apparent centrality of Islam to the
Iranian Revolution, Americans did not want to "plumb the Moslem mind."
Few were those, like myself, trained as a social historian of medieval
Islam, who  saw the revolution as the logical and potentially positive
outcome of a century and a half of dismal political history.
 
During the months and years that followed I frequently expressed the view
that the Iranian Revolution was a watershed event in world history and
that even without further revolutions, within twenty years Islam would
become the center of political and moral discourse throughout the Islamic
world.  I was and I remain excited by the prospect and actuality of Muslim
thinkers and believers adapting their fourteen-century tradition to the
realities of contemporary world conditions.
 
Responses to these views varied from well-meant correction "arguing, for
example, that the Iranian Revolution was the product of imbalanced
modernization and had no real religious content" to anger and ridicule.
However, as a history professor and journeyman novelist who does not
depend on palatable analysis of current affairs for a living, I failed to
accept the corrections offered and persisted in my unpopular views.
Now, twenty years later, I am the keynote speaker at this august event.
Why?  I haven't asked Rocky Suddarth directly, but I presume because Islam
has become the center of political and moral discourse throughout the
Islamic world.  Right prediction, it seems, has rewards.  However, the
ways in which Islam is today being portrayed in its moment of global
reassertion still seem short-sighted.  I believe that our understanding of
this force lags almost as far behind its evolving reality as it did twenty
years ago.  The first purpose of this talk, therefore, will be to sketch
several ways in which we have still not fully grasped what has been
happening in the world of Islamic politics over the past several decades.
My second purpose will be to suggest some likely directions of change over
the next twenty years.  After all, if I am standing before you because I
made some correct surmises twenty years ago, I should, for consistency's
sake, say something weighty about the decades that lie ahead, in hopes,
perhaps, that at the venerable age of 77 I might be asked back to review
what actually transpires.
 
First the past.
Prior to the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the number of books about
contemporary Islam written by American-trained scholars could be counted
on one hand.  Since that time, as we all know, books about contemporary
Islam have become as abundant as air molecules, to borrow a simile from
Dave Barry.  Many of them have analyzed the thought and described the
impact of major figures like Ayatollah Khomeini, Sayyid Qutb, and Abu
al-ATla Mawdudi, figures whom American researchers of the 1960s and 1970s
failed for the most part to take notice of despite their growing
indigenous audiences.
 
American scholarship and policy deliberation failed to take note of the
emerging current of Islamic politics because the dominant theories of
international development and the primary American concerns in the Middle
East encouraged observers to look elsewhere:  to the Arab-Israeli
conflict, to the danger of communist subversion, and to the Holy Grail of
economic and political development, whose knights were, for the most part,
conceived to be modernizing technocrats with professional military
training.  Some of these concerns grew from the ideas of Daniel Lerner,
Manfred Halpern, John C. Campbell, and a few others, whose work of the
late 1950s anchored the paradigm of Middle East Studies in the then
emerging university area studies programs.  The 1967 Arab-Israeli war
prompted other concerns, and the 1974 oil shock still others.  None of
these concerns, however, required the slightest understanding of Islam.
In citing these particular authors, I do not mean to hold them up for
blanket criticism.  If the intellectually and theoretically insecure
enterprise of Middle East Studies was to survive in the 1960s, a few bold,
simple, and immediately useful ideas were needed to hold it together.
That those ideas reflected American ideology and foreign policy concerns
does them no discredit, for the academic enterprise was designed precisely
to address such concerns.  Unfortunately, both the enterprise and the
ideas that undergirded it fell short when it came to assessing the future
strength and adaptability of the Islamic religion. 
 
Catching up with the current of Islamic politics after 1979 was both easy
and difficult.  It was easy to find and read the publications of prominent
thinkers, but it was difficult to understand why they were mesmerizing
young people of talent, not to mention the urban poor and other groups
being bypassed in the interest of modernization.  As researchers delved
into the latter difficulties, and did some excellent research on veiling,
student attitudes, rural-urban migration, feelings of identity and
authenticity, and the like, some larger issues were neglected.
 
First, the professional character of modern military officer training, and
the notion that modern military officers were destined to be the change
agents of modernization, somehow obscured the fact that by the 1960s most
of the Middle East had become subject to autocratic regimes increasingly
addicted to the use of police state methods to maintain power.  Indeed,
after the fall of the Soviet empire in 1991, the Middle East became the
world's foremost arena of despotic, non-participatory government, whether
in monarchical or military guise.  By the time of the Iranian Revolution,
a generation of young men and women was coming of age that had been born
under regimes of national independence and educated through the mass
schooling those regimes instituted.  But they had even less hope than
their parents living under imperialism had had of meaningful participation
in choosing or shaping the governments that ruled them.
 
Though the officer regimes of that era, and to some degree the monarchical
regimes, espoused ideologies labelled as "secular nationalist," I prefer
to call them Neo-Mamluk regimes.  While the words "secular" and
"nationalist" are drawn from the vocabulary of Western modernism, and thus
connote the sort of modernizing role assigned these officers by Western
theorists, "Neo-Mamluk" stresses important continuities with the
pre-imperialist past.  Mamluk professional military officers bound to one
another by strong ties of training and camaraderie, but substantially
divorced from the general populace in outlook and career path, had been a
pervasive force in Middle Eastern governance for 600, if not 1000, years
prior to the onset of Westernization in the nineteenth century.  The
system, in a variety of forms, had consistently provided excellent
soldiers, and it was often receptive to new ideas of a technical sort
emanating from the West.  But the system had been unrelenting in its
tendency toward tyranny:  government of the officers, by the officers, for
the officers.
 
My purpose in identifying a number of Middle Eastern regimes from the
1950s onward as Neo-Mamluk is twofold.  First, the term puts an emphasis
on autocracy and the officers' self-serving exclusion of the general
populace from political participation, relegating issues of declared
ideology to a subordinate role.  Many have argued, for example, that the
failure of these regimes to defeat Israel or secure the material blessings
of modernization sapped their ideological legitimacy and made an Islamic
resurgence possible.  I would point not to these undeniable failures, but
to their success in instituting brutal and all-pervasive internal security
regimes as a root cause of the Islamic opposition.  Secondly, and
following from this observation, the term Neo-Mamluk reminds us that
confrontation between despotic government and Islam has endured for a very
long time.
 
This latter point takes me to the next of the three matters I believe we
have wrongly ignored:  Islamic political theory.  Without delving into
unnecessary detail, and at the risk of some oversimplification, I would
suggest that Muslim political thought has long maintained that any
government is better than no government, a truth that was sadly brought
home to us during the tragic years of the Lebanese civil war.  On the
other hand, Muslim theorists similarly held, anticipating Lord Acton, that
"power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Pessimistically, but realistically, Muslim thinkers have looked upon all
wielders of government power, save a rightly guided and divinely approved
Imam, as potential tyrants.
 
What they saw as curbing the tendency toward tyranny natural to those who
wield governing power was Islam, and Islamic law in particular.  Whereas
the evolution of political theory in the West gradually led to the concept
of "the people" as a countervailing force against tyranny, in the Islamic
world, that countervailing force was thought to be Islam:  the submission
of all, ruler and ruled alike, to God and His law.  Hence the unhappiness
of Muslim theorists with rule by unbelievers, whether Mongol or British,
and the stress on the necessity of such unbelieving rulers upholding the
ShariTa, or at least some of its tenets.
 
The merest glance at the history of the Islamic Middle East reveals that,
in fact, Islam did not effectively prevent despotism.  But it also reveals
that virtually all rulers nominally acknowledged the supremacy of Islamic
law, and their own personal obeisance to God.  Almost as consistently,
past Muslim rulers, whether Mamluk or other, acknowledged the exclusive
role of Muslim scholars as interpreters and implementers of Islamic law,
even to the extent of occasionally accepting political or moral correction
from religious tribunes.  Though no formal compact ever existed, a tacit
bargain was struck around the twelfth century according to which, in
return for recognition of the financial, institutional, and moral
independence of the collectivity of Muslim scholars, known as ulama, and
affirmation of their authority over the religious law and the training of
specialists in that law, the government would be free to exercise more or
less absolute power.  The assumption was not that the scholars would be
able to intervene frequently or effectively to curtail tyranny, but that
rulers would themselves feel bound, as believers, to stop short of total
despotism or blatant contravention of the Shari'a, and that the society as
a whole would benefit from the moral instruction offered by ulama whose
status was independent of and morally superior to that of the rulers.
 
This historic compromise, to which the Mamluks of old were party,
progressively dissolved over the course of the nineteenth century.  Modern
techniques for extending government control - for example, the telegraph,
military conscription, and bureaucratic rationalization - facilitated a
convergence of interests between Christian European and Muslim Middle
Eastern governments.  The former, as inheritors of centuries of fear and
hatred, longed to see a lessening of the influence and assumptions of
superiority of Muslim divines and to institute a regime of legal equality
for non-Muslims.  The latter, witnessing the perfection of absolutism in
Napoleonic France and Wilhelmine Germany, desired to rid themselves of the
shackles represented by religious institutions and the independence of the
ulama.
 
The result was a movement of Westernization, spearheaded by Egypt and the
Ottoman Empire, that to this day is highly praised by Western historians.
The measures taken in the name of Westernization disemboweled the Islamic
educational and legal systems; reordered economies away from the guilds,
which were often linked to religious leaders; broke down traditional
patterns of urban life and business, which were strongly influenced by
Islamic values; and stripped Muslim religious institutions of their
financial independence.
 
While much may be said of a positive character about these various
"reforms," one thing became crystal clear in the long run:  They validated
Muslim political theory.  Freed from the countervailing power of
Islam - even though that power had been more a theoretical potential than an
active force - tyranny flourished, especially after the attainment of
national independence.  The Neo-Mamluks have wielded power more completely
and ruthlessly than any of their predecessors, and they have abundantly
manifested their fear of independent religious voices.
 
Thus my first two points converge.  Maximum tyranny has validated the
prediction embodied in Muslim political theory.  And in so doing it has
provoked a response from the only indigenous source available:  Islam.  To
be sure, the generation that struggled against overt imperialism was often
attracted to "liberal democracy" or "socialism" as modalities for
expressing the desire to help shape their destinies.  You fight powerful
enemies, after all, with their own weapons, and the ideologies of
imperialism were the ideologies of the West.  But against homegrown
"secular nationalist," i.e., Neo-Mamluk, regimes Islam provides more
authentic and potent armament.  It was entirely natural for thoughtful
members of the first generation of independence to be drawn to Islamic
articulations of resistance, just as it was perfectly natural for Muslim
thinkers to react to the emergence of Neo-Mamluk despotism with theories
promising to redress the imbalance caused by Westernization and reassert
the rightful role of Islam as the countervailing force against tyranny.
 
Many of their ideas, however, proved to be new, and some of them truly
strange, which leads me to the third aspect of Islamic politics that we
have not adequately taken the measure of:  the devolution of religious
authority attendant upon the advent of print, and more recently
electronic, media.  It has long been argued and abundantly demonstrated by
historical research that the impact of printing on European history went
well beyond multiplying the number of books available.  Pamphlets,
broadsides, journals, and newspapers transformed the political order.
Page numbering, indexing, cross-referencing, and standardization of
language imposed new disciplines in the intellectual realm.  And the
disentanglement of authority - as in "author" - from personal classroom
presence changed the nature of formal and informal education.  Citing
parallel, if somewhat dissimilar, transformations in China, Korea, and
Japan, scholars have argued that the impact of printing can legitimately
be called revolutionary.
 
In the Muslim world, access to printed religious texts and viewpoints
dates generally to the last quarter of the nineteenth century.  If
printing does have revolutionary consequences, therefore, should we not
today regard ourselves as living within an ongoing revolution in the
Islamic world?  The evidence, once looked for, is abundant.  Major
twentieth century contributors to the discourse of Islamic reassertion
include, on the one hand, editors and journalists, such as Rashid Rida and
Abu al-ATla Mawdudi, whose influence came not from some paramount
religious post, for which they may have lacked qualification, but from
their journalistic writings.  Others, such as Sayyid Qutb and Ayatollah
Khomeini, composed their most influential works while in prison or in
exile and saw their fame grow as the result of book circulation more than
classroom tutelage.
 
Compare the spread of  Islamic political movements in nineteenth century
North Africa (Tijaniya, Sanusiya), Sudan (Mahdiya), and, slightly later,
Somalia, all pre-print phenomena, with those of the print societies of
this century.  The former were led by charismatic religious leaders,
trained in traditional religious ways, who derived power from personal
ties of discipleship and inspirational personal presence.  Leaders of the
latter include editors, Western-style lawyers, engineers, economists, and
sociologists with limited formal religious training and scant access to
religious educational or legal institutions.  Their impact derives only
secondarily from discipleship or personal charisma.  It comes primarily
from books and articles, or, more recently, from reports about them in the
print and electronic news media.
 
Devolution of religious authority, the de facto transfer of religious
primacy from madrasa professors, mosque imams, muftis and the like to
self-designated "leaders" with lesser, or no, religious scholarly
credentials, but skilled in the use of magazines, newspapers, pamphlets,
and press conferences, is a fact of our times.  Just when the peaking of
Neo-Mamluk totalitarianism and the spread of mass schooling - itself
dependent on printed textbooks - was providing a constituency for Muslim
reassertion, the print (and now electronic) revolution was transforming
the shape of religious leadership in ways that have often been deplored,
but seldom understood, much less countered in other than police-state
fashion.  No matter, therefore, how reactionary or modern, conservative or
radical, violent or meliorative, one or another contemporary Muslim
political agenda might seem, all are immersed in, and to a substantial
degree products of, the print revolution.  The era of the shaikh in the
classroom instilling wisdom and devotion in his students is gone; the era
of the religious quester, male or female, logging onto the internet in
search of answers to moral and political questions - regardless of the
formal qualifications of the answerer - has arrived.
 
So much for the past twenty years.  What of the future?
To begin with, I see no reason to suspect that the attractions of
political Islam, in some form, will lessen in the coming years or that
those people already inclined to put Islam at the center of their
political and moral lives will disappear.  Thus I see Islamic politics as
a phenomenon that will be with us for the rest of our lives and well
beyond and as a factor that will become increasingly important in our
pondering of American policies toward the Islamic world.
 
More specifically, I see three likely trends.  First, the Islamic Republic
of Iran will become an ever more interesting laboratory for observing
political Islam in practice.  Iran may or may not become a model for
others, but its successes and failures will provide lessons for all.  In
this respect, note should be taken that as the twentieth anniversary of
the Shah's overthrow approaches, Iran is doing, in comparative
revolutionary terms, quite well; and it is likely to be doing still better
twenty years from now.
 
-  Twenty years after the surrender of Charles I to Parliament in the
English Revolution, Charles II was back in power.  But forty years later,
the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 ended the Stuart dynasty and
established a firm new relationship between the ruler and the people.
-  Twenty years after the French Revolution, Napoleon had transformed the
First Republic into an autocratic empire.  But forty years after, the
principles of the French Revolution were inspiring other Europeans in the
revolutions of 1830.
-  Twenty years after the American Revolution, the United States was
engaged in its first foreign war, against the Barbary States, and the
suspicious opponents of Thomas Jefferson were inveighing against his plan
for a national navy for fear that the federal government might use such a
military force against the states.  But forty years after the end of the
Revolutionary War, the election of Andrew Jackson, the hero of the War of
1812, confirmed the popular and national character of the federal
government.
-  Twenty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, the USSR was mired in
Stalin's paranoid purge trials and decimation of the Red Army officer
corps.  But forty years after, it was launching its first Cold War
challenge with the Berlin Blockade followed shortly by the first Soviet
nuclear explosion.
-  Twenty years after the triumph of Mao Zedong's Communist movement, the
People's Republic of China was wracked by the turmoil of the Cultural
Revolution.  But the revolution's fortieth anniversary found the country
in the midst of a generally successful transition to prosperity in a
globalized economy.
 
Six hundred years ago, Ibn Khaldun sagely set forty years, the time the
Israelites spent wandering in the wilderness, as the period of a
generation in his four-generation sequence of dynastic rise and decline.
He understood that long-term impacts are determined less by the specific
deeds of the founding generation than by what survives them when they have
passed away.
 
In Iran, the revolutionary generation is still in power and will be for
another two decades.  After that, the Iranian Revolution will fade into
history, its lasting impact to be determined either by the myth it will
have established, or by the example of a secure, prosperous, and effective
Islamic Republic.
 
To date, analysts of Islamic political movements have paid greatest
attention to thinkers and agitators bent on wresting power from Neo-Mamluk
or other regimes.  The goal of these thinkers and agitators has been
political mobilization, not thoughtful and orderly conduct of government.
The plans they visualize have not been tested by the realities of power,
nor have they themselves had to organize and staff ministries, meet
budgets, or implement policies.  They are the equivalent of Thomas Paine
and Patrick Henry in the American Revolution:  exhorters rather than
performers.  In the long run, however, it is the Thomas Jeffersons, the
Alexander Hamiltons and the James Madisons that determine whether a
revolution will survive primarily as myth, as was the case with the French
Revolution, or as the foundation of a new form of government, as in the
American case.
 
Over the next twenty years, we should look for the emergence of a new
order of Islamic political thinker, and the most likely place to look is
the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Only there are the problems of practical,
constitutional government being faced on a day-to-day basis; only there
are institutions originally adumbrated in revolutionary speeches or
manifestos being tested against the hard reality of exercising power.
Though no individual may stand out at this moment as the Iranian winner of
a James Madison look-alike competition, the level and diversity of
political debate in Iran is very encouraging.
 
Moreover, the constitution of the Islamic Republic recognizes the
impracticality, in an era when governments wield so many instruments of
power, of having the countervailing force of Islam based outside of
government.  And it addresses, though with less than total success, the
problem of how to incorporate the restraining hand of Islam into the
governing apparatus through the institution of the Guardianship of the
Religious Jurist (Velayat-e Faqih).  Though American Iran-watchers
understandably applaud every move toward moderation made by the popularly
elected government of President Khatami, they should also understand the
constructive role the Guardian Jurist, Ayatollah KhameneUi, plays in
balancing the system and preventing social turmoil.
 
The veterans who fought for their country during Iran's bloody, eight-year
war with Iraq all came to political awareness in the days of the
revolution and remember the rule of the Shah.  By contrast, the mass of
voters between 15 and 25 who contributed so much to President KhatamiUs
victory have no substantial recollection of the Shah or of the revolution.
Though Western observers see in these young voters the stirrings of
change, an elementary look at their own national histories should remind
them that no country can look unconcernedly at a generational split
between an older veteran generation and a "naive" younger generation.
 
Recall, for example, American and French turmoil in 1968.  In the Iranian
system, the popularly elected president represents his young majority
constituency, and it falls to the Guardian Jurist to ensure that change
does not come too fast and that the sacrifices of the "martyr" generation
are not ignored.
 
At this point I would like to digress to discuss two subjects that are
commonly raised by those who disparage the Islamic Republic, namely,
democracy and the status of women.  Proponents of Western democracy as the
best known form of government often acknowledge, pro forma, that even
American democracy does not function perfectly.  They could hardly do
otherwise given our current electoral climate of big money, soft money,
photo ops, sound bites, attack ads, and platforms determined by public
opinion polling.  Yet they commonly set aside these confessions of
imperfection when prescribing for the non-Western world.
 
Critics of the Iranian political system complain that candidacy for office
there is constrained by qualifying procedures dominated by the clergy,
seemingly ignoring that candidacy in the U.S. is almost completely
controlled by extra-constitutional party structures that do not
necessarily represent the party rank and file, much less the people, and
do not reliably put before the public the best qualified candidates.  The
original Constitution of the United States, one should note, did not
provide for the popular election of the President.
 
Detractors further complain that Iranian elections are not democratic
because some political points of view, for example, those of monarchists,
communists, and others opposed to the countryUs constitution as an Islamic
Republic, are not permitted to run.  In lodging this complaint they
conveniently ignore the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
excluding from office anyone who had served or supported the Confederacy
during the Civil War.  They further ignore the fact that U.S.
office-holders must swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States
of America, a document that stipulates a secular republican form of
government.  Conceivably, monarchists might run for office in the United
States on a platform calling for return to British rule - an amusing thought
now, but one of political significance in, say, 1800 - but such people could
not serve without forswearing their principles.  Similarly, office-holders
and electoral candidates in Iran must support the constitutional structure
of an Islamic republic.
 
It should be noted that successful democracies do not generally structure
elections as constitutional referenda wherein every constitutional
viewpoint merits a place on the ballot.  Constitutional change is rare and
entered into with trepidation.  Voters normally select individuals or
parties to conduct a country's business, not to change its fundamental
structure.  To require of the Islamic Republic of Iran such
all-encompassing elections as a litmus test of democracy is absurd and
gratuitous.
 
A third complaint by Iran's "democratic" critics maintains that divine
will rather than popular sovereignty undergirds the Republic.  Hence it is
a theocracy.  A reading of the Iranian Constitution, however, specifies
that the Guardian Jurist, the clerical mainstay of the system, derives his
mandate from the majority will, not from God.  To be sure, in the absence
of a clearcut popular mandate of the sort Ayatollah Khomeini enjoyed, an
Assembly of Experts selects the Guardian; but even then, the Assembly is
an elected body, and there is no constitutional indication that their
choice is divinely sanctioned or inspired.
 
To sum up, critics may find the constitutional order of the Islamic
Republic unappealing in some particulars, just as they may dislike its
leaders and their policies.  But the election of President Khatami on May
23, 1997, an outcome immediately and unequivocally endorsed by the
Guardian Jurist, remains one of this centuryUs most dramatic examples of
the power of democracy.
 
My second digression concerns the status of women.  The revolutionary
regime came to power intent on reversing the Shah's liberal legislation
concerning women.  It quickly accomplished this goal and mandated severe
restrictions on women's dress, employment, and behavior.  Now, two decades
later, an active Islamic feminist movement in Iran has seen a woman take
her place at the cabinet table as director of women's affairs and another
attain the rank of vice president.  Moreover, the parliament has put in
place a body of legislation that makes the Iranian laws of marriage and
divorce among the most liberal in the Islamic world.
 
Though improvement of the condition of women was far from being a priority
in the context of the revolution, the realities of governing, the power of
women as half the electorate, and the possibility within Shi'ite legal
thought of advancing cogent arguments for improving the status of women
combined to foster this Islamic feminist movement.  Action on this front
provides a good example of the practical difference between sloganeering
to mobilize a revolution and learning how to govern in the context of an
electoral system.  Iranian women, like other Muslim women, still suffer
under disabilities.  But participatory governing structures are more
important to the amelioration of their condition than advocacy from abroad
or reliance on benevolent monarchs and military officers.
 
These digressions illustrate my broader contention that Iran should be
looked upon as a laboratory for the evolution of Islamic democracy.  From
an American policy perspective, this suggests that we should recognize the
Islamic Republic as a legitimate constitutional and moral entity and
applaud its participatory form of government without trying to imbalance
it by clumsy expressions of factional preference.  Furthermore, we should
dismiss the hubristic notion that "positive" developments in Iran are the
product of American sanctions and isolation, an absurdity that serves only
to entrench anti-Iranian views in the U.S. government while supporting the
Iranian contention that the United States is deliberately seeking hegemony
over the non-Western world.
 
I have spent a good deal of time discussing Iran because I believe that
its role and impact in the region and in the Islamic world in general will
increase steadily over the next two decades.  
 
My other two prognostications for the years ahead are less optimistic.
 
The first returns to the observations made earlier that the mother lode of
totalitarian government in the contemporary world is to the found in the
Middle East and that Islamic political theory projects the Islamic Shari'a
as the counterbalance to tyranny.  Mass schooling, nearly universal
literacy, and a consequential growing politicization of the general
populace are working together in encouraging the Muslims of the Middle
East to seek for themselves a measure of governmental participation, just
as populations have done in other parts of the world.  In a growing number
of minds, however, participatory government is conceived in Islamic terms.
I would not be surprised, therefore, to see at some time in the not too
distant future a rapid political transformation similar to the one that
overtook eastern Europe in the late 1980s.  While the Neo-Mamluks wield
too many coercive instruments to make outright revolutions likely, they
are vulnerable to mass demands for real elections and inclusion of Islamic
parties.  In the short run, one may see cooptation, in the form of
officers retaining the presidency and control of military affairs and
foreign policy while ceding most other governmental functions to Islamic
political figures chosen in general elections.  In the longer run, the
officers, too, socialized within a largely Islamic political climate, will
reflect the growing current of Islamic politics; and the system as a whole
will evolve accordingly.
 
In terms of a U.S. foreign policy fixated on notions of stability that
boil down in too many cases to unquestioned support of authoritarian
government and police state measures, this prediction implies a loosening
of ties that might commit the U.S. to rescuing precarious Neo-Mamluk
regimes and an ever stronger avowal of democratic values, explicitly
affirming the legitimacy of Islamic versions of those values.  The
Algerian option must not become a regional norm supported actively or
tacitly by the United States.
 
My final prediction reverts to the issue of religious authority in an era
of media revolution.  The devolution of authority in Islam upon whoever,
irrespective of religious knowledge, has control of a magazine, newspaper,
or radio station, or gains the attention of the world press through acts
of violence, threatens the coherence of Islamic thought and the well-being
of the Muslim community.  I believe that it is incumbent upon the Muslim
world community to appraise the real character of contemporary religious
authority - who is actually following whose leadership - and take measures to
define the boundaries of faith it deems acceptable.  I have no clear idea
how this might be done, but history offers examples of precisely this kind
of religious recentering, most notably when the community evolved a
consensus on which hadith, or traditions of the Prophet, should be
considered sound, discarding in the process thousands of traditions people
had hitherto accepted as true elements of their faith.
 
In the absence of effective measures in this arena, including, presumably,
agreement to disagree on constitutional issues and to honor and respect
the opinions of those one disagrees with, I believe there is a strong
possibility of warfare among Muslims over what version of Islam should
shape the community's destiny in the twenty-first century.  At the moment,
the most dramatic and dangerous polarity is between jumhuriya (republic),
a system predicated on electoral government, and imara (autocracy), a
system based on the individual rule of a leader claiming religious
sanction.  Yet even if the proponents of these two systems learn to live
with one another, there are other, more extreme, doctrines that need to be
either reined in, anathematized, or guided into more pacific and
constructive paths.  Men of violence with no qualifications as religious
authorities beyond their weapons and their access to the media should not
be able to make declarations of war and hatred, couched as religious
manifestoes, without suffering universal, explicit, and vocal rejection
throughout the world Muslim community. 
 
In policy terms, the clear directive in this area is for the United States
government (as opposed to American Muslims) not to involve itself in the
doctrinal politics of the world Islamic community.  The United States can
develop, and should start working on, mutually constructive relationships
with polities that embody participatory government but whose philosophical
or religious bases do not include admiration of American government or
Western culture.  As we increasingly honor pluralism within our own
national community, we should similarly honor pluralism in the world
community.
 
I am sorry to close with predictions of political disorder, possibly
mounting to the level of war; but when in the past century has any period
of two decades passed in the Middle East without a significant measure of
war and chaos?  In fact, I do not look forward to the next two decades of
Islamic politics with a mood of pessimism.  I firmly believe that Islam
will become, in time, a basis for participatory governments and moral
societies in tune both with the modern world of the twenty-first century
and the great religious heritage of the Islamic past.      
 
 
 
 
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