These four books encapsulate a range of political issues that have shaped the formation of states and ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa since the beginning of the modern encounter between Europe and the Islamic world, from the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt through the post-World War I demise of the Ottoman world up to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The overarching methodological approach to the analysis of these books can be seen through the themes developed by the writers and contributors. The authors and contributors describe and analyze the quest for modern political representation, especially in light of the presence of religious and ethnic minorities, in the context of the clash between religion, tradition and modernity in the Islamic world.
The current war and religious conflict in Iraq can be better understood through the Gramscian approach of Eric Davis. He focuses on the relationship between intellectuals, culture, state formation and civil society by analyzing details of Iraqi intellectual developments in the twentieth century. He throws light on the formation of the debate on the Iraqi political identity among Iraq's literati and intelligentsia and the “roads not taken” since 1922, which marks the beginning of the British mandate on that territory. It is a book for specialists.
This approach complements the articles in The Future of Kurdistan that deal with the more immediate political crises in Iraq following the American invasion. Of particular importance here is the role of Iraqi Kurdistan in its uneasy and often tragic dimension as a component of the Iraqi state. This last point can be compared and contrasted with the articles edited by Maya Schatzmiller in Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies; the contributors to this opus analyze religion and ethnic minorities from Morocco to the Arab Middle East, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.
Clinton Bennett's Muslims and Modernity contributes to the themes by introducing the reader to the ideological debates among Muslim intellectuals in Europe and the Islamic world, addressing the relationship between Islam and its response toward Western civilization, minorities, secularization and the separation between religion and state.
Historically, the formation of nation-states has seen a particular region and/or a particular ethnic or linguistic group impose its hegemony on a wider territory through military, economic and cultural means. Classic examples are the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon at the closing of the Middle Ages in Spain, and Prussia and Piedmont respectively in Germany and Italy in the nineteenth century. This is an ongoing and dynamic process that characterizes the modern state and sees its consolidation challenged by minorities and majorities in all areas of the world, irrespective of the degree of economic development and modernity.
Examples from the modern state experience can be seen in Canada with Quebec, in Spain with Catalonia and the Basque region and in a much more tragic sense in the former Yugoslavian federal state ever since the demise of the Communist systems. Examples form the developing world are numerous—Sri Lanka, India, China, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Pakistan come to mind, as well as areas such as the Caucasus with Chechnya and Abkhazia, and South Asia, where Burma and Thailand face internal insurrections by religious and ethnic minorities.
The themes and subjects that the authors and contributors of these books probe can be best seen through the comparative context of the development of the modern nation-state and its continuous mercurial and Protean dialectical encounter with a post-Cold War international system.
Maya Schatzmiller has collected ten case studies in this volume, all with the potential to answer some questions on the elements and dynamics that shape the formation of minority identities. These are cases of religious and ethnic minorities living in Muslim majority nation-states. The authors attempt to outline and define the social and cultural boundaries of each minority group and, at the same time, to develop a set of variables, and possibly a taxonomy, for a common and larger comparative framework. Two classes of minority groups are of particular interest in the development of such an approach. The first category, in which the main distinguishing characteristic is religion, includes ancient religious minority groups such as the Copts in Egypt, and more recent religious minorities formed during the nineteenth century or later, such as the Christians of Pakistan and the Baha'is of Iran. The second category consists of Muslim ethnic groups whose presence overlaps two or more nation-states but who claim their own linguistic autonomy and cultural and historical identities: these are the Berbers in Morocco and Algeria and the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey.
Among the religious minorities, the factors dominating the process of minority identity formation were not only creed or clerical institutions, but varied considerably from region to region. One can argue that the Egyptian Coptic case is not comparable to the Lebanese Maronite case because of the fragmented nature of Lebanese society and its colonial experience with France. A different set of historical factors affects the role of religion in minority identity formation in the case of the Christians in Pakistan and the Baha'is in Iran. In the Pakistani case, conversion to Christianity through missionary work among the untouchables in Pakistan created a Christian community perpetually imprisoned and locked into a low social economic status best described as a caste. In the case of the Baha'is, the development of such an identity has to be seen in light of the development of millenarian Shiism in the nineteenth century and its illegitimacy when viewed through the dogmatic prism of the majority. The Baha'is also came to be perceived suspiciously by secular Iranian nationalists, who saw them as a source of disunity or a fifth column for foreign powers. They had been harassed and persecuted by the Islamic government in Tehran. Under the Shah, they were tolerated though they were not considered an officially recognized religious minority.
Among the Berbers and the Kurds, the formation of an identity has involved strong and sometimes violent claims for cultural and linguistic autonomy as well as the appropriation and incorporation of secular ideologies from the European experience, such as nationalism and marxism. What unites all the cases in this group is how the formation of minority identity was influenced by the adamant hostility it provoked from the modern Islamic nation-state, as the Kurdish experience indicates in Turkey and Iraq. The decades old internal wars of Turkey and Iraq are very instructive in this regard.
In the Berber case, Morocco tried to co-opt, if not encourage, the Berber identity on its territory. However, the Algerian case took a different path, as the Algerian state tried to repress any claims to cultural or linguistic distinction by its Berber population.
It is interesting to note here the references by many authors to the creation of diasporas that have influenced and continue to influence the politics of minority relations in the home countries—Copts, Berbers and Kurds are all good examples of this phenomenon.
The issue of the Kurds in Iraq is taken up by Brendan O'Leary, John McGarry and Khaled Salih in The Future of Kurdistan in Iraq. Several articles focus on the Kurdish population problem since the inception of the Iraqi state in 1922 to fully integrate its Kurdish-speaking population with the Arabic-speaking. The demise of the Ottoman Empire meant that the French and the British had to confront the issue of the status of the territories seized by London and Paris. Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine were assigned as mandates to Britain while France came to control Lebanon and Syria.
The Ottoman Empire, in the person of the Sultan, had controlled much of the Arab Middle East, where the Porte imposed its political domination through a system of local religious autonomy. Until the rise of nationalism in the Middle East and in the Ottoman dominions in the Balkans and North Africa, ethnicity was never as important an issue as religious allegiance. Jews and Christians were considered protected minorities and the relationship to the Islamic universal community was regulated by Islamic law and in some cases by local traditions. Theoretically, the allegiance of all the subjects was to the person of the Sultan as the inheritor of the theocratic power of the Khalif.
The creation of new states, ostensibly an emanation of the liberal European experience in the Middle East, introduced anew the problem of loyalty and legitimacy, and the role of religious and ethnic minorities, in societies with no previous experience in the formulation of political systems above and beyond religious and traditional legitimacy.
In the case of Iraq, the relationship between Kurds and Arabs, and that between Sunnis and Shiites, posed fundamental barriers to creating a modern Iraqi state. With the rise of pan-Arabism, communism and socialism, the populations of the Middle East were confronted with basic political dilemmas that have yet to be resolved. It is instructive and relevant to read Ofra Bengio's essay on the historical perspective in analyzing the Kurdish search for a role in twentieth-century Iraq. The essays in The future of Kurdistan in Iraq provide the reader with insight into the ongoing problems of the Kurdish population in adjusting to either Iraqi nationalism or pan-Arabism. Following the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, as the Iraqi state evolved, the rise of the Baath Party in the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein underlined even more emphatically the problematic issue of multi-ethnic states in the Middle East. One of the essays addresses the subject of a federal state by suggesting a Canadian solution; there is naivety in such an answer, given the radically different historical circumstances that governed the formation of the Canadian Confederation.
Critical writing on the transitional stages of the development of the Iraqi Constitution and its government should be read in light of the final acceptance of the document by the Iraqi Parliament in 2006, following the election of a representative body. The articles by Peter Galbraith should also be viewed from the same perspective. In part 4, the title “What Went Wrong” serves as an introduction to more recent debates on the contemporary conflict in Iraq, and the problems of the American administration in engineering security and a stable political system in that country. What is clear is that this volume is only one of numerous articles written in both America and Europe on what went wrong. The initial Anglo-American optimism on regime change and democratization came up against a murderous civil war between Shiites and Sunnis, where power struggles, Iranian intervention, Al Qaeda and Sunni Arab involvement met Islamic millinarianism, Jihadism and anarchy. Only in the Kurdish areas of Iraq does local administration seem to function with a degree of law and order, in contrast with the apparent lawlessness in some of the Southern provinces.
The confessional war, with the Sunni reaction to the rise to power of the Shiite majority, was the result of a combination of both immediate and longstanding political, theological and social conflicts and differences between the two branches of Islam. It is a conflict that needs to be understood in its historical development and a chapter on the topic would have been appropriate.
The gap between theory and practice appears to be a consistent and abiding characteristic of Arab and to a lesser extent Iranian politics and society. Over thirteen centuries of historical evolution, Islam has remained, by far, less institutionalized than Western Europe: social organizations such as guilds, urban centres, tribes, professional associations and political parties are segmented rather than corporate in nature. The fundamental units of the Islamic community have been and remain primarily those of the individual and his or her immediate kinship or friendship groups.
Political organizations are of limited efficacy and lack the cohesion and institutionalized directiveness common to their Western counterparts, save in the sense of providing social settings within which individuals build and maintain power and influence. Political culture in the Arab and Islamic Middle East is shaped by patrimonial and neo-patrimonial systems that are less differentiated and less complex than the more organized and reutilized structures of Western nation-states with their legal-rational traits. Personalism characterizes patrimonial rule and often defines leadership in the Arab and Islamic world, as in the case of Iraq, with Saddam Hussein and his extended family, or in Syria, with the Assad dynasty. This is not to say that Iranian and Arab political systems in the past and present have lacked the elements of a state organization and bureaucracy, which traditionally have been linked to the person of the ruler rather than to his or her position, and have provided for the articulation and exercise of power.
This has been the case in both Sunni and Shiite experiences, though it is relevant to point out that the theological differences do magnify structural and behavioral gaps in Shiite and Sunni world views. Shiite Islam, the majority religion in Iran and amongst the Arabic-speaking population of Iraq, has always had an active millenarian component, with a concomitant expectation of the kingdom of God on earth. The belief in the coming of the Messiah, central to Orthodox Judaism and fundamentalist Christianity, is even more relevant in Shiite Islam, and it is perhaps this concept that gives salience to its dogmatic differences with Sunni Islam. Mainstream Islam has a very vague and undeveloped concept of a Messianic arrival.
The cleavage between the two main branches of Mohammed's message goes back to the dawn of Islamic history. The split was grounded in the dispute between theologians, and eventually Arabs and Persians, as to who the successor to Mohammed was and which line of descendants should rule. Shiites did not accept the first three kalifs—Abu Bakr, Omar and Osman—as the rightful inheritors of Mohammed's religious, political and military mantel. In fact, it has been the proper duty of Shiites to ritually curse them, though the emphasis on this practice has varied over time.
Shiites maintain that in the realm of Islam, supreme political and religious leadership descended by blood from Mohammed to his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, and eventually to particular members of his progeny. The Alid line eventually disappeared with the twelfth imam, a child who went into occultation and whose return is expected at some time in the future as a harbinger of the kingdom of God on earth. This belief forms the core of Shiite eschatology, and has parallels with the classical notions of the divine right of kings in Europe and the Davidic origins of the Christian and Jewish Messiahs. It is also worth noticing that the Ethiopian kings made similar claims by linking their legitimacy to rule to the putative origins of the encounter between Solomon, son of David and the queen of Sheba.
There are other Shiite sects with their own interpretations of the lineage of Ali's putative descendants, but it is the Twelevers who have steadfastly held to this legend. In early Islam, the theological and eventual social differences between Sunnis and Shiites led to open warfare and persecutions, with the Shiites suffering the most. As a result, a tradition of martyrdom and martyrology developed within the main body of Shiism, giving it a rather morbid and pathological character best represented in the mournful celebrations commemorating the death of Shiite imams.
Clinton Bennett's Muslims and Modernity cites prominent Muslim thinkers, theologians and philosophers on relations between Islam and the non-Islamic world, principally Europe and North America. Strangely enough, none of these thinkers, intellectuals, literati, philosophers and pundits seem to be concerned about intra-Muslim relations and relations between Muslims and the rest of the non-Western world, such as China or India. They are even less concerned about Sunni-Shiite relations, which are at the core of the internal wars of Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to see Shiism and Sunni Islam as two different religions that share common theological underpinnings, very much like the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The hatred and the genocidal Sunni behaviour toward Shiites in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan are symptomatic of theological differences that can be better understood in terms of the millennial conflicts between the interpreters of the Abrahamic message.
The hierarchical structure of Shiite Islam and its rejection of the world, especially among some of its more radical schools of thought, the Khomeinist interpretation being one, set the Shiite world totally apart from the Sunni world view. The destruction of Shiite shrines by Sunni suicide bombers in Iraq is symptomatic of the many problems that plague the construction of a modern state in Iraq. Here, the confessional differences that have often been manipulated by political leaders in Iraq and elsewhere in the Arab and Islamic world (as described by Davis in Memories of State) have been the grist of continuous bloodshed in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. All of the authors reviewed here would have benefited from including some reference to the Wahabi school in Sunni Islam and its radical rejection of Shiism, to the extent that Shiites are considered idol worshippers by Sunni radicals.
Nation building in the Middle East has been characterized by an underestimation of ethnicity and religion by leaders in the Arab or Islamic world, who have swept under the rug the conflicts that historically were controlled and contained by traditional leadership. Only in Turkey has a charismatic leader such as Ataturk been able to fashion the premises of a modern secular state, and even that model is now under scrutiny and challenge. All the same, it is a model that has potential for emulation in the Middle East in the separation of church and state and the development of a modern, Western-based legal system. The Turkish treatment of the Kurdish issue may be seen as enjoining nation builders to avoid some of the pitfalls of the strong unitary nation-state toward linguistic and cultural autonomy by minorities. It could serve as an instructive example for the Algerian state.
The issue of Turkish entry into the European Union and the skepticism in many European quarters about Ankara's liberal democratic credentials is matched by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in some areas of Turkish civil society. This skepticism was strengthened by the rise of radical Islam and its official entry onto the international stage after the 9/11 Al-Qaeda attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.
In one state after another—Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Palestine, Somalia and Afghanistan, to name a few examples—radical Islamic movements challenge the social and political establishments, threaten minorities and majorities, and hinder international tourism and trade and any kind of European or American presence. Meanwhile, segments of immigrant Muslim minorities in Europe and North America are challenging established norms governing church-state relations, gender equality, secularism and individualism. Policies ranging from full integration to various forms of multiculturalism appear to be symptoms, arguably, of a much deeper problem, namely, the relative inability of the Islamic world at large to adapt to the modern and post-modern capitalist globalized international system and its relentless inherent drive to challenge conventions and traditions. Clinton Bennett's book can be read in this context, as can the other volumes reviewed here.
Ever since the “Rise of the West” and the worldwide expansion of the European and American models of economic and political development, whether liberal, fascist or marxist, only Japan has managed to successfully match European and American power through a fast-paced programme of economic and technological modernization. Today, a few other regions in Asia, such as the Chinese enclaves of Hong Kong and Singapore and South Korea and Taiwan, seem to have adapted their societies to the process of political and economic modernization. As for India, it should be noted that its society has accepted and integrated the premises of a modern representative democracy and it seems presently committed to rapid full-scale economic modernization. The case of Mainland China needs further analysis, but even there, the Communist Party has come to accept some of the premises of modern liberal capitalism.
The constant and fashionable debates on “globalization” and the rhetoric of aid, free trade, WTO rounds, IGOs, NGOs, regional integration and similar topics of great concern to social scientists, economists, international specialists and politicians mystify some harsh truths about development and ideologies. The annual United Nations Arab Human Development Reports are a solid starting point for some critical perspectives on socio-economic developments in the Arab world, where it is clear that the social, economic, technological and scientific gap between that part of the international system and Western Europe and North America is not being reduced.
All the same, different rates of economic growth, approaches to capital accumulation and investment strategies, as in the case of some oil-producing countries in the Gulf and North Africa, seem to indicate that leadership, institutions and resources offer relevant points of comparison that go beyond ideological rhetoric and the clash of civilizations. Compare and contrast, for example, the problematic rule of Ghadafi in Libya, or the military elites in Algeria, with the United Arab Emirates or Kuwait: the traditional and quasi-autocratic Gulf entities on the Arab littoral have enjoyed an economic boom, substantially improved the quality of life of their citizens, and increased relative social and political freedoms.
The weaknesses or omissions in these works stem from a lack of insight or explanation into the Arab-Israeli conflict and the relationship between Jews and Moslems in the Islamic world. The fact that Jewish communities have practically disappeared from the Islamic world and that hostility to Israel is the basis of foreign policy in an overwhelming majority of Islamic societies and states needs to be explored in greater depth and detail. Any study of minorities in the Arab world should attempt to do so, as should any study of nation building and nationalism in the Middle East. The recent war between Lebanon and Israel, and the two-decades old presence of Iran in Lebanon and its intrusion into the Arab world, are cases in point.
The evolution and transformation of traditional societies is not a new phenomenon, neither historically nor as a subject for social scientists and political economists; a systematic study of the Middle Eastern Islamic societies, whether in the areas of ethnic or religious relations, democratization or secularization, should not overlook a comparative historical approach. The future of minorities and the creation of modern states in the Middle East and other Islamic territories constitute a chapter in the evolution of the modern world, however painful its cycles have been, following the demise of European colonial empires and the fall of Soviet Communism.
These four books should be seen in the final analysis from this methodological standpoint.
