Much contemporary scholarship in the field of Middle Eastern politics is concerned with understanding why the Arab Spring—that frenetic season of popular revolt that began in late 2010 and ended (or at least paused) with Egypt’s July 2013 military coup—did not issue forth in freedom and democracy for all of the region’s peoples. One popular set of explanations hinges on the characteristics of the so-called Islamist parties and movements that were by many accounts the Arab world’s most powerful political forces (outside of the regimes themselves). In this telling, where Islamists are relatively liberal and reconciled to democracy (such as in Tunisia), transitions to democracy are likely to succeed. Where instead Islamists remain beholden to a conservative religious agenda and view democracy merely as a conduit to power (as in Egypt), they are likely to scare their potential allies in the liberal camp and force them into unholy alliances with agents of the ancien régime. The predictable result of the latter scenario is a transition snuffed out in its infancy or one that never gets off the ground in the first place.
Thus, it is for good reason that the gifted scholar A. Kadir Yildirim opens his superb book Muslim Democratic Parties in the Middle East with the declaration that “in the wake of the Arab Spring, few questions seem as pertinent as the role of Islamist parties in the Middle East.” Although not quite validating the prejudices of those who view Islamists as inherently antidemocratic, Yildirim recognizes that more moderate Islamists are at the very least less likely to awaken the kinds of fears that drive secularists and liberals into the arms of generals and autocrats. Thus, the task he sets himself in this book is to explain the conditions under which “radical” “anti-system” Islamists evolve into the kinds of moderate, nonthreatening, democracy-loving parties that might be able to contribute to and cement genuine democratic transitions. To do this, he explores the divergent trajectories of religious parties in Turkey, Morocco, and Egypt over the past 100 years and emerges with a novel and finely drawn causal story that locates the source of Islamist moderation in an unlikely place: the economic policies of the dominant authoritarian regime.
The contributions of this book are many. One of the most important is conceptual. Unlike others (including me) who tend to lump all Islamically oriented parties under the broad label of “Islamist” and then describe some as more moderate than others along such dimensions as the importance of religious law or the inviolability of democracy, Yildirim introduces a new social-scientific category: the “Muslim Democratic Party” (MDP). Although the term has been used before—most notably by the scholar Vali Nasr—Yildirim transforms it from a vaguely positive moniker into something more precise. According to Yildirim, a Muslim Democratic Party is one that “adhere[s] to a secular political regime, ha[s] a normative commitment to the rules of a democratic political system, and desire[s] the democratic political representation of a religious identity” (p. 1). In contrast, run-of-the-mill Islamist parties are those that wish to legislate Islamic law and pursue the “Islamization of state and society” (as opposed to merely promoting religious values) and whose commitment to democracy is purely instrumental (p. 5).
The second major contribution of this book is theoretical. Previous accounts of the emergence of moderate Islamists (or “Muslim Democrats” to use Yildirim’s language) generally focused on the role of state repression in either incentivizing or disincentivizing moderation (there are good theoretical arguments both ways). Yildirim instead argues that whether MDPs emerge and are electorally successful depends critically on whether authoritarian regimes pursue liberal economic policies that enable the growth of small businesses, whose owners desire precisely the combination of Muslim traditionalism, commitment to secular democratic politics, and the enthusiasm for markets that (according to Yildirim) Muslim Democrats represent. When autocrats instead seek to enrich a narrow class of crony capitalists, the small business class never becomes consequential, and religious politics takes a traditional Islamist form, replete with calls for God’s law and skepticism of democracy and free markets. This is a wholly new argument in the study of Islamic parties and one that, in its attention to the role of social and economic cleavages in shaping the party systems of Middle Eastern countries, is long overdue.
The third major contribution is empirical. This book is close to a model of what qualitative comparative politics should be. The author has conducted dozens of interviews with party activists, intellectuals, and businessmen in Turkey, Egypt, and Morocco; analyzed party platforms in Arabic and Turkish; and probed the secondary literature to compose analytic narratives that illustrate neatly the operation of his hypothesized causal mechanism. The geographic and temporal expanse over which Yildirim roams in this book is impressive, and the result is a formidable work of scholarship that will be mined with profit not just by scholars of the Middle East and of political parties but also by graduate students seeking to learn how to conduct disciplined cross-country comparisons.
As with any work of social science, however, this one invites questions. The first has to do with the distinction the author tries to make between Islamists and Muslim democrats. In his typology of Islamist parties, the author identifies three major criteria on which Islamists and Muslim democrats differ. The first is in their ultimate goal: Islamists want the “Islamization of state and society,” whereas members of MDPs want the “promotion of Muslim values.” However, the book does not provide us with a clear distinction between the two. For instance, the author labels Turkey’s current ruling party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), a Muslim Democratic party, and describes the National Outlook Movement (NOM) of Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011) and its affiliated parties, the National Salvation Party and the National Movement Party, as Islamists. And yet Yildirim reports that “historically the NOM’s references to Islam and its Islamist agenda are largely diluted compared with those of other Islamist groups worldwide” (p. 89). What, then, makes the NOM Islamist? At one point Yildirim avers that “the NOM’s calls for morality and spirituality sufficed to produce the perception of impending Islamization and a radical Islamist platform” (p. 79). But the distinction that Yildirim offers between Islamist and Muslim Democratic parties does not hinge on how they are perceived—if it did, then the AKP would also have to be classified as Islamist. After all, Yildirim himself relates to us the testimony of an AKP parliamentarian who declares that her relationship with some relatives had become “sour” because of her membership in the AKP and who complains that her secularist cousin told her, “I fear that I will wake up one day, and it will be as if Iran is all around us” (p. 89).
A similar difficulty arises when trying to measure differences between the parties on the second dimension that the author identifies: their view of democracy. According to Yildirim, Islamists are “instrumental” with respect to democracy, whereas Muslim Democrats are “committed.” But how do we know when a party’s preference for democracy is purely instrumental or the result of normative commitment? We would not be able to find the distinction in the contemporary discourse of Islamist parties, almost all of which declare their fealty to democracy. In contrast, the ideal-type Muslim Democratic party in this book—the AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi) of Recep Tayyip Erdogan—is today the poster child for democratic backsliding.
The third difference between Islamists and Muslim Democrats—their attitudes toward economic liberalization—is easier to identify and measure. Islamists, Yildirim tells us, are “nationalist and protectionist,” whereas Muslim Democrats favor a “liberal economy.” However, when the author actually describes what parties say about the economy, the differences prove hard to pin down. In Egypt, for instance, both the Muslim Brotherhood (Islamist) and the Center Party (Muslim Democratic) move between free-market liberalism and nationalist, protectionist rhetoric (pp. 153–57). Admittedly, the author is better able to document the economic policy differences between the Turkish Islamist and Muslim Democratic parties, but it is not clear that economic policy should be elevated to the status of a definitional criterion to begin with. The fact that Muslim Democratic parties may want economic liberalization (alongside democracy and secularism) is important, but presumably we would still care about these parties if they did not. Similarly, is opposition to economic liberalization essential to what makes an Islamist party Islamist? If a political party wanted to legislate Islamic strictures, had a purely instrumental understanding of democracy, but endorsed the free market, would we not be able to call it Islamist?
Some readers may fail to be convinced by the admittedly novel causal mechanism. Yildirim testifies that he “treat[s] economic liberalization as an exogenous factor and focus[es] on its impact over Islamist moderation and empowerment” (p. 31). But it is possible that the economic policies that set off the causal chain are themselves endogenous to the power of Islamists. If, as the author tells us, Islamists are uninterested in opening up their countries’ economies to trade with the West, adopting unfettered markets, and allowing modern interest-based banking, it seems logical that in societies where Islamists are strong, regimes will be constrained in how far they can liberalize. In contrast, in societies where Islamists are weak, regimes will have a freer hand to pursue liberal economic policies. Although perhaps the least original critique one can render of a social-scientific theory is that its independent variable may be endogenous to its dependent variable, the author has not given us evidence that would allow us to dismiss this possibility.
Even though the author’s attempt to endogenize the emergence of moderate Islamic parties to economic policy represents an admirable theoretical innovation, it is not clear that it outperforms more obvious alternative explanations. It should not be surprising to readers that the party that did the most to soft-pedal its connection to Islam is the one that arose in Turkey, given that country’s decades-long history of aggressive secularization, something that neither the autocrats in Egypt nor Morocco attempted. Similarly, the relative moderation of the “Muslim Democratic” party in Morocco (whose name translates, like that of its Turkish counterpart, to the Party of Justice and Development) could simply be a function of the fact that, since the 1990s, the Moroccan monarchy has allowed the party to participate openly in public life, including allowing it to hold the government from 2011 to 2017. One suspects that if the party were to start feeding citizens a steady diet of religiously inflected red meat, it would be quickly shut out of political life, as is the organization that Yildirim describes as Morocco’s principal Islamist movement, the Society of Justice and Charity.
Finally, all of us who write about the Middle East have had our theories challenged and in some cases overturned by the unfolding events of the last decade, and this book is no exception. For instance, Tunisia today boasts the sole Islamic party (the Ennahdha Movement Party) that has managed to help establish and maintain a liberal democracy, and yet that party arose in an economic context marked by the kind of corruption and cronyism that the author credits with entrenching more “radical” Islamists. I am fairly certain that the author would describe Ennahdha as a Muslim Democratic party. Does its existence suggest an alternative pathway by which moderate Islamic parties might emerge?
Similarly, as the author himself admits, contemporary developments in Turkey defy the book’s argument. As noted earlier, Turkey’s AKP—the quintessential “Muslim Democratic Party”—is now blamed for a serious democratic regression in that country, as the party’s leader (and Turkey’s president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan centralizes power, purges opponents, and rolls back freedoms. The author shies away from explaining this transformation, declaring in the conclusion that the antidote to “the kind of leadership displayed by Erdogan” is “the strengthening of the institutional structure to increase accountability, decentralize governance, and encourage compromise rather than majoritarianism” (p. 232). But if this prescription is to be taken seriously—as I believe it should—it gently undermines one of the book’s principal claims. Part of the argument for the importance of Muslim Democratic parties, after all, was that their normative commitment to democracy made its attainment and consolidation more likely. If it does not, then what, precisely, is the value of this new social-scientific category? And what can be said to those who argue that Islamic parties—whether they fly under the Islamist, Muslim Democrat, or some other banner—cannot be trusted with democracy? These are questions that I suspect the author of this brilliant, important first book will eventually help us answer.
