Is Turkey Remaking Muslim Democracy?

Book Review
Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks
Jenny White
Princeton University Press

January 26, 2013

One evening in September 2011, thousands of Egyptians heralded the arrival of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Cairo airport with cheering and shouts of "Allahu Akbar!" Many of the well-wishers were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the rising Islamist organisation that has in recent years cited Erdogan and Turkey as an inspiration. On his first post-Arab Spring visit to the region, observers expected the tough-talking leader of the world's most successful Islamist party to offer support and guidance.

But in his speech that night, Erdogan explained that Turkey was a secular, rather than an Islamic, democracy, and advised Egyptians to build a state that respects all religions. Days later, in Tunisia - where the leading political party, Ennahda, has also acknowledged the influence of Erdogan's party - he explained his remarks. "A person is not secular; the state is secular," Erdogan said in Tunis. "A Muslim can govern a secular state in a successful way."

Though likely to disappoint ascendant Arab Islamists, this idea of a personal Muslimhood, free from state oversight, is at the centre of Turkish life today. It's also the focus of Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, a deeply insightful book by Jenny White, a professor of social anthropology at Boston University. As a number of nationalist groups battle for Turkey's soul, White sees the "new Turks" strutting on the world stage, remaking Muslim democracy and finding great pride in their Ottoman past and their ability to consume God and goods as they choose.

***
With the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, Mustafa Kemal, later given the name Ataturk, or father of the Turks, began to remake Turkey as a westernised republic in which an authoritarian government oversaw religion. Ataturk also established the Turkish national identity, centred on Muslimhood, racial purity, and Turkish language and culture.

The Turkish military soon emerged as the guarantor of secularism, repeatedly stepping forward to push out leaders it thought had compromised Kemalist ideas. To this day, says White, the Turkish army purges its officer corps of anyone who refuses to drink or whose wife wears a headscarf.

To outsiders, the 2002 rise of Turkey's Islamists seemed at the time a startling event. But White's hindsight outlines a natural progression, linked to globalisation and the broader, regional resurgence of Islam. Starting in the 1970s, the Turkish military allowed greater Islamic freedom, with open discussions in the press and in public about Islamic intellectuals like Maulana Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb.

The country's first Islamist political movement appeared in 1975, when a group led by Necmettin Erbakan released its National Vision, a pro-business platform linking Islam to nationalism. In the 1980s, the success of thousands of pious businessmen from the Turkish heartland, dubbed the Anatolian Tigers, gave rise to a more conservative elite and to influential networks like the followers of religious educator Fethullah Gulen.

Erbakan's Welfare Party stood against westernisation and secularism and preferred alliances with other Muslim countries to Nato, the European Union (EU) and Israel. Yet it was also seen as forward-looking, progressive and pro-Turkey, and had support in small towns and major cities, among rural women, urban professionals and the Anatolian Tigers. The party gained ground, and in 1994 mayoral elections, its candidate, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, became mayor of Istanbul.

By the time Erbakan became prime minister two years later, 40 per cent of the party's supporters were secularists, and Welfare had emerged as Turkey's modern political party. To the military, of course, that meant Erbakan had to be pushed from office and the party shut down. Its successor, the Virtue Party, rose quickly, until it too was banned in 2001. But that same year, Erdogan founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP), adding an embrace of globalisation to Erbakan's vision and downplaying the Islamist elements. The party won the 2002 elections and has dominated Turkish politics ever since.

***
On the surface, Turkey's AKP decade has been one of social stability, economic growth and hope for the future. But White reveals how the public discourse has fractured. As Ataturk's vision has collapsed, Turks have splintered into a million shifting shades of nationalism: Kemalist, Islamist, rightist, ultranationalist, neonationalist, liberal and more.

Despite their disagreements, all these groups place great value on the country's Ottoman past. Today, the year that most evokes Turkish pride is not 1923, but 1453, when Constantinople fell to the army of Sultan Mehmet II. That victory is now celebrated in malls and history museums, bestsellers and popular soap operas.

Ottoman glories also undergird Turkey's new quasi-imperialist foreign policy. Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey's bold foreign minister, often speaks of reintegrating the greater Middle East to "bring back the golden era".

"Since 2002, when the AKP won its first major election," writes White, "an Islamist vision of political life has given way to a Muslim nationalist vision that is focused less on a shared global umma and more on a structured relationship with the Muslim world in which Turkey takes a leading role, as it had in Ottoman times."

We see this in Turkey's toughness with Israel and the creation of a visa-free zone with Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Yet just as Turks treasure their Ottoman heritage, they also see themselves, and their religion, as distinctly un-Arab. "One thing all nationalists agree on," writes White, "is that Turkish Islam differs from Islam tainted by Arab influence."

But what does that mean? How can Islam be uninfluenced by the people who midwifed its birth? Speaking to White, Omer Ozsoy, a reformist theologian at Ankara University, wonders: "While reading the Quran, to what extent am I facing an Arab reality and to what extent the demands of Allah? We have to distinguish between these." Such comments might be blasphemous in many Sunni Arab-dominated countries, but Turkish Islam has been steeped in centuries of moderate, Sufi ideology.

Turkey's leaders stress a modern, personalised Islam, as suggested by Erdogan's remarks in Tunis. The new Turk can wear Gucci and still go proudly and with purpose to Friday prayers. With more than half the country's population under 30, this marks a profound shift. "The choice to be suurlu, a 'consciously believing Muslim', as opposed to blindly following tradition, has become highly valued as a sign of Muslim modernity," White writes.

The word "tradition" has become shorthand for Wahhabism, Salafism, and other deeply conservative Sunni belief systems that have gained a foothold across the broader region. "This government is rather different than the Muslim Brotherhood," Ceylan Ozbudak, the executive director of the talk show Building Bridges, said during a recent episode. She and her co-hosts explained that they didn't like the word "Islamist". "We have a Muslim government," Ozbudak explains, "but they apply the rules of Islam, not the rules of tradition."

Indeed, Erdogan has said he views Sharia not as a strict legal code but as "a metaphor for a just society". The country has no influential, deeply rooted religious establishment, no body akin to Egypt's millennium-old Al Azhar - which is mentioned in that country's new constitution - or Saudi Arabia's powerful ulema. This allows AKP leaders to determine, largely free of outside influence, how to build a 21st-century Muslim democracy, and forge a new national identity.

***
White uses her fluent Turkish and more than 30 years of extended stays in the country to flesh out this bold and unpredictable social and political experiment. Of her two previous non-fiction works on Turkey (White has also written three Ottoman-era crime novels), the second, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, won the 2003 Douglass Prize for best book of European anthropology. White is indeed an anthropologist, rather than a journalist or political analyst, and her book goes on to detail the uncertain place of women in 21st-century Turkey and the "contradictory nature of Turkish social and political life as it accommodates individual choice while validating primacy of family and community in determining ethics and norms."

But academic jargon of that sort is rare; the writing is generally clear and straightforward, and the book is chock-full of rich titbits from Turkish society. White highlights changing fashions among Turkey's elite in the evolution of the word for squatters - from gecekondu (literally, "placed there at night") in the 1970s, to varos, a Hungarian term referring to an area beyond the city walls, today - and the sudden disfavour of moustaches. Once a proud, defining facial feature for nearly every Turkish man, they now signify the meaner classes ("men from the varos").

White has a clear affection for Turkey, which may serve to mute her criticism. Though she does briefly discuss the vast Ergenekon trial, in which a shadowy group of 200-odd military, police, journalists and activists have been accused of plotting to overthrow the government, she neglects to discuss the government's oppression of journalists until the book's final pages. And she mentions Ahmet Sik, a journalist who has spent the past year in prison awaiting a verdict on questionable, Ergenekon-related charges, only in her endnotes.

Yet crackdowns on the press have been skyrocketing. No country jailed more journalists than Turkey in 2011, including China and Iran, and no country is currently holding more reporters in prison. In recent months, the European Union and the London-based writers organisation PEN International have criticised the Erdogan government for using antiterrorism laws to justify arrests and create a climate of fear.

A greater oversight may be the short shrift given to Turkey's long-suffering Kurds. Kurdish militants have since the late 1970s fought the Turkish government for their own state. But the vast majority of Kurdish Turks, estimated at 13 million, or about 16 per cent of the country's population, seek only to maintain their own language and traditions. The willingness of the Erdogan government to accept and integrate them is key to the country's future.

White does better detailing how the state and society marginalise non-Muslims. She visits Ishak Alaton, an 82-year-old Jewish Turk and a well-known entrepreneur, who says he "has never been given the feeling by this nation that I am part of it". The Turks even have a word for such people: vatandas, non-Muslim minorities, who can be citizens but not true Turks. She also points out how the authorities, the military and the media regularly voice concerns about the threat of Christian missionaries, engendering widespread fear and occasional, vicious attacks on priests.

***
Filled with insight, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks is sure to become a leading text for those looking to read the Turkish tea leaves - a readership on the rise of late. In her conclusion, White considers the Turkish model, acknowledging similarities between Turkey and newly free Arab countries. Ultimately, the differences win out.

Turkey was never conquered and colonised, and is thus able to view western ideas with interest, rather than suspicion. It has been a democracy, or has at least resembled one, for 90 years - time enough to strengthen its institutions and solidify its political system. Finally, decades of economic growth have created a large, globalised middle class able to balance Islam with modern living.

Speaking at a political conference in 1998, Erdogan quoted from an Islamic poem: "Democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination. The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets." How did he go from there to the secular Muslim statesman of today? Perhaps it was the five-year political ban that came as a result. Perhaps his time in office, bumping up against the possible, altered his perspective. Perhaps he hasn't changed at all, and we'll find with his government's release of an updated constitution later this year that he has merely been biding his time.

Whatever the case, Islamist groups like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood are unlikely to emulate Turkey's Muslimhood model anytime soon, though the AKP vision might suit the young activists of Tahrir Square. Yet, if Turkey's history is any indication, their time in power is decades of democratic and economic development away.


Originally ran in The National

Election Marks Next Phase of Egypt's Democratic Struggle

For The National, November 2011:

Barring an election delay, Egyptian voters heading to the polls next week could put their country on the road to becoming Turkey, that regional beacon of Muslim democracy, or Iran, that dark, authoritarian theocracy - or a military state somewhere in between. Some 6,000 candidates from over 50 political parties are running, but Islamist groups led by the Muslim Brotherhood are likely to gain a near-majority of parliamentary seats.

What they do with that power - whether they push for a more Sharia-influenced constitution, how aggressively they confront the military - may well decide the fate of the new Egypt. Few are better placed to assess the shifting political landscape than Gunes Murat Tezcur, who has studied Muslim political actors across the region, particularly in Iran and Turkey. If Egypt's Islamists hope to establish a legitimate democracy, he urges them to strike a balance: be patient enough to gain political legitimacy, yet stay vigilant for opportunities to confront the military.

"A reformist government has the best chance of reducing the power of the military when it is confrontational, but has also accumulated enough power to overcome the military's resistance, as in the case of Turkey," Tezcur says during a recent interview in his office at Chicago's Loyola University, where he lectures on political Islam and democracy.

Tezcur's book, Muslim Reformers in Iran and Turkey: The Paradox of Moderation, applies moderation theory to Turkey's Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the Reform Front in Iran. The theory describes the process by which radical political actors - such as Islamist parties, or socialist parties in Europe at the turn of the last century - begin to accept pluralist electoral politics and the rule of law and move away from provocation in order to win the necessary votes to gain office.

The AKP is among the most successful contemporary examples. "Here you have an Islamist party rising in the late 1980s ... and it soon became clear that they could not get the votes they needed to win elections," explains Tezcur, a 32-year-old Turkish national. "So a younger generation led by Tayyip Erdogan helped the party shift to a more centrist platform."

Today, the AKP's grip on power is practically unchallenged. In Iran, however, former president Mohammad Khatami and his Reform Front lost traction several years ago because "they failed to use their leverage to gain concessions from the Guardian's Counsel and other Iranian institutions," says Tezcur. "Ultimately they could not change the power structure."

The question, then, is whether Egypt's Islamists, led by the Muslim Brotherhood, can successfully navigate the shoals of transition like the AKP, or are doomed to smash against the rocks of authoritarianism like the Reform Front. Meanwhile, some western observers continue to question whether Egypt's Islamist groups are working towards liberal democracy at all.

Tezcur argues that, for Islamist parties, embracing pluralist politics and becoming more open-minded (ideological moderation), helps move along the process of democratisation. But becoming less confrontational and building coalitions (behavioural moderation), can be problematic. "Behavioural moderation is not necessarily conducive to democratic progress," he says. "In certain contexts, as happened in Iran recently, it actually hampers democratisation. This is the paradox of moderation."

He sees this tension between behavioural moderation and the process of democratisation as central to politics in post-Mubarak Egypt. Indeed, many have pointed to Turkey as a model for Egypt, both as a successful, modern Islamic state, and for its leadership, in the AKP.

Egypt has a powerful, politically influential military, as Turkey had for decades. In both countries, Islamist groups have been oppressed for long periods - the Muslim Brotherhood under Mubarak; the AKP before coming to power. Turkey's Kurds and Egypt's Copts have faced varying degrees of marginalisation for half a century. Finally, millions of secular, modern urbanites in both countries must accept that more conservative, more religious voters in smaller cities make up the balance of the population.

"Turkey is a model because of its success in politics, economics, foreign policy in recent years," says Tezcur. "But there are so many differences between Egypt and Turkey." Turkey has seven decades of mostly free and fair elections, while Egypt is having its first legitimate vote. Turkey's middle class is larger and more influential. And most importantly, there has never been a mainstream demand for Sharia.

Tezcur believes the Egyptian military is unlikely to gain the type of power long held by their Turkish equivalents, mainly because of the Kurdish insurgency. "Their argument is that 'We are fighting against the terrorists, the insurgents, so we need more power,' which basically means they can dominate the civilian government," says Tezcur. "Unless the Copts become insurgents, I don't think you'll have the same problem in Egypt."

Yet Egypt's military leadership, known as the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), has been consolidating its power. Scaf generals recently drafted supra-constitutional principles that would increase military controls and leave the generals free of civilian oversight. Muslim political parties have vehemently rejected the principles, and tens of thousands of protesters returned to Tahrir Square last week calling for the military to reduce its grip on power. Back and forth clashes between protesters and security forces on the square - the most violent since the departure of Mubarak - have resulted in several deaths and hundreds injured.

The Scaf "has emerged as the most serious threat in the transition to democracy," Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote last week. "The military rules Egypt - and it intends to maintain its control indefinitely."

Some generals have begun to depict Scaf as the guarantor of Egyptian secularism - much the same role as Turkey's military held for decades. "We want a model like Turkey, but we won't force it," an anonymous Scaf general told The Washington Post in July. "Egypt as a country needs this to protect our democracy from the Islamists. We know this group doesn't think democratically."

Of course, the AKP has in recent years pushed the Turkish military from its lofty perch, from where it had muscled out a handful of civilian regimes since 1950. In consolidating its current position, the Egyptian military hopes to keep the Muslim Brotherhood from doing the same.

Still, a quick glance at the list of political players in Egypt reveals the AKP's influence: the Building and Development Party, Change and Development, and Equality and Justice, all Islamist parties; the Justice Party, a liberal group; and of course the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice.

"These groups look at the AKP as very successful, because it's kind of a cross-class party, with large support among merchants, traders and the middle class and also lower classes," says Tezcur. It has also managed to run a sizeable country rather well for a decade, and has made the military its subordinate. "For these Egyptian parties, this is the model."

Three party lists are most important: the Islamist Alliance, including Nour and the Islamic Group's Building and Development Party; the Democratic Alliance, led by the Brotherhood; and the liberal Egyptian Bloc, featuring the Free Egyptians and Social Democrats. Liberal groups and secular parties led by youths who fomented the revolution in Tahrir Square are expected to garner about a fifth of the total vote, while Islamist parties are likely to receive about half (40 per cent for the Brotherhood; five to 10 per cent for Salafis).

Once in power, Egypt's Islamist reformers are likely to fare better than Iran's Reform Front, as the Scaf has nowhere near the deep roots and influence of Ayatollah Khamanei and the Guardian's Counsel. Yet Iran still offers a cautionary tale for Egyptian parties: being patient is good, but being too patient could be disastrous.

"On the one hand, they may pursue a patient or gradual strategy in order not to provoke the military," says Tezcur. "The risk is that they miss unique opportunities and lose their influence over time. On the other hand, they may directly confront the military and risk repression." Another concern is how the Brotherhood and the Salafis will treat Copts and Muslim minorities. "The real challenge is more about how to protect individual liberties and minority rights," says Tezcur.

If Islamist groups are to achieve lasting success, their leaders must be charismatic, open to new ideas and willing to challenge the party hierarchy. About a decade ago, Erdogan appeared at the forefront of a new, open-minded generation of Islamists in Turkey.

When the Turkish prime minister landed in Cairo for a September visit, a Brotherhood-organised crowd of thousands greeted him at the airport with shouts of "Allahu Akbar!" Erdogan spoke of secularism and later met a handful of religious and political leaders, including Muslim Brotherhood chairman Mohammed Badie.

Details of their meeting were kept secret, but Tezcur thought Erdogan might have advised Brotherhood leaders to follow the example of the AKP, which held power for years before going after the most powerful generals. "He would tell them not to get overexcited, to be more strategic, and pursue your policies more patiently and gradually," says Tezcur.

Patience is likely to be a virtue for all the candidates. It will require more than four months of staggered rounds of parliamentary votes for all of Egypt's 40 million eligible voters to have their chance at the polls. Many observers are convinced the organisational strength of the Brotherhood will win out, and Islamists will gain a high percentage of the early vote. This could put the fear of Sharia rule in both the military leadership and liberal youth, sparking more widespread protests and violence.

Either way, Egypt's path to democratisation is only beginning. Tezcur says it takes years for a single party or group of parties to gain the strength required to stare down entrenched powers.

"It takes a couple of elections before you see which party becomes most prominent, which has the best social networks and can draw votes from the various sectors of society," he says. "In Egypt, there may only be a few opportunities on which to capitalise to achieve a breakthrough towards democratisation. If you miss them, who knows when they will next be available."




--------
Ran November 2011:
http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/election-marks-next-phase-in-egypts-democratic-struggle

Osama and the Arab Spring

By David Lepeska
thenational.ae

In recent months, many observers have viewed the wave of protest sweeping the Middle East as indicative of an increasing drive toward democracy and a repudiation of religious extremism. Not former US intelligence analyst Michael Scheuer -- who is convinced that al Qa'eda and other radical Islamist groups plan to fill the vacuums of power left behind.

"Get rid of the tyranny and take advantage of the aftermath," says Scheuer, referring to Egypt in particular. "I think that's what the Muslim Brotherhood is going to do, and that's what al Qa'eda will try to do. I think it's a situation that benefits them enormously."

Contrarian, Cassandra, or a bit of both, Scheuer seems most comfortable going against the grain. In recent weeks he has been promoting his new book, Osama bin Laden, which argues that Washington's misunderstanding of the al Qa'eda leader has the US fighting the wrong war, the wrong way. The Financial Times called it "a needed corrective to most of the airy generalisations about bin Laden and his followers".

The 59-year-old led the CIA's bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, then advised his successor from September 2001 until the November 2004 publication of Imperial Hubris. Published anonymously, the book critiqued US counter-terrorism policies and became a bestseller. Found to be its author, Scheuer was thrust into the spotlight and relieved of his CIA duties.

He has since become an equal opportunity offender: denouncing neoconservative nation-building, the invasion of Iraq and the US-Israeli relationship; blaming the Clinton administration for repeated failures to neutralise bin Laden; and criticising fellow authors such as Steve Coll (Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens) and Lawrence Wright, (the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Looming Tower) for inexpert analyses of Islamic societies.


Sitting in a Chicago hotel, bespectacled and grinning through his grey beard, Scheuer seemed more jolly uncle than monkish analyst. Then he turns to the war on terror. "We're clearly losing," he says. "And it's been through American and western obtuseness, primarily … It's almost like the Marx Brothers are in charge, but the Marx Brothers are smarter - they always win in the end."

For Scheuer, the bungling begins with bin Laden. Most observers believe the al Qa'eda leader and his second-in-command, Ayman al Zawahiri, are hiding in the badlands along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Yet continued search efforts have yielded minimal results.

Scheuer offers a litany of reasons. After 25 years in hiding, bin Laden has become an expert fugitive. It also helps that he is pious, generous, patient, deliberate - and highly successful. "There's no one in the last 50 years who has affected American life more negatively than Osama bin Laden," Scheuer adds.

Yet the CIA closed its bin Laden unit in 2005. This office had previously brought the agency's antiterrorism work under one roof, allowing an agent studying al Qa'eda in the Far East to regularly confer with a colleague looking at the Islamic Maghreb. "Now they're across the hall or in another building," Scheuer explains.

He also believes that inadequate troop numbers further undermine Western efforts to snuff out al Qa'eda. In a country bigger than France, the US's 100,000 soldiers "have to keep Karzai in power, help build a democracy, develop the economy, create a transportation and communications infrastructure from scratch, defeat the Taliban, eradicate heroin and go after Osama in their spare time".

Yet since September 11, al Qa'eda's platform has spread from Afghanistan to Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia and North Africa. Western forces have reportedly killed thousands of al Qa'eda militants over the years, but these casualties have been replaced by fresh, young fighters. According to Scheuer, insurgencies by their very definition are always pitted against a more powerful enemy. Thus, they place tremendous emphasis on succession.

"The next generation of al Qa'eda is likely to be a little bit more religiously extreme, certainly better educated, more savvy with the tools of modernity and perhaps a little bit more bloody-minded … And we're seeing increasing inroads among young Muslim males, especially in English speaking countries, of al Qa'eda's propaganda."

Scheuer blames two key areas of American foreign policy for continuing to inspire anti-western sentiment. "To say that Israel is a terrible burden and a costly ally for us in the Muslim world is not an opinion, it's a fact," he said.

Controversial in some circles, this view is nothing new for Scheuer. In an April 2009 episode of the Doha Debates, he blamed the Iraq War on "the American fifth column that supports Israel". His opponent, the lawyer and commentator Alan Dershowitz, called him a bigot.

He is also extremely sceptical about America's dependency on foreign oil imports, which he believes compromises the nation's relationship with Saudi Arabia.

"I don't think we can break the status quo of our policies in the Middle East until we do something about energy," adds Scheuer. However, he considers that Obama is unlikely to make that shift with elections looming next year. "In my old age I'm beginning to fear that the only thing that brings change in America is calamity."

His other fear is that this change of policy might come soon. The number of terror plots in the US has increased exponentially. Only last month the FBI arrested a Saudi citizen studying in Texas for plotting to bomb the home of George W Bush). "We're really going to be surprised how many Muslim men in the West turn to violence," says Scheuer.

As for the millions of Arabs turning to nonviolent protest, the received wisdom is that in barely two months they have offered dissatisfied Muslim youth a new path and successfully marginalised al Qa'eda. The leading terrorism analyst and Harvard professor Peter Bergen believes "al Qa'eda is irrelevant" to recent events on Arab streets. The French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu has said that, for al Qa'eda, "it's not just a defeat, it's a catastrophe."


Yet, Scheuer notes, elections and upheaval across the region have often led to a stronger presence for Islam. Islamists won Algeria's 1991 elections (only to be blocked from taking power by the military). Hamas and Hizbollah gained strength through elections in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, respectively, while Iraq's governing coalition also has Islamist leanings. And of course the 1979 revolution in Iran resulted in an unbending theocracy.

Scheuer sees Islamism again creeping across the region. Already in post-Ben Ali Tunisia, violence has returned to the streets and a political party affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood has begun to regroup. Support for the Islamic Action Front, the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, has increased considerably in recent weeks. In Yemen, where a bloody al Qa'eda affiliate has put down roots, the radical cleric and former bin Laden mentor Abdul Majid al Zindani called last week for the departure of the nation's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

And a recent Pew poll found 95 per cent of Egyptians believed Islam should play a large role in politics, while 85 per cent thought it had positive impact. Add to that, Scheuer contends, the Muslim Brotherhood's experience, deep roots and better organisation than any of the political parties forming in Mubarak's wake and the future appears to be set.

"Do you think 80 million Egyptians, mostly Muslim, in a time of violence, turmoil and chaos, are going to reach for an alien ideology like secular democracy?" asks Scheuer.



------
appeared in the 18 March 2011 The National, www.thenational.ae

Visa row over, Muslim scholar to visit US

Just as Tariq Ramadan was preparing to take up a professorial post at the University of Notre Dame in August 2004, the United States government revoked his visa, denying him entry on ideological grounds.

The US State Department lifted the ban in January, and the Swiss scholar is set to arrive on American soil later this week for a series of speaking engagements – his first visit since losing his visa.

“It was a mistake by the Bush administration, to prevent intellectuals from being critical,” Ramadan said during a recent interview in Doha. “The main thing is for me to go there and build bridges.”

It can sometimes be difficult to tell if Ramadan – rigorous scholar, champion of Islam and outspoken advocate for the rights and assertiveness of Muslims in the West – is building bridges or burning them.

Born and raised in Switzerland, the 47-year-old is a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and the grandson of Hassan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood.

He is often named among the world’s most influential public intellectuals yet regularly excoriated in both Muslim and Western media for a seeming lack of commitment to their respective values: he regularly denounces global capitalism, for instance, and says women should decide for themselves whether to wear the veil.

Last week he lectured in Doha at the request of the Faculty of Islamic Studies, where he will teach a course on contemporary Islam later this year. Before delivering his speech he considered the tensions within Gulf societies.

“You have some people that are very reactive to anything that has to do with the West, saying ‘this is the end of Islam,’” he said. “And you have some others saying, ‘No, we have to follow in the footsteps of the West because this is the way to be developed and modern,’ and in between you have people trying to find their way.”

In his next book, to be titled The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy for Pluralism, Ramadan writes about the shared values between Islam and the West.

“My understanding of Islam makes it clear that there is no contradiction in the Islamic values and the Western values,” he said. “To deal with modernity doesn’t mean that you lose your Islamic background.”

Yet since Al Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington, DC, in September 2001, signs of a clash have been near-constant. After a unanimous parliamentary vote last week, Belgium inched closer to becoming the first nation in the world to ban the full Islamic veil in public. Ramadan's home country, Switzerland, recently voted to prohibit the construction of minarets.

And in the wake of Farouk Abdulmattalab's attempt to blow up an Amsterdam to Detroit flight on Christmas Day, the United States has increased background checks on visa applicants from Muslim majority countries.

But in US President Barack Obama, Ramadan sees a leader with a considerable grasp of the situation. Though impressed by Obama's speech to the Muslim World in Cairo last June, he thought the time for words had passed.

He pointed to Iraq, where despite elections terrorist attacks, such as Saturday's massacre of two dozen members of a single family in Baghdad, are still common and society remains fragmented along sectarian lines. He cited the lack of progress with Israel, which has continued to announce settlements in East Jerusalem despite the Obama Administration's repeated calls for a freeze.

“Netanyahu is sending a very strong message: 'we don’t care,'” said Ramadan.

Despite what he sees as Palestinians' continued suffering and the marginalization of many Muslim communities in the West, Ramadan believes Muslims must look forward, not back. “We need to stop nurturing the victim mentality,” he said.

This is among the key points of Ramadan's 2009 book, What I Believe, that Muslims living in the West need to engage positively and work to become full partners in Western democracy.

“As citizens it is our Islamic duty to abide by the law of the country as long it does not contradict with our religious beliefs,” he said during the Doha lecture. “We must criticise the government while remaining loyal to the law – this is critical loyalty.”

Dr Basma Abdelgafar, a professor of public policy at the Faculty of Islamic Studies who has read several of Ramadan’s books, attended the lecture and came away impressed.

“It’s a very useful type of contribution to our understanding of Muslims in the West,” said Abdelgafar, a Canadian of Egyptian heritage who was looking forward to having Ramadan as a colleague. “It has nothing to do with a person’s creed or belief, it’s that they are representing something that’s right.”

Ramadan's critics, however, see him as a dangerous radical. “I don't see anyone today who is as effective as Tariq Ramadan in furthering fundamentalism in France,” French journalist Caroline Fourest, the author of an anti-Ramadan book, said last year. She accuses him of double-speak – saying one thing to Muslims and another to Western audiences.

Paul Berman, a journalism professor at New York University, goes further. “The problem lies in the terrible fact,” he wrote in a lengthy 2007 article, “that Ramadan's personal milieu -- his grandfather, his family history, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition -- is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theoretical justification for religious suicide.”

That may be going too far. Ramadan has distanced himself from Al-Banna's political opinions and denounced radical violence. His website prominently displays a large banner ad supporting non-violent resistance in Palestine.

Still, he does have some views unlikely to sit well with some Westerners.

“The neo-liberal economy, the way it’s now impacting lives and killing people every day because of the injustices of the economy, this is a'anam al harb (the world of war),” Ramadan said during the interview in Doha. “This economic order is killing people, and this is why we need ethics in our economy, and this recent global crisis is telling us exactly this.”

Taking an anti-capitalist, even socialist, stance is neither illegal nor in opposition to the West. But his position on certain huddud punishments may be more problematic.

Ramadan was asked if he saw any contradiction between his stated commitment to Western values and his calling, on French TV in 2003, for a moratorium on the stoning of adulterers in order to debate the merits of the punishment.

“As long as we don’t have answers to these questions we have to open a debate,” he said last week in Doha. “It’s not a contradiction, because Amnesty International, a Western organization, is calling for the same thing on the death penalty. So why is it not a contradiction for them and it is for me?”

In truth, the New York-based rights advocate takes a rather less equivocal stance on legal executions. “Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases and under all circumstances,” according to their website. “The organization works for an end to executions and the abolition of the death penalty everywhere.”


-----

an edited version appeared in 5 April 2010 The National, www.thenational.ae