Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West's Past
232
Confronting Political Islam: Six Lessons from the West's Past
232Hardcover
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Overview
Political Islam has often been compared to ideological movements of the past such as fascism or Christian theocracy. But are such analogies valid? How should the Western world today respond to the challenges of political Islam? Taking an original approach to answer this question, Confronting Political Islam compares Islamism's struggle with secularism to other prolonged ideological clashes in Western history. By examining the past conflicts that have torn Europe and the Americas—and how they have been supported by underground networks, fomented radicalism and revolution, and triggered foreign interventions and international conflicts—John Owen draws six major lessons to demonstrate that much of what we think about political Islam is wrong.
Owen focuses on the origins and dynamics of twentieth-century struggles among Communism, Fascism, and liberal democracy; the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century contests between monarchism and republicanism; and the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars of religion between Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and others. Owen then applies principles learned from the successes and mistakes of governments during these conflicts to the contemporary debates embroiling the Middle East. He concludes that ideological struggles last longer than most people presume; ideologies are not monolithic; foreign interventions are the norm; a state may be both rational and ideological; an ideology wins when states that exemplify it outperform other states across a range of measures; and the ideology that wins may be a surprise.
Looking at the history of the Western world itself and the fraught questions over how societies should be ordered, Confronting Political Islam upends some of the conventional wisdom about the current upheavals in the Muslim world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691163147 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/23/2014 |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Confronting Political Islam
Six Lessons from the West's Past
By John M. Owen IV
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-16314-7
CHAPTER 1
Don't Sell Islamism Short
I know I am leaving the winning side for the losing side.
—Whittaker Chambers, explaining to his wife his decision to quit the American Communist Party, 1938
"The Islamists Are Not Coming." This reassuring title headed an article in early 2010 in the influential U.S. magazine Foreign Policy. The authors, experts on Islamist movements, reported that religious parties usually do not perform very well in elections in Muslim countries: in campaigns over the past forty years, 80 percent of these parties received less than 20 percent support, and most receive less then 10 percent. And when Islamist parties do manage to get elected, they soften their policies, sometimes dropping their core program of imposing Sharia on society.
"Islamism seems to be fading as a revolutionary force," pronounced the Economist at roughly the same time. Yes, young Egyptians are more pious or observant of the religion than was the case a generation previous. But, the magazine reassured readers, "[t]he symbols of commitment among today's radical youth are no longer guns and beards but pious conduct and knowledge of scripture. The religious wave has certainly not passed and may still carry a lot in its wake. But in Egypt, at least, it no longer looks like a revolutionary force."
Just over a year later, as the first buds of the Arab Spring were appearing, pundits calmly predicted that the incipient revolutions would usher in secular democratic governments. "Look at those involved in the uprisings, and it is clear we are dealing with a post-Islamist generation," wrote Olivier Roy. "Egyptians have seen Mubarak and the mullahs and want neither," wrote Fareed Zakaria.
By the end of 2011, however, a sober Economist was openly acknowledging that the real winner of the Arab Spring might be the Islamists—and that their victory might come at the ballot box. Islamist parties were winning post-revolution elections. Islamism, or at least politicians espousing it, was popular. "Indeed," ventured the magazine, "political Islam now has more clout in the region than at any time since the Ottoman empire collapsed almost a century ago, and perhaps since Napoleon brought a modernising message to the Arab world when he invaded Egypt in 1798."
Since those days Islamists have had setbacks across the Arab world, most pointedly in Egypt, where the government of Mohamed Morsi was ousted by the secularist Egyptian Army in July 2013. The point is not that Islamists have won or are going to win in the end. It is rather that Westerners, time and time again, have underestimated their popularity and power. As Middle East expert Shadi Hamid notes, "Analysts always seem to be finding signs of Islamist decline," yet real decline is not evident. Take the March 2010 parliamentary elections in Iraq, well before the Arab Spring began. A coalition of parties headed by Ayad Allawi won, and Western pundits hailed this victory for secularism in the new Iraq. But in fact, Allawi's coalition included an overtly Islamist party. Adding all the seats that other Islamist parties won yields 159, just shy of the 163 needed to form a government.
Underreporting of this kind often happens when a Muslim country holds elections: analysts note that Islamists are divided, ignoring the overall strength of Muslim sentiment that "Islam is the solution." "In short," concludes Hamid, "it would be a mistake to assume that when Islamist parties lose, that this reflects a broader shift away from religious politics or from religion, and towards 'secularism'—the kind of thing we like to believe is happening in the Middle East but, for both better and worse, rarely does and most likely won't."
Analyses and predictions that short- sell Islamism disclose a deep conviction, prominent among many Western observers, that political Islam cannot last, that it is simply an unsustainable, impractical set of ideas in the modern world. We Westerners come by this conviction honestly. For at least two hundred years, we have tended to believe in historical progress. Much of our discourse and the way we think about social and technical problems suggest that we believe that the human race is moving in the direction of rationality and morality (as we define those things). History, we believe, is a story not of decline, nor of stagnation, nor of cycles of progress and regress; it is a story of forward or upward movement. Indeed, it seems self- evident to us that society has steadily improved over the past several centuries.
Our unprecedented and growing power over nature, owing to the spectacular successes of modern science, is probably the most important source of that belief. But we also are less violent and superstitious, and more tolerant, fair, and productive, than the forebears we read about on Wikipedia or see in movies. Even our parents and grandparents, who likewise believed in progress, were backward, we agree—greedy, violent, sexually repressed, lacking environmental consciousness—and we congratulate ourselves for being more enlightened. Thus the critically acclaimed television show Mad Men depicts America in the early 1960s as experiencing a kind of collective mental illness. Perhaps people back then dressed better than we do, but they smoked, drank too much, littered, repressed their feelings, and were sexist.
We do not know what America will be like in 2060, but we can be fairly certain that Americans will consider us backward, exotic, morally suspect, and embarrassing. This Western narrative of progress is old and probably invincible. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant famously proposed that human history was a story of unsteady but real progress. A generation later G. W. F. Hegel wrote a philosophy of history depicting the emergence of universal rationality that influenced thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. Progressive or teleological histories have long had their severe critics. In the 1930s the British historian Herbert Butterfield chastised the members of his guild for assuming that developments in Britain's past had led ineluctably to the best of all possible worlds, parliamentary democracy.
Butterfield's complaint was that this "Whig interpretation of history" distorted our understanding of the past. But there are other objections to it. What would constitute progress, anyway? More consumer goods? Less suffering? Better art (whatever that might mean)? More individual autonomy? More social solidarity? More mastery of nature? Or perhaps more deference to nature? If we cannot agree on what progress looks like, then we cannot know whether it is happening.
Lesson 1 from the West's own past is about caution: simply because we find Islamism irrational and inconsistent with what we take to be the movement of history does not mean it is disappearing any time soon. Particularly when an ideology is exemplified and sponsored by one or more countries, it may enjoy a much longer life than its opponents and observers imagine. The history of the West's own prolonged ideological struggles bears this out.
The Longevity of europe's Catholic- Protestant Struggle
At many points, the legitimacy crisis in early modern Europe seemed to have ended but had not. The end of 1559 was one such time. The Catholic and Lutheran estates of the Holy Roman Empire (roughly today's Germany) had recently fought two wars: the Schmalkaldic War of 1546–47, which ended in an overwhelming victory for the Catholics (particularly the Habsburg emperor); and, when the emperor overreached after his victory, a follow- up war in 1552 that turned the tables. In 1555 the estates and Habsburgs agreed to the Religious Peace of Augsburg. At Augsburg Lutherans and Catholics agreed that the ruler of an estate has the sole right to determine the established religion in that estate. Using force to try to alter a neighboring estate's religion was illegal. The formula was later to be restated as Cujus regio, ejus religio: "Whose the realm, his the religion." Europeans continued to be devout Catholics and Lutherans, and each group regarded the other as heretical, but their differences were depoliticized. The heresy of one prince or realm was no concern of another prince. The empire could return to normal politics, with its mundane jealousies and rivalries and its periodic diets (congresses) to sort things out.
But that was only in Germany. To the northwest of the empire, England was going through a violent re-Catholicization under Mary I. The first daughter of Henry VIII was raised a Catholic by her Spanish mother and married Philip II of Spain. She undid the Protestantization of her half brother Edward VI, the sickly king who had died at age fifteen in 1553. Mary burned hundreds of Protestant clergy and bishops; hundreds of others fled into exile. But upon her own death in 1558, her half sister Elizabeth, raised as a Protestant, became queen and wrenched England back into the Protestant camp using similar means.
The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559, Protestant yet sensitive to the persistent Catholic convictions of many of Elizabeth's subjects, seemed another sign that Europe's decades- long religious strife had ended in a sort of stalemate. It was not to be, however. The trouble was that Lutherans and Anglicans were not the only Protestants. Most consequential of all in political terms was the movement begun by the Frenchman John Calvin. Calvinism was, in the telling of its own adherents, simply the logical completion of Lutheranism: if man could not voluntarily move toward God, if saving faith was solely God's to grant, then it follows that God preordains who is to be saved and who damned. In practice, whereas Lutherans tended toward political quietism, Calvinists stressed the active building of a righteous society in the here and now. The movement was disciplined, fervent, and revolutionary, validating commerce more than its rivals and tending toward republicanism and social equality. And it spread rapidly from the city of Geneva, Calvin's headquarters and model polity from 1541, gaining converts among the nobility and commoners in France, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Transylvania, and elsewhere.
As noted in this book's introduction, in the late 1550s a Calvinist rebellion broke out in Scotland and spread to other countries. These explosions, detonated by wealthy and middle- class people with political as well as religious discontents, were related. A Calvinist revolt in one place would encourage Calvinists and frighten Catholics in another, making repression and rebellion more likely there. The Calvinist revolts also attracted foreign intervention by Catholics (especially Spain) and Protestants (especially England and the Palatinate in Germany), thus aggravating the situation.
The larger point is this: just when a religious settlement emerged in one time and place, and it seemed that Western Europe had returned to more normal, less ideological times, religious polarization would happen elsewhere and make clear that normal times were still a long way off. The Protestant Reformation was not finished, and hence neither was the Catholic Counter-Reformation.
A few violent decades later, at the end of the sixteenth century, it again appeared that the so-called wars of religion were over. Within the countries in question, the religious questions had been settled by force of arms and truces. The Catholic- Protestant ideological warfare that had shaken Northwestern Europe for so many years was history. Swiss cantons and Scotland were firmly in Calvinist hands, as was the new Dutch Republic. England's Elizabeth had made her peace with the Puritans. In France, Henry IV, who converted to Catholicism to ease his path to rule, issued the Edict of Nantes in 1598, granting wide toleration to Huguenots within certain territories. In the Holy Roman Empire, Emperor Rudolf II was in practice relatively indulgent of all religious minorities. Pockets of religious conflict remained—the occasional German city would heave with the old sectarian strife—but on the whole princes, nobles, city councils, and their subjects seemed to have settled upon a practical peace. A Machiavellian political rationality appeared regnant, in which states looked after their interests and religious zeal was put toward other purposes.
Yet Europe was not finished with ideological strife and violence. Within two decades, Central Europe fell hard into what became its worst war until 1914: the Thirty Years' War (1618–48), in which an estimated 15 to 20 percent of Germany's population (three to four million persons) died. This ferocious conflict was not only about religious ideology, any more than any political conflict is only about ideology; dynastic ambition, resistance to political centralization, technological change, greed, and sheer bloody- mindedness all played a role. But those things are always with us. What triggered the war was a revolt in Bohemia in 1618, in the far east of the empire, by Calvinists fearful of increasing Catholic persecution under the heir apparent to the imperial throne.
Catholics and Calvinists had begun to repolarize in the empire two decades earlier. Calvinism was spreading in Germany, and in 1598, the same year that France gained religious toleration, Emperor Rudolf sent troops to suppress Calvinism around the town of Aachen. Calvinists and Lutherans alike began to boycott imperial diets (periodic congresses), and in 1609 a new Protestant Union formed, led by the Elector Palatinate. A Catholic league quickly formed in response. The two tussled over Cleves-Jülich in 1609–10 and again in 1613. In 1612 the Protestant Union formed an alliance with James I of England.
In that same year Matthias, a moderate, succeeded Rudolf as emperor and tried to conciliate his Protestant subjects. But in 1617 his cousin Ferdinand, a militant Catholic, was elected next in line to the imperial throne, and that aggravated religious tensions still further. Ferdinand was determined to restore all Habsburg- ruled lands to the Catholic fold. When Protestants in Bohemia revolted the following year, he took matters into his own hands, overthrowing Matthias and seizing the throne. But the blame for the horrific war to come did not all lie with Ferdinand. To the west, in the imperial estate of the Palatinate, the Elector Frederick, a zealous Calvinist, had ambitions of his own. He accepted the rebels' offer to crown him king of Bohemia, and Habsburg armies marched to put down the revolt.
The lines of conflict in the Thirty Years' War, then, had been laid down gradually in the two preceding decades. And those lines, in turn, had been laid down a half century earlier. The conclusion is clear: an ideological struggle can appear dead, even to smart people for whom the stakes are high; yet if the questions that gave rise to it remain unresolved, the struggle can later reignite in a new place. The trouble in 1618 was that the fundamental questions that had emerged in Germany a century earlier were still unsettled. Those questions—concerning which church should be the established one, the Roman Catholic or some Protestant alternative—remained because most Europeans continued to believe that permanent political stability required religious uniformity. Thus Catholic and Protestant rulers and aspiring rulers could live in peace, but the peace was uneasy. They continued to fear one another and the growth in one another's branch of Christianity. So long as that fear persisted, a spark could ignite conflict by repolarizing people into radically opposed ideological groups. The threat of ideological- religious war could not disappear until rulers became indifferent toward the relative growth rates and encroachments of the various branches of Christianity. As we shall see in Lesson 5, that indifference was not to take hold for yet another century.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Confronting Political Islam by John M. Owen IV. Copyright © 2015 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Tables ix
Preface xi
Introduction It Did Happen Here 1
Lesson 1 Don’t Sell Islamism Short 26
Lesson 2 Ideologies Are (Usually) Not Monolithic 46
Lesson 3 Foreign Interventions Are Normal 67
Lesson 4 A State May Be Rational and Ideological at the Same Time 86
Lesson 5 The Winner May Be "None of the Above" 110
Lesson 6 Watch Turkey and Iran 130
Conclusion What to Do and What Not to Do 156
Notes 165
Bibliography 193
Index 211
What People are Saying About This
"Through a systematic, rigorous comparison of the trajectory of historical ideological conflicts in Europe during the last five centuries and today's struggles over Islamism in the Middle East, Owen draws insightful conclusions about the future of political Islam and U.S. policy responses. His book is sure to advance understanding of the defining ideological debate of our time—that of Islam's role in political transitions throughout the Muslim world."—Lisa Curtis, Heritage Foundation"Many people talk about the 'lessons of history,' but Owen actually delivers them. With erudition, balance, and good judgment, he uses the history of ideological conflict in the West to discern guidelines for how to deal with the challenge to American interests presented by contemporary Islamist politics in all its forms. This is a wise and well-reasoned book."—F. Gregory Gause III, Texas A&M University"Critiques of Islamic fundamentalism rarely seek parallels in Western history. Owen assesses Islamism and offers perceptive, provocative comparisons to the historical conflicts among Protestants and Catholics, and liberals, socialists, and communists. Showing that the duel between Islamists and Muslim secularists is far from over, he explores how it has challenged and changed the West. Scholars, officials, soldiers, and students would do well to read this book."—Reuel M. Gerecht, Foundation for Defense of Democracies"With an innovative approach, Owen provocatively argues that previous episodes and ideological battles in Western history can shed light on the questions and likely political developments in the Muslim world today. The topic is very important and will spark many reactions and discussions."—Jeremy Pressman, University of Connecticut"Combining scholarship with important policy proposals, Confronting Political Islam successfully puts forth a set of recommendations for U.S. grand strategy toward Islamism. This engaging and accessible book does a good job relating past ideological struggles to the current ‘long war' against religiously oriented terrorism."—Daniel Nexon, Georgetown University