As thousands celebrated the victory of the Freedom and Justice Party—part of the 84-year-old Muslim Brotherhood organization—in Tahrir Square, just a few blocks away a much more somber mood prevailed.

“Let me enjoy another bottle of beer,” said an old man as he plunked some coins on the counter at a local grocery store. “Soon the Jama’a (Muslim Brotherhood) will ban it.” The store owner, Mr. Ahmad, nodded. “Allah yastur al balad, [May god protect the country]—it will be like Sudan or Pakistan.” Clearly, anxiety and divisions still persist in Egypt. The pharmacists at the nearby El-Ezaby Pharmacy also looked disillusioned. This profession in Egypt is overwhelmingly dominated by the Coptic Christian community, who represent about 10 percent of Egypt’s 85 million people, but 90 percent of whom voted for Shafik according to exit polls.

Early in June my colleague Bruce Lawrence and I took some of our students to the African And Arab Research Center of Cairo, where a group of Cairo University professors welcomed us to a round-table discussion on the Egyptian elections. A colleague from Cairo University asked the group to help him decide who to vote for. He said he found it difficult to choose between the Muslim Brotherhood, who he said would “cloak the democratic process,” and Shafik, whose victory “would enable a second and more decisive round of the revolution because of his connections to the unpopular ruling military junta, known as the Supreme Council for Army Forces (SCAF).”

Ironically, only Professor Lawrence and I argued for Morsi while the rest, including the visiting students and the left-leaning Cairene professors opted for Shafik. Professor Lawrence cited eloquently the historical significance and momentous need for change in Egypt, and said Egyptians would never know the real Muslim Brotherhood unless they elected him. My hypothetical vote for Morsi was grounded in my overall philosophical belief in risk-taking as the most genuine path to human progress. It was and is still my belief that the economic ills of Egypt warranted assuming that risk. But many people’s justification for voting for Shafik reflected fear of the unknown. Reverting to a pre-revolutionary Egypt seemed to them a safe bet.

There has been wide speculation on the root causes of Shafik’s popularity; namely, how he carried the governorate of Cairo during the election or manage to get 48.3 percent of the vote despite his leadership status during the Mubarak years. This is not a new phenomenon for societies that have experienced radical transformations. Dispatching a message of ‘fear’ in an atmosphere of uncertainty always pays off in attracting politically-excluded minorities and business elites, as well as a large segment of the middle class. Just look at the results of South Africa’s presidential election of 1994, the US presidential elections in 2004, and Russia’s 2012 presidential election.

Shafik mobilized voters with his charismatic personality, savvy communications skills, and assurances of security by variously stating in interviews, speeches, and advertisements:

“I will clear Tahrir from the wandering kids because I love the revolution.”

“Egypt needs a leader and certainly not a sheikh.”

“Mubarak is my ideal person, but I happen not to agree with him.”

“I will give the young Tahriri revolutionaries chocolates as I love their graffiti around the cities.”

“I will bring law and order back to the streets of Egypt in 24 hours.”

There is another dimension to the popularity of Shafik. It’s psychological. He is a general, and Egypt’s modern history is a history of military leadership and war memorials. The four leaders since 1952—Muhammad Naguib, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak are all military figures, and proudly tapped into their roles in Egypt’s wars against Israel to solidify their patriotism and legitimize their leadership. It is no surprise that many of modern Cairo’s bridges and monuments are named after generals and dates of these wars.

Currently, Egypt’s political divisions are particularly evident in Cairo’s public spaces—literally the public squares. The Muslim Brotherhood (MB) persisted in occupying Tahrir following the conclusion of the run-off election and managed, in this way, to re-invent Morsi as the symbol of the revolution. Preceding the election on June 12, the headline in the MB’s official newspaper Freedom and Justice introduced Morsi’s win in overseas voting as the “candidate of the revolution [who] leads throughout the Continents of the Globe.” Various groups affiliated with the Occupy Tahrir movement, mostly organized and transported by the Muslim Brotherhood, have gathered in Tahrir since the last day of the run-off campaign on June 15 and are now calling for the removal of the military Amended Constitutional Declaration, re-establishment of the dissolved parliament, and the immediate release of all political detainees.

Meanwhile pro-Shafik groups are looking for alternative physical spaces to express their views and make their voices heard. On the day of Morsi’s swearing-in ceremony, they called for a million man march of ‘Egypt above all’ in Nasr City at the Minassa Podium—where President Sadat was gunned down in 1981 during an annual victory parade by an Islamist fanatic and military infiltrator. Gathering in the Minassa and sometimes numbering in the thousands, these groups are calling for a civilian state and dissolution of the MB organization—this latter demand is in the hands of the Egyptian courts. And following Morsi’s presidential decree to re-establish the Parliament on July 8, they accused him of treason for not upholding his oath of office. While fewer women than ever before are gathering in Tahrir Square, pro-Shafik groups have been putting women at the forefront, displaying nationalistic songs and pro-military signs.

I am glad that the Egyptian people have chosen courage over fear, progress over retreat; and in the words of the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al-Aswany in Al-Misri Alyawm newspaper on June 25, “the Egyptian revolution has achieved a great victory in dropping Shafik and electing Morsi.” But Morsi’s victory cannot be seen as a total mandate. The difference was only 883 thousand votes. Votes from the Egyptian diaspora might have put Morsi over the top. While Egyptians at home feel the weight and the pain of the continued revolution, the increase of crime and perturbance in their daily life, those who emigrated overseas might have voted for Morsi for other reasons. It can be argued that many votes for Morsi (in Egypt and from the diaspora) were votes against Mubarak rather than votes for the Muslim Brotherhood.

There is a beautiful painting on the wall of the American University in Cairo (see above)—“Tahrir Square” by the Egyptian revolutionary artist Omar Picasso in which Mubarak’s face is merged with the face of Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of SCAF, alongside the faces of Amr Moussa, the former Presidential candidate and former secretary general of the Arab League, and Shafik. Written beneath their colorful faces are the words of an Egyptian proverb, “He who left son behind is not gone yet.”

Mustafa Kamel, an Egyptian writer whose book, The Final Exit, was seen as predicting the revolt against Mubarak, echoes this view in our discussion of the matter. He said, “Shafik’s victory would have been shameful for all Egyptians, erasing all sacrifices made in the name of the revolution.”

In analyzing Morsi’s victory, however, it is not an overstatement to say that the MB’s marginal victory is worrisome for its leadership. It reflects diminishing popularity, narrowing constituencies, and a problematic connection to the young liberal revolutionaries.  The MB won roughly over 10 million votes in the November parliamentary election, carrying 37.5 seats of the total 508 parliamentary seats. The more conservative Islamist Salafi-affiliated candidates won roughly over 7 million votes, accounting for 27.8 seats. During the first round of the presidential elections the MB garnered 5,553,097 votes; representing only 25.30 percent of the 49 percent of voters who turned out for the poll, and only roughly 300 thousand votes ahead of Shafik. The populist revolutionary Hamdeen Sabahi, the favored candidate of the young revolutionaries, came in third place with 21.60 percent of the votes. Abd al-Moneim Abul Futuh, a more liberal Islamist, came in fourth with 17.93 percent of the votes. Numerically speaking, this means the MB lost fifty percent of those who had supported them in the parliamentary elections. In the presidential run-off, the MB’s candidate Morsi got less than a million votes more than Shafik, despite the direct support they got from many revolutionary groups, Salafi party sympathizers, and Futuh supporters. In a July 5 interview with the editor of Egyptian daily al-Shrooq newspaper, the visiting spiritual leader of Tunisia’s ruling Islamist Nahda party, Rashid al-Ghannushi, reminded the Egyptian public that Morsi has not won a political mandate, and that he should therefore rule through a unity government.

Morsi’s fist week in office demonstrates his acceptance of this limited mandate, but also his disposition to challenge the military establishment. He has so far been navigating it well. He has tackled major obstacles between the MB and other segments of civil society groups as well as the military junta. While the military establishment insisted in the Amended Constitutional Declaration of July 17 that the elected president must take the oath before the High Constitutional Court, civil society groups and the MB insisted on bringing members of the dissolved parliament to Tahrir Square and having the President take the oath before them. He avoided a clash by visiting Tahrir on Friday, June 29 and giving a nationally televised speech in which he pledged to protect the Constitution, defend the country, and elevate the Egyptian people’s power above all institutions in society. On Saturday, June 30, he paid a visit to the High Constitutional Court (HCC), where he took the oath before 18 black-robed judges of the HCC, chaired by Farouk Sultan, who, a few days earlier, was depicted by the Freedom and Justice newspaper as “corrupt felool, a reminiscent of the Mubarak era.” Further, Morsi thanked the HCC judges for their “role in fostering democracy in the country.” Two hours later, he was at Cairo University, where he met with the leading military junta, thanking them for their sacrifices and dedication to Egypt. In a nationalistic setting, interrupted by an outpouring of statements that “the people and the army are one hand,” he promised to support the army against external enemies morally and financially, praising the armed forces. An hour later, he was part of a military parade, signaling the final transfer of power.

Beyond these official ceremonies, Morsi’s domestic political personality is emerging while his regional intentions are not completely clear. On the domestic front, he is presenting himself as a populist Muslim leader, not a revolutionary, and so far, not exactly a nationalist either.

His religious image also stands in clear contrast to the secular Mubarak. He has memorized the entire Quran, which is a highly respected trait in traditional Muslim societies. He cites Quranic verses in all his speeches, projecting Egypt as a Muslim nation, who will support “Palestine and the Syrian people.” He chose to attend Friday prayer at the Al-Azhar grand mosque, and didn’t allow his security guards to disturb the crowd.

He has requested that his photos not adorn government buildings, and encouraged his supporters to give money to charity instead of spending it on newspaper ads congratulating him on his victory.

He cried at imam Qusi’s Friday sermon on June 29, when the imam pointed out to him that he must fear God and act like Umar Ibn Khattab, the second Caliph after prophet Muhammad, who many Muslim scholars idealize as the symbol of a just ruler.

Many journalists have poked fun at Morsi’s way of talking as being too religiously oriented, far from the norm of the promised non-religious state. On July 2, Emad Abdullatif of the al Tahrir daily newspaper wrote that “Morsi’s Tahrir speech disenfranchised non-Muslim Egyptians.” In the speech, Morsi used a traditional Muslim figure of speech: “I have been elected over you, but I am not better than you.” He demonstrated that he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest as a sign of his connection to the people on the street. When confronted by a group Egypt’s newspaper editors on June 28 on the imperatives of resigning from the MB if he is to be the leader of all Egyptians, he responded to the veteran journalist, Amr Hamzawy, that his resignation “was already done.”

Not all Morsi’s days are so far consecrated in rhetorical speculations of his intention. There are systematic efforts to appear as a pragmatic and a get-the-job-done leader. On one hand, he has adopted a 100-day project of addressing the most pressing needs in ordinary people’s life: traffic problems, police and security issues, bread and fuel crises, etc. On the other hand, he has surprised the Egyptian public on July 8 by issuing a presidential decree ordering the return of the dissolved parliament, which is generally perceived by most Egyptian newspapers as defiant towards both HCC and SCAF. SCAF might not challenge the decree directly, but the HCC has, and the parliament, which has been very unpopular among Egyptians except with Islamist supporters, could become irrelevant as a respectful branch of government, and this could potentially weaken his presidency.

Regional figures see Morsi another way. Dubai’s top police chief Dahi Khalfan responded to his victory by tweeting that “the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood is a doom and disaster for the Egyptians, the Arab and the Muslim nation…and he will come to us crawling.”

In a June 30 statement, widely understood to be addressing his anxious Gulf neighbors, Morsi said “Egypt will not export its revolution” and “Arab national security is Egypt’s priority.” A more engaging step toward the monarchies of the Gulf was declared on July 8 that the President’s first international trip would be to Saudi Arabia. This is a clear contrast to President Nasser, whose presidency never masked his ambition in exporting his revolution.

Turkey’s foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, was the first non-Arab statesperson to visit the President. He informed many Egyptian newspapers on July 5 that, “he has a blank paper for the President to list his needs from Turkey.” Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan already contacted Morsi on Sunday, June 24 to express his congratulations. Islamists of the Arab Spring often speculate their eagerness to replicate the Turkish model of democracy. Morsi alluded to honoring the peace treaty with Israel, but refused to answer Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s phone call despite Netanyahu’s letter congratulating him on his historic victory. However, he accepted a phone call from the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but made no promise to accept his invitation to visit Iran. This is a complete departure from the legacies of Sadat and Mubarak, whose leaning toward Washington and Israel was equally replicated in their aloofness from Tehran.

As Morsi settles into the presidency, major questions still lurk in the minds of many Egyptians: What type of leader will he be? What will be his relationship with the military establishment? How will he address the issues of poverty and corruption? Will Egypt duplicate Turkey’s Islamist model of business-oriented government? Will it look like Pakistan’s ever-failing state’s institutions? Or will it curve its own model of Islamo-democratic state? As the Arabs say, Allah a’alam—only God knows.

For more on the Egyptian elections, please read our recent off the cuff discussion.—ed.

To what extent do current depictions of the Egyptian situation reproduce the simplistic narrative of the “Brotherhood” versus the “Army” as the only options worth discussing? How does this binary either illuminate Egypt’s cultural, political, and religious dynamics or obscure its more complex realities?

Our respondents are:

Margot Badran, Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Senior Fellow, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University

Thanassis Cambanis, Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and Fellow, The Century Foundation

Mohammad Fadel, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Charles Hirschkind, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

Atef Said, Attorney, Researcher, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

Samuli Schielke, Research Fellow, Zentrum Moderner Orient

Jeremy F. Walton, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Religious Studies, New York University

Jessica Winegar, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University

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Margot Badran, Senior Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Senior Fellow, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University

In the recent runoff presidential elections, Egyptians were forced to choose between an Islamist as head of state (with all the old fears stirred up and further stoked by some extreme statements emanating from some Islamists) on the one hand, and yet another president of military background-cum-felool, or remnant of the old regime, on the other. It seemed like a replay of the Mubarak broken record: it’s me the protector, the strong (military-pedigreed) man of the secular state or the tyranny of an Islamist takeover. Many “ordinary” people, rather unexpectedly, voiced strong anti-Islamist fears while pricey posters, many billboard-size, of fear-mongering Shafik suddenly became ubiquitous not just in Cairo and other big cities but in rural areas as I could see while driving in the eastern Nile Delta. Islamists, meanwhile, raised specter of the return of the felool on the apron-strings of the army while breathlessly pledging allegiance to a secular state and talking togetherness. Now, four days after the announcement of Morsi as president, discourse swivels. The polarized debates that ballooned during the campaign frenzy are deflating. The secular-Islamist binary which never made “real” sense is suddenly devalued political currency, although it seems to retain life in the international exchange. Inside Egypt, from where I write, the frame is Egyptian; the concerns are social justice, jobs, a secure life, and mutual respect or more simply getting along with each other, as people are prone to do when not whipped up. The rhetoric of the new president, of public figures, and of ordinary people is noticeably the inclusive rhetoric of the revolution. Citizens are hopeful but not naïve. One builds on hope, not gloom and doom. People I meet here say, “let us see if the words of the new president, speaking of and for the whole people, translate into reality.” For most here it is not a simple zero-sum game of secular or Islamic, win or loose—that kind of thinking that Mubarak had fostered and exploited and that found new life in the runoff. It is instead a slog with eyes wide open to gain a better life in a better Egypt. If the cudgels of polarization between “secularists” and “Islamists” (increasingly meaningless categories) are now being laid down in Egypt (pace disruptive diehards), it would be helpful for all if the world outside followed suit.

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Thanassis Cambanis, Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and Fellow, The Century Foundation

In the utopian early days of Egypt’s uprising, the self-declared citizens in the “Republic of Tahrir Square” imagined a new politics that would transcend the tired binary of secular despot and Islamist dissent. What they lived briefly embodied a new coalition, which could unite Nasserists and Muslim Brothers, social democrats and revolutionary socialists, Salafis and labor organizers, under a common cause: the fall of the regime and bread, freedom, and social justice.

The year and a half since then unsurprisingly has featured a power struggle among the most entrenched and best organized forces in political life. A Muslim Brother faced a felool, or “remnant” of the old regime, in the presidential runoff primarily because the Brotherhood and the old ruling party are the only parties with money, cadres, and national organizations that can run campaigns and distribute patronage.

It has become fashionable to decry the failure of revolutionary forces, or secular liberals, to organize effectively. And they have, in fact, displayed an unfortunate proclivity for fractiousness and political dullness.

Viewed from a long-term institutional perspective, however, the presidential contest makes sense as a transitional vestige of the dying old order, rather than a harbinger of the new. A shoddy, rushed transition, (mis)engineered by an intrusive military junta bent on protecting its privileges, will naturally privilege status quo players.

Yet in the short historical period since Mubarak was shunted aside, alternative political forces have appeared and already have captured a broad swath of the electorate. Consensual, liberal, and relatively secular candidates captured 51 percent of the first round presidential voting. An analysis of the parliamentary and presidential balloting suggests that Salafis, Muslim Brothers and ex-regime felool will lose political shares to nationalists, secular liberals and socialists, and less doctrinaire Islamists. Furthermore, the new parties and candidates have proved dogged at building national networks that will allow them to better compete in future elections and importantly, to develop a tangible, alternative policy agenda.

For all the reasons to despair about the final choice in the presidential runoff—Mubarak’s old false binary of the repressive state or rigid Islamists—there is plenty of reason to believe that the dream of a new politics is coming true. We’ll just have to wait many years to see it take shape.

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Mohammad Fadel, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

Almost eighteen months after the resignation of Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi has been sworn in as Egypt’s first, democratically elected president. Few would have predicted that Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s inner circle, would ascend to this post, especially given the Brotherhood’s pronouncements at the time of Mubarak’s resignation that it was not interested in competing for the presidency. To make matters worse, the man Morsi defeated for Egypt’s top post was Ahmed Shafik, Mubarak’s last prime minister who openly ran on anti-revolution, law-and-order platform. Predictably, this turn of events frustrated many outside observers, as well as many Egyptian revolutionaries themselves. Indeed, some commentators continue to insist that in fact nothing has really changed in Egypt and that despite five free elections in the eighteenth months since the January 25^th Revolution, Egypt remains, essentially, a military dictatorship, albeit with the Muslim Brotherhood playing the role of junior partner. This analysis, however, is remarkably short-sighted. Egypt now has a dynamic and competitive public sphere with at least three major political groupings: Islamist revolutionaries; non-Islamist revolutionaries; and an old guard whose power is increasingly disappearing. The Islamist revolutionaries themselves are not a unitary group, nor are the non-Islamist revolutionaries. While the success of Ahmed Shafik indicates that the old guard might, in fact, be the most coherent political group in post-revolutionary Egypt, their failure to secure their man’s election in Egypt’s first competitive presidential elections proves that their monopoly on Egyptian politics has been shattered. Likewise, Morsi was only able to win because of his ability to secure votes outside of his Islamist base. The conciliatory tone Morsi has taken toward both old regime elements and non-Islamist revolutionaries, in his victory speech, speech in Tahrir Square and inaugural speech, is consistent with his (and by extension, the Muslim Brotherhood’s) recognition that Egyptian politics is inherently pluralistic. While it was always unrealistic to believe that Egyptians could wipe out a legacy of 60 years of military rule in eighteen months, they have already made great strides in destroying the superstructure of military dictatorship. Whatever control the military continues to enjoy, its influence is clearly on the wane. Likewise, while Islamist revolutionaries currently have the upper hand relative to non-Islamist revolutionaries, the gap between them is not so great that it threatens genuine pluralism.  In short, Egypt will continue to trod a path leading it to an era of ever increasing political pluralism and democratic politics. While some may be disappointed in that the first competitive presidential election in Egyptian history came down to a battle between symbols of the old regime’s political battles, one should not be surprised if, by decade’s end, Egypt’s political culture has undergone a radical makeover, and that its leading political figures then will be complete unknowns today.

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Charles Hirschkind, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley

According to some observers, the victory of Mohamed Morsi in the Egyptian presidential elections signals a return to the pre-revolutionary political order, one anchored in the tense but stable relation between military and Islamist forces. I think this a mistaken view. First, prior to the uprising, Islamist groups—most important among them, the Muslim Brotherhood—had not been exercising political power in Egypt, shaping state economic policies, drafting legislation, guiding Egypt in its relations with foreign nations. Rather, they were excluded from the decision-making apparatuses of the state, and were commonly targets of its repressive actions. However while the Egyptian military may continue to control and limit challenges to its power, Morsi’s election as president has to be seen as a direct result of the opening in Egypt’s political system produced through the forces of popular sovereignty mobilized on January 25th, 2011, and should be respected as such. Secondly, it’s wrong to interpret the electoral results as tantamount to the seizure of the state by the Muslim Brotherhood. By many indications, Morsi’s administration recognizes that it will have to build bridges to other political parties and constituencies if it is to have any chance of pushing back the military’s hold on power. Recent meetings between Brotherhood leaders and representatives from the campaigns of Abd al-Moneim Abul Futuh and Hamdeen Sabahi, as well as the group’s announcement that it would appoint a woman, a Copt, and a youth activist as vice-presidents all point toward such a recognition.

Such steps toward coalition building suggest a very different political terrain than the one that existed prior to the revolution, and hence of political possibilities whose outcome cannot be foreseen with any certainty. Yes, the entrenched power of the military remains an ongoing threat to any transformation. But the only other stable element in Egypt’s political life today is the knee-jerk refusal of some of the old leftist and liberal political movements to see beyond the politics of the “Islamist threat.”

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Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

In a recent piece in the Los Angeles Times Jeffrey Fleishman described the negotiation of a power-sharing arrangement in Egypt between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood. “The maneuver,” Fleishman reported, “revealed the generals’ determination to prevent a new political force from tugging the country closer to an Islamic state while threatening the army’s stature and sprawling business interests.”

Here we go again. Even before democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi had assumed power, the American media proved itself incapable of resisting the temptation to trot out the Islamist bogeyman. The notion that the victory of an MB-affiliated candidate necessarily moves Egypt closer to an “Islamic state” was one among many Mubarak-era assumptions that the revolutionaries sought to consign to the dustbin. The idea of the revolution was to open up the political field and allow new voices to be heard, including but not limited to the MB. The idea was to restore politics to Egypt. That Fleishman reports the Mubarak establishment’s storyline as fact reflects the stubborn persistence of an outdated mindset in which authoritarianism and theocracy are seen as the only alternatives for governing Middle Eastern states. The Egyptian people have rejected these positions. As Juan Cole argued last week, the recent elections revealed a diverse and pluralistic Egyptian political landscape. Politics in Egypt is alive, if not entirely well.

It is not only Mubarak who needed to be overthrown to improve this situation. It is the domestic and international power structure that supported him and continues to support active remnants of the old regime. This includes the American foreign and military establishment. An example is the State Department’s recent use of a waiver to avoid congressionally mandated democracy conditions on U.S. military assistance. Egyptians are well aware of U.S. support for the old regime, understand American ties to the SCAF, and remain wary of official American influence in Egypt. And rightly so. Mubarak may be gone, but Fleishman’s piece reminds us that his powerful legacy lives on, not only in Cairo and Washington, but in our own minds. Egyptians with different political and religious views are challenging the generals not because they want to “tug the country closer to an Islamic state,” but because they want to live with dignity in a democratic Egypt.

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Atef Said, Attorney, Researcher, Ph.D. candidate in Sociology, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

While the results of the presidential election in Egypt seem to be reproducing the dichotomy of military vs. Islamists, the reality is more complex and fluid than this. It is important to note that we miss a lot looking only at electoral politics—and even that has been puzzling. For example, almost all the top candidates in the first round have gained votes from the far left to the far right, except for Shafik, whose votes have to be explained by wide range of reasons. Looking outside the election box, it is important to look at two crucial issues. The first is that the military/Muslim Brotherhood relation is in itself contradictory and explosive in nature. The dichotomy exists superficially, but its problematic nature makes a lot of room for all parties in Egypt to maneuver. It is contradictory and problematic because it is a kind of competition over power but is a partnership at the same time. The military, for example, has used the Muslim Brotherhood after the revolution, and has used the parliament as a way to suppress protests.

The argument here was that once you have elected bodies, protests should stop, i.e. using electoral politics rather than street politics. But at the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood is a very ambitious and difficult partner. Both parties need one another; one can be described as a real power without a political party (the Supreme Council for Armed Forces, SCAF), and the other is a political party without real power (the Muslim Brotherhood, albeit now they have limited or unclear presidential power). Neither domestic nor international atmosphere will allow for an explicit military coup today. Hence, the army will continue to find a way to work with the MB, but at the same time, keeps the military and the security apparatus away from the MB. The Muslim Brotherhood has lost lots of its popularity before the presidential election when it distanced itself from the street. And it seems to be back to flirt with the street to gain political legitimacy battling with SCAF over power.

The second reason why this dichotomy is simplistic is that it ignores the power of street politics, or what may be described as the Tahrir “party.” I mean by this those youths who vary from liberal to the far left, those who have not been channeled into strong political parties yet. In other words, street politics and protests will not stop in the near future in Egypt, and those youths, despite not being very organized in one strong political party, have the power of monitoring and pressuring both SCAF and the Muslim Brotherhood and its new president. One main source of this unorganized “party’s” strength is that it holds the spirit and demands of Tahrir and the revolution. While I am writing this today, the elected president Mohamed Morsi, MB, came to Tahrir Square and took his President oath informally. While he is seeking the street support vis-à-vis SCAF, this proves the power of the revolution and the street. This third “party” is also strong because neither SCAF nor MB has an alternative vision to solve real economic problems and the social and economic justice issues that were strong motivation for the revolution. Both SCAF and MB share a similar economic vision, which is neo-liberal. There will also be real problems posed by competition in the economic sphere.

At the time of writing this, two coalitions, each of them consisting of multiple political forces and political parties, have been announced. Both are against the military and Islamist dominations of post-revolutionary Egypt. Both coalitions are calling for a civilian democratic (not religious and not military) Egypt. It is important to note that neither the Army and its security apparatus, nor the Islamists or even the Tahrir “party” are homogenous entities. The situation in Egypt is very fluid and far from settled.

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Samuli Schielke, Research Fellow, Zentrum Moderner Orien

It is both in the interest of the Brotherhood and the Supreme Military Council to depict the struggle in Egypt as a bipolar one between the military and Islamists. This is good propaganda, but quite inaccurate. Since the constitutional referendum of March 19, 2011, there is an uncanny and uneasy alliance between the two power blocks. Morsi’s victory, aided by concessions from the Brotherhood towards the military, only makes this alliance official. The real revolutionary struggle takes place elsewhere.

The most important misconception about the Muslim Brotherhood (actively promoted by the Brotherhood itself) is that it is a revolutionary movement committed to democracy. The history of the Brotherhood has often been one of deals with the system and rarely one of a radical demand for change. As a political movement on the grass-roots level (nevermind their public discourse), the Brotherhood is authoritarian, opportunistic, and arrogant, lacking any genuine respect for its political competitors. The military, of course, is no better, determined as it is to guard its privileges at all cost. There is no reason to expect any genuine commitment to democracy, political freedom, labor rights, or gender justice by either of the two – unless they are forced to do so by a strong opposition.

The revolution failed to overthrow the state of the Free Officers (Morsi’s victory marks only an adjustment or reform of it), but it has been successful in establishing a large and vocal democratic opposition that has become a powerful political voice in large cities of northern Egypt; less so in southern Egypt and in rural areas. Although too weak and heterogeneous (and, perhaps, too principled) to gain power at the moment, they are the third power block to reckon with, and the only one committed to changing the system towards social justice and freedom.

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Jeremy F. Walton, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Religious Studies, New York University

In the wake of the Egyptian Revolution, I have frequently encountered a rather predictable set of questions: What will happen in the Middle East if the Muslim Brotherhood comes to power? Will Egypt become “more Islamic”? (and my own favorite) Is secularism in danger? My kneejerk response to these queries is to plead relative ignorance—although my scholarship concerns the myriad relationships between the practices of Islam and those of liberal democracy in Turkey, I cannot claim to have any specific expertise on Egypt. Nevertheless, friends and acquaintances have continued to solicit me, evincing a near-fetishistic anxiety over the empowerment of a Muslim political movement in Egypt. How might a scholar of Islam, secularism, and contemporary governance address these anxieties without slipping into the Manichean language of religion vs. secularism, liberal autonomy vs. authoritarian coercion, of Islam vs. the West? Many commentators have suggested the recent history of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey offers a potential model for Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood. While the center-right AKP does draw its electoral strength from a similar demographic constituency as the bedrock supporters Muslim Brotherhood—the conservative, urban petite bourgeoisie—I have already argued against making such broad-stroke comparisons that hinge only on the common religious orientation of otherwise distinct organizations and actors. Indeed, a more nuanced comparison to current condition of the Muslim Brotherhood might well be found in the post-Communist trajectory of Poland’s Solidarity Movement or the period of democratization following Franco’s rule in Spain. Like Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood at the current moment, both post-Communist Poland and post-fascist Spain witnessed the transformation of anti-establishment, counter-hegemonic political movements into legitimate, newly hegemonic, democratic actors. Unfortunately, such comparisons between the Muslim Brotherhood and non-Muslim political actors and contexts are both rare and difficult to put forward. I suspect that the reason for this difficulty has to do with the immense power of the adjectives “Muslim” and “Islamic” in Euro-American political discourse. Within this discourse, “Muslim” as a political adjective connotes a single, problematic relationship to both the systems of democratic governance and a democratic ethos. As long as such an essentialist political connotation of the term “Muslim” perseveres, a multifaceted analysis of the relationship between Islam and any political context, Egyptian or otherwise, remains immensely difficult to achieve.

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Jessica Winegar, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern University

As the election commission waded through the votes to decide who had won the Egyptian presidential election, the leftist Nasserist candidate Hamdeen Sabahi from the previous round was on the `umra pilgrimage to Mecca. Perhaps it was bad timing on Sabbahi’s part to be away from the country at a time of negotiations among revolutionary forces. Yet his surprising success in the polls (capturing 21.5% of the vote) and his religious trip are but one indicator among many that the secular army/religious divide presented by the U.S. media does not fully capture the complexity of Egyptians’ relationships to the military, religion, and politics. The results of the first round of elections, with the general’s candidate and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) candidate on top, certainly reflect Nasser’s creation of a militarized state and suppression of the MB. At the same time, the candidate most faithful to the Nasserist tradition openly criticized the army, left the country at a crucial moment for religious reasons, and sent members of his party to meet with both Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s new president, and Abd al-Moneim Abul Futuh, the centrist Islamist and former MB member who captured 19% of the vote.

Although many self-described secularists and Islamists in Egypt join US media pundits in presenting a binary view of Egypt’s political choices, the situation on the ground is much more complex and constantly changing. In the first round, the majority of voters (taken as a collective) chose candidates other than the army man Ahmed Shafik and the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsi. Divisions within the MB (and within Islamist groups in general) that are marked by geography, gender, and generation belie any attempt to generalize; divisions within the army are also revealing themselves in the process. Furthermore, perhaps the most serious issue obscured by the binary is that the MB and the army are arguably not that different in terms of their approach to economic policy and in their urban, often upper middle class biases towards social betterment. To reproduce the binary is indeed to fall into a trap set long ago, perfected by the Mubarak regime, and, time may tell, continued by collusion (intended or not) between the army and the new president. One hopes that the complexity and diversity of Egyptian political life after Mubarak will open new possibilities for overcoming these divides.

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The rallying cry of demonstrators, “irhal” (“leave”) is the best expression of what made the revolts so specific. Tunisians did not take to the street for the recognition of an essence (We are all “Islamists” or “proletarian” or “anti-French”). The ideal that emerged from the “irhal” movements is of the “whatever” individual, in Giorgio Agamben’s terms. “Whatever” here does not mean indifferent or deprived of substantial value, but rather of “being such that it always matters.” An insistence on equality, an irreverence towards any form of authority (sultat), and a suspicion of all types of privileges suggest that what Tunisians are now calling for is a “solidarity that in no way concerns an essence.” Claiming to speak in the name of Islam, laïcité, democracy, human rights, or the caliphate does not grant you privilege any more in Tunisian public debates. It does not give you support from the public. It simply gives you a right to argue “whatever.” No politician, activist, or intellectual is immune from the risk of being silenced by a sneering, angry, or weary “irhal.”

In this context, a major challenge for Islamists is to articulate a political and cultural project that is both consistent with their own principles and in tune with this polyphonic and somewhat opaque “coming community.” Tunisian and foreign secular organizations insistently call out Islamists on the issue of religious freedom, with the hope of exposing their duplicity or unveiling their double-speak. But religious freedom has actually a very limited part in Islamists’ current conversation, not because it is perceived as a divisive issue, but because it is viewed as unproblematic and irrelevant. A central concern within Islamist circles today is not of whether a sharia state must be established, but whether Nahda should primarily be a cultural movement (haraka) of reform or a government party (hizb).

When asked about religious freedom, most Nahda leaders give one of the following three explanations of why it needs to be protected. First, a theological rationale: there is no compulsion in Islam. Second, a historical-nationalist rationale: Tunisian culture is built on a very ancient history of cultural diversity that encompasses elements of Phoenician civilization, the Roman Empire, African traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and others. Finally, a political rationale: Islamists have experienced repression and torture under the regimes of Habib Bourguiba and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. They know the importance of respecting freedom of expression and do not intend to submit any other group to the same type of arbitrary repression.

Nahda leaders do not argue over whether Tunisia should respect religious freedom or turn into a sharia state. While some of them, such as the philosopher Abu Yaareb Marzouki, argue that the maqasid al-sharia (objectives of sharia) could have been included in the preamble of the constitution, simply as a cultural reference, most Nahda members pay limited attention to this type of discussion. At the core of the movement’s project is cultural authenticity, not religious conformity. Philosopher Ajmi Lourimi, a member of the Bureau Executif of Nahda and a Levinas scholar, describes the current crisis in Tunisia as an “epistemological problem.” The main challenge for Tunisians—and people from the Maghreb, more generally—is to deal with the “inferiority complex” caused by colonization. “We need to work so that all citizens gain a sufficient level of culture and collective awareness, to make sure that there will be no going back,” he explained at a recent meeting organized in Tunis by the ReligioWest program.

Tunisian Islamists’ insistence on the imperative of cultural authenticity represents a moral narrative of modernity that is analogous to the Western narrative of modernity analyzed by Webb Keane, in which the category of sincere belief plays the central role. Just as Dutch missionaries defined interiority and sincerity as the core standard and site of modernity and true religiosity, Nahdawis insist on the re-appropriation of cultural authenticity as the defining standard of modernization and development. A return to what is imagined as authentic Tunisian tradition is presented as the condition of modernization. Collective consciousness and cultural reformation are here the active agents of progress, rather than individual conscience. But the idea of cultural authenticity serves also to mark a separation between what is deemed archaic (postcolonial laïcité but also alien forms of religiosity expressed within the Muslim world such as the Saudi or even Egyptian ones), and what is modern (unity, reconciliation, synthesis).

Tunisian Islamists have always had very little to say about religion. If they see religious freedom essentially as a non-issue, it is partly because they do not see religion as a problematic intellectual category, but simply as an obvious part of reality (waqa’) and life (hayat). Islamist intellectuals’ view on religion and politics is primarily informed by the writings of Rashid Ghannouchi, who has long considered that the key line of confrontation in Tunisia is not between religion and politics, but between society and the state. The crucial challenge is the protection of society from the state, not the protection of individuals from groups, or of true belief from heterodox practice. Tunisian Islamists hold an optimist view of society as a self-regulating and virtuous collective organization. Granted enough freedom, education, and economic opportunity, society will invent self-regulatory mechanisms that will lead to the development of piety and virtue, and allow non-Muslims to live according to their own beliefs. Now that Islamists have won 40 percent of the seats at the assembly and hold a prominent position within the transition government, their discourse has remained consistent with these previous preoccupations. The key questions for them are how to elaborate safe institutional mechanisms that will prevent the return of corruption (fasad) and despotism (istibdad), and how to establish social justice. In fact, Islamists are, in some sense, more secular than secularist groups. They advocate a high wall of separation between religion and the state, while secularist organizations and parties demand a close monitoring of mosques and religious institutions by the state.

The project discussed and promoted by Tunisian Nahdawi leaders today can be described as a historicist, hermeneutical project of cultural reformation. It is based on a teleological view of the direction of Tunisian history and the place of Islam in this history. After the ruptures of the colonial moment, and of the authoritarian regimes of Bourguiba and Ben Ali, now is the time when Tunisians can regain consciousness of their history and re-appropriate their past to better progress towards modernity. “The priority,” Lourimi insists, “is not Islamization of society, but modernization.” Key intellectual figures and leaders of Nahda such as Ajmi Lourimi, Abu Ya’areb Marzouki, and Ghannouchi, describe the current context as a moment of dialectical synthesis that comes after a long period of estrangement and division. Their call for unity, reconciliation, consensus—of national healing—is not strategic double-speak; it draws upon a deeply rooted Islamist sense of history in the postcolonial Maghreb. Mehdi Mabrouk, the current Minister of Culture, a sociologist, ex-member of the secular party PDP (Parti Démocrate Progressiste), and now close to Nahda (but not an official member) insists on Malekite heritage, Tunisian patrimony, and genealogy. During the Tunis ReligioWest meeting, Mabrouk stressed the need for unity and synthesis: “We need to find our Immanuel Kant, someone who will reconcile skepticals and dogmatics. We cannot stay in a state of division.” Over the past months, Mabrouk repeatedly dismissed allegations that the Islamist led government plans to engage in a plan of “Islamization of culture.” He condemned those who resort to accusations of takfir to silence artists and artistic production.

Mabrouk did trigger heated debates within the Tunisian and Arab artistic scene when he argued against the inclusion of a couple of sexy Lebanese female artists in the programming of the next festival of Carthage, a national cultural festival that takes place every summer. But, interestingly, he did not justify this decision with reference to Islam, but to good taste and high culture. This is not the “dictature of the proletariat anymore,” he explained half-jokingly; there needs to be a “diktat of good taste.” This combination of nationalism, social conservatism, and elitism resonates with most intellectuals and leaders of Nahda, who reject both miniskirts and salafi outfits as expressions of alienation, romantically longing for the return of the Tunisian traditional jebba (robe). However adamant or undiplomatic the Minister’s statement may seem, it is much closer to, say, the position of the French Ministry of Culture on American movies and pop music, than it is to a theocratic form of cultural repression. Ultimately, among the public, statements of this type are welcomed as subjects of satire and derision, rather than as real sources of concern. When Mabrouk further explained what he meant by the “diktat of good taste,” citing Jauss and Adorno, the young journalist who was interviewing him gently made fun of him, and reminded him of the success of El General, the most famous Tunisian rapper. Here generational divides are as important—if not more so—as the so-called division between Islam and secularism.

For Tunisian Islamists, obstacles to a collective reappropriation of national identity do not come mainly from the West or the North, but from Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, or even Egypt and Turkey. While most Nahdawi leaders refrain from engaging in overt critique of salafi groups or of the Islamist politics of neighboring countries, they strongly emphasize the originality and wealth of Tunisian cultural heritage, citing Tunisian Islamist reformers from the early twentieth century such as Tahar Haddad and Mohamed Fadel Ben Achour. In addition to this nationalist emphasis on Tunisia’s own historical resources, Nahdawi intellectuals and leaders call for a comprehensive hermeneutical reformation. This, they argue, is more than a mere issue of random ijtihad: Islamists, in collaboration with their supporters, need to develop a new methodology to reinterpret the past and see the present. “We need more than splinters of ijtihad, more than tinkering with the texts, we need a unified methodology,” argues Sami Braham, an intellectual “compagnon de route”—but not an actual member of Nahda. While most of them more or less openly admit that an integralist view of how Islam can inform political and current events is now passé, they also recognize the need for elaborating an Islamic ethics, not simply as the negation of alternative worldviews, but in positive terms.

The way Nahda leaders and intellectuals define Islam today, as the source of an ethical and cultural project of collective introspection and reformation, echoes the way in which Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce talked about the Christian identity of Europe in 1942. In his essay “Why we cannot help calling ourselves ‘Christian,’” Croce did not argue that “we” are Christians, or that “we” must call ourselves Christians. The phrasing of his title was an acknowledgement that Christianity as an unquestioned set of norms and institutions was dead. But the pamphlet was also an attempt to demonstrate why Christianity could still have something to say to, and about, Europe. Christianity here was not opposed to secularism, atheism, or Islam, but to the fascist and imperial politics of 1942 Europe and to the complicity of the Christian institutional church with this politics. Croce’s “Why we cannot not” is not a demand, but a proposition—almost a plea. It combined hope for a better future with nostalgia for a time when people were “all the more intensely Christian than they [were] free.”

A similar combination of nostalgia and hope can be found in the discourse of contemporary Islamist thinkers and politicians. Longing for a golden age of Tunisian history and culture sustains a hope for emancipation from an era defined by postcolonial politics, authoritarian secularism, and state Islam. No matter how fierce Nahda’s opponents are, there is wide support for Nahda’s message and project, one that can be summarized in the same terms as Croce’s statement: “We cannot not call ourselves ‘Muslims.’” Such a performative statement stems from a realization of the inadequacy of the ideology of shumuliyya (integralism) to Tunisian society, but also from the conviction that Islam still has something to say about that society. The reference to Islam and the Muslim appellation are indeed polysemous, and may appear as empty signifiers to many. But this is precisely what defines Nahda’s project; the reference to Islam is conceived as constraining, performative, and self-reflective, rather than as imposed by some external force or institution. Only through this reference to Islam, Nahdawi argue, will Tunisians be able to re-appropriate a sense of their own history. Ultimately, what matters is retrieving control of their history, more than adopting Islamically-correct ways of being and governing. “Our existence depends on God,” writes Gianni Vattimo, “because here and now we can’t speak our language nor live our historicity without answering to the message that the bible has transmitted to us.” Ajmi Lourimi, an admirer of Vattimo, says something similar when he insists on the need for Tunisians to regain a consciousness of their history. The reference to God and Islam matters primarily as the enabler of “our” existence, “here and now.”

Why We Cannot Help Calling Ourselves Christian.”

Mindful of these anxieties and pragmatic in its approach, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) has backed away from earlier calls for an “Islamic state.” Its 2011 election platform opts instead to promote the sharia as a “frame of reference. ” Working hard to assuage anxieties both at home and abroad, the Party explicitly calls for a “civil state” and repeatedly stresses the importance of equality of citizenship among Muslims and Christians:

Egyptians, Muslims and Christians, are integral parts of the fabric of the one homeland, with equal rights and duties, and without distinction or discrimination, and all together they must remove the injustice inflicted upon them.

Yet the FJP operationalizes this commitment to equal citizenship and religious freedom by declaring further that, “the basis of citizenship is full equality before the Constitution and the law and fully sharing all rights and duties, with the exemption of personal status matters where ‘each has his own rules’” (emphasis added). Elsewhere in the FJP platform, the party reiterates its position that “non-Muslims have the right to refer to their own rules and laws in the fields of family and religious affairs.”

As benign as this aspect of the FJP platform may sound, provisions guaranteeing “special rights” for different religious communities often carry illiberal implications when codified as state law. But the presumed alternative—banishing religious law through strict secularism—is also not an unqualified good. It imposes restrictions on “religious freedom” in another way, by disempowering citizens from entering into legal arrangements inspired by their own religious commitments. This paradox of religious freedom—the difficulty of reconciling the individual’s right from religion, while providing for the right to religious law is a paradox rooted in the modern state’s capacity and proclivity to codify and monopolize law. And, ironically, it is not modern state law but the Islamic legal tradition itself that may point the way out of this impasse.

It is important to note that the codification and implementation of religious law as state law is not only troubling from a “Western” liberal rights perspective, but also from the standpoint of the Islamic legal tradition. The core epistemology of Islamic jurisprudence dictates that Islamic legal doctrine is unavoidably pluralistic. Sharia is believed to be the perfect Law of God, but Muslim jurists have always insisted that it is impossible for fallible human beings to know that Law with certainty. Thus, the legal rules they extrapolated from scripture were treated as only “probable” articulations of sharia, all equally valid because there is no way to know for sure which jurist is correct (and no Muslim “church” to designate favorites). The legal doctrine they crafted is called “fiqh” (literally, “understanding”), and it eventually formed into schools of law that disagreed with each other, sometimes in significant ways. For Muslims, then, there is one Law of God, but there are many schools of fiqh articulating that Law on earth. That simple fact is what makes discussing sharia so challenging in the West, where it is assumed by many to be exact, uniform, and uncontestable by believers.

Fiqh pluralism allows Islamic law to be tangible enough for everyday use, but still flexible enough to accommodate evolution and personal choice. This pluralism is lost with state codification. Because sharia doesn’t exist as one code of law but rather as multiple fiqh schools, any state “legislation of sharia” is purely an exercise of state power, selecting one (humanly-created and fallible) fiqh rule out of several equally valid choices and enforcing it as state law, often in the guise of divine law. State codification of fiqh rules (and calling them “sharia”) undermines the dynamism of Islamic jurisprudence and the organic relationship with society that these jurisprudential traditions have had in the past. It freezes certain rules from a past time, anachronistically applying them in today’s different social, political, and technological contexts.

This is seen most clearly in the field of family law. A growing body of scholarship suggests that the codification of Islamic family law in Egypt and most other Muslim-majority countries was selective and partial. Far from advancing the status of women, the codification of Islamic family law actually narrowed the range of rights that women could claim in the diverse doctrines of multiple fiqh schools. Thus, the limited (and antiquated) laws of divorce that are applied today to Muslims in Egypt are dictated by contemporary politics, not by sharia.

All of this means that, from the perspective of both secularists and religious Muslims, collective rights for specific religious communities will stand in tension with the individual rights of citizenship as long as religious law remains wedded to state law. Moreover, this situation begs a perennial question of religious authority—that is, who has the right to define the rules of a religious community. In their current mold, the governments of most Muslim-majority countries essentially claim to be both authors and enforcers of sharia. The theocratic dangers of this arrangement should offend not only secularists who feel that state law should be separated from religion but also Muslims because it disrespects fiqh pluralism and allows the state to claim control over what used to be left to the autonomy of independent fiqh scholars. For both sides of the “religious-secular” divide, if “religious freedom” is to have any meaning, this paradox needs to be addressed.

One possible resolution is to examine the historical roots of the problem—to interrogate the codification and incorporation of Islamic family law as state law and to delink and reconfigure the relationship between religious law and the state. A first step would be to recognize that most political Islamist movements operate on an image of Islamic government that is a stark departure from the structure of nearly every pre-modern Muslim government, in which there was a separation of legal authority between fiqh scholars and government lawmakers. Rulers made and enforced laws ostensibly to serve public order (siyasa laws) but they did not make or codify fiqh law. Siyasa power was used to enforce judicial decisions of fiqh-based legal disputes, but fiqh did not need state enactment in order to be authoritative. And before “legal monism,” a term adapted by Sherman Jackson to denote the presumption that all law must emanate from a centralized state, siyasa enforcement of fiqh-based judicial decisions was generally done with respect for fiqh pluralism.

Today’s reigning assumption that a Muslim state may codify religious laws for an entire religious community undermines the legal pluralism that religious communities (Muslim and non-Muslim) used to enjoy in pre-modern systems. Before centralized nation-states, Muslim governments operated on a “to each his own” approach to religious law that included not just the many Muslim fiqh legal schools, but also the religious law of Christians, Jews, and others. It is this model of religious pluralism from the Islamic legal tradition that the Muslim Brotherhood ostensibly invokes in its 2011 election platform, but there is a key difference: individuals in pre-modern Muslim systems enjoyed official recognition of their preferred religious law without the state codifying it for them.

Contrary to the impression created by many contemporary Islamists’ focus on codification, “legislating sharia” is not what makes a country Islamic. Pre-modern Muslim rulers enjoyed sharia legitimacy for their lawmaking on the premise that they served the public good, not because they were selecting and enforcing a preferred interpretation of scripture. In fact, it was their early attempts to do the latter that led to the separation of fiqh and siyasa legal realms in the first place.

State codification of sharia also flies in the face of the core epistemology of Islamic jurisprudence: that no human can ever know God’s Law for sure. Codifying fiqh on the premise that “it is sharia” rejects the humility exhibited by centuries of fiqh scholars and implies that the state can declare what is the correct interpretation of divine law for their society. This is a radical and unprecedented move.

Unfortunately, many lay Muslims and Islamist political activists seem to unquestioningly assume a centralized state model, and this presumption bolsters the idea that an “Islamic” government should use the state apparatus to legislate and enforce its preferred interpretation of sharia upon the population. Few think of law in terms of the fiqh-siyasa bifurcation of legal authority that was built upon the hard-fought lessons of Muslim history. In fact, the average Muslim conception of sharia itself has largely mutated over the past century. Many are so unaware of fiqh pluralism that government assertions of “the” sharia rule are often blindly accepted as true, even when there are actually multiple fiqh opinions on the topic. Many Muslims even defend “sharia legislation” as if defending their very faith, fiercely opposing anyone challenging it as a perceived enemy of Islam.

All of this manifests in the familiar and seemingly endless war between secularists and Islamists discussed and analyzed by political commentators. Unfortunately, both inside and outside Muslim-majority countries, the focus is usually on whether one or the other side will win the latest battle. A better path is to explore creative alternatives to end the war.

The 9/11 debate was centered on a single issue: Islam. Osama Bin Laden was taken at his own words by the West: Al-Qaeda, even if its methods were supposedly not approved by most Muslims, was seen as the vanguard or at least a symptom of “Muslim wrath” against the West, fueled by the fate of the Palestinians and by Western encroachments in the Middle East; and if this wrath, which has pervaded the contemporary history of the Middle East, has been cast in Islamic terms, it is because Islam is allegedly the main, if not the only, reference that has shaped Muslim minds and societies since the Prophet. This vertical genealogy obscured all the transversal connections (the fact, for instance, that Al-Qaeda systematized a concept of terrorism that was first developed by the Western European ultra-left of the seventies or the fact that most Al-Qaeda terrorists do not come from traditional Muslim societies but are recruited from among global, uprooted youth, with a huge proportion of converts).

The consequence was that the struggle against terrorism was systematically associated with a religious perspective based on the theory of a clash of civilizations: Islam was at the core of Middle East politics, culture, and identity. This led to two possibilities: either acknowledge the “clash of civilizations” and head toward a global confrontation between the West and Islam or try to mend fences through a “dialogue of civilizations,” enhancing multiculturalism and religious pluralism. Both attitudes shared the same premises: Islam is both a religion and a culture and is at the core of the Arab identity. They differed on one essential point: for the “clashists,” there is no “moderate” Islam; for the “dialogists,” one should favor and support “moderate” Islam, with the recurring question, what is a good Muslim?

Then came, just ten years after 9/11, the Arab Spring, in which Islam did not play a role, and the killing of Osama Bin Laden, whose death went almost unnoticed among Muslim public opinion. What about the “Muslim wrath”? Suddenly, the issue of Islam and jihad being at the core of the political mobilization in Muslim societies seemed to become, at least for a time, irrelevant. So what went wrong with the perception of the Western media, leaders, and public opinion? Was the West wrong about the role of Islam in shaping political mobilization in Muslim societies? Yes. The essentialist and culturalist approach, common to both the clash of and dialogue of civilizations theories, missed three elements: society, politics, and more astonishingly . . . religion.

In fact, three paradigms—social, political, and religious—have changed in Muslim societies over the last twenty years:

1. A new global generation — As Philippe Fargues showed some time ago, there has been a profound demographic change in the Arab world: the fertility rate has fallen dramatically (in Tunisia, it fell below the French rate after 2000), women have entered universities and the job market, young people marry later, there is more equality in couples (in terms of age and education), they have fewer children and are better educated than their parents, and nuclear families are replacing extended households. Cell phones, satellite TV, and the Internet have allowed these new generations to connect and debate on a “peer” basis rather than through a top-down authoritarian system of knowledge transmission. The younger generation is a peer generation and does not want to be strongly bound to a patriarchal society that has been unable to cope with the challenges of contemporary Middle Eastern societies.
2. A shift in the political culture — Being more individualistic, the members of this new generation are less attracted to holistic ideologies, whether Islamist or nationalist, and there is a sharp decline of interest in the patriarchal model embodied by charismatic leaders. The failure of political Islam that I pointed to twenty years ago is obvious; it does not mean that Islamist parties are no longer present on the political field—to the contrary—but that their Utopian conception of an “Islamic state” has lost credibility. The Islamist ideology is challenged either by a call for democracy, which rejects the claim of any party or ideology to have a monopoly on power, or by the “neo-fundamentalists,” or Salafis, who claim that only a strict personal return to the true tenets of religious practices could help to establish an “Islamic society.” Even among the Muslim Brotherhood, young members reject blind obedience to the leadership. The new generation calls for debate, freedom, democracy, and good governance. They are more patriotic than nationalist, and while the Palestinian issue still has an emotional impact, it is no longer at the core of political mobilization (a fact, by the way, that undermines the well-established cliché stating that, as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unsettled, there will be no peace or democracy in the Middle East). The appeal of democracy is not a consequence of the exportation of the concept of Western democracy, as fancied by the supporters of the US military intervention in Iraq. It is the political consequence of a process of social and cultural changes in Arab societies, which, of course, is part of the globalization process. It is precisely because the Arab Spring is a succession of indigenous upheavals, centered on the nation and unlinked from Western encroachments (which, when they happen, come after and not before the movement, as in Libya), that democracy is seen as both acceptable and desirable. Consequently, the ritual anti-imperialist mottos and chants have disappeared from demonstrations (including the usual condemnation of Zionism as the source of all the problems of the Arab world). This explains why Al-Qaeda is out of the picture: the uprooted global jihadist is no longer a model and fails to germinate when he comes to enlist local militants for the global cause (Al-Qaeda has been expelled from Iraq by the local fighters), with the exception of the geographic fringes of the Arab world (Sahel, Somalia, Yemen). Al-Qaeda was part and parcel of the old anti-imperialist Middle East political culture: fighting the West first and never caring about real societies. It disappears with the dictators because they are two sides of the same coin.
3. A new religiosity — This is probably the least understood mutation. There were two recurrent premises underlying the debate on Islam: that democratization is linked with secularization and that this secularization process should go with a rise of a “liberal Islam.” So began the search for reformers, liberals, not to speak of a Muslim Martin Luther (the people who advocate a reformation of Islam in order to free it from fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and gender prejudices apparently never read Luther). The visible re-Islamization of Muslim societies during the last thirty years (spreading of the veil, growing mosque attendance, Islamization of daily life, and so forth) seemed at odds with this supposed prerequisite, but in fact, it is far more congruent with a process of democratization than expected. Why? This wave of re-Islamization hides a very important fact: it has contributed to the diversification and the individualization of the religious field. Religion (theological corpus) did not change, but religiosity (the way the believer experiences his or her faith) did, and this new religiosity, liberal or not, is compatible with democratization because it unlinks personal faith from collective identity, traditions, and external authority. The usual religious authorities (ulema, or Islamist leaders) have largely lost their legitimacy in favor of self-appointed, and often self-taught, religious entrepreneurs. Young born-agains have found their own way by surfing on the Internet or joining local groups of peers: very critical of the cultural Islam of their parents, they have tried to construct their own brand of Islam. Religion has become more and more a matter of personal choice, ranging from Salafism to any sort of syncretism, not to mention conversions to other religions (see, for instance, the growth of an evangelical Protestant church among former Muslims in Morocco and Algeria). This individualization and diversification has had the unexpected consequence of disconnecting religion from daily politics, of bringing it back to the private, and of excluding it from the sphere of government management. As I tried to show in Holy Ignorance, fundamentalism, by disconnecting religion from culture and by defining a faith community through believing and not just belonging, is in fact contributing to the secularization of society (hence the bitter belief of any fundamentalist, from born-again Christian evangelicals to Salafi Muslims, that true believers are a minority, even if the surrounding society is nominally sharing the same religion).

All these changes gave way to what I called “post-Islamism” (the expression was first used by Asef Bayat)—it does not mean that the Islamists disappeared, but that their Utopia did not block social, political, or even geo-strategic realities. They have no blueprint for an “Islamic economy,” and although they run many charities in deprived neighborhoods, they tend to become socially conservative, opposing strikes and approving of the rescinding of agrarian reform in Egypt; they have never been able to articulate a coherent supranational program of mobilizing the “ummah” (the Islamic world), leaving the concept in the bloody hands of Al-Qaeda and standing in the Middle East in an uneasy status quo between the strategic ambitions of a supposedly Islamic, but Shia, Iran and Arab dictators (from Saddam Hussein to the Saudis) who claim to protect the Sunnis from the “Shia threat.” They favor elections because they do not support armed struggle even when unable to strike a deal with authoritarian regimes, but they are uneasy about sharing power with non-Islamic groups and turning their “brotherhood” kind of an organization into a modern political party. They have not given up formal support for sharia (except in Tunisia and Morocco) but are unable to define a concrete ruling program that would go beyond banning alcohol and promoting the veil or some other petty forms of shariatization.

After the Arab Spring, which started outside their ranks, the Islamists have choices to make. The first option would be the “Turkish model” (the AK Party): turning the “brotherhood” into a true modern political party, trying to rally a larger constituency than hard-core devout Muslims, recasting religious norms as more vague conservative values (family, property, work ethic, honesty), adopting a neoliberal approach to the economy, and endorsing a constitution, a parliament, and regular elections. Another option would be to ally with “counterrevolution” forces for fear of a real democracy that they are not sure to control, but they thereby risk losing their remaining legitimacy, as in Egypt, where they might be instrumentalized by the army. They may also side with the Salafis by calling for an Islamization that would center on certain isolated issues (veil, family law), the same way Christian conservatives in the West are focusing on abortion and gay marriage while ignoring other social and economic issues.

Whatever the political ups and downs, the diversity of the national cases, the foreseeable fragmentation of both “democrats” and “Islamists” into various trends and parties, the main issue will be to redefine the role of, and the reference to, Islam in politics. The de facto autonomization of the religious field from political and ideological control does not mean, once again, that secularism is necessarily gaining ground. What is at stake is the reformulation of religious reference in the public sphere. There is large agreement on inscribing in constitutions the “Muslim” identity of society and of the state; there is also large agreement on the fact that sharia is not an autonomous practical system of law that could be implemented from above and replace “secular” law.

As I’ve described, modern forms of religiosity tend to stress individual faith and choices over conformity to any sort of institutionalized Islam. The old motto “in Islam, no separation between religion (din) and worldly issues (dunya)” already turned a long time ago from an academic statement to mere wishful thinking, but it has been definitively undermined by the Arab Spring. What we see, more than secularization, is a deconstruction of Islam, torn between some sort of a cultural identity (there could be, in this sense, “atheist Muslims”), a faith that could be shared only by born-again believers (Salafis) in the confines of self-centered faith communities, or a “horizon of meaning” where references to sharia are more virtual than real.

The recasting of religious norms as values helps also to promote an interfaith coalition of religious conservatives that could unite around specific causes—opposition to same-sex marriage, for instance. It is interesting to see how, in Western Europe, for example, secular populists tend to stress more and more the Christian identity of Europe, while many Muslim conservatives try to forge an alliance of believers to defend shared values. In so doing, many of them tend to adopt an evangelical Protestant agenda, fighting abortion and Darwinism, both issues that have never been relevant in traditional Islamic debates. In this sense, modern neo-fundamentalists are trying to recast Islam as a kind of Western-compatible religious conservatism, a fact that is obvious in Turkey, where, in 2004, the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, tried to promote an anti-adultery law that defined adultery not in terms of sharia but by reference to the modern Western family (a monogamous marriage of a man and a woman with equal rights and duties, thus making the custom of polygamy, not uncommon among traditional AK local cadres, although illegal since 1926, more clearly a crime). Islam is thus part of the recasting of a religious global market disconnected from local cultures.

Such an evolution is completely inconsistent with the image of Islam that is constructed and spread by populist movements in the West. In fact, as far as the West is concerned, the main legacy of 9/11, which will survive the “War on Terror” and the death of Bin Laden, is the rooting of Islamophobic populist movements in Western Europe and the United States. These movements have fully borrowed and legitimized the clashist theory: Islam is construed as the enemy of an otherwise elusive “Western” identity. Even populist movements born of a different set of grievances (Lega Nord in Italy, the Tea Party in the United States, the Vlaams Belang in Belgium) have endorsed Islamophobia as one of their main battle cries. It is no surprise that they all dismissed the Arab Spring as irrelevant and don’t acknowledge the way Muslims, both in their native societies and in the West, are recasting their faith into global forms of religiosity. Interestingly, the debate on Islam in the West raised the same questions as in the Middle East: Is religion first a faith or first an identity? Is the crucifix in Italian classrooms just a cultural symbol of national identity or the symbol of the sacrifice of Christ for sinners? The debate about the role of religion in the public sphere should be conducted beyond the clichés of Orientalist essentialism by acknowledging the transversal dimension that connects all the great world religions in their endeavor to find a balance between faith and identity, religion and culture, individual quest and collective belonging, and territorialization and globalization. In this sense, there is neither an Arab nor an Islamic exceptionalism.

Due to severe restrictions on Islamist political parties throughout most of Turkey’s history, charitable foundations and organizations have taken on a particularly important role in developing and defining Islamic politics in a country that is constitutionally secular, but, at least nominally, 99.9 percent Muslim.

To take only the most prominent example, the Gülen movement has become one of the most powerful and influential forces within Turkish society, with control of Turkey’s most popular newspaper, a major university, several television stations, a bank, etc. Internationally, the movement, through businesses, charitable groups, scholarly activity, and, in particular, affiliated schools, has done a tremendous amount to increase both its own and Turkey’s influence abroad. In a remarkably shrewd program of public diplomacy, it quietly runs conferences and tours of Turkey for foreign academics and opinion makers, which aim to increase public sympathy both for Turkey and for the Gülen movement’s own vision of Islamic modernism. Its influence has garnered attention; it is the subject of a remarkable literature, some unabashedly hagiographical, and some depicting an almost mafia-like network of control. The Gülen movement is also the most successful example of a religious movement integrating itself into the fabric of the Turkish political system, with strong mutual ties between itself and the AKP and, by all appearances, with influence on major bureaucracies (most notably the police, which it has apparently used to stifle criticism). For decades, the secular government viewed the movement as a direct threat to the state. In recent years, however, despite some apparent tensions, a relationship has developed between the AKP and the Gülen movement and has clearly strengthened both.

The Gülen movement is also the most significant example of a larger process, however. As Jenny White outlined in her landmark Political Mobilization in Turkey, the relationship between religious organizations and charities, on the one hand, and Islamist political parties, on the other, was central to the rise of what would become the AKP. It is a formula that has continued to work and one of the reasons why the AKP has, since it first came to power in 2002, almost completely dominated Turkish politics and, in many ways, initiated an era of transformation in Turkish society that is at least as profound as that undergone during Turkey’s transition to democracy under Adnan Menderes, between 1950 and 1960.

The same type of alliance between private charities and the AKP that marked its rise to power and continues to color its domestic policy can be seen in its foreign policy. In particular, the AKP has worked with the İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetler İnsani Yardım Vakfı (The Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief), or IHH, in several highly conspicuous missions that have greatly increased Turkey’s regional visibility and prestige. This relationship, in turn, has allowed Turkey greater flexibility of action than it might otherwise have enjoyed.

The IHH initially developed as a response to the targeting of Muslims in the breakup of Yugoslavia. Despite harassment by the Turkish government and early controversies regarding use of funds and its relationship to militant Islamist groups, it has, since the 1990s, become one of the most effective and influential Islamic NGOs in Turkey. Like many civil society organizations, the IHH gained substantial credibility in the aftermath of the earthquake of 1999, which left the Turkish state looking lackadaisical and uncaring in comparison to the proactive and efficient response of civil society. In addition, the IHH highlights the growing prominence of self-consciously Islamic actors within the Turkish public sphere under the AKP.

The AKP has won elections, not just by carrying its base, but also by creating shifting coalitions—pulling in voters who, while not necessarily sympathetic to its religious profile, nonetheless see it as the best electoral option. The IHH, however, represents the AKP’s core constituency: more religious and, while still deeply nationalistic, far more aware of itself as part of an international community of Muslims. Although it is true that many in the AKP’s devout base would prefer a party that was more explicitly Islamic, there is little question that this group makes up the AKP’s most loyal supporters. Like most Turks, they tend to see Muslims in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans as part of their “near abroad.” However, the IHH and groups like it have been especially innovative through their a longstanding interest and activities the Muslim Africa and the Arab Middle East, which has, in turn, helped to redefine the Turkish public’s commitment to these regions (and although the IHH has engaged in charitable activities outside of the Muslim world, the reality is that these efforts have been extremely limited in both scale and duration).

It is precisely because of this “internationalist” outlook that the IHH and similar groups have proven such valuable allies to the AKP in its regional foreign policy, which has taken on an increasingly “Islamic” tone in the past five or so years. Initially, Turkey made real efforts at EU ascension, at addressing the issue of Cyprus, and at improving ties with both Greece and Armenia. Since the middle of the last decade, however, most of these programs have stalled, sometimes because of Turkish decisions, but just as often because of choices quite outside of their control. As the 2000s wore on, therefore, the “strategic depth” envisioned by the AKP’s chief foreign policy strategist, Ahmet Davutoğlu, took on an increasingly (though never exclusively) Muslim character.

Groups like the IHH have been a central component of the “soft power” influence that Davutoğlu sees as central to Turkey’s growing regional role. For example, the IHH served as the vanguard for Turkish reconstruction work in Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel’s 2006 invasion. Their work has included, in addition to medical and other charitable support, the establishment of an “Istanbul Education Center.” Along with technical training, the school offers Turkish classes, Similar programs have been developed elsewhere. A survey of the IHH’s activities makes it clear that it is an Islamic charitable organization, but one also very much colored by its Turkish identity. From the AKP’s perspective, this has made it an important vehicle for Turkish ties to the region (and visits by AKP dignitaries make clear the IHH’s prestige). At the same time, the IHH also represents one means by which the AKP’s devout Sunni base has been able to pressure the government to take policies more in keeping with their vision. In the past year, the IHH was particularly active in pressuring Turkey to take a harder line with the Assad regime in Syria, and it appears to have facilitated Turkish contacts with the Syrian opposition.

The IHH played an even larger role in the dissolution of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, which the AKP has inherited from its predecessors. The close relationship between Turkey and Israel was largely the product of the Turkish military’s determination, in the 1990s, to define Turkish foreign policy. From the perspective of the AKP, a cooling of this relationship was attractive in terms of domestic politics (demonstrating that the civilian government had the final say over all matters of policy), electoral politics (Israel’s standing with the Turkish public was never high and declined precipitously after the Second Intifada), and for Turkey’s standing in the wider Middle East. In order to be an effective regional player, Turkey needed to be able to interact with Israel without appearing to be merely a U.S. proxy. Ideologically, politically, and strategically, the Turkish-Israeli alliance was an unwelcome inheritance for the AKP and grew increasingly sour over time. By 2009, Erdoğan was loudly berating the Israeli government for “knowing well how to kill,” while at the same time increasing Turkey’s contacts with Hamas and Hizbullah.

Although the IHH had facilitated these shifts, both by lobbying in Turkey and through its contacts in Lebanon and Palestine, its most dramatic contribution has been its participation in an international “Gaza Freedom Flotilla,” in 2010, which aimed to weaken the Israeli blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip by transporting humanitarian aid directly to the Port of Gaza, bypassing Israeli controls. Despite claims that it had no role to play, there is little question that the Turkish government supported the flotilla, facilitating the IHH’s purchase of the Mavi Marmara ferryboat from the AKP-controlled Istanbul Municipal Government. The leader of the IHH, Bülent Yıldırim, specifically thanked the AKP and two other parties for their support at the ceremony marking the beginning of the flotilla. And although Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu later claimed that he attempted to persuade the IHH to bring the aid through an Israeli port, it seems unlikely, given the close relations between the AKP and the IHH, that real pressure was brought to bear. Indeed, the Turkish position at the time was simply that it had no way of controlling a civilian organization.

Although the flotilla was certainly designed to prompt a confrontation that would embarrass Israel and weaken the embargo of Gaza, it seems unlikely that anybody had foreseen Israel’s clumsy attack on the flotilla, which left nine activists killed and dozens injured. Despite the high human costs, however, Turkey had the excuse it needed to finally end an awkward alliance with Israel, while its moral stature in the region was now unparalleled. Turkey’s economy, its cultural output, and the broad model of a Muslim democracy all are important elements of its improved standing in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the assertiveness with which it has positioned itself as a critic of American policy in the region, along with its increasingly vocal support of Palestinian rights, has put it in a class by itself. According to recent polls, Tayyip Erdoğan is the most admired foreign political leader in the Arab world and most Palestinians see Turkey as their best regional ally.

Nonetheless, the AKP seems to have calculated that, while it has no particular interest in a warming of relations with Israel, it also has little to gain from further heightening tensions. The AKP successfully persuaded the IHH to forego a second Gaza Flotilla in 2011. Diplomatic ties will continue to be cool, but Turkey has a strong enough tradition in multi-party talks to serve as a mediator if the opportunity arises. In the meantime, Turkey can enjoy the independence and prestige of a public estrangement. Israel, in turn, is left painfully aware that it needs Turkey far more than Turkey needs it. Official apology or no, hopes in Israel that the estrangement with Turkey is temporary are simply wishful thinking. Posters placed by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and the Istanbul Municipality promise brotherhood with the Palestinians in their struggle to liberate Jerusalem, and Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan has voiced interest in a visit to Gaza.

An IHH aid flotilla played a similarly central role in another recent Turkish foray into regional politics. Initially, Turkey met the rise of the anti-Gaddafi resistance movement in Libya with considerable discomfort, finding itself at odds with both its Western allies and regional public opinion. To its credit, however, the Turkish government quickly changed tack, pairing minimal and grudging support for the NATO intervention with a very broad humanitarian effort, with the IHH again taking a leading role. At a time when the Libyan opposition was still protesting against Turkey’s apparent sympathy to Gaddafi, the IHH’s presence enabled the Turks to backtrack from an untenable position: it allowed them to address a real humanitarian crisis, to build bridges with an initially antagonistic Libyan opposition, and to distinguish themselves from their NATO allies by highlighting humanitarian projects over military intervention. As Turkey realized that Gaddafi’s position was hopeless, it began to build on these ties to reach out to the Libyan opposition. By July 2011, Turkey had clearly positioned itself as an ally of the Libyan opposition. Humanitarian aid had played a key role in allowing the AKP to negotiate a difficult transition and to reposition itself for a post-Gaddafi Libya.

The alliance between the AKP and Islamic charities such as the IHH has been mutually beneficial. The AKP mobilized its base as a means of increasing its outreach, both domestically and overseas. This cooperation has both appealed to the internationalist outlook of the AKP’s devout base and afforded Turkey increased influence in its “near abroad,” thus serving as an important component of the AKP’s emphasis on amplifying the country’s “soft power.” Under the AKP, charity abroad has served Turkey well.

I studied with the Jesuits in St. Xavier’s School, in Dhobi Talao, no more than two kilometers from the Taj and the Oberoi Trident. We had the most recent reunion of the Class of 1965 at The Ritz Hotel in January 2008, only about five hundred meters from the Taj and the Oberoi. This reunion brought together a group of “old boys” near their sixtieth birthdays. They included Goan Catholics who are now engineers, hoteliers and priests; Marwari, Gujarati and Sindhi classmates who are now portly magnates or diabetic executives; Parsis and Iranis in various walks of business and commercial life; and Tamil-speakers who are about to retire from the software, medical and academic worlds. Some had come from California, some from the Persian Gulf, some from New York, many from other cities in India, a few from London. But the majority was still in Mumbai, though they now lived in places further away from South Mumbai than before. It was a riotous polyglot event, to which spouses were not invited for reasons of space and cost. A drunken set of singing, reminiscing “boys,” joking about their bald heads and big bellies, making plans to see each other again in Dubai, or Toronto, or San Francisco or perhaps Mumbai again, in another five years.

No one at the reunion talked about Hindutva, or Islamic terror, or Mumbai’s class cruelties or about the poorer members of our graduating class, who could not afford the $25 fee for the food and drinks, or were too ashamed that their lives and careers had gone nowhere. The night was a palace of memories, a requiem for our dreams of a Bombay of mixing and fixing.

In the mid 1960s, I attended a great colonial institution, Elphinstone College, the academic jewel of the University of Bombay. It is hardly a hundred meters from the Café Leopold, whose customers were butchered by the gunmen from the sea, a hundred and fifty meters from the Taj, and perhaps three hundred meters from Nariman House where Tel Aviv and Jerusalem were re-enacted in miniature. Those were magic years too, where seventeen and eighteen year old boys and girls from high schools across the city discovered Tennyson, Ionesco, calculus and joyous libidinal upticks. My college had magazines and “wallpapers” (early versions of blogs) in English, Marathi, Urdu and Gujarati, and our beloved “canteen,” a filthy little hangout, was the scene of political banter about Marx and Mao, chit-chat about the theatre of the absurd, loans of tattered copies of The Waste Land and the latest James Bond novel, as well as of feverish efforts to prepare for exams in logic, Indian history, development economics and much else. The high-end South Mumbai flaneurs among us fancied ourselves the envy of the “vernaculars” (who still were most comfortable in various Indian languages) but some of these boys and girls from humble and unglamorous backgrounds ranked first in the examinations and put the South Bombay slickers to shame. Elphinstone College was an aristocracy of the mind. We hardly knew anything about Delhi, and almost none of us had heard about St. Stephen’s College, which we only learned to envy when we met the Delhi Dons in Oxford, or Cambridge or Berkeley or New York, years later.

We lived blissfully in the cocoon of South Mumbai, roaming past the Taj, wandering through the cafes of Colaba Causeway, including Café Leopold, sneaking away from classes to the Regal cinema to watch re-runs of Rock Hudson and Doris Day, hoping for own nights of pillow talk. Our cosmopolitanism extended from Satyajit Ray to Ingmar Bergman, from Raj Kapoor to Charles Bronson, from Encounter to Photoplay, and from Bakri-Id to Diwali. I grew up thinking that Jews were a sect of Muslims and that the distance from Vohras to Bohras was no more than a typo.

Our parents also thrived in this golden period of friendships and business relationships which cut across differences of language and food, religion and neighborhood, though always restrained by the exclusions of caste and class, which we Anglophones were privileged to ignore. I left Bombay for the United States in 1967 and though I visited regularly thereafter, I soon knew that things had begun to change. The first big sign was the 1984 attack on the Golden Temple by the Indian Army, which led to a nationwide and shocking series of attacks on Sikhs, inspired in part by the regime of Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by some Sikhs among her bodyguards. This was the first major ethnic trauma of India’s still young secular democracy after Partition. Sikhs were painted as India’s enemies, in effect a fifth column of faux Hindus, Muslims in disguise. The rape, burning and brutalizing of poor Sikh populations, especially in Delhi, was the first sign that any Indian minority could henceforth be the “other” and that Hindu mobs were capable of organized bestiality on a grand scale.

The mid 1980s also saw the rise to respectability of the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organizations committed to Hindu nationalism, some of whom had already won their colors in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948. The BJP rose to national prominence at the very same time that Rajiv Gandhi (the son of Indira Gandhi) opened up India’s markets and laid the foundations for free market competition, state capitalism and cyber-technology, even before the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In India, 1989 marked the moment when the Hindu Right became politically legitimate and launched its major nation-wide campaign of mobilization, propaganda, revisionism and violence against Muslims, which culminated in the now notorious destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, which could have been prevented by the Government had they had the will and the courage. This led to a wave of Muslim mobilizations and reactions across the country and created a powerful link in the minds of young Muslims between the devastating nature of Indian state violence in Kashmir and the growing terror against Muslim religious institutions, identities and organizations across India from the Hindu right, both official and informal.

The late 1980s, widely seen as the period when Islamic fundamentalism went global, also witnessed the birth of an aggressive global Hinduism, sponsored by traveling Hindu ascetics, youth camps, newspapers, and fund-raising campaigns that connected overseas Hindus, especially in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom to their models and teachers in India. Their message was simple: India is Hindu; all non-Hindus in India are potentially treacherous minorities; Muslims are especially dangerous because they substantially support Pakistan; and Pakistan is armed, dangerous and belligerent, especially in Kashmir. Muslim militants in Kashmir, meanwhile, linked their struggles to Palestine, Chechnya, Kabul, as well as to London, Europe and elsewhere in Asia. Today, the global Hindu Right is forcefully represented in the United States by Indian lobbying groups, pseudo-academics, cultural cover organizations and bland philanthropic para-organizations, who work assiduously to peddle soft Hindutva even as they whitewash genocide and cultural terror in India. This twenty-five year process today threatens to sneak by even the sharp eyes of President-elect Obama’s transition team.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, Indian Hindus and Muslims became globalized together. Muslims were brought together by fundamentalist messages from the radical elements of the Sunni world, by funds from Saudi Arabia to build mosques and madrassas in India, by the opportunities for smalltime Arab men from the Persian Gulf to purchase poor Muslim brides from India, and above all, by the increasing brutality of India’s military forces in Kashmir. Pakistan, meanwhile, steeply morphed into South Asia’s most dangerous failed state, provoked Muslim anger against the West in India, Afghanistan and elsewhere, helped to breed the Taliban in its Northwest provinces, hosted Al Qaeda in the late 1990s and after, and has recently discovered that it is now a hostage to Islamic terror itself.

These parallel globalizations met fatefully in Mumbai on November 26 and that too in multiple ways. Global Islam seems the easier to describe. The suspects clearly had ground support in Pakistan, quasi-official elements in Pakistan must have known of the plan, Kashmir was invoked by the lone survivor among the gunmen, and other evidence exists not only of Pakistan-based support but also of India-based human infrastructure for the attack. All this is clear, and in coming weeks the forensic wheat will be separated from the chaff.

What of the Hindu side? On the face of it, Hindus (and Muslims, Jews and Christians) were apparently just victims. But global Hindutva was also implicated, at least in two ways. First, Mumbai is the major site where global finance intersects with the major Hindu fascist party of the last 40 years, the Shiva Sena. The Shiva Sena, which began as a bunch of lumpen Marathi-speaking thugs who took advantage of the linguistic chauvinism of Marathi-speakers has grown into a forceful, protean and sustainable source of vile anti-Muslim propaganda from the 1960s until today. Second, Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, perhaps the most dangerous and persuasive BJP ideologue in India today, an aspirant for the Prime Ministership, and a remarkable blender of genocidal Hindu nationalism and soft development-speak in Gujarat, has been to Mumbai regularly in the last few years, including since the recent terrorist attack.

Not only is this a God-given opportunity for Narendra Modi, few analysts have observed that Modi’s recurrent appearances in Mumbai over the last decade and his highly publicized appearances with major Mumbai-based business leaders in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Delhi and elsewhere remind us that Gujarat never forgave Marathi nationalists for successfully annexing Mumbai to their side after the linguistic riots of 1956. Gujarati-speakers still regard Mumbai as their city, usurped by the Maratha peasantry and the Marathi-speaking lumpenproletariat of the city. Among other things, the recent events in Mumbai are a struggle between the Indian Ocean (the Arabian Sea) and the Marathi and Gujarati hinterlands for control over Mumbai. Modi is the voice of the Gujarati jihad against the Islam of the Arabian Sea, just as Bal Thackeray is the voice of lumpen Maharashtra against its land-based enemies from Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, U.P, Bihar, etc., all now telescoped into the battle against land-based Islam in India.

Atop this deep struggle, which could arguably be read back into the geo-politics of the Indian Ocean for at least the last five centuries, lie the interests of New Delhi, which sees Mumbai as a homegrown Shanghai in its aspirations for global economic stardom. In addition, Mumbai is the home of the Western Command of the Indian Navy, by far the most powerful base for Indian ships, sailors and naval strategists, all of whom have a massive presence within a few hundred meters of where the terrorist visitors landed on the night of November 26, 2009. Mumbai is also the home of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (in Chembur) perhaps 30 kilometers from the major attacks, and a key part of India’s nuclear apparatus. A vast proportion of Mumbai’s real estate is directly or indirectly controlled by the Indian Navy, the Indian Army, the Mumbai police and various other military or security agencies. Mumbai is armed to the teeth, though it is primarily seen as India’s commercial hub. This makes the terrorist attacks an amazing kick in India’s military teeth.

Last, but hardly least, Mumbai has been the cosmopolis of criminal interests in gold smuggling, arms smuggling and other forms of oceanic crime linking the Persian Gulf, Pakistan and the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra for at least a few centuries.  Inland from the West Coast of India, and on the Eastern side of the hills known as the Western Ghats, Maharashtra and Gujarat have massive differences, a history of ethnolinguistic conflict and a classic struggle between elites based in commerce (Gujarat) and elites based in warfare and agrarian control (Maharashtra). But on the West Coast of India, looking out to the Persian Gulf, it’s a different story, in which smugglers, pirates, fishermen and politicians, as well as ship-owners, dhow captains, commercial brokers and policemen have seamlessly crossed the lines between coastal languages, castes, classes and ethnicities.

Mumbai is where this coastal world meets the Mumbai underworld and it has long been a meeting place between communities of Hindus and Muslims from as far afield as Tamil Nadu, Afghanistan, Goa, Konkan, Kerala, and the island world surrounding Mumbai. True, the major criminal figures who have long been involved in linking smuggling, gold, cinema and real estate in Mumbai, famously Dawood Ibrahim, have been Muslims. But beneath this religious identity lies a complex patchwork of identities and biographies that range across much of the West Coast and peninsular India. In short, the links between Mumbai, Pakistan and the Gulf are now profoundly multi-lingual and do not easily match the tensions between speakers of Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Hindi that constitute the land-based politics of the Shiva Sena. Thus it is not a minor matter that Dawood Ibrahim is a Muslim from the Konkan region, between Goa and Kerala on the West Coast of India.

In other words, as we learn more about the deep geo-politics behind the terrifying attacks on Mumbai earlier this month, we need to recognize that there is a tectonic struggle going on in and near Mumbai on at least three axes: the deepest axis (from a historical point of view) is the struggle between the Indian Ocean commercial/criminal nexus and the land-based nexus that stretches from Mumbai to Delhi to Kashmir. The second, more recent struggle is the struggle between political and commercial interests now located in Maharashtra and Gujarat for control over Mumbai, a struggle that was superficially resolved in 1956, when Bombay was declared the capital of the new state of Maharashtra. The third, most subtle, is between a land-based, plebeian form of Hindu nationalism, best represented by the auto-rickshaw drivers and small street vendors of North Mumbai and Greater Mumbai, who would be happy to see South Mumbai destroyed; and the more slick, market-oriented face of the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose elite supporters know that South Mumbai is crucial to the mediation of global capital to India, and where business tycoons like Mukesh Ambani are building homes larger than many global hotels.

The gunmen who struck Mumbai are probably unaware of these tectonic struggles. Those who answer the call to self-immolation in the cause of war rarely are. But the way they arrived on Mumbai’s shores, the sites of their targeted violence, the fact that they could blend into the local population a few hundred meters from the might of the Indian Navy, and the fact that they struck sites where both upper and lower class Mumbaikars rub shoulders with each others most, should give us two kinds of pause. The first is to be sure to place the politics of the world after 9/11 in various longer histories of Mumbai and its terrestrial and oceanic hinterland. The second brings me back to my fears as a child of Mumbai in its magic years.

Many well-meaning observers have stressed the “resilience”, the mutual generosity, the quotidian heroism and the remarkable resistance of Mumbaikars to jump to quick conclusions or hasty reprisals. I too congratulate and celebrate these facts. But I fear that all resilience is historically produced. And what history gives, history can take away. Yes, we are all Mumbaikars now. But in a world that links Mumbai, Kashmir, Karachi, Madrid, Peshawar, London, Wall Street, Washington and Faridkot, that is not necessarily a source of comfort. Resilience is a public resource. But, unlike terror, it is not indefinitely renewable.

Foremost on the minds of many is what brought on this terrifying attack? To this there are no obvious and firm answers.  Nevertheless it is possible to hazard a few plausible explanations even in the absence of incontrovertible evidence. At the outset, it is possible to dismiss the claim of responsibility of the “Deccan Mujahideen.” Indian intelligence and police sources have made clear that they have no evidence of the existence of any such entity. More to the point, the cell phone transcripts reveal that the callers did not even have a clue about their demands. At best, this call was a deliberate distraction and at worst, a prank. The inability to articulate a set of explicit demands suggests that it was the latter.

Did the attack emanate from within or without India? Again, while the evidence is murky, based upon the available circumstantial evidence there is undoubtedly a Pakistani connection. One of the captured terrorists is of Pakistani origin, he and his fellow marauders came ashore on rubber rafts from the Arabian Sea and the Indian Navy has apprehended a trawler that had sailed from the Pakistani port of Karachi.  Does this corpus of evidence implicate the Pakistani state in this dastardly act of terror?  Perhaps. However, there are levels of culpability and presently it is impossible, with any degree of certainty, to assign a precise degree of involvement or responsibility.

That said it is equally impossible at this stage to easily exculpate Pakistan of any possible responsibility in these attacks. From the 1980s to the present day, various Pakistani regimes have either encouraged or allowed its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate  (ISI-D) to exploit a range of India’s home grown political difficulties. To that end, it is well known that Pakistan trained, supported and provided sanctuaries to Khalistani separatists in the Punjab and continues to do the same for separatists in the Indian-controlled portion of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. Indeed in Kashmir, thanks to the ISI-D’s role and involvement, a mostly spontaneous, local uprising against Indian rule has been transformed into a vicious, religiously motivated extortion racket. Despite Indian diplomatic entreaties and military pressures, the Pakistani state has steadfastly refused to eschew its support to the jihadis.  Indeed, Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed, the leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organization implicated in multiple attacks on India including the most recent, remains comfortably ensconced in the city of Lahore.

Yet the complexity and organization of the attack suggests that it could not have been carried out without domestic support.  If the attackers were indeed Pakistanis, without a doubt, they had the assistance of disaffected Indian Muslims.  No operation of this complexity could have been orchestrated solely from abroad. Why would any members of the Indian Muslim community be a party to this carnage? In recent years, a small but significant minority of Indian Muslims has responded to the siren call of radical Islam. The reasons for their turn to Islamist extremism are complex.  At the time of the partition of India, a significant segment of the Muslim elite departed for Pakistan.  Elements of that elite remained and thrived in post-independence India.  Others who managed to avail themselves of educational opportunities prospered and blended into India’s vast, plural society. On a day-to-day basis, they face little or any discrimination because of their religious identification.

Other less affluent parts of that community, however, are hardly so fortunate. They have long endured routine discrimination in everyday life, in employment and in housing opportunities.  Past generations passively acquiesced in these daily humiliations.  Ironically, because of the relative openness of Indian society, lower middle class Muslims are now much more politically conscious and mobilized and less prone to accept their consigned lot.

Against this social backdrop, two salient incidents can be deemed as the catalysts for their political radicalization. The first was the spate of anti-Muslim riots that swept across much of northern and western India in the wake of the destruction of the Babri Mosque by Hindu zealots in the state of Uttar Pradesh in 1992.  Hundreds of Muslims lost their lives as Hindu mobs went on a rampage, especially in Bombay, with the police acting as passive bystanders. The second episode was the pogrom that occurred in the western state of Gujarat in 2002 in the immediate aftermath of a fire on a train with Hindu pilgrims which, some claim, was set alight by Muslim miscreants.  Sadly, few, if any, individuals who were involved in the Bombay riots or the Gujarat pogrom have been prosecuted. Not surprisingly, following these two episodes, Muslim radicalism has emerged and flourished.

Despite this growing menace of domestic Muslim extremism, the Congress Party, the principal component of the ruling coalition, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), has been in willful denial about it. Its reasons are straightforward. Muslim constituencies in various parts of the country constitute important swing voters and can thereby determine the outcome of a number of electoral contests. Fearful of alienating these critical voting blocs, Congress has preferred to turn a Nelson’s eye to the problem.

The failure of the national government to forge a set of policies designed to address the social roots of Islamist zealotry are apparent. To worsen matters, many of India’s state-level police forces, when confronted with the challenge of violent Islamist radicalism, have failed to muster the requisite intelligence, forensic and prosecutorial tools necessary to suppress it. Instead they have resorted to the random arrests of young Muslims, have tainted evidence and have abused draconian anti-terrorist laws. In turn, far from curbing the rise of Islamist violence, their actions have actually provided a boost.

Despite this lugubrious analysis there is no imminent danger of India falling apart along the civilizational fault lines that Robert Kaplan has sketched out.  Even after the spate of bombings that a domestic Islamist terrorist organization, the “Indian Mujahideen,” have carried out this past year, including in the capital city of New Delhi, they have abjectly failed in promoting Hindu-Muslim discord and violence.  Even the crassest of India’s politicians have not tailored their electoral rhetoric along religious lines to exploit the attacks of the “Indian Mujahideen.”  Instead, they have concentrated their fire solely on the Congress-led coalition’s apparent ineptitude to contain the growing scourge of domestic terror.

Also, India’s feisty press has been at pains to underscore that Muslims have frequently been the victims of a number of terror attacks.  Earlier significant segments of the press had also done yeoman reporting on the complicity of the state government of Gujarat in the pogrom that took place in 2002.  These bold attempts of the press to highlight the callousness of the Islamist extremists as well as the culpability of a state government in promoting ethnic strife and violence, in turn, has prompted India’s quasi-official National Human Rights Commission to investigate and report on the malfeasances of various state governments. Such public shaming though hardly a substitute for judicial probes and public prosecutions, nevertheless can act as an important restraint on the fecklessness of politicians keen on exploiting ethnic tensions for electoral gains.

These constraints notwithstanding, there is no gainsaying the tragic fact that India faces terrorist threats from within and without. Nevertheless, the imminent fracturing of India’s state and society are, like Mark Twain’s death, greatly exaggerated. The country has been witness to worse times in its 60 odd year independent history. On each occasion it managed to defy the doomsayers. Its societal and institutional resilience, though frayed, is not beyond repair. Tragically, the Bombay attacks may provide the impetus for such an effort.

A critical problem that all religious reformers of whatever faith face is the relationship between their reformist thought and what for many is the authority of tradition, the need to demonstrate some kind of continuity between tradition and change. The conservative or traditionalist bent of many religious scholars, madrasas and Muslim populations make this requirement even more necessary. The importance of the framing narrative and its repertoire, which will engage the context of its intended audience, is critical to the success and effectiveness of social movements. Daniel Philpott perceptively identifies the Achilles heel of An-Na’im’s argument:

What is interesting about these arguments is that they ground the case for the secular state not in the Quran, not in claims about the presence of the imago Dei in the person or in some other source of the person’s intrinsic dignity, not in natural law, some closely similar type of practical reason, or universal moral precepts, but rather in what might be called “second order” observations about the phenomenology of belief, the character of government, the lessons of history, and the like. To be sure, good reasons for the secular state lie therein. But are these arguments sufficient to ground an Islamic case for constitutionalism, human rights, and the secular state? I doubt it.

When one looks at the context in which An-Na’im speaks, hurdles become clearer, as does the need for a more Islamically grounded argument.

Many Islamists , along with many other Muslims, have cast secularism as a completely foreign doctrine imposed on the Islamic world by colonial powers; they hold up traditional Islamic society, particularly during the first century or so of Islam, as a model of how the early community was guided by religious principles in all areas of life, including politics. The prominent judge and Arab historian Tariq al-Bishri, for example, seeks to contradict the idea that modernization and secularization must be linked by arguing that Muhammad ‘Ali’s regime in Egypt was not secular; it took aspects of military science and technology from Europe to aid an essentially Islamic political entity. Western ideas did not become pervasive, according to al-Bishri, until the early 20th century due to the spread of missionary schools and pro-Western secularist print media. The non-sectarian Islamic movement started to grow parallel to geographically-based secular nationalist movements until it became clear that there was a split in society between an inherited and revitalized Islam and a newly-arrived secularism. This initial split, according to Al-Bishri, has amounted to a fully-entrenched “war of ideas” between the two sides that has continued up to the present.

An-Na‘im offers his own interpretative framework in the debate about Islam and secularism, knowing full well the associations between “secularism” and foreign colonial domination in the Islamic world. Like al-Bishri and others, An-Na‘im looks for evidence from pre-modern and modern Islamic history to support his views, but to a very different end. He argues that his vision of a secular state, meaning one that is neutral regarding religious doctrine, is “more consistent with Islamic history than is the so-called Islamic state model proposed by some Muslims since the second quarter of the twentieth century.” The old notion that secularism is “neutral” regarding religion is itself a contested issue. Although An-Na‘im insists that he is not claiming that the “pre-colonial state was secular in the modern sense of the term,” he does suggest without convincing proof that “the states under which Muslims lived in the past were never religious, regardless of occasional claims to the contrary.” The realities of Islamic history as well as a good deal of contemporary scholarship on Islamic history (Fred Donner, Ira Lapidus and many other scholars) would counter the notion of “occasional claims” and thus require that a convincing argument substantiate this claim.

An-Na‘im asserts in his analysis of Islamic history that religious and political authority stem from different sources and require different skills and, therefore, to conflate the two leads to dangerous confusion. This conflation was only possible, according to An-Na‘im, during the time of the Prophet, “because no other human being can enjoy the Prophet’s combination of religious and political authority.” Since such harmony is no longer possible, religious and political leaders should instead pursue their autonomy so that each side will be strengthened and not subject to subordination or coercion by the other.

An-Na‘im claims, furthermore, that a reading of Islamic history that highlights a differentiation between religious and political authorities can be traced back as early as the caliphate of Abu Bakr, whose Wars of Apostasy, he says, were not religiously motivated, despite the fact that they were justified by the caliph in religious terms. What An-Na‘im considers “confusing the political authority of the caliph with his religious authority” continued into the Umayyad dynasty, which An-Na‘im characterizes as a “total and complete monarchy in every way” that, nevertheless, “still sought to maintain the fiction that the authority of their caliphs was an extension of the authority of the Prophet.” In spite of ‘Abbasid claims of religious legitimacy, the proliferation of sects during this period as well as the upheaval of the Mihna provided further challenges to the “myth of Islamic unity” as well as the impracticality of applying the Prophet’s model of leadership after his death.

While it is not surprising that An-Na‘im chooses to focus on the Mamluk and Fatimid eras in Islamic history, the Ayyubids rather than the Mamluks would be the more accurate example regarding dynasties in which the state bureaucracy had really come into its own and that therefore the dynamic between the religious scholars and the political authority had also reached a new level of complexity and contention. Religious institutions and scholars, for example, relied on state patronage for financial support while at the same time trying to maintain some level of independence and authority.

An-Na‘im argues that the Fatimid self-image as a Shi‘i imamate upholding the spiritual and political legacy of the Prophet was at odds with the “hypocrisy and corruption” of some state officials charged with both administrative and religious functions, such as the muhtasib who acted as both a tax collector and trade arbiter as well as an enforcer of public morality. Stemming the Shi‘i tide, the Mamluks came to power asserting their status as the defenders of Sunni Islam. As An-Na‘im points out: “Military campaigns against crusaders, the protection of Muslim lands, and the endowments of religious institutions were public symbols designed to emphasize the Mamluk service to Islam.” During this time, religious scholars (and judges in particular) felt pressure to legitimize and support state authority or risk imprisonment and punishment, the fate of Ibn Taymiyya, for instance.

An-Na‘im sees this tension as becoming potentially destructive when rulers start to abuse their power and the religious authority is not able to hold them accountable. Rather than arguing, like Tunisia’s Rachid al-Ghannouchi and others, that if Muslim rulers/leaders were truly pious such violence would be unnecessary, An-Na‘im advocates a secular state built on constitutionalism, human rights and citizenship – resources that he acknowledges “were totally lacking in all societies everywhere until the modern era.”

Perhaps the most controversial element of An-Na‘im’s interpretive framework is his understanding of the nature and role of Shari‘a in Islamic history, especially in the context of his proposed secular state solution. An-Na‘im suggests that the Shari‘a must be marginalized in order to save it. More precisely, he asserts that no state has the right to enforce religious law, even if it is the religion of a majority of its citizens: “By its nature and purpose, Shari‘a can only be freely observed by believers; its principles lose their religious authority and value when enforced by the state.” States do not enforce principles; they enforce laws. Like Fu‘ad Zakaria and contrary to much of the scholarship on the origins and development of Islamic law, An-Na‘im denies that Islamic law included both a divine, unchanging element (Shari‘a, principles and values rooted in sacred sources) and a human interpretation and application (fiqh). He writes: “both Shari‘a and fiqh are the products of human interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunna of the Prophet in a particular historical context. Whether a given proposition is said to be based on Shari‘a or fiqh, it is subject to the same risks of human error, ideological or political bias, or influence by its proponents’ economic interests and social concerns.” While the human dimension in both cannot be denied, there are significant differences between sacred texts and human interpretation, laws that are based on clear texts and those based on analogy, as well as differences in the degree and extent of human interpretation in Shari‘a and fiqh.

An-Na‘im’s claim that no human institution, such as the state, can implement or enforce religious law would seem to contradict the example already noted from pre-modern Islamic history, in which state-appointed judges carried out a parallel system of rulings at times in agreement with, and at times in opposition to, state authority. Each side, the political and the religious, relied on the other for moral legitimacy and support. The noted Islamic legal historian Wael Hallaq describes the delicate balance of authority: “Our sources reveal that the caliphs and their subordinates generally did comply with the law, if for no other reason than in order to maintain their political legitimacy. Yet, it appears reasonable to assume that their compliance stemmed from their acceptance of religious law as the supreme regulatory force of society and empire.” Or, put differently: “On balance, if there was any pre-modern legal and political culture that maintained the principle of the rule of law so well, it was the culture of Islam.”

Finally, An-Na’im’s reformism faces two practical hurdles: broad-based Muslim public opinion that favors Shari‘a as “a” source of law and the continued centrality and authority of the classical tradition of Islamic law.

Data from the largest, most comprehensive study of contemporary Muslims ever done, based on tens of thousands of hour-long, face-to-face interviews with residents of more than 35 Muslim nations and representing more than ninety percent of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims, indicates that majorities of Muslims want Shari‘a as “a” source of law but not “the” source of law. The data reveals a desire for a new model of government—one that is democratic yet embraces religious principles and values. Majorities in most countries, with the exception of a handful of nations, want Shari’a as at least “a” source of legislation. Of course, in practice this sentiment can mean many things: requiring that no law be contrary to Shari‘a, drafting laws that incorporate or are not antithetical to Islamic principles and values. Interestingly, we don’t have to look far from home to find a significant number of people who want religion as a source of law. In the United States, a 2006 Gallup Poll indicates that a majority of Americans want the Bible as a source of legislation. Forty-six percent of Americans say that the Bible should be “a” source, and nine percent believe it should be the “only” source of legislation.

The second issue/reality that An-Na’im does not adequately address is the hold of tradition. The manner in which he bypasses or ignores the classical tradition fails to come to grips with the reality on the ground and risks reducing the influence and impact of his substantial efforts to the bookshelf rather than becoming a catalyst for change in Muslim societies. In Sunni Islam, the classical tradition, legitimated by the consensus (ijma) of the community (in fact by its religious scholars), has been normative. While historically the Sunna of the Prophet has controlled the understanding of the Quran, the consensus of religious scholars (ijma) has ruled over the Sunna. In other words, for traditionalists in Sunni Islam, the consensus (ijma) of the past is authoritative and overrules everything. Thus, for example, even if the Quran doesn’t advocate hijab or prohibit women from leading mixed gender prayer, and some or many hadiths are false, the interpretations and practices sanctioned by the ijma of the past, the classical Islamic tradition, prevail. Not to do so is to depart from tradition, to fail to establish a necessary link or continuity between the authoritative ijma of the past and modern change. This outlook is epitomized in an Azhar saying: “Consensus is the stable pillar on which the religion rests.” The Indonesian reformer Nurcholish Madjid has referred to this as the “sacralization” of tradition in Islam and called for a “de-sacralization” of tradition. However, he does not reject the importance of tradition, but of the notion of a fixed, static tradition, arguing that tradition and consensus or ijma are ongoing and cumulative.

An-Na’im is not alone in re-examining the relationship of religion to the state and arguing that a Muslim country can also be secular. However, some like Indonesia’s Nurcholish Madjid (as well as Mustafa Ceric, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia-Herzegovina or Oxford’s Tariq Ramadan) recognize more clearly the need to acknowledge the force of tradition even as they proceed to engage in wide ranging reformist thinking. Although emphasizing the value/merit of classical Islam and its legacy, they do not regard it as an absolute reference point or religious authority but only a tool for solving modern problems. Madjid has spoken of the danger of the “sacralization” of tradition. While neo-traditionalist reformers, muftis with international followings like Ali Gomaa, the Mufti of Egypt and Qatar’s Yusuf Qaradawi, acknowledge the authority of the classical tradition but have methodologies to legitimate substantive reforms, modern reformers more freely bypass the classical tradition and go back to the Quran as the primary basis for fresh understandings and interpretations.

Although An-Na‘im’s interpretation of pre-modern Islamic history and law are problematic at times, the great strength of the book is the author’s analysis of political realities in the modern, post-colonial state and his projections and recommendations for a future secular state founded on principles of constitutionalism, human rights, and civic reason. Here, An-Na‘im’s choice of India, Turkey and Indonesia as examples of how secularism is contextualized in different societies is instructive. He eschews a single solution for all cases, a single formulation of secularism for all contexts, but wisely and realistically affirms the fact “that each society’s conception and experience of secularism has to be contested and deeply contextual.” An-Na’im’s methodology, and thus a more Islamically grounded methodology that would also enhance the Islamic legitimacy of his argument, would have benefited from the approach of Abdulaziz Sachedina’s The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism. Sachedina does what An-Na‘im does not; he examines the traditional sources (Qur’an, hadith, tafsir) in order to build up a case for democratic pluralism from an Islamic frame of reference.

Although An-Na‘im’s views on secularism and the role of Shari‘a in society are far from the mainstream amongst Muslim scholars, he does, as intended, provide a major new interpretative framework that has created a vital forum for future discussion and once again demonstrates the courage to put in writing what others might only think. His “interpretive framework” will be both a source for heated debate as well as a foundation for others to build on and flesh out.

The book is avowedly didactic, aiming to persuade Muslims in public debate that constitutional rule of law, human rights and democratic citizenship in a secular state represent the only form of political regime consistent with Islam in the modern world. Despite lengthy and repetitious exposition of the notions of democratic constitutionalism, “civic reason,” citizenship and human rights, An-Na`im fails in his explicit purpose of justifying and legitimizing them in Islamic terms, which appear somewhat incidentally and do not carry the primary charge of justification. In this regard, his preaching can only have an effect on those already converted. An-Na`im does, however, have two compelling arguments for his position in terms of Islam, one substantive and the second historical. The substantive argument is that only with such a state can Muslims autonomously and without compulsion follow the law of God as interpreted by themselves. The historical argument is that his “proposal for a secular state is more consistent with Islamic history than is the so-called Islamic state model.” The problem is that few Muslims requiring specifically Islamic legitimization and justification will accept his premises regarding “the inherent nature of Shari`a” and find his substantive argument convincing. An-Na`im’s appeal to history is not intrinsically Islamic either; nor is it easy to sell rhetorically. But it is his more original and stronger argument. Furthermore, as we shall see, the historical argument is even much stronger than he is able to present.

Muslims, An-Na`im argues, need a secular state that is “neutral regarding all religious doctrines” but allows legislation and public policy to “reflect the beliefs and values of citizens, including religious values.” This requires dispelling “the illusion that the Islamic state is supposed to enforce Shari`a,” and “keeping a clear distinction between Islam and the state while regulating the connectedness of Islam and politics;” or again, it requires “the institutional separation of Islam and the state” and “the religious neutrality of the state.” This amounts to a more clear and careful definition than has been provided by the Iranian reformists such as Abdol-Karim Soroush and the former President, Mohammad Khatami, for what they have called “religious democracy.”

Clarity ceases, however, with his call for “regulating the connectedness of Islam and politics.” Returning to the notion of “regulating the political role of Islam,” An-Na`im ends with a reaffirmation that the separation of Islam and the state should be “accompanied by the nurture and regulation of the organic relationship between Islam and politics,” and calls for “an enabling discourse for promoting the role of Islam in public life.” Having convincingly argued against the French and Turkish variants of secularism as exclusions of religion from politics and the public sphere (incidentally, by appealing not to Islam but to democracy and human rights), it is not clear why any regulation of any kind beyond the generic rules of constitutional democracy, civic reason and human rights should be needed. What is the meaning of “regulation” other than the obvious non-exclusion? Does the call for “promoting the role of Islam in public life” point to a hidden agenda lurking behind the innocuous thesis that constitutionalism and human rights need to be justified in terms of Islam rather than Western liberalism to be understood by Muslims? I will come back to this at the end.

The most original aspect of the book is An-Na`im’s historical analysis of law and the state in medieval Islam and the Ottoman empire, as well as the contemporary patterns of the secular state in Turkey and in post-colonial India and Indonesia. Being a lawyer and not a historian, An-Na`im concedes far too much to the proponents of ideology of the Islamic state, whose alleged function is the execution of the Shari`a. He can show that such a state never existed. In fact, the evidence for separation of religion and the state in Islamic history is much stronger. An-Na`im certainly exaggerates the importance of the Shari`a relative to state law (qānun) and customary law in the administration of justice in medieval Egypt and the Ottoman empire, not to mention the Mughal empire and Indonesia. And the myth of the Islamic state he rejects still has enough hold over him to induce a serious, anachronistic misreading of the communal politics of Indian independence in which the Shari`a played no role, either positively or negatively. Nevertheless, the evidence he presents proves his historical argument for the differentiation between the state and religious law and authority more than adequately. This discussion of the separation of religion and the state in Islamic history, and the analysis of the strengths and limitations of the three very different contemporary secular states built on it, constitute the major achievement of this book.

In An-Na`im’s account of imperialism in India, which generalized to the other two cases of empires without substantiation, “colonial reason” is credited with the invention of legal codification. There is no denying the oddity of what developed as the “Anglo-Muhammadan law” under the British Raj, but the colonial motive for codification, beyond the requirements of efficiency in the administration of justice, is not entirely clear. The same claim that codification was the product of colonial reason is not explicitly made in the case of the Dutch empire in Indonesia. Legal codification in the non-colonial Ottoman empire is also seen by An-Na`im as an imperial imposition of a piece with the so called “capitulations”—extraterritorial imperialist rights to consular jurisdiction over their subjects and the compradors declared under their protection. (An-Na`im may be forgiven for passing over the fact that human rights, so dear to him, were introduced side by side with the capitulations and were more strongly pushed by the imperialists in favor of the religious minorities under their protection than codification, in which they had only a tangential interest.) He also conveniently ignores the arguments that legal reform in general and codification in particular may in fact have been a means of resistance to imperialism in Egypt, and the patent fact that codification was part of the autonomous Ottoman will to defensive modernization to withstand the imperialist pressure. An-Na`im shares this dim view of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement for codification of the law, whose proponents saw it as an effort to adopt modern civilization, with Noah Feldman, whose view I have criticized earlier in The Immanent Frame. The vilification of Muslim modern codes stems from the replacement of “democracy” for the “modernization” of the earlier generations of Muslim reformers in An-Na`im’s teleology. This shift exacts a heavy cost in terms of understanding the legal history of the last two centuries. The complex issues of procedural rationalization, separation of law and ethics, reform of the appellate system and systematic use of written documents, and the dilemma of majoritarianism versus judicial activism in protection of human rights—the nitty-gritty of the role of law in a modern constitutional order—are entirely set aside by this hard-nosed lawyer for the glib talk of democracy and civic reason. Here, I must be forgiven for being old-fashioned and thoroughly skeptical.

An-Na`im’s head is in the right place when he insists on Islam’s compatibility with the secular state, but at the very end, when he calls for “restoring the liberation role of the Shari`a,” the former loses its control over the latter, revealing a starry-eyed utopia. An-Na`im had briefly alluded to his commitment to Islamic reform as advocated by his Sudanese master, Ustadh Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, stating that “it also requires the reformulation of usul a-fiqh [principles of jurisprudence].” But why should we expect the new ijtihād and reformulation of the principles of jurisprudence to produce results this time that are different from the Wahhabi ijtihād from the eighteenth century to the present, Salafi ijtihād of the early twentieth century, or the current one of the Islamists? The implicit answer seems to be that Islamic reform would now take place within the framework of constitutional democracy and be subject to human rights. But I see little evidence for An-Na`im’s presumption that the form of Islam to be promoted by his project would legitimize the constitutional democracy and human rights to which it should be subject! In fact, his own evidence of the democratic enforcement of the penal code of the Shari`a in Aceh proves the contrary. He takes cold comfort in “lack of agreement between Achenese leaders about what the application of Shari`a means.” (This is An-Na`im’s variant of the hackneyed assertions one hears often, such as “not everyone agrees what the Shari`a is,” or, “there are different schools of Islamic jurisprudence.”) He thus misses the chance to discuss such judicial devices to protect human rights against democratic majoritarianism as constitutional courts. (Indonesia has an inactive one, but the activist constitutional court of Egypt is not discussed either.

An-Na`im wants to beat the Islamists at their own game by appropriating their rhetorical tools, but this is a very risky strategy. He has made an impressive effort to involve Muslims throughout the world through his website, and used an Indonesian Muslim institute to organize discussion groups. But the Iranian reformists lost badly in their attempt to appropriate the rhetoric of the hardliners despite the fact that they created and controlled, for a few years, the most vigorous press in the Muslim Middle East. The chances of the An-Na`ims and the Feldmans firing single shots from the hip at the same remote target from the far west are much smaller. Attempts at the rhetorical appropriation of Islamism by “restoring the liberation role of the Shari`a” (An-Na`im), or the historical romance of the Shari`a as constitutionalism and modern rule of law (Feldman) are bound to fail. Like all religious law, the Shari`a has a restrictive, and never a liberating role, and the Muslims who wish to free themselves from its rigid restrictions historically did so through the liberating flexibility of man-made, secular law (qānun). For Muslims there certainly is a higher realm of freedom corresponding to the religio-mystical sense of the divine path. Yet if history is a guide, the Sufis through the centuries had good reasons for differentiating that realm from the law and for considering Shari`a the inevitably rigid husk to religion’s kernel, which they called Haqiqa (the truth).