Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective (25 page)

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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

Tags: #Religion, #General, #Fundamentalism, #Comparative Religion, #Philosophy, #test

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although I am still in the process of reviewing the evidence (surveys, press reports, memoirs, short stories), it is quite possible that some of the success was more apparent than real; that many of the alarmist reports coming from fundamentalist circles with regard to the subjugation of religion and cultural activity suffer from excessive use of hyperbole. What
is
evident is that in certain areas the state encountered powerful resistance to its expansion. The best example is family planning, where the muted lack of collaboration on the part of medium- and lower-level
ulama,
coupled with solidly anchored values shared by rural and petite bourgeoisie populations, stymied any attempt to influence social mores in this, the most intimate zone of human life (the major exception, and not an enduring one, is Tunisia). In other fields as well the state may be less powerful than its rhetoric would indicate. For instance, if for no other reason than sheer lack of funds, the nation-states did not embark upon a serious program of kindergarten and prekindergarten schooling. Thus, socialization was still largely a matter of the (usually extended) family, though that ''ever-present baby sitter," television, began to play a substantial role.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the state's assault on civil society was largely successful. I agree with Leonard Binder that a crucial test in this type of inquiry is what happens to formal and semiformal institutions (as distinct from associations. Here the victory of the new authoritarian state is impressive: parliaments were coerced into a rubber-stamp mentality; political parties were outlawed and those that went underground were effectively persecuted; trade unions were disbanded or forced to merge into a state-controlled unitary organization; the press (especially daily and weekly) was nationalized or subject to stringent controls; book publishing and book imports were transformed into a state monopoly (whether directly by law or through efficient use of censorship). Religious institutions did not escape the interventionistic state:
shari'a
courts were either abolished and forced to merge with the civil courts system or were placed under its aegis and control;
waqf
endowments were tightly supervised; ulama training was integrated into the state educational system; and the ulama in their rostrums were used as propagandists
 
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for the regime. Last, but certainly not least, the hitherto largely independent civil judiciary was cowed into servile obedience (with recalcitrants summarily fired and replaced by docile new appointees); and wherever particularly "dirty" or problematic tasks existed, military courts (often dubbed "state security courts")their realm greatly expandedcould be relied upon to perform them.
There were obviously differences in degree and scope among the various modernized countries: in Iran, for instance, the ulama domain proved to be quite impregnable; in Jordan and Morocco the state court system had to resign itself to coexist with the custom lay system. And there were likewise variations in the curtailment of ethnic or regional autonomous institutions. The direction of the development of these states is, however, more or less the same.
Similar is the persistent attempt of all of these states to create a set of brand new institutions (unitary party, youth and women's movements, intellectuals' associations)presumably voluntary but under effective state controldesigned to mobilize the population and, perhaps more important, to assure the state of a "presence" (in Gramsci's sense of the term) in all walks of life. Coupled with the institution-building was the creation of a national civil religion (already alluded to) with its panoply of heroes, symbols, sacred places (monuments, historical sites), sacred times (holidays, memorial days), and above all, myths. These could be "founding myths," relating to the nation's or the regime's origins, or future-orientedsort of eschatologicalmyths referring to their goals and aspirations. The enactment of these myths was mostly in the public place and anchored in the here and now, as evidenced in ceremonies, for example. Their success in shaping not only behavior but also basic attitudes to primordial (and intensely private) issues such as sex and gender, death and the hereafter, is debatableas proven by, among others, the studies of Imad al-Din Sultan (1972) on the Egyptian middle class, and of Sayyid Uways (1971) and Manufi (1980) on Egypt's peasants and the urban lower classes. But in most areas of social behavior, cultural hegemony was no doubt appropriated by the new rulers, all the more aggressively as time wore on due to the technological advances in the field of electronic media.
 
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2
Buttressed by the state's expanding economic rolenotably in doling out public sector and civil service jobs for school graduates, and in shrinking, through nationalization, the economic basis of the middle-class autonomy, i.e., the crux of the old civil societythe new hegemony appeared impregnable from 1960 to 1965. Although the tide was soon reversed and civil society began to expand, this reversal actually confirms the above evaluation of the state's dynamism, persistent initiative, and relative success. For the reversal was based not in civil society's vigor and initiative but rather in the state's failures. These failures mean that in certain domains the state was unable to modify its people's core values in relation to the ultimate meaning of life. Even more important, the dramatic reverses and debacles the state suffered during the 1960s brought into question not only its claim to represent an inevitable historical tide but also the feasibility (and justification) of many of its goals. As a result, both those committed to its cause and those who had joined not out of conviction but through sheer opportunism became a less recurrent phenomenon. The list of these debacles is long and well known, so suffice it to mention the most obvious: the breakup of the UAR and the Yemen War as the first heavy blows to Pan-Arabism; the 1967 war, which hit the credibility of the military elites; the economic recession of 196567, which punctured the myth of public sector dominance as the panacea to rapid GNP growth and to the instant gratification of spiraling material expectations.
Only when the state was sorely weakened did the Islamic resurgence begin to challenge the newly established borders between state and civil society. True, like any such social phenomenon, the resurgence had its precursorsSayyid Qutb in Egypt, Khomeini in Iranwho had developed a set of core ideas (related, among others, to the state-society relationship) by the time the state had reached its zenith of power. But theirs were lonely voices in the desert, and social receptivity was virtually nonexistent. It took the debaclesin Iran's case, the state's unsuccessful attempts in the early 1970s to fulfill rising expectations and to limit the damage of social dislocations created by rapid modernizationin order for these ideas to gain a
 
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sizable number of adherents. Khomeini is a rare case of a ''precursor" who lived to become a "pioneer" (in Mannheim's terms) and to lead a movement anchored in the very ideas he had put forward. He owed his success to the shah's relative leniency and to his own longevity. Sayyid Qutb's fate was much more in line with the historical precedents studied by Mannheim. It was given to other, much younger people to pioneer the resurgence for which he had laid the foundation.
The Islamic resurgence can be explained to a large extent by the durability of the Islamic "traditional bedrock," i.e., the persistencethrough constant adaptationof classical Islam as a
living tradition,
especially with regard to basic attitudes toward the fundamentals of human existence. However, this beleaguered bastion would not have recaptured the initiative had there not occurred the series of failures described above coupled with the subsequent failure of nerve and ebbing initiative on the part of the state's elites. This is a crucial point, for although the prospects of the resurgence would seem to depend on its actions, they are also inversely related to the state's performance. In other words, the worse the state's record in gratifying economic needs, in creating and transmitting a nation-state (and no more a suprastate)
mystique,
the better the chances of the resurgence. The paradox isand this is a topic that requires more detailed empirical researchthat some of the means employed by the rulers in the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., expansion of the public sector, greater political pluralism, broader autonomy of the judiciary) tend to buttress civil society, which forms the very basis of the fundamentalist tide.
3
Against this background, the Islamic resurgence may be interpreted as a response of civil society to the state's debacles, recapturing the initiative and redrawing the boundaries between the two. That this response took an Islamic character highlights the validity of Gramsci's thesis as to the vital importance of everyday culture. For if everyday culture is made of "various layers and deposits, infinite traces with no inventory," it is evident that even in the heyday of the
 
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new state, these deposits. had one thing in common: they were for the most part Islamic. The survival of the
hijri
calendar, punctuating the rhythm of everyday life (alongside and above the state's Gregorian calendar of holidays and memorial days), the broader appeal and mass participation in religious ceremonies and festivities, are but the most obvious instances of this endurance, even as the religious tradition was battered by consumerism, mass recreation, and other deleterious innovations (
bid'a
).
It is thus understandable why the resurgence channeled so much of its energy into modifying the division of spheres between state and society. The participant-observer studiescarried,
inter alia,
by Kepel, Guenana, and the present writer in Egypt; by Fischer in Iran; by Seurat and Shapiro in Lebanon; by Waltz in Tunisia; and by Mayer in the Israeli-occupied Gaza stripprovide ample evidence of the primary importance of this strategy of reconquering civil society. The strategy was greatly facilitated by the fact that technological developments tended, at long last, to favor civil society autonomy rather than state control: cases in point are tape cassettes, Xeroxing, offset printing techniques, and most recently, videos. Though more research must be done on these issues, the strategies can be summarized as follows:
1. Reestablishment of a patchwork of voluntary associations (
jama'at
)based upon age, gender, occupation, social position, or residencearrogating to themselves above all educational and ritualistic functions, but sometimes also trade unionist ones (e.g., for students, shopkeepers, and craftsmen) and serving always as foci for sociability, particularly for uprooted strata (e.g., migrants from the countryside to town, or from provincial towns to a metropolis).
2. While jama'at-type groups take as their original basis of operations the hitherto uninvaded private domain (usually the home or the remaining
ahli
mosques), they move swiftly into the public place. A prime tactic in the service of this strategy is the creeping but persistent invasion of public mosques, either through conversion or "buying out" of their poorly paid personnel, so mistreated in the past by the state apparatus. In many cases the invasion or "recuperation" of the public mosque (often formerly an ahli one) is accomplished by intimidation.
 
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3. The same mixture of persuasion and intimidationmodeled on the state's former "carrot and stick" tacticsis also found in the greater use of vigilante-style action (enforcing the fast on Ramadan, prohibiting one from watching licentious TV programs or listening to rock music, respecting the prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and imposing the injunctions on modest attire for women). The trend in recent years, as the movement grows more assertive, is toward a more frequent and daring use of violence (e.g., burning movie houses and video clubs) and toward the systematic expansion of space monopolized by the movement's ethos (segregated lecture halls, banning "blue" movies and video cassettes).
4. Where such concessions are difficult to get or too slow in coming, the associationswhose vitality and amoebic expansion is the best indicator of the renaissance of civil societytend to fall back on self-help, creating their own autonomous social space. They fund gender-segregated shuttle buses for students; organize study groups and summer camps found cooperatives and shops that have no recourse to interest-carrying loans (and which, of course, also provide employment for the fundamentalist clientele); and fund charitable associations which provide health care and social welfare predicated on Islamic norms (care segregated by gender, loans that are interest-free, etc.). In the last two or three years there have also been initiativesmostly in Jordan and Egyptin preschool education and in enrichment programs for school children, both domains in which the state had always been deficient.
5. A no less effective, but insufficiently documented line of action, relates to the creeping invasion (or "recapturing," if you will) of the judiciary. In Tunisia and Egypt there are a growing number of instances of judgesinspired and/or applauded by the fundamentalistswho rule according to the shari'a, especially in cases where state legislation is ambiguous, but also where the Islamic law runs counter to the state laws (i.e., on matters related to interest-based banking). Likewise there are a few reports on the growing popularity of "pacts" entered into by members of jama'at, according to which the signatories agree to bypass state courts (notably in civil litigation) and go instead to fundamentalist imams who serve as arbiters and rule exclusively by the shari'a.

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