Islam and the Arab Revolutions – the Ulama between Democracy and Autocracy

Well, good evening and welcome, welcome to the Middle East Centre here in Oxford. My name is Michael Willis. I'm the director of the Middle East Centre, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to the Friday seminar series from the Middle East Centre for Hillary Turn. This is the first of our series in the eight week series to Hillary of the seminal series. We had hope, but we will be holding all of its term seminars in person, as has been the tradition of the Middle East Centre.

However, the vagaries of the COVID virus, notably the recent McCrum variant, which paid me a little visit last week. But I'm feeling much better as I'm sure it's paid. A lot of people on this call in recent weeks has unfortunate Blige's to run the first two weeks of the seminar series online. We are currently waiting to see if we need to run the rest of the series online, but it currently leaves me hopeful that we'll be able to run a substantial part of the latter part of the series in person,

but we will keep you posted on that. However, holding the series online does allow us to invite friends and attendees, both old and new. We might not normally be able to come to Oxford itself, so we're delighted that many of you are able to join us from farther afield. Welcome to you. Now, the last few terms in the centre, we have had an overarching theme for the seminar series. We looked at the Middle East in the environment last term michaelmas term.

We looked at authoritarianism and we looked at the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring or Arab revolutions last year. This time we won't be running. This is because for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows us to address a wider and more diverse array of subjects and issues throughout the term of sticking to one particular fate.

And more specifically, it allows. Firstly, in detail at some of the regrettably ongoing crisis in the region, we will be having sessions and later in the series in the seventh and eighth week on the crises in Syria, then on Yemen. More broadly, it gives us the opportunity also to have a forum for introducing and discussing recent research on the region, particularly a number of books that have appeared in recent months.

Specifically, ones written by members of our own academic community here at the Middle East Centre and in Oxford. More generally. Now, while this may seem like blatant self-promotion by the Middle East Centre, which indeed it is, it does, I think, answer a complaint that has been occasionally raised by publicly by students at the centre.

But we never, never get to hear much about the work in the search of the actual members of the academic team in Oxford, and I'm hoping that this term's Friday seminar series will hopefully answer this criticism by giving a platform to research of a number of people.

Firstly, three of the fellows at the centre itself, Lawrence, meanwhile, Neil Critchley, unless some Alhazmi, one of the members of the advisory board at the centre, Joseph Sassoon and also two members of the wider community at Oxford, Marilyn Booth Malkovich and Rafael Lefevre of New College. And therefore, delighted to be beginning the series of one of my colleagues here in the Middle East and to some allies of me.

Osama is lecturing contemporary Islamic studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies, a position he's held since 2019. Summer completed his Ph.D. at Princeton, having studied Arab and Islamic studies at Oxford undergraduate. And The Sun has been a truly wonderful addition to our community, bringing in great new energy and a host of new ideas. He's also contributed hugely to our teaching here.

Previous courses he has taught on on modern Islamic thought and Islam and politics, and also for a relatively young scholar. He has already a very impressive research record. And I'm very, therefore very pleased to have the opportunity to discuss this in the form of his new book, just published by Hearst. When did it actually come out this summer? Is it? It's out? Is it this month or last month? It was out with Hearst in November? You know, this month, this month, right?

So it's out of its out. So it's been out a couple of months, and the book is entitled Islam and the Arab Revolutions. The Dilemma Between Democracy and Autocracy, Osama. Thank you very much for joining us this evening. Thank you so much for having me and for your very generous introduction, it's really delightful to be able to present at the Middle East Centre amongst friends, colleagues, students who I also consider colleagues.

And it's really an honour to be able to do this in your company because much of this book was also written in your company as it was set to share it with friends who with whom conversations have taken place, that have informed the writing of this book as well.

So this is this is a book which I have in a sense, been writing since 2013 in some form, although it really took off from 2019 onwards, and it's always wonderful to see one of these long projects come to fruition in this way and in the interest of both self-promotion. But also, I hope the benefit of viewers. I've got a couple of codes on the screen which, when this is shared on YouTube, hopefully will also be easily accessible and it'll also be on the final screen.

And if you're beaming in from across the Atlantic, what you'll be concerned about is the global one on the bottom and first. For anyone based in the UK, you'll be able to get 30 to 35 percent off, which is always handy with these expensive academic books. So this is a book which really looks at the way in and in my view, a relatively understudied dimension of the Arab revolutions,

sometimes referred to as the Arab Spring, sometimes referred to as the Arab uprisings. I'm not particularly committal on that. I didn't spend a bit of time explaining the word, but this dimension is basically the role that religious scholars had to play. And I think the sort of role is significant, you know, to a certain extent, sometimes scholars perhaps are overly preoccupied with the role of intellectuals in these sorts of activities.

And a lot of the time it's, I think, justifiably the case that people have focussed on the underground actors and the political actors. But I wanted to sort of pay attention to a set of actors who are not just somewhat neglected in the literature, but also with whom I share a certain affinity. And this, you know, by this, I'm referring to the fact that I am myself a seminary trained as well as academically trained.

And so, you know, some of these scholars are people I've met personally or have studied under or teachers of my teachers. So it's a really interesting sort of type of exercise writing a book like this. And I reflect on my position pretty briefly in the introduction and the epilogue at the left. But the overall sort of structure of the work is one that looks at.

It's more of a descriptive intellectual history and to a certain extent, I guess the sociopolitical history that looks at the ways in which the scholars responded to the Tunisian revolutions of 2011, followed by the Egyptian revolution of twenty eleven. And then as that transitioned into sort of the maelstrom of activism and recrudescence, you could say, of the old regime within Egypt and the focus of the book really direct it.

I do most of my attention to Egypt, and I look to 2013 as the major moment, of course, in Egypt, with the Egyptian coup and its aftermath, and a lot of people don't realise the extent to which religious actors were implicated deeply in legitimising the aftermath of the coup, including indeed, there are massacre, which is kind of the the the darkest moment in Egypt in 2013.

And so, you know, my chapters go over this and I'll be in in what follows presenting, hopefully unless I have any glitches presenting sort of, in a sense, the Arab revolutions through the eyes of the ulema, through the eyes of these Islamic clerics. And in the book, which is, you know, a fairly lengthy about 400 pages just just shy of work, I dive quite deeply into the religious arguments and I can't really, you know, go into these in any great detail.

But I hope that I can give a flavour of what comes up in the book and perhaps in the Q&A session. We can sort of explore some of these if anyone's interested. So my first slide and I should be going through these slides reasonably quickly as I understand it, and I've got about 20 minutes or so to go through this.

Twenty five, twenty five minutes, half an hour. So I my first line is basically reflecting on the first two chapters you could say, and the first two chapters after the introduction are looking at useful following this fascinating figure. Egyptian based in that a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and a graduate of the asset, perhaps the US has most recognisable scholar in recent decades. He's now retired, so he's not really in the public eye anymore, and he is a figure born in 1926.

So in 2011, he's already well into his 80s. But someone who is, you know, becomes a very forceful religious voice advocating for the Arab revolutions. For the most part, I say in most places because come March 2011, and although he is remarkably reticent about Bahrain. OK. And so that's something that is noteworthy. And there are, you know, interesting discussions that we had about that.

But what's also interesting is his advocacy, his kind of tenacious advocacy of quote, peaceful revolutions and what he calls a Mubarak is, to me, a peaceful protest. And his opposition to any kind of engaging in violence in places like Egypt and Tunisia. We can talk later on about the way in which that shifts for Syria and Libya and why that is the case.

You know, my in a telescope for my, I would say that although it perceives those as cases of self-defence rather than cases of initiating any kind of violence and after the success of the Tunisian revolution. And he's he has a show on Al Jazeera, which he dedicates entire episodes week on week to supporting these revolutions on religious grounds, saying that these are legitimate from on the basis of, you know, religious and scriptural justifications.

And he does the same for the Egyptian revolution. Of course, Egypt is the most populous state in the Arab world and the region as a whole. And it's, you know, it's falling. Quote-unquote to the revolutions was an immensely significant sort of event.

And although he was fully behind the protesters, you know, ahead of the Muslim Brotherhood, ahead of the US, her as an institution and you know, his sort of religious reasoning very much is based on a Koranic concept known as a little bit not often that he had a look at commanding or in joining the good and forbidding what's wrong or forbidding evil. And on the flip side, you have the Egyptian religious establishment. So moving to my second slide, you have these two figures.

The chap on the left is Ahmed, the grand imam of the lesser jump. On the right was the former. He's the former now the former grand mufti of Egypt and Gomorrah. And both these scholars to differing degrees sort of expressed the disquiet at the protests, but both of them are quite unequivocal that the protests should be considered haram or, you know, from an Islamic legal standpoint, prohibited.

And as I will discuss in later slides, Ali Gomaa becomes particularly vociferous in his advocacy of an aggressive crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood once that is possible after the coup of 2013.

Now these figures, I explore their reasoning and their justifications in chapter three of my Chapter two of my book Sorry, Sorry, Chapter three of my book too many chapters to keep track of apologies, and a lot of it's based on notions of stability order, and they're not very they're not as rigorously grounded in my estimation, within the Koran or within the sort of hadith literature, the juristic tradition.

But the echoes of that, and they certainly can generate certain types of arguments in religious sort of language. Another set of scholars, I describe them here, eventually counter-revolutionary. They start off by the sort of quiet Newt as it were. Or indeed, the chap on the left is an interesting figure because he's actually an American. What's he doing in the midst of the maelstrom of Middle Eastern revolution, but from America, who is writing enthusiastically about the Egyptian revolution?

And you know, I explore part of the reason he's included here is he's a reasonably influential Islamic scholar in the West who is probably amongst the Islamic scholars in the West. One of the most recognised in the Middle East, particularly as he's now a political appointee in the United Arab Emirates. He's the vice president of something which I'll talk about a bit later for the forum for promoting peace in Muslim societies.

So this is humza Yousaf and the other chap here being kissed on the forehead by another none other than Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the United Arab Emirates. This chap is Abdullah bin Be, a very eminent scholar who worked closely with his father for well over a decade.

But someone who sort of soon finds himself in the midst of the Arab revolutions on the the side of the those opposing these revolutions of the sort of the status quo states, most notably perhaps the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. So I explore sort of their arguments and their reasoning and and with respect and Bayer, whose ideas I think, you know, far more significant in many respects. I explore this in the latter half of the potentially in greater detail. I live in Bayer.

I think in a way that is unprecedented in Islamic history basically justifies, you know, executive absolutism over and above any Sharia dissent. So this is an interesting case of a religious scholar who basically says that my role in society should be sort of subordinated to the role of the ruler. This is something which is kind of the opposite of the way in which scholars saw themselves in much of history and certainly in pre-modern times.

So, you know, I think there's interesting work, and I hope to explore a bit of India's work and future in my own future writings, just philosophically and theologically. Perhaps I am going to rush on to the next slide, which kind of jumps to 2013 through 2011. Some of my treatment of Philip and Violet set know discussions that he engages in in 2012 and 2013, and indeed the chapter where I'm going to start forgetting the numbers, the relevant numbers.

But the chapter where I start to look at the, you know, the Egyptian coup also up at the lead up to it from 2012 onwards and looks particularly at the activities of an income. I know the theme is particularly significant in the coup of 2013 because he is someone who is, as you can see, present during now president. Then General al-Sisi is a constitutional declaration, so annulling the Constitution in 2013.

And and so, you know, he actually functions as someone who is offering religious legitimation to the Egyptian coup 2013. And I don't think it's an accident that these religious figures, the pope and the Coptic pope, is actually seated next to him. If I recall correctly, I've obviously sort of cropped the image behind him is a figure who is associated with the Latino Party. I don't think it's an. These religious figures are there to confer a certain degree of legitimacy upon the act of the coup.

Yet as I say here, the rabbi massacre takes place the following month. In July, you will have the coup and in the middle of August we have the rabbi massacre. And Human Rights Watch calls it somewhat notoriously one of the world's largest killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history.

And the thing it shows the limits of his support for the Egyptian regime, something that really transpires and far more interesting in successive years, even though he is instrumental in bringing about the massacre. That's right, bringing about the Egyptian coup, which needs to the utmost care. He expresses his disquiet at the massacre at Rabat. Now I'm going to talk more specifically about Rabat in a moment.

But I've taken this image from the website. It's noon post and someone who's obviously quite a person to Ali. But what it says on the screen is Mufti Laska, the the mufti of the Army. And in many respects, I think it's an accurate portrayal of the role that this person at this point. He was the former prime minister. It seems that the Muslim Brotherhood, in the short stint in power, arranged for alcona not to be retired, shall we say.

And so he was now former Grand Mufti, but he became this vociferous supporter behind the scenes initially and eventually out in the open, you know, as some of these recordings are eventually leaked. He's someone who basically privately, as I say, privately incites the killing of protesters in religious terms to the army specifically and the security services. And and then also subsequent to their attempts to privately celebrates, you know, I actually have a chapter celebrating the rather.

I view him as actually engaged incidents, ratification, justifying and celebrating the success of the Egyptian army against this horrible enemy, et cetera, that is constituted by the the protesters at Rabaa. And I perhaps should have mentioned this much earlier. I mean, Rabaa was basically the epicentre for a major protest after the Egyptian coup of 2013, where a large number of people it was, I think, largely organised and supported by the Muslim Brotherhood.

But people who are opposed to the coup, whether they're members of the Muslim Brotherhood or they were people who were opposed to be a sort of reversion to a pre democratic era in Egypt had come together and they were protesting the coup. And this persisted for weeks on end until the military and security forces came together on the 14th of August and engaged in this massacre.

And I think, you know, on screen, I have two books what a book and a report that I draw on in writing about the massacre that went according to plan as Human Rights Watch is and a forensic treatment of what actually happened. And Human Rights Watch basically estimates estimates that likely over 1000 people were killed on the 14th of August by the security forces in Egypt.

And I actually sort of explore using to a certain extent the data that Human Rights Watch has brought forward, and I suggest it may well be higher than over a thousand. It could be as much as 2000 or even higher and into the hands of the soldiers. Is David Kirkpatrick's really penetrating and reflective city's extensive narrative? And I mean, David is a journalist for The New York Times.

But really, I think one of the most careful testimonies regarding the Arab uprisings and revolutions over the last decade, decade or so that we have in the English language. And I draw on it quite liberally when outlining the narrative, the threat of massacre and other parts. So, you know, just briefly about the other massacre. I mean, it's it was overwhelmingly unarmed. And so the killing of over a thousand protesters in that context was particularly sort of shocking and striking.

And it was clear, based on Human Rights Watch's assessment, that there were there was the deliberate effort to liquidate, you know, actually kill people. And so, you know, I think that. It's something that I spend I think the chapter is chapter the latter part of Chapter five, possibly Chapter six, that basically explores this.

And then I also look thereafter at the way in which various scholars opposed both the coup and the subsequent massacres and the sort of language that they used the way in which scholars want to characterise this Islamist, by which I mean people who are broadly aligned to projects like the Muslim Brotherhood's sort of project in Egypt. You know, they articulate their opposition to the coup in the language of democracy.

One of the points I make early on when looking at Karabo is sort of support for the revolutions in the first place. He articulated in the language of freedom, and he has this fascinating phrase, which is kind of a counterintuitive for a lot of people. Think of Islamism or study Islamism. He says that freedom has to be prioritised over the implementation of the Sharia. And I argue that this is actually it sort of makes perfect sense in the Islamist universe.

But it's something which is counter very often because of the ways in which the Islamist Islamists are constructed and sort of widespread narratives, shall we say. And so, you know, these are some of the scholars say you have an incredibly useful corollary now retired, of course, and then you have Ahmed Arizona, who is now actually the head of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. So these are three scholars associated with this organisation based in.

I didn't really touch in great detail on the fact that Qatar is, you know, the Al Jazeera channel, which on which although we actually had a show, become somewhat instrumental in promoting the agenda of us is well and well studied of the Arab revolutions in 2011. And, you know, as Christian Eriksen and others have pointed out, in a sense, the Qataris overplayed their hand and have to backtrack subsequently. And so as I come towards the end, I just wanted to.

So this is something I discuss in great detail, probably in chapter nine of my book, The Final Sort of substantive chapter. And then you have Abdullah bin B with the foreign minister of the United Arab Emirates, Abdullah bin Zayed and other and say basically bankrolls a project called the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies. It's very sort of like, you know, elegantly named and it makes you gives very positive vibes. But that's what I argue is its purpose.

Of course, it is a front institution, in my estimation, one of several, but one of the most important front institutions, religious institutions for counter-revolutionary sort of activism, shall we say, and observant. But it's not an accident that he becomes the head of it, given his juristic reasoning that, you know, creates actual Islamic juristic justifications for autocracy.

And by 2019, I believe Abdullah then becomes the effectively the Grand Mufti, the chair of the Emirates Council of the Emirates. But a lot of the sort of fatwas have this transnational ambition as well, so he becomes a major tool in the toolbox at the Emirates. United Arab Emirates soft projection, in my estimation. And in 2020, I think it's in 2020 know within the space of a few months.

Both designates the United, designates the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist organisation as the Grand Mufti of the Emirates. So in religious terms, they said, of course, been done in legal terms within the UAE many years earlier. And he also ratifies the normalisation with Israel. And so he's perhaps the most senior scholar to have done this in the Arab world. And, you know, I also highlight I've done so in other writing on the level that he's actually also highly respected as a jurist.

He's, you know, there's no question of his juristic credentials, shall we say. And so this is a bit of a provocative argument that I'm making towards the tail end of Chapter nine. And and I basically argue that the there's kind of a twin the rise of anti-democratic religious discourses and the rise of ISIS. So in a sense, the failure of democratic Islamism at the hands of scholars like the little man in particular,

I think can be twinned with the rise of ISIS. And I can't remember which up to this is now. But I remark how the rabbi massacre a week after the rabbi massacre. Of course, you have an even worse massacre in Syria with a chemical weapons attack. And so, you know those sorts of things the permit, the permission for the rabbi massacre on the part of, I mean, these things are done in subtle ways.

But you know, the lack of reaction to the massacre also, in a sense, greenlights the possibility of these sorts of horrendous chemical attacks that we see. You know, one of many, actually, and I said Syria, of course, over the years. And so, you know, this isn't an original sort of observation that the failure of democracy and the rise of ISIS are winnable as it were.

This is an observation I make drawing on the excellent work of Jean-Pierre to you and in his it's considered he's got a book called From Deep State to Islamic State, and also in the work of David Kirkpatrick that I've alluded to already. And I think that sort of, you know, the UAE signalled sort of like successes have allowed for these sorts of groups to emerge. And there's a kind of a somewhat macabre logic to the existence of groups like ISIS and the need for authoritarianism.

I think many of us recognise in the region as part of the the logic of authoritarianism in the region at the moment. So in conclusion, my conclusion is I can try and trace a certain set of questions that I outlined in my introduction, a lot of which are to do with, you know, how do these different approaches to the Islamic scholarly tradition translate the scriptural sources, the same scriptural sources very often that they draw on to come to such diametrically opposed conclusions?

And how cogent are the various arguments and so on? And perhaps the agency component is not quite so thoroughly explored as you know what sort of arguments are actually presented. And in the conclusions, I kind of present an outline looking at some of the debates in the secondary literature, and I position myself in those debates in a certain way. I roughly think that the Islamic tradition is, of course, diverse and open to multiple readings.

And so both the Pro and the counter-revolutionary scholars can find resources to argue for their positions. And this is manifestly clear throughout the book. Yet I would argue that, you know, the pro-democratic scholars do seem to deploy those resources somewhat more persuasively, even though I don't systematically engage in a comparison between those two sort of sets of arguments.

And I conclude on a book on what I think is a kind of hopefulness, which is that, you know, to a certain extent, these kinds of figures like Bambi and you know, this kind of autocracy discourse is necessary in the face of the weakness of the current status quo in the sense that the current prototype is the arguments that were were continued to be presented are not terribly persuasive to the audience.

They are directed. And this is why Islamic democracy will continue to be a threat in the region for the region's autocrats. That's a kind of hopeful note on which I conclude, I hope that that was interesting if anyone has any questions, just wanted to read highlights if anyone would like to get their hands on the. That can get a discount that that's available through those two codes. I'll leave them on for five or 10 seconds if that's all right with you. But thank you very much for having me.

And that was interesting. Thank you very much. No doubt about it. That was actually fascinating summer. I think a lot of us sometimes wonder if there's anything new to be written about the Arab revolutions. But you've proved conclusively that there was a really fascinating dimension, but really hasn't been looked at in in that way before looking at the role of the theologians, the dilemma and how they talk about it.

That's been largely, as you said, ignored, and I think it's fascinating that you, you have dealt with it in this way and looked not only at those who supported it, which is perhaps being covered a little bit, but those who actually were critical and supported the official perspective, which is fascinating. If it's rather depressing, I think of that on certain levels. We now have time for some questions.

If anybody wants to put a question to Osama what we do, we would invite you to put your question right, your question into the question and answer function. If you look on the bar of this webinar, you'll see a little Q&A with a couple of speech bubbles coming out of that. And if you press that, that will allow you to type in a question. So please type in a question.

If you would like to be identified, you put your name in or you may be automatically identified if you wouldn't don't want to put your name in, that's absolutely fine and put that in. But if you want to put your questions in and I'll try and field as many of them as I can to Osama in the in the time that remains, we have about about 25 minutes, half an hour of some questions, so hopefully we'll get some questions.

So please do put your questions in. In between time, I would like to take advantage of my position as chair to ask my own question. The book obviously focuses on on Egypt and I think you justify that very well because of the centrality Egypt is not only just in the revolutions themselves, but actually in the Arab world, certainly in the last 100 years.

But I wonder whether the what happened in Egypt and the sort of issues discussing, to what extent do they relate to the explicit position of the Muslim Brotherhood as an organisation? Now, as you know, a lot of the the official discourse and criticism of what of the revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood was about the Muslim Brotherhood as an organisation,

particularly the accusation that it was some sort of dangerous cult. And that leads me to wonder, get you to say a little bit more, perhaps on the dynamic between the traditional Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, which I think has always been very interesting in Egypt. And to what extent do you think a lot of the things you've been discussing are, are the development out of this rather interesting historical and often strained relationship between the two?

Or whether you think as you, as you've portrayed in your tape is actually a much broader set of issues that refer across the region? So I don't know if that makes sense as a question. Forgive me, your son cut out briefly when you say, Oh, sorry, maybe just as I understand you basically saying that to what extent are the Muslim Brotherhood and their various positions conditioned more by their position as Egyptian actors as opposed to their engagement with or kind of fraught relationship?

Shall we say, with all of us looking at the tradition, but particularly the Egyptian context and whether it's a lot of these issues about the relationship historically between the Brotherhood and the more traditional ulema? Yes, I mean, it's been a very sort of fraught relationship, I think through much of that history, because the Ottoman, of course, have centred on the outside.

And you know, famously, you've had plenty of religious figures and ulema indeed who have been members of the Muslim Brotherhood. But they their authority in a sense, has been subordinated to the organisation rather than to their authority as religious sort of authorities unto themselves.

And I can't remember whose phrase this is, but it's quoted in a an edited and fantastic edited volume on this kind of level of global mufti where in a chapter, I forget who the author is called useful Kabbalah and as the nature of a special relationship.

But above is one of the very few scholars that we can think of who's who've been able to sort of navigate this tightrope, so to speak, of keeping both on the good side of the ALLAMA as a class and maintaining his considerable authority as an island, he's seen and highly regarded as a jurist. But at the same time, you know, always played up the fact that he is a student of Senator Ben, actually a direct student of customs and a member of a proud member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

So, you know, he's always in public warmly as haredi garb. As soon as you see him, you can immediately identify him as an asset. But he's also a very proud member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and I think this is hopefully answering your question somewhat. I think it's the case that, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood have struggled to do that because the religious authority of the alema is a competing sovereignty of sorts to the authority of the institution of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood's resilience and its continued existence. Shadi Hamid talks about for, you know, nearly 100 years at this point and to a certain extent, are a function of it being a very regimented organisation that respects the hierarchy of the organisation rather than the sort of non-hierarchical hierarchy.

If I can kind of phrase of the ulema because as scholars, everyone can debate, everyone has a right to have an opinion and scholars are not, you know, scholars are notorious for not really being very organised when it comes to thinking in and regimented terms of an organisation. So in that regard, I think that the Muslim Brotherhood will have its own internal logic when it thinks about how Islam operates.

And I think that will always have a certain degree of friction with the way in which the ulema will think about, you know, things in juristic or theological terms. I hope that somewhat on. Is the question that you are asking the bounds of the question very well? Yes, I was thinking really boundary is that you said the key figure in that respect, he actually bridges those two conditions. Thank you. We begin to get questions coming in and I'll I'll ask one of them.

The first one I'll go to and comes from Iftikhar Malik. Thank you for joining us. And if the court says Ahmed could ruin his recent book highlights the long term legacy of collaboration between the authority and the ulema at the expense of civic and enterprising classes leading to authoritarianism, as well as civilizational decline. Individuals are vital, but shouldn't we be focussing on social and theological trajectories within the societies which keep on throwing up such figures as these?

So I've only read sort of a couple of pages from the introduction about his work, and I must say I'm not terribly sympathetic to his analysis in the sense of it is. To a certain extent, it doesn't really engage the discourse and these sorts of historical grand narrative sort of attempts at grand narratives and casting the villain as a certain type across history, which I get a sense of. In his argument, I don't find terribly compelling.

And the ultimate. I don't really have a very clear answer to this, to be honest. I don't think the alumni have undermined civic and enterprise classes in the way that someone like amateur guru or perhaps Tim McCarron in a slightly different context is arguing.

And I think, you know, the work of my colleague in the Department of CUNY, H. I don't know why I'm blanking on his name right now, but our colleague and associated with the Middle East Centre, the economic historian, fantastic economic historian Adeel Malik, Neil Malik. I got Malkin my name, but I was wondering if that was coming from the first name.

So he has an excellent review, I think of Temperance long divergence, which makes it a similar, but, you know, somewhat different argument about economic history as opposed to authoritarianism.

I think that those sorts of broad brush arguments as qualified and careful as they are, we need to be careful about sort of teleological historiography, speak historiography, in my estimation, but to do justice to his work and I hope to engage with my teacher like I would need to read it carefully, obviously. So I hope that that's somewhat useful. Thank you. I have a question here now from Jack Dickens, who thanks you for a fascinating lecture.

Thank you. And Jack wants to know, are there? Is there any indication as to what type of democracy the pro revolution in Egypt to a desire to build? Would they desire the type of democracy that we saw take root in Tunisia? Or would they be more inclined to support the creation of a political system more like that of revolutionary Iran? I mean, in the the the year or so. But certainly Mohammed Morsi was in Mississippi speaking about which is adding my own little bit might be the most we saw.

We saw some island with that and that had a lot of criticism about the way rather than, I wonder if on the theological aspect, whether you could add something on that. Thank you. Sure. I mean, I think fantastic question. Thank you very much, Jack. And I think in a sense, the Egyptian alumni would be somewhere in between. I think that would be a good way to put it. So Anousheh is an Andrew.

Much has a fantastic book on this. The caliphate of man, popular sovereignty and I think the rest of the subtitle. But in in essence, I think that Russia's she's practised in the Tunisian context was far more pragmatic. He was far more willing to sort of engage in a pragmatic dialogue with, you know, more secular forces and yet mainstream Islamists of the type that I study not so much in this book as in my other work, mostly unpublished.

They they are very eager to highlight that we don't believe in theocracy. They can. What do they mean by that? They mean the model that is found in Iran now? I mean, I think people could reasonably well. A theocracy is a concept, which means that you're bringing religion into the political sphere and you still believe that that's what you're what is appropriate to do. I certainly think that it wouldn't, you know, as I argue, again, briefly elsewhere, them a place.

These these people aren't arguing for liberal democracy by any stretch of the imagination, but even talks about this in his first book, Temptations of Power. He calls it a liberal democracy, and I don't like that label because, you know, to a certain extent, you're defining something by what it isn't. But also illiberal is a very sort of loaded phrase, and in our culture, I would say I would call it Islamic democracy.

And the way in which I characterise this is that liberalism is in liberal democracy. Liberalism is a check on a majoritarianism in Islamic democracy. Islam is a check on majoritarianism. And so, you know, that's how I would see it in other causes, all sorts of anxieties within, you know, particularly Western policy circles.

And I think, Michael, if you sort of permit me on your comment about how Mohamed Morsi actually acted again, Shadi Hamid and other scholars and David Kirkpatrick talks about this in his book Into the Hands of the Soldiers. And they all come that in practise when you. Shadi Hamid is looking at it as a quantitative social scientist, as a political scientist, you know, quantitatively speaking, Morsi was not really a dictator, doesn't it doesn't sort of work that way.

And so there is a certain perception, in my estimation in the West that if someone identifies with Islam, then they will necessarily go towards a kind of authoritarian theocracy. And I would just point out that, you know, that presupposition doesn't always hold very well in their discourses, where for decades they've been arguing against autocracy, particularly since that's the main thing that they suffer from in the region.

Right? And so but it would be, you know, these are untested because, you know, the autocratic forces in the region have always had the upper hand, unfortunately. And even in Tunisia, we have seen them. So if that's a really long winded response, but I hope that answers the question. No, that answers it very nicely. We have a couple of questions coming in, inevitably asking you to sort of look at a little broader focus looking at other aspects of the countries, right?

I'm think coming in from Salma Daudi too, asking about the situation in Syria. Thank you for joining us and thank you for your question, Salma and Sam specifically. I was wondering if you could perhaps discuss a little bit the threat that pro-democracy Islamic scholars could pose to the Syrian regime. Recently, the Assad regime has effectively forced Syria's Grand Mufti into retirement and seems to be positioning itself as a secular force in the region,

even if the reality seems to contradict this narrative. All these tensions? Reflective of broader disagreements within influential Islamic authorities on the Syrian revolution and I mean, the Syrian revolution, I actually lived in Syria from 2005 2006. I was as an undergraduate here. Of course, I was sense that when it was possible to travel to Syria, so I have a deep and abiding love for the Syrian people.

Sadly, my scholarship does not expel Syria quite systematically and obviously in at the other end of it, which scholars have done the really defining work on the Syrian revolution. So I don't I wasn't aware of this. I assume relatively recent developments.

I mean, it's interesting to think about if I may speculate for a while, the Grand Mufti and I assume we're talking about as soon as the former Grand Mufti was, of course, a stalwart of the Assad regime, the sort of and the Grand Mufti before him. Of course, people like the Pharaoh and others have for decades been stalwarts of the Assad's. And so in that regard, I think it would be interesting to me if that shift to a more secular orientation is now being adopted systematically.

There's always been a tension within the Syrian context, in my estimation, because of the Alawite background of the the heads of the regime. But the fact that the Grand Mufti has always been a Sunni, quite a mainstream Sunni, in my estimation, even if they've been politically, you know, not necessarily mainstream and in being so aligned to the dictator. And so I remember when I lived in Syria that the Sunnis were happy that their dictator was secular.

You know, some some Sunnis would express that to me. You know, at least they're secular, right? In a sense that they're not going to sort of start interfering within our religious world as Allawi's, for example. And so, you know, I'm not sure that, you know, the the clearing of that space for from from the state and from the state's sphere of influence makes a great deal of sense for Assad as a dictator. But I'm not. I'm not sure exactly how the average Sunni would respond to that.

They might think, OK, well, that's great. We never really respected the Grand Mufti. I think something like that. But they might. I mean, Syrians, I noticed and forgive me if this is a bit of another generalisation, but I noticed many Syrians would consider themselves quite devout, and perhaps some of them would be uncomfortable with it. There's no sort of like public voice of religion or something like that, so it's just speculation on my blog posts with. Thank you, Summer.

This question comes from a not only a friend and a colleague, Marilyn, Bob and Marilyn will also be giving a talk in this series later this term. Thank you very much for joining us and thank you for your question, Marilyn. Marilyn's really inviting you a summer to look at more recent developments in Egypt.

And specifically, she's curious about the seeming unstoppable, unstoppable movement of el-Sisi, the agenda to implement a new Dubai in Egypt, and how these defining themselves as Islamic actors deal with this.

I don't know if there's a particularly interesting with the increasing the links with it with the Emirates and whether these how will the move defend the suspect behind Marin's question is the idea of how will the defenders of what happened certainly is rubber and what happened in 2013 dealing with this new dimension? So I mean, there's been a considerable amount of tension within. Egypt, between Bashar al Assad and Assisi over the last four or five years.

So I mean, there's been an interesting sort of and somewhat counterintuitive coup on the part of the Egyptian Al-Azhar in that the US in the 2012 Constitution managed to get a certain degree of independence. So the shuttle, as has now to be appointed by the people. And for some reason, that was continued in this sort of like constitution. I believe it was 2014. And so, you know, there is a tension between and so Sisi would love to actually replace.

From what I can tell, place Ahmed, play it with Alguma, who is, you know, an absolute sort of like shows absolute fealty to the needs of the military states in a way that, as I kind of indicated, a play does not seem to be willing to countenance. And so, you know, you do have a situation where there's already some tension between the most important sort of religious figure in Egypt and Sisi.

Yet at the same time, I suspect someone like Ali Gomora, who is, you know, really championed by the state and is, you know, going to be quite in line with a lot of these sorts of agendas. So the new Dubai, I mean.

That's that's a tall order and wall to wall to armrest with the obvious person to comment on the feasibility of not sort of the move and the attempts to create a new capital city and kind of redo the urban geography of the cities in order to allow for, you know, a neoliberal remaking of Egypt that also prevents the possibility of these kinds of revolution, revolutionary moments.

And I think that those scholars who are fully aligned like any and there are others I haven't mentioned, you know, some say it was a student, is a student of radicalised, and he became the sort of almost the shadow Democratic race adviser to the Office of the Presidency, meaning to seek his father in law as a senior, as a scholar on the ticket. So I would suspect that it depends on where people fit in to the various fractures within the Islamic classes.

But I may be close with invoking Nathan Brown's latest book, which I really love loved arguing Islam, where he basically this is a line I quote in my own book. He says that, you know, it seemed that the all my classes that he met with were roughly divided 50-50 on supporting the two verses opposing the two. And you know, I think there are all sorts of dilemmas about getting involved in the political space, which would create, you know, a significant kind of 50-50 divide.

So I suspect about 50 50 would be the case with respect to support Sisi on anything. Thank you. Building off of that, just to get you to say something about sort of foreign influence more broadly, in particular, coming from a question from William the Mo'ne, I'm not sure that may be our good friend Frank Timoney, but the question is asking about foreign foreign interference in in in. I make so as to reform Islam, and he prefers, especially particularly to the Tony Blair Institute involvement in.

I wasn't aware of, I must admit myself, right? I mean, I'm not specifically aware of the Tony Blair Institute's involvement that Blair has been, you know, a, shall we say, a colourful characters. It's the most polite way of putting this in the region. And certainly Blair, should we say good grief? And and basically I. Let me, you know, recount an anecdote, I visited Egypt in 2007 and was visiting an American scholar who had enrolled in the US and was studying to become island.

An American convert to Islamic State, is now a respected scholar in North America. And he complained that the Blair government had, or I can't remember which ministry the FCO. I think under the black government had donated a huge amount of money to the US to strengthen its sort of Faculty of Humanities effectively, and the US and the Egyptian government had unilaterally redirected it to pharmacy and medicine or something like that.

And he was feeling about this, saying like, you know, for all dislike of Blair's shenanigans in other parts of the Middle East, that that would have been something that would very much help strengthen the ISI as an institution. And so I think that, you know, these sorts of foreign forces can be quite complicated. And, you know, the obvious foreign force in the region is, of course, the United States with its billions of dollars of military aid.

But of course, that military aid, as David Kirkpatrick so masterfully documents in his fantastic book, which I can't recommend enough into the hands of the it set time and mentioning this is dwarfed by the amounts of money coming from the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It's dwarfed by orders of magnitude. And so, you know, when we think of foreign forces, I think we all foreign influences. We also need to think regionally and not just trends regionally as well.

And I hope that you know this question to some extent. Thank you very much. We have time just for one more question, which comes from another, another colleague of ours. It's not. I'm not choosing these in a particularly biased way. Most of the questions have been coming from friends and colleagues here and call it comes from the South and Najaf. Thank you for joining us. The Saudi question, obviously all this over all the authorities you've been naming are all male religious authorities.

And she wondered whether there were any female preachers or female religious authorities got involved in this discussion on authoritarian regimes and on on the Arab uprisings more generally. Absolutely fantastic question. And so I know her work has also explored the fascinating world of female preachers in the military that as they are known and in Morocco.

So I think those sorts of initiatives like the military that or Turkey has, you know, this entire cohort of female preachers that have emerged. And I think they're less salient in the political spaces that I'm looking at.

I, you know, I hope this isn't just my myopia, but the people are focussed on it in these sort of top ranking, highly influential and very often government appointed figures who are both scholars of higher ups and well-established in the academic credentials as it were, but also politically extremely significant. And no female scholars, you know, appeared in my radar in either Egypt, which is the main focus of the book for Tunisia.

Tunisia is interesting because for a period, and I don't know if this is still the case. The spokesperson for another was a woman, a daughter of Russia, the Mucci. And so those sorts of things do happen occasionally in the political space in places like Tunisia. But I, you know, even in the political space in Egypt, it seemed to be quite a bit more limited.

And you know, this is an ongoing complaint I have. I'm speaking for a moment with my seminarian, pressed on with the fact that, you know, I have colleagues who went and studied the in the female sections, and they said that the teaching was atrocious and it was an afterthought, obviously. And you know, that sort of reality means that serious theologians and jurists are unlikely to be produced in those sorts of centres.

I'd like to be proven wrong and I'd like to be shown to be ignorant about that. I would welcome that. But unfortunately, to my knowledge, that seems to be the reality at the moment. And may it change as it were? Thank you so much. Yes, that may change. I'm afraid the clock is against this and we've come to the end of our hour.

But thank you so much, Asomugha, for a fascinating talk and been able to boil down quite to a really quite complex issue into such an accessible and such understandable and such an interesting way. Thank you. And I'm I'm sure they are many people out there, myself included, who will be going out to buy the book fairly soon after this this seminar. And so thank you. Thank you. Very much.

Thank you so much for having me, Michael, and I really want to thank all of the I mean, I was really shocked by the number of attendees, incidentally. So I really want to thank everyone who stuck it out for the entire hour as well and for your interest in the book. And I hope that it's something which I mean, I don't want to dissuade you from buying, but I understand the Oxford Scholarship online will be sort of producing the PDF of it in a few short months.

And so that should be downloadable from your university networks at some point. Right. So but if you if you would like to buy the expensive hardback, please feel free to use the discount codes. But I won't be sharing on my Twitter, and I'm sure it will be shared on the YouTube video of this video as well. We'll make sure we put it on, but thank you so much for putting them up because that's that does make a big difference.

So thank you very much again and again. I join me this summer and thank you all of you for joining us this week. Please do join us next next week when we have another colleague, at least Centennial, culturally speaking, but in between. John, thanks so much for joining us and have a wonderful weekend. Thank you again for Selma. Thank you. Bye bye.