Good evening and welcome to our third session of the webinar series for this term Hillery term at the Middle East centre. And my name is Sam Azami and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to our third session on religion and secularism in the context of the Arab uprisings. And this is an opportunity for us to reflect ten years on on the way in which religion has featured as a prominent part of the Arab uprisings,
but also secular voices. And we have two speakers, two wonderful speakers to kind of give us the two perspectives on this question. We're really happy to be able to welcome Nadia away, Dad and Shadi Hamid both beaming in from across the Atlantic in Washington, D.C., as I understand. And we're also very proud to have them here because they're both graduates of the Middle East centre. Nadia is also a class of twenty seventeen Richardson fellow at New America.
She holds a deep faith in Oriental studies from the University of Oxford. She is currently working on a book on social media and positive change amongst Arabic speakers. And her doctoral research focussed on the challenges facing liberal Muslim intellectuals who attempt to update Islamic thought and bridge the gap between modern values such as secularism and women's rights in Islam.
Prior to her doctoral studies doctoral way that worked as a research associate at Rand Corporation, where she has led several research projects and our second speaker, again, a graduate of the Middle East centre and the University of Oxford. Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Centre for Middle East Policy and a prolific author, author of Islamic Exceptionalism, most recently How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World by St. Martin's Press.
And this was shortlisted in 2017 for the Allina Gober prise. I see. Most recently, because he has actually I should correct that he's he's published coedited volumes since then, including a coedited volume entitled Rethinking Political Islam, published with Will McCants and published by Oxford University Press.
And we're delighted to have the two of you here to talk really about what it is that we can learn from the past 10 years and what we perhaps could expect going forward with respect to the question of religion and the question of secularism in the Middle East. And as I should say right now, please feel free to put in your questions. Those who are joining us, you're more than welcome to put in questions and comments. And they will be done by my colleague Michael Willis around the midpoint.
And NATO will begin by speaking for about ten to twelve minutes, followed by Shaddy for about another ten to twelve minutes. And then we will go into discussion mode and allow you all to interrogate and learn from our two distinguished speakers. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Nadia. Thank you very much. Wonderful to be with some of my favourite people in the world. Eugene Rogan, Michael Wallace. Chad, the academy also, like Salman said, went to Oxford as well.
So we share that love of our alma mater. So the subject of religion. I mean, if we talk about the Middle East, not just in the past 10 years, but in fact in the past fifteen hundred years or even much older. There is not another topic that have impacted the region more profoundly than religion. It has changed the geography of the region. It has changed its language. It has changed its culture. So it has been shaping the region for thousands of years, without exaggeration.
But if you look at the Muslim world and in the Arab world in particular. A shift has been taking place, especially in the last. I mean, this shift has been happening in the last maybe 20 years, but the Arab Spring witnessed a tipping point in this shift. But let's go back a little bit to the beginning of this shift. So the Muslim world was very confident, actually asserting in its cultural and moral, if you would, an even political superiority.
It had nothing to learn from anywhere in the world, nothing at all. But it just wanted to take what's been agreed technology from the West. And, you know, because the West advanced so quickly, I need to tell you that it had a moment of like where they are advancing. What's wrong? Why have we missed out? Because we are supposed to be the one, as we said, and Muslim on oh language. It should have been ours.
But along with the borrowing of this technology, ideas, modern ideas of separation of church and state, personal liberties like freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of enquiry, all of these moral values were introduced to the Muslim world and they have been causing a rift, really. Some believe they are irreconcilable with Islamic culture. They're very different. It's a very different paradigm. Can these two paradigms exist?
And what happened is at the beginning, we see that these ideas have, in fact, champions from within the intellectual class of the Muslim world. That starts with the rise up, for example. And Magico, actually, you know, the rise of essentially said the caliphate, it is is not really mandated by Islam. In fact, the caliphate has brought nothing but grief to Muslims. The masses have been suffering under dictatorships in the name of counterfeits.
But there's absolutely nothing in the Koran that mandates that we need a caliphate. In fact, we need these modern European essentially ways of governance. And of course, that was an accepted by a lot of traditional conservative voices. And he was tried for a quest to see he was fired from his job as a as Harry sculler. He was forbidden from ever holding any position.
When you have a second wave of intellectuals taking on the subject of modernity and modern values and religion, because, again, religion controls every aspect of people who live in the Arab world, every aspect, really.
And especially as a woman, I know this firsthand. And so then you have a second generation of reformers like Nasser Hameed Abuzaid, who not only argued that his most I was so excited to see that at Yale University Press published his book and set up a detailed critique of religious thought for our discourse.
And he not only critique this marriage between politics and religion, but even religion and even business, giving as an example that a lot of, you know, average Egyptians lost their retirements because they invested in so-called Islamic investments, as if if something has delivered Islamic, it automatically means that it will quadruple in profit. And there is no chance at all of it. You know, it doesn't apply to the rules of finance.
It applies to the divine rules of Islam. And he basically Abuzaid, again, he represents a large number of intellectuals that want to separate their religion from politics and the public sphere in general. But all of this we're still at the intellectual level and the masses, you know, the very traditional in their outlooks to life. And, you know, Islam and spirituality in general plays a huge role in all of humanity's daily life.
But Islam was very much intermingled with the state, even as many states modernised. So what happened is in a culture where there is really no critique of free increase, free exchange of ideas. I mean, I can if I may have the liberty to say, look, somebody who grew up in Jordan, in the Arab world, went to Islamic schools, went to Koranic memorisation schools, went all the way up until I finished my university at the University of Jordan,
everybody had to take Shariah class and. There is no debate on anything that is even a little bit critical. It's a one way street. You either praise or you you're silent. So what happened is. And it was easy. Like, everybody's doing this. Classes are a one way street. It was easy to maintain a common culture. And what happened is the mid 90s, the Internet came about and something we've never had in such volume started to happen,
which I believe led to the Arab Spring. One reason, but it's cause there is this is a very complex issue is that on the Internet. If somebody if people are debating very taboo issues. There is not the ability to immediately intimidate them and silence them. There is not that ability. So if somebody asked very controversial questions and write up questions like how could the concept of Subi be divinely inspired, like it's rounding up people's daughters to be sexual slaves.
How could a prophet practise savvy? How could this be in the Koran? How could I mean, again, like most people are a product of the 21st and 20th century environment. They take for granted human rights and a lot of individual rights and a lot of even Islamists. And my colleague Shaddy will cover that voice. But all of a sudden, we start to see incredibly audacious voices.
And not only that. So I was noticing before the Arab Spring, I was seeing that there's definitely something unprecedented in the Arab world because these debates, I had questions. I couldn't. There's no way I could. You ask a question, even in the most respectful way, you're inviting abuse, if not more. So even scholars didn't escape sometimes. So. So all of a sudden that space unleashed an avalanche of debates.
Unprecedented. So in 2000, I kept agitating about wanting to really study that space, and as an intellectual historian, I wanted to see how is it this virtual space? How is it impacting the way the Arab world is processing these ideas? Because it definitely, my opinion, causing a shift in consciousness, without a doubt. And you know how I know that for certain. If you look at the Arab Spring and that really was the epitome of how we see that change the calls where for.
Madani, though, Lemonnier, a civic state. And if you know, like about the Middle East, a civic state is as close as you can come to saying we don't want Shariah or a religious state or an Islamic state. We want a state where the laws are written by people. We can challenge them. We can change them. We can adjust them. It's not, you know, God's law. It's madness. It's people's law. So that is as close as this is unprecedented.
It was never a debate that we haven't Islamic. I mean, again, anybody who came even close before that is essentially inviting violence. So how did that happen, like to go all the way to a civil state? And I don't want to negate the importance or the potency of the Islamist voice as well. But again, allegedly cover that. And this doesn't mean that Islam will disappear. But the shift is I think it really is amazing. And it is worthy of study, of being studied.
So what happened is a lot of former Muslims also started to have YouTube channels to good they rectally to the heart of these controversial issues like slavery. Like a lot of a lot of the heritage. In fact, a lot of us, I myself can speak again from experience. We discovered our history by these banned books. I mean, the Internet all of a sudden allowed an avalanche of knowledge.
We didn't even know existed. All the in books like, for example, the books of the Lakota saying to me is the father of Arab Effie's. And I was hearing his voice from former I kid you not former imams. I mean, no, actually, former imams. Some of them are still in their positions, but who no longer believe in Islam. But I was really intrigued by them because, wow, I mean, I was interviewing them to get the moderate Islam version.
And they're like at the Torah, by the way, you know, I really don't believe what happened is like. And then I asked if I can record them just for me and have hours and hours. No, I am going to publish an article of the intellectual journey of these former imams. But when even people who like, you know, these are not laypeople, one of them taught at an immense university in Yemen. One was what was I still alive in Jordan for 16 years?
And I was seeing this everywhere. And my trouble until I'm gonna share with you just a screen for a split second, and that would be eight. I was looking at The Economist and I saw an article about the number of Muslims in America actually is also in the Arab world increasing and the number is, according to Pew Research, 23 percent, which is this is almost a quarter. Basically, almost a quarter of Muslims are no longer identifying as Muslims when the punishment for apostasy is death.
So what I'm saying in conclusion, is that there's a shift happening. It's no longer just the Islamist and traditional. There's a very potent voice as well. And the minority, that one's religion to be a private matter, just like it is in the West. And let's talk about another important voice. Q Thank you so much, Nadia. Really fascinating perspectives. And, you know, it's not every day that we also get a bit of action on the screen by looking at The Economist or something like that.
So, you know, it's wonderful to have a video. If anybody wants to see. But if you have a website or anything like that, I'm sure people would be very interested. Very interesting perspective, very interesting reading of the rise of modernity and the way in which sort of secularism is coming, as you put it, kind of liberated, sort of the rigidity in a place like the Middle East.
And I think what will be interesting here is to see the way in which Chaddy, who's obviously someone who studies Islamists very closely and also will be very familiar with the US Hurn and traditionalist institutions as well, will potentially give us an interesting counterpoint to what you've just said. And I really look forward to the very dynamic discussion, which I'm sure will ensue from this. So without further ado, I'd like to hand over to you, shall we? Thank you.
Well, first of all, it's great to be back virtually at Oxford, man. Thank you, Sam. Michael and Eugene, for having me. It's a pleasure. So when we're talking about the Arab Spring and I should be more specific. The Arab Spring and then the failure of the Arab Spring. The problem, in my view, isn't Islam. The problem wasn't Islam. The problem wasn't Devinn Islam's outsized role in public life. I would argue instead that the problem or if you will.
The dilemma was the inability to accommodate Islam's role in public life. And really, the failure ultimately to accommodate Islam's outsized role in public life. Islam does play, again, I would argue, an outsized role in public life and in any a number of ways. And I think NATO has sort of discussed aspects of that. So if we take that as a given that there is still a large majority of Muslims in various countries.
So we can take Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, so on. Tunisia is a little bit lower because of the secular background. We still see large majorities saying that they want Islam to play a prominent or central role in public life. So if that's the given and the question is what do we do with that? And that's part of what I want to address here. Now, this inability to accommodate Islam's public role, it's not a new problem.
This has been a and in many cases, the foundational divide since independence and even before independence. And let me just backtrack a little bit here. If we're looking at the premodern era, Islam provided an overarching moral and legal and religious architecture for the better part of 14 centuries. It went without saying. So it wasn't said. So what that meant in practise is that Islamists didn't exist in the premodern era.
It wouldn't have made sense for Islamists to exist because the very idea of Islamism would be redundant. No one questioned Islam's role in public life. Of course, there was diversity in various levels of practise. And, you know, Kalis themselves weren't always known as being very observant themselves. But everyone upheld the notion that there was an overarching legal and moral architecture.
Then something happened. And this is where the story overlaps with some of what Nadia said, that we have, first of all, secular ideologies being introduced in the 19th century and then in the first half of the 20th century and then nationalist regimes post independence. They wanted to dominate their societies. They wanted to centralise power. So they felt the need to control and regulate Islam.
So in some ways, it was ostensibly secular regimes that ended up further politicising Islam through their efforts to domesticate Islam visa b the state, because if there's some tension between Islam's sort of sort of power and resilience on one hand and the nation state on the other. If you're an authoritarian post independence leader, the solution is obvious. You have to find a way to cut Islam down to size in terms of how it can challenge power and your rule.
So eventually, most Arab countries, I mean, really over the past process, over the past century, the primary cleavage became one around the role of religion and Islam's relationship to the state. The state's relationship to Islam, and this is obviously different than many other regions were, you know, for for many decades. The primary cleavage would tend to be economic in nature. And that's how we saw the left right spectrum.
Generally, the Middle East has had a different left right spectrum, if you will. And this isn't to say that there's just Islamists and non Islamists. There's various shades in between. A minority of secular elites, liberals, faux secularists, Islamists, lite, different strains of Islamism. So it's a very diverse framework and a very diverse array of actors and characters.
But what distinguishes them from each other is their differing approaches to religion, not so much their differing approaches to economics or unemployment or whatever else it might be. So this is the cleavage that we have. This is the fundamental divide in not all Arab countries, but in many Arab countries and certainly in the ones that I tend to focus on more Egypt being the telling example. Now, this divide isn't necessarily something to lament.
It's hard to imagine it being any other way, because with mass literacy, mass education and access to different sources of information, inevitably you're going to have a diversity of perspectives on politics and religion, which Nadia touched on. And in some ways, this is the natural condition of any modern society, is growing levels of ideological, ethnic and religious diversity. So then the question is, what do we do with this diverse reality?
Because Islamists are not going to be able to defeat non Islamists and non Islamists or secularists in quotation marks will not be able to defeat or a race Islamism. These are ideas that are now entrenched in these respective societies. The Arab Spring. Then if we look at it from this perspective, what didn't happen? The Arab Spring was accommodating these two perspectives in a peaceful way.
And that's why we see a resort to violence. So what I've laid out here is a different conceptualisation of the problem of Islam. And if we take this as the problem, then there's really only one solution. And I would say that solution is democracy, but not just any kind of democracy. Not even not even the virgin. Not even not liberal democracy that most Westerners favour.
So I'm not talking here about a specifically Western style liberal conception of democracy, because part of the issue here in these Arab societies is that citizens can't agree on their conception of the good life. And that's why you can't come in and say, oh, liberalism or distinctly liberal version of democracy is the solution, because then you're basically imposing a particular understanding of the good life.
And that's also why secularism isn't the answer. And one thing I talk about in my work is a minimalistic conception of democracy. And in this reading of the word democracy, democracy isn't a means to an end. It's not about starting with democracy and getting to liberalism or getting to rationality or other things that we hold dear.
No, in this minimalistic conception, democracy is a way to manage and regulate conflict between opposing sides that don't like each other or perhaps even hate each other. So we don't want to ask for too much share. So when you have this teleological scenarios that, oh, one day the Middle East will become like other regions and people will become less religious and. People will secularise like they have generally in certainly in Europe and to various degrees in the US.
I mean, my response would be this teleological scenario is maybe not the most helpful way of looking at it, because it presumes a lot of things that may not necessarily happen and very long into the future. The last thing I'll say is I just close up here is that so we have one option of accommodation.
The other option is to say basically that we should insist, especially as westerner's in here, you know, speaking as an American, you think about the policy implications and how the U.S. should relate to the Middle East. Sometimes there is this desire to encourage secularism or to put pressure or to assume and the danger with this is that it might sound fine in theory, but in practise, any time you see, you kind of elevate secularism as the end goal in the Middle East, you end up with coercion.
And we've seen this time and time again because the vast majority of citizens in these countries are not secular in the sense of wanting to separate religion from politics. There is there is no survey that I've been aware of where there is any significant support coming close to to a majority for separating religion from politics. People say they don't want clerics to play too much of a role or they don't want Islamic law to be implemented in a very strict literalist way.
But that's a different issue than this kind of strict separation of saying religion is something private that has no implications for the public sphere. So the problem is you have masses of people who really aren't on board with the secular project. And then if you want secularism, then you basically have to you have to coerce and force people to get with the programme and taken to extremes. This can lead to something like Rahbar, the massacre that happened in August 2013.
The Sisi regime isn't secular, persay, but I think it's fair to call Sisi anti Islamist and he and his supporters saw the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat to the identity of the nation. So their response, which is very different than mine, mine is accommodation. Their response was brute force. And we don't just see this in Egypt, but any time there has been a perception of an Islamic or Islamist threat.
We've had regimes basically resorting to coercion. They're not trying to convince people to not be Islamist or to do so through peaceful means. They say these people have too much influence and electoral support. They must be destroyed. So that's why I worry that once we start along, this path of secularism is good. Secularism is the answer. We inevitably come to a set of conclusions that is contrary to democracy and morally objectionable because it leads to coercion.
Thank you so much, Chaddy. That's that's a fascinating sort of another counterpoint in many respects. I mean, you've both presented, I think, fascinating perspectives on the region and on specifically what's happened in India in the case of the Arab uprisings. But also your prescriptions are very different about the future. Of course, Chaddy, you're coming from the Brookings Institution and you're thinking like a policy man, as you should.
But I want to actually take this opportunity to do two things. One is to encourage people. We have we have quite a few questions coming in. And Michael will be kindly taking that on in just a moment. But I wanted to actually ask you both questions, drawing on each other's presentations. So for Nadia, I'm just sort of wondering about if you can reflect on these comments about coercion that he's suggesting, actually.
You said that there's a huge groundswell of interest in secular perspectives that are critical to the sort of really homogenous religious outlook that you read in the region. And you've lived and experienced yourself in the region, probably more so than myself or Chaddy. But Shaddy presenting statistics that suggest that there's not enough popularity of those perspectives. And ultimately, when states want to assert themselves, they use coercion and crush people who are Islamist.
So that would be my question for yourself and for Shaddy drawing on Nadja's. It's around a bunch of both together, Ali, up there. It is obviously an extremely influential figure in terms of like the discourse that he inaugurated, and that is a powerful force. And there are forms of secular discourses that result in the sorts of people like Nasser Abuzaid, who are driven out by an ostensibly sort of secular, modern nation state.
So I think you made the point that Sisi isn't really a secular figure, but does that not indicate a kind of problem in terms of the kinds of things that can be tolerated within within a state? So it's alright. I'll start with Nadia and then Shadi, if you could take him from there. And we welcome your questions as ever. If you want to ask questions, please do. And Michael, we'll take that on in just a moment. Thank you.
So I agree with Chaddy that there needs to be a system that allows both these voices to coexist and to compete for people's hearts and minds. The thing is, I mean, if I may share, I hear and maybe I'm not hearing this right, that regimes are very coercive and there's no question about it. Nobody will argue that regimes are coercive, but Islamists are just as equally, I would even argue, just as equally coercive as regimes.
And in fact, I even believe that it was because a lot of people have seen multiple versions and reiterations of an Islamic state, whether etc., Abia, Iran, the Islamic State, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Muslim mother in Egypt were anything but inclusive in writing the constitution of Egypt. They were arresting journalists. They were trying to coerce. So they had the same exact methodology there. I was watching a lot of their television stations. They were inciting violence.
Truly, I I really believe that a lot of the people who felt terror that, oh my goodness, these people were just going to sit down so so that the regimes and Islam is to have a lot of that violence. In fact, in common and that exclusivity, the regime is just pure authoritarianism and Islam and Islamists, in addition to the authoritarian trend, they're holier than thou because they are they represent God versus, you know, others representing the devil, however.
But from my reading of the voices that want separation, it is like Shaddy said, there's anticlerical and because they've seen all sorts of political interpretations. But I would not say that those who are calling for separation between politics and religion, they actually want to coerce against religion. In fact, the opposite. Like, if you read again, this rabbi said he believes they should be able to rule, but there should be a mechanism for them to be voted out if they don't deliver.
I mean, that's a problem. Islam is don't want to be voted out. They just want to be voted in. So I think the region does need a democracy that allows for these two very important voices in the Muslim majority countries to compete and others as well. But definitely sharing of power. This is good. I think we have we'd have planned some contrasting perspectives here. So let's do it.
Let's get into this. So I think if we're talking about Egypt for a moment, what we know about secularists or liberals is that the vast majority of them supported the 2013 military coup. Not only that, the vast majority of them supported the worst mass killing in modern Egyptian history. What this tells us is that, again, so-called these liberals or anti Islamists or whatever, they were not willing to play by the electoral rules.
They weren't willing to wait for another election and to try to beat Mohammed Morsi and the Brotherhood through electoral means. And we used to play a game. It's actually a pretty dark game. And I'm not even sure the game is quite the right word. But after the coup, me and a few friends who were like, you know, watching what was happening in Egypt, we would try to count on one hand how many prominent liberals in the entire country of 100 million oppose the coup.
We usually got to two or three individuals. That's how rare it was for liberals to actually uphold the democratic process. Now we have to ask ourselves why. Why do people who claim to believe in enlightenment principles and liberal ideals of tolerance and diversity? They claim they believe in these ideas, but then they tend to end up supporting military coups. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think the two are just OK.
But I'll just finish on the other point on the Brotherhood. And there might be a little bit of a gap in how we perceived the Brotherhood. Look. I think Iran and Saudi Arabia don't really fit in the rubric, because in those cases we didn't have Islamist parties coming to power through democratic means.
So I wouldn't want to put the Brotherhood or other Islamist parties that participate in the parliamentary process in the same bucket as a revolutionary context where and also a Shia context, which is different for a number of reasons. Now, the Brotherhood, I don't want to relitigate what happened in 2011 to 2013 when the Brotherhood was rising to power. Yes, the Brotherhood did not govern inclusively or as inclusively as it should have in the constitutional process.
There was certainly overreach from Morsi and Morsi was the wrong person at the wrong time. And as someone who got to know Morsi, you know, individually and spend time with him before he became president, he's not exactly the person I would have gone for. That said, if we look at Egypt's modern history, 2011 to 2013 was the most democratic Egypt has ever been.
It was a flawed experiment. It was a scary experiment. And I know because many of my friends and family in Egypt, I mean, born raised here in the US. But most my relatives are still in Egypt. They are pretty anti brotherhood and pro Sisi. And they would they would see me as a kind of interloper like, oh, now you're you're American. You're coming back to the country of your parents and you're trying to tell us how to live democratically.
These people are dangerous. We want to get rid of them. And if that means through a coup, so be it. But I think that we still have to try to look objectively at this moment. And I think that the case is very strong, that this was a relative high point, despite its flaws or with all of its flaws. And my preference by very strong preference would have been that instead of supporting military coups, some of these liberals would have said, let's try to convince our fellow Egyptians.
So next time around, we can get the Brotherhood's percentage in the polls down. But that's not what happened. And I don't know when Egypt will be able to recover from this. It could quite literally be decades. You know, if I may just say one point, you ask why I agree with you that it was the most democratic Egypt has been since early 20th century.
And judging from what I've seen myself in the discourse that was coming out of Islamists, there was a lot of threat of violence that would terrify anybody, honestly. So the discourse. Terrorised people. I mean, this is the thing about a lot of Islam is they do not recognise how this threat of violence and terrorises people. That makes people think, OK, we'll take the army rather than have ISIS coming next.
So even if Morsi himself maybe was not doing this, but there were a lot of his supporters that were really threatening ISIS like treatment of liberals, which make people basically it's it's survival. It's existential. And that's a problem of the discourse, because the discourse is not civil. The discourse is not. Hey, let's let the best idea win. Let us talk about issues. How do we we have serious issues in the Arab world. We have issues of economy, issues of environment.
The discourse was not on what's the best idea. The discourse, especially with Islamists, is very quickly. Are we going to show these people we're going to essentially govern down? So, I mean, I've seen this. I'm sure you have seen a lot of videos of Islamists is very quickly turns threats of violence. And, of course, you know, then the regimes use that fear to do exactly what the Islamists say they would do to their opponents.
But they're both, you know, using violence and there's no justification at all to violence. And the discourse I'm interested in actually is one that discredits violence as a mechanism in any shape or form to engage with any issue politically, socially, religiously, etc. Nadia, I would just say very quickly, I know that we want to move on to Q&A and all that, but the test of the Brotherhood's position on violence versus non-violence.
We had that with the Sisi regime's repression. I think a lot of us fear that we could have at Algeria like situation the Brotherhood as hundreds of thousands of members and supporters and sympathisers in Egypt. It's what it is, the largest mass movement in the country. But we didn't see a mass turn to violence. Why? I think one of the reasons is the Brotherhood, you know, counselled its members to the extent possible to not take up arms and start some kind of endless insurgency.
Yes. Were there outbreaks of violence from people who left the Brotherhood fold and said enough is enough? Yes, but it's it's also, I think, a relief that when we might have expected a mass turn to violence, that's not actually what we saw despite very high levels of repression. I would just note that. OK. Thank you. Thank you both very much. We're going to now move to questions coming from the audience. They're coming in. They can fast in a number of them. Both of you.
And individually, the first one is going to both with you. It comes from Metgasco here. Very nice of you to join us, Marty. And that is really interesting to see. To what extent is this debate on the pace of religion in the Arab world, certainly since the Arab Spring been influenced what happened in Iran, particularly with the revolution and thereafter? So that's for both of you. Nadia, please. You know, I actually would be interested what you think.
But from what I've been monitoring, so Iran had almost almost a spring before the Arab Spring. And so when when the Arab Spring started, there was a lot of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts basically carrying the sentiment. We're not going to be like Iran. That was at the beginning of the Arab Spring. But I don't know honestly, because most of the media outlets in the Arab world are controlled by the regimes.
So they're very polarised, whether they are pro Iran or against Iran. There's a huge polarisation that I think the average people are lost in that. Like, I don't know if I would think that there is. I haven't seen any, you know, that reach between people or intellectuals outside that polarisation in politics. I haven't seen much of that myself.
So on this, I would say that, you know, having spent a lot of time with Brotherhood leaders and ordinary members in various countries, but mostly Egypt and Jordan, but also in Nahda, which is not technically brotherhood. In Tunisia, very rarely. And I started doing my my interviews in, I guess, 2004, 2005. So over this long period of time, it's been remarkable to me how rarely Iran has been brought up as a model to emulate of anything. It tends to come up as a cautionary note of going too far.
Now, there was a period in the 80s, you know, more recently after the revolution where some brotherhood linked individuals saw Iran in a positive light and rushed on. Nucci is one example of this. So the notion is more kind of confrontational phase. In the 80s, he like the language of Khomeini and others and share yachtie of fighting for the dispossessed and the kind of anti imperialism narrative and all of that.
But then, you know, she switches in the 90s and distances himself from the Iranian model. When he sees that you can't really say Iran is moving towards democracy and we can have a debate about double discourse, to what extent Islamists are sincere when they say they believe in procedural democracy. I don't want to get into that too much.
But even when people aren't even ordinary members so, one, you can you maybe expect that even if one gets to know Islamist leaders, there's still kind of trying to present themselves as moderate? But even but on the grassroots level, I never saw much evidence that Iran had any hold on the Brotherhood's imagination. Also, it's a little bit of a tough fit because there are major differences. I mean, Iranian Islamists are very clerical in their orientation.
As is obvious, I think I've generally seen the Brotherhood, at least in Egypt, as being maybe not anticlerical, but non-clerical. If you look at their senior leadership, there are very few clerics who play any real role. It's primarily doctors, engineers, lawyers, teachers and so on. So this is not a movement that's known for deep theological insight coming from clerics, which is very different to the clerical deference model that we see in Iran.
Thank you very much. There's a question specifically the Shaadi, but I'd be interested to see both of yours response to this. It's a very interesting question coming from Christopher Wheeldon. Christopher asks. We have heard about how religion affects politics in the Middle East after the Arab Spring, but how the politics of the last 10 to 20 years changed political Islam and Islamism over the same period, particularly in terms of its methods and ideas.
It's almost like not religion in politics or what has politics done for religion, in particular, Islamism. So shoddy, first of all. And if you wanted to weigh in on that, Nadia would be most welcome. So sometimes I use a conceptual definition for mainstream Islamism, which gets at this tension, sometimes I describe it as the attempt to reconcile premodern Islamic law with the modern nation state. Now, the problem is they're hard to reconcile. Islam was not revealed in a time of nation states.
So naturally, Islam is not going to speak to our Westphalian dilemmas. And there's not a whole lot we can do about that in the corpus of Islamic law. Also developed in a premodern period where, again, nation states were not the primary unit. What mainstream Islamists want to use this term, mainstream Islamists, I'm referring primarily to brotherhood or Brotherhood inspired organisations.
They tried to square the circle. Now, the problem when you're trying to square the circle with something as powerful as the state. The state might end up changing you. And I think that one critique of Brotherhood movements is that they become too enamoured by the nation state. They can't see beyond the state. And I think this was very clear during the Arab Spring when despite maybe their earlier and better judgement of not contesting the presidency, they became obsessed with capturing the state.
And they saw the state as the means to achieve their Islamic project, which, of course, was rather vague and undefined. And this obsession with state power is something that I think has hurt Islamists quite a bit. And it is, I think, encouraging to see some younger Brotherhood members in exile, whether in Europe or in Turkey or Doha, understanding that this was a mistake that Morsi and other senior Brotherhood leaders made.
They rushed. They what they saw this state as a prise and they started to have tunnel vision. And I think also another example of this is when so Brotherhood movements use Moslehi arguments, a lot of public interest arguments where they can basically be like, oh, well, this would technically violate Islamic law, like taking a loan from the World Bank or the IMF. But they couldn't get around that theologically by using these very general, vague Moslehi arguments.
And this goes back to the point I made, that because they don't have a strong clerical role in their movements and because they're not very theologically or legally strong, you don't go to the Brotherhood for advice on Islamic law. You go to the Brotherhood for getting out the vote. That's what the Brotherhood does really well, internal discipline organisation, hierarchy, leadership delegation, so on and so forth.
So I think this has become the major intellectual deficit with Brotherhood movements is that they're not theoretically rich and they're not theologically rich and they deferred too much to the nation state. You know, it's very interesting. Ironically, intellectually speaking, both liberal thinkers like Abuzaid, like his whole class to be damaged. A lot of them also like looked down upon the whole political class because they want modernity in some ways.
But the is a lot harder because they actually have an Islamic model. And yet a lot of it's very hard core pillars, really. They do not, like you said, that you're trying to square a circle. They don't quite fit. And this is what the impossible state by Halep. What he tried to argue that basically it's an impossibility to have an Islamic state with a nation state. It's based on a different paradigm. The nation state is is based on every individual as a participant.
So as an individual, I have rights. I have duties as well. But inverses the rights of the religion, Islam. So it's a very different two different paradigms. One puts men, if you would, at the centre and the other puts a the centre. So it was more important. A lot of. So with the nation state is very clear its people. I cannot just get rid of Saudi because I don't like how it's not. Thank you very much. I'm going to combine a couple of questions on a similar theme.
Really looking at the extent to which we may have seen Islamism decline since the Arab Spring. I mean, in Egypt, effectively, the Muslim Brotherhood had been decimated. And whether that's a sort of reality or just the over the power state has led to, it has actually been a decline in support for the Brotherhood, as Shadi said, didn't fight back in quite the same way. But you've also seen in other countries and it comes with Catherine Adella.
Caller's question about we've seen in somewhere like Tunisia whether or not a movement against Shadi said not quite a Brotherhood party, but certainly a much broader family and related has seen its support shrink at successive elections in Tunisia. So, first of all, is there this decline in support, particularly for Brotherhood parties? And what does that say about the place of religion? Does it mean people are moving away from that?
Or is it the sort of thing that Brotherhood Islamist parties are offering is no longer as attractive as it once was on the eve of the Arab Spring? So to both of you, if I may start. So there are two reasons for the decline of Islamists. One is because of the authoritarian practises of regimes, which goes in cycles like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is a very good examples.
Every time the Mubarak regime, for example, would would really come down on the Islamists, on the Brotherhood, they would have a decline temporarily. And that decline. I'm not worried about this. If I was an Islamist, I wouldn't worry about it because oppression. There's something else that pushes the party underground. And it actually furthers a lot of the old hoax in the basically that the hard liners to to really just follow the blindly.
I mean, that there was a crisis within the Muslim Brotherhood during the Arab Spring and a lot of former Brotherhood wrote books like I read seven of them. So there must have been a whole avalanche of them. But the other decline, which I think has the most significance going forward, is a decline, again at the level of ideas. So at the level a decline because of persuasion, a decline because they weren't able to put forth a persuasive model.
And I think it's, again, fascinating that Tunisia was able to have a constitution that has no Sharia. It's based on liberal human rights. Women can marry infidels, for example. They're Muslim without their husbands converting to Islam. Freedom of thought, freedom of conscience. I mean, it's a very unprecedented kind of constitution in Tunisia. We see even like those headlines in Sudan, after 30 years of Islamist rule, there's a separation between politics and religion.
I mean, again, it's in the early stages. But I think that idea of civic state and the idea that I think there is a growing. Circulation of debates that Islamists are not really an Islamic state cannot really address the challenges of the 21st century because they're too outdated. It doesn't mean, again, Islam. Well, we've begun far from it. I mean, even in the US or Europe, there's still very strong religious people.
But it does mean that there is a growing, growing minority and a minority doesn't have to be ineffective. I mean, the Middle East has been ruled by minorities for centuries. So I wonder where that debate will take the Middle East. I'm not sure that Islamism has as much promise as it used to before. It has multiple reiterations that people could see in the Middle East.
So I actually agree with Nadia on this, that I definitely think that there is some souring towards Islamist models of various sorts and certainly towards the Brotherhood model because ultimately the Brotherhood model didn't work out so well and people feel burned by it.
And even former Brotherhood members and, you know, I've been trying to interview sort of brotherhood, but also X Brotherhood folks in east in Istanbul, where many of them currently are, and many of them have decided to leave the Brotherhood and some of them have even become, you know, secular in certain ways or liberal and so on and so forth. I wouldn't want to overstate how big that group is, but there's certainly a sense that something didn't go right.
That said, I think what we've learnt from previous iterations of this is that even if you decimate Islamists and they have no organisational structures and you have a strong secular culture like in Tunisia in the 1990s, Islamist groups can bounce back very quickly because of their built in advantage when it comes to organising. And they know how to run elections. Liberals might have some interesting intellectual ideas.
They're not great at like knocking on doors. And sometimes that can really make the difference. Internal discipline matters a lot. The brother you know, the Brotherhood leadership. It can say to its supporters and followers, hey, vote for these candidates. But with liberals, you have a very fragmented space. They compete with each other. And that's one reason that even though a knot has gone down in its support in Tunisia, it's still the largest single party in parliament.
There's an interesting debate in Tunisia now inside of Islamist circles. That is the reason that Anada has lost support because they're Islamist or because they they've deemphasizes their Islamist origins. And now it's harder to distinguish between them and other parties because I know she doesn't talk that much about Islam or Sharia.
Definitely not Sharia anymore. And this wing of the party, if we want to call them doves versus hawks or something like that, the doves, which is now the vast majority of the party, they have dominated and they've moved in a very particular direction. So you might have voters who say, well, what's the point of voting for ANADA if they're not even that Islamist anymore? Because part of the trick in voting or elections is that you've got to have differentiation between parties.
And the question is, is it not, that doing a good job of that now? You know, I want to point out something that I think is is missing and we need to take it into consideration in looking at the secularists versus Islamists, is that Islam is to have tremendous, tremendous funding to have schools and to have clinics, whereas liberals, they don't have the funding and liberals, you know, Islamists can can take money from the Gulf states, can take money from wealthy Gulf people,
whereas liberals do not have that advantage so that they are really the winning up to a quarter of people that are identifying as basically. No, I do not even identify anymore. I wasn't. That is entirely made and accomplished through persuasion with active clinics and schools and funding and satellite channels night and day. So given the disparity in support, it's really, you know, what will it be? They had even support. I'm not so sure. Right.
We have time for one last question, and it comes to both of you from Noma and no more would also be interested in knowing how how to access your work, Nadia. So that's no mother nowhere asks basically about. We talk a lot mainly about the Brotherhood. But is the future now? What about the Salafi movement? Is this where things are moving? Is this a future? Is this a new development or is it something else? Briefly, if you could, both of you. Michael, I'm sorry. Would you please say that again?
Rob, I see the role of Salafis. And we've seen you've just mentioned about the Brotherhood possibly be in decline. Is Salafis and actually the new and interesting and dynamic part of Islamism, or is it something else? So I assume what she means, Salafism, is basically the piety without religion that there's multiple.
I mean, when we come to the categories, they are very, very diverse and very one run of self ism is basically let us just let us not participate in politics and wait until the environment is conducive to us having an Islamic state. Until then, we stay away from politics. So it's very personal religiosity, if you would. I don't think that personal religiosity in Islam or other faiths will go anywhere any time soon in humanity.
In fact, interestingly, even those that are leaving the faith altogether are having a different kind of spirituality. But just as urgent. Whether it's converted to Christianity or some Buddhism or a form of spirituality without labels, which in fact is the largest growing in the world. The spirituality without religion, like basically this very individualistic, inward looking.
So I don't think it's going to go anywhere. But I really would be incredibly shocked if that Salafism becomes ever again a majority of the population giving the competition over ideas and the access to social media, access to modern ideas that, you know, you're young, you don't look to Iran or Saudi as an Islamic state or any as the place where you'd want want to live and have freedoms. And so then they don't offer attractive virgins. I doubt that the future.
But I don't think they disappear. You know, just a very quick get on that. I mean, Nadia captured some of the less political Salafis. It's also interesting to ask about Salafi parties. They aren't as active as they used to be during the Arab Spring. But, you know, I remember after the parliamentary elections when I was in Egypt in early 2012 and the results are finalised and the Noor Party or the Noor Parties Coalition.
So the Salafi coalition won a remarkable portion of the vote, close to 27 percent. And I remember that, like all my like secular elite family members were like, OK, we kind of knew about the Brotherhood, but we really didn't know our country. If there's twenty seven percent of our countrymen and women who are going for these crazy Salafi types. I think the Noor party has lost a lot of support because it supported the coup and Sisi and it hasn't got a lot in return.
You know, it's an interesting question. If there is a political opening, whether they can whether Salafis can try to position themselves as an alternative to the Brotherhood and say, look, we tried the Brotherhood already. That didn't work out so well. Salafi, you know, that that might be part of how they approach it.
It's really hard to anticipate these things. Part of the problem with having so many authoritarian regimes in authoritarian societies, we don't have a clear sense of what people's natural inclinations are. We do have polling, but obviously a lot of this polling is happening with very high levels of fear and perhaps self-censorship. So, for example, if you're polling people on the Brotherhood in Egypt, I mean, you're probably not the most honest answer.
And Salafis probably to some extent as well, which is why oftentimes I go back. You know, we go back to the question of political opening and democracy that changes so many of the variables and so many new new factors will be introduced if there is a political opening in Egypt that we're going to have to reassess. I think a lot of our starting premises, because it's going to be a very fluid situation once again, just as it was in 2011.
Chaddy, thank you very much and thank you so much, Nadia. I mean, this has really been a great session because you've really bounced off each other. There's been a lot of dynamic discussion, and I think our viewers have thoroughly enjoyed it. We apologise to you that we still have 20 questions actually pending. So we really apologise. But I hope that this has been very fascinating discussion. And indeed, there is a wonderful debate element to this as well. And I think a lot of us learnt a lot.
I'll leave you at this point to that. And I look forward to staying in touch with you. And for everyone else, please do join us. Next week. We're going to have a couple of wonderful scholars. And again, a think tank. And I will go Mattie and Mary Fitzgerald talking about Libya, where roughly exactly ten years on from the start of the Libyan uprising. So we really look forward to having you there. And until then, stay safe. Take care. Thank you, Emma. Thank you. Thanks very much.
Great to see you.