The arabs and islam: The troubled search for legitimacy

Daedalus

Volumn 128, Issue 2, 1999, Pages 127-145

  Masoud, Tarek E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27744508731     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. "Cracking Down on Deep Purple," Newsweek (Atlantic Edition), 17 February 1998; "
2. Macarena linked to Satan worship in Egypt: Author," Agence France Presse, 28 January 1997.
3. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 15.
4. Max Weber, "The Nature of Charismatic Domination," in Economy and Society, 4th ed. (1956), II, 662-679,
5. reprinted in W. G. Runciman, ed., Weber: Selections in Translation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 226.
6. Milton J. Esman, "State and Street in the Muslim Middle East," The Brown Journal of World Affairs (Summer/Fall 1996).
7. But even in a situation where a leader rules by force and coercion, he must at least be seen as legitimate by those who would act as his agents in the application of that force, i.e., the regime that surrounds him. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, 15-17.
8. Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of Illiberal Democracy," Foreign Affairs (November/December 1997).
9. Judith Miller, God Has Ninety Nine Names: Reporting from a Militant Middle East (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 309-310.
10. Shireen T. Hunter, The Future of Islam and the West: Clash of Civilizations or Peaceful Coexistence (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1998), 46.
11. Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 112.
12. Patrick Seale, Assad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
13. Miller, God Has Ninety Nine Names, 314.
14. Another version of this popular Saudi story substitutes the radio with the telephone. The version I use is considered least apocryphal.
15. David Gardner, "A Modern Assassin," The Financial Times, 22 August 1998.
16. In 1991 the Saudi-funded World Muslim League began a campaign to convince Muslims that the distance between the Eastern Province and the holy sites in Mecca and Medina made it acceptable for American troops to be stationed there, but by then it was too late. The damage control was recognized for what it was.
17. Andrew Loewenstein and Tarek Masoud, "Saudi Arabia and the Westphalian State System," paper presented at the International Studies Association convention, Minneapolis, March 1998.
18. Tarek Masoud, "Desert Storm: Bin Ladin's Ideological Roots," The New Republic, 28 December 1998.
19. But even Nasser, who waged a merciless campaign to crush Islamist opposition during his rule, was not above seeking Islamic cover for his policies. He justified his socialist agrarian-reform program, which involved confiscating huge tracts of land from prosperous individuals and resditributing them among the farmers, as "Islamically just." See Miller, God Has Ninety Nine Names, 79.
20. "The Trickiest One of All: The Chief Obstacle to a Democratic Future for Muslims," The Economist, 6 August 1994.
21. Sayyid Qutb, AI Islam wa-Mushkilat al-Hadara (Islam and the Problem of Civilization),
22. quoted in Miller, God Has Ninety Nine Names, 62.
23. This is not to say that Islam writ large is to blame for the Muslim world's political dysfunctions. True, from Mali to Malaysia, one encounters the same problems of political instability and economic underdevelopment found in the Arab world, and the common denominator is Islam. But like the nations it embraces, the practice of Islam varies greatly throughout them. To ascribe to the faith the problems of countries as diverse as Pakistan, Egypt, and Malaysia is to ignore the fact that each of these countries has a distinct history, one in which Islam was shaped more by the culture than it was the shaper of that culture. A scholar seeking to understand the lack of democracy in, say, Malaysia, might be better served by looking at Singapore, a country with a similar culture and pattern of economic development, than by looking at Egypt, which shares with Malaysia only the fact that its people face East when they pray. Non-Arab Muslim countries like Malaysia, Bangladesh, Mali, and Indonesia (the world's largest Muslim country) came relatively late to Islam. They were never its proselytizers and had little of their identity bound up with it. They were, to be sure, part of the great Islamic kingdoms that rose and fell from the seventh through the nineteenth centuries but were never central to them; when those kingdoms dissolved or, as they did in the twentieth century, bowed to Western might, these peoples on the periphery felt no great sense of loss. In fact, if anything, they saw in the crumbling of the old order a chance to determine their own fates, set up their own nations, make their own political kingdoms. Islam was certainly something they grappled with, but, with the exceptions of Iran and Pakistan, it was mainly part of the cultural backdrop of their process of nation building. It was not a defining force and was thus not mutated into the political ideology that it has become in the Arab world.