HISTORY 3453 Islam and Nationalism James Whidden BAC 404 585-1814 jamie.whidden@acadiau.ca Office Hours: Mon-Fri: 10:00-12:00 Course Objectives: The Arab Spring has transformed domestic politics in the Middle East. The course investigates the ideological, sociological, and political forces that have shaped modern politics in the region by asking several questions through a reading of seminal works on the topic: What are the forces driving massive protests against authoritarian rule? Where does Islam fit in these processes of political change? To what degree are the Islamic organizations modern? Or is political Islam a straightforward rejection of modernity? What is the relationship between state and society in the Middle East? Can we speak of a civil society and democracy or only of authoritarian rule and political oppression? Readings (at the book store, on reserve at the library, or in the e-library) Albert Hourani, The Islamic State in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, Harvard University Press, 2002. Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modern Middle East, London: Routledge, 1994. Gassam Salamé, Democracy without Democrats, London: I.B. Tauris, 1994. Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State, London: I.B. Tauris, 3 rd edition, 2009. Evaluation: Final Exam: 30% Participation 40% Paper 30% Final Exam The final exam will consist of essay questions and will be designed to test your knowledge of the primary texts, lectures, and presentations. The primary texts are Kepel and Zubaida. Other readings are selective. The course will also introduce several films, including Persepolis and Syriana. Participation The participation grade will be based upon your presentation, as well as your attendance and discussion of the texts during class. Discussion of texts will involve students answering questions distributed by the instructor. Answers must be submitted upon the request of the instructor.
Presentation (last three weeks of term) The presentation will be a reading or presentation of the research paper. Research Paper The paper (3,000 words) will be a study of themes investigated in any one of the texts. Students should identify case studies, either a particular country in a distinct period or a political organization or tendency, such as the Salafi or Jihadi organizations (Muhammad Brotherhood, al-qaeda). The paper will include: 1) Thesis statement. 2) Themes that support the thesis statement. 3) A bibliography with at least 5 sources (articles or books) in addition to the required textbooks. Encyclopedia-type entries (either books or internet sources) may be included, but will not count as one of your sources. You may of course use books, articles or other documentary sources on the internet, if the author can be identified. Follow the guidelines in Turabian s A Manual for Writers. 4) A preliminary thesis statement, annotated bibliography will be submitted after reading week, which will engage with one of the articles in Salamé or one of the chapters in Zubaida or Kepel. The purpose is for you to define a theoretical (argumentative) approach to a specific topic. You will lose 10% of your paper grade if you neglect this assignment. The Course Outline is numbered according to the weeks of the term. The readings should be completed beforehand in preparation for discussions, assignments or tests. 1. Introduction, Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Modern Middle East, pages 3-7 & Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State, ix-xxxii. 2. Revolution in the Middle East, Philip Fargues, Demographic Explosion or Social Upheaval? in Salamé, Democracy Without Democrats & Zubaida, Classes as political actors in the Iranian Revolution. Clearly technological devices have been crucial in the contemporary Arab Spring; however, there are clearly other forces at work. Begin with a consideration of the social forces behind the Iranian Revolution of 1979, which, as Zubaida says, the example of which is by means confined to the case of Iran. Based on a reading of Fargues and Zubaida, consider whether demographic, generational, or class analysis is best applied to revolution in the Middle East. Which social group was most important in the revolutionary situations (1979 & 2011)? 3. Social Forces and Historical Processes: Owen, State, Power and Politics, pages 3-31 & Zubaida, Class and Community in Urban Politics. Explain the concepts of vertical and horizontal social solidarities to the cases of Iraq and Syria. How did the configuration of these social forces change over time? Why do sectarian or vertical groups sometimes adopt revolutionary ideologies with a nationalist or socialist content? Why did Shi is in Iran switch from socialist to sectarian ideologies? Apply these concepts to the case of Egypt or Tunisia.
4. The Modern State: Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Modern Middle East, pages 3-7 & 32-80. Why does Owen choose to make the role of the state the focus of his explanation of politics in the modern Middle East, rather than arguments based on ethnicity or religion? Describe the strategies or mechanisms that authoritarian states employed to control society. Give specific examples that indicate differences between states, but pay attention to the bottom line that most post-colonial states shared in common. Explain the two most common forms of locating politics within an authoritarian, single party regime? What are the criticisms of these two types of analysis? How does Owen refine these analyses? What s the king s dilemma? How do the politics of family rule differ from the single party regimes and what are the main problems in sustaining family rule? Pay particular attention to the examples of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. 5. Religion and the State: Owen, State Power and Politics, pages 167-196. Define the common historical context and common elements of religiously inspired politics in the modern Middle East? What are the implications of these observations? Compare the degree to which Islam, as opposed to Western ideas on political modernity, influenced the political institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran. To what degree did the Muslim Brotherhood seek an Islamic state or simply compromise and accommodation with the existing Arab regimes? How did the Islamic groups of the 1970s and 1980s break with the earlier policy of the Muslim Brotherhood? 6. Iranian Revolution, Zubaida, 1-34 & Persepolis. How does Zubaida define fundamentalism? Trace the evolution of fundamentalism from Afghani and Abduh to Rashid Rida, Hasan al-banna, and Sayyid Qutb. What were the main elements of continuity and change in the thinking of these fundamentalists? To what degree and when did members of the Iranian religious establishment develop a fundamentalist political stance? Describe Shariati s doctrine of the people. Is this idea incorporated into Khomeini s doctrine of the rule of the jurist (waliyat al-faqih)? What are the distinctive features of the Shia tradition that lend itself to revolutionary activity? Give particular attention to the relationship of the religious establishment and the Iranian state. In his discussion Zubaida makes various comparisons between the thought of Islamic fundamentalists and Western political thought. Do these support the idea of Political Islam as a modern phenomenon? 7. Reading Week. 8. The Islamic State: Albert Hourani, The Islamic State in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age & Zubaida, 38-63. Compare and contrast Hourani and Zubaida s discussion of historical forms of the Islamic state. What new observations does Zubaida bring to our understanding of the impact of the Islamic tradition upon modern political Islam?
What are, according to Zubaida, the most important causes of oppositional Islamic movements in the contemporary Middle East? Give examples of social processes and historical conjunctures that illustrate his conclusions. Indicate how the Muslim Brotherhood illustrates these processes and conjunctures. What was Hasan al-banna s vision of the Islamic State? Account for Sayyid Qutb s theory of jahiliyya relate it to the political and social circumstances of his era. Similarly, Khomeini s ideology is situated in specific historical circumstances. Describe these. 9. Expansion: Sunni Islam. Gilles Kepel, Jihad, 1-105. Answer the questions given below. 10. Jihadists. Gilles Kepel, Jihad, 255-322. Answer the questions given below. Syriana. 11. The Nation-State in the Middle East. Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State, 121-181 Answer questions 9 & 10 in the section on Zubaida. 11. Paper Presentations. 12. Paper Presentations. 13. Review. Questions: Gilles Kepel, Jihad. 1. What were the essential similarities between Khomeini, Maududi, and Qutb that leads Kepel to identify them with an Islamic cultural revolution? What are the basic differences between them? 2. From Morocco to Indonesia, the position of the ulema in relation to state and society is quite diverse. Explain with concrete examples. In which regions did Islamism have a firm hold in the late 1960s? 3. Why did Islamism adopt a strictly conservative political agenda in Sunni Islam, rather than a truly revolutionary one? 4. Why did the radical and revolutionary strains of Sunni Islam fail to win broad based support? Consider the examples of Egypt, Malaysia, and Pakistan. 5. What made the Shiite form of Islamism in Iran uniquely suited to develop a revolutionary movement? 6. Explain the expansion of Shiite Islamism into Lebanon.
7. Why did the Islamic zone of influence come to embrace Afghanistan, Algeria, and Palestine? 8. Why did the Gulf War result in a split in the Arab Islamist movement? How did this split impact upon Saudi Arabia and the globalized Arab Islamist organizations? 9. The Islamist movement in Algeria shifted from democratic opposition to salafist-jihadist, and finally to takfiri Islam. Explain why these changes took place and what impact this had upon social support for the Islamists in Algeria. 10. How did the Islamist organizations come to control Egyptian civil society? Why did this control fail to translate into political power? 11. Contrast the tactics of Hamas during the first and second intifada. Why did this change of tactics take place? 12. Referring to the epistle of 1995 Kepel suggests that Osama Bin Laden belongs to a school of Islamists that stood at the intersection of the jihadist-salafist movement and the Muslim Brothers. Explain. Compare his jihad to that of the jihadists in Egypt and Algeria. 13. In several cases, Kepel refers to the traditional relationship between the ulema and the Islamic prince, in what ways did modern Islamism break this traditional relationship? 14. Explain the significance of the following themes that run through Kepel s analysis: a) the conflict between secular nationalists and Islamists; b) the alliance between urban youth and the devout middle class Questions: Sami Zubaida, Islam, the People and the State, pages 121-181. 1. What were the political consequences of the differing patterns of modern social and economic development in Europe and the Middle East? Give particular attention to the role of Islam in the nation-state context. 2. Define the meaning of essentialism and describe the way Zubaida uses themes such as specificity and historical change to critique the essentialist approach. Use examples from Egypt and Iran to illustrate your observations.
3. How does the notion of a political field supersede earlier analysis based on essentialist or dependency theory? 4. Review the forms Islam takes in contemporary politics. How does Zubaida show that these types only operate within a modern political field? What are the implications of his observations upon essentialist theories of Islamic politics? 5. How does Zubaida define political Islam? What observations does Zubaida make to complicate the term political Islam or give it a more nuanced meaning? 6. Compare Owen s discussion of the state in the Middle East with Sami Zubaida s discussion of the patrimonial state (Chapter 6). What are the similarities and differences of their arguments? Persepolis 1. How are the events of 1978, which toppled Muhammad Reza Shah, represented in the film? 2. What were the most important revolutionary groups active in 1978? 3. How is the history of the formation of Reza Shah s rule (at the end of WW1) told in the film? 4. How does the film portray the regime of Reza Shah? 5. How did revolutionary groups fare under the new Islamic regime? Which groups suffered most? 6. What were the basic guidelines for women under the Islamic republic? How were these rules enforced? 7. Compare the numbers of political prisoners under the Shah as opposed to under Khomeini. Can this be taken as a universal measure of the Islamic state? 8. Judging from the film, how would you characterize the ideology of the Islamic republic? How effective was this ideology in mobilizing support for the regime? 9. Characterize Iranian society and culture during the Iran-Iraq War? Concepts Islamist Fundamentalist Caliphate Rashidun Asabiya
Salaf (Salafi or Salafiyya) Salafi-Jihadist Watan Wataniyya Shura (Mashwara) Bay a Maslaha Ijtihad Ijma Taqlid Bida Jahiliyya Hijra Jihad Takfir Fard al-ayn Velayat-e-Faqih (Wilayat al-faqih) Thinkers & Activists Ibn Taymiyya Muhammad Ibn Abd al-wahhab (Wahhabi) Jamal al-din al-afghani Muhammad Abduh (Abdu) Rashid Rida Abd al-raziq (Abduraziq) Khomeini Ali Shariati Hassan al-banna Sayyid Qutb Abdallah Azzam Maududi Umar Abd al-rahman (Omar Abdel Rahman) Bin Laden