Langohr Islamists & Ballot Boxes

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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 33 (2001), 591610. Printed in the United States of America

Vickie Langohr

O F I S L A M I S T S A N D B A L L O T B O X E S :

R E T H I N K I N G T H E R E L AT I O N S H I P B E T W E E N

I S L A M I S M S A N D E L E C T O R A L P O L I T I C S

As Islamist movements have gained strength across the Muslim world, their commit-ment to democratic means of achieving and exercising power has been repeatedlyanalyzed. The question of whether resort to violence to achieve its goals is inherent

in the Islamist project (that what some Islamists understand as a divine mandate toimplement shari a ultimately sanctions the use of force against dissenters) or contin-gent (that the violent exclusion of Islamists from the political arena has driven themto arms, best expressed by Franc ois Burgats contention that any Western politicalparty could be turned into the Armed Islamic Group in weeks if it were subjected tothe same repression Islamists had endured 1) looms large in this debate. Where Islamistmovements have not had the opportunity to participate in elections for political office,analysts willing to give these movements the benefit of the democratic doubt arguethat their peaceful participation in the student body and syndicate elections that theyhave been allowed to contest proves their intention to respect the results of national-level elections. 2 They also point to these groups repeated public commitment to playby the rules of the electoral game. 3 The fact that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptand Jordan and members of the Islah Party in Yemen have successfully competed innot one but a series of parliamentary elections and evinced a tendency to wage their battles through parliament and the courts rather than by force suggests to many thatthe question of whether Islamists can ever be democrats has already been settled inthe affirmative.

Analysts who are more skeptical of the possibility of a democratic Islamism gener-ally advance one of two arguments. The first is procedural: that although some Islam-ists have seemingly opted to effect change through the ballot box, they have chosenthis method only because they do not yet have the power to use more forceful ones.In a manner of speaking, this line of thinking accuses Islamists competing in parlia-mentary politics of engaging in political taqiyya , of parroting the rhetoric that demo-crats want to hear until they obtain sufficient power to abort the democratic politicalprocess and institute a policy of one-man, one-vote, one-time. For other critics, it

Vickie Langohr, Department of Political Science, College of the Holy Cross, One College Street, Worcester,Mass. 01610-2395, USA.

2001 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/01 $9.50


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is not the means Islamists employ but their goals that are suspect. Although democ-racy in its narrowest sense may be defined by observance of particular rules abouthow power is obtained and policies are made, its ultimate value lies in its pledgehowever short it may fall in realityto value and protect the rights of all citizensequally. It is at this more fundamental level that many scholars have found Islamismwanting, as they argue that all Islamists want to implement shari a, and shari a ashistorically practiced systematically discriminates against members of many groups,particularly women and non-Muslims. 4 If this argument is accepted, then the democ-racyIslamism question takes on a different cast and can be expressed as the followingset of propositions: Islamists seek ultimately to implement shari a, shari a itself isinherently undemocratic, and thus Islamists are, a priori , opponents of democracybecause they intend to use their power, regardless of how legitimately they may haveobtained it, to implement undemocratic policies.

In assessing the democratic commitments of various Islamist movements, it is im-portant to remember that the question of whether Islamist movements are prepared to

participate in democratic politics is by and large an inaccurate one. This questionassumes a political context in which democratic politics actually exist and that Islam-ists choose or decline to try their luck at them. In fact, very few examples of suchpolitics exist in most of the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East. What isactually on offer to most Islamist movements, as well as to other opposition move-ments, is participation in electoral contests for political office within regimes thatremain highly authoritarian. In this context, the questions to be asked are whether,and why, specific Islamist movements choose to forgo violent methods of achievingtheir goals in favor of their pursuit through electoral processes, and whether the goalsthemselves are compatible with democratic notions of equal basic rights for all citi-zens. These are empirical questions to which five new booksGeneive Abdos NoGod but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford University Press, 2000), Rob-ert W. Hefners Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton

University Press, 2000), Shaul Mishal and Avraham Selas The Palestinian Hamas:Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (Columbia University Press, 2000), Anthony Shad-ids Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam (West-view Press, 2001), and Quintan Wiktorowiczs The Management of Islamic Activism:Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State Power in Jordan (State University of NewYork Press, 2001)provide some preliminary and provocative answers. These worksexamine a wide spectrum of contexts, ranging from those in which opportunities for parliamentary competition are relatively new and movements associated with moreviolent approaches to politics, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, are choosing whether to participate in them; to a countryIndonesiain which a combination of Islamicgroups is credited with having played an instrumental role in peacefully ousting anauthoritarian regime. These new works represent a significant contribution to our un-derstanding of the procedural part of the democracy question referred to earlier, with

Shadid and Hefner skillfully deploying interviews with Islamists to illuminate whyand how they reached their commitments to democratic politics, and Mishal and Selaand Wiktorowicz demonstrating the potential costs and benefits of such commitments.They also invite us to revisit the goals part of the democracy question, with Shadidnoting the emergence of some Islamist movements, such as the Egyptian Center Party,


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which evince a willingness to reconsider traditional interpretations of shari a on someissues, while Hefner contends that doing away with the mythology of the Islamicstate 5 which seeks to join religious and political authority in the name of implement-ing shari a was a precondition for the emergence of democratic Islamism in Indonesia.

Four of the five books are in-depth studies of single countries or movements, andin adopting this approach they are part of a larger recent trend away from multi-casetreatments of Islamism. Not since Gilles Kepels influential Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh ,6 first published in English in 1985, have therebeen as many book-length treatments of Islamism in a single country as have beenpublished in the past three years. 7 Throughout the 1990s, academic studies of Islamismleaned heavily toward collections of chapters on different Islamist movements, 8 booksthat mined the experiences of several Islamist movements to arrive at more generalarguments about Islamism, 9 or studies situating Islamism among similar movementsbased on other religions. 10 This comparative approach was an important and largelysuccessful attempt to challenge the generalizing about a single, unitary form of Islamic

politics that accompanied the rise of Islamism on the world stage in the aftermath of Anwar Sadats assassination and the Iranian Revolution. It provided essential frame-works for thinking about the development of Islamist politics, and the influence of these frameworks in the books reviewed here is clear. The battles of younger genera-tions of Islamists against the rigid hierarchies in their own movements described byShadid, for example, would be inexplicable outside the context of an earlier devolu-tion of authority to interpret Islam from the ulema to a much wider swath of theMuslim population, developments that scholars such as Dale Eickelman and Jon An-dersen have attributed to the spread of mass higher education and the rise of inexpen-sive methods of mass communication. These new books can also be seen as an indirectresponse to the assumptions on which some of these earlier frameworks were based.Hefners tracing of the rise of a reformist, nonshari a-bound Islamism in Indonesia,for example, seems to challenge Olivier Roys influential assessment that political

Islam has failed because its revolutionary manifestations have not fundamentallyaltered their societies while its more conservative branches have devolved into neo-fundamentalist campaigns to alter individual behavior. For all of the new approachesemployed in these works, however, a feeling of la plus c a change, la plus de memechose remains in two regards. The insight that these works bring to their analysis of Islamists is largely matched with an unreflective treatment of the state, whose exis-tence as a clearly bounded entity entirely separate from Islamist activism is assumedeven though Islamists entrenchment within state bureaucracies themselves is a keysource of their movements power. Similarly, Nikki Keddie has argued that most re-cent works on modern religious movements pay scant attention to women, either asactors in the movements or as objects of their policies, 11 and several of the worksreviewed here fit squarely into this trend.

S O C I A L S E RV I C E S , E L E C T O R A L P O L I T I C S , A N D N E W I S L A M I S MI N T H E M I D D L E E A S T

The books reviewed here offer important insights into the ways that Islamist activistsassess the constraints within which they operate in the political arena. Mishal and


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Sela, Shadid, and Wiktorowicz examine the activities of a range of Islamist groupsthat act within very different political contexts, ranging from environments in whichparliamentary politics are relatively new, as in the Palestinian Authority, to those inwhich parliaments and Islamist participation in them are well established, as in Turkeyand Jordan. The very real and important differences in these contexts, however, donot alter the fact that movements in different places on this spectrum often face thesame questions: what can be achieved by working within political systems whoseleaders are both fundamentally opposed to key points of the Islamist agenda andwilling to use authoritarian methods to defeat it? Are the minimal political gainswhich can be won through formal politics worth the compromises that are the priceof entry into the game to begin with?

One answer that seems to emerge from these works is the important and complicatedrole that Islamist social-service networks play in determining their managers approachto politics and the ways in which their opposition to incumbent regimes will be ex-pressed. The gains that Islamist movements can win through social-service provi-

sionranging from opportunities for patronage through hiring social-service provid-ers to delegitimizing governments by contrasting their neglect of basic services withIslamist provision of themmay well be more significant than those which move-ments can hope to win through parliamentary politics, a consideration that may dictateIslamist political moderation in and outside of government in order to protect theseservice networks from government intrusion. However, if a movement assumes it willbe allowed to contest relatively free elections in which the amount of support it enjoyswill be accurately translated into parliamentary seats, social services may assume aneven more prominent role in Islamist politics as a way to win widespread electoralsupport.

In The Palestinian Hamas , Mishal and Sela take on the questions of violence, mod-eration, and social services more explicitly than the other works reviewed here, andthey advance two major arguments. The first is that despite its prevailing image . . .

as an ideologically intransigent and politically rigid movement, ready to pursue itsgoals at any cost, 12 Hamas has in fact been markedly balanced and shown a highdegree of political flexibility 13 in weighing various methods of achieving its goals.The second is that, its image as a violence-prone group notwithstanding, Hamas isfirst and foremost a social movement that prioritizes the provision of social servicesto its constituency. Herein lies the conundrum, as what the authors describe as Ha-mass effort to secure a dominant public position by committing itself to promotePalestinian national interests through violence against Israel while still maintaining itsIslamic social institutions of education, welfare, and health 14 has placed it in thedelicate position of trying to continue its violence against Israeli targets without pro-voking the Palestinian Authority (PA) to retaliate by crushing its service institutions.Within this framework, the authors meticulously trace Hamass forays into and absten-tion from violence over time and re-create its leaders debates about the value of

participating in elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council.In a sharp and welcome contrast to much writing on Hamas, Mishal and Sela avoid

what Burgat has termed the over-ideologiz[ing] of political violence in the Arabworldthe tendency to assume that the violence of various groups is dictated by theideologies to which they subscribe rather than paying attention to the specific contexts


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in which that violence might be deployed at any given time. 15 Crucially, Hamas vio-lence as Mishal and Sela portray it is not a tool to be used in the domestic politicalarena, as the movement swears and abides by its commitment not to solve conflictswith other Palestine Liberation Organization factions by force. According to Hamasfounder Ahmad Yasin, such violence would be deployed only if the PA were to takesteps to undermine Hamass civic infrastructureits religious, educational, and socialinstitutions and its public activities. 16 Violence against Israelis for the purpose of regaining the historic land of Palestine, on the other hand, is always perceived aslegitimate, with the timing and nature of particular violent attacks influenced by threefactors: attacks by Israelis on Palestinians, such as the Hebron massacre, which precip-itate Hamas retaliation; repressive measures by the Israeli government, which oftenunintentionally end up promoting more Hamas violence, as in 1998 when the arrestof senior leaders in Gaza shifted the locus of authority to Hamas activists outsidePalestine who more readily authorized violence than their inside counterparts; andthe perceived strength or weakness of Fatah and, later, the PA, Hamass main competi-

tors. Much of the book is devoted to this final factor, with the authors portraying atype of ongoing shadowboxing in which Hamas tries various ways of using violenceto abort the Oslo negotiations without provoking Fatah retaliation.

For an analysis that ascribes significant explanatory potential to Hamass desire toprotect its services by carefully regulating its violence, it is curious that the authorsfail to mention Hamass ultimate failure in this endeavor, manifested in the severe PAcrackdowns on Hamas social services that began in March 1996, continued periodi-cally after that date, and severely marginalized the movement. 17 Given the analyticalweight that their framework ascribes to these services in influencing Hamas decision-making, it is equally curious that these serviceswhat they are, who they servegoalmost undescribed throughout the book. Mishal and Selas discussion of Islamistsocial services in the West Bank and Gaza focus almost exclusively on the 1970s and1980s, but Hamas was founded only at the end of 1987. Hamas services in the Oslo

period, the focus of the book, receive only cursory treatment at the end of the volume,as Hamas writings on the goals of its educational programas opposed to evidenceof what that program actually wasare paraphrased and names of organizations thatthe movement runs are listed. This shortcoming may result from the sources used bythe authors, who relied exclusively on secondary material and internal Hamas docu-ments to build their analysis and thus could not draw on first-hand observation of these services to describe them or assess their scope. These particular internal docu-ments, while perhaps ill-suited to the task of providing a full sense of Hamass socialservices, provide unparalleled insight into the larger question of how the movementassessed the relative merits of violence versus electoral politics at a pathbreaking juncture in Palestinian politicsthe anticipated formation of a Palestinian LegislativeCouncil to govern Palestinian territories relinquished by Israel in the Oslo Accords.

Mishal and Sela reprint an internal Hamas document examining the benefits and

drawbacks of each of four options on the elections question: participation, participa-tion under a name other than Hamas, boycotting and encouraging the populace to dothe same, and a boycott combined with violent disruption of the elections. This debatesheds light not only on Hamass position toward peaceful political competition withPalestinians outside the movement but also on a predilection for consultation within


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it, as the options document was circulated among senior-level Hamas figures withinstructions that they poll as many members as possible on the issues that it raised.The assessment of the four options demonstrates a high degree of realpolitik on Ha-mass part in dealing with what it saw as the most serious threat since its founding tothe Palestinian cause: the Oslo Accords and the Palestinian Legislative Council elec-tions, which were mandated by the accords and widely understood to legitimize them.Violence was quickly ruled out, both because the relative balance of forces betweenthe PA and Hamas would have made this a suicidal proposition and because of popular excitement over the elections. The boycott option was similarly dismissed, in partwith the argument that just as voter turnouts lower than 50 percent do not delegitimizeU.S. elections, neither would the low voter turnout that might result from a Hamasboycott call undermine the legitimacy of Palestinian balloting. The heart of the debate,then, settles on the options of abstaining without calling for a wider boycott or contest-ing the elections, as leaders debate whether the influence they might gain over theresolution of the conflict by working within the Palestinian Legislative Council merits

the weakening of the Oslo rejectionist front that might result if Palestinians took Hamas participation in the council to signal its acceptance of the agreements. It is intheir use of movement documents to reconstruct these kinds of internal debates thatMishal and Sela make their most important contribution by contextualizing the envi-ronment in which Islamist movements make their decisions on electoral politics, anessential task if we are to move away from a priori assertions that Islamists opposeparticipation in such politics to a better understanding of why they might do so inspecific cases. In this case, the final Hamas decision on the matternot to competein the elections formally but to encourage its supporters to register to vote and itsmembers to run as independentsappears not as a rejection of electoral politics out-right but as a rejection of elections that were widely understood, including by thesecular opposition forces that also boycotted them, to legitimize Oslo. This conclusionis supported by the fact that Hamas urged supporters to register to vote for the Pales-

tinian Legislative Council elections because the rolls generated there would be usedto determine eligibility in subsequent municipal elections, which Hamas fully ex-pected to contest and to win because they would be held outside the Oslo framework and would allow the movement to capitalize on the popularity that its social servicesprovided.

Anthony Shadid skillfully deploys interviews with subjects in several countries toilluminate similar debates over violent versus electoral means of achieving change inhis insightful Legacy of the Prophet . His exploration of groups ranging from theTaliban and Sudans National Islamic Front to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leadshim to conclude that Islamist politics in the Middle East is undergoing a fundamentaltransformation as the adolescence of yesterdays militants . . . yield[s] to the maturityof todays activists, 18 part of a new generation that is finding a more realistic andpotentially more successful future through democratic politics. 19 A key focus of the

book is his chronicling of the evolution of some Islamist groups away from a historyof battling their domestic opponents through violence to an acceptance of the ballotbox as the ultimate arbiter of conflict. A Hezbollah that in the 1980s denounced theLebanese regime as illegitimate and imposed its views on fellow citizens by forceentered parliament in the 1990s committed to achieving its domestic agenda peace-


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fully. The movements spokesman notes that if Hezbollah cannot persuade other Leba-nese to create an Islamic state, then it is possible to have a dialogue . . . on the shapeof the regime that we want, and we can live together with them within this regime. 20

In the case of Egypts Center Party, formed by younger members of the Brotherhood,what is new is not participation in parliamentary politics per se but the incorporationof Islamist activism into a new type of political party. In 1996, these Muslim Brothersapplied for a license to form a party that, with a Copt among its founders and clear statements that it perceived itself as part of, not an alternative to, the existing politicalsystem, contrasted sharply with traditional Brotherhood approaches to politics.

In Shadids narrative, it is exhaustion from the high costs of violence and a realiza-tion of its futility in achieving Islamist goals in the domestic arena that bring groupssuch as Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood to the parliamentary table. Hezbol-lahs Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah notes that the Lebanese people shouldnever return to internal fighting under any circumstances, 21 and the Muslim Brotherslong sojourns in Egyptian jails help convince them to work within the system. These

sojourns, however, also left ingrained in the Brotherhoods leaders hierarchical pat-terns of leadership in which strict obedience was demanded, a model that Shadidargues so alienated Center Party leaders that they determined to form a more internallydemocratic party. It is this renunciation of the hierarchy that accounts in part for theBrotherhoods response to the Center Party, whose activists were expelled from theBrotherhood while the movement cooperated with the government to deny the partylegal recognition. But another reason for the Brotherhoods animosity toward the Cen-ter Party project is more fundamentala deep doubt as to how much change canreally be achieved through party politics within an authoritarian regime. As the Broth-erhoods spokesman Mamoun Hodeibi has asked rhetorically, Are there really anyparties in Egypt, religious or nonreligious? To have parties means to alternate power.Parties compete in elections, real elections, people vote for something and they changesomething. Can that happen here? 22

For those Islamists convinced that effective change can be achieved through theballot box, the importance of social services is multiplied by the possibility that theymight gain and keep substantial voter blocs in the Islamist camp. Like Mishal andSela, Shadid highlights the importance of services in winning support for Islamistmovements, and his field research allows him to discuss many of these services infascinating detail. This is particularly true in his discussion of Hezbollah, which hascreated a mammoth network of services that completely overshadows those of theLebanese state in many areas. For the new Islamists, concerned as they are to wagetheir battle for social change through the ballot box, services are provided not only tosatisfy Islamic injunctions on helping fellow believers but also because they will helpget and keep Islamists elected to office. As a Turkish Welfare Party official toldShadid, Every day since weve come to power, weve opened new roads, new high-ways, new bridges. In the past, the citys garbage was never collected but were col-

lecting it now. . . . [E]veryone talks about air pollution and traffic problems. By intro-ducing natural gas for heating, were going to solve the air pollution problem. 23 Thesenew Islamists understand that, in competing for elected office, in the words of theWelfare official, whats important is that the job gets done, regardless of whether youre veiled or have a beard . . . of whether youre Muslim or Christian. 24


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Shadid has produced a rare combination of engaging narrative and analysis thatremains faithful to the local contexts of individual Islamist movements while anchor-ing them in a larger story about old and new Islamism that has considerable geo-graphic breadth. It is worth noting that it is not necessarily the goals that Shadidsnew Islamists seek that makes them new. Although the commitment to a secular stateembedded in the political consciousness of the Turkish elite from the founding of therepublic has made implementation of shari a a non-issue for the Welfare Party, andthe Center Party evinces an interest in revisiting questions such as whether women or non-Muslims can serve as judges, Hezbollah remains firmly committed to an Islamicstate. The key thing that makes the new Islamists new for Shadid is the methods thatthey use. As he writes about the Center Party, they are engaged in competing inelections for unions and professional syndicates, networking with other groups, andinvolving itself in human rights campaigns. 25 These methods, he argues, are largelyalien to traditional Islamic movements. 26 Because the only group that Shadid explic-itly casts in the role of a traditional movement is the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood,

which has engaged for more than a decade in much of this type of activism, it feelsas if a bit of a straw man is being created here. The future Center Party leaders wholed the Brotherhoods charge in the professional syndicates did so with the full ap-proval of the movements leaders, who have themselves repeatedly run for parliament.

Other criteria that Shadid advances for distinguishing between old and new Islam-ism are more compelling, but these distinctions need to be more finely drawn. On theissue of networking with other groups, for example, cooperation of old-style Islam-ists with non-Islamist groups in pursuit of short-term gain is not new, as shown bythe fact that Egyptian Brotherhood candidates ran on lists with secular parties in the1984 and 1987 elections. What would be new would be for Islamists to go beyondtemporary alliances for instrumental purposes to engage in ongoing campaigns for political reform with secular groups. There are signs that this may be happening: therole of Center Party founders in denouncing torture, an example of the engagement in

human-rights campaigns that Shadid highlights as a marker of new Islamism, contrastssharply with the silence of the Brotherhood on repeated attempts to press for lessrestrictive NGO legislation, which has been attributed to the fact that existing NGOlaws privilege Islamic NGOs over their secular counterparts. Similarly, Shadids argu-ment that a key inspiration for new Islamists support of electoral democracy istheir rebellion against the authoritarianism within their own movements is very impor-tant. If it can be demonstrated, as he begins to in a brief discussion of the JordanianBrotherhood and its political party, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), that these move-ments systematically adopt more internally democratic methods of operation, thenthis, too, would constitute a sharp break from older forms of Islamism.

The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood is a key subject of Wiktorowiczs The Manage-ment of Islamist Activism . The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood has been marked bycooperation with the regime since its inception in 1945 and by what may be the

longest record of Islamist parliamentary contestation in the region, stretching from the1950s until Parliament was suspended in 1966 and resuming again once it was re-stored in 1989. Wiktorowicz does not take up the question of why the JordanianBrothers opted for parliamentary politics. He is interested instead in why the Brother-hood chose to work through the medium of formal organizationslargely social-


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service organizationswhile the Jordanian Salafis have by and large abjured suchorganization in favor of a focus on spreading their ideas through study circles andpublishing. The answer that he offers is not surprising: that the Brotherhoods coopera-tive stance has won its formal organizations significant freedom from governmentintervention, while the Salafis, a movement whose armed and unarmed wings share afundamental opposition to the Hashemite regime, have found their few forays intoNGO terrain quickly crushed. What is more valuable is Wiktorowiczs contention thatin contrast to the assumption of much social-movement theory that formal organiza-tion is an important resource for social movements, this type of organization canactually weaken such movements by bringing the attention of authoritarian govern-ments to their activities. His Foucauldian analysis of the rules regulating JordanianNGOs demonstrates a conclusion applicable in much of the Middle Eastthat en-meshing non-governmental groups in a web of bureaucratic requirements designed tomake their every move visible to the government, and thus more easily subject toregulation, is merely a politically cheaper way of retaining the same high levels of

government control over civil society that characterized an earlier and more openlyviolent pre-liberalization period. Formal organization in this context all but evisceratesany possibility of truly oppositional activity, and Wiktorowiczs interviews with Salafisdemonstrate their keen awareness of this as well as their choice to abjure formal organi-zation rather than compromise their beliefs. His perceptive analysis of how Salafi studycircles function to expand the movement reinforces the arguments of scholars such asSheila Carapico writing on Yemen that an overemphasis on formal organizations leadsto an underestimation of the transformative power of civil societies. 27

Wiktorowiczs explanation of the reason that the Brothers engage in formal organi-zation while the Salafis do not, while valuable for its illumination of the dangersinherent in excessively regulated formal organization, avoids the more fundamentalquestion of why the Brotherhood has chosen to adopt such a moderate stance andignores the tensions concerning, and continual renegotiations of, that stance within

the movement. Put another way, his answer to the question of why the Brotherhoodchooses to act through formal organizations is that it chooses to because it canthatis, because the government will allow it. He does not advance a causal argument likeMishal and Selas to explain this moderation; he does not say that the Brotherhoodhas chosen moderation in order to protect its social-service network. Rather, he ob-serves that their moderation has protected their social-service network. His detaileddescription of the movements impressive network of charitable organizations, whichoffer the movement ample opportunities to win supporters through patronage andproselytization, makes the benefits of avoiding an overly oppositional posture clear.But what about the costs? Wiktorowiczs extensive interviews with Salafis sharplyevoke their conception of the costs and benefits of moderating their stance, but hisdiscussion of the Brotherhood suggests no such cost-benefit analysis on the part of amovement that appears in his narrative to be seamlessly committed to political moder-

ation. Although Wiktorowiczs Brotherhood informants might well have been loath toput their assessments of the drawbacks of their cooperative stance toward the govern-ment on record, there is some evidence to suggest that growing numbers of themsense these drawbacks acutely. Much of this evidence is provided, in various contexts,by Wiktorowicz himself, who notes that a major source of new recruits for the Salafis


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are disaffected Brothers, 28 and he mentions several high-profile acts of Brotherhooddefiance of the government, including the arrests of the IAF Member of parliamentAbdul Munem Abu Zant for defying government edicts against antipeace-process khut-bas and Brotherhood participation in banned rallies in support of Iraq. Other examplesof such disaffection include the debates that the Brotherhood and the IAF have repeat-edly engaged in over whether and the conditions under which the IAF would participatein government and in parliament, debates that caused schisms within the IAF as earlyas its 1992 and 1993 internal elections, as well as divisions between the Muslim Brother-hood and the IAF over whether the party would follow the Brotherhoods dictate toboycott the 1997 parliamentary elections. These schisms, arrests, and defections fromthe Brotherhood to the Salafis suggest that at least some Brothers are assessing the costsas well as the benefits of their moderation. They also demonstrate that organizationalunity and coherence may well be an important cost of such a stance.

O L D A N D N E W I S L A M I S M O U T S I D E T H E M I D D L E E A S T

Islamism in the Middle East ranges from groups attempting the overthrow of localregimes to movements long entrenched in cooperative relations with them. What thisrange has yet to include, however, are Islamist movements playing an instrumentalrole in a successful transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. The lack of sucha transition, Islamically aided or not, has resulted in the regions almost completeexclusion from academic discussions of democratization, as if it were destined never to experience it. It has also given rise to arguments by Samuel Huntington and othersthat Islam itself is somehow anti-democratic. These arguments are severely challengedby Robert Hefners Civil Islam , which traces the growth since Indonesian indepen-dence of a commitment among what he calls Muslim modernist movements to apluralistic, democratic Islam that he credits with having played an essential role inIndonesias peaceful ouster of Suharto.

The debate over the role of Islam in the Indonesian state dates to the states incep-tion and the last-minute dropping of the Jakarta Charter, which stated that the Indone-sian nation was based on belief in God, with Muslims obliged to follow shari a, fromthe constitution in 1945. This left politicians who advocated an enhanced role for Islam in the state and public life feeling betrayed and marginalized from political life.This feeling would continue for the next four decades. After a brief period of demo-cratic government in which Islamist political parties won significant but not majoritypopular support, democratic rule was replaced by various forms of authoritarianismunder the guise first of Guided Democracy under Sukarno and then by Suhartos NewOrder. This period saw supporters of an Islamic state largely excluded from politicalpower, their parties dissolved, and their voices significantly muted. It also saw, how-ever, an unprecedented expansion of state support for non-political Islam as Suhartosought to demonstrate his Muslim bona fides and undermine competitors by devoting

enormous resources to Islamic education in particular. Muslim modernist movementswere divided, often along generational lines, over the lessons to be learned from their extended political night. Senior modernists turned to increasingly rigid and sectarianinterpretations of Islam, while younger members prioritized education and social-wel-fare programs as the true path to a reform that they argued required changes in society,


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not an Islamic state. A vigorous culture of debate emerged in universities and in journals that re-examined traditional interpretations of shari a and engaged a varietyof positions on the relationship between Islam and politics. By the time the Indonesianeconomy collapsed in 1997 and Suharto descended into ever-more-murderous incite-ments of sectarian violence, Muslim groups had become polarized into two camps.The first, wedded to Suharto, espoused a fiercely anti-democratic, anti-Christian, andanti-Chinese version of Islam. The second, headed by Abdulrahman Wahid of Nahda-tul Ulema, Indonesias largest Muslim movement; Muhammadiyas Amien Rais; andthe influential thinker Nurcholish Madjid, entered into a redgreen alliance of secu-larists and Muslim modernists symbolized by the cooperation of Wahid and MegawatiSukarnoputri.

This book is a tour de force. Hefners long experience in studying Indonesian Islam-ism allows him to trace the development within it of various approaches to politicsand democracy with great sensitivity. Authoritarian regimes that endure for any lengthof time do so in part by making their rule at least somewhat beneficial to all but their

most incorrigible opponents, and Muslim modernist movements in Indonesia, boththose which opposed Suharto because he did not run a democratic state and thosewhich opposed him because he did not create an Islamic one, found much to benefitfrom in the New Order. On the more crass level, generous spoils, including govern-ment-created research centers, were available to those who cooperated. Even thoseIslamists who were above such maneuvers found that central parts of their agenda,such as the effective marginalization of Javanist indigenous religion, were beingachieved by the policies of the very government that they attacked, in this case bymassive government Islamization programs in Javanist areas. The multifaceted natureof the relationship between the Suharto regime and Islamists accounts in part for thedifficulty in formulating a consistently anti-Suharto position among Muslim demo-crats, and Hefner paints a compelling portrait of the choices that various Muslimgroupsor, in some cases, the same group at different points in timemade to ex-

ploit authoritarian rule for their own gain, to ally with particular parts of the regimein order to press for democratic openings in others, or to call openly for democracyat great institutional risk. Following these evolutions and keeping track of the variousplayers will require careful reading from those with little background in Indonesianpolitics, but the effort is amply rewarded. Democratic convictions are found in unex-pected places, with surprising roots. For example, Nahdatul Ulema relies on a highlytraditional base of ulema who expect the movement to keep their networks of spiritualand financial power afloat, while the countrys second-strongest Muslim group, the25 million-strong Muhammadiya, recruits primarily among the Western-educated with jobs in the modern economy. It is Nahdatul Ulema, however, that is credited withhaving produced some of the countrys most tolerant and innovative proponents of non-sectarian democracy, a paradox that Hefner attributes in part to the groups verylack of ideological rigor and its early need to compensate for its own lack of educated

cadres by working with secular activists. The fact that Nahdatul Ulema could pushaggressively for political democratization while much of its constituency derived itspower from traditional hierarchies of religious authority contrasts with Shadids argu-ment that Islamists support of democratic politics is often prompted by repudiationof the authoritarian relations within their own movements.


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While many analysts of Islamism and democracy focus on Islamists willingness tocommit to the procedural aspect of democracywinning power solely through theballot boxHefner advances a more robust claim for the Muslim modernists whoseemergence he traces. In contrast to a movement such as Hezbollah, which in optingfor parliamentary politics instead of violence to obtain an Islamic state has changedits methods but not its goals, Indonesian modernists have repudiated what Hefner,quoting an informant, refers to as the mythology of the Islamic state built on amonopolistic fusion of religious and political authority. 29 This repudiation, he con-tends, was an essential prerequisite to the emergence of what he calls Indonesiasdemocratic, religiously ecumenical, and boldly reformist movement. 30 How this ecu-menism and bold reform manifest themselves in terms of concrete positions on issuesother than achieving power through elections, however, remains unclear. For example,one can extrapolate religious ecumenism from modernists refusal to endorse violenceagainst non-Muslim groups, but does this ecumenism extend to guaranteeing non-Muslims equal access to all rights, including rights to political office, that Muslims

enjoy? Hefner offers very few concrete examples of modernists opinions on theseissues, and the one example that he gives of modernist responses to a controversialreform proposalthe suggestion by a former government official that inheritancelaws be changed to provide equal shares in inheritance to male and female inheritors,which was met with hostility by many modernistssuggests some of the possiblelimits to the boldness of Indonesian reformist Islam. Modernist leaders such asWahid and Amien Rais have not been in power long enough to have amassed a policyrecord with discernible positions on these issues, but highlighting the content of thedebates in some of the modernist Islamist journals that Hefner argues were so crucialto the development of the modernist camp might have shed some light on these issues.

Hefners book is the latest addition to a small but important body of work thatincludes Dale Eickelman and James Piscatoris Muslim Politics (Princeton UniversityPress, 1996), John Esposito and John Volls Islam and Democracy (Oxford University

Press, 1999), and Bruce Lawrences Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence(Princeton University Press, 1998), which incorporate non-Middle Eastern cases intodiscussions of Islamism. By highlighting differences in Islamism in different areas,this comparative work provides a starting point for separating what may be particu-larly Middle Eastern from what is Islamic in Muslim politics, an essential endeavor in understanding a phenomenon that is unremittingly trans-regional in scope. Thethree explanations that Hefner offers for the emergence of pluralistic Islamism inIndonesia, one of which implicitly contrasts Indonesian with Middle Eastern experi-ences, are important hypotheses in their own right about the sources of democratiza-tion in Islamism in general. They also offer ways to think about why this impulse hasbeen less pronounced in Middle Eastern contexts. The implicitly comparative argu-ment is a historical one, as Hefner traces what he calls the civic seedlings of demo-cratic Islam back to Indonesias history of a pluricentric pattern of mercantile city-

states, inland agrarian kingdoms, and tribal hinterlands,31

each of which possessedpower in different parts of the territory. This distribution of political power existed inan archipelago that, he points out, was never conquered by invading Muslim armies,smothered under a centralized empire, or supervised by an omnipresent clergy. 32 Al-though the authority of Middle Eastern empires and ulema was probably never as


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reform that concerns Abdo only occasionally overlaps with or is instituted throughnational-level electoral politics; she focuses instead on Islamist advances in civil soci-ety, particularly the professional syndicates, and in what she calls the pillars of thestate, including the judiciary and al-Azhar. Unlike the other works reviewed here,Abdos is primarily interested not in the activities of self-contained movements withclear leadership structures such as Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood but, rather, ina gradual process of Islamization originating from many nodes that are largely inde-pendent of one another. This approach has one clear advantage over the focus onevolutions in Islamist positions on democracy adopted by most of the other authors:it allows Abdo to illustrate the concrete effects on peoples lives of a particular typeof Islamist politics that Olivier Roy terms neofundamentalist in its focus on alteringindividual behavior. Abdo evocatively sketches both the foot soldiers and the leadersof the neofundamentalist battle in a wide-ranging discussion that demonstrates thedifferent ways that Islamism operates in a variety of class environments. Any studentwho has had difficulty understanding the concept of the ability to interpret Islam

authoritatively spreading beyond the ulema to other sections of the population, a phe-nomenon often described as being at the heart of contemporary Islamism, will find itclarified in the figure of Muhammad al-Hudaiby, a former drug dealer turned streetpreacher who offers Islamic guidance while selling juice from a kiosk in Imbaba.Abdos coverage of Imbaba, the site of the governments all-out war against the Ga-ma a al-Islamiyya in the early 1990s, includes some laugh-out-loud examples of theabsurdity of government policy there. She recounts Eddie Murphy and Prince Charlesbeing paraded through areas that had been improved through millions of dollars in(U.S.) Agency for International Development funds, and Hassan Karate Sultan, theformer Gama a member touted by the state and intelligentsia as a reformed militant,growing wealthy enough from foreign interviews that he could subcontract his foodstand, by then garnished with a banner marked God Is Great, starring Hassan Ka-rate. She chronicles one of the more important manifestations of Islamism in the

professional middle class through an in-depth look at Brotherhood activity in theprofessional syndicates, and interviews wealthy, once-Westernized women who faith-fully attend lectures by and received guidance from shaykhs who had clashed withthe government.

Although Abdos narrative provides a nuanced feel for the many facets of non-violent Islamist activity in Egypt, her attempts to fashion larger arguments out of thisnarrative are problematic and at times contradict her data outright. She refers toEgypts moderate Islamists as the only hope for a brighter future, 36 but what thisassessment is based on is not clear, as she offers no analysis of what Egypts problemsare or suggestion of how Islamists might address them. It appears that her optimismis based on the fact that Egyptian Islamists have installed their changes peacefullyfrom below rather than violently from above as in the case of Iran, but unlessone presumes that changes in the direction of Islamization are inevitable, the mere fact

that they are brought about peacefully does not in and of itself make them desirable or sources of hope. A similarly undeveloped thesis comes in the guise of her argumenton Egypts relations with the West. Egypts peaceful Islamism, she suggests, poses afar greater challenge to Western interests than the militant movement now on thedecline, 37 but Western interests are left undefined, as though they were a self-evident


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category. Abdos cursory treatment of this issue contrasts sharply with the morethoughtful discussion offered by Shadid, who argues that although new Islamists op-pose many long-held Western policies, such as unwavering support for Israel and theGulf monarchies, the more fundamental Western interests of long-term stability andpromotion of democratic ideals would be better served by allowing democracy tofunction freely in the region even if that brought these Islamists to power than bycontinued support of authoritarian regimes. Shadids clear definition of what he meansby Western interestswhether one agrees with them or notallows the reader toengage with his argument, while Abdos assertion of Islamist dangers to Westerninterests, in the absence of any supporting argument, merely serves to further stereo-typical generalizations about Islam.

Abdos weakest analysis comes in her discussion of the relationship between theEgyptian state and moderate Islamists, which seems to underestimate both the extentto which the state recognizes and battles Islamism and the degree to which statesupport of some Islamists has been essential to their success. Mesmerized by . . .

alarmist headlines and sound bites that the Western media reserve for deadly Muslimmilitancy, the state, she argues, has overlooked the far more dangerous threat to itssurvival that Egypts grassroots piety has come to represent. 38 This thesis is belied,however, by her subsequent tracing of the great lengths to which the state has goneto stop moderate Islamism in its tracks, ranging from closing down private mosquesto placing Islamist-dominated syndicates in receivership to mounting campaignsagainst the veiling of primary-school girls, all of which suggest that the state is notonly aware of but hypersensitive to the challenge posed by moderate Islamists. Thischallenge is only part of the whole picture, however, and Abdos focus on govern-mentIslamist competition makes her miss the extent to which the Egyptian state hasintentionally facilitated the spread of certain strands of moderate Islamist activism for its own purposes. She offers one example of this phenomenonthe states 1994 deci-sion to expand substantially the ability of al-Azhars Islamic Research Academy to

censor artistic materialbut state support lies just under the surface of many of theother Islamist advances that she addresses, as in the case of Shaykh Muhammad Mat-wali Sharawi. Sharawi, whom Abdo calls Egypts most beloved religious figure 39

and whom she credits with much of the shaping of the new image of the idealIslamist woman in Egypt, 40 was indeed an important force in popularizing Islamism,but his high profile could not have been achieved without his constant presence onstate-controlled television.

N E W B R E A K T H R O U G H S A N D O L D P I T F A L L S I N T H E S T U D Y O F I S L A M I S M

The lack of sensitivity to the various types of relationship that exist between non-violent Islamists and the state that characterizes Abdos analysis plagues most of theother works reviewed here as well, as well as much research on Islamism more gener-

ally. Such research usually places stateIslamist relationships on a continuum betweentwo polescompetition and cooperation or co-optation. Both of these poles, however,begin from the same place: an assumption that the state and Islamist groups are twowell-bounded entities entirely separate from each other that then choose whether tofight against or cooperate with each other. Missing almost entirely is a third possibil-


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itythat as Middle Eastern and other states in the Muslim world have grown astro-nomically since independence, members of Islamist movements in their capacity aswell-educated members of their societies have become employees of state bureaucra-cies. Hefner is the only author surveyed who addresses this possibility, as he notesthat large numbers of the younger generation of Indonesian modernists, beneficiariesof the New Orders massive expansion of modern education, joined the burgeoningstate bureaucracy. He then demonstrates the benefits that can come from being posi-tioned within the state in his exploration of the Association of Indonesian MuslimIntellectuals (ICMI), one of the larger institutional sites for modernist Islamist dis-course. The ICMIs rapid growth, and many of its activities, was made possible bythe large numbers of state bureaucratsIslamists as well as non-Islamist opportun-istswho joined it. Although the preponderance of opportunistic bureaucrats withinit served to dampen the ICMIs reformist tendencies, the institutions affiliation withthe state bureaucracy also gave it the necessary cover to serve initially as a platformfor modernist discourse on the compatibility of Islam and democracy.

Whether Islamists end up in the bureaucracy in their capacity as private citizens or are placed there when their parties win some power, working from within the bureau-cracy can provide them with important resources to be used on behalf of their move-ments. Abdo, Shadid, and Wiktorowicz all demonstrate the willingness and ability of state coercive apparatuses to crack down on Islamist organization, but when Islamistsare heavily represented in these apparatuses the targets of repression can be quitedifferent. Sami Zubaida has argued, for example, that in Turkey by the mid-1990s theWelfare Party had placed significant numbers of its supporters into all echelons of theInterior Ministry, with the result that the armed might of the state fell heavily on leftistprotest activity while Islamist demonstrations and gatherings proceeded unhindered. 41

Paying more attention to the ways that Islamists within the state can further thegrowth of their movements also provides another way to think about why these move-ments choose to moderate their political stances. Wiktorowiczs discussion of the Jor-

danian Muslim Brotherhoods moderation, for example, focuses almost exclusivelyon the benefits that that policy brings to its charitable organizations, which functionindependently of the state. Another important benefit of that moderation, and perhapsan incentive for it, is the awarding of the Ministry of Education to Islamic ActionFront members, which, as Glenn Robinson points out, means that new openings inthis 60,000-person strong bureaucracy can be filled from the ranks of IAF and Broth-erhood members. 42 Although this provides the IAF and Brotherhood with enormouspatronage opportunities, it also offers them a chance to influence curriculum longafter their high-ranking elected officials have been turned out of office.

The unreflective treatment accorded the state by most of the works reviewed hereis matched or exceeded by their treatment of women active in and affected by Islam-ism. If we exclude the issue of veiling, Nikki Keddies argument that most work onmodern religious movements pays scant attention to women 43 rings true in the study

of Islamism. Shadid and Wiktorowicz pay some attention to the issue of women asactors in Islamist movements. Wiktorowicz points out that women served on the boardof only two of twenty-eight nonwomen-specific Jordanian Brotherhood NGOs, 44

while no women were elected to the 120-member IAF general assembly in 1992, andonly one was elected to the subsequent assembly. 45 In the Egyptian Center Party, by


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contrast, the one hundred founders included nineteen women, although it is not clear that they subsequently exercised any power in the group, and Shadid highlights therole that women play in mobilizing wards for the Turkish Welfare Party. One of thefew authors to have devoted significant attention to womens role in Islamism, BruceLawrence in Shattering the Myth , has argued that the myth of the independent, volun-tary female fundamentalism has no factual basis . . . even when women do join in[Islamist] public gatherings, whether to sport rifles or to shout slogans, their presence,and one imagines also their performance, is choreographed by men. 46 With the possi-ble exception of Welfare, the books reviewed here provide insufficient evidence tochallenge Lawrences claim. The one place where one would most expect to find sucha challengeIndonesiais the one place where women are almost completely absentfrom the authors narrative. Mainstream interpretations of Islam in Indonesia havelong been more favorable to women than elsewhere, with an Islamic family law thatis significantly more liberal than those in most of the rest of the Muslim world, andwith women assuming Islamic positions of authority denied them in other places,

particularly through their service as Islamic judges.47

In contrast to many of their middle-class Middle Eastern counterparts, Indonesian women have a long history of working outside the home and being active in public life, 48 and more to the point here,the Islamic mainstream in Indonesia has also not produced a campaign to veilwomen, to keep them at home, or to deny them substantial gains already made. 49

Given a context in which women seem to have enjoyed many more rights and pos-sessed a longer history of public life than in much of the Muslim world, one mightwell have expected them to play a role in the emergence of Indonesian Muslim mod-ernism chronicled by Hefner, but he provides no evidence of this, as women are allbut absent as actors from his narrative. As was noted earlier, Hefner advances themost robust definition of democracy of any of the authors discussed here, explicitlyarguing that it goes beyond elections and institutions to include Robert Bellahs hab-its of the heart, but if women played no important role to speak of in the two largest

Indonesian modernist movementsmovements that together have millions of mem-bersthis would strongly imply that the new Islamist modernism that Hefner chroni-cles is not as reformist or democratic as he suggests.

The question of women in Islamism centers not only on female participants inIslamist movements but, even more important, on womens experiences as the objectsof Islamist policies. This subject is all but absent from the narratives of four of thefive authors reviewed here. In a book that extensively chronicles ebbs and flows of Hamas violence, for example, it is curious that Mishal and Sela do not discuss theviolence employed by Hamas activists against unveiled women in the first year of theIntifada. 50 Although this violence ended after the first year, its impact was longer-livedbecause of the pressures women face not to unveil once they have veiled. 51 In analyz-ing the effects of fundamentalism on women, Lawrence, discussing the case of Egypt,concludes that it is only a tiny fraction of urban-dwelling Egyptian women who are

affected by either the fundamentalism or the feminist optionor by a newly emergenttrend toward Islamic feminism. 52 Lawrence reaches this conclusion by limiting histhe definition of Islamist effects on women to the question of their effects on womensright and ability to work outside the home. Abdos much broader examination of theissue, particularly her tracing of the inf luence conservative Islamists have had on


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thwarting campaigns to criminalize clitorodectomy, suggests a much larger pool of women adversely affected by conservative forms of Islamism.

Despite these flaws, the five books reviewed in this essay provide an unparalleledglimpse into the contemporary practice of Middle Eastern and Indonesian Islamism.Although the prospect of allowing Islamists to compete for parliament prompted apoc-alyptic predictions from Middle Eastern leaders and some scholars of the region, twoof the Islamist groups that have been represented in parliament the longestthe Egyp-tian and Jordanian 53 Muslim Brotherhoodshave achieved very few of their substan-tive goals through this forum. By demonstrating just how much of a broadly Islamistagenda is being achieved in Cairos courts, from banning offensive books and filmsto divorcing of so-called apostates from their Muslim wives, Abdos discussion of Islamization in Egypt suggests that the judicial system may well be the more impor-tant national institution to focus on in understanding how many of Islamisms mostconcrete gains are won. The books reviewed here also identify crucial questions whoseanswers will determine the future shape of Islamism and profoundly affect the course

of politics in the Muslim world. The rise of contemporary Islamism represents in parta type of democratization in which the power to make and question authoritativepronouncements on Islam spreads beyond an elitethe ulemato much of the popu-lation. Will the critics of authoritarianism within their own movements that Shadidhighlights, such as the Center Party or more recently parts of the IAF in Jordan, beable to take this trend a step further and create viable forms of democracy within their own movements, a development that would be unparalleled in the ranks of oppositionmovements in the Middle East more generally? Would more internally democraticIslamist movements be stronger and more effective supporters of democracy in thewider political arena, as Shadid suggests, or are hierarchically organized movementssuch as Hefners Nahdatul Ulema better positioned to commit to electoral democracybecause their leaders have the power to keep their supporters in line? Finally, andperhaps most important, the books reviewed here demonstrate in extensive detail the

dirty tricks practiced by incumbent regimes not only against Islamists but againstall opposition movements, reinforcing Lisa Andersons argument 54 that, although wedo not yet have sufficient evidence to argue that Islamists are not committed to democ-racy, we have ample proof that incumbent and ostensibly secular regimes are not.Hefners description of the redgreen alliance of secular and modernist Muslimforces that ousted Suharto suggests what students of democratization have long under-stood: that extracting democracy from the jaws of authoritarianism requires alliancesof opposition forces across the political spectrum. If Shadid is correct in contendingthat willingness to work in coalition with secular forces is a key marker of newIslamism, and ifand this is a big ifsecular forces were equally willing to work with them, broad-based alliances against authoritarianism could be constructed thatmight well be the regions best hope for democratization.

N O T E S

1Franc ois Burgat, discussion comment, as quoted in Ballot Boxes, Militaries, and Islamic Movements,The Islamism Debate , ed. Martin Kramer (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and AfricanStudies, 1997), 45.

2For example, Khaled Hroub cites examples of cases of elections in which Hamas adhered to itscommitment to pluralism at the expense of tactical gains it could have made, such as the September 1992


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elections to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Jenin, in which the last-minute addition of hundredsof ineligible Fatah supporters to the voting lists led Hamas to withdraw from the contest without spoilingthe elections. Of course, whether Hamas had any other options is not clear: Khaled Hroub, Hamas: Political

Thought and Practice (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2000), 212.3See Gudrun Kramer, The Integration of the Integrists: A Comparative Study of Egypt, Jordan, andTunisia, in Democracy Without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World , ed. GhassanSalameh (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994); Denis Sullivan and Sana Abed-Kotob, Islam in Contemporary Egypt:Civil Society versus the State (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999).

4One of the better-known and compelling developments of this argument is found in Abdullahi Ahmedal-Na im, Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law (Syracuse,N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

5Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2000), xviixviii.

6Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).

7In addition to the studies analyzed in this essay, others include Marion Boulby and John Voll, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Kings of Jordan 19451993 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999); Sondra Hale,Gender Politics in Sudan: Islamism, Socialism, and the State (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997);Hroub, Hamas ; and Donald Petterson, Inside Sudan: Political Islam, Conflict, and Catastrophe (Boulder,Colo.: Westview Press, 1999).

8John L. Esposito and John O. Voll, Islam and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995);Joel Beinin and Joe Stork, ed., Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); John L. Esposito, ed., Political Islam: Revolution, Radicalism or Reform (Boulder,Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1997).

9This trend includes, but is not limited to, such influential works as Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (London: Routledge, 1991); Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994); Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Poli-tics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), Franc ois Burgat and William Dowell, The Islamic Movement in North Africa (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); and Bruce Lawrence, Shattering the Myth: Islam Beyond Violence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998).

10Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1993), and Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam,Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 1994), not tomention the five-volume Fundamentalisms study edited by R. Scott Appleby and Martin Marty, beginning

with Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and concluding with Funda-mentalisms Comprehended (Chicago, Univeristy of Chicago Press, 1995).

11Nikki R. Keddie, The New Religious Politics and Women Worldwide: A Comparative Study, Journalof Womens History 10 (1999): 16.

12Shaul Mishal and Avraham Sela, The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence, and Coexistence (New York:Columbia University Press, 2000), vii.

13Ibid., 314Ibid., 215Burgat, Ballot Boxes, 35.16Mishal and Sela, 111.17This omission cannot be explained by the period covered by Mishal and Sela in the book, as their

analysis goes up to the Wye River Accords in October 1998.18Anthony Shadid, Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam (Boulder,

Colo.: Westview Press, 2001), 2.19Ibid., 2.20

Ibid., 278.21Ibid.22Ibid., 25758.23Ibid., 14849.24Ibid.25Ibid., 626Ibid.


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27Sheila Carapico, Civil Society in Yemen: The Political Economy of Activism in Modern Arabia (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

28Quintan Wiktorowicz, The Management of Islamic Activism: Salafis, the Muslim Brotherhood, and State

Power in Jordan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 136.29Hefner, Civil Islam, 28.30Ibid.31Ibid., 14.32Ibid.33Table 4, Human Poverty in Developing Countries, shows the percentage of national income accruing

to each of the five quintiles of a countrys population. The middle three quintiles in Egypt account for 51.2percent of the national income, while they account for 47.1 percent in Indonesia. The richest one-fifth of the population in Indonesia enjoys 44.9 percent of the national income, compared with 39 percent in Egypt.The figures are for 1998: United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report (2000),17173.

34Indonesias Human Development Index (HDI) was 0.670, while Egypts was 0.623. While this maynot appear to be a sizeable difference, ten countries separate Indonesias and Egypts performance on thisindicator, demonstrating a substantial gap between the two: ibid., 15760.

35Geneive Abdo, No God but God: Egypt and the Triumph of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2000), 8

37Ibid., 11.38Ibid., 33.39Ibid., 146.40Ibid.41Sami Zubaida, Turkish Islam and National Identity, Middle East Report 26 (1996): 12.42Glenn Robinson, Can Islamists Be Democrats? The Case of Jordan, Middle East Journal 51 (1997):

381.43Keddie, New Religious Politics, 16.44Wiktorowicz, Management of Islamic Activism , 87.45Ibid., 88.46Lawrence, Shattering the Myth , 111.47Daniel Lev notes that the Indonesian Islamic family law regime has long been one of the most liberal

in the Muslim universe and that it may be an Indonesian first that women have served as Islamic judges(hakim agama ). Daniel Lev, On the Other Hand?, in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia , ed. LaurieSears (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 19394.

48

Suzanne Brenner notes that as early as the 15th century Indonesian women worked in a wide varietyof influential fields, and that the New Orders attempt to cast women as housewives and make their presencein the work world seem exceptional flies in the face of Indonesian reality: Suzanne April Brenner, The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth, and Modernity in Java (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 1998), 243.

49Lev, On the Other Hand? 194.50This violence is discussed by Rema Hammami, From Immodesty to Collaboration: Hamas, the Wom-

ens Movement, and National Identity in the Intifada, in Political Islam , 194209.51This point is made in ibid., 20252Lawrence, Shattering the Myth , 124.53Glenn Robinson argues that in the late 1980s and early 1990s a pattern was . . . established by which

the Islamist parliamentarians would raise an issue only to be turned back by the king or by the successiveprime ministers appointed by the king. On many issues, including the segregation of the sexes at publicschools, the prohibition of alcohol, and opposition to the peace talks with Israel, the position of the MuslimBrothers was defeated: Robinson, Can Islamists Be Democrats? 375.

54

Lisa Anderson, personal communication, 3 December 2000.

Langohr Islamists & Ballot Boxes

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