Beyond Piety and Politics

Religion, Social Relations, and Public Preferences in the Middle East and North Africa

Sabri Ciftci, F. Michael Wuthrich, Ammar Shamaileh

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780253060532
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253060556
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics

How do ordinary men and women in Muslim-majority societies create religion-informed views of political topics such as democracy and economics?

Beyond Piety and Politics provides a groundbreaking approach to understanding the depth and variety of political attitudes held by people who consider themselves to be pious Muslims. Using survey data on religious preferences and behavior, the authors argue for the relevance and importance of four outlook categories—religious individualist, social communitarian, religious communitarian, and post-Islamist—and use these to explore complex and nuanced attitudes of devout Muslims toward issues like democracy and economic distribution. They also reveal how intrafaith variation in political attitudes is not due simply to doctrinal differences but is also a product of the social aspects of religious association operating within political contexts.

By highlighting the dynamic societal and political implications of religious devotion, Beyond Piety and Politics offers a fascinating new theoretical perspective on Islam and politics.

1

RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES, THE STATE, AND RELIGIOUS OUTLOOKS

WHAT DO WE MEAN WHEN WE DISCUSS THE influence of religion on social and political attitudes? How does it influence them, and does it always influence attitudes in the same way? For example, is the result equally as predictable when devout Muslims are asked about their attitudes regarding democracy and democratization as when they are asked about dietary prescriptions or conducting loans with interest? We might anticipate that a pious Muslim’s attitude toward halal diets or interest in loans would not change much depending on whether they live in Saudi Arabia, the United States, or China. In these cases, we would assume that whatever variance exists is related to level of devotion and, among the devout, doctrinal interpretations of well-known texts. That is, we would expect that people’s attitudes and preferences toward these practices would come from the cognitive realm of explicit beliefs, values, the received wisdom from their school of jurisprudence, and interpretations of doctrine. Nonetheless, we might imagine that among the less devout, there might be more freedom and variation in beliefs among Muslims in China or the United States than one would anticipate from the less pious in Saudi Arabia or Jordan.

Now, what if we consider how strictly practicing Muslims in Saudi Arabia feel about the prospect of a policy of state-sanctioned freedom for open proselytization of all religious beliefs in their country in comparison to similarly observant Muslims in China and the United States? Most likely, we would expect devout Muslims in China and the United States to support any political policy that supported religious freedom and protections for religious minorities, and we might also assume that such attitudes would be less prevalent among the devout in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Iran. If we flip the script with geographic contexts and insert devout Christians, Hindus, and so on, we would likely predict a similar trend. Why?

Religious doctrine rarely provides an indisputable guide, immune to interpretation and debate, for important social and political questions. This observation might lead us to question the influence of religion on one’s broader political attitudes, and in fact many of the empirical studies of the impact of religion on Muslims’ attitudes toward democracy and regime type have shown that the relationship is insignificant, weak, or variable from case to case (Ciftci 2010; Jamal 2006; Jamal and Tessler 2008; Tessler 2002, 2015). This finding does not square well, however, with the common perception that religion has a significant influence on individuals’ political attitudes. Many have anecdotally observed a consensus of similar political opinions among devout members of a particular faith community. Is there any way to reconcile this “perception on the ground” with empirical data that suggest otherwise?

We believe this disjuncture stems from the fact that religion’s influence on people’s attitudes can stem from different modes of influence. As has been widely observed, religion potentially informs individual attitudes derived from substantive, or doctrinal, guidance. Religious texts often have specific prescriptions or proscriptions regarding certain behaviors—do not eat pork, do not commit adultery, do not charge interest, do not gamble, and so on. When individuals consider specific issues closely related to a particular doctrine of their faith, the response is usually predictable based on the individual’s religiosity, religious knowledge, or investment in those beliefs. For the devoutly religious, it might be difficult to follow substantive faith-based rules in a country of a different dominant faith, but these followers are generally still inclined to adhere to the behaviors of their faith. Even in a foreign land, they find like-minded communities and people who help them continue along the right path.

However, beyond the substantive influence of religion and no matter where we live, our religious practice (or lack thereof) necessarily has social—that is, relational—implications (Djupe and Gilbert 2008). Most religions strongly enjoin communal association. Every religious community—and by this, we mean a locally bounded group of individuals who regularly assemble and engage in religious practices with one another—operates in some sort of dynamic relationship with the broader society, if not also the state. This social reality creates a relational influence that guides individuals’ attitudes toward broader political and socioeconomic questions in direct and indirect ways (Djupe and Gilbert 2008; McClendon and Riedl 2019). Religious traditions do have scriptural tenets that touch on political affairs; however, these tend to provide enough wiggle room for contextual realities that even devout “letter of the law” believers are able to interpret politically relevant guidance in religious texts differently. Thus, this salient influence of religion operates not according to textual decree but as a logical consequence of the social context and relational dynamic between an individual’s community and his or her place in society. To the extent that the state is involved in regulating religious practices in society, this is also a key component of the dynamic.

In short, attitudes such as ambivalence toward or support for democratization or liberalization, for example, can be derived from the status of a member’s religious community within society and whether or not further democratization or liberalization would enhance or impede his or her survival and ability to thrive and grow in that society.¹ Religious communities (i.e., local congregations) of the same dominant religion in a particular society would likely have different political preferences based on their status, or they might support democratization for different reasons. Members of religious communities whose individuals behave and act according to the dominant social norms might prefer the majoritarian elements of democracy—that is, that the government is elected with a mandate from the political majority. Others who find themselves in communities with practices that differentiate them from the broader society might find the liberal and pluralistic provisions that provide foundational protections for minorities to be the desirable components of democracy.

We argue that broader political and socioeconomic questions are not substantively influenced by religion but are influenced relationally and rationally by participation in the social context in which religion is practiced (Campbell 2013). The rest of this chapter is devoted to unpacking these dynamics. We discuss the phenomenon of religious outlooks, which could be understood as religious perspectives toward others primarily derived from religion’s relational, rather than substantive, influence on attitudes. To this end, we begin by clarifying the case for existing pluralism among practicing Muslims and providing a theoretical framework for understanding the dynamics that generate nonstatic but patterned distributions of religious communities and religious outlooks within a society. The link between an individual’s broader political preferences, his or her religious outlooks, and local religious communities are discussed in the context of the state’s role in this relationship.

The Case for Religious Pluralism in Muslim-Majority Societies

It might seem that the case for intrafaith pluralism would be a foregone conclusion. However, this assumption has not always been the working framework in studies of political opinion and religious attitudes, especially in Muslim-majority societies. Studies conducted in the US, for example, began to move away from the simplistic usage of religiosity as a meaningful variable separate from congregational affiliation several decades ago (Gilbert 1993; Jelen 1993; Leege and Welch 1989). In the United States, this happened as a response to observations in the 1980s and 1990s that Christian traditions (such as mainline Protestant, Evangelical, Catholic, Black Protestant) and denominations were increasingly showing distinct political trends that required measures other than generalizable Christian practices to account for meaningful trends in political attitudes.² In surveys of Muslim-majority countries, however, the movement away from such simple measures to a nuanced treatment has occurred far more slowly. The religious practice and belief questions of large cross-national and national surveys tend to ask generic questions regarding prayer, Koran reading, and attendance that aggregate rather than distinguish adherents to the majority faith (or even multiple faiths).

Clearly, the reliance on such questions to generate an index of religiosity fails to consider the impact that social interactions or relational influences within distinct religious communities might have on an individual’s religious outlook (Gilbert 1993). As Djupe and Gilbert (2008) have shown, however, the local congregation is far more influential than the overall denomination on the political views of its congregants, although congregations vary significantly in their ability to influence their members’ political views. Furthermore, they found that the strength of attitudinal affinity between individuals and their religious community is not their religiosity according to the traditional measures (praying, weekly attendance, reading sacred scriptures) but their level of social activity within their community. All of this adds up to an important challenge to the assumption that using measures based on religious practices in surveys will tease out linear attitudinal trends from nonreligious to religious.

To illustrate the challenges of using such general measures in the US context, it would be easy to imagine that a Catholic, an Episcopalian, a Baptist, a member of a Black congregation, and a Latter Day Saint would all report that they are Christian and express a similar level of religious practice—church attendance, regular prayer, and so on. Yet it is fairly easy to recognize that these groups might differ not only in doctrinal beliefs but in political opinions and preferences (Campbell 2004; Jelen 1993) and that this variation could even be found at the intracongregational level (Djupe and Gilbert 2008; McClendon and Riedl 2019).

If we are looking for parallels in Muslim-majority societies, even though Islam does not have the extensive denominational diversification that exists within Christianity, its decentralization of religious authority into very broad schools of jurisprudence or madhāhib—that is, among Sunnis, H.anafī, Shāfi‘ī, H.anbalī, and Mālikī—leaves a great deal of latitude to local congregations and their leadership. This should serve to heighten, not reduce, diversity in practices, beliefs, and attitudes across local communities, which is at least part of the reason that the governments in Muslim-majority societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have made attempts to oversee religious activity through state-run or state-supported organizations (Fox 2008). Although, as we will discuss below, the supply-side of a regulated religious society does have implications on the proportion and distribution of types of religious communities, undeniable diversity exists at the congregational level (Putnam and Campbell 2010), even in highly regulated Muslim-majority countries (Ayoob 2009; Stark and Finke 2000).

There are several reasons why the study of religion and attitudes in Muslim-majority countries has not advanced at the pace of such public opinion studies in the United States, in particular, but also Western Europe. First, it is important to acknowledge that there has historically been an influential trend in the literature on the Middle East region that reflects what Edward Said referred to as an Orientalist tradition in Western scholarship. The scholarship in this tradition has tended to essentialize the Other and especially Islam as it pertains to the life of Muslims in the East (Said 1978). This type of scholarship, which prioritized interpretations of Muslim societies through their ancient sacred texts, created a set of assumptions about Islamic culture and Muslims which still dominates scholarship on the region, if only in the efforts of various scholars to challenge some of the commonly held claims from this tradition, whose literature still casts a long shadow. Studies in this line of research have continued to make the same assumptions about Islam, measuring religion’s influence through binary categories of religious versus nonreligious and equating Islam with sharia law. Such reductionist approaches have naturally neglected the pluralistic and dynamic nature of Islam (Ahmed 2015; Ayoob 2009). Thus it was a critical advance when Tessler (2002) and others sought to measure the religious-nonreligious binary and demonstrate its lack of significance and inability to explain attitudes toward political considerations such as support for democracy.

Beyond the impact of these older paradigms in the study of Muslim-majority countries, studies of religion in the MENA region have also lagged behind those in the US and Europe because of inadequate funding: countries such as the United States actively fund research into US politics and society through nuanced public opinion surveys and experiments that are simply not a financial priority for most Muslim-majority countries.³ Even when funding is available and large national and cross-national surveys investigate opinions in these countries, the nature of many of these political regimes and their frequent desire to censor questions of political delicacy—including questions about the participants’ involvement with specific religious communities or orders—prevents the kind of experimental designs and analysis that have been particularly illuminating in the US and elsewhere.

Although these constraints on the study of religion and attitudes in most Muslim-majority societies may seem to have brought us to an impasse, we believe there is still a way forward, even considering the current limitations of public opinion surveys in MENA. If there is, as we assume, religious variation at the communal level—regardless of whether we can currently measure this via surveys—an implication of this would be a dynamic connection between these communities and the existence of a variety of religious outlooks. By religious outlook, we mean an individual’s broader cognitive framework for understanding the role of religion regarding social order and interactional norms. Why would there be a connection between various religious communities and religious outlooks? As Kellstedt and his colleagues (1996, 175) write, “The principal mechanisms for the worldly realization of religious beliefs are religious communities.” How communities interact and understand themselves necessarily has social consequences that transcend the boundaries of the congregation itself, and this broader dynamic establishes how the congregation and its individual members place themselves within the society. To link this all together, it will be helpful to draw from the literature on religious markets (Stark and Finke 2000) to understand how various communities are distributed throughout society. We can then establish the connection between state regulation of religion and posture toward these religious communities and likely patterns of religious outlooks and political attitudes among members of these groups.

Religious Markets and Variation among Religious Communities

It may not be readily apparent why an individual’s association with a religious community and its position in society and in relation to the state (rather than received doctrine) will strongly shape his or her religious outlook. In this regard, Stark and Finke’s (2000) theory of religious markets offers a simple but useful analogy for generalizable assumptions of religious pluralism within a faith community—such as among Muslims in a Muslim-majority society—and we will use this theory as a basis to explain how diversity among communities could be logically distributed within a bounded society.

Stark and Finke (2000) propose that religious communities within a society are distributed according to the logic of supply and demand within a particular religious economy or market—that is, the broader politically and socially bounded community of faith. Absent heavy state intervention in the “supply” of options for religious participation, individuals select and prioritize different levels of religious practice and activity, spanning options from low intensity and lower costs to high intensity and higher cost. Locally bounded religious communities fit into these larger preference categories, which Stark and Finke (2000) refer to as “religious niches.” These niches indicate the major categories of variation in the pattern of provision of services and experiences (i.e., benefits) offered by religious organizations within a religious economy along a scale determined by the increasing levels of costs but also religious “goods” accrued to the individual through participation.

In an unregulated market, it is assumed that the distribution of communities across the scale of niches will resemble something like a normal curve. On the far-left side of the scale, the “liberal” niche includes communities that require minimal cost but provide minimal rewards; in other words, their members are unencumbered by high demands and expectations, but such congregations also provide few benefits to these individuals and encourage high levels of free riding—that is, attempting to partake in common goods without sharing in the costs involved to produce them—reducing the overall corporate benefits that are seen as coming from participating together in spiritual activities or experiences.⁴ At the other end of the niche scale are “strict” communities, which offer maximum costs and maximum rewards. These come from the tendency of communities in this niche to have high levels of exclusivity accompanied by similarly high levels of imposed costs that reduce free riding and bring valuable “club goods”—such as euphoria from intense group participation in spiritual activities, higher expectations of reciprocity, support and sacrifice from others, and deeper bonds of relationships—to its members (Iannaccone 1992). To the extent that the full array of options is open to the social market, the vast majority of individuals will nonetheless cluster in religious communities that fit the niches in the middle—the “moderate” and “conservative” niches. Communities in these niche options offer a religious experience that most evenly balances the costs and rewards within the particular social context, with conservative options leaning more toward strict and moderate leaning more toward liberal options.

Membership in a local religious community, whether a church, mosque, or other religious communal organization, involves cost-benefit trade-offs that ultimately establish the overall distribution of congregants. Where an individual’s choice is free and unregulated, religious market theory anticipates that few would bother with liberal religious communities offering great freedom but little spiritual benefit and woul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1. Religious Communities, the State, and Religious Outlooks
• 2. Attitudes of the Devout: The Nature of the Substance or the Nurture of Relationship?
• 3. Empirical Foundations of Religious Outlooks
• 4. The Individual and Contextual Determinants of Muslim Religious Outlooks in MENA
• 5. Islam and Support for Democracy
• 6. Temporal Change in Religious Outlooks and Political Preferences
• 7. Islam and Distributive Preferences
• Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors