Mobilizing Islam

Religion, Activism, and Political Change in Egypt

Carrie Rosefsky Wickham

• Editorial: Columbia University Press
• Año: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780231500838
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Afrikanische Geschichte

Mobilizing Islam explores how and why Islamic groups succeeded in galvanizing educated youth into politics under the shadow of Egypt's authoritarian state, offering important and surprising answers to a series of pressing questions. Under what conditions does mobilization by opposition groups become possible in authoritarian settings? Why did Islamist groups have more success attracting recruits and overcoming governmental restraints than their secular rivals? And finally, how can Islamist mobilization contribute to broader and more enduring forms of political change throughout the Muslim world?

Moving beyond the simplistic accounts of "Islamic fundamentalism" offered by much of the Western media, Mobilizing Islam offers a balanced and persuasive explanation of the Islamic movement's dramatic growth in the world's largest Arab state.

1	Introduction

Over the last quarter century, authoritarian regimes the world over have found it harder than ever to coerce their citizens into silence. In Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, ordinary men and women have managed to overcome their fear and do what once seemed unthinkable: confront their own leaders with demands for sweeping reform. Recent challenges to authoritarian rule embody different hopes and dreams. In places as diverse as Prague, Santiago, Johannesburg, Manila, and Beijing, protesters have raised the banner of liberal democracy, invoking the example of earlier democratic struggles in the West. In the Muslim world, however, the most insistent calls for reform have come not from movements favoring secular democracy but from those seeking to establish a political system based on Islam. Indeed, Islam has eclipsed secular ideologies as the primary source of political activism in much of the Muslim world. Although the goals and strategies of Islamists differ, they are united in their conviction that the most vexing problems facing contemporary Muslim societies can be resolved through an individual and collective return to religion. The Islamic movement is not confined to a single geographic region, but the idea that al-Islam huwa al-hall—Islam is the Solution—resonates with particular force in Arab politics. In the Arab world today, the best organized, most popular, and most effective opposition movements call for an Islamic reform of society and state. Moreover, the prototypical Islamic activist is not an illiterate peasant or laborer but a young, upwardly mobile university student or professional, often with a scientific or technical degree. Far from embodying the defensive protest of traditional social classes on the decline, the Islamic movement is strongly associated with the most “modern” citizens in Arab societies.

Although Islamic groups are at the forefront of opposition politics in many Arab states, their support among students and professionals runs especially deep in Egypt. The latest wave of Islamic activism in Egypt has its roots in the universities, where independent Islamic student associations began recruiting students in the early 1970s. By the end of the decade, Islamist student leaders controlled the student unions in most faculties at Cairo University and other institutions of higher learning, and graduates with Islamic orientations were reaching out to a wider circle of youth in the residential neighborhoods of large cities and provincial towns. Then in the mid-1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood—the largest organization of the Islamic movement’s reformist wing—submitted its own list of candidates in the elections for leadership of the country’s national professional associations. Through a series of stunning electoral victories, the Brotherhood gained a controlling majority on the boards of several associations, including those of the country’s engineers, doctors, pharmacists, scientists, and lawyers. Indeed, by the early 1990s, Egypt’s professional associations—which Sami Zubaida aptly described at the time as “the most advanced sectors of public life in Egypt, enjoying high status and speaking with an autonomous and respected voice”¹—had become major sites of Islamic political experimentation, giving rise to new models of political leadership and community that stood in sharp contrast to the policies and practices of state elites.

There is a special irony in the fact that the largest opposition movement in Egypt derives the bulk of its support from educated youth. After the “revolution” of 1952, the Nasser regime abolished all school fees up to and including the university level, thereby enabling Egyptian youth from non-elite backgrounds to obtain a coveted shahada, or university degree. In an even more stunning act of generosity, the regime promised every university and high-school graduate a government job. Not surprisingly, the graduates on the receiving end of such entitlements were, as Malcolm Kerr observed, “among the most reliable enthusiasts” of the new regime, quick to embrace its twin projects of Arab national self-assertion abroad and socialist revolution at home.²

Why, then, did the sons and daughters of the revolution turn against it? And why did so many of them join an opposition movement calling for a return to Islam? This book explains how Islamist groups captured the hearts and minds of educated youth—the high achievers at the apex of Egypt’s educational pyramid—during the first twelve years of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency, from 1981 to 1993. This period represents a critical phase in the evolution of Islamic activism in post-1952 Egypt, when participation in the movement reached its height. After that, beginning in the mid-1990s, a new wave of repression brought the movement’s self-confident expansion to an abrupt end. After more than a decade of toleration, the government launched a major counteroffensive against the Muslim Brotherhood, arresting many of its most dynamic leaders and hammering away at its reputation by condemning it as an “illegal organization with ties to extremist groups.” Yet despite the government’s best efforts, it has been unable to significantly erode the movement’s mass support.

One clear indication of the Brotherhood’s continued popularity was its surprisingly strong performance in the parliamentary elections of November 2000. Despite the government’s intensive media campaign against the Brotherhood, the arrest of several prominent Brotherhood leaders before the elections, and attacks on Brotherhood candidates and their supporters by security police during the election period itself,³ Brotherhood candidates won seventeen seats, the same number as those won by all of the country’s legal opposition parties combined.⁴ In an ironic twist, the banned Muslim Brotherhood now controls the largest opposition bloc in the Egyptian parliament. The Brotherhood’s recent comeback, together with the persistent weakness of the country’s secular opposition parties, suggests that the Islamic movement is likely to remain Egypt’s largest opposition force for years to come. The success of Islamic outreach in the 1980s and early 1990s thus remains profoundly relevant to the analysis of Egyptian politics today.

Western media reporting on Egypt’s Islamist movement has often focused on the acts of terror committed by members of its underground militant cells. This trend intensified after the events of September 11, 2001, when it was revealed that the alleged leader of the hijackers, Muhammad Atta, was an Egyptian national and that two of Osama bin Laden’s most senior commanders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Muhammad ‘Atef, were leaders in the Egyptian group al-Jihad.⁵ Despite the high profile of Egypt’s Islamic militants, it should be recalled that (1) they represent only a tiny fraction of those Egyptians active in the Islamic movement as a whole and that (2) their use of violence is repudiated not only by the general Egyptian public but also by the majority of people in the Islamic movement itself.⁶ Rather than dwelling on the Islamic movement’s militant fringe, therefore, this book explains why thousands of Egyptian graduates have chosen to participate in the nonviolent, reformist groups of the movement’s mainstream. Hence it concentrates on the dominant (but not the only) form of Islamic activism in Egypt since 1952.

The rise of a popular Islamic reform movement in Egypt not only has transformed the character of opposition politics in the world’s largest Arab state but also has affected political trends beyond Egypt’s borders. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization founded in Egypt in 1928, currently has branches in several other Arab states, and Egyptians have directly influenced their evolution through the dissemination of ideas, resources, and personnel. (In fact, over the past century a conspicuous number of the Islamic movement’s leading ideologues have been Egyptian nationals).⁷ Looking ahead, Egypt’s stature as a leader in the Arab world is such that an Islamist victory—at the polls or in the streets—could significantly alter regional alliances, as well as offer a model and source of inspiration for Islamist parties in neighboring states. Finally, the Mubarak regime’s status as an American ally and strategic partner in the Arab-Israeli peace process has given to a broader set of international actors a stake in Egypt’s political stability. Egypt’s cultural and political centrality in the Arab world and its strategic role in preserving the current regional balance of power have thus raised the profile of the Islamic trend in Egypt, regardless of whether its progression is met with enthusiasm or alarm.

An Islamic Social Movement?

The rise of Islamic activism in Egypt is important because of its immediate political impact and also because it raises some broader questions about how opposition movements reach out to potential recruits and why their appeals succeed or fail. Such questions occupy a central position in social movement research, an interdisciplinary field encompassing works in sociology, psychology, history, and political science. Until recently, the study of Islamic activism in the Arab world was detached from theoretical developments in the social movement field.⁸ But over the past few years, a small but growing number of scholars have come to appreciate the potential analytic payoff to be gained from applying social movement theories and concepts to the study of Islamic groups.⁹ My work is part of this emerging trend. In particular, I contend that our understanding of the rise of Islamic activism in Egypt—and, by extension, elsewhere—can be enriched by attention to social movement research, which illuminates how mobilizing agents, structures, and ideas mediate the progression from individual grievances to collective action.

If scholars of Islamic activism have only recently begun to harness the analytic power of social movement theory, social movement scholars have yet to devote systematic attention to Islamic groups. Contemporary social movement theory derives almost exclusively from research on movements in the democratic polities of Western Europe and the United States. Acknowledging this point in 1996, several leading movement scholars called for an enlargement of the field to include studies of contentious politics in non-Western, nondemocratic settings.¹⁰ Since that time, the number of studies in this genre has grown, and they have been cited more frequently in mainstream theoretical texts.¹¹ Yet compared with the vast literature on American and European movements, the study of movements outside the West remains at an early stage and has yet to be extended to movements in the Arab-Islamic world.¹²

The study of Islamic activism in Egypt raises some interesting theoretical issues that have not been fully explored. First, such a study can help illuminate whether and in what ways the conditions, dynamics, and outcomes of mobilization are different in authoritarian settings than they are in democratic ones. While benefiting from theory building in the social movement field, the study of Islamic activism in Egypt can also contribute to it by helping clarify how and why citizens become active in opposition politics under conditions of authoritarian rule. Second, the Egyptian case enables us to explore the role of religion—and “culture” more generally—in the generation of opportunities, resources, and motivations for collective challenges to powerful institutions and elites. In so doing, it allows us to address a puzzle largely neglected by “rational-actor” models of collective action, namely, what motivates citizens to participate in opposition politics when self-interest should propel them toward political abstention.

To integrate the study of Islamic activism into the social movement field, I have treated Islamic activism in Egypt as a case of social movement activism, subject to the same methods of analysis used to study movement activism elsewhere. As a point of departure, I adopt Sidney Tarrow’s definition of social movements as “collective challenges, based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.”¹³ The instances of movement activism that concern us actually form a subset of this broader category. First, I look at popular participation in a particular type of social movement, that is, those seeking a fundamental change in existing social and political institutions and elites, as opposed to “issue-oriented” movements promoting (or resisting) more discrete changes in public policy or behavior. I refer to the participation of citizens in movements oriented toward systemic change as “opposition activism.”¹⁴ Second, I explain the rise of opposition activism in a particular setting, that is, in authoritarian political systems in which freedoms of speech and association are circumscribed and, as a consequence, independent political activity is, to varying degrees, restricted.

A primary contention of this book is that the rise of Islamic activism in Egypt—and, by extension, of other instances of opposition activism in other authoritarian settings—was not a natural result of accumulated grievances but hinged on the mobilizing efforts of opposition elites. In Egypt, Islamists marshaled resources and created opportunities for opposition activism outside the formal political channels controlled by the authoritarian state. Moreover, through a massive project of ideological outreach to educated youth, they created new motivations for activism that transcended the logic of self-preservation underlying dominant patterns of political abstention. Before I discuss what strategies of mobilization the Islamists employed and why they were successful, let me clarify why prevailing explanations of Islamic activism are incomplete.

Challenging Grievance-Based Explanations of Islamic Activism

Scholarly interest in the resurgence of Islam as a force for social and political change has grown in the wake of such dramatic events as the Islamic revolution in Iran and the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and over the past two decades a sizable literature has developed on what has been alternatively described as the “Islamic revival,” the “rise of Islamic fundamentalism,” or the “rise of political Islam.” This literature includes some excellent studies of the ideology, organizational structure, and membership of Islamic groups, as well as their relationship with incumbent political elites.¹⁵ While such studies provide valuable insight into many aspects of the Islamic resurgence, they do not offer a persuasive theoretical account of citizens’ participation in Islamic groups. What has motivated thousands of students and professionals across the Muslim world to join the Islamic movement, despite the personal risks that such participation often entails?

Many studies of Islamic activism draw implicitly or explicitly on one of two major explanatory models, which we might call the “cultural identity” and “political economy” models, respectively. Although they differ in focus, both locate the origins of Islamic activism in the grievances of potential recruits. According to the “cultural identity” viewpoint, the rise of Islamic activism is a reaction to the domination of Muslim societies by the West. Beginning with the European colonial expansion and continuing, albeit in more subtle forms, to the present day, Western influence has insinuated itself into not just the economic and political domains of Muslim societies but also, and more fundamentally, into their cultural domain. From this viewpoint, the Islamic resurgence is a collective protest against decades of Western cultural domination, in which Muslims have reclaimed their Islamic heritage as a positive and “authentic” source of identity and values.¹⁶

Other studies attribute the rise of Islamic activism to the absence of economic prosperity and political freedom in the new states of the Middle East and North Africa. From what we might call the “political economy” viewpoint, the secular authoritarian regimes that have dominated the region since the era of decolonization have failed to provide economic growth, social equity, and political rights for their citizens. Political mismanagement and corruption also have contributed to chronic housing shortages and rising unemployment, particularly among ambitious, educated, lower-middle-class youth whom the modern sector of the economy cannot absorb. Such youth express their “real-world grievances” through the idiom of political Islam. Hence from this perspective, Islamic activism is more a vote “against” the status quo than a vote “for” a specific (in this case, Islamic) alternative.¹⁷

Whether defined in terms of cultural alienation or political and economic deprivation, the rise of Islamic activism is typically portrayed as a collective protest against the abject conditions prevailing in much of the contemporary Muslim world. That this protest has assumed an Islamic form is either incidental, following the logic of the political economy viewpoint, or natural, from the cultural identity viewpoint, given the salience of conservative Islamic beliefs and values in contemporary Muslim culture.

Grievance-based explanations of Islamic activism are not wrong, but they are incomplete. Even under the most extreme conditions of human misery and exploitation, the emergence of collective prot...