Reforming Laïcité or Reforming Islam?

This paper focuses on management of Islam by the French State since the state of emergency declared in 2015. We analyze the legal actions of the State using a law-in-context approach and theorize secularism as the State’s management of religion. We focus on the Senate Report (2016) concerning Muslim worship, the legal changes wrought by the state of emergency, and the institutions formed to govern Islam and secularism. We examine whether there has been a change in the French State’s approach to Muslim worship. Rather than remaining neutral, the French State has become even more actively involved in the field of religion by adopting a reformist attitude intended to transform not the principles of laïcité but the Muslims in France. In this period, the State has taken concrete steps and built institutions both to support the formation of a secularized French Islam and to govern the boundaries of laïcité.

Current security concerns of Europe: radicali-zation in Central Asia

The purpose of the paper is to track processes of radicalization in Central Asia (CA) leading to acts of terrorism in Europe and to show the Western approach to the multiple drivers for violent extremism in СА. The revival of Islam throughout the region was a natural factor, as it filled the ideological vacuum formed after the collapse of the communist ideology, and the radicalization of Muslims could not be a consequence of these processes. Western scholars are viewing the efforts of the CA governments to counter radicalization and violent extremism through the lens of the «Western values» framing them in human-rights terms. The authoritarian states of Central Asia do monitor the activities of all religious groups and individuals but the author is sure that such religious restrictions cannot lead to violent extremism in Central Asia. The conflict is not between Islam and secularism, the real dispute unfolds within Islam: the traditional faith opposes radical brands of Islam. The governments of Central Asian states are not opposed to Islam per se, but rather to radical, politicized Islam, which serves as a framework for political opposition. Hundreds of Central Asian citizens travelled to the Middle East to support Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. The populations most at risk of radicalization are residents of the border regions of the CA states, ethnic minorities, youth, migrants, divorced women and orphans. Geographic proximity of the region to Afghanistan also matters. Now the exodus to wage jihad in the Middle East or in Afghanistan is not an immediate threat, but it should be borne in mind that the surviving IS fighters are returning to Europe, Central Asia and Russia.

Secularism in the Arab World

This book provides a study of secularisation and secularism in the Arab World, between middle of the nineteenth century and the end of the twentieth. It approaches the its subject in the modern history of the Arab World as a set of historical changes which affected the regulation of social, political, religious and cultural order which permeated the concrete workings of society, rather than as an ideological discussion framed from the outset by the presumed opposition between Islam and secularism. The book traces social, institutional and cultural changes of a secularising character, the emergence and consolidation of a secular political and legal system, the rise of a new type of educational and political arrangements with their complement of a modern intelligentsia, the social and institutional attrition of the Muslim religious institution and the strong reformist current in Islam, the rise of modern cognitive regimes, ideologies and secular culture, and the balances of secular and religious elements in nationalism. The book traces the rise of secularist and anti-religious culture in the variety of its manifestations, and of anti-modernism as well, and the emergence of associated religious and anti-modernist currents in the wake of the 1967 war, the associated strengthening of Islamist politics and its move from the margins to the centre in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

A Dimension Reduction Method Application to a Political Science Question: Using Exploratory Factor Analysis to Generate the Dimensionality of Political Ideology in the Arab World

This paper utilises data dimension reduction to settle a heavily debated question concerning the dimensionality of political ideology in the Arab World. It relies on recent data available through the World Values Survey to generate a stable solution for the number of important and exciting dimensions defining ordinary citizens’ political attitude structures. The findings of the analysis suggest that in four Arab states, political ideology is multi-dimensional on the mass level. This negates the widespread assumption made about Arab politics where Islam and secularism constitute the only dimension organising voters’ attitudes and behaviours. This is important because many analyses of Middle Eastern politics start with this assumption without questioning its validity. Further, models of political ideology are to be modified when transferred to studying Middle Eastern political attitudes. The single-dimension hypothesis applicable in some Western settings is not attainable in the Arab World.

Faiza Ambah's Mariam and the Embodied Politics of Veiling in France

This article argues that Mariam uses its eponymous heroine's lived and embodied experiences of veiling to explore the impact of French secular legislation on Muslim schoolgirls' everyday lives in France. Interweaving secularism studies, feminism and phenomenology, I argue that the film portrays the headscarf as the primary means by which its protagonist is able to resist male patriarchal authority and negotiate her hybrid subjectivity. I conclude that Mariam offers a nuanced representation of veiling that troubles the perceived distinctions between Islam and secularism, oppression and freedom, and the veil and feminism in France and the West.

Politics and Islam in Turkey

Since 1937, Turkey has been officially defined as a secular state, albeit with a Muslim-majority population. However, secularism in the Turkish context is distinctive, a product of its particular historical experience and development. Both the Ottoman heritage and contemporary Turkey’s Kemalist founding fathers’ apprehension were decisive factors in the evolution of Turkish secularism (laiklik) and set Turkey’s experience apart from that of other modern secular states. Turkish understanding of secularism itself has never had one single, unambiguous interpretation in Turkey, but in general it is widely understood that it reflects a sense that the state should not be totally blind to religious issues, but also should never favor one particular religion over another. Thus, Islamic practice was carried over in the society from the Ottoman state to the new Turkish Republic and allowed republican elites to declare a new structural order, without losing hegemonic power over religion. At the same time, the older Ottoman tradition of state management of religion was retained. For this reason and as a continuation of a social and political heritage from the Byzantium Empire, the Presidency of Religious Affairs (hereinafter the Diyanet) was established in March 1924 in the wake of the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate and its associated institutions, including the Şeriye Vekaleti (Ministry of Religious Affairs) and the Evkaf (Pious Foundations). Even though the Diyanet started its journey as a protector of both religion (read the Oxford Bibliographies article “Sunni Islam”) and secularism, it started as a promoter of raison d’etat’s Islamic understanding, and afterward it was instrumentalized by dominant political structures. In this regard, Turkey’s attitudes and the Diyanet’s different positions regarding Islamic issues, as well as various sociological phenomena in Turkish society, have always played a determinant role in the political arena. Under these circumstances, Islam in Turkey, and its status in the political arena, has been contentious in different areas, such as the historical heritage of Islam’s role in politics, Alevism and other Islamic sects, non-Muslim others and minorities, Islamic communities and cults, institutional Islam, and women and LGBT rights. Furthermore, Turkey has been coming face to face with a new experience over the second decade of the new millennium: the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP) and its authoritarian shift through instrumentalizing the religion. The party’s leadership, mostly coming from an Islamist background, recast itself as conservative democrats. They promised a new social contract between the state and society and called for a series of liberal reforms that would enhance the separation of powers, the independence of the judiciary, the freedom of the press, and the rule of law. Yet since 2011, the AKP has opened discussions advocating for a change from parliamentary democracy to establish an executive presidential system to consolidate its power, and Islam is one of the prominent pillars of this new process. In this respect, political Islam has been the subject of various studies in such diverse disciplines as political science, international relations, sociology, history, anthropology, religious studies, and gender studies. The sources cited here serve as a guide to the politics of Islam in Turkey, and they broadly offer an introduction to a deeper engagement with the literature.