Liberalism, Islam, and the Arab state

...Not only is associational life relatively weak—a weakness all the more striking since the state itself is sufficiently organized and bureaucratized to provide elaborate welfare services—but organizers and members of officially sanctioned associations are compromised, complicit in the regime as recipients of its largess...

...It is this profile, the pre-industrial, nonextractive welfare state, to which I would attribute the characteristic patterns of political and social organization in the Arab world...

...In extractive states, wealth translates into the capacity to pay taxes to, and demand concessions from, the government—that is, into political power...

...But first, what are those patterns...

...Because only self-defined moral responsibility or ideological commitment, not any fiscal incentives or obligations, required the governments to rule responsibly, the idiom of politics was not the prosaic language of budgets but, far more often, the righteous rhetoric of war, family honor, ethnic purity, religious virtue...

...Elsewhere, press censorship was tightened, as in Tunisia...

...The divorce between the rulers and the ruled—or, perhaps better, their financial separation— makes for reliance on the rhetoric of welfare, on moral suasions and religious exhortation...

...The Islamists thus challenge the regimes where they need and want support—the realm of symbolic production— and the regimes respond in ways that reflect the extent to which issues of identity are central to their legitimation...

...Although culture and policy play important roles in fostering political affiliations and organization, I want to argue for the role of state institutions and structures in shaping political life...

...Why are the Islamists so effective in advancing the cause of political opposition...

...They obtain significant resources from patrons abroad with which they construct and sustain their domestic clienteles...

...The demise of the once vigorous Tunisian labor movement is the most poignant of many illustrations...

...The class- and interest-based organizations —chambers of commerce, industrial and professional syndicates, labor unions—represent constituencies whose contribution to the government coffers is minimal, and they play a relatively small role in the domestic conflicts over government policy...

...In his candid style, the King of Morocco has reminded the members of the Moroccan Parliament of their responsibilities: The Holy Book indicates that all whom God has charged with a legislative or executive responsibility have to obey his control...

...Most advanced industrial societies are now mixed economies, in which both extraction and distribution (or redistribution) take place...

...The largest construction magnate in Egypt married his son to Anwar al-Sadat's daughter...

...444 • DISSENT...

...Although associated with a period of economic liberalization, the crackdown on the labor movement in Tunisia in the late 1970s was predicated on the prior development of an elaborate social welfare system, making the union's demands on behalf of its members comparable to "special pleading...

...Even the secular Arab nationalists in Syria acknowledged the importance of Islam in the genius of Arab civilization...

...become a framework of incentives...

...3 In these rentier states, the relationship between power and wealth characteristic of the extractive state is reversed: here wealth derives from power...

...Although they are quick to take advantage of expanded rights, such as greater press freedoms and opportunities to contest elections, the Islamists are not well disposed to liberal democracy, either by ideological inclination or social base...

...and in Algeria, Islam provided the sole marker that distinguished "Algerians" from their colonial rulers during the war of independence...

...The ruled, schooled in the politics of identity and morality, began to reexamine the obligations of righteous rulers in Islam...

...So we are told, for example, that "democracy is alien to the mind-set of Islam...

...The short answer is that after Islamist political movements began to avail themselves of the newly created political "spaces," the political elites changed their minds about allowing them (and therefore anyone else) freedom to speak and assemble...

...One might say that only periodic elections provide "hard political constraints...

...They appear to have found support in those social groups that benefited least from government largess, usually the poor and the young...

...Very few professional associations, labor unions, or student syndicates took up the opportunity presented by political liberalization actually to challenge government policy...

...In Egypt, there are 12,832 "voluntary social organizations" at work but, despite the fact that the number of civic associations and the diversity of their activities can often give a mistaken impression of effectiveness, reality shows that there exist substantial constraints on such organizations, the most important of which being the limitation of volunteers upon whom civic activity is founded...

...Because they are not defined by the state in terms of their position in a productive process, however, they eschew what Jean Cohen calls the "productivist" cultural model and, like the new social movements of Europe, cast their claims against 442 • DISSENT the government in terms of personal (religious) identity and moral outrage...

...In rejecting the prevailing system, they aspire to an alternative no more "liberal" or "democratic" than the regimes that spawned them...

...Their multi-class following has made them an important force in their own right as well as a valuable coalition partner...

...6 Robert Bianchi, "Democratization in the Middle East: Four Reasons for Optimism," Arab-American Affairs, 36 (Spring 1991), p. 6. Reported in Le Matin du Sahara, October 16, 1978, and cited by Mohammed Tozy, "Islam and the State," in I. William Zartman and William Mark Habeeb, eds., Polity and Society in Contemporary North Africa, (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), p. 108...

...A second important argument gives great weight to state policy...

...Indeed, many of these movements look very much like the governments they oppose...

...I will begin with a few general observations about the nature of the states of the Arab world...

...Thus governments that supported ostensibly docile Islamists against left-wing political movements in the early 1970s are seen, particularly by those sympathetic to leftist positions, to be getting their just desserts...

...and, during the 1980s, from foreign debt incurred, not in the private sector as in much of Latin America, but by the states themselves...

...In the days before independence, European rulers established extensive colonial state administraFALL • 1994 • 439 tions, and the pattern then set of reliance on external infusions of funds to cover budget deficits persisted well after independence...

...Contemporary actors abandon what they see as the "productivist" cultural model of the Old Left as well as its modes of organization...

...6 In the Arab world, the politics of the pre-industrial welfare states have diminished the significance of economic distinctions as bases for political identity...

...3 Amani Kandil, "Some Features of Egypt's Civil Society," Civil Society: Democratic Transformation in the Arab World...

...where distribution predominates, as in the rentier state, identity politics eclipses other forms of organization...

...Moreover, they target the social domain of civil society FALL • 1994 • 441 rather than the economy or state, raising issues concerned with the democratization of structures of everyday life and focusing on forms of communication and collective identity...

...But all the states of the Arab world, oil producers and non-oil producers alike, avail themselves of externally generated revenues...

...If a state organizes benefits around certain categories, those who can qualify may well adjust their self-descriptions and self-conceptions to fit the official ones...

...It was soon followed by demands, particularly among property holders, for protection against such arbitrary exactions and for a role in deciding how state income was spent...

...It seems to me, however, without gainsaying the fact that the vast majority of people in the Arab world are Muslims, we must ask why, at this historical moment, Islamic political sentiments and movements have taken precedence over other sentiments and movements —including some, such as secular nationalisms and labor movements, that have had considerable support in the recent past...

...Jean Cohen provides us with a useful characterization: It is clearly part of the self-understanding of many feminists, ecologists, peace activists, and autonomists ["local autonomy movements"' that their identities, goals and modes of association are historically new...

...As a result, the governments are not subject to the ordinary obligation of domestic accountability...

...4 For a variety of reasons, including the dynamics of both patronage and "affirmative action," the criteria of distribution are often noneconomic...

...Indeed, in important respects, class politics is a result of state extraction...

...from the foreign aid they obtained as a result of the region's geostrategic location...

...Why have secular groups within civil society not been able to profit from similar support when they have gotten it...

...In their absence, incumbency is a matter of repeated but irregular bargaining between the officeholders and their patrons and clients...

...In the last five years there has been a subtle but palpable reversal of the 1980s trend toward a liberal politics...

...The critical resources are ideological or symbolic, and only secondarily economic...

...This presents us with a second question: why was it Islamists—rather than secular liberals, labor unions, or big business—who so quickly filled the space provided by political relaxation...

...Far more taxing, literally and figuratively, is the construction of the material means of guaranteeing popular representation and government accountability...

...Impersonal, formal, arbitrary state extraction—taxes and conscription, for example —was the first sign of government as penetration and control in the early modern nation state...

...By contrast, where distribution is the most significant economic link between government and people, the criteria by which goods and services are allocated become critical determinants of interest and identity...

...But if state policy is so powerful, why have subsequent state efforts to reverse its effects failed so dismally...

...440 • DISSENT Such associations are also affected by a lack of financial resources and thus have to depend on the funds they receive from the Ministry of Social Affairs, which obviously affects their autonomy...

...5 All this will be familiar to any student of the Islamist movements in the Arab world...

...2 On what do the regimes spend their money...

...Why can subtle support of Quranic study groups defeat the leftists while harsh repression fails to daunt the Islamists...

...This elicits political organization based on common identities—often officially constructed and sanctioned—rather than common interests...

...Unlike those of their counterparts who are accountable to voters (and therefore know quite promptly when their "controllers" are unhappy), the absolutist rulers of the Arab world live with ambiguity...

...On the negative side of the balance sheet, these policies retarded the appearance of demands for participation in government decision making, breeding instead societies dependent upon the state for many of the necessities of modern life...

...That doesn't mean, however, that there is no associational life at all...

...Just as liberalism appeared to triumph in much of the rest of the world, most of the Arab world retreated from it...

...To some extent, the Islamists' reliance on a moral, critique of their governments mirrors the rhetoric of those governments themselves...

...It was, of course, the Islamists who took up the government challenge to participate in politics...

...Indeed, when given the opportunity to contest elections, from Morocco to Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan, the secular liberal opposition has been notable for the frequency with which it chooses highminded election boycotts over the rough and tumble of campaign politics...

...Where extraction predominates, class politics remains prevalent...

...Where taxation is the most important economic relationship between state and society, different kinds of property ownership or control serve as markers of political interest and identity...

...The terrain of symbols of reciprocal moral obligations may be a passionate, complex, and potentially dangerous one, but it has the FALL • 1994 • 443 singular advantage of being cheap to government and opposition alike...

...This accounts for the relative weakness of "old social movements" in the region, many of which atrophied as the welfare states grew in the 1950s and 1960s...

...Equally important is the positive effect of the non-extractive welfare state, that is, the impact of distribution, or welfare politics, on the development of social division and conflict...

...elections more carefully manipulated, as in Egypt...

...In their debates about political and moral authority, neither the existing regimes nor their opponents speak of establishing institutions by which government might be held accountable...

...So it is not surprising that the growth of the welfare state in the advanced industrial world brings with it the appearance of "new social movements...

...As, for example, Robert Bianchi put it, Their aim is not the rapid seizure of power to impose a theocratic order from above, but the steady transformation of values and behavior that will create a more Islamic society from below...

...As a result, political groups reflect both interest and identity...

...Most of these states are characterized by "soft budget constraints...

...The most spectacular setback was the January 1992 military coup in Algeria that led to cancellation of the results of free and fair elections, suspension of Parliament, dismissal of the president, and what now looks like a low-grade civil war...

...Small wonder, then, that the regimes of the region seem to have gotten cold feet about liberalization...

...1 (January 1992), p. 3. 4 Paul Starr, "Social Categories and Claims in the Liberal State," Social Research, 59:2 (Summer 1992), p. 273...

...Just as Arab nationalism itself was not an expression of specifically economic grievances against European imperialism but an assertion of identity and a demand for dignity, so too the role of religion in the Moroccan king's self-portrayal as the "Commander of the Faithful" and in Qaddafi's claim to legitimacy as a righteous ruler are appropriations of religious formulas for political uses...

...Thus the clients of Morocco's king, the residents of the Iraqi president's natal village, the members of the Qadhdhafa clan in Libya, the Alawi sect in Syria, the royal family in Saudi Arabia—all have enjoyed preferential access to governmentcontrolled benefits...

...Historically, states have become beholden to their citizens through reciprocal obligation...

...Notes Elie Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture (Washington: Institute for Near East Policy, 1992), p. 1. 2 Quoted in Tim Niblock, "International and Domestic Factors in the Economic Liberalization Process in the Arab World," in Tim Niblock and Emma Murphy, eds., Economic and Political Liberalization in the Middle East (New York: British Academic Press, 1993), p. 63...

...the people on the commanding heights of the Iraqi private sector are intermarried with the Takriti network that controls the regime...

...Indeed, the "modern" or profitable sectors of the economy are often monopolized by the state itself...

...After independence, governments garnered windfalls from foreign exchange reserves that accumulated during the Second World War...

...It is most effectively generated not through production but through close ties with the regulatory and distributive agencies of the state...

...Indeed, apart from the somewhat more political posture of some—though by no means all—of the movements, a feature itself dictated by the authoritarian political environments in which they operate, Cohen's description is a close fit...

...There is a class or quasi-class connection if not exactly a class "base" for many of these new movements...

...Both supporters and foes of the regimes in the Arab world have been encouraged, sometimes by deliberate policy, sometimes as an unintended consequence of the criteria of distribution, to organize around noneconomic, familial, patronage, or identity -based commonalities...

...As the director of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) Middle East department remarked in 1988, Egypt's government is like "an employee who earns 100 pounds a month, but spends 122...

...Economic corruption becomes a mere symptom of moral corruption...

...the availability of external revenue releases governments from reliance on domestic taxes for a substantial component of their income...

...Whether or not the liberalizing regimes of the 1980s expected professional syndicates, labor unions, or liberal political parties to spring up and engage in decorous debate about sharing the burdens of structural adjustment, they certainly did not get anything like that...

...Unlike the Old Left, actors involved in the contemporary movements do not view themselves in terms of a socio-economic class...

...These developments we now think of as the expansion of individual rights, democratic participation, and class politics...

...5 Jean Cohen, "Strategy or Identity: New Theoretical Paradigms and Contemporary Social Movements," Social Research, 52:4 (Winter 1985), p. 667...

...The governments of the Arab world provide generous consumer subsidies, education, health care, and other services to their people, becoming, in essence, pre-industrial welfare states...

...The classic cases in the region are the oil producers, of course: high-capital, low-labor-intensity oil production has meant that very little local labor is required to maintain the flow of revenues to the state...

...As Paul Starr has suggested, even in "the liberal state," by virtue of their institutional use, official categories...

...a control from God first of all, a control from the one that God has charged with the responsibility of the Muslim community [that is, the King himself], and last of all a control by the voters.' Like most governments, the regimes failed to meet the standards they set for themselves, losing at wars and succumbing to the temptations of flesh and spirit...

...What difference does such a political economy make for the nature of these states and their societies...

...Instead of forming unions or political parties of the socialist, social democratic, or communist type, they focus on grass-roots politics and create horizontal, directly democratic associations that are loosely federated on national levels...

...and indeed, only poor Jordan seems to offer much hope to the proponents of liberalization...

...In our "soft constraint" states, by contrast, the conventional relationship between purse strings and polity is reversed...

...In fact, of course, there is taxation in the Arab world, but it is not equal to government expenditure...

...What do identity-based movements look like...

...What was supposed to be little more than a sop to a timid, largely dependent bourgeoisie, a device to broaden and solidify the regimes' support, now threatens those very regimes—but not with liberalism or democracy...

...from nationalizations of foreign-owned property immediately after independence...

...most of the very large Saudi royal family has private business interests...

...Class or interest-group associations such as business or labor unions—organizations based on common positions within a productive process—are less effective in amassing wealth than are relations built on personal patronage and bureaucratic clientelism...

...I think it is fair to say that the regimes expected precisely the weak and timorous responses they encountered among their "interested" constituencies...

...A quick and unsystematic review of the literature on social organization and "civil society" in the Arab world is revealing: whether nonexistent or merely incoherent, independent associational life is not conventionally thought to characterize the Arab world...

...Where they are not, the private entrepreneurs are friends, clients, relatives of the ruler or even—as in Morocco, where the king is by far the largest property holder—the ruler himself...

...Many of the regimes permit and even foster personalistic ties as the principal mechanism through which the distribution of economic resources takes place...

...Distributive policies not only discourage interestbased politics but foster political affiliations based on noneconomic identities...

...Perhaps the most common response, particularly in press and policy circles, is to attribute primacy to culture and tradition, concluding that there is something in Islam that disposes its adherents to set it above all other political affiliations...

...The generous distributive policies of these governments have had both negative and positive effects, inhibiting certain kinds of organization and promoting other kinds...

...Apart from the rulers' personal enthusiasms, by and large, the regimes use their externally generated income to buy acquiescence in their rule...

...This approach has a long and distinguished pedigree...

...Despite the variety of the regimes, from monarchies to "socialist" singleparty governments, they all proclaim their solicitude for ordinary folk without making significant demands upon or concessions to them...

...Unconstrained by periodic elections, the rulers let their welfare systems grow ramshackle and lined their pockets instead, all the while continuing the sing-song demands of sacrifice for the good of the nation...

...What happened...

...It appears to be true in general, and it is certainly- true of the Arab world, that interestbased movements are weakened by the welfare state, while the importance of identity-based movements is amplified...

...From the perspective of appropriation, the usefulness of associations based on impersonal but common interests is markedly diminished, and labor unions and industrialists' syndicates have mostly been façades for other interests...