Summary Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World
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Course
Islam En Moderniteit (LXX004B05)
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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
Book
Islamic Exceptionalism
English summary for the book 'Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World' from Shadi Hamid. This summary is also available in Dutch for students Middle-Eastern Studies at the University of Groningen. For the Dutch summary look at my profile. In the Dutch summary a su...
how the struggle over islam is reshaping the world
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Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (RuG)
Midden-Oosten Studies
Islam En Moderniteit (LXX004B05)
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Chapter 1 – To take joy in a massacre..................................................................................................... 3
Religion Matters .................................................................................................................................. 4
Foundational Divides .......................................................................................................................... 5
Islamists are Islamists for a reason ...................................................................................................... 6
Can Liberalism Still Prevail in the Middle East? ................................................................................ 7
Religion and State Building ................................................................................................................ 8
Is there an Arab Problem? ................................................................................................................... 9
A Way Out? ....................................................................................................................................... 10
Chapter 2 – Is Islam ‘’Exceptional’’? ................................................................................................... 10
God’s Word and God’s Speech ......................................................................................................... 13
Religions and Their Resources .......................................................................................................... 13
Is Islam the Most ‘’Modern’’ Religion? ............................................................................................ 14
A Reformation and Its Discontents ................................................................................................... 15
Chapter 3 – Islam’s Reformation .......................................................................................................... 17
One Man’s Reformer is Another Man’s Fundamentalist .................................................................. 18
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Message ................................................................................................ 19
How Modern is Islamism? ................................................................................................................ 20
The Long Game ................................................................................................................................. 22
The Illusion of Unity ......................................................................................................................... 23
Chapter 4 – The Muslim Brotherhood................................................................................................... 24
The End of an Experiment................................................................................................................. 24
Reform or Revolution? ...................................................................................................................... 25
Accidental Leaders ............................................................................................................................ 27
A Question of Violence ..................................................................................................................... 28
An Unlikely Ideologue ...................................................................................................................... 28
Losing Faith....................................................................................................................................... 29
A State Beyond the State ................................................................................................................... 29
Chapter 5 – The Turkish Model: Islamists Empowered ........................................................................ 30
A Problem of State ............................................................................................................................ 31
Learning to Love the State ................................................................................................................ 32
Islamism versus Authoritarianism ..................................................................................................... 34
A Deisre for Revenge ........................................................................................................................ 35
Chapter 6 – Tunisia: Islamists conceding their Islamism ...................................................................... 35
The Great Islamist Hope.................................................................................................................... 35
‘’Our Big Trip to the Center’’ ........................................................................................................... 36
Ennahda and the Problem of Exceptionalism .................................................................................... 37
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,Chapter 7 – ISIS: After the State Fails .................................................................................................. 39
Democracy’s Costs ............................................................................................................................ 40
The ISIS ‘’Model’’ ............................................................................................................................ 42
How the Islamic State Governs ......................................................................................................... 44
Chapter 8 – Islam, Liberalism, and the State: A Way Out? .................................................................. 47
The Persistence of Foundational Divides .......................................................................................... 48
Islamism, Liberalism, and the State .................................................................................................. 49
The Liberal Veto and Its Limits ........................................................................................................ 50
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,Chapter 1 – To take joy in a massacre
The author was standing in Tahrir Square on February 11, 2011. On this, the eighteenth night of the
revolution, the crowd buzzed with the news that President Hosni Mubarak was stepping down after
nearly thirty years of autocratic rule. But the euphoria was short-lived; the intervening four years
featured a military coup, a succession of mass killings, and the return of dictatorship. If this new phase
of the “Arab Spring” was really about anything, it was about a collective loss of faith in politics.
Before the uprisings began in 2011, Egyptians would take pride in the fact that they had little history
of political violence. The July 3, 2013 military coup that ousted the country’s first democratically
elected president (Morsi) would irrevocably change that. Less than three years earlier, Egypt had shown
the world what was possible. Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab uprisings, was a strategically and
geographically remote nation of ten million. It was blessed with higher levels of economic growth and
educational attainment than most other Arab countries. If the uprisings had begun and ended there,
then the possibility of peaceful protest and regime change could have easily been dismissed. Egypt
changed the calculus, trumping the narrative that Tunisia was the region’s exception. Buoyed by
Mubarak’s fall, mass protests soon spread to two other countries, Syria and Libya, which were seen
as unlikely candidates for political upheaval. On August 14, 2013, Egypt was once again leading the
way, but this time Egyptians – turning against one another – showed us something much darker but just
as real.
There was a time when only a few Americans had heard of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or
ISIS, soon to be rechristened as simply the Islamic State. That changed in the summer of 2014, first with
the fall of Iraq’s second largest city of Mosul – when a first wave of around a thousand fighters overtook
an Iraqi force that was some thirty thousand strong. The horrifying beheadings of American journalists
and the November 2015 killings of 130 civilians in Paris – the worst such attack in France since World
War II – anchored the Islamic State’s reputation for ostentatious acts of savagery. Seemingly overnight,
the Sunni extremist group had emerged as a terrifying new enemy.
For instance, when trying to understand the wars of the Middle East, the rise of the Islamic State, and
cultural divides over something as seemingly trivial as cartoons of the Prophet Mohamed, how much
does Islam really matter? Is it about “religion” or “politics”? And can we even separate the two, when
they have become so intertwined in the minds, and hearts, of believers?
To understand today’s seemingly intractable conflicts, we need to go back to at least 1924, the year the
last caliphate was formally abolished. Animating the caliphate – the historical political entity governed
by Islamic law and tradition –was the idea that the “spiritual unity of the Muslim community requires
political expression.” Since the caliphate’s dissolution, the struggle to establish a legitimate political
order has raged on, with varying levels of intensity. At the center of the struggle is the problem of
religion and its role in politics. Two related arguments form the core of the first half of this book:
• Islam is, in fact, distinctive in how it relates to politics. Islam is different. This difference has
profound implications for the future of the Middle East and, by extension, for the world in which
we all live. This admittedly is a controversial, even troubling claim, especially in the context of
rising anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and Europe. “Islamic exceptionalism,”
however, is neither good nor bad. It just is, and we need to understand it and respect it, even if
it runs counter to our own hopes and preferences.
• Because the relationship between Islam and politics is distinctive, a replay of the Western
model – Protestant Reformation followed by an enlightenment in which religion is gradually
pushed into the private realm – is unlikely. That Islam – a completely different religion with a
completely different founding and evolution – should follow a similar course as Christianity is
itself an odd presumption.
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, Why exactly does the Middle East suffer from a lack of legitimate order? This legitimacy defeat, the
author argues, is tied to a continued inability to reckon with Islam’s relationship to the state.
Mainstream Islamists are defined here as the affiliates or descendants of the Muslim Brotherhood,
the mother of all Islamist movements, founded in Egypt in 1928 by a schoolteacher named Hassan al-
Banna. They hoped to blend the premodern with the modern and East with West. In this sense,
contrary to popular imagination, Islamists do not necessarily harken back to seventh-century Arabia.
As we will see, they are distinctly modern, perhaps too modern.
Islamist movements are those that believe Islam or Islamic law should play a central role in political
life and explicitly organize around those goals in the public arena. Though they now find themselves
eclipsed by radicals, the most politically influential Islamist groups have generally been of the
mainstream and nonviolent variety, so it’s worth focusing considerable attention on them, even if
they may not be the ones who, today, attract the most headlines.
Turkey and Tunisia have had to contend with decades of forced secularization. These two countries
have been touted as models of reconciling Islam and democracy. Interestingly, despite their secularized
contexts, they are also two of the only Middle Eastern countries where Islamist parties have come to
power. For a variety of reasons, however, these “mild,” more secular-friendly Islamists have failed to
advance a successful Islamic synthesis. The Arab Spring’s failure to produce a legitimate, stable
political order opened up space for more radical approaches, forged in violence and absolutism.
The rapid rise in the summer of 2014 of Islamic State may have caught observers off guard, but that
something like the Islamic State could thrive in this century, as history’s arc was supposedly bending
toward justice, was surprisingly appropriate. There had never been a serious, sustained attempt to
reestablish the caliphate since its demise in 1924. The Islamic State, in stark contrast to the
Brotherhood and other mainstream Islamist movements, had little interest in the Middle East’s existing
state structures. For Islamic State partisans, the last caliphate was the Ottoman caliphate, but the last
model caliphate was that of the Prophet Mohamed’s four righteously guided companions, each of
whom would briefly reign as caliph of an ever-expanding empire (three of the four were assassinated).
That, however, didn’t keep the Islamic State from viewing the breakup of the Ottoman caliphate and its
portioning off into artificial, arbitrary states as the modern era’s original sin. God, and no one else,
was the sole lawgiver. Where the Brotherhood and its compatriots in countries as diverse as Turkey,
Tunisia, and Jordan sought to reconcile premodern Islamic law with modern notions of pluralism and
democracy, the Islamic State ostentatiously basked in its rejection of them, with results that could be
both terrifying and effective. Sometimes they were effective because they were terrifying.
Religion Matters
Political scientists have tended to see religion, ideology, and identity as “epiphenomenal” (products of
a given set of material factors). As individuals, most (although not necessarily all) Islamic State fighters
on the front line are not only willing to die in a blaze of religious ecstasy, they welcome it. It doesn’t
particularly matter if this sounds absurd to us. It’s what they believe. Many join the Brotherhood
movement so they can “get into heaven. We might be tempted to dismiss this as irrational bouts of fancy,
but, if you look at it another way, what could be more rational than wanting eternal salvation?
It would be a mistake, then, to view Islamist groups as traditional political parties. Muslim
Brotherhood branches and affiliates are acting both for this world and for the next. The tendency to
see religion through the prism of politics or economics (rather than the other way around) isn’t
necessarily incorrect, but it can sometimes obscure the independent power of ideas that seem, too much
of the Western world, quaint and archaic.
The dramatic rise of the Islamic State is only the most striking example of how liberal determinism
(the notion that history moves with intent toward a more reasonable, secular future) has failed to
explain Middle East realities.
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