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Challenges to Democracy in the Arab and Muslim World

Alon Ben-Meir

President Bush’s notions that democratizing Iraq will have a ripple effect on the rest ofthe Arab world, bringing prosperity and peace to the region, and that democracy is the panaceafor Islamic terrorism are unsubstantiated as well as grossly misleading. Even a cursory review of the Arab political landscape indicates that the rise of democracy will not automatically translateinto the establishment of enduring liberal democracies or undermine terrorism in the region. Thesame conclusion may be generally made for the Muslim political landscape. In fact, given theopportunity to compete freely and fairly in elections, Islamic extremist organizations will mostlikely emerge triumphant. In the recent elections in Lebanon and Egypt, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood respectively, won substantial gains, and in Palestine Hamas won thenational Parliamentary elections handedly. That they did so is both a vivid example of the today’spolitical realities and an indicator of future trends. And if current sentiments in the Arab statesoffer a guide, any government formed by elected Islamist political parties will be more antagonistic to the West than the authoritarian regimes still in power. In addition, there are noindications that democracy is a prerequisite to defeating terrorism or any empirical data tosupport the claim of linkage between existing authoritarian regimes and terrorism.

Muslim Americans Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream

Pew Research Center

Muslims constitute a growing and increasingly important segment of American society.Yet there is surprisingly little quantitative research about the attitudes and opinions of thissegment of the public for two reasons. First, the U.S. Census is forbidden by law from askingquestions about religious belief and affiliation, and, as a result, we know very little about thebasic demographic characteristics of Muslim Americans. Second, Muslim Americans comprisesuch a small percentage of the U.S. population that general population surveys do not interview asufficient number of them to allow for meaningful analysis.This Pew Research Center study is therefore the first ever nationwide survey to attempt tomeasure rigorously the demographics, attitudes and experiences of Muslim Americans. It buildson surveys conducted in 2006 by the Pew Global Attitudes Project of Muslim minority publics inGreat Britain, France, Germany and Spain. The Muslim American survey also follows on Pew’sglobal surveys conducted over the past five years with more than 30,000 Muslims in 22 nationsaround the world since 2002.The methodological approach employed was the most comprehensive ever used to studyMuslim Americans. Nearly 60,000 respondents were interviewed to find a representative sampleof Muslims. Interviews were conducted in Arabic, Urdu and Farsi, as well as English. Subsamplesof the national poll were large enough to explore how various subgroups of thepopulation — including recent immigrants, native-born converts, and selected ethnic groupsincluding those of Arab, Pakistani, and African American heritage — differ in their attitudesThe survey also contrasts the views of the Muslim population as a whole with those ofthe U.S. general population, and with the attitudes of Muslims all around the world, includingWestern Europe. Finally, findings from the survey make important contributions to the debateover the total size of the Muslim American population.The survey is a collaborative effort of a number of Pew Research Center projects,including the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the Pew Forum on Religion &Public Life and the Pew Hispanic Center. The project was overseen by Pew Research CenterPresident Andrew Kohut and Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life Director Luis Lugo. ThePew Research Center’s Director of Survey Research, Scott Keeter, served as project director forthe study, with the close assistance of Gregory Smith, Research Fellow at the Pew Forum. Manyother Pew researchers participated in the design, execution and analysis of the survey.

IN PURSUIT OF LEGITIMACY

Hesham Al-Awadi
On the extraordinary morning of 11 September 2001, I happened to be in the London office of the Muslim
Brothers conducting interviews for this study. The faces of everyone in the office reflected the shocking scene of aeroplanes crashing into the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.
Although the identity of the perpetrators was initially unclear, there were early fears that radical Islamists from Al-Qa‘eda might be involved. The Brothers in the office were clearly uncomfortable about the potential implications. If Islamists were indeed involved, such an event would certainly heighten the fears of the Americans, and of the West at large, against Islam and Muslims, and would give more credibility to Huntington’s notion of the “clash of civilisations”.
In the midst of these legitimate Western fears, the significantly visible line of differentiation between moderate and radical Islamists would become blurred or irrelevant. Not only would this register as a seriously mistaken attitude on the part of the United States and the West towards the sophisticated Islamist phenomenon, but it would encourage authoritarian Arab regimes to quell all Islamists indiscriminately, on the basis of would-be conventional wisdom that
“all Islamists are potentially dangerous”.
Egypt’s President Mohammad Hosni Mubarak was among the Arab leaders who had already launched coercive campaigns against Islamists, both moderates and radicals, since the early and mid- 1990s. His campaign reached its peak in 1995, when 95 civilian Islamists who were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, were put
on trial in military courts, charged with belonging to an illegal organisation and conspiring to overthrow the government.

Democracy Protecting Itself from Itself?

Ebru Erdem

Studies on government in Muslim societies and in the Middle East in particular have mostly focused on authoritarianism. They sought to answer why authoritarianism is the most often observed regime type, and why it persists. Recent work has looked at the role of elections and elected bodies under authoritarianism, explaining why they exist and what purposes they serve (Blaydes 2008; Lust-Okar 2006). The goal of this paper is to shift the spotlight onto the judiciary, and to the political role of high courts in Muslim societies with different levels of authoritarianism.Judiciaries and the judicial processes in Muslim societies have not caught much scholarly attention. Much of the work in this area has revolved around Shari’a. Shari’a law, incorporation of the Shari’a into western style judicial systems and legal codes, conflicts between western and Shari’a inspired codes of family law, and especially the impact of the latter on women’s rights are some of the extensively studied topics concerning the judicial processes in these societies. On the other hand, work on judiciary as a political institution in the Muslim world is scarce, notable exceptions being Moustafa (2003) and Hirschl (2004). Judiciaries may take different institutional forms, be based on different legal traditions, or vary in the level of independence they enjoy, but they are still a political institutions.Why study the judiciary in the Muslim World? Is a focus on the judiciary meaningful given the dominance of the executives in countries with authoritarian regimes? The justification for a focus on the judiciary has different dimensions. From a rational choice-institutionalist perspective: if an institution exists, there must be a reason for it, and we think that investigating the raison d’être of the judiciaries will provide interesting insights about political processes and executive strategies. From an institutional-design perspective, the shape that an institution takes2is related to the strategies of the actors negotiating over that institution, and we would like to use the observed variance in judicial institutions and powers across countries and time periods to learn about different aspects of political bargains that scholars have studied in other political realms. From a democratic development perspective, the establishment of the checks and balances is central to a functioning and sustainable democracy, and we would argue that studying the judiciary is central to understanding the prospects towards establishment of rule of law and a credible commitment to democracy (Weingast 1997).