54
MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. X, NO. 2, SUMMER 2003
BEYOND THE CRUSADES: WHY HUNTINGTON, AND
BIN LADIN, ARE WRONG
Lisa Wedeen
Dr. Wedeen is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
This essay has benefited from discussions with Nadia Abu El-Haj, Saba
Mahmood, Jar Allah Umar, Moishe Postone, Don Reneau and Anna
Wuerth. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the United
Nations, the University of Maine, Bangor and to Chicago alumnae. This
essay is dedicated to the memory of Jar Allah Umar and to Muhammad
Qahtan.
S
amuel Huntington's 1993 article
"The Clash of Civilizations?" and
his subsequent book The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking
of World Order (1996) may seem pre-
scient at first glance. Declaring the onset
of "a new phase in global history," Hun-
tington defined "the fundamental sources
of conflict" in the current world, not as
economic or ideological in nature, but as
"cultural." For Huntington, all civilizations
have a primordial cultural identity so that
the "major differences in political and
economic development among civilizations
are clearly rooted in their different cul-
tures." He warned: "Culture and cultural
identities . . . are shaping the patterns of
cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the
post-Cold War world . . . .The rivalry of
the superpowers is replaced by the clash of
civilizations." "The fault lines between
civilizations will be the battle lines of the
future," Huntington predicted, and the two
civilizations that are of particular impor-
tance in this narrative of battles and futures
are Islam and the West.1
For Huntington, Islam and the West
are construed as "highly integrated civiliza-
tions," as bounded entities in which
sedimented essences inhere in monolithic
groups. I will focus on three problems
underlying such a vision: First, the
sedimented-essences version of "civiliza-
tion" or "culture" ignores the specific
historical processes and particular power
relations that have given rise to the recent
phenomenon of radical religious expres-
sion. Second, the clash-of-civilizations
story rides roughshod over the diversity of
views and the experiences of contention
among Muslims. Communities of argument
arise over what makes a Muslim a Muslim,
what Islam means, and what, if any, its
political role should be. Third, Huntington's
analysis neglects the terrains of solidarity
and fluidity that exist between Muslims and
non-Muslims, the ways in which political
communities of various sorts have de-
55
WEDEEN: WHY HUNTINGTON, AND BIN LADEN, ARE WRONG
pended on the cross-fertilization of ideas
and practices.
To take into account historical pro-
cesses would mean to identify the recent
and global dimensions of radical religious
expression. "Fundamentalism," as radical
religious expression is sometimes termed, is
not exclusive to Islam, nor does it have its
roots in age-old traditions. Current
Islamicist movements are part of a global
phenomenon that originated in the late
1970s, and they share with other contem-
porary movements two key similarities: a)
they resuscitate, invent or construct an
essentialist understanding of political
identity based, at least in part, on ascrip-
tion; b) although they have important
antecedents, they have emerged as a
potent contemporary political force at the
same time that international market pres-
sures have weakened the economic
sovereignty of states and undermined their
roles as guarantors of citizens' welfare.
The story may by now be a familiar
one: In the 1970s, states began withdraw-
ing economically, privatizing property,
reducing or eliminating subsidies,
deregulating prices, and ceasing to provide
services to which people had become
accustomed, felt entitled ­ and needed. As
the state has retreated economically in the
Middle East, Islamicist movements have
tended to fill in the gaps, providing goods
and services states do not proffer.2
Egypt
was one of the first Middle Eastern
countries to initiate liberalization measures
in 1973. Although such measures could be
deemed successful during the oil-boom
years, they were disastrous in the bust
period of the mid-1980s. Liberalization
measures introduced Egyptians to a
number of imported goods and luxury items
at the same time that oil revenues and
privatization policies generated a new,
American-oriented parvenu class.3
This
new class enjoyed a lifestyle that stimu-
lated widespread resentment among the
urban poor and middle classes. Liberaliza-
tion programs created markets, but they
also enhanced perceptions of corruption,
widened income disparities and fostered
considerable economic suffering. Liberal-
ization also removed safety nets that
guaranteed people some security. Rising
unemployment, decreases in subsidies,
housing problems and population explosions
all contributed to the glaring gap between
rich and poor. Strikes grew more common
in the 1980s, food riots were "a frequent
worry" among government officials, and
middle- and lower-class citizens reported
economic anxieties.4
The undermining of the state as the
vehicle of economic development also
subverted its role as the carrier of abstract
communal solidarities. It was in this
context, often termed "globalization," that
politicized religious movements started
being mobilized on the basis of a complex
blend of ascriptive and behavioral identifi-
cations. What is common to most of these
movements is that they express anxieties
about corroded values and the loss of
communal attachments. They register the
"moral panic"5
of citizens longing for a
state or community capable of protecting
and providing for them.
In the Middle Eastern context,
Islamicist movements have captured this
popular discontent, in part by delivering
concrete economic benefits to constituents.
They have devised disciplined, effective,
skillful organizations for channeling re-
sources and providing goods and services.
Some offer housing, books and health care
no longer (or never) provided by the state.
56
MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. X, NO. 2, SUMMER 2003
Islamicist movements also organize affec-
tive attachments in the wake of the failure
of Arab states to deliver on Arab-national-
ist promises.
The appeal of Islamicist groups, then,
can be historically situated in the changing
relations of global capital (and the con-
comitant shift from nationalist abstractions
to religious ones). Invoking a "clash of
civilizations" argument is also, as political
scientist Chalmers Johnson notes, "a way
of evading
responsibility for
the `blowback'
that U.S.
imperial projects
have gener-
ated."6
Possible
sources of
"blowback"
include the
widely shared views that the United States
serves as a proxy for Israel, is responsible
for the decade of sanctions against Iraqis,
shores up corrupt dictators, stations troops
in SaudiArabia specifically, and upholds
double standards between official commit-
ments to democracy and equality, on the
one hand, and actual political activities, on
the other. Current global economic ar-
rangements are also implicated in beliefs
about U.S. imperial projects. They are
understood as bringing wealth to the United
States and its perceived institutional
surrogates, the IMF and World Bank, while
making many parts of the world more
miserable and destitute.
The fact that economically incapaci-
tated states in the region encourage expres-
sions of popular discontent in forms that
deflect attention away from domestic
leaders' incompetence may also explain the
elective affinity between state discourses
and some aspects of Islamicist movements.
The available idioms through which a
people's experiences of common belonging
become institutionalized in the post-(Henry)
Fordist, post-colonial world are confined to
what the state will tolerate and what the
Islamicists have won. Thus demonstrations
of Muslim piety combine with common
understandings of anti-American and pro-
Palestinian solidarities in officials' speeches
and in mass demonstrations. Islamicism has
become a
coherent anti-
imperialist
doctrine and a
way of re-
establishing
community. It
offers visions of
an equitable,
just,socially
responsible way of life, much as the failed,
discredited Arab nationalist regimes of the
1950s and '60s did.
To some extent the success of the
Islamicist movements also has to be
attributed to the state's elimination of leftist
opposition by means of incarceration,
torture and cooptation. In Egypt, for
example, the regimes of Nasser and Sadat
worked actively to demobilize the working
class. Sadat found tactical allies among
the Muslim Brotherhood and among the
newly growing radical Islamic movements
in universities. He released imprisoned
Muslim Brothers in 1972-73, and encour-
aged them to attack leftists, whom he
regarded as his major political adversary.7
In Yemen, unification between North and
South was followed by the northern ruling
party's consistent assault on its southern
socialist partners. In 1992-93, there were
approximately 150-160 assassination
Islamicism has become a coherent
anti-imperialist doctrine and a way
of re-establishing community. It
offers visions of an equitable, just,
socially responsible way of life.
57
WEDEEN: WHY HUNTINGTON, AND BIN LADEN, ARE WRONG
attempts against members of the Yemeni
Socialist party (YSP) ­ most of them
carried out by self-identified radical
Islamicists who were encouraged finan-
cially and politically by the regime.8
Viewing the emergence and appeal of
Islamicist movements historically thus
compels us to come to terms with the post-
Fordist economic world in which the state's
economic sovereignty has been under-
mined globally, with consequences for the
forms of solidarity and expressions of
community currently politicizing citizens in
a number of places. A historical account
also requires us to recognize the absence
of alternative visions of community and
authority, as leaders failed both to deliver
on their pan-Arab promises and to produce
effective state-centered projects for
development. With the disintegration of the
Soviet Union and the global decline of
Soviet ideology as an alternative paradigm
to liberal capitalism, Islamicism provides a
critical vision of the world and a sense of
hope for some people. Islamicist positions
on social justice, based on mechanisms of
redistribution such as the Islamic zakat
taxes, avoid the radical land-reform
projects of old. They also tend to respect
the concept of private property and en-
courage profit as an appropriate outcome
for entrepreneurial activity.9
Islamicists
can thus appeal to the middle classes and
to the urban poor, even though the credibil-
ity of Islamicist solutions to economic
problems has been undermined by the
failure of some Islamicist firms to deliver
on their financial promises.10
CONTENTION AMONG MUSLIMS
Despite the success of Islamicists in
providing adversarial idioms and resonant
political critiques, the struggle among
nominally Muslim citizens and Islamicist
adherents is as pronounced as the solidari-
ties an Islamicist adversarial politics has
fostered. Being "Muslim" might signify a
set of religious beliefs, an ascriptive
attachment, a "cultural" identification, a
state classification, a set of recognizable
activities, or none of the above. There are
those who see a separation of mosque and
state as fundamental, and those who
advocate their conjuncture. There are
those who think the sharia should be the
source of legislation, those who view it as
a source, and those who wish it were
irrelevant to contemporary law. There are
countries where the ulama or religious elite
is independent of the state, places where
mosque sermons are controlled by the
state, and places where the ulama is
coterminous with the state. There are, in
short, vigorous communities of argument
and varieties of social and political prac-
tice. This plurality makes any invocation of
a single political doctrine of Islam empiri-
cally untenable and theoretically meaning-
less. We have to keep this sense of variety
and plurality in mind when thinking about
political patterns and the terrains of solidar-
ity that might animate future political life.11
MODERNITY, RULE OF LAW,
HUMAN RIGHTS
Rather than discussing reified catego-
ries such as Islam and democracy in
general, we should talk, as the theorist
Gudrun Krämer encourages us to do, about
"Muslimslivingandtheorizingunderspecific
historical circumstances."12
This may seem
obvious, but it is often hard to do, in part
because many Muslim authors represent
their "views as `the position of Islam.'"13
In addition, some Islamicists may end
up adopting the strategic option of democ-
58
MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. X, NO. 2, SUMMER 2003
racy because leaders calculate that it is in
their interest to do so. Such rational
calculations explain how the theologically-
minded Belgian Catholic movement, for
example, despite members' theocratic
inclinations and lack of commitment to
democracy, ended up supporting demo-
cratic institutions.14
In other words, a
discussion of ideas, values or shared
political commitments may exaggerate the
importance of particular ways of thinking
while underestimating the salience of
common strategic interests and trade-offs
­ the familiar
practices of
calculating costs
and benefits, which
many political
leaders, who share
the same vocation
(but perhaps not
the same values),
do when making
decisions.
Keeping these
points in mind, let
me suggest three shared understandings
that might constitute a terrain of solidarity
between Islamicists and liberals (I claim
membership in neither group). First,
conservative ulama and moderate Muslim
Brothers (in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and
Yemen) hold ideas that are fundamentally
modern.15
Implementing the sharia,
according to these theorists, means building
a state whose common bureaucratic
institutions are designed to provide goods
and services in return for citizens' alle-
giance and obedience. Humans, endowed
by God with reason, have the ability to
interpret correctly the purposes of the
sharia and therefore to define the precise
contours and functional tasks state institu-
tions will assume. In this light, the adoption
of democratic practices or categories may
be "acceptable, recommended or even
mandatory," as long as these do not
contravene Islamic principles.16
Second, then, is the admissibility of
democratic norms and procedures in the
process of constructing institutions. A
fundamental concern of many contempo-
rary Muslims is the need to check the
arbitrary powers of leaders and institute
the rule of law, and strict application of the
sharia is seen by many as a way of check-
ing tyranny while
ensuring procedural
justice. Whatever
problems one might
see in this proposi-
tion, criticisms of
despotism and
corruption animate
the works of both
radical and reform-
minded Islamicists
(as well as those of
secularists). Identi-
fying tyranny as a key spiritual and political
problem on the grounds that it treats men
as gods, when there is only one God,
provides the justification for rendering
dictators and those who work for them
apostates.17
Although some groups still
advocate the restoration of a "caliphate,"
many groups, including the Muslim Broth-
ers, use the term in ways analogous to a
modern president who is entrusted to
execute God's law as a fallible human
agent and an accountable, political repre-
sentative of the Muslim community. Thus
many Muslim authors claim that the ideal
Islamic state is a dawla madaniyya (a
civil state) rather than a theocracy ruled by
the ulama or an authoritarian state ruled by
Identifying tyranny as a key
spiritual and political problem
on the grounds that it treats
men as gods, when there is
only one God, provides the
justification for rendering
dictators and those who work
for them apostates.
59
WEDEEN: WHY HUNTINGTON, AND BIN LADEN, ARE WRONG
the military. In Yemen, moderate
Islamicists also stress the importance of a
shura whose actual duties look less like
the Prophet Muhammad's version of a
consultative body and more like a Western
parliament.18
Many authors in Yemen and
elsewhere accept the importance of a
separation of powers in which the execu-
tive, the legislature and the judiciary keep
each other in check.
Third, moderate, pragmatic Islamicists
and many self-identified Muslim authors
also express concerns about protecting
human rights (although there are also
lively debates on the extent to which the
importation of allegedly Western under-
standings of human rights contradict the
sharia and/or are used opportunistically by
Western NGOs, journalists and govern-
ments to justify intervention).19
Especially
in their role as oppositional political figures,
moderate Islamicists have demanded the
safeguarding of individual rights and civil
liberties from government intrusion, and the
human right to live free from repression
and torture.
CONCLUSIONS
The vast majority of people in the
Middle East probably never ceased to
consider themselves Muslim even at the
apogee of secular nationalist movements.
But before the 1970s, most Muslims did not
seem to identify primarily as Muslims or,
rather, that identity did not override other
forms of political identification. Disillu-
sionment with the performance of states in
the 1970s and the creation of parvenu
classes that exemplified the ostentatious
excesses of the "haves" in contrast to the
impoverishment of the "have nots" gener-
ated widespread discontent. This discon-
tent was exacerbated with the debt crisis
of the 1980s, the decline in the price of oil,
and the IMF-imposed restructuring projects
that limited state expenditures. At a time
when the distributive capabilities of states
were undermined and leaders were
increasingly perceived to be venal and
corrupt, the popularity of Islamicist move-
ments rose considerably. The messages ­
calls for social equity, political transparency
and accountability, and moral piety ­ were
resonant alternatives that gave many a
sense of belonging to a common political
project with anonymous but like-minded
others. It may be difficult to establish a
direct causal relationship between eco-
nomic suffering and political Islamicist
movements, but we might acknowledge
that fundamentalisms are "intimately
connected with material conditions and
disaffection" without arguing that such
conditions fully explain "the appeal of
fundamentalist ideas."20
To focus on the economic incentives,
discursive content and political-affective
impulses that have underpinned Islamicist
projects is not to suggest that there is a
single, unified political doctrine of Islam.
Islamicists differ from non-Islamicists and
from one another. There are pragmatically
minded Muslim Brotherhood adherents and
radically minded, militantly inclined
Islamicists. There are secularists and
pious practitioners. Reifying "Islam" not
only denies the empirical world of plurality
and diversity, it also proves politically
dangerous by making "Islam" into an
object rather than a set of polyvalent
activities whose practitioners have diver-
gent visions, fantasies, understandings and
interests.
Moreover, the moderate, pragmatic
Islamicists have come to articulate recog-
nizable aspects of a modern state and a
60
MIDDLE EAST POLICY, VOL. X, NO. 2, SUMMER 2003
democratic politics: government account-
ability, the rule of law, political participation,
the separation of powers and the protection
of human rights. As Gudrun Krämer points
out, despite these explicit commitments,
Muslim Brothers are not, strictly speaking,
liberals, if "liberalism" also means "reli-
gious indifference."21
But their moral
vocabularies, expressions of entitlement
and political practices share important
characteristics with liberal formulations of
democratic institution building.
Thinking about shared terrain between
Islamicists and non-Islamicists and be-
tween Muslims and non-Muslims does not
mean riding roughshod over important
disagreements, nor does it require forcing
consensus where consensus does not
reside. If democrats are to take their own
commitments to democratic political life
seriously, they (we) have to embrace the
varied and contentious politics that allows
differences to thrive.
Focusing exclusively on Islamicists,
moreover, does a disservice to other groups
and individuals in the Middle East whose
ideals may be less resonant with current
public opinions, but whose practices forge
the conditions of possibility through which
future political life may also get created.
Finally and more generally, by ignoring
historical processes and specific relations
of political power, the treatment of culture
(especially in political science) has
downplayed the heterogeneous ways
people experience the social order within
and among groups, while exaggerating the
commonality, constancy and permanence
of group beliefs and values. As a result,
culturally essentialist explanations of
political outcomes such as ethnic or
religious violence tend to naturalize catego-
ries of group identity, rather than exploring
the conditions under which such experi-
ences of group identity come to seem
natural when they do.22
1
Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, p. 22, and The Clash of
Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), pp. 20, 28-29.
2
Khaldoun Hasan Al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective (New
York: Routledge, 1991); Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, eds. Joel Beinin and Joe Stork
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1997); Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, The Price of
Wealth: Economics and Institutions in the Middle East (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Clement
M. Henry and Robert Springborg, Globalization and the Politics of Development in the Middle East (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Khalid Medani, "Funding Fundamentalism: The Political
Economy of an Islamist State," Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report; Yahya Sadowski, "Egypt's
Islamist Movement: A New Political and Economic Force," Middle East Insight, 1987, pp. 37-45; Diane
Singerman, Avenues of Participation: Family, Politics and Networks in Urban Quarters of Cairo (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Robert Vitalis, "Introduction to Part Two," Political Islam: Essays
from Middle East Report; Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, "Islamic Mobilization and Political Change: The Islamist
Trend in Egypt's Professional Associations," Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, and Mobilizing
Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); and Mai Yamani, Changed Identities: Challenge of the
New Generation (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2002).
3
Sadowski.
4
Ibid.
5
Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Occult Economies and the Violence of Abstraction: Notes from the
South African Postcolony," American Ethnologist, May 1999, p. 5.
6
The Nation, October 15, 2001.
7
John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1983); and Sadowski.
61
WEDEEN: WHY HUNTINGTON, AND BIN LADEN, ARE WRONG
8
Interviews with Yemeni Socialist party leaders, Fall 2001; see also the interview with Tariq al-Fadli in al-
Quds al-Arabi, November 10, 2001, reprinted in the YSP's weekly al-Thawri, January 3, 2002. Al-Fadli was
a well-known Yemeni Islamic Jihad movement leader who joined the ruling General People's Congress party
in the mid-1990s.
9
Sadowski; and Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2002).
10
See, for example, Gilles Kepel's description (2002) of the banking crash in Egypt in the late 1980s, pp.
279-281. Thanks are owed to Anna Wuerth for suggesting these passages to me.
11
Recognizing the fact of diversity does not mean avoiding generalizations, but it may help identify the kinds
of generalizations that can plausibly be made.
12
Gudrun Krämer, "Islamist Notions of Democracy," Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, p. 72.
13
Ibid.
14
Stathis N. Kalyvas, "Democracy and Religious Politics: Evidence from Belgium," Comparative Political
Studies, Vol. 13, No. 3, June 1998, pp. 292-320.
15
Krämer, p. 74. I am obviously indebted to Gudrun Krämer's essay for my Part Three. Her work intro-
duced me to the works of Abd al-Qadir Awda, Al-Islam wa-awdauna al-siyasiyya and Al-Islam wa-awdauna
al-qanuniyya (Cairo: n.d.); Ali Jarisha, Ilan dusturi islami (al-Mansura: 1985), and Al-Mashruiyya al-
islamiyya al-ulya, 2nd ed. (al-Mansura: 1986); Muhammad Imara, Al-Dawla al-islamiyya bayna al-almaniyya
wa al-sulta al-diniyya (Cairo and Beirut: 1988); Muhammad Salim al-Awwa, Fi al-nizam al-siyasi lil-dawla al-
islamiyya, new ed. (Cairo and Beirut: 1989); Fahmi Huwaydi, Al-Quran wa al-sultan: humum islamiyya
muasira (Cairo: 1982), and Al-Islam wa al-dimuqratiyya. My own research on Yemen has led me to study
the writings of Yasin Abd al-Aziz, Adwa ala haqiqa al-musawa (Sana: 1996), and Al-Hurriya wa al-shura,
dirasatani fi al-fiqh al-siyasi (Sana 1999). I am also beholden to al-Qardawi's television commentaries on al-
Jazeera. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
16
Krämer, p. 75.
17
Critiques of dictatorship among Islamicists also use vocabulary that does not carry religious connotations,
such as despotism (istibdad) and oppression (zulm).
18
Yasin Abd al-Aziz, Al-Hurriya wa al-shura, dirasatani fi al-fiqh al-siyasi (Sana: al-markaz al-yamani lil-
dirasat al-istratijiyya, 1999), pp. 63-116.
19
The status of women, the rights of gay people and of non-Muslim minorities, and the freedom of academic
research remain fraught topics. In Yemen, the right of private individuals to retaliate against a crime or to
settle accounts privately (qisas) is also a particularly charged issue.
20
Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism, A
Work of Comparative Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 89.
21
Krämer, p. 80.
22
See Lisa Wedeen, "Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science," American Political Science
Review, Vol. 96, No. 4, December 2002, pp. 713-728.