It’s not all about Islam: misreading secular politics in the Middle East

Much western, particularly French, media
coverage of the January attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and the kosher
supermarket in Paris fell prey to an old orientalist trope of the ‘War on
Terror’: that Western secular culture is innately peaceful, rational and
tolerant, while Islam is distinctly ambiguous on these matters.

In some of this coverage, the incident was
reduced to an attack on secular freedom. This not only failed to capture the
complexity of the events. It also failed to reflect accurately the tangled
histories of secular ideas, political settlements, and ways of living in the west
and the Arab Middle East, shaped by centuries of interaction, including empire
and migration.

The so-called ‘War on Terror’ was an important
chapter in these tangled histories. War is always a social and cultural
encounter between sides. One of the by-products of this terrible chapter was
the re-assertion of orientalist binaries. Another, less appreciated by-product
was increased western policy and media attention to the terms of western
secularism.

This is not to say in any way that the US and
Europe have a monopoly on all things secular. It is merely to point out that
the salience of Islam to the ‘War on Terror’ had the knock-on effect of drawing western attention to its own secular political ‘truths’, and the Christian
cultural provenance of these. This spawned in the west both reaffirmation of
the terms of western secularism(s) and some self-critique.

This process of self-reflection did not quite
translate into better understanding of the dynamics of secularism as a
political project in the Middle East, and the complexities and contradictions
of lived secularity there. Western policymakers have improved their
understanding of political Islamism since 2001. But their understanding of
other dynamics in the region—including secularisation and de-secularisation
processes and their political impact—has not received much attention.

Instead, a rather uncritical presumption that
seemingly ‘secular’, westernised actors are somehow more pragmatic and
trustworthy partners for the west has prevailed. This is too simple. To ignore
this complexity is to misread the idioms through which many aspects of Arab
political and social life are animated and contested, as well as the ways in
which political authority is organised.

More recently, with the rise of Islamic State,
mainstream western media outlets have begun to report on Arab critics of
religious authority over politics and social life. Most famously, the case of
Raif Badawi—sentenced to ten years in prison, 600 lashes and a fine for his
critique of the marriage of Wahhabism and Saudi authoritarianism—drew popular western condemnation.

Not all of these Arab critiques come in an
overtly secular political idiom, but some do, calling for separation of
religion and state, increased rights for women and LGBT individuals, and a ban
on apostasy laws. Like many Islamist groups, these secular critics also frame
their calls within the language of political reform and democratisation.

Still, where once western policymakers better understood
the dynamics of secular politics in the Middle East, this knowledge has been
lost, subsumed under a fixation on Islam’s supposed threat to western security
interests. In what follows, I call for renewed attention to these dynamics.

Secular politics in the
Arab Middle East: a historical snapshot

The label ‘secular’ is highly problematic, in
theory and practice. Actors in the Arab Middle East are more inclined to use
terms such as leftist, liberal, Ba’athist, communist, socialist and Marxist to
describe their orientation, with a critique of Islam’s influence implied in the
term.

In the west, the designation ‘agnostic’,
‘atheist’ or ‘indifferent’ tends to mean someone’s personal belief rather than
their politics. In the Arab world there is a public, political and performative
aspect to these labels. Also, a person may simultaneously declare a religious
affiliation (Sunni, Christian, etc.) to mark out their political identity in a
national context.

As in the west, religious practice and discourse
run along a spectrum in the Arab world. Individuals situate themselves
somewhere along the spectrum but engage in practices and language that are a
mix of ‘religious’ and ‘secular’. There is no binary between the two. Western
ways of living secularly and secular political settlements are heavily
conditioned by their continuities with Christianity. The same is true of the
Arab Muslim context.

In the second half of the 19th century,
intellectuals in Lebanon and Egypt began to articulate secular political and
social ideas. These were inspired by, but not reducible to, contemporary
European currents of thought. Intellectuals came into contact with these ideas
through imperial occupation but also through their own study and travels to the west. The growth of Arab secular outlooks received a boost
after World War I, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, abolition of the
caliphate, and extension of the British and French mandates in the Levant.

The originators of both Arab nationalism and Ba’athism
during this period saw important continuities between Islam as heritage and the
new, modernising direction in which they hoped to move the region. They recognised
that Islamic practice would likely continue to be important to Arab
populations. To a certain extent, secular political and social ideas were, and
continue to be, held by the elite and middle class that emerged later in the
twentieth century.

The secular forces of Arab nationalism,
communism and Ba’athism vied with more traditional, monarchical forces after the
end of the Second World War. During this period of the Cold War, US
policymakers saw secular political parties and regimes in Egypt, Iraq and Syria
as well as Iran as reinforcing their susceptibility to Soviet influence. In
short, secular actors were seen as a threat.

However, with the rise of political Islamism—in
response to the failure of Arab nationalism, the Arab defeat in the 1967 war,
the Iranian revolution, and the end of communist parties as a credible
political force in the region—the content of secular political idioms no longer
interested western policymakers. The PLO and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria continued
to pose a threat to Israel, but the region was unlikely to fall under Soviet
influence.

By the end of the Cold war, the two remaining
Ba’athist regimes in Syria and Iraq were seen as dangerous solely because of
threats they posed to Israel, Kuwait and regional stability. By 1993, secular
Fatah (though not the PFLP) set aside violent resistance and began to engage
with the Israeli government under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority and
the Oslo Accords. Indeed, the ascendance of Bashar al-Assad in 2000 inspired
some western optimism that he might steer that secular Ba’athist regime in a
more reformist, less antagonistic direction, which would lead to further
stability in the region.

The post-9/11 paradox

A new chapter in this tangled history began in
2001. As has been widely discussed, the salience of Islam within Al Qaeda’s
political idiom prompted western policymakers to crudely associate the
followers of a world religion with security threats. In the middle of the
twentieth century, secular Arab actors were sometimes perceived as
ideologically suspect and a threat to western and Israeli interests. Now, it
was Arab Islamist actors who were viewed with a suspicion previously reserved
for the post-revolutionary Iranian regime.

I argued in my 2013 book, Secular War:
Myths of Religion, Politics and Violence, that a secular security habitus led the British—and
potentially other western militaries and policy-makers—to misread Islamic
idioms, symbols and social structures as both more and less dangerous than they
actually were. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus as ‘a set of
dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways’, not all of
which are fully conscious.

The contemporary British secular habitus is a mixture of liberal
democratic political tradition, Christian heritage, post-imperial
multiculturalism, and casual indifference towards religion. This social
and political context shaped British policy, which then had a knock-on effect
on the populations of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Muslims in the UK.

Secular habits of understanding the world made
it difficult for western security services to come to grips with nuances within
Muslim populations, to understand what was truly threatening and what was just
unfamiliar. Despite ruling Muslim majority areas during centuries of empire,
European governments had limited recent, in-depth experience. The US government
was even more in the dark.

As Islamist groups turned their attention
towards the Middle East during the 1990s, their salience to western security
priorities trailed behind the so-called ‘new wars’ in the Balkans and Africa
and containing Saddam Hussein. Despite Al Qaeda attacks during the 1990s, western security experts were caught off guard in 2001. Bourdieu has suggested
that hysteresis—or lag in the habitus—occurs
when “the environment [it] actually encounter[s] is too different from the one
to which [it is] objectively adjusted”. It took western policymakers the better
part of the decade to catch up.

While by no means the main driver, these habits
helped to facilitate the imposition of security services into the lives of
Muslims around the world, including during the devastating occupations of Iraq
and Afghanistan. Still, global politics is full of contradictions, and the
picture is not entirely negative. Western habits of secular state neutrality
made possible political support for the participation of Islamists in Afghan-
and Iraqi-led democratisation processes. They also made possible financial
support for further development of Muslim civil society in Europe.

The secular security habitus produced paradoxical
effects. For
example, while on the one hand secular hysteresis contributed to British
misreading of the threat posed by Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaish al-Mehdi militia in
2003-4 (key instigators of the 2006-7 civil war), British habits of political
liberalism also led them to work with Islamist politicians to facilitate
representative democracy in Iraq. While the intention may have been to
secure western interests, actors were able to capitalise on these opportunities
and achieve some autonomy. Still, this somewhat ambiguous openness to
Islamism should not be over-interpreted. Hamas and Hezbollah remained
proscribed terrorist organisations in western eyes.

The myth of ‘Islamic
moderation’

This brings us back to the point about tangled
histories. One of the many ironies of the post-9/11 decade is that the western
secular security habitus led
policymakers to focus on Islam. Paradoxically, western policymakers did not pay
very much attention to Arab secular critiques of Islamist politics or ways of
living with less Islamic influence during the decade after 9/11. And with the
occupation of Iraq, Arab secular critics saw Western governments as the enemy,
not an ally.

In the middle of the post-9/11 decade, western
policymakers focused on the potential of Arab politics articulated in a western-friendly Islamic idiom to bring the containment of security threats
against the West. Western policymakers, influenced by a secular security habitus, created a range of policies,
programmes and campaigns which have depend on the notion that ‘moderate’
religion can be harnessed to promote alignment with western policy objectives
and contain threats against western targets. This
is the logic that has influenced western aid democratisation programmes and
counter-terrorism policies, among others. While it figures more
prominently in US foreign policy, the EU has started to follow suit.

In reality, moderation is always a social
construct, contextually dependent, with no real content. There are no inherent
features—even non-violence—to which one can look and say ‘this is moderate’.
But western policymakers and security experts continue to be wedded to the myth
that there are features of moderation in the Middle East that are consistent,
identifiable, uncontested, and that this will help them identify allies. One
need only look to attempts to arm Syrian ‘moderates’.

At the same time, Arab actors also seek to
capitalise on the political and economic opportunities that have opened up by
portraying themselves as ‘moderate’. Certainly the picture is far from
straightforward. Civil society actors in the west and the Middle East capitalised
on opportunities to manoeuvre themselves into positions of international and
domestic influence vis-á-vis other
groups, or to genuinely develop their community’s political and social
capacity, often from a position of structural disadvantage.

This has allowed smaller, quieter voices in
civil society to exercise normative persuasion over more powerful states. However,
regimes in Muslim-majority states in the Gulf and the Levant have also
portrayed themselves as ‘moderate’ to successfully deflect western pressure to
institute political reform or recognise human rights.

The rise of the Islamic State and the
re-emergence of jihadism at the top of western security agendas have provided, and
will likely only continue to provide, more structural opportunities for
self-styled Arab and ‘Muslim moderates’.

It is unclear that western states can avoid
relying on these alliances when Arab states hold the key to containing what the west sees as multiple overlapping security threats: state breakdown in Yemen,
Syria and Iraq, the return of Islamic State fighters to the west, and the
maintenance of a potential nuclear deal with Iran. The ability of the Islamic
State to seduce supporters suggests that western and Arab efforts to counter
its narratives with ‘moderate Islam’ will likely only receive a boost from these
regional developments.

Post-Arab Spring: secular
security habitus 2.0?

By contrast, the Arab Spring forced western
policymakers to pay more attention to Arab secular politics when secular
political parties began to assert themselves. A less appreciated and understood
knock-on effect of the western secular security habitus was the impulse among western policymakers to trust
revolutionary actors they saw as ‘secular’.

Some of these actors, such as Nidaa Tounes in
Tunisia and SCAF in Egypt, articulate their politics in a secular idiom,
pitting their social and legal agendas directly against the Islamist positions
of their competitors. Others, such as Stronger Jordan which calls for equality
between men and women, do not frame their calls for less conservative religious
influence on the state so explicitly.

But it has become accepted wisdom among western
governments and security think tanks that actors that look ‘secular’ are likely
to be trustworthy western allies, that a certain rationality, pragmatism and
consistency guides their actions and that they are immune to ideology. They can
be trusted to curb jihadist threats against the west. The March museum attack
in Tunis under the eyes of the ruling secular party suggests that these two
things are not related.

These two western security myths—of ‘religious
moderation’ and ‘secular moderation’—have inhibited the west from condemning
authoritarian brutality. The US and Europe tentatively supported the Muslim
Brotherhood government which ruled in Egypt between 2012 and 2013. However,
their condemnation of the coup that brought General Sisi to power, and of subsequent
violence against the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition forces, was muted.

While western states were loathe to repeat the
occupation of Iraq on Syrian soil, in 2011-2013 they also feared that unseating
Bashar al-Assad would bring Islamist forces to power—either the Muslim
Brotherhood or more radical groups—which would threaten regional stability.
While recognising Assad as an egregious violator of human rights, western
states figured a (more) secular regime was the lesser of two evils.

This preference extends beyond the Arab states.
Erdogan has escaped too much western condemnation for his increasing
authoritarianism, and not only because Turkey is a key NATO ally on the Syrian
and Iraqi borders. Lingering western enthusiasm for Turkish laiklik (secularism)
as an antidote to Islamist extremism, so heavily touted by Erdogan in 2011-12,
also plays a role.

Western states have long upheld anti-democratic
regimes in the region because it suits their interests. This is nothing new.
However the secular security habitus,
which emerged in western security policymaking after 9/11 and continues to
animate it, has provided an additional, underpinning logic to these alliances.

These alliances may be pragmatic, but that is
not their only feature. In some ways, they are a continuation of past trends.
Since the emergence of political Islamism as a credible force in the 1970s, western policymakers have trusted some (not all) secular dictators to stem
threats to western interests—Sadat, Mubarak, Bourguiba, Ben Ali, Bouteflika,
and in the 1980s Saddam Hussein—even while they cooperated with traditional
monarchs. Obviously alliances with authoritarian regimes are built on more than
a loose sense of secular affinity, but global politics is irrational and
‘seeming like me’ makes political trust that little bit easier.

With the emergence in some states of secular,
pro-democratic political actors on the left, the west has had a variety of
potential allies to choose since 2011. However, particularly in North Africa,
it has chosen to support regimes it knows rather than destabilise them through
support for the opposition.

The one notable exception is in Syria, where the
training of so-called ‘moderates’, secular and Islamist, has come too little
too late. Hope for these leftist forces looks likely to come from the Tunisian
model of self-assertion, rather than through direct western sponsorship. While
real political power for these groups is seemingly still far off, a lack of western interference in their political development is to be warmly welcomed.

Islamic State and the western secular security habitus

For nearly three and a half years, from late
2010, to mid-2014, jihadism was temporarily eclipsed as the primary western
security animus. With the exception of the Amenas gas plant attack in Algeria
in January 2013—in which western hostages were taken and killed—jihadist
militancy, spearheaded by Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and Al Shabab, has been confined
predominantly to non-western targets.

Even the 2012 emergence of Al Nusra front as a
key player in the Syrian civil war was overshadowed in western security
thinking by a reluctance to take on the Syrian air force and get involved in
yet another regional civil war. Western governments resisted military action
against Islamic State for nearly a year, finally compelled not by the horrors
suffered by people in the region but by the spectacle of the beheading of western hostages, the flow of young western Muslims to Syria, and plots against
European targets.

Western policy and media discourse on Islamic
State echoes many of the tropes levelled at Al Qaeda after 9/11. Some echoes
can also be seen among western analysts who over-interpret the role of
sectarianism in Iranian-GCC regional proxy conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
However, whether a Western secular security habitus will have any appreciable impact on a response to
Islamic State remains to be seen.

Policy recommendations

In light of ongoing security instability in the
Middle East posed by both Islamic State and authoritarian regimes, I have three
policy recommendations for the governments of NATO states:

1. Develop new analytical tools to better
understand the evolution of secular politics in the Middle East, beyond the old
categories of leftist politics, liberalism or nationalism.

2. Approach the performance of moderation,
Islamic and otherwise, with a critical eye, interrogating how Middle Eastern
states’ and non-state actors’ use labels to forge alliances, undermine
competitors, and engage in power politics as usual. Do not presume that actors
who articulate their politics in a more secular or western-friendly idiom are
inherently progressive or democratically inclined.

3. Mainstream a check for distortive secular
assumptions within the policy process.

This paper follows on from a November 2014 workshop at Chatham House on Islam, Secularism and Security.

Secular politics in the Arab Middle East: a historical snapshot