Transcript
Marshall Poe:
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the Editor of the New Books Network and you're listening to an episode of Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast. Today, I'm very pleased to say we have Danielle Lussier on the show and we'll be talking about a book that she co-authored with Mohammed Ayoob called, The Many Faces of Political Islam Religion and Politics in Muslim Societies, just had a First edition and now there's a second edition because well, things happen and you need to update things and Mohammed and Danielle have done that. Danielle, welcome to the show.
Danielle Lussier:
Thank you so much for having me, Marshall. It's a pleasure to be here.
Marshall Poe:
The pleasure is all mine. Could you begin the interview by telling us a little bit about yourself?
Danielle Lussier:
Sure. I'm an associate professor of political science here at Grinnell College. I joined the Grinnell faculty in 2011 after finishing my Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley. I am within the field of political science, what's called a comparativist, which is a little bit of a misnomer because all politics involves the study of comparison. We're all comparing various things, but within political science, the way that we think about our subfields is comparativists are individuals who focus primarily on the domestic politics of countries outside of the United States.
Most comparativists have a geographic area of expertise, that's where they have done a deep dive into understanding a country's historical and economic and social background. Maybe they've developed some language skills that they can be using to do that type of research. My primary geographic region of expertise is Russia and the former communist world. In fact, I was a Russianist before I was a political scientist.
Marshall Poe:
Really? I didn't know that.
Danielle Lussier:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
I'm a Russianist.
Danielle Lussier:
Undergraduate degree.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, how do you like that?
Danielle Lussier:
My undergraduate degree was from a similar institution to Grinnell, Wesleyan University. I was a Russian and East European studies major. It was my love of Russia and my desire to understand Russian politics that ultimately led me into pursuing graduate study in political science. However, when I was in graduate school, I developed a secondary geographic interest in Indonesia. It's unusual to have a comparativist look at two very distinctive geographic regions, but that's how my intellectual interests have evolved.
In part, that is what united those two very different regions for me was the primary, I would say political questions that have motivated my research, which was an understanding, a really deep desire to understand why countries attempt to build democracies and why they either succeed or fail at that. In particular, wanting to investigate the relationship between the population at large, the mass population, your average citizens, and the way that political institutions are formed and interact with the population.
That's what has driven me to study. That's what drove me to really understand, being interested in understanding Russia as an adolescent when the Soviet Union was dissolving and when I was in graduate school, understanding Indonesia that had just been going through a period of major upheaval after the end of the Suharto regime, at the end of the 20th century.
Within that broader study of trying to understand democracies and when you get them and when you don't get them, that has, over the years, led me to pursue a variety of different research questions that I think relate to it. One of them being in recent years of closer focus on the relationship between religion and politics.
Marshall Poe:
Well, thank you very much for that. It is always interesting to me how you start at one place in academia and you always end up at another.
Danielle Lussier:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
That's-
Danielle Lussier:
If you had told me when I was in graduate school that it, and I would say this, if you had told me when I was in graduate school that within a decade of finishing my graduate studies, I would've been the co-author of a book called The Many Faces of Political Islam, I would've thought that was very strange. That would've not been necessarily the direction I saw myself going.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I say something similar. I mean, I run a podcast network now. I was a professor of Russian history. If you would've asked me 15 years ago if I'd be running a podcast network, I would've laughed at you. I would've said, "What's a podcast network?" Could you tell us what you and Mohammed wanted to accomplish with this book? What was its goal?
Danielle Lussier:
Sure. I think the origin story of this book is actually pretty interesting. As you mentioned, this is a second edition. The first edition was published in 2008, and that was a single-authored publication. It was Muhammad Ayoob's solo-authored work. That original book was attempting to do something, was attempting to fulfill, I would say, a need within scholarship at that time. There was no good introductory-level text on political Islam. Everything was written for a specialist audience.
At the same time, this was a period where I would say, there was a very broad hunger among students and the broader population to understand a little bit more about this and there was a need, really. I think especially when you looked at where US foreign policy was, there was a need for a greater understanding about the relationship between Islam and politics and outside of US borders.
He had written that book at that time with a goal of filling that need. It was an excellent book. It was very well-received. It was written in a very contemporaneous style. I first started to, I became acquainted with the book around the time that I was finishing up my degree and joined the Grinnell faculty because one of the courses that I was designing that I created when I came to Grinnell was a seminar on Islam and politics.
It was a book that I acquired to teach in my class. It was an excellent book. My students loved it. I loved teaching it. It was rich in terms of offering a nuanced theoretical picture for us to understand what I think is a very complex topic that covers a lot of different countries. It had these really well-rounded case studies that students could sink their teeth into and understand and debate.
I loved teaching this book, and my students really loved learning it, but a lot happened between the time when that book was published in 2008, and even when I began teaching it, the first time I taught that class was in spring of 2012. A number of really important events had happened that shaped at least our own, the questions we have about Islam and politics.
For example, Osama bin Laden had been killed. There had been this series of Arab uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa in 2010 and 2011 that had led to meaningful regime change in many cases resulting in civil war. You had had a decline in Al Qaeda following the death of Osama bin Laden and the rise of a new violent Islamist entity known as the Islamic State or ISIS. These are just a small sampling of the types of events that had taken place in the period between when this first edition was published and more recent time.
I had been teaching this book and continuing to feel as though my students would say, "I really like this book, but well, what about this? What about that?" I started to feel that the texts were a bit outdated and I had searched for a long time for something that would be an adequate replacement and was frustrated. I didn't really find anything.
I had decided one year that I said, "Well, you know what, it's a research seminar." It's mostly third- and fourth year students who take it. This is what our big research project is going to be. We're going to read this book with the eye of updating it. We're going to read it as a critical — and that we're going to take a critical lens to it, we're going to identify what things have changed, what needs to be updated. The students would do research projects on it, and that would be sort what our research focus for the semester was.
I'd made up my mind to do this, and I contacted Mohammed Ayoob and said, "I'm doing this with my students." This is pre-COVID. "Would you be interested in maybe joining us for a Skype session when they, towards the end of the semester?"
Marshall Poe:
Right, Skype. [inaudible 00:08:57].
Danielle Lussier:
Yeah. Skype, exactly. I reached out to him about that and I said, "By the way, have you ever thought about publishing a second edition of this book? I'm hungry for it. My students would love it." He wrote back, he said, "University of Michigan Press has been asking me for years to write a second edition of this book, but I just don't have the capacity. I've been pulled in a lot of other different directions. Do you want to co-author it with me?"
Marshall Poe:
Wow, that's great. That is just great. Well, it's great and it's bad because now you have to write a book, update a book.
Danielle Lussier:
Well, it was funny. It came out of nowhere. It wasn't on my to-do list.
Marshall Poe:
Right.
Danielle Lussier:
I gave it some thought and we had a lot of correspondence back and forth about what that would look like. I decided to go ahead and do it. Primarily, because I agreed with my initial assessment, which is that this is a fantastic book and it's dated and that with some updates, it would really continue to contribute to, I think, a very important conversation that needs to be happening, not just among scholars, but among the broader population.
Marshall Poe:
That is a great origin story. Mohammed's generosity deserves to be acknowledged. That's very, it's unusual and very nice.
Danielle Lussier:
Without a doubt. It was unusual and very nice, and it was really wonderful collaboration because we were not individuals who had a relationship going into this, which I think was also a bit unusual. It was a very generous offer on his part to bring me in on this project. It showed a lot of trust.
Marshall Poe:
Yes, it did.
Danielle Lussier:
It was a wonderful opportunity because as we were working out what this would look like, I had to acknowledge and say, "Hey, I'm a specialist on Indonesia. I am not a specialist on," there are certain topics in this book and certain areas in this book that stretched me and are beyond my capacity. We had to work through what that would look like.
I was very pleased with where we landed, which was, I would say he approved everything that I would put out ideas and he would approve things and would offer really valuable suggestions, offer sources, and we worked on everything together. He was open to every single suggestion that I made, every single recommendation. In the end, I feel as though this book really is, it's ours. It has his very strong imprint in his areas of expertise and I think it has the updates that we both desired.
I think it also speaks to my own scholarly interests and contributions in terms of thinking about democratization, thinking about the relationship between societies at large and institutions at large. Even I would say one of the contributions that we make in this second edition is to actually elevate up, I think, the theoretical contributions and thinking about how we delve even further into thinking about political Islam as a concept and thinking about ways you can take that concept and the ideas that are introduced in this book and apply them more broadly. Apply them to cases that are not exclusively the cases that are covered in the book.
Marshall Poe:
This is an excellent segue to my first question, which is about definitions. I'd like you to talk a little bit about three words or phrases. One is Islam. What's that? The second is political Islam. What's that? Then, this very fraught phrase, which I confess I don't really understand, Islamism, because for example, we don't have a term Christianism. That's not a thing.
Danielle Lussier:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Maybe you just begin with Islam and then go to political Islam.
Danielle Lussier:
Build it from there.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
Danielle Lussier:
When we think about Islam, we really are thinking about the religious devotion and belief system that Muslims profess. Individuals self-identify as Muslim. Their adherence to Islam includes their five pillars that individuals profess and practice.
When I think about, gosh, even providing a definition of Islam, I'm wading myself into the territory of having to define religion, which is its own, I would say, fraught conversation, but if I'm going to excuse myself a little bit to not go too deep in the weeds on that, but when we think about religion, we're thinking about a structure of beliefs and ritual practices that bring together humans with the divine.
Islam, as we think of as a religion that brings together individuals through beliefs and ritual practices with the divine and that is professed by a very large segment of the population around the world that adhere to these five pillars and an important one is acknowledging Mohammed as their prophet and as their last prophet. Now, within that, of course, there is a broad range of practices...
Marshall Poe:
Yes.
Danielle Lussier:
... and a broad range of beliefs and interpretations. Now, when we add that definition, political Islam, the definition that we use in the book, we borrow and build on a definition by Guilian Denoeux, which defines political Islam, who defines political Islam as a form of instrumentalization of Islam by individuals, groups, and organizations that pursue political objectives.
Thinking about this use of religion and these beliefs in devotional practices by either individuals or groups or organizations with the goal of engaging in some type of political struggle. That's a very broad definition that can encompass a lot of different types of activities, a lot of different types of actors.
Now, when we think about that relationship between political Islam and your third definition, Islamism, I would say if we go really far into the weeds, there are some scholars who make a distinction between these two words in terms of details that I'm not going to go into. I would say the broader consensus among scholars who work in this tradition are to see political Islam and Islamism as synonyms in the sense of, we can think of Islamism as another noun to describe a theoretical approach that encompasses political Islam.
If we take it and we change that to Islamist, we think about actors who are acting in favor of political Islam. If I then take that one step further and say, Islamist versus Islamic, we think about these two different adjectives. Those are important adjectives that I talk about a lot with my students. We use the adjective Islamic to refer really to those devotional practices to talking about the religion Islam.
Islamist is the adjective that we use to talk about, or the noun in this instance, we're talking about an individual, the noun that we use to talk about political Islam. The use of religion to achieve political objectives, the instrumentalization of it.
Marshall Poe:
Thank you for that. I guess there probably could be a noun Christianism, but it just clangs off my ears, but maybe people in Baghdad or something or studying Christianism. One thing that struck me about your book, just as a kind of lay person, is that the ways in which Islamic ideas and devotional practices have been applied to various sorts of, let's call them regimes, has been incredibly varied.
Danielle Lussier:
Yes, it's very diverse.
Marshall Poe:
You don't just end up with, and I could just, just to digress for a moment, one of the things that I kind of got from the Noosphere or whatever it was, that there's something theocratic about Islam, that it doesn't like secular authority or that it takes over secular authority in a kind of one way sort of direction. I don't think this is correct, just looking at the map, because as you point out there is Islamic democracies and Islamic autocracies, there are full-blown theocracies. It's not like you get one kind of regime out of this thing, Islam.
Danielle Lussier:
That's-
Marshall Poe:
Maybe talk a little bit about that.
Danielle Lussier:
Absolutely. The first chapter of the book, we do talk about myth, demolishing myths. There's sort of three primary myths that we seek to demolish in this book. The first one is the idea that the intermingling of religion and politics is something that's unique to Islam. You're right, we don't have this word about Christianism. We don't have the vocabulary that gets at this, but it is this myth that is perpetuated I think by a lot of the ways that we as, just as Americans, probably talk about the relationship between Islam politics that assumes that there's this intermingling that's unique to Islam and that's simply not true.
The intermingling of religion and politics happens across all different types of religious devotion and in all different types, it happens in democracies, it happens in autocracies, right? That's one-
Marshall Poe:
I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm reminded of the fact it's the queen's something Jubilee. I don't know. She's been on a throne forever.
Danielle Lussier:
Exactly, right?
Marshall Poe:
The Queen of England is, and many people don't recognize this, the head of the Church of England.
Danielle Lussier:
Exactly, right? We make the pledge of allegiance in the United States. We talk about one nation under God. I mean, it's intermingled in all different types of instances. That's one myth. The second myth, and this gets [inaudible 00:19:03] your question is that political Islam is monolithic, right? That there's sort of one vision of what it looks like and that vision is theocratic and that's certainly not the case.
The third myth that we are trying to demolish in this book is this idea that political Islam is inherently violent. I think that stereotype of violence also is tied in with this view of theocracy, this sense that political is Islam inherently means the organization of a state around religious principles and that one will use violence as a tool to try to accomplish that end game. Those are myths. We don't really have actually any substantive basis to say that any of those hold.
Marshall Poe:
Right. I mean, if you just look at a map and even as a lay person, which I am, the regimes, if we can call them that, the political systems of Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran could hardly be different.
Danielle Lussier:
Exactly.
Marshall Poe:
I mean, more different than they are, right?
Danielle Lussier:
Yeah. I mean...
Marshall Poe:
They're barely different.
Danielle Lussier:
... they run the gamut. They run the gamut. They really, really do. That's one of the things that we write about in the book. We start off talking with, or the first empirical chapter really puts Saudi Arabia and Iran as a head-to-head comparison. They're called the self-proclaimed Islamic states. They claim to be Islamic. Yet, those are their claims. We have to look at, well what is it that means?
I find that these two examples are really interesting ones to discuss because I think for many Americans, and at least I can say this for myself, as somebody who grew up in the 1980s right in the United States, that if you gave me an image of as an adolescent growing up in the United States, an image of a Muslim country, what did that look like? I had an image of Saudi Arabia and that is such a unique case.
There's no other case in the world that looks like Saudi Arabia in terms of the way that religion and politics are intertwined. Then, the counterexample, of course, being Iran. Iran is a very unique case in that it is the only instance in the world where religious leaders have a role that basically plays the role of a veto player over the political system. That's also highly unique.
Iran is also the only Shia-majority country in the world. It has a very distinct, it follows a very distinct subset within Islam that is not representative of the broader Muslim world.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. The self-proclaiming aspect and this leads me to something that I'm kind of interested in because it gets a lot of press, is that sometimes people will say that Islam is backward-looking, that it looks to this golden era. You talk about this in the book of the Caliphate when the Uma was united somehow and the idea that there maybe you should be some return to this. Can you talk a little bit about that belief, how widely it's held?
Danielle Lussier:
That's a great question and my immediate response to this ties back to what we were talking about before, which is the distinction between Islam and political Islam. When we think about political Islam is being the instrumentalization of Islam for political objectives, that's where we see, I would say, this focus on a golden age.
The way that I would describe this would be that Islamists, again, thinking about individuals who are using Islam to pursue political objectives, are reimagining and reappropriating aspects of the Islamic past in ways that essentially allow them to invent traditions and dehistoricize Islam for very particular objectives and gains to be obtained in the contemporary era.
To just flush that out a little bit more, for most of history, there was a distinction between temporal rule and religious rule. Muslim lands had, they had political rulers who were not necessarily religious rulers. There was a different way of organizing politics and religion than there is now.
What has happened and what I think Ayoob and I argue, the contemporary manifestation of political Islam is responding to really has to do with political changes, geopolitical changes that came into being in the last several hundred years, namely the rise of European powers in the international arena that brought many regions that have had historically been populated by Muslims under colonial occupation and changing, sort of shifting the global concentration of power in terms of military power, economic power, commerce to Europe in a way that allowed the subjugation of populations that were Muslim.
This happens and as this also happens, we see a shift in the way that politics is organized globally toward the modern nation-state. For much of human history, we were not organized as nation-states. For much of human history, we were organized as-
Marshall Poe:
For almost all of it.
Danielle Lussier:
Almost all of human history. The modern nation-state, it's a very recent phenomenon, but it's a recent phenomenon, but it's lasting or at least it's certainly lasting and representative of our contemporary era in which we have territories that are marked off that have demarcated borders and a mutual recognition of rulers.
That process of building the modern nation-state on a global level was something that had, reflects European dominance of a particular historical era that the rest of the world has had to respond to and evolve with for better or worse. I put that out there as a neutral statement. That-
Marshall Poe:
This I should add, sorry to interrupt, this is also true of Christianity because when nation-states were first born, I mean, it's hard to pin it down, but in the 16th, 17th century, the idea of nation-states did not sit well with, for example, the Catholic church because the Catholic church is an international organization. It's an international religion and if you ask Catholics, there's one kind of Christianity and that's it. It doesn't sit well with nation-states.
Danielle Lussier:
Right. I mean, we're dealing with this broader concept that does intersect and divide up populations whose religious identities don't necessarily cut across or transcend borders, but political Islam and going back to this idea of this golden age, it's reimagining that golden age to create a motivation to mobilize against much more recent and contemporary infringements and repression of Muslim peoples in terms of the creation of nation-states, European colonization, and any number of other factors that have contributed to political dissatisfaction in Muslim majority countries.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I mean, this is all very interesting because it does kind of parallel the Christian development, but well, in the Christian world, if we can call it that, Europe primarily and America, this all happened in the 16th and 17th century when the religious wars were fought and they were kind of fights over nation-states. Is there going to be a nation-state? Who's going to appoint bishops and so on and so forth?
Christianity being an international religion, I mean, even saying that is kind of strange because it's just a religion. It's not just a religion, it's a religion that transcends national borders. Even to this day, it doesn't really sit very well with the kind of broader Christian idea of Christian universalism.
Danielle Lussier:
Right.
Marshall Poe:
You would have national churches like the Queen, the head of the Anglican Church, what's that about? How are English Christians different than Italian Christians are different from, I don't know, Chinese Christians? You get this tension is not specific to Islam in any way.
Danielle Lussier:
Right.
Marshall Poe:
Maybe you could talk a little bit about the way in which, well, let me ask you this kind of odd question, occasionally, well again, I'm such an ignorant about these things, there have been various attempts to kind of reunite or create a caliphate that is a transnational entity. I'm thinking of the Ottoman Empire for example, or Pan-Arabism, which was a big thing and not so much anymore. Is this another iteration of that desire to unite the Uma?
Danielle Lussier:
That's a great question and my response to that has to do, I would say, that this is where we see such variety. It's not a single way of responding to these changes. There are a variety of different patterns that political Islam takes and some of them actually take are in response to precisely these types of trends that you, you've observed.
For example, one of the, in the book we described for what we call ideal types of different Islamic actors or manifestations of political Islam, and I use that word, "ideal type," in the way that Max Weber, the social theorist, used it, which is that we see these as crystallizations of particular characteristics that come together. In real life, we're never going to find the ideal, the pure example of how these different characteristics come together, but they provide a template for us to look at and say, we can look at different manifestations of the world around us, the positive world around us, and say this is closer to one or another ideal type.
Within that, we identify four different ideal types of political Islam. To just talk about one or two of them, because I think that this helps to answer your question, one of the ideal types we talk about are national liberation movements, national resistance movements.
These are examples of instances where you have groups that are seeking to basically develop a sense of nationhood and protect a territory on which they see their nation living and using Islam and that religious identity as a tool to help inspire and organize and defend and make the claim for why they should be able to have that territory and defend that territory. That's a particular type of political Islam that's really quite distinct from the recreation of a caliphate.
Now, we think about that recreation of a caliphate, do you know there are, that is in and of itself an impossibility within the existing international system if you accept the legitimacy of the existing international system. We identify Islamist national resistance groups. Those who are, they accept the legitimacy of temporal rule. They don't see the need for the recreation of a broader caliphate. They accept the overall contras of international system, but they're instrumentalizing Islam for political gain by drawing on that Islamic identity.
Now, that's distinct from a group of actors that we call violent transnational actors. Violent transnational actors comprise a very, very small number of Islamist actors in the world. Their objectives really are to restructure the contours of the international system, to nullify existing nation-state structures, to do away with the Liberalist international order, by which I mean, an international order governed by entities such as the United Nations or the World Trade Organization, et cetera and to construct a political identity that's based on religious rule, but that's a very small number of actors.
I mean, we're really talking about Al Qaeda and ISIS and a few other smaller actors. That's not the bulk of Islamist actors. The bulk of Islamist actors fall into another type of entities. Either the Islamist National Resistance Groups that I talked about, a lot of Islamist actors accept the existing nation-state structures and are using political Islam to try to respond to more domestic concerns.
You mentioned, for example, Pan-Arabism earlier. One of the trends that we see is a use of Islamist organization and rhetoric in countries where Pan-Arabism led to political structures that were largely authoritarian and non-representative that Islam is being used actually to organize opposition to secular authoritarian leaders.
Marshall Poe:
Well, this was the case in Iran actually, if I'm not-
Danielle Lussier:
Yes, totally.
Marshall Poe:
Yes. Yeah. Then, there was a fourth, I think, I don't know, I kind of lost track. Yes.
Danielle Lussier:
Yes. Right. I'm talking about our four ideal types, I mentioned the violent transnationalist Islam, the Islamist Nationalist Resistant Groups, and we talked about non-violent political parties.
Thinking about non-violent political parties, just to add a little bit more onto that, they have the opportunity to engage in peaceful types of political organization because they're in political regimes that are including them. Not all political regimes are going to be inclusive of Islamist actors. They may deny them opportunities to be engaged politically.
Our fourth ideal type that we write about are what we call vanguard Islamist movements. That's using, and you'll appreciate this as a Russian historian, it's using Vanguard very much in the spirit of Vladimir Lenin's vanguard party. Lenin, as an interpreter of Karl Marx, viewed the need for a cadre of professional revolutionaries to help raise the political consciousness of the masses that he saw that you were not going to have a communist revolution absence this vanguard party.
We take that concept of the vanguard party to think about this particular type of Islamist movements that reject the legitimacy of the existing state structure and focus on revolution, but within a territorially circumscribed area. Not trying to rebuild a caliphate, but really thinking about revolution within a very specific territorial area.
What distinguishes these vanguard Islamist movements from some of the other groups that I've talked about is very much this focus, a belief on the ends, justifying the means. A willingness to use violence to build this future-oriented political system, but also with an awareness that revolution can't be sustained indefinitely.
Vanguard Islamist movements are, I would say, they're never in an end state, that you'll have a group that will be this vanguard Islamist movement for a period of time and then will ultimately transition into something else. In some cases they might transition into a non-violent political party, other cases perhaps into a national resistance movement or something else altogether.
One of the things that's really significant about thinking about these different ideal types is that they're really dependent on the type of political regime where an entity is operating. Is that regime open enough for opposition to take on a form that's instrumentalizing Islam in a way that's peaceful? Are peaceful tactics even an option or is political organization centered around Islam so marginalized within a very repressive system that the only way it can take form would be through violent tactics?
Marshall Poe:
That's very interesting. I want to shift just a little bit, and I wondered if you could discuss what I might call apolitical Islam, because I mean, I know Muslims in the United States, some of them are hosts on the New Books Network, we have them all the time and they don't seem particularly political and they seem to have acquiesced or I don't know if that's the right word, but they seem to accept the way we do things in the United States and I'll speak here as a parochial American, that they don't seem political at all.
Danielle Lussier:
Right. I mean, again, I tie this back to the way we conceptualize and define political Islam, which really is the instrumentalization of Islam for political purposes. Islam, at its forefront, is a religion and you have any number of people who practice their religious beliefs or hold their religious beliefs and do not intersect them with their political beliefs that these are, or one might say, and this is something my students and I study extensively in my seminar in Islam and politics, to what extent do religious beliefs shape political actions?
That's something I would say is studied more at the individual level. When we're talking about political Islam and the focus that we're looking at in this particular book, we're really looking at organizations and actors whose entire method of attempting political engagement is through the instrumentalization of religious beliefs.
Marshall Poe:
This gets me back, what springs to mind there is Judaism in the 19th century, I don't know how political it was, to be honest with you, but there was a sector of the Jewish community, namely Zionists, who were very interested in instrumentalizing Judaism for political purposes.
Danielle Lussier:
Right, exactly. Something I just want to be very clear about is there's no claim made anywhere in this book, and I would say there's nothing empirically to support such a claim, even though I think there may be a stereotype or an assumption out there that Muslims' political activity inherently stems from their religious beliefs.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that doesn't seem to make it look like.
Danielle Lussier:
I mean, most of Islam is apolitical and that's not something we're really exploring in this book.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, the reason I mentioned this is because if you do read the press and you listen to Talking Heads and blow your haters and pundits, you do sometimes get this line that if you are a Muslim, then you will adhere to these kinds of political values and have this particular political program, which always seem to me to be just wacky from the point of view of everyday Muslim life, which is about the five pillars and essentially observing the religion.
Danielle Lussier:
Well, and what's really interesting in hearing you talk about that is when we see examples of political Islam. Again, if we go back to the examples of the non-violent political parties where you can have a country and Indonesia as a great example, where you have multiple political parties making claims about political organization and how the state should be organized and what types of policies are pro-Islam. There's not a single Islamist party.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, I mean, that's true.
Danielle Lussier:
There are about five or six different parties.
Marshall Poe:
Again, I'm not an expert on Israeli politics, but I think that perfectly describes much of Israeli politics is different Israelis arguing about who has the best claim on the Jewish question. There's not going to agree. They're not going to kill each other over it, but they're not going to agree about it. We shouldn't forget, I think that in Europe, there are Christian democratic parties...
Danielle Lussier:
Right.
Marshall Poe:
... and that's what they're called.
Danielle Lussier:
Right, right.
Marshall Poe:
We don't have that in the United States.
Danielle Lussier:
I'm glad you brought up that example because it's an interesting … it brings us back to this question of the nomenclature and how we think about that word, "Islamist." One of the examples that we write about in this book, we have a chapter in the book on Muslim democracies. In that book, in that chapter, we talk about Indonesia, Turkey and Tunisia.
Tunisia is a really interesting example because it's the only case whereof a state that had an uprising in the Arab world in 2010, 2011, had a regime change that ultimately developed into a democracy. There were lots of other regime changes in the Middle East and North Africa during that period of time, but they tended to move from one type of authoritarian regime to another. Tunisia actually had a transition to democracy.
An Islamist actor, the party Ennahda played a very, very important role in that transition and has since, in operating in a Tunisian democracy, denounced a label is being Islamist. It now calls itself a Muslim political party. Part of that I think, is very much this goal of trying to separate out a sense of public consciousness of recognizing that they want to advocate on behalf of particular Muslim values, but don't want to be tied in with public stereotypes of Islamist with theocracy, which is certainly, that's not the way that we use the term in our book, but it speaks to sort of a sense of where there's public consciousness about this.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, lots of examples are springing to mind in which various American politicians will mobilize Christianity for various purposes, putting the 10 commandments on the court law, that kind of thing, which doesn't really sit well with most Americans because of the separation of church and state, but they're there. We're not so different after all as the conclusion that I would reach about that.
Danielle Lussier:
Very good point.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Well, Danielle, we've taken up a lot of your time. I really appreciate it. We have a traditional final question on the New Books Network and it is this, what are you working on now?
Danielle Lussier:
Right. What I'm working on now is a book project that's tentatively titled Mobilizing the Devout. This is actually a project I had started prior to working on the Many Faces of political Islam and then hit the pause button to complete this book, but in this project, I actually get at some of the questions that you and I were talking about are not being covered in this book, which is, I'm interested in this question of how it is that the average individual, the average religiously devout individual is to what extent their religious practice affects their political participation with a very specific focus on Indonesia.
It's looking at both Muslims and Christians in Indonesia and I have already done the fieldwork for this project. It involved doing participant observation in four mosques and in four churches in one city in Indonesia where I observed their worship and non-worship services and activities. Also, did an original survey of those eight communities to look at to what extent are people encountering politics through their religious life and to what extent do those encounters with politics in their religious life shape their political beings.
Marshall Poe:
That's a great project because you could essentially do that project almost anywhere.
Danielle Lussier:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
You could do it in the United States with the same you could questions.
Danielle Lussier:
You could do it. You could do it absolutely anywhere. That's exactly right. I was very much motivated in doing this by what I saw as sort of a shared identity, if you will, among people who are practicing their faith that they come together in community and that that's something that is shared across any type of religious denomination, but that focus of coming together in community and just having that shared experience in a house of worship is something that we don't theorize and think about across religious denominations.
We think about the role of churches and Christianity, we think about the role of Muslim organizations within Islam and we think about, of course, the way that Jewish communities are structured among, in different communities as well, but we don't think about theorizing across those different religious traditions.
Marshall Poe:
To theorize, to compare this, what you need common categories. You have to have them.
Danielle Lussier:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
I mean, I think people don't understand this, but you really have to have common categories, which is why I like your study because somebody else could do the same study in the United States, but then you'd have a nice comparative case.
Danielle Lussier:
Exactly.
Marshall Poe:
Well, I want to wish you good luck with that. I also want to thank you very much for being on the show, Danielle.
Danielle Lussier:
Thank you so much for your time.
Marshall Poe:
Okay. Bye-bye.
Danielle Lussier:
Bye.
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