Role Of Religion In Politics Research Articles

Between Arabism and Islam

It is the consensus among Middle Eastern and Western students of the Middle East that Arab nationalism as an ideological premise of politics and policy in the Arab countries was devalued after 1967. Its supreme goal of Arab unity has been abandoned. 1 In any event, its radical heyday was associated with one particular leader in the 1950s and early 1960s, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Its other exponent and standard-bearer, the Baath party, suffered a relentless process of militarization and fragmentation in the Fertile Crescent and the Levant. The very core of its programme, Arab unity, is not for the moment a credible objective or a popular ideology. The defeat of both centres and leaders of the Arab nationalist and Arab unity cause, Egypt and Syria, at the hands of Israel in 1967 put paid to their claims and aspirations. The convergence, at the same time, of the growing financial power of the more traditional and conservative Arab states, some of which, like Saudi Arabia, claim an Islamic basis and identity for their political order, further eroded the political vitality of secular Arabism. It also encouraged movements to promote the primacy of Islam in the affairs of Arab states and in their relations with the outside world. So-called fundamentalist movements arose in many of these countries to challenge the authority of their respective rulers and states, and to combat external, non-Islamic influences and power. These movements, too, theoretically seek Islamic unity,the unification of the umma, the community of believers. They wish to reassert Islamic identity, implement the sacred law, and reject everything non-Islamic, that is, of infidel provenance. Such an Islamic movement succeeded in coming to power in Iran under the leadership of the Shia divines for reasons peculiar to both the Shiite creed and the status and organization of its religious teachers. The fact remains that the Khomeini regime in Iran justifies its power and control of the state on its rejection of a modernity that was being imposed through Western, or Westernized, means. In Lebanon, religion, as the basis of political identity and ideology, culminated in a ten-year destructive civil war, leading to the disintegration of the State of Lebanon and the armed confrontation between the various religious communities, with no political resolution of their differences in sight. Although a recurrent enough phenomenon, militant Islamic fundamentalism has had a sustained growth in the last 20 years. Its virulence and apparent strength reiterates the peculiar role of religion in politics. It also exposes the weakness and transience really failure of its secular counterpart, Arab nationalism or Arabism. Its proponents reject nationalism as an alien ideology that is ill-suited to Muslim societies, and claim authenticity for their call for a return to Islam which is the native cultural and political idiom. They put it forward as the only alternative order for Muslims, and the only efficacious shield against the hostile non-Islamic world. Yet only in Iran, so far, has such a movement acceded to state power. Elsewhere, it remains a

Religion and the Collapse of Gladstone's First Government, 1870–1874

Gladstone has not been well served by the historiographical tradition dominant for much of this century. It has disseminated an image of him that emphasizes little more than an undefined ‘reformism’ and a moralizing populism; this is as unhelpful and distorted as is the interpretation, emanating from the same source, of much of the rest of nineteenth-century politics. It is no longer enough to judge public figures of this period by the degree of their commitment to nebulous platitudes like ‘social reform’ or ‘progress’: historians have recently exposed the flimsy foundations that sustain the reputations of even those most frequently celebrated in these spheres. It is misleading to concentrate attention on the development of institutional reform, centralized government, trade union legislation, or welfare statutes for the poor; franchise extension apart, advances here were often provoked solely by bureaucratic agency or by the concern of philanthropic backbenchers, and contributed only occasionally to the major disputes of Victorian political society. If we are to shed light on the domestic issues of vital importance to contemporary politicians, we need a far more coherent account than is now available of financial, taxation and land policy on the one hand, and, on the other, of the main subject of this article, the role of religion in politics.