Mass movements in the Muslim World and their Third World implications by Nikki Keddie side 1

we're pleased to have with us dr. Nikki Katie professor of history at the University of California Los Angeles specializing in movements in Iran and other Muslim countries dr. Katie as past president of the Middle East Studies Association of Northern America dr. Katie has written nine books including roots of Revolution an interpretive history of modern Iran Iran tonight dr. Kennedy will address mass movements in the Muslim world please join me in welcoming dr. Nikki Katie thank you I'm very pleased to be here and be part of this exciting looking program that has been sent to me I admire all your fortitude for showing up so many events although I know different people show up at different from looking at your student newspaper and hearing oral reports I see that I expected some how to speak either about the Islamic revival in case or the Iranian Revolution in another I guess when people read mass movements or see my name those are the two things that I think of however I tried to be very virtuous and actually do something on a very broad topic that was wanted which is mass movements in the Muslim world so that these two topics I just mentioned will come in only partially in to what I have to say it's always good to start off with a question which I want to answer right away information what I just said which four countries in the world have the largest Muslim populations I always focus on my classes and sometimes on my colleagues and I'll tell you at the end if we have to come to it already in the course of the lecture somebody thinks he knows them all it's not really a trick question that is there's a great difference in population between number four and number five but but still what happens is that most people think of Middle Eastern countries and their reasons for this historical precedence of this Islam in Middle Eastern countries before it went elsewhere but in fact none of the four is a Middle Eastern country that's probably I already told you enough so that you want to go too far afield and everybody always guesses Egypt Turkey and places like that and I bring that up because I'm going to be cleared I'm not just going to talk about the Middle East which is first there's crucial strategic importance and we hear about it a lot and it happens to be my field of study but it shouldn't be all that becomes Creighton I'm going to talk about the muscle in the world now the first thing I wanted to say is that the mass movements of the type that are talked on under that head in Latin America which tend to be leftist mass movements of one sort or another especially in recent years with perhaps an alliance with Catholic and secular forces will on the whole not be found in the Muslim world I don't know all the reasons for this I think in part it's simply that Latin America got its freedom from colonialism so much earlier that in a sense it's gone through more stages and has at least large numbers of people who are more secularists in their orientation than it's true in the Muslim world and so we find that mass movements that is movements that really involve masses of the population Muslim world have tended to one degree or another to be Islamic in content or at least to have large elements that are Islamic in content this even before the Islamic revival over the last two decades and certainly more true now another reason for this difference with an area like Latin America I think is the nature of the Islamic religion itself which I don't react I into a single entity because it's extremely varied both over time and place but still does nearly always have a political as well as a what we would call a religious element and many people who follow it follow Islam think of it as a total way of life rather than as a part of a way of life and therefore tend to interpret even what we would regard as radical political ideas in Islamic terms in reinterpreted Islamic terms rather than in purely secular terms this doesn't mean they're no secularists and they're no secular movements but somewhat ironically for those who like to structure things in terms of class analysis and I partially did stuff as you move towards the working-class and peasants you get more away in many cases from those who take purely secular views and more toward those who take more Islamic views of the world and one of the reasons for the so-called Islamic revival of recent years is precisely the entrance of the masses into politics in much greater numbers than before and the masses of people partly the petty bourgeoisie but heavily peasants who've migrated to cities and become workers or what we call sub proletariat sort of casual workers are very likely to go into Islamic movements of a radical type has our students and young intellectuals and so it's true that there has been especially in recent decades a kind of Islamic coloring - such mass movements as have existed which is not quite parallel to Latin America and I say this realizing that in Latin America there has been an entry of Catholics and even Catholic priests and nuns into liberation movements has the Liberation Theology and a number of people have tried to equate almost the Liberation Theology of Catholics in Latin America with radical Islam and although certain comparisons can be made I don't think the comparison is entirely justified because first of all it is not primarily the clerics in Islam who have led this if you want to call it a liberation theology in the Muslim world here Iran is a bit of an exception when I'll go into that later but elsewhere in the Muslim world it is precisely people who tend to be anti-clerical to revolt against the interpretation of Islam given by the clerics and not to belong to the clergy who have entered into these movements they are laid people who give a new interpretation of the religion and secondly and perhaps equally as important in Latin America on the whole insofar as I understand these movements guerrilla movements and others the secularists including communist marxist and sort of democratic liberal types have kept in most cases a kind of leadership in the movement which is not paralleled in the Muslim world in the Muslim world on the whole when secularists have entered into such movements that heavily involved people with an Islamic identity it is the secularists who have had to adapt to Islam and somehow call themselves or say well our idea Marxist compatible with Islam but give the leadership role ideologically as well as politically in most cases to the Muslim elements so I think the situation is thus far at least are not really parable now what did we talk of mass movements through most of the Muslim world and look for them because they don't exist everywhere unfortunately perhaps for our study what I think we find or what I found in trying to put together this lecture was that most of the mass movements involving the largest number of people in the Muslim world had been what I would call nationalist movements rather than either leftist movements on the one hand which have been quite few true leftist movements or the purely Islamic one purely Islamic is overstating but primarily Islamic movements which to a degree repudiate nationalism although in some ways also as well see they reflected such as found in Iran in the Islamic Revolution so that we should at least briefly look at these movements to know what has been the character of most Islamic mass movements now when I say nationalist I mean a few things there is a French well an Arab scholar who writes in French would rather call the National military in movements and that hasn't caught Janee wish but the idea is that nationalist that's kind of a negative it's not conservative connotation of the kind of nationalist sorority and power and want to expand their state and what I'm really talking about is people who want to liberate their area from colonial rule and set up a new state even if the area is technically liberated in some cases they regarded as being too subservient to foreigners and want to set up a truly independent state now those movements have sometimes been quite secular they have tended to be what I call multi class on a class scale as nationalism usually tends to be going up from the very top and there's a certain group that identifies with the old formulas but going from near the top to near the bottom of the class stratification but often refer to as bourgeois often having a kind of middle-class orientation and some of these movements have been quite secular surprisingly so for people who think of the Muslim world in its recent context certainly the first of them that I think is important in our context here the first that had mass basis was that mustard come on later called Ataturk and Turkey who did lead a mass movement against the treaty that the Western powers were trying to impose them Turkey after World War one was almost a revolutionary movement for a time interestingly in the period when it was a mass movement it it appealed to Islamic slogans because even in that kind of secular mood of Ataturk which came to the fore very soon after there was a clear recognition that when you're really trying to appeal to the mass of the population you use Islamic means and slogans and that was done in this period when they were kicking out the Europeans who essentially wanted to divide Turkey and leave it almost nothing in the way of an independent state and as you probably know they succeeded in this so that Turkey became the only state that was able to rewrite the treaties that have been written at Versailles and elsewhere after World War one and set up a viable state now other Islamic mass movements or mass movements in the Muslim world include those in Indonesia against the Dutch after world war ii which was a massive mass movement if I may Indonesia by the way is the biggest Muslim country in the world and population and it did include some Islamic organizations which were in their own way anti imperialist but Indonesia has always had a secular Constitution and even though it's population has been affected recently by the Islamic revival or sectors of the population it's worth remembering that the largest month of the country in the world today retains its secular Constitution up to date at least against all attempts to make it more self-consciously and exclusively Islamic of course they have a considerable amount of non Muslim population but that in itself I think would not keep this Islamic trend out because each if also has a for example also has a considerable Muslim population and yet I can see the possibility of an Islamic movement winning out for a time at least in Egypt so Indonesia was another one of these massive movements and actually fought the Dutch for a number of years and attained freedom under this secular Constitution kept in by the even though Sukarno Soeharto were very much opponents both of them kept to this secular Constitution and in this immediate post-world War two period it's interesting the only state which won its statehood in a kind of a struggle kind of a mass movement which stressed Islam was Pakistan and in the case of Pakistan the reason I think was not primarily religious or in a sense even Islamic in Africa broad sense but because if Islam was the only justification for the creation the state of Pakistan before World War two only a very small number of people thought about the creation of an Islamic state in what had been the subcontinent of India ruled by the British either directly in most cases or indirectly through princes and until about World War two most people thought that if the British gave or if and when if or when the British gave freedom to the subcontinent they would give it to a United Hindu Muslim State the idea of Pakistan first put forth in the 1930s first deducted as a program of the Muslim League I think in 1940 and the state actually formed in 1947 really amazingly rapid change and here we hear for the first time some of the kind of Islamic state slogans that we've heard a lot more recently and yet even here interestingly enough the first leader and the man most influential and bringing about this state was a thorough secular is not a very good Muslim and Pakistan resisted for a long time having identified the Islamic or exclusively Islamic Constitution and series of laws and something very recently that that kind of thing has happened and even very recently after the current president zio POC came in by a coup it is more a case of putting in a few Islamic punishments and a few Islamic laws as a kind of veneer for what is really a military dictatorship than it is of bringing in leaders of Islam in any way to determine the nature of the state and so we have these various mass movements showing a considerable secularist element however much there might also be Islamic elements - and that's also true of the final one of these great nationalist mass movements I'm going to mention that was the one of the Algerians against French in which again there were many secularists involved but there was a kind of identity of the common mass of the population with Islam and because the French had been so heavily identified with trying to make everything in Algeria French and Western I think there was a strong reaction against that even though the party intellectuals and so this mass movement took on something of an Islamic specific tone and there was the notion that they were going to set up a kind of Islamic socialism but in Algeria there's nothing like the degree of enforcement of what a regarded as Islamic was that there is in Saudi regular Iran or even Pakistan some of them are enforced indeed now so the largest body then of mass movements in the Muslim world have been if you will if you don't like nationalists we can call the national liberation movements but they've been national liberation movements not with the leftist tone that craze sometimes has but much more towards the middle with the either middle class people or lower middle class people coming out on top and governments set up which range from conservative to sort of social democratic but are not going far off to either the left or the right there is however no question that in recent years what is variously called the Islamic revival or Islamic resurgence or a number of other things has been a reality and in a number of countries in the world there have been movements that have grown up which may not be mass movement the sense that they involve great masses in the population but that often that's deceptive because that often is simply because if they did try to involve eight masses in the population they would be very much more brutally suppressed than they even are now so I think they represent a genuine sentiment on the part of large numbers in the population and they have tended to react against secularism against liberalism against things Western and to come forth with ideas which are sometimes called fundamentalist I sometimes use that word but you have to remember that fundamentalism is a modern movement even in the United States where it originated it's not traditional it's just going back to the past nothing ever goes back to the past but it's something new and has a strong populist element as well as its fundamentalist claim to go back to the Quran and Quranic punishments and Quranic justice and things of that sort now why the appeal person varies from case to case but I don't have time in the question period to go into each individual case why do we appeal in the 60s and 70s of the moment our populist movements Islamic populist movements well I think there number of reasons I'm not sure the order of importance of these reasons but somehow give them to you without any special quarter I think for one thing there continues to be a much more strongly anti Western and anti imperialist feeling in the Muslim world particularly the middle eastern part of the Muslim world than in many other parts of even the third world this is partly because of the arab-israeli issue that should not be underestimated in which the in Arab eyes and to some degree in Muslim eyes Israel is seen as a remaining outpost perhaps the last most important the last important remaining outpost of Western colonialism which is set itself down in the middle of the Muslim world and is supported by the United States and so there is a reaction against things Western colonial Western life as in Israel and a feeling that you need to have an eye theology which is totally different from that of the West now this feeling is strengthened by the fact that those governments which imitated Western liberalism or even Western social democracy both in the period between World War II between the world wars and since we're not seen by the masses of the population or the petty bourgeoisie as having a particularly good record that's having had done done anything very much for the masses of the population and therefore the former enthusiasm for such things as constitutions Parliament liberalism things of that sort has largely waned at least in this period and the feeling is that something different is needed now in some parts of the world this something different is needed a feeling I think has translated itself more often into various parts of Marxism or communism than it has to return to the past this has not happened in the Middle East in most cases I'm not sure of all the reasons but perhaps the hold of Islam on the masses is stronger than that of some what I think use the word more limited but I think the ideological systems other ideological systems are more open to outside penetration or to accommodating themselves to outside ideas in some ways then Islam generally is and and so Marxism by those who are believing Muslims in most cases has been seen as something alien and Western and not too well regarded by them or by their majority either and so the desire to return to or to go to something which is different from the Western ISM that they've been subjected to and haven't liked very much or haven't seen branding and results from it was much more likely to go to some version of this law now the both the group that brought in or the groups that brought in the Islamic part of the Iranian Revolution and the small groups in Egypt one of which was responsible for the killing of Sadat but they many other groups active and the Muslim Brotherhood elsewhere all of these groups don't just revive Islam but they create a really new populist version of this bomb which emphasizes certain aspects of Islam such as social justice and sort of egalitarian idea ideas in terms of some of their ideologues actually taken from Marxism but put into an Islamic framework and interpreting Islamic terms in these ways and as I mentioned outside of Iran most of these Islamic movements have non clerical leaders their young people often people from the campuses of Egypt let's say are people from the petty-bourgeois in the cities usually quite well educated who present a new ideology of what their Islam is and although as I've said in most countries these things are not yet last movements I don't at all exclude the possibility that they will become mass movements in countries other than Iran now another thing I think which sped up the spread of this Islamic revival was somewhat ironically the oil income received by a number of Islamic states I went to conference when I was in France in 1977 on the oil having to do with the oil exporting states of the other hemisphere the eastern hemisphere and I hadn't realised them till that time that well by now you have written in Norway but these were we were talking about OPEC countries the OPEC countries all the oil exporting states of the eastern hemisphere are majority Muslim now I think it's just a coincidence I regard ala I regard it as a curse anyhow in many ways so that I I don't think it's the blessing about that I think we'd have to be regarded as somebody's cursed but in any case why should this oil make a difference towards Islam well a few reasons one is that as this conference indicated is more and more people have seen since I was at least not an unmixed blessing why are you come it is tended particularly in those countries which have a considerable population unlike Saudi Arabia the Emirates to create a situation where people move very rapidly red migrate very rapidly from the countryside to the cities it tends to ruin agriculture to encourage very fancy construction projects and corruption both of which benefit the wealthy very much as do some of the other kinds of economic programs it pushes and so there's a rapid change in demographic patterns towards the cities at the same time as you have an extremely rapid growth in income disparity on the hole between the have-nots and the crabs and even if they have not making a little more they can see well you know we have twin certainly wrong this upgrade we have 20 billion dollars in oil revenue coming in every year what do I see it but you know I mean get a little bit more but I see everybody driving Mercedes and Catholics and things like that and being corrupt and naturally this raises the level of discontent and this I think happened a lot of this discontent got directed towards Islamic radical Islamic movements in many of these countries and you had somewhat similar things on a smaller scale arising in Egypt understood that even though it the Egypt it was not a significant oil country it was getting some of the indirect effects from other Arab countries that were oil countries and you had the same kind of growth and disparity of income rapid urbanization and kind of disgust on the part of the petty bourgeoisie intellectuals and proletariat of the cities and so there this also leads to a notion of turning away from things Western because you can see once again these big buildup projects and everything are associated with West that are often owned by multinational corporations as a close intertwining with Western and and the idea of going back to something indigenous and the sort of old nationalist ideas based on language what says in Turkey or Iran when I say oh let me about 40 years old I had become associated with the ruling elite in these countries and so once again you have a notion of turning back to Islam and often you turn against whatever it is you have I mean our countries you see that in very simple ways but when you throw the rascals out and the times are bad and even now in Europe you see that the countries with left governments are turning right and their countries were right they're turning left when they're all going through the bad times so in a larger scale I think the people who saw westernized government's doing badly in a variety of ways would say well what's our alternative now and if they had been in a period when the rulers were sort of traditionally Muslim there were there and as indeed happened in there various times since the beginning of the 20th century in these countries they said well the way to improve things must be to become more like the West but then if after a period of years that hadn't worked out very well then there was a natural tendency among many of them to say the thing to do is go go back to its long now these aren't exactly the same classes I think I indicated that already the people who tend to be the most Western artists were more Western time in big traders or bush water or Western educated people whereas the people tend to be more Islamic are often from Laurel Aquinas or stratification scale nonetheless this contrasting trend that I mentioned I think does exist now with all this background we could look very briefly at the Iranian Revolution which is a major phenomenon we major phenomenon as a mass movement I think as I've indicated I don't think it's necessarily the lightest we won't see I think practically unique in world history people in urban centers going out of the millions and standing up to being shot at things of that sort but we may see some mass movements in other countries now why Iran I don't pretend to know all the compensation offered directed against the British primarily in order to Iranian independence from foreign control this lasted only two years from 1951 to 53 at which point it was overthrown with a great deal of US and British planning in the overthrow although there were important sections the Iranian population which also joined into this this is sometimes forgotten I was mentioning I think a dinner that people often tend to look at things as simply the virtuous third world countries against the vicious Western countries I think it's an oversimplification you and if within each country you look at whether a third world or Western world you have very contradictory forces and you did there too now this was a mostly secularist movement again only towards even the mostly secularists end of the various nationalist movements I talked about it did have some religious allies some of the most important of whom actually laughed the movement before it finished and joined in with the opposition and there were clerical elements in the opposition to most of it that were very important but when you come to 78 79 you have quite a different picture of heavy clerical involvement now again I'm not sure I can analyze all the reasons for this change partly it was simply that may apply to other countries later too it's much easier to suppress secular opposition movements in the Muslim worlds and is to suppress the cleric and clergy it's almost impossible to suppress the clergy that's very important and indeed the secular opposition movements were suppressed and how did the shot had a very effective secret police and the National Front practically ceased to exist the two-day party leadership went abroad almost ceased to exist the only thing you had that was active were small guerrilla movements which have since become much larger movements the magenta and the diam but these really were not they had sympathy in the population but they didn't now it's relatively easy if you've got an efficient secret police and their despotic to put it to put down these movements or to reduce them considerably but it's very hard with the clergy that is that you get a cleric making a statement in the mosque about tyranny thousand years before and martyrs and opposition and justice and things like that it's there's a kind of a code where you knew which tyrant was really being referred to in which martyrs in which strugglers were really being sure - under the names of people who had lived hundreds of years before and you can't arrest somebody for talking about that and so the group there grew up a kind of elusive network of an oppositional clergy certainly not all the clergy were opposed to the Shah that's the kind of a myth that people have now but important numbers were and because of some of the reasons I indicated in the rise of Islamic sentiment there was a kind of a coalescence of this movement of a part of some of the clergy Johnny those who came from peasant rural origins with a kind of new intellectual who went towards Islam associated particularly with the person named Ali Shariati which actually incorporated some Marxist and socialist ideas into its interpretation of Islam and these two things went with this kind of over rapid economic change and it wasn't only over rapid but it was the way it was done top-heavy everything going to favor the people at the top rather than the bottom and this plus the general action against against the secret police against various forms of oppression and a economic downturn beginning 75 or 76 which oft was the kind of thing that often precedes a revolution and upward turning for a while and then a downturn these things all created a very volatile situation which did indeed culminate in revolution that's a very schematic thing had to go into because it's so briefly because of the time but I wanted to go over briefly to say that although some of these elements exist in other countries the structure of the Iranian clergy was something quite different which doesn't exist in other countries as some of you know Iran is what we call a Shiite country and partly sunny as the majority of Muslim countries partly because of that and partly because of simply the historical evolution of the Iran the Iranian clergy has been probably the most independent clergyman the government they have their own income their own taxes their own networks and this put them in a position to develop political leadership of the opposition to the Shah in various periods from the over about a century this isn't the first time although it's the biggest and so that gives a kind of unique base which is not true of the other Islamic movements in the Muslim world as I've already suggested those movements are not clerical by and large by large the clergy in those countries tend to follow whatever comes whatever government is in power in Egypt you have beautiful quotations about socialism and liberalism and whatever it was Nasser wanted to pass coming from the leadership of the clergy these people are despised by these new Islamic movements but the fact that these new movements don't have that kind of base in the clergy means not only that they're different from Latin America but we're important that they're different for me wrong and I think makes it unlikely that we're going to see that kind of large-scale mask clerical and movement that would repeat we may see other kinds of movements that in fact in some cases but I just want to say or could come into power but before I leave for questions on that last note about the possibility of coming into power in other countries and I wouldn't make a particular prediction by the way on any particular country their age if to certain a possibility but there's also the other side of this coin that should be remembered and that is that in the Muslim world as elsewhere ideological or political trends come and go they go up and they go down and although what we've been seeing in the last 15 years or so tends to be moving in the direction of what's called Islamic revival I think that this is not necessarily a permanent trend and I think people can get just as disgusted with Islamic governments as they got with those they regarded as too Western or specular I happen to be talking to some people the other day and he said that this was already happening in Pakistan where as I said xiana talk in a sense was he to just use it Islamic punishments and Islamic laws on the whole to cloak a military dictatorship which is not all that popular now of course you can regard to react two ways to this you can say this is not real Islam and we're going to be in real Islam but it seems that in Pakistan at least some people of important numbers are reacting in the opposite direction and saying we'd rather more secular kind of government we had before this government so I think particularly once a government calling itself Islamic comes into power and doesn't come through just as the previous secular governments haven't come through we're more likely to see a movement to various kinds of secular solutions whether it whether and or leftist on the other in a number of these countries so in other words the Islamic revival a while very real yeah I don't think is necessarily a permanent phenomenon this doesn't mean that I think this one is going to disappear by any means anywhere that Christianity has but that since it can be interpreted in any number of directions that there at least in some countries in the foreseeable future may be a set reversed counter-trend not anti Islamic I think but one which tries to bring in were secular kinds of reforms and perhaps reach something more effected by the masses of the people to reach the masses of the people as few of these earlier seculars countries have okay I'll take my own questions I'll just say before I do that that I'd like them to be really questions and that I'm not going to engage in long dialogues with any individual okay brief very brief