Keiko Sakai, Editor. Social Protests and Nation Building in the Middle East and Central Asia

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Summer, 2004 by William W. Haddad

Keiko Sakai, Editor. Social Protests and Nation Building in the Middle East and Central Asia. (Chiba, Japan: Institute of Developing Economies (IDE) of the Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO): 2003). Xvii and 217 pp. No price indicated.

SOCIAL PROTESTS IS A REMARKABLE BOOK that is successful in providing us with a broad sweep through the Middle East and Central Asia and describing various social movements and their impact on nascent nation states in that area. That JETRO would publish such a complex volume is perhaps a surprise to western experts of the Middle East and Central Asia, but should not really be so given the centrality of trade to Japan's well being. The IDE is a think-tank located within JETRO. It conducts academic research on strategic areas of the world and its publications presumably influence Japanese decision makers.

The book under review is the product of a three-stage vetting process that included a preliminary study group, sessions at a Japanese symposium on the Islamic world, and finally an international workshop sponsored by the Institute of Developing Economies. Crucial to the success of the project which resulted in the present volume was Editor Sakai, a Senior Research Fellow at the IDE who is a widely published scholar of modern Iraq.

Sakai's volume deals with myriad issues, most notably the failure of westernizing Muslim intellectuals like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani to have their ideas dominate the discourse of the 20th century. He and others, like Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi and Muhammad Abduh, failed to convince the Muslims with whom they argued to include ijtihad (private opinion, often equated with ra'i) and ta'wil (interpretation based on accepted commentaries) as legitimate forms of Muslim interpretation. Had independent interpretation and judgment been widely accepted amongst Muslims, it would have meant that no one group could monopolize the Islamic text. The failure to incorporate disparate points of view meant that liberals who wished to harmonize western science with Islamic beliefs were also doomed.

This liberalizing trend within Islam was reversed, interestingly, by one of the followers of Muhammad Abduh, Muhammad Rashid Rida, editor of the Egyptian journal, al-Manar. In his journal, he argued that the westernizers were more dangerous than Christian proselytizers. Al-Afghani and his ilk wanted to introduce civil codes, separate religion from the state, and liberate women from their traditional roles. Thus tarred and ultimately marginalized, an important opportunity to chart a different scientific and political course failed.

Maher al-Charif of the Institute d'Etudes Arabe in Damascus adds, in his chapter on modernization, of the subsequent failure of political leaders like Gamal Abdul Nasser to achieve the same goal of transforming their societies. In the case of Nasser, Charif writes that the Egyptian leader failed because he did not understand that constructing a modern state and society required an environment that encouraged freedom to learn, rational thinking, minds that could analyze and solve problems and not be guided "from above". More importantly Nasser did not encourage religious liberals who could have revived the earlier failed religious reform movement which sought to reconcile Islam with western advances, especially in the sciences. Charif's strong argument could have been made even more compelling had he also mentioned that the Arab-Israeli conflict severely constrained Nasser's ability to transform society.

El-Sayed Yassin of the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Egypt has written a chapter titled, "The Cultural Crisis and the Future of Arab Civil Society." In it Yassin argues in a manner similar to al-Charif and asserts that the failure to modernize, especially to encourage democratic secularism and the modern social sciences, has led to regimes that lack legitimacy and that cannot confront the security threats imposed by Israel and the United States.

Yassin in his condemnatory chapter says the result of this Arab backwardness is the emergence of a number of social, political and psychological phenomenon, most notably alienation from politics. To counter this trend, counter cultures are emerging as well as cultural and social institutions that are independent of state authority. These developments have led to increased tension: between the authoritarian state and the emerging civil society, and within civil society itself--a struggle between secular democratic trends and Islamic fundamentalism.

Other important chapters in this volume deal with Central Asia and the process of state building in several former republics of the Soviet Union, particularly those with Muslim majorities. The tenor of the articles is that state building has been difficult, poverty and corruption are rife, protests rare and usually end in failure as autocrats dominate the political culture. What is of special interest in the chapters on the new republics is the various methods that have been used to overcome apathy and to infuse state consciousness into the citizenry.