Arab Culture Wars Bubble Under the Surface

Religious conservatives and nationalists in the Muslim world and beyond have the wind in their sails. So do Arab autocrats,...

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Protestors at a vigil in Cologne, Germany, for Mahsa Amini, the young Iranian woman who died in police custody. Photo: Reuters/Ying Tang

Religious conservatives and nationalists in the Muslim world and beyond have the wind in their sails. So do Arab autocrats, even if they increasingly cloak themselves in nationalism rather than religious conservatism.

The recent first election round in Turkey saw conservatives and ultra-nationalists win control of parliament, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a third presidential term in Sunday’s run-off against opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan’s conservative religious and nationalist coalition will enjoy a 322-seat majority in the 600-member Turkish parliament.

Turkey is home to the world’s largest Syrian refugee community, estimated at 3.7 million, followed by Lebanon and Jordan. As a result, Syrian refugees, like other minorities and disadvantaged groups, would have been the losers no matter who had won the Turkish election. The Syrian plight is compounded by the welcoming of President Bashar al-Assad’s return earlier this month to the Arab fold, when he attended an Arab League summit in Jeddah.

Instead of establishing criteria for handling the millions of people displaced by Al-Assad’s brutal conduct during a decade-long civil war, Arab leaders catered to the Syrian leader’s insistence that refugees return to his war-ravaged country. The lack of criteria has opened the door to forced deportations, even if authorities in host countries deny the involuntary removal of refugees and Arab officials insist that their return must be voluntary.

Religious support for Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) fits a global mold in which conservative Muslims, Jews, Orthodox Christians, Anglicans, Hindus, and others find common ground in popularly supported traditional family values that constitute the norm in conservative societies.

Embrace of those values allows civilisationalist leaders such as Erdogan, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the prime ministers of India and Hungary, Narendra Modi and Victor Orban, to position themselves as bulwarks against Western promotion of gender fluidity and LGBTQ rights.

Even so, Turkey is one of two Middle Eastern countries most immediately prone to a culture war given Erdogan’s use of identity politics, culture warring, and anti-migrant rhetoric in his election campaign.

If Turkey is one step removed from a full-fledged culture war, Israel, governed by the most ultra-conservative and ultra-nationalist coalition in its history, is already at war with itself.

Government policies have sparked sustained mass protests and strained relations with the United States and significant segments of the Jewish Diaspora. They have also escalated tensions with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

At the other end of the Muslim world, reformers in Indonesia are concerned that Anies Baswedan, a former Jakarta governor with close ties to religious conservatives, including the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as Islamic militants, is one of three top candidates for the presidency in February 2024.

“These links raise concerns among Indonesia’s religious minorities, which make up 13 percent of the population, as well as many moderate Muslims,” said journalist Joseph Rahman.

To be sure, Iran is the Middle East’s true outlier. Forty-four years after the creation of an Islamic republic, culture was at the core of months of anti-government protests that sought to reduce, not increase, religion’s role in politics.

The protests were sparked by the death in custody last September of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman detained by morality police in Tehran in September for allegedly wearing her hijab “improperly.”

Interestingly, renewed popularity of religious conservatism has not sparked culture wars in the Arab Middle East like the battles fought in polarized societies such as Israel, the United States, and India or Christian faith communities like the Anglican church.

In various Arab countries, rulers pushing social and economic rather than political change subjugate religious elites potentially opposed to their liberalizing reforms. In addition, the repression of freedom of expression makes non-violent culture wars virtually impossible. So does the criminalization of apostasy and blasphemy and, in Saudi Arabia, defining atheism calls as an act of terrorism.

Finally, Arab autocrats and authoritarians were early adapters as they waged a brutal campaign against Islamists in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts in what analysts such as Shadi Hamid said amounted to a culture war.

The campaign rolled back the achievements of the revolts that toppled Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen’s leaders. A 2013 United Arab Emirates and Saudi-backed military coup overthrew Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president. In addition, wars were waged to counter Islamists and jihadists in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.

In a twist of irony, that may have been round one in a Middle Eastern culture war. If recent polling is any indication, political Islam is making a comeback alongside religious conservatism, at least in terms of public sentiment.

“In most countries surveyed, young and old citizens demonstrate a clear preference for giving religion a greater role in politics,” said Michael Robbins, director and co-principal investigator of Arab Barometer. The group regularly surveys public opinion in the Middle East.

“In 2021-2022, roughly half or more in five of ten countries surveyed agreed that religious clerics should influence decisions of government,” Mr. Robbins added.

To be sure, the comeback may remain restricted to support in anonymous polling. There is little, if any, space for political Islam to express itself in countries like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt. In exile, Islamist’s space is narrowing. For now, that gives autocrats and authoritarians the upper hand.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning journalist and scholar, an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.

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