The Awakening of Muslim Democracy

Jocelyn Cesari (senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkly Center; director,Islam in World Politics program), teaches contemporary Islam at theHarvard Divinity School and directs its Gerogetown-based interfaculty“Islam in the West” program. On March 3 at the IIIT headquarters in Herndon,VA, she elaborated on the topics discussed in her latest book: The Awakeningof Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State (CambridgeUniversity Press: 2014). She explained that this book was based on threeyears of research on state-Islam relations in Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan,and Tunisia.She began her talk by saying that she was interested in “broadening outthe concept of political Islam,” which had existed before the now well-knownmovements and parties in the Muslim world. The key moment in this regardwas the building of nation-states in Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq (under SaddamHussein), and Pakistan. She pointed out how the West was enthusiasticabout Arab Spring, which brought both men and women into the streets withoutsigns proclaiming “Islam” in a “bizarre” manner of protest.She maintained that political Islam cannot be limited only to secularismand the state, for the former, especially in Europe, is supposed to engenderthe decline of religiosity, the movement of religion to the private sphere, andthe separation of religion and state. But all of this is unique to the West becauseIndia, the oft-proclaimed world’s “largest democracy,” is officially secular despiteits pervasive Hinduism. She wondered why the West cannot see Islamin the same way. And, moreover, why does the last century of the very westernapproaches of secularization and modernization have to determine what

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