I write this based on my notes and the abstracts on the panel web site, but warn anyone who clicks through that ideas can shift between the submission of the abstract and the actual paper, and I think something like that happened with the paper “Public Religion, Democracy and Islam: Examining the Moderation Thesis in Algeria” by the University of Notre Dame’s Michael Driessen. At the very least, while I guess some of what’s in the abstract makes sense given the paper, my own notes picked up on different themes, perhaps because history is a less theory-driven field than political science and the abstract couched its topic in terms of theory. That said, he talked about the nationalization of religion which has taken place during the past decade or so as a means of co-opting Islamists and government attempts to manage religion, but also notes that, once the religious ideas are floating around, ideas, attitudes, and behaviors develop independent of both government and opposition Islamist influences, which he called an “individualization” of Islamist ideas. (Or was the government competing with the Islamists? The abstract suggests the former, but my memory the latter.)

The well-known Algerian Civil War of the 1990′s was an influence seen in the paper of Noureddine Jebnoun of the University of Montana, which was called “The Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG): From Armed Confrontation to Ideological Reversal.” That conflict led the Libyan government to perceive and sell the perception of Islamist forces in their own country as a major threat, and quelling that threat was one of the objectives behind the Qadhafi regime’s reconciliation with the United States. Since then the LIFG has come to seek its own reconciliation with the Libyan regime, renouncing both violence and the practice of takfir, or rejecting another’s claim to me Muslim, in what Jabnoun sees as a sincere change of attitude.

The other two papers (a fifth presenter was unable to attend) dealt with Morocco, and were focused to some extent on the Justice and Development Party’s position in Moroccan politics and society. The government has legalized its political participation, and today it is the largest opposition party in parliament. However, St. John’s University’s Azzedine Layachi argues in “Official and Popular Islam: The PJD and the Struggle for Legitimacy,” this cannot be seen as a successful co-option of Islamism into the Moroccan regime as the PJD does not represent the bulk of Moroccan Islamists. Layachi put forward the idea that it might ultimately be on the same path as socialism in North Africa, gradually losing contact with its grassroots in gaining inclusion without being able to act on any of its agenda.

The University of Texas’s Avi Spiegel focused exactly on those grassroots supporters with his study of the political attitudes of youth in Rabat, Casablanca, and the belt along the train tracks between them. In addition to the PJD, he looked at the JSO, or Justice and Spirituality Organization, an illegal rival of the PJD, as a means of conceptualizing not the relationship of an Islamist movement to the state, but the relationship of Islamist movements with each other. In this case, the two organizations acted as rivals competing for supporters and therefore resources. Spiegel portrayed a fluid world, but argued for a broader trend in which, instead of disillusioned youth pushing seasoned movement leaders to take more radical stances, movements’ desire to broaden their base among youth led to an increasing moderation of an initially highly conservative religious message. I forget if this was addressed by Speigel, Layachi, or both, but in entering parliament, the PJD has added to its traditional focus on public morals and family law one on political reform which it uses to compete for public support.

Similar ideas came up later in the day in a panel on political change in Iran and Kuwait in a paper by the University of Oslo’s Bjorn Olav Utvik called “Electoral Religion: Salafis and Muslim Brothers Competing for Votes in Kuwait.” One of his points was that due to Kuwait’s somewhat open political system, one gains relevance in that country through election to parliament, and therefore in order to compete with the Muslim Brotherhood in the country, the Salafis had to enter the political fray. Since doing so, however, the Salafis have drifted well away from the common image of Salafism: The slogan of the most prominent hadhar Salafi MP is “Shari’a, stability, development,” and all have taken on broader social and economic causes. In response to a question, Utvik, who was also at the morning session on North Africa, thought the idea of parties moderating to successfully compete for influence among the broader public made sense.

This has been a long post, so I won’t say much about my own thoughts stimulated by all this, but I did think of Hamas, which has entered politics but focused on aspects of government other than moral reform, even in Gaza which it now dominates. The group has thus in a sense “moderated,” but one side effect is that hardline elements then form their own groups, such as the al-Qaeda-like one from a few months ago. This, I think, represents a response both to Hamas’s moderation and its inability to achieve much through its chosen strategy. The base unit of politics is not the autonomous organization, but the individual, and when individuals are free to choose whether or not to join organizations, those organizations will permutate based on their view of the benefits of recruiting new members and the strategies they employ to do so.

(Crossposted to my blog)

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The chapter’s subtitle comes from Cole’s argument that U.S. energy independence simply isn’t in the cards in the near term, as it can only be sustainably guaranteed by solar power, which cannot reach its potential until problems of cost and storage are resolved. One might quibble here that Cole does not do justice to possible combinations of different energy sources and degrees of independence, but his main point is undeniable: For the foreseeable future, the United States and the rest of the world will depend on fossil fuels for most of their energy, and those fossil fuels will come predominantly from countries with Muslim majorities.

Cole’s book is directed primarily at an American audience, and an audience of the interested general public, at that, so he doesn’t spend much time taking apart the phrase “Islamic oil” which titles the chapter, preferring instead to make his major points simply and effectively before moving on. Cole therefore bypasses the issue of what sense, if any, energy supplied by Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan deserve to be called “Islamic oil” and focuses almost exclusively on the Middle East and Muslim South Asia. One might, however, shake loose the point that by joining OPEC, the Arab Gulf states went against the hopes of Arab nationalists such as Nasser, placing their own national economic interests above the pan-Arab concerns that animated the original “Arab street” whose specter analysts continue to invoke. Oil his not been a barrier to relations between the U.S. and these states, but rather the major bond, with the U.S. guaranteeing the regimes’ stability and independence to safeguard the free flow of oil, and frequently adopting what Americans consider the “moderate” line on foreign affairs to help maintain that alliance and the goodwill of their customer base. In Cole’s brief discussion of sanctions, one might go even further in discussing U.S. aid to Egypt and the economic benefits Egypt and Jordan get under the Qualifying Industrial Zone protocol to highlight the ways in which the U.S. has used economic carrots and sticks to create relations of dependence which are similar to those it has with the oil-producing Gulf states.

Cole’s historical background for the oil industry in the Middle East is important reading, and contextualizes the current tensions over oil prices and profits, as well as highlighting the ways in which the geopolitics of oil has shaped American policy in the Persian Gulf since the British withdrawal in 1971. It does, however, contain an error when he states that, “Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and was administered indirectly through the governor of Basra Province, in what is now Iraq.” When Baghdad governor Midhat Pasha asserted Ottoman claims to northern Arabia in the 1870′s, he did include Kuwait, but the Kuwaiti agreement to call themselves part of the Ottoman Empire depended on the Ottomans never actually doing anything. According to Frederick Anscombe’s The Ottoman Gulf Midhat Pasha’s agreement with Kuwait implied only “patronage and protection.” The Ottomans stationed no officers there, collected no taxes or fees, and did not intervene in local affairs, although Kuwait’s rulers occasionally supported them militarily. The deeper connections were economic, with Kuwaitis owning agricultural land in southern Iraq, which they continued to do deep into the 20th century. Jill Crystal has written of the role this played in the 1938 Majlis Movement, when both Iraq’s King Ghazi and some Kuwaiti merchants were interested in union between Kuwait and Iraq. Altogether, the relationship between Kuwait and the Ottoman Empire, even in the late 1800′s, does not fit that of a modern nation-state, but of a premodern agrarian empire with a tribally organized periphery.

That aside, Cole is right in pointing to the common threats faced by the United States and Muslim oil producers, such as global warming and the potential for resource wars as the demand for fossil fuels may surpass the available supply. These are challenges that can only be addressed by accepting interdependence and working toward commonly beneficial solutions.

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