Religion and Secular Politics in the MENA Region

Abstract

The relationships between religion and politics in the MENA region have been discussed intensively, especially since the Iranian revolution of 1979, with a strong focus on the forces of political Islam. Last year, religious political parties came to power in Israel, re-enforcing the idea of a specificity of the region in this regard. Recently, some authors have shown how state-controlled religious institutions played a role in the birth of political Islam (Cesari, 2018), and in the 1970s re-Islamization, co-constructing it along with Islamist organizations through competition and cross-pollination (Rock-Singer, 2019). Yet the relations between religious grassroots organizations and institutions on the one hand and religious parties on the other are not exclusive. Secular parties as well can gain the support of religious actors. Of course, institutions and movements from religious minorities are prone to support secular parties to conjure the risk to become second class citizens. But large fractions of the majoritarian religious institutions and movements support secular political forces as well. This panel will investigate these relations between secular forces and religious institutions and movements in several MENA countries: Egypt, Turkey, Israel and Tunisia, with an emphasis on a mid-term time period, accompanying the building of modern states across the region.

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