No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Theocracy and the Separation of Powers
Abstract
The revival of the concept of theocracy in the English language arguably flows from three major phenomena of the past thirty years. The first is the Iranian Revolution of 1979, in which a regime that calls itself an Islamic republic was established, and which formally respects the “guardianship of the jurisprudent” (vilayat-i-faqih) in its constitution, and practice, the notion of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, originally presented in a lecture series in 1971.1 This regime is regularly described as a theocracy, sometimes as a “populist theocracy.”2 Some of its ruling clerics attempted to transform the Shia ulema into a monolithic institution under a single spiritual leader simultaneously considered (by some) as the head of state and (by some) as the functional equivalent of a contemporary pope. Khomeini’s many new titles included Na’eb-e Imam (deputy to [the twelfth] imam). Secular educational arrangements were disbanded in schools and universities; the sexes were publicly segregated; and moral police enforced an Islamic dress code.3 Iran’s current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insists that the real ruler of Iran is the twelfth imam, and has instructed his cabinet to pledge its loyalty to that occultating entity. Western and “indecent” music were banned from state-run TV and radio stations in December 2005, though women have been allowed into major sporting events for the first time since 1979.4 Among Ahmadinejad’s many international provocations is Holocaustdenial. Fears remain among some American and European policymakers
This book introduces political science of religion – a coherent approach to the study of the political role of religion grounded in political science. In this framework, religion is viewed as a political ideology providing legitimation for power and motivating political attitudes and behaviors of the public. Religious organizations are political actors negotiating the political system in the pursuit of their faith-based objectives. Religion is thus interpreted as a power resource and religious groups as political players. The theoretical framework developed in the first part is applied to the study of theocracies and contemporary democracies, based on the case studies of Poland and the USA. The empirical analysis of resources, strategies and opportunities of religious actors demonstrates their ability to influence the politics of democracies and non-democracies alike. Using a multilevel approach, the book seeks to explain this tremendous political potential of religion.
Maciej Potz is a full professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Systems, Faculty of International and Political Studies, University of Łódź, Poland. His research focuses on political theory and political science of religion. As a Foundation for Polish Science scholar he did research on Shaker and Mormon theocracies in the USA. His publications include monographs on the relations between religion and the state in the USA and on American theocracies, as well as several articles, including in Religion, State and Society, Journal of Political Power, Politics and Religion Journal.
Despite gradual elimination of religion’s institutional and normative links with the modern Western state, the loss of its legitimating function and its withdrawal from many spheres of social life, religious organizations remain active in the public sphere. Their survival strategy consists of claiming unique philosophical and legal status for religion and, at the same time, relegitimating themselves by emulating the behaviour of other political actors in the pluralistic public arena (mimicry strategies). In addition, they use certain religion-specific strategies grounded in their supernatural claims and thus unavailable for secular actors. This chapter concludes with a multilevel analysis of the relationship between religion and political conflict, including phenomena such as religion-induced transformation of contemporary states, religious symbolic conflict and religious extremism.
Beginning with the main theoretical and methodological assumptions of political science of religion, this chapter proceeds to conceptualizations of religion as a subject of study for social sciences and religious groups as actors within a functionally defined political system. Religious actors, perceived as communities or institutions, are analysed in terms of their ability to change the status quo (veto players vs. stakeholders) and their structure, resources and modus operandi. Finally, three main research perspectives within the discipline are outlined: economic, viewing religious actors as institutions maximizing their profits in transactions with other social actors; social movements theory (SMT), looking at religious actors through motives, resources and external constrains bearing on their potential for mass mobilization; and “cultural”, discussing individual sources of religion-driven political commitment. These three perspectives could be combined into a relatively coherent chain of causal explanations to provide a comprehensive account of political significance of religion.
This chapter is devoted to theocracy, a type of a political system defined by its supernatural legitimation, not the rule of religious functionaries. It presents religion as a resource used to sanction political power on normative, institutional and personal levels—to sacralise it—in order to explain the existing social and political order with its unequal distribution of valuable assets, to uphold its institutional structure, and to justify the religious status the rulers claim. The origins and conditions of stability of theocratic regimes are explained with a transactional model derived from theory of social exchange. Thus conceived, theocracy can be incorporated into a three-dimensional typology of political systems—with mode of succession, scope of political control and the source of power’s legitimation as the leading variables—thereby gaining usefulness in political analysis.
This chapter addresses three main deficiencies in the political science literature dealing with the relationship between politics and religion: its narrowly legalistic-institutional approach, resulting in viewing the political significance of religion exclusively through models of “church-state relations”; its normative overload, whereby the research is informed by philosophical preconceptions on the proper place of religion in the public sphere; and its methodological eclecticism, resulting in the failure to provide a coherent account of religion as a power resource and religious organizations as political actors, grounded in theoretical frameworks of political science. The critique is a starting point to proposing political science of religion as a consistently political science approach supplanting the “church and state” and “religion and politics” paradigms and integrating the study of religion into the mainstream of the discipline, instead of singling it out for a special treatment.
A model of religion-inspired political activity—taking into account internal organization of a religious actor, with its members, resources, leadership structures and level of ideological cohesion; external political opportunity structure offering access points but also restricting political options of churches; and the strategies it chooses—is applied to the analysis of Polish and American religious actors in terms of their potential impact on the political process. The Polish Catholic Church has been described as a veto player, an actor able to block the change of the status quo. This is demonstrated with the case study on the making of the Polish constitution, where the Church succeeded in blocking regulations potentially inhibiting its public presence. Conversely, American religious actors have been described as stakeholders, interested and involved in public policymaking, but—due to a variety of differences in social structure, architecture of the political system and political culture—often unable to exert their influence in a direct, causally demonstrable way the Polish Church has been.
This chapter looks into three key aspects of theocratic power relations: how rulers are selected (succession procedures), how their power is institutionalized within the system (institutional regimes) and how they make the ruled conform to the norms they establish (political control). Theocratic succession procedures, regardless of their form, are interpreted as instruments used by God to reveal his choice. Institutional arrangements in theocracies vary as to the type of relations between secular rulers and religious functionaries, from hierocracy to caesaropapism; they often emerge in response to pressures within and outside of the political system as a way to maximize the regime’s “utility function”. Mechanisms of political control, defined as social control consciously applied by the rulers, and illustrated with examples from American theocratic communities, consist of norms and sanctions attached to them. Whether these sanctions are violent or not, they may lead to high, even totalitarian levels of control, especially in theocratic communes.
The book is a political science study of theocracy – defined as a type of power which is legitimized by religion – using some North American political systems as its empirical basis. In the first, theoretical part, an original conception of theocracy as a distinctive type of a political system is developed; it is complemented with the analysis of the techniques of sacralisation of power and the origins of theocratic power, derived from the theory of social exchange. The second, empirical part of the book focuses on certain dimensions of political systems of selected North American religious groups (Puritans, Shakers, Mormons), such as their political regimes, succession procedures or mechanism of political control.
The main purpose of the book is to demonstrate that theocracy may, in certain conditions, become an optimum solution ensuring stability of a political system. The research questions concern, among other things, mechanisms of religious legitimation of power, conditions of stability of theocracies, the role of coercion in theocratic power relations. The study adopts a political science (rather than religious studies) approach: religious beliefs are treated as components of legitimation formulas, generating justifications for the existing power relations, and, from the individual perspective – as motivators for social and political action.
The triumph of the Islamic revolution of Iran in February1979 surprised many observers, and continues to baffle others today. The introduction into contemporary politics of a religious dimension challenged contemporary understandings of the human condition in ways that have called into question much of the basic premises of modern secularism. The revolution tended to be perceived largely in light of the preconceptions and predispositions of the observer rather than as something original and unique - sui generis. Many failed to see the revolution as a phenomenon that is to be understood and comprehended from within its own dynamics and on its own terms, rather than in terms of mere Western social science categories (insightful as they may be). Consequently, varied designations were and continue to be attributed to the Iranian state; ranging from it being a form of “anachronistic theocracy” to being pejoratively referred to as the “rule of the mullahs” or a “religious dictatorship”. Such attitudes oversimplify highly complex issues and reflect an ideological prejudice and/or lack of comprehension. The deep impact that this revolutionary phenomenon had and continues to have on the Muslim community, both Sunni and Shi'i, renders it a profound social, political as well as religious innovation that combines the twin elements of religious reasoning (ijtihad) and renewal (tajdid). Both elements were infused with the praxis dimension, beyond mere theoretical constructs, through the theory of Wilayat al-Faqih and the person of al-Faqih represented by Grand Ayatollah Khomeini.
Katharine Adeney demonstrates that institutional design, rather than the role of religion, is the most important explanatory variable in understanding the different types and intensities of conflict in India and Pakistan. Deploying an innovative methodological approach, Adeney focuses on the rationale behind the creation and different designs of federal and consociational structures in the two countries. Deftly interweaving historical narrative with an analysis of the salient cleavages in both countries, Adeney examines the politics of institutional design and ethnic conflict regulation, as well as the extent to which previous constitutional choices explain current conflicts.
This volume brings together articles by the one of the leading scholars in comparative politics written over the last thirty years in the field of comparative politics and in particular, the topic of the nature of contemporary democracy and its prospects. The volume begins with a personal analysis of the intellectual, and often political, reasons as to why and how Stepan chose to engage in certain critical arguments over the last thirty years. The volume is then divided into three sections each with a distinctive theme: state and society; constructing polities; and varieties of democracies. The introduction and articles ask whether, both for intellectual and political reasons, there are strong grounds for questioning both Rawls and Huntington on religion and democracy, Riker on federalism, and Gellner on multi nationalism. The volume contains articles on civil society, political society, economic society, and a usable state. The possibility of multiple and complementary political identities is argued for. The incentive systems and political practices of the three macro constitutional frameworks for democratic government - parliamentarianism, presidentialism, and semi-presidentialism - are compared and contrasted.
This dissertation identifies and tests a hypothetical proposition regarding the exceptional relationship of nationalism and Islam. The modernist paradigm of ethnonationalism posits that a shared culture and language are the locus of nationalist identities in their corresponding nation-states. In a model attributed principally to Ernest Gellner, industrialization promotes the creation of modular citizens in an ideally homogeneous nation-state. Modernized urbanites then share a High Culture of seamless communication, cultivated and recreated by a system of state education. Individual social mobility requires literacy and general economic prosperity depends on a shared and standardized language. A contrasting theory posits Muslim societies are the exception to this rule: a shared religion, Islam, and a shared sacred language, Arabic, are the locus of political identities in Muslim states. In a model attributed not only to Ernest Gellner, but also Adrian Hastings, Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, Islamic culture precludes the emergence and mobilization of ethnonational identities. High Culture and Islam are fused; public education promotes religious instruction. Ethnicity and native languages are politically irrelevant since the polity is defined by membership in a community of faith, or ummah. In this view, claims for autonomy among Muslim minorities in multiethnic states are interpreted as religious conflicts rather than ethnic or national conflicts. To test the hypothetical propositions of Muslim national exceptionalism, the leadership of separatist parties and organizations were interviewed regarding specific reasons for separatism, and whether the group and its followers mobilize in support of Islam or ethno-linguistic nationalism, their faith or their flag, a nation of Islam or a Muslim nation. Field work was conducted in a cross-regional comparative study of six separatist conflicts, including Kurds in Iraq, Uighurs in China, Sindhis in Pakistan, Kashmiri-speakers in India, Acehnese in Indonesia and Moros in the Philippines. In sum, these movements frequently invoke the doctrine of national self-determination to protect a minority culture and language, while political Islam functions infrequently in this role. Muslim minority populations that share a unique print culture are likely to mobilize in support of language rights, especially in regard to public education; Muslim minorities without written vernaculars are not.
In August 1974, when the overnight tripling of Iran's oil revenues seemed to offer boundless opportunities, the Shah publicly announced his intention to find the construction of 23 nuclear reactors with an electricity-producing capacity of 1,000 megawatts each. This declaration almost made economic sense at the time although many suspected that the Shah's real aim was to acquire nuclear weapons. When Iran's relation with United States became tainted due to Iran's persistence to continue developing its nuclear reactors, US started to seriously consider the use of force on the country. However a close look at the recent turn of events, observers elaborate three reasons not to bomb Iran at the present time. The first reason is that in time, the fanatics who now oppress the non-fanatical majority will inevitably lose power. Second, Iran should not be bombed because the worst of its leaders positively want to be bombed. Third, the effort to build nuclear weapons started more than three decades ago, yet the regime is still years away from producing a bomb. With these three reasons, no premature and therefore unnecessary attack is warranted while there is still time to wait in assured safety for a better solution.
Revealing why Hindu-Muslim riots in India break out when and where they do, Steven Wilkinson demonstrates why some state governments in India prevent Hindu-Muslim riots while others do not or even help to incite violence. Wilkinson asserts that riots are manipulated to help win elections, and that state governments decide whether to stop them--depending on electoral calculations concerning the loss or gain of votes. He tests this claim using a dataset on riots and their causes as well as case studies of several Indian states. © Steven I. Wilkinson 2004 and Cambridge University Press, 2009.
Lost in the debate about how to prevent Iran from crossing the nuclear threshold is the fact that we lack the ability to prevent it. The Iranians have the indigenous technical ability, and possibly the nuclear material, to build nuclear weapons right now. They can do it if they want to, and we know so little about their program they could likely achieve it without detection. The question is why they're so intent on detection. There are several potential explanations of Iranian government behavior, but the U.S. is unlikely ever to have adequate understanding of the opaque workings of Iran to determine its true motivations. This gap in our knowledge is only one of many. Yet our government is going to need to make policy decisions on how to deal with Iranian intransigence and duplicity without the luxury of better information. Building a successful strategy requires acknowledging areas of uncertainty and hedging against misjudgment. But we should not allow imperfect information to paralyze action that better secures our interests. The current course we are on seems likely to result in the U.S. accentuating the political value Iran would gain from going nuclear, while reducing our own leverage to affect Iran's choices or increase the cost to them short of a military attack. It is very much in America's interests to frame our concerns differently. Iran's reaction to even the mild sanctions approved by the un Security Council in December will raise the stakes and force a confrontation should Iran actually expand enrichment, as they are preparing to do. Rather than trapping ourselves in a policy that will leave us little choice but destroying the Iranian program on terms unfavorable to us or appearing impotent to prevent it, we should adopt a three-pronged approach of: • increasing un sanctions and U.S. military pressure on Iran while opening negotiations on cessation of enrichment and a range of other issues, such as government repression and stabilizing Iraq; • calling into question the existence and usability of any weapons that have not been tested, thereby shifting the burden of proof from our claims that fuel enrichment will give Iran nuclear weapons to Iranian action that will be indisputable, namely, a test nuclear explosion; • clearly and publicly articulating our determination to destroy any Iranian nuclear weapons we believe are being readied for use.
Religious nationalism is a subject of critical importance in much of the world today. Peter van der Veer's timely study on the relationship between religion and politics in India goes well beyond other books on this subject. He brings together several disciplines - anthropology, history, social theory, literary studies - to show how Indian religious identities have been shaped by pilgrimage, migration, language development, and more recently, print and visual media. Van der Veer's central focus is the lengthy dispute over the Babari mosque in Ayodhya, site of a bloody confrontation between Hindus and Muslims in December 1992. A thought-provoking range of other examples describes the historical construction of religious identities: cow protection societies and Sufi tombs, purdah and the political appropriation of images of the female body, Salman Rushdie and the role of the novel in nationalism, Mahatma Gandhi and Swami Vivekananda, the Khalsa movement among Sikhs, and nationalist archaeology and the televised Ramayana. Van der Veer offers a new perspective on the importance of religious organization and the role of ritual in the formation of nationalism. His work advances our understanding of contemporary India while also offering significant theoretical insights into one of the most troubling issues of this century.
World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. Civilizations - the highest cultural groupings of people - are differentiated from each other by religion, history, language and tradition. These divisions are deep and increasing in importance. From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future. In this emerging era of cultural conflict the United States must forge alliances with similar cultures and spread its values wherever possible. With alien civilizations the West must be accommodating if possible, but confrontational if necessary. In the final analysis, however, all civilizations will have to learn to tolerate each other.
Copyright © 2006-2010 ProQuest LLC. All Rights Reserved.
BARON HOLBACH'S EPIGRAMMATIC DESCRIPTION OF RELIGION as ‘the “eau de vie” of the people’ will undoubtedly outlive the memory of its author. On the other hand, Kingsley's advocacy of Christian socialism to the masses clearly implied the presumption that religion could also be their amphetamine. This latter possibility was systematically explored by Troeltsch with reference to Christianity. Weber deepened the analysis of the revolutionary potential of religion and extended it to the other world religions of salvation. There was something the philosophes did not know; religion could be revolutionary.
This study investigates the practices of religious management used by radical modernizing states, usually labeled 'secular.' The method applied is a comparative historical study of institutional and ideological practices, principally legal and educational reforms, as revealed in constitutional and other key legal texts, curricular documents and textbooks, and significant speeches and writings of major regime figures. The cases studied are the French Third Republic, the Turkish Republic of the single-party period, and Arab nationalist republics, principally Tunisia under Bourguiba and Syria under the Ba'th Party. The study finds that these so-called secular states find uses for religion in a particular form. That form reflects Rousseau's notion of the Civil Religion, and its genealogy leads back to Rousseau via the French Revolution. Latter-day Jacobins follow the early Revolutionary French National Assembly in nationalizing religion, follow Robespierre in seeking to reform it from above, and follow Napoleon in bureaucratizing it into an effective arm of the state's ideological machinery. In other words, twentieth century revolutionaries such as Atatürk or Arab nationalist regimes have carried out projects of political secularization that do not seek to remove religion from public life, but rather attempt to harness it to their projects of political transformation and state- and nation-building. Even where social conditions are very different from those facing the first Jacobins in France, for example in terms of which religion is dominant or the degree of religious and other diversity, their ideological descendents have pursued similar strategies with apparently similar ends. By studying both the institutional paths chosen and the ideological content of projects of political secularization across regions and cultures, this inquiry contributes to the understanding of comparative secularizations and secularisms. The story told here of these particular cases may illuminate projects pursued more broadly among later-developing states.
The Islamic world has experienced extensive social changes in modern timesâthe rise of new social classes, the formation of massive bureaucratic and military states, and the incorporation of its economies into the world capitalist structure. Yet despite these changes, a national consensus on even the most important principles of social organizationâthe form of government, the status of women, national identity, and rule makingâhas yet to emerge. An ambitious comparative historical analysis of ideological production in the Islamic world from the mid-1800s to the present, Mansoor Moaddel's Islamic Modernism, Nationalism, and Fundamentalism provides a unique perspective for understanding the social conditions of these discourses. Moaddel characterizes these movements in terms of a sequence of cultural episodes characterized by ideological debates and religious disputations, each ending with a revolution or military coup. Understanding how the leaders of these movements formulated their discourses is, for Moaddel, the key to understanding Middle Eastern history. This premise allows him to unlock for readers the historical process that started with Islamic modernism and ended with fundamentalism.
Leo Strauss articulates the conflict between reason and revelation as he explores Spinoza's scientific, comparative, and textual treatment of the Bible. Strauss compares Spinoza's Theologico-political Treatise and the Epistles, showing their relation to critical controversy on religion from Epicurus and Lucretius through Uriel da Costa and Isaac Peyrere to Thomas Hobbes. Strauss's autobiographical Preface, traces his dilemmas as a young liberal intellectual in Germany during the Weimar Republic, as a scholar in exile, and as a leader of American philosophical thought. "[For] those interested in Strauss the political philosopher, and also those who doubt whether we have achieved the 'final solution' in respect to either the character of political science or the problem of the relation of religion to the state." âJournal of Politics "A substantial contribution to the thinking of all those interested in the ageless problems of faith, revelation, and reason." âKirkus Reviews Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago. His contributions to political science include The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, The City and the Man, What is Political Philosophy?, and Liberalism Ancient and Modern.
Traducción de: Jihad: Expansion et Déclin de l'Islamisme Se abordan diferentes movimientos políticos islamistas que surgieron a finales del siglo XX y que están marcados por la Yihad (guerra santa) que es el fenómeno más extremo de manifestación política-religiosa del Islam y que el autor trata de ver como el segundo efecto del ataque a las torres gemelas del World Trade Center en Manhattan en la ciudad de Nueva York y en Pentágono.
The Civility of Indifference
- F G Bailey
- FG Bailey
The History of Government. 3 Volumes
- Samuel E Finer
- SE Finer
Waiting for Imam, or the Political and Hygienic Theology of Khomeini or Government Not by Imams but by Lawyers Also published as “Inside Khomeini’s Mind.” The New Republic 18
- Ernest Gellner
The Invention of Enmity
- D Sri Little
- Lanka
Monty Python and Philosophy: Nudge
- Gary L Hardcastle
Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within
- Melanie Phillips
- M Phillips
Histories. 6 Volumes. Translated by W.R. Paton. New York: Loeb Classical Library
- Polybius
Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah
- Olivier Roy
- O Roy
Waiting for Imam, or the Political and Hygienic Theology of Khomeini or Government Not by Imams but by Lawyers
- Ernest Gellner
- E Gellner
Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam
- Gilles Keppel
- G Keppel
Who Rules Iran? The Structure of Power in the Islamic Republic
- Wilfried Buchta
- W Buchta
The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End
- Peter W Galbraith
- PW Galbraith
Wahhabism: A Critical Essay
- Hamid Algar
- H Algar