Keywords

The author of this study accepted with interest the invitation of the Austrian “Dokumentationsstelle Politischer Islam” to write an analysis of what can be said about the phenomenon of “political Islam” in the Arab world and what can be said about religiously motivated political extremism (hereafter abbreviated RMPE) in an international comparison from the perspective of international, empirically oriented social sciences. Such a study by a quantitative political scientist should be conducive to an objectified debate and be useful for all concerned.

This work is by no means a study of “Islam in Europe” “per se”. Whoever wants to read such an analysis into this publication is mistaken. There are already enough good presentations and analyses of “Islam” in Europe in international and also European social science, for example on the website Euroislam run by Jocelyn Cesari.Footnote 1 Incidentally, the same researcher, Jocelyn Cesari, wrote a study in 2018 on the topic of “political Islam” (Cesari, 2018) on a global level.Footnote 2

In this publication, after discussing the conceptual issues, the author, following the example of Cammett et al. (2020), attempts to present his own empirical data from recognised social science surveys on political Islam. In doing so, the focus is on a tradition influenced by the mathematical logic and analytical philosophy of the Vienna Circle through Rudolf Carnap (1988), of relying on the extension of a contested concept. In our case—of “political Islam”—the research of the Arab Barometer as well as Francois Burgat, but also Jocelyne Cesari, John Esposito, Gilles Kepel and Oliver Roy has in any case very clearly outlined which important value patterns the adherents of political Islam represent (five items from the Arab Barometer) and which political movements and governments of countries can be assigned to the extension of the phenomenon, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Sudan and Jordan, Jamaat-i-Islami in South Asia, the Refah Party in Turkey, the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, al Nahda in Tunisia, Hizballah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Palestinian territories and Gamaa Islamiyya and Jihad in Egypt. It is certainly also legitimate, in the light of the above literature, to describe the current AKP government in Turkey and the Islamist regime in Iran as “political Islam in power”. Our measurement of “political Islam” thus adopts this perspective without “ifs” and “buts” and 1:1. After all, according to the “Arab Barometer” team, “political Islam” occurs whenever the following opinions are held in the region:

  • It is better for religious leaders to hold public office

  • Religious leaders should influence government decisions

  • Religious leaders are less corrupt than civilian ones

  • Religious leaders should influence elections

  • Religious practice is not a private matter.

The empirical-analytical starting point for our analyses is thus the important study by Harvard Professor Melanie Cammett (Cammett et al., 2020), which also deals explicitly with political Islam and political values in the Arab world using data from the Arab Barometer. The empirical analyses by Cammett et al. (2020), use longitudinal data from the Arab Barometer as well as data from the World Values Survey 2015.

Although the individual studies reviewed here diverge in details, they all agree that organisations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas can rightly be described as “political Islam”.

The data used here and also the statistical methods are internationally comprehensible, the data are freely available, and the statistical software package IBM-SPSS is implemented at most institutions of tertiary education in the world. Even critics of our publication should come to the same conclusions as those presented here. In debating our findings, it should be noted that the data and perspectives presented here are based on what leading minds in international and Arab political science, including those at educational institutions in Qatar, have come up with about political Islam. The same is true of the debate out in the Western world: what is needed is a fact-based debate that takes note of and develops the research as it is conducted in the world’s leading peer-reviewed journals and book publishers. In addition, as shown in this publication, proponents of political Islam, or those who see it as a possible partner for the West in a world of turmoil, also name it as such. In our study, such supporters have their say in detail, as do those scholars whose statistical evidence suggests that there is no connection between “political Islam” and support for anti-Western, Islamist terror. But this whole question is then a question of good empiricism and not an a priori political evaluation of which terms should be used and which should not.

Melani Cammett, Political Science Professor at Harvard,Footnote 3 for example, explicitly addressed political Islam and, more specifically, political values in the Arab world using data from the Arab Barometer (Cammett et al., 2020).Footnote 4 In our presented voices on political Islam, the Arab television station Al Jazeera also has its say in detail.

Within a few years of the historic Arab uprisings of 2011, Cammett et al. (2020), found popular mobilisation dissipating amid instability in many Arab countries. In doing so, Cammett and her team tracked the relationship between changing macro-political conditions and individual-level political values in the Middle East, showing that a preference for democracy and political trust are not fixed cultural traits of the population, but can change rapidly in the face of perceived uncertainty. Cammett’s empirical analyses use longitudinal data from the for 13 countries as well as data from the World Values Survey 2015, which includes both Arab and non-Arab countries, to compare regional developments with global patterns. This basic model is also applied in our study. Cammett’s findings contradict cultural studies accounts of fixed political attitudes among Muslims in a narrow perspective on the relationship between Islam and democracy. Our analysis starts with such quantitatively and statistically measurable conclusions from international value research and will sometimes reveal very surprising empirical results for the international debate, which sometimes diametrically contradict ideologically shaped expectations from all possible sides.

So what can the readers of our study expect? In this publication, we attempt to empirically shed light on the following research questions, based on established international surveys and data collections, and thus provide an objective contribution to the ongoing debate:

  1. (1)

    We show with the data of the “Arab Barometer Survey” explicitly referring to it how strongly political Islam is rooted in the Arab world among the Arab population as a whole and then compare it with the political Islam of those who have said in the Arab Barometer surveys that they want to emigrate to Western Europe (according to the data presented here, this is more than 1/5 of the entire Arab population). Would continued migration from the Arab world lead to an “import” of “political Islam”, or would it be precisely those who do not share the values of “political Islam” who want to emigrate, as a high-profile study by Falco and Rotondi, 2016b, in the renowned journal “World Development” explicitly claimed? We also examine the multivariate correlates of “political Islam” in a factor analytic model that, among other things, explores the question of what correlations exist between an endorsement of political Islam, attitudes towards restrictive gender norms (UNDP, 2019) and explicit support for Islamist terror against the United States of America.

  2. (2)

    Then, using data from the World Values Survey, 2017–2020 and the items “political violence is justified” and “in a democracy, religious authorities should interpret the laws”, we show how high the proportion of the total population and of Muslims internationally is that corresponds to these categories, and we ask ourselves in a multivariate comparative analysis with 79 states about the drivers of a readiness to use political violence understood in this way across denominational boundaries, which coincides with a religious sovereignty of interpretation in the legislative process. For the debate on political Islam, this raises the not insignificant question that internationally, and also among other denominations, and not only in the “Dar al Islam”, i.e. in the House of Islam, a fundamental pillar of the secular constitutional state, namely the renunciation of political violence and the monopoly of state, and not religious, authorities in the interpretation of laws, is rejected by a certain percentage of the population worldwide.