Foreign Affairs. January-February 2020

Recent Books

January/February 2020 197

Lebanon: The Rise and Fall of a Secular

State Under Siege

BY MARK FARHA. Cambridge

University Press, 2019, 326 pp.

These two treatises on religious politics

are thoroughly researched and insightful

and take up important questions of social

theory. They seek to correct conventional

scholarly narratives about secularism and

religious identity in two very different

countries. Lord examines the idea that the

rise of moderate Islamist politics in

Turkey—as epitomized by the rule of

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his

Justice and Development Party, or akp—

reflects the confrontation between a

grassroots Muslim society and a mono-

lithic secular state bent on snuffing out

religious observance. Instead, Lord

argues, the Turkish republican state

that came into being after World War I

contained significant Islamic elements,

clustered in the Directorate of Religious

Affairs, known as the Diyanet, and they

were granted considerable latitude.

Although nominally secular, the Turkish

republic embraced de facto Muslim

majoritarian rule. Turkish Islamism, Lord

suggests, emerged as much from within

the state as in opposition to it.

Farha, a political scientist, disputes

the narrative that sees Lebanese confes-

sionalism—the intersection of religious

identities and politics in the country—as

imposed by colonial European forces

seeking to divide and rule. The roots of

confessionalism in Lebanon are deep

and strong and predate the country’s

colonization by the French. Great feudal

families among the Shiites, the Sunnis,

the Christians, and the Druze helped

build Lebanon’s politics of identity. Farha

should have spent more time on these
policy choices and less on the biographies.

A Tale of Four Worlds: The Arab Region
After the Uprisings
BY DAVID OTTAWAY AND MARINA
O T TAWAY. Hurst, 2019, 240 pp.

The 2010–11 Arab uprisings undid an
older order. Ottaway and Ottaway bring
unrivaled cumulative experience to the
analysis of a region they divide into
four parts: the “non-states” in the
Levant (Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria); an
authoritarian Egypt; the bustling emir-
ates of the Gulf (poorly led by Saudi
Arabia); and Algeria, Morocco, and
Tunisia, the three Maghreb states that
are drifting away from the Arab world
and toward sub-Saharan Africa and
Europe. The region’s newly fragmented
configuration invites intervention from
Iran, Russia, Turkey, and the United
States. Curiously, the authors barely
mention Israel, which is heavily involved
in Lebanon and Syria. The Arab upris-
ings precipitated the greater entry of
Islamic organizations into formal politics.
This shift has gone furthest in the
Maghreb, where Islamists have partici-
pated in elections and in governments.
The authors contend that “an antecedent
phase of authoritarian state-building” is
a prerequisite for any kind of more
liberal political opening. Nevertheless, in
their analysis, only the countries in the
Gulf (not including Saudi Arabia), plus
Morocco and Tunisia, are poised to move
toward greater democratic freedoms.

Religious Politics in Turkey: From the Birth
of the Republic to the AKP
BY CEREN LORD. Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2018, 386 pp.