Rokkan is unclear on what the ‘law’ dimension encompasses in his original grid.298 The dimension of law evolves around the strength of center-imposed versus local legal traditions that are characterized by the distinctiveness or sharedness of territorial legal system. The law dimension included furthermore ‘organizations for adjudication’ and ‘internal representation’, which I figure are courts and representative political organization such as parliaments. The ‘law’ dimension becomes all the more complex in as far as Rokkan turns to the individual level and links the equalization of rights of participation and the establishment of ‘political citizenship’ to the ‘law’ dimension.
The lack of focus on the ‘law’ dimension with reference to state formation in The Formation of national states in Western Europe was commented upon by Tilly who admitted that a chief omission which researchers who contributed to the book “came to regret was the judicial system. Because courts, judges, and judicial proceedings antedate national states and appear in so many unstately guises, it is easy to forget how large a part certain kinds of courts played in the day-to-day construction of Western states. […] the volume as a whole treats the judicial system much less adequately than we would have liked.”.299
While a theorist on state formation regrets the omission of the judicial system as an area of analysis in probing into western European state formation, researchers on the politicization of religious law in contemporary states in the Middle East have since the turn of the millennia been increasingly sensitive to the establishment of centralized power and the institutionalization of a territorially based legal system. Legal scholar on Islamic law, Lynn Welchman, cites her colleague Leon Buskens who points that the “study of the process of
298
Rokkan, "Dimensions of state formation and nation-building: A possible paradigm for research on variations within Europe," 566-67.
299
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state formation, in which a central government claims the monopoly on the imposition of uniform and generally valid legal norms, offers a key to understanding the constantly changing relationships” between state, religion and society in the Middle East.300
The Norwegian historian and scholar on Islamic law Knut S. Vikør discusses likewise the proximity of the law and force dimensions in his analysis of the development of Islamic law during the Ottoman Empire. Pointing at the historical conflicts regarding which authoritative body can codify religious law, he emphasizes that “[t]he monopoly of force which centralizing agents are eager to obtain is usually conferred upon the ruler by a system of law. Control over the legal system is therefore one of the definitions of political power, making the legal system an executive branch of the state.”301
Seen through Rokkan’s conceptual map on state formation, the persistence of legal pluralism within the state’s corpus of laws in the Middle East exhibits the power of counterforces against the centralization of the state’s legal system. The influence which religious authorities exert on sustaining conservative readings and interpretations of religious text varies, however, with the limits and opportunities which those holding political power are able to set. The contemporary Arab state has thus ‘abdicated’, so to say, in centralizing its legal system. The state’s abdication in the legal sphere follows from what Vikør sees as a ‘containment strategy’ where the state creates protected spheres in which religious groups and communities have partial autonomy in regulating the group’s ‘internal affairs’, most often in the arenas of education and family law.302
In his studies on the development of Norwegian pious movements, Rokkan sees their rise as a consequence of the efforts by centralized government and urban elites into creating standardized religious institutions under the auspices of urbanized elites. I see interesting parallels, and better analytical glasses, in analyzing the rise of radical religious groups (such as ultra-conservative and Salafist303 groups, some who do not refrain from the use of
300
Lynn Welchman, "Islamic law: Stuck with the state?," in Religion, law and tradition: comparative studies in religious law, ed. Andrew Huxley (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 61.
301
Knut S. Vikør, "The shari'a and the nation state: Who can codify the divine law?," in The Middle East in a Globalized World, ed. Bjørn Olav Utvik and Knut S. Vikør, Nordic research on the Middle East (Bergen: Nordic Society for Middle Eastern Studies, 2000), 223. For a comprehensive historical analysis, see Vikør, Between God and the Sultan: a history of Islamic law.
302
Vikør, "The shari'a and the nation state: Who can codify the divine law?," 234.
303
Often portrayed as religious revivalists, Salafists – i.e. those who call for orthodox and textually-based interpretations of Islamic doctrines without abstaining from the use of force – can and should, I argue, be analytically distinguished from other groups of ‘religious revivalists’ who oppose the use of force as means to obtain political objectives (such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood after 1995, for instance). In cases where
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violence) in contemporary states in the Middle East along these analytical terms rather than viewing them as ‘cultural representations’ that give rise to clashes of civilizations.304
Rokkan’s center-periphery approach towards counterforces in Norway maintained that three particular movements – one anchored in religious pietistic movements (lekmannsbevegelsen), another in an anti-alcohol movement (avholdssaken) and the third based on linguistic vernaculars (målstriden) – characterized the democratization process of political development in Norway.305 There is thus nothing particularly ‘Islamic’ about the political force or the role which ‘religion’ in general, or pious religious movements in particular, have played – and continuously play – as societal transformational agents.306
Despite the unclear delineations between the law and culture dimensions, Rokkan viewed that the phase of participation “brings subject masses into active participation in the Muslim puritans oppose state authority, as the case is with the strand of Islamists referred to as ‘jihadists’, these are ipso facto not only ‘puritans’ but also political dissidents because they oppose state authority altogether, and some profess the use of violence in challenging the principles on which the current world political order is based upon, i.e. the territorial sovereignty of individual states.
304
Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of civilizations?," Foreign Affairs 72(Summer 1992). See the discussion on various authoritarian responses to religious pluralism and the rise of religious radicalism at the international level in Turner, Religion and modern society: citizenship, secularisation and the state: 184-93, 271-84. See particularly chapter 14 entitled “The globalization of piety” in ibid. For an excellent Rokkanian study on countercultural forces and the rise of the Norwegian right-wing party Fremskrittspartiet which became Norway’s biggest party in the 2001 and 2005 parliamentary elections, see Tor Bjørklund, "Fremskrittspartiets suksess og kulturell standarisering," Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift, no. 2 (2007). Bjørklund argues that the
standardization of the three countercultural movements in Norway has occurred at the regional level in contemporary politics, but that we can still find pockets of counterforces in contemporary religious movements among ethnic Norwegian in Western Norway, among immigrants and citizens of immigrant background, as well as among followers of new-age worldviews. Ibid., 157.
305
See chapter 8 («Sentrum og periferi, økonomi og kultur: Modeller og data i kliometrisk sosiologi») in Rokkan and Hagtvet, Stat, nasjon, klasse: essays i politisk sosiologi: 229. See also the Norwegian historian Jens Arup Seip’s critique of Rokkan’s center - periphery analysis of Norwegian politics, «Modellenes tyranni: Analyse av Stein Rokkan’s anvvendelse av en sentrum-periferi modell på norsk historie», chapter 12 in Jens Arup Seip, Problemer og metode i historieforskningen: [artikler, innlegg, foredrag 1940-1977] (Oslo: Gyldendal, 1983). For the original articles by both scholars, see "Periferi og sentrum i historien: Utdrag av foredrag ved Nordisk fagkonferanse for historisk metodelære på Røros 16. - 20. juni 1974", (paper presented at the Nordisk fagkonferanse for historisk metodelære på Røros 16. - 20. juni 1974, Røros, 1974). Seip and other Norwegian historians point at the establishment of the Konventikkelplakaten in 1741 while Norway was under Danish rule as an important element which laid the bases for the democratization of Norwegian politics. ‘Konventikler’ were religious meetings led by laymen which were arranged without obtaining the authority of the local priest (sognepresten). The ordinance prohibited thus religious gatherings without the authoritative permission by state authorities, i.e. Norwegian bureaucratic officials (embettsmenn) who ruled by proxy of the Danish king. Internal opposition against the ordinance created an upsurge in national counterforces of religious puritans and political dissidents in both rural and urban areas which are referred to as ‘lavkirkelige bevegelser’ (low- church movements) in contrast to ‘høykirkelige bevegelser’ (high-church movements, i.e. religious groups and movements legitimized by state officials). The ordinance was abolished in 1842 and spurred the establishment of mass religious groups and movements, including radical revivalists, moderates and conservatives, which served as significant roots to the democratization of Norwegian domestic politics.
306
See, for instance, Bjørn Olav Utvik, Islamist economics in Egypt: the pious road to development (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2006); Lara Deeb, An enchanted modern: gender and public piety in Shi'i Lebanon (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).
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workings of the territorial political system”.307 As such, the politicization of matters related to family law and demands for reform in Arab states since the 1990s can be seen as encompassing a political participatory process whereby conflicts of interest span along a continuum between pressures to equalize civil rights between citizens and pressures to sustain and strengthen conservative interpretations of religious law as state law. From a citizenship regime perspective, this struggle centers around pressures for reform that seek to establish an individually-based citizenship regime and counterforces against change that seek to bolster and sustain group-based citizenship.