Well, Hosni Mubarak's gone, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has gone, and surely Gaddafi can't be that far behind.Who'da thought, eh? To me, it's all the more remarkable because prior to these revolutions the received wisdom was that the ‘Arab street’ was incapable of revolt (I guess so long as you forget about the revolt against the Ottoman Empire!).
But in fact there has always been quite a lot of support for revolution among Muslims. Back in 2004, Robert MacCulloch (Imperial College London) and Silvia Pezzini (London School of Economics) analysed data from the World Values Survey between 1980 and 1997 of 130,000 people living in 61 nations (you can find their report here).
They analysed which people wanted a revolution – specifically, they wanted to know what kind of person agrees that “The entire way our society is organised must be radically changed by revolutionary action”.
They matched that to religious affiliation, and found that 17.4% of Muslims want a revolt, compared with 10.3% of the non-religious and 7.9% of Christians.
Of course, Muslims are more likely to live in countries that are autocratic and where rights are limited – according to a list compiled by Freedom International, there not a single majority-Muslim country that is ‘Free’.
So they adjusted for the degree of freedom and also for other important factors that affect the taste for revolution – wealth (both individual and national) and national economic growth. Once you do that, Muslims, the non-religious and unreligious are all equally like to support revolt, while Christians are about 3% less likely to. But the precise relationship is different in free and unfree countries.
In 'free' countries, Muslims have about the same taste for revolt as the non religious, while Christians are significantly anti-revolutionary (about 4.1% less likely to support revolution).
In countries that are not free, however, Muslims are 12.6% more likely than the non-religious to support revolt, while Christians are only 1.1% less likely.
It seems that being a Christian or a Muslim in an unfree country seems to be a trigger for revolutionary sentiment – especially for Muslims.
It’s not clear why this should be, but there are some intriguing pointers in the data. For example, one way dictators keep themselves in power is by favouring some groups over others – the old ‘divide and rule’ strategy. In turns out that Muslims are more likely to support a revolt when they are in the majority – in unfree Muslim countries, support for revolution reaches an impressive 25%.
Muslims always have a higher level of taste for revolt than Christians, now matter how you cut the data by freedom and minority/majority status. That might be partly because not all revolutions are the same. Muslims are much more likely to want a revolution to increase political rights – they’re not so interested in revolutions to improve civil liberties.
So part of the reason that we don't see more revolutions in Muslim countries might be that potential revolutionaries actually want a government that is more restrictive of personal freedoms! We'll have to wait to see which kind of revolutionary wins out in North Africa.
This article by Tom Rees was first published on Epiphenom. It is licensed under Creative Commons.
Wow seriously, that's what you conclude? That Muslims want less civil liberties?
ReplyDeleteThe Iranian Revolution was hijacked and not entirely supported by the majority. I hope you keep that in mind.
So you're telling me when Muslims go out without head scarves or beards to protest against a dictator, they're doing it because they want less civil liberties.
The way I see it, this data is inconclusive and your conclusion is based on preconceived notions about us, nothing more. You seem to lack basic knowledge about Muslim society. The funny thing is that Christians are more often than not as religious as the majority of moderately conservative and secular Muslims (the minority of extremely conservative Muslims is an exception, and that can be attributed to cross cultural influence among third world countries since that's where Islam is mostly dominant as opposed to Christianity being dominant in developed countries). Except for sectarian countries like Lebanon, Christians and Muslims in Arab countries will tend to be natural allies both politically and religiously. Did you know that Christians in Egypt and Lebanon can get media censored if its offensive to them? Not so much in Egypt since they're a minority, but they definitely do have a voice there - and in Lebanon that voice is pretty loud. Tell me does that mean Christians want less civil liberties too? Because they censor Iranian TV shows about Islamic Jesus?
If you're honestly gonna jump on the bandwagon of scare mongering against a Muslim revolution (it's not even Muslim when Christians in Egypt played a vital role in it), then I suggest you utilize better arguments than that. Tunisia is reasonably secular enough to avoid falling to an Islamist regime, while Egypt is much more conservative but can still avert ending up like Iran. Libya is different because it is tribal and divided; it is ripe for Islamists to take over part of the divided remains of the country, if not all of it. Just like Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia.
Either way, if those Arabs find themselves facing another repressive regime, they could just take to the streets against it. I wonder how could Iranians (and soon, Saudis) get even less civil liberties than they already have. No one is stupid enough to want to live under the Taliban, and accusing them of that is quite insulting.
Well, just to unpick some assumptions. First, Muslims are a mixed bunch (like everyone else), and what's being reported here are averages. Averages don't tell you anything about individuals, and they also don't tell you about distributions. The average might be 'typical', or it might simply be halfway between two polar opposites (and represent hardly anyone).
ReplyDeleteThese data show that, on average, Muslims react twice as strongly as Christians to the denial of political rights. But they are no different from Christians when it comes to denial of personal liberties.
What that suggests to me is that there is a conflict among Muslims about what kind of society they would like to replace the current autocracies.
That's not exactly a radical idea. I suspect that this conflict of ideas is part of the reason that the autocracies have managed to hold on to power - they play off fears of an Islamic take-over, thus frightening other potential revolutionaries into line.