IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rsc/rsceui/2010-32.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Political Instrumentalisation of Islam, Persistent Autocracies, and Obscurantist Deadlock

Author

Listed:
  • Jean-Philippe Platteau

Abstract

The empirical literature has established a strong link between the fact of being a Muslim-dominated country and indicators of political performance and democracy. This suggests the possible existence of a relation between religion, Islam in this instance, and societal characteristics. Bernard Lewis and others have actually argued the case for such a relation, pointing to aspects of the Islamic religion and culture that make the advent of democracy especially difficult. These arguments fall into the general idea of the “Clash of civilisations” put forward by Samuel Huntington. In this paper, we discuss this sort of argument and show that there is a systematic misconception about the true nature of the relationship between Islam and politics: far from being merged into the religious realm, politics tends to dominate religion. Because of the particular characteristics of Is-lam, namely, the lack of a centralised religious authority structure and the great variability of interpretations of the Islamic law, there is a risk of an “obscurantist deadlock” in the form of a vicious process whereby both the ruler and his political opponents try to outbid each other by using the religious idiom. This risk looms particularly large in crisis situations accentuated by international factors.

Suggested Citation

  • Jean-Philippe Platteau, 2010. "Political Instrumentalisation of Islam, Persistent Autocracies, and Obscurantist Deadlock," RSCAS Working Papers 2010/32, European University Institute.
  • Handle: RePEc:rsc:rsceui:2010/32
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://cadmus.eui.eu/dspace/bitstream/1814/13857/1/RSCAS_2010_32.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dalila Chenaf-Nicet, 2020. "Dynamics of Structural Change in a Globalized World: What Is the Role Played by Institutions in the Case of Sub-Saharan African Countries?," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 32(4), pages 998-1037, September.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Islam; Instrumentalization of religion; autocracies;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rsc:rsceui:2010/32. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: RSCAS web unit (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rsiueit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.