This article examines three regime types that assert that they represent “Islam in power.” They are the conservative dynastic regime of Saudi Arabia, the populist clerical regime of Iran, and the authoritarian military regimes of the Sudan and Pakistan. These regimes articulate different interpretations of Islam that reflect the interests and ideology of those who control the state machinery, the influence of society's historical legacy, and specific characteristics of the immediate situational setting. The Islamic legitimization of all three types has been contested on religiopolitical grounds by domestic rivals for power and external rivals for leadership in the Muslim world. The most effective challenges to regime legitimacy have been manifested in the Islamized military regimes. The predicament of “the Islam of the marshals” is due to several factors: their lack of the political capital available in the Saudi type of “the Islam of wealth,” or the legitimacy generated by revolutionary change under charismatic leadership known in the Iranian type of “the Islam of revolution,” and their antipolitical character, manifested in their distrust of political movements that supported their Islamization programs and whose leaders aspired to play the roles of its theoreticians and organizers.
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References
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Ibrahim Karawan, “ `Reislamization Movements' according to Kepel: On Striking Back and Striking Out,” ibid., pp. 161-79.
2.
2. The statement was made by Lutfi al-Kholi in Nadwat al-tataruf al-siyasi al-dini fi Misr [The workshop on religiopolitical extremism in Egypt], Fikr li-al-dirasat wa al-abhath (Cairo), p. 100 (Dec. 1985).
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Sadek Belaid , “Role of Religious Institutions in Support of the State,” in Beyond Coercion, ed. Adeed Dawisha and I. William Zartman (London: Croom Helm, 1988), pp. 147-163.
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4. See Mohammed Arkoun, “The Concept of Authority in Islamic Thought,” in Islam: State and Society, ed. Klaus Ferdinand and Mehdi Mozaffari (London: Curzon Press, 1988), pp. 53-73.
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See also Rif`at Sayyid Ahmad, Rasa`il Juhayman al-`Utaybi [The letters of Juhayman al-`Utaybi] (Cairo: Madbuli, 1988), pp. 11-52.
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For a biting critique of the role of establishmentarian Islam during the crisis, see Magdi Hussein, Azmat al-khalij bayn ahkam al-Qur'an wa fatawi al-sultan [The gulf crisis between Quranic rules and sultanic stipulations] (Cairo: Dar al-Sharq al-Awssat, 1990).
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According to Ram, the sermons delivered at the Friday prayers in Tehran described the victory of Iran's Islamic revolution as “reminiscent of the victory of the Noble Prophet over the infidels.” Ibid, pp. 11-13.
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In practice, however, the initial narrowing of the income gap between the top and bottom segments in society was ultimately halted in the urban centers and reversed in the countryside. See Sohrab Behdad, “Winners and Losers of the Iranian Revolution,”International Journal of Middle East Studies, 21:327-358 (1989).
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19.
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Claude van England , “Iran Picks up the Pace of Reform,”Christian Science Monitor, 17 Apr. 1992.
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John Voll , “Political Crisis in Sudan,”Current History, 89:153-156, 178-180 (1990).
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See Gehad Auda, “The Foreign Policy of a Fragmented Polity: The Case of Sudan,” in The Foreign Policies of Arab States, by Bahgat Korany and Ali Dessouki (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), p. 368.
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Hassan , “Islamization,” p. 269.
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On the organized opposition by women to particular draft “Islamic ordinances,” see Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed, eds., Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back? (London: Zed Books, 1987), pp. 123-142.
37.
37. On student political activism during that period, including a reference to the lives of 80 students lost in this wave of violence, see Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr, “Students, Islam, and Politics,”Middle East Journal, 46:67-68 (1992).
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David Long , “Stability in Saudi Arabia,”Current History, 90:9-13 (1991).
