Routledge Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa

Roel Meijer, James N. Sater, Zahra R. Babar, Roel Meijer, James N. Sater, Zahra R. Babar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429603280
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This comprehensive Handbook gives an overview of the political, social, economic and legal dimensions of citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa from the nineteenth century to the present.

The terms citizen and citizenship are mostly used by researchers in an off-hand, self-evident manner. A citizen is assumed to have standard rights and duties that everyone enjoys. However, citizenship is a complex legal, social, economic, cultural, ethical and religious concept and practice. Since the rise of the modern bureaucratic state, in each country of the Middle East and North Africa, citizenship has developed differently. In addition, rights are highly differentiated within one country, ranging from privileged, underprivileged and discriminated citizens to non-citizens. Through its dual nature as instrument of state control, as well as a source of citizen rights and entitlements, citizenship provides crucial insights into state-citizen relations and the services the state provides, as well as the way citizens respond to these actions.

This volume focuses on five themes that cover the crucial dimensions of citizenship in the region:

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• Historical trajectory of citizenship since the nineteenth century until independence

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• Creation of citizenship from above by the state

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• Different discourses of rights and forms of contestation developed by social movements and society

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• Mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion

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• Politics of citizenship, nationality and migration

Covering the main dimensions of citizenship, this multidisciplinary book is a key resource for students and scholars interested in citizenship, politics, economics, history, migration and refugees in the Middle East and North Africa.

Part 1

Emergence of modern citizenship

1

Peace to those of faith

Political affiliation and belonging in classical Islamic thought

Omar Farahat

This chapter examines some of the central concepts of human community and belonging and their implications in a number of classical legal and exegetical works. This is done by highlighting early and classical Islamic concepts that occupied a place comparable to ideas of nation and citizenship, understood as a specific form of political status and identity, or the “need to belong to a community” (as described in Heater 1990: 182), with an emphasis on the disciplines of Quranic exegesis and substantive law. I argue that, in several noteworthy texts in both of these scholarly domains, classical Muslim intellectuals continued to think of concepts pertaining to human association through the lens of tribe-like formations. For classical scholars, humans belonged to circles of kinship of various degrees of breadth and quality. As with tribal affiliation, the methods and boundaries of belonging were fluid and multi-layered. Affiliation did not occur in a strict institutional way, nor were there universal notions of identification in the writings of such scholars. Rather than an abstract nation, institutionalized within a political entity that individuals could join under certain conditions, acquiring a certain set of rights (as theorized, for example, in Heater 1990: 1–15), classical Muslim scholarship adopted a more pragmatic approach based on actual kinship and centered on the extent to which a person could be trusted as a peaceful or potentially harmful participant in a community.

This unique outlook notwithstanding, affiliation to the community naturally determined access to a whole host of rights and privileges specific to members and affiliates of the Muslim communities, a feature classical belonging has in common with modern citizenship. Furthermore, conceiving of human communities as networks of kinship and protection reflects a certain continuity with tribal practice, Muslim scholarship was distinguished by an emphasis on faith in God and moral behavior as central to determining the ideal human community: the Muslim umma. Not only was the declared faith in God a social asset that signaled trustworthiness and proximity or belonging to the Muslim umma, it was a foundational moral principle that shaped the classical Islamic viewpoint of the Muslim nation as morally central. This was critical to determining the classical discourse governing Muslim interactions with non-Muslim communities. The formulation of those ideas in commentaries on two much-discussed Quranic verses will be addressed in the first section, whereas some substantive legal discussions will be analyzed in the second section. The third section will briefly discuss the idea of citizenship as a set of rights and point to some areas within the Islamic tradition where an analogous notion could be found.

Attempting to address the question of what constitutes “citizenship” in Islamic thought normally raises a range of difficulties that are familiar to the contemporary scholar of Islam. Citizenship in its modern sense belongs to a set of concepts, such as democracy, equality, and human rights, that can only be understood in the context of the specific historical circumstances that led to their conception and framing, and yet impose themselves normatively in political and academic discourse with a significant weight. In dealing with a question such as “what is the position of Islam on citizenship,” some attempted to explore adjacent concepts in the classical tradition and investigate the possibility of finding reasonable overlap between the traditions, while others explored the possibility that Islam may have offered a more comprehensive notion of citizenship. For example, Liyakat Takim argued that many verses of the Quran “command Muslims to build bridges of understanding and cooperation with fellow human beings so as to create a social order rooted in and reflecting the highest ideals of justice and equality” (Takim 2018: 140). An example representing the second approach is Mohammad Hashim Kamali, whose work will be addressed in the final section (Kamali 2009).

Unlike those writings, the present chapter is focused on the conceptual analysis of key discussions of human association and affiliation in classical Islam, and their potential implications. It is not my aim to suggest that classical discourse could be reframed to fit a liberal political mold, or to claim that Islamic scholarship had fully developed ideas of citizenship in pre-modernity, as suggested, for example, by Rachid Ghannouchi (discussed in the final section). Such claims would require an assumption of modern citizenship as the yardstick against which all theories of human belonging must be measured. This assumption is ubiquitous in contemporary scholarship on citizenship both in Islam and more generally. For example, building on Max Weber’s assertion that “the notion of citizens of the state is unknown to the world of Islam, and to India and China” (Weber 1924: 316, as quoted in Heater 1990). Derek Heater goes on to argue that “Citizenship … requires the capacity for a certain abstraction and sophistication of thought” (Heater 1990: 2–3). While I do not contest the idea, advanced by Heater and others, that citizenship is a particular status best embodied by an adherence to an abstract state, it is my contention here that the assumption of superiority of such status, in relation to justice and the protection of fundamental rights, needs to be jettisoned before we can understand notions of political belonging in the classical Islamic context. Specifically, I am arguing that, in a different socio-historical context, Muslim scholars developed a set of conceptual tools to help make sense of how human communities are divided, and to solve the crucial problem of determining the scope of intra-communal rights and responsibilities arising from the moral commitments of the Muslim umma. Classical Islamic legal and political theory developed an elaborate framework of rights protection in the absence of an abstract egalitarian universalist notion of citizenship, not the opposite. This understanding of citizenship as encompassing both status and rights is common in modern theories of citizenship (e.g. see Barbalet 1994: 227). Along the same lines as Barbalet, however, I maintain that the enjoyment of a range of rights is not exclusive to citizenship in its modern state context.

Communities and belonging in revealed sources

In modern reformist thought, Quranic verses on human tribes and peoples are often invoked to suggest that the Quran had anticipated a form of universalist egalitarian rights discourse before its rise in modern Europe (e.g. Takim 2018). The basic premise of this view is that the Quran, unlike the classical legal tradition, advanced a “tolerant” and “universalist” view of humanity. It is with the classical juristic tradition that this (modern-like) universalist view was abandoned. Specifically, verse Q.49:13, which reads

O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may [get to] know one another. Surely the most noble of you in the sight of Allah is the most righteous among you. Allah is truly All-Knowing, All-Aware,¹

is taken to be an acknowledgment and celebration of the global ethnic and cultural diversity of human nations and a negation of ideas of race- or gender-based discrimination (e.g. Kamali 2009: 122; see also al-Jabri 2009, 201 for a gender-based interpretation of the verse). The present chapter, by contrast, maintains that the principles of non-discrimination and faith-based moral superiority were established in both the Quran and some important classical legal writings. As we will see, these universalist ideas were not present in classical interpretations, although the rejection of discrimination because of origin or affiliation was indeed affirmed. What is missing is a framework in which there are distinct nations that are represented by states, accessible through a process of institutional adherence. Instead, human communities are conceived by classical scholars through frameworks of tribe-like belonging, understood as a set of outwardly expanding networks of affiliation, formed through bloodlines and peace or collaboration arrangements. This pragmatic view of human association was nonetheless coupled with a distinct moral take: affiliation to one tribe or the other is no reason for pride or feeling of supremacy. It is essentially a way of organizing the types of rights, privileges, and responsibilities that arise from political belonging (on the derivation of rights from status more generally, see Barbalet 1994: 227–229). Still, people are not equal: those who are God-fearing, both in belief and action, are superior to those who are not. That is, the Muslim nation is, by definition, destined to be morally central among mankind. The view of human belonging as operating within a system of tribes and super-tribes, and the Muslim-centric nature of this conception, are the two key characteristics of classical Islamic ideas of belonging, on which this chapter is focused.

A well-known Quranic pronouncement pertaining directly to the idea of human belonging to a community can be found in Q.49:13. This verse sets out a basic distinction of human division into “peoples” and “tribes” (shuʿūban wa qabāʾil). A modernist approach to this verse manifests in the tendency to render “shuʿūb” as “nations” rather than “peoples,” as we will see later. The evolution of reactions this verse is especially telling of the kind of fluidity that characterizes conceptions of community and political units in the Islamic tradition. The illustrious exegete, Ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, offered an interpretation of that verse that focused primarily on the recognition of different bloodlines, and the moral centrality of fear of God. Ṭabarī’s interpretation does not assign any gender-based significance to the pronouncement that humankind is created from male and female (innā khalaqnākum min dhakarin wa unthā). For him, this simply states a biological truth: humans are created from the reproductive matter of a male and a female (Ṭabarī 1994, 7: 85).

Further, Ṭabarī’s conceptualization of the distinction of shuʿūb and qabāʾil revolves entirely around affiliation (nasab). He explained that people are born within a network of blood relations and other formed relations, which manifest in different degrees of affiliation. Some are closely affiliated within the same social unit, which is referred to as a tribe (qabīla), others are affiliated with a broader, but still related, network of tribes, which is referred to as a people (shaʿb). Ṭabarī does not attempt to advance a universal theory of human association, but rather limits his explanation to how individual people may relate to each other at different levels as evident in his own socio-historical reality. Nothing is said of people outside of these narrow and broad networks of tribal affiliation and what imagined relation one might have with them. This is a concrete view that focuses on existing forms of human organization, which, for Ṭabarī, are entirely subsumed under the concept of the tribe, in its narrow and broad senses. The understanding of shuʿūb as a form of super-tribe was also advanced by Shawkānī in his Fatḥ al-Qadīr. For Shawkānī, shaʿb is a large group of inter-related people, and it is referred to as such because of its size: it spreads out (mutashaʿʿib) like a giant tree (Shawkānī 2002, 5: 67). Tribes (qabāʾil) are only different in size.

Ṭabarī’s idea of acknowledgment of tribal affiliation serves as a form of social identity-formation: acknowledgment of degrees of affiliation (nasab) is a way of identification (taʿāruf) which allows people to situate one another within their social universe. This world in which each person occupies a specific role in a social network in relation to others is a world in which the place within the network, in itself, may not be invoked as a source supremacy. Only rapprochement to God (qurba) may be invoked as such (Ṭabarī 1994, 7: 86). Shawkānī’s understanding of taʿāruf was largely similar but advanced the centrality of identification to tribal affiliation in more explicit terms than Ṭabarī. Shawkānī argued that “the benefit of recognizing [tribal difference] is that it leads each to adhere to their affiliation and not claim any other” (Shawkānī 2002, 5: 87).

The second component of the conception of nationhood in the Quran, which is Muslim-centricity, emerges in a verse revealed at a later time, which is Q3:110:

You are the best nation produced [as an example] for mankind. You enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong and believe in Allah. If only the People of the Scripture had believed, it would have been better for them. Among them are believers, but most of them are defiantly disobedient.²

Unlike the emphasis on tribes and super-tribes that we find in the prior verse, here the emphasis is squarely on a Muslim nation (umma), which is viewed as, in a moral sense, superior to others. The range of interpretations related by Ṭabarī in relation to that verse is telling. Some exegetes limit this judgment to the small community of early Muslims who migrated with the Prophet from Mecca to Medina (Ṭabarī 1994, 2: 303). This interpretation would establish moral superiority as a purely historical fact and negate any such claim to subsequent Muslim communities. Another interpretation makes moral evaluation of human communities conditional upon the practice of commanding the good and forbidding the evil, a central characteristic of Muslim communities according to the classical tradition (an extensive study of this concept can be found in Cook 2000). In that sense, the Muslim community is only morally distinct because and to the extent it engages in this communal practice of moral encouragement, and not just by virtue of their identification as Muslim. A variation of this interpretation sees the verse as merely descriptive: the Muslim community at the time was the best human community because it engaged in such moral practice (Ṭabarī 1994, 2: 304). Ṭabarī embraces the view that this is a general judgment pertaining to the Muslim community. He insists that “kuntum” in the verse is not to be understood as a designation of a past reality, but rather a turn of phrase indicating a permanent state. Nonetheless, this special status of the Muslim community is tied to and explai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1 Emergence of modern citizenship
• Part 2 Formation of citizenship from above
• Part 3 Social movements and formation of citizenship from below
• Part 4 Mechanism of inclusion and exclusion
• Part 5 Migration and regulation of citizenship and nationality
• Index