Religious Revivalism and the Secular State

One of the most controversial phenomena observed in the mid and especially the second half of the twentieth century is the extraordinary increase in the role of religion in public and private life. This unprecedented escalation of religious activism forced in some cases the national governments to adjust their political vector to the religious demands of society, while in others led to the overthrow of civil governments, thus transforming secular states in religious ones. Moreover, it seems that the revitalization of religious values is not a phenomenon bound to a specific type of society with a particular set of political, economic or social values but affects all types of states independent of their religion, geographic location or form of political organization. In this sense, we could follow the rise and fall of a wide variety of revivals taking place around the world throughout the twentieth century, in particular. For instance, Garfein (n.a.) notes the occurrence of sixteen different revivals taking place in the United States alone. Not all of them have had a fundamental impact upon American society even though some have left behind significant changes. Other sizeable revival movements have also been witnessed in South and East Asia, such as the revivalism of Sikhs and Muslims in pre-independent India (Fox 1985) and the tremendous increase in the number of adherents to religious cults in modern China. Concurrently, the dissolution of the Soviet Union brought up massive religious revivals of the Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches. Nevertheless, despite their cardinal dissimilarities in the form of revivalist manifestations, none of the above-mentioned revivals challenged seriously the authority of the state as an institutional structure. Moreover, none of them undercut the established political legal procedures.

A notably different trajectory could be observed in the case of some Islamic revivalist movements in the Middle East. Unlike in the above-mentioned revivals, the increase in the religious activity in the states with a majoritarian Muslim population directly challenged the authority of governments and represented at times a serious threat to the peaceful secular political process. Thus, we might notice an increase in political Islamic activity in Egypt during the 1970s and 1980s in particular that has led to the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. Moreover, the radicalization of Islamist movements in Iran led to the outbreak of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the overthrow of the Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’s secular regime. Also, the increase in religious fervor in the Muslim Pakistan region, in the end of the 1960s, led the army leaders to encroach and to topple down the civil government and to transform the country into an Islamic state. Hence, in some instances religious revivalism threatens the existence of the secular state and the civil political institutions and practices while in other cases it does not.  

Consequently, the research question that I raise in this paper out of this puzzle is why does revivalism pose a threat to the civil governments in states with a predominantly Muslim religion while in states with a largely Christian society it does not threaten the central political power? I argue that revivalism in states with a majoritarian Muslim society displays a much tougher impact on the political system than in the states with majoritarian Christian society. This amplified effect of the religious revival in the political sphere is caused by the relatively low level of legitimacy of current secular regimes in predominant Muslim societies and by its legal capacity to substitute the secular political system. Moreover, the increased role of Islam in this region is a consequence of its dual image. From the onset, Islam emerged as both a political and a spiritual doctrine, which was used as the language, or semiotic code of the political discourse. Closer to modernity, especially with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, and the beginning of colonization and persecution for anti-colonial struggle, Islam became a mass vehicle for social resistance. Hence, it also represented the engine for the promotion of collective mobilization for civil, social, and political rights.

Conversely, religious revivalism in predominantly Christian societies historically has not threatened the state civil authorities and has not undermined the established political process. The reason behind this different scenario I argue is the different nature and target of revivalism. Christian revivals emerged as a reaction to the intrusion of the government in the moral and spiritual realm of society. Moreover, they promoted reforms that were targeted at the institution of the Church as such or, addressed the “moral vacuum” rather than the political one that existed in societies at different points in history. Finally, Christian revivalism used successfully or unsuccessfully the political institutional framework to achieve its desired social reforms and did not attempt to change the extant political institutions or the secular state as a whole. It activated within the political organization of the state which oftentimes was based on values drawn from the Christian religion.      

In order to develop my thesis in this paper I begin with a comprehensive analysis of the concept of revivalism in the academic literature and how such concepts as Jeremiah, collective memory, Golden Age and nostalgia shape a better understanding the term. Next, I give my own definition of the term which I will base my further hypothesis on. Consequently, I analyze several cases of revivalism in Muslim countries to see the impact of these revivalisms upon civil governments. I try to contrast them with revivalisms in western countries, in particular to the United States.

Conceptualizing Revivalism

It seems that the meaning of the word revivalism varies across time and field of study. In its common application it means a return to previous values or increase in interest in something that has already passed. Thus, this term is commonly applied in literature, art, architecture and astronomy. Yet, the sense of revitalization is not as flat even in its most common application because the return to former or traditional values does not imply that the application of the same values to a new context will lead automatically to similar results. Wallace (1956), for instance, defines a revitalization movement, more specific, as “a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture” (265).

Moreover, the largest application of the concept of revivalism is related to the field of religious studies and mainly to Christian religion. In this sense, Oxford Dictionary describes religious revivalism as “a general reawakening of or in religion in a particular community or church” and “arose of religious fervor …. by means of lively evangelistic services”.  Though, assuming that history provides us with fragmented narratives about diverse religious revivals which took place in the last several centuries, the following question is whether we should analyze the fragmented revival as a part of the same phenomena manifested in ebbs and flows of intensity, or each revival should be seen as an independent act with its separate genesis and end?

In this sense, the literature on the conceptualization of the term has not reached a consensus. The supporters of the cyclical understanding (McLoughlin 1978) affirm that the religious revival passes through a number of cycles. Consequently, analyzing the American revivalist movements, McLoughlin mentions that United States passed through four Great Awakenings (term used by him for revivalism) within the periods 1730-1760, 1800-1830, 1890-1920 and 1960-1990. According to him, the Awakening is the reaction of a particular society to political instabilities and the newly accepted values throughout history. Thus, he insists that the Awakening is not an isolated religious phenomenon but a reaction of the church to the changes in moral principles, such as honesty, frugality, and piety.  A similar view is taken by Marvin (cited in Long 1994) who describes revivalism as a “supernatural act of God to restore the church from a decline in ‘primitive purity of doctrine’” (84).

The critics of the cyclical understanding of revivalism underline the approach’s incapability to analyze revivalism in a larger historical context. Thus, analyzing revivalism in Islamic societies, Davis (1987) observes that this particular approach fails “to address in the systematic manner the nature of socio-economic changes” (36). Thus, the solution that he proposes is not to analyze revivalism as a discontinuity but to look at it as a form of relation between Islam and politics or, in other words, the politicization of Islam.

On the other hand, the supporters of the linear model (Smith and Conan cited in Long 1994) understand revivalism as a continuous process of spread of religious beliefs. In this context, analyzing the similarities in the aspects of revivals of Old School Presbyterian and Reformed Dutch coalition and New School Presbyterians, Baptists and Congregationalists, Conan (cited in Long 1994) emphasizes that revivals develop in stages. Therefore, he mentions:

“We are now … in the fourth great revival under the gospel dispensation. The first commenced in Pentecostal times… The second commenced in the time of Martin Luther … The third was in the days of Edwards, and Whitefield, and the Tennants. The fourth is that which now pervades our country” (82).   

Having presented the mainstream debate on the central components of revivalism the following question is what are the internal and external conditions, which lead masses to join revivalist movements? Why individuals magnify the role of the past and why do they venture to transpose it into the future? How do the feelings of personal discontent with the present become a part of the collective grievance to change the future? In this context, we can observe that the public manifestation of revivalism has at its basis a personal predisposition of the individual to look at his own past with an increased degree of mystical admiration, and consecutively, to try to exteriorize it by creating nets of social alliances of solidarity. At the basis of public discontent stays a hidden image about an idealized past. The larger is the discomfort with the present, the greater is the illusion that the past time was better. This type of admiration is mostly defined by scholarship as nostalgia or homesickness. In this context, for Murphy (2009a) “nostalgia serves important psychological functions, including building a sense of personal identity, defending against existential crises that arise in times of rapid social change, and bolstering social bonds among groups and generations” (131). Considering the fact that homesickness most often affects people who leave their homeland, theorists recognize that nostalgia is a psychological mechanism that connects the individual with a certain place. In this regard, Boym (2001) adds that nostalgia is not only the longing for a place but also longing for a specific time, which is not necessarily retrospective but can also be prospective.

On the other hand, Boym (2001) emphasizes that nostalgia can bear a great deal of danger because “it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one” (xvi). Consequently, the author mentions that “in extreme cases [nostalgia] can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die and kill” (xvi). Consequently, Boym distinguishes between two types of nostalgia, restorative and reflective. As she posits, the political application of the first type of nostalgia is extremely dangerous because its proselytes do not perceive nostalgia as a fragmented image of a segmented truth but as an absolute “project of truth”. On the contrary, the reflective type of nostalgia recognizes the shortcomings of the past but try to construct the future taking the past as a spiritual fundament.

Thus, having determined that nostalgia is a psychological comforting mechanism that reacts against the uncertainty of the present, the question is how the personal understanding of reality shapes the pattern of collective behavior. In this regard, one can observe that many political entrepreneurs tended to use the image about history (real or imagined) to lure the public into idealized political projects. In this sense, I will review several scholarly analyzed mechanisms of how individualized nostalgia becomes a platform for collective grievances.

The first, in this sense, is the use of nostalgic politics, which means the appeal to psychological mechanisms of nostalgia to manage political and/or social change rather than to deal with personal issues. In other words, the nostalgic politics tends to externalize the personal feelings of history by bringing them into the public space and to shape from them a coagulated system of political grievances.

The second is the concept of collective memory, which is close in meaning to the notion of nostalgic politics. The difference is that, it switches the level of analysis from individual to community. Thus, for Baker (cited in Zerubaverl 1994) collective memory is a “kind of history that has most influence upon the life of the community and the course of events in the history that common people carry around in their heads” (3). In addition, Halbwachs (cited in Zerubaverl 1994) shows that the perception in history of one group is different from the history itself. The history entering into the collective memory is a recyclable subject, which is used for the political reconstruction and for adjustments in future political projects. In this sense, Davis (2005) and Hourani (1991) agree with Schwartz (cited in Zerubaverl 1994) who argues that “the past cannot be construed; it can only be selectively exploited” (5).

The next concept, which tries to understand the preconditions for religious revivalism is the Golden Age. Similarly to nostalgia, the Golden Age makes an appeal to revive or to reconstruct an image of the collective memory about an idealized past. Yet, differently from the last, it does not try to build its “ideal” version of political model on any of the lived experiences but digs much deeper into history, stretching its arguments from historical beginnings or from the time of glory. In this context, Lowenthal (cited in Murphy 2009a) labels Golden Age as “an imaged landscape invested with all [critics] missing in the modern world” (130).

As a result, taking a general view over the three analyzed concepts we can observe that all notions bear some similarities. All of them generate their images of the future based on individual emotions about the past, and all of them contrast their idolized historical models against the corrupted image of the present. Consequently, considering that the precondition for the outbreak of a mass revival is due to a sophisticated arrangement of all the puzzle pieces about reality, the question that pop up is who is the promoter and who shapes the contrast how past and present should be understood?

The answer to this question could be found in Murphy’s Prodigal Nation (2009b), who describes Jeremiads as the main agents who emphasize the discontinuity between the past and present. Consequently, as the scholar mentions, jeremiads “[lament] a current crisis, identifying a historical point in time where the source of decline was introduced” (83). In this context, the jeremiads deconstruct the image of history. They select and put together only those segments that prove their diagnosis of the present ills. Thus, on the one hand, they appeal to the personal feeling of nostalgia, and on the other hand, they are the active agencies of reconstruction of the images of collective memory and Golden Age. Accordingly, as Murphy (2009b) states, by appealing to this method they distort the reality twice: firstly, by denigrating the present and secondly, by exalting the past. Hence the success of jeremiads’ projects is the reflection of their capacity to create an alternative attractive version of history, which is desired to be transposed into present, and the most important, their capacity to coagulate all nostalgically oriented individuals to share a unique identity and to start a collective action.

In order to introduce some clarity in my further analysis about the difference between patterns of Christian and Muslim revivalisms, the concept will be used as a combination of elements and factors mentioned in the analyzed scholarly literature. Revivalism, in this sense, will be understood as a sudden intensification in religious activity in the public sphere as a reaction to the radical social changes taking place in society, aiming to restore traditional values and norms either by using the political mechanisms available, if these permit, or otherwise by overthrowing the existing political system.

Legitimacy of Secular States

Muslim Societies

At the beginning of 1970s the secular Bhutto regime in Pakistan was forced to adjust its policy to the increasing demands of the rising revival of the fundamentalist Islamic movements. The start was given by constraining the power to accept the Islamic signs as state symbols and continued by prohibiting the sale of alcohol, banning gambling and shutting down all night-clubs, restaurants and other kinds of night entertaining venues. Apparently, all these adjustments did not appease the raising claims of the Islamists who intended to transform Pakistan into an Islamic state. Consequently, the pan-Islamists formed an electoral alliance (Pakistan National Alliance) made of the major religious parties such as Jama’at al-Islami, to reach the public offices and to change the state from within. The platform of the alliance was based on the demands listed in the manifesto, which according to them was based on Qur’an. Moreover, after losing the elections, the Islamists openly supported the Pakistan’s military leader in his pursuit to power. Thus, in 1977, the chief of army Shaff Zia al Haq, together with a number of other officers, arranged a coup thus removing Bhutto and its government from power. Next, Al-Haq suspended the working constitution and declared the martial law. In the same year the insurgents formed a joint government with Islamists.

The undertaken reforms of the upcoming period focused on the fundamental change of both the state structure and of the basics of the Pakistani society. In this context, one of the reforms was the creation of a Council for Islamic Ideology whose purpose was to work into the direction of islamisation of the Pakistani society. The “islamisation touched on all areas relating to Islam and public life, including prayer, Ramadan, social issues such as segregation, economic reform, shari’a and the rights of women”  (Milton-Edwards 2005: 61). Thus, the final purpose of the newly created government was the transformation of Pakistan from a Muslim state into an Islamic one. This example gives a general picture of the lawlessness of the civil rule in Muslim societies, such as Pakistan. Why did it happen?

In this section I try to argue that the low capacity of secular states in predominantly Muslim societies to face the increasing advance of religious revivals in the 1970s and the 1980s is due to the lower level of political legitimacy of civil governments in front of their populations. This decreased acceptability was especially emphasized by the increased legitimacy of Islam. In this sense, both the political borders and the political system skeletons of the modern postcolonial states, such as Pakistan, were mostly duplicated from their former metropolis or were arbitrarily imposed by the former rulers. Thus the new political entities were formed without many consultations of the ordinary inhabitants of those territories. Consequently, many of those artificially included into the newly formed political organization were members of different clans and kinships which indwelled diverse territories. They also had different traditions and practiced different versions of Islam. Therefore, it is hard to imagine that just in several decades of independence the populace of such states acquired a sense of loyalty to a remote government sometimes composed of members of another clan. Accordingly, there was a huge gap of trust, transformed into very low legitimacy, between the political leaders of the laic state and the local population. Thereby Islam appeared for many states as the only shared value among these various kinships which was in different historical periods embraced by both the political regime leaders as well as their challengers.

In this sense, Karpat (2001) mentions that when the Ottoman Empire started to crumble, Sultan Abdulhamid intensely used Islam as a unifying ideology between all Muslim territories without challenging local rules and customs. A similar example is attested in the case of the Sadat secular regime that deliberately resorted to Islamic symbols in the 1973 war against Israel. Numerous radical Islamic movements interpreted the military defeat of the Egyptian army as a price paid for its deviation from Islam. Consequently, the rising criticism against Nasser drastically decreased the legitimacy of the laic political regime, hence forcing Sadat to recover it by embracing Islam closer to his governance.

On the other hand, the legitimacy of Islamic revivalist movements in the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was growing. Their effects were aggrandized by placing a substantial focus on social, economic and cultural goals. Islam, in this context, was used as an engine for promoting new values. Thereby, the late nineteen-century Islamic revival in India triggered the development of Urdu language. Similarly, the nineteen-century Sufi revival in the remainings of the Ottoman state is considered by Karpat (2001) to be “a form of grassroots Islamic democracy” (23).

Another important factor, which enhanced the superior legitimacy of Islam, was its intensive propaganda against colonial domination. The anti-colonial component of the Islamic revival was even more accentuated in the regions where the foreign domination did not accept any form of antagonist political manifestations. The religious discourse, in this case, became a script, or a hidden transcript, understood only by those who shared the local code of meanings. While some revivals tended to upkeep a hidden anti-colonial message, others openly displayed their political intentions. In this context, we can mention the Sayyid Ahmad’s brotherhood revival in the nineteenth century, which shortly became a mass political movement, which in parallel with its religious agenda, openly tried to mobilize the Muslim part of the Indian society against the British domination (Karpat: 31). Another increase in the Islamic revitalization was observed in the case of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This attack coagulated together many dormant religious forces from the whole region. Thus throughout the war against the Soviets, the Islamic fundamentalists oriented their resistance against the communist occupation (Milton-Edwards 2005: 77).

            Moreover, the low economic performance and inability to provide the majority of population with minimum standards of living were two of the main features that stopped the secular governments from achieving a sufficient level of legitimacy in front of their population. The encouragement of a liberalist “open door” policy (infitah) by the Sadat regime in Egypt in times of a deep economic crisis during which thousands of employees lost their jobs and the food prices magnified dramatically, and the massive discontent with the state economic policy were inflated by the intensification of the religious activity of the Islamic Brotherhood which kept stressing the illegitimate character of the promoted policy and the institutionalized secular political process. Thus, Sadat was considered to be a barrier for the state advancement that deviated from the ‘true’ form of Islamic society. In this context, one of the radical leaders, Ahmad Shukri Mustafa stated:

“I reject the Egyptian regime and the Egyptian reality in all its aspects since everything in it is in contradiction to the shari’a and belongs to heresy… we demand a return to natural simplicity and reject the so-called modern progress” (Hopwood 1986: 118).

Another dimension of the discontent on behalf of the majority of population, who contributed to the de-legitimization of the political institutions, was the inability of the state apparatus to ensure a proportional level of wealth accumulation. Thus, the implementation of both the Nasserite “socialism” and its successor, the liberal “open door” policy, emphasized the differential accumulation character of the Egyptian economy. Consequently, the increased pauperization of a large part of the population was perceived to be the result of the abuse of power by the oligarchic elites who used their political offices for the advancement of private self-interests. As a result, according to Davis (1984), the “[differential accumulation] contributed to de-legitimization of both capitalist and socialist development models” leading to a “crisis of authenticity by creating an ideological vacuum which a militant political interpretation of Islam could fill” (139). Consequently, as the scholar argues, the social impact of Muslim Brotherhood over the Egyptian society was so strong because it framed its ideology to reach the support of the town middle class who were the main losers in the process of differential accumulation. 

The Christian American Society

Christian as well as Muslim revivals have at their basis large social transformations such as urbanization, immigration, and the birth of a consumer society (Murphy 2009b: 81). McLoughlin (2007), in his discussion of the origins of the First Great Awakening (1730-1760), also mentions the “rapid social change” and “changing structures of authority and power” (52-53). He talks about the transformation of society during the English settlers from Gemeinschaft, or a community-based society, to Gesellschaft (the society where the individual self-interest prevails the community interest) where religious values and the word of God could be interpreted by ordinary individuals. Values such as wealth, luxury, and more general personal economic ambition were replacing traditional values of honesty, diligence, and frugality. It is possible to notice structural similarities with the Muslim societies that have been discussed earlier.

Yet, Christianity has never posed a threat to the secular rule in Christian societies. All its claims have been extended within the institutional framework of the state thus religion has never attempted to overthrow the state institutions. The legitimacy of the state as an institutional construct, in this sense, has never been under attack by any religious groups or movements. The religious revivalist discourse became oftentimes a part of the political discourse but without any attempts to overthrow the existing legal institutional structure. Why is it the case?

Christian revivals, like the Muslim, put in contrast the pathologies of the present with the virtues of the past. In this sense, I will quote Dan Quayle (cited in Murphy 2009b: 78) who I think best describes the nature of religious claims in American society in the 1990s: “the lawless social anarchy that we [see] is directly related to the breakdown of the family structure, personal responsibility, and social order in too many areas of our society” (78). Hence, he sees a rupture of the present from the previously “dominant religious teachings”.

Moreover, Quayle talks about the development of “a culture of poverty” that has resulted from social transformations taking place in the moral realm. In a broader context, the Christian Right narrative, as Murphy mentions, presents the American nation as being “awash in sin and the fruits of sin” such as increased criminality, high rates of divorce, drug use, media violence, and dishonesty (88). In addition, the two central issues that stay at the heart of American moral decay, as George Weigel puts it (cited in Murphy 2009b), is abortion and gay rights (89). Hence, the social transformations in the 1980s and 1990s brought along a turn away from religious principles and values that created a “moral vacuum” in public life, as Neuhaus puts it, space that was exploited by Christian Right religious revivalist movements (98).

So it is noticeable that the dissatisfactions that are at the basis of American religious revivals in this period are socio-cultural in nature and aim to address the problems that exist only in this realm of society. This has been noted by Wallace (1956: 264-5) who discusses religious revitalization (used for revivalism) as a “conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture”. It has been also discussed by Murphy who describes the Christian Right’s involvement in bringing change in the moral-cultural realm (87). Finally, McLoughlin (2007) amongst other authors addressing the issue of revivalism in Christian context, also notes that the moral-cultural aspect of societies is at the core of the changes that religious revivalism is targeting.  

Moreover, the reforms that are proposed by the religious revival movement are developed within the political institutional structure. As Murphy (2009b) describes in the Prodigal Nation, Quayle designed a political roadmap for his envisioned reforms that was transformed into a political program with the support of President Bush, which promoted home ownership, personal responsibility, community-based policing, the encouragement of marriage, and the implementation of child support payments (79). This example is just one of the many that are embedded in the history of the rise of the Christian Right in the period between the Civil War and World War II that Murphy addresses in his piece.

In this context, Christian Right activists entered politics in the 1980s as a reaction to the growing role of the federal government into areas of moral and religious concern, as Carl Henry notes (cited in Murphy 2009b: 84). Yet, as Murphy notes, the lack of tangible policy achievements, such as the reelection of Bill Clinton and the inability to pass a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion practices, doomed the movement to failure in terms of its involvement in American politics (85).

If we go back into American history, more illustrations of this kind can be identified. The Evangelical United Front (EUF), for example, even though involved in politics, sought social reforms rather than political, by trying to substitute external constraints with the “inner discipline of morality” (193). An example portrayed by Hadden and Shupe (1989) in this sense is the EUF’s prison reform. Hence, the Evangelists managed to lobby for the introduction of the “corrective” element in prisons, thus reshaping the function and meaning of such institutions. Hence, by reconceiving the prison as a place for correction, the authors consider that it is appropriate to interpret this reform as encouraging “responsible personal autonomy” (193). This example illustrates again the different nature of reforms sought by religious movements that had access to politics.          

Another example is the early revivals in American society. During the First Great Awakening, political strings have been used to restructure the Church as an institution. In this context, it is worth noticing that no social reforms were targeted and politics were left untouched also. McLoughlin (2007), in this context, describes the efforts to fundamentally reform the Congregational churches as well as to achieve legal exemption from religious taxes by the Separate Baptist dissenters by petitioning the towns, legislatures, even the King in Council as well as the Continental Council to change the tax laws (67). Moreover, McLoughlin talks about the role of Edwards, who is considered, according to him, to be the theological leader of the First Great Awakening. Even so, “there is scarcely a word in all his [Edwards] writings to justify social reform, and nothing on politics” (71). This leads me to think that the First Great Awakening was targeting the reform of the church as an institution, rather than the state, in any of its dimensions. 

Yet, it should be mentioned that the First Great Awakening did have a political impact, at least in the perception and writings of Bushman (cited in McLoughlin 2007). He says that out of this religious revival “came a new concept of government and public good based on the reciprocal interest of the governed and the governing” (79). The author however does not consider this change in governing values to be an intentional outcome of the First Great Awakening but rather a side effect of the revitalization of society as a whole.               

Here it should be mentioned that there is a significant difference behind the reasoning of Muslim revival activists to get involved into politics. It is namely the divide between state and religion that secular governments in Muslim societies try to achieve that represent the main issue that Muslim fundamentalists do not want to see realized. This is because in Islam, religion penetrates both the public and the private, and it is considered that it should stay like this. In the American society, on the other hand, religious activists protest against the intrusion of the state into religious and moral matters, hence they want to see a clear separation of state and religion.

Furthermore, a significant difference between the Christian and Muslim activism in terms of bringing back the traditional values is that many American religious fundamentalists engaged in the civic sphere rather than in the political realm to promote their “mission”. Civic activism rather than political involvement was perceived to be a more efficient tool to promote a return to traditional Christian values. Hence, many fundamentalists started their own educational programs, established Bible study institutes, appeared on radio and television shows, and taught religious fundamentalist seminaries across the country. Billy Graham is probably one of the best illustrative examples in this context who promoted a political agenda of enhancing religious revivalism not only in the United States but around the world, and still never got into politics per se. 

Yet, there are prominent earlier examples in Christian history of the American society, such as the Beecher family. Lyman Beecher, in this sense, is of the many illustrations of the power of religious voluntarism, as Hadden and Shupe (1989) put it. He is the founder of numerous reform movements in the early nineteenth century that contributed to the positive social changes taking place in the American society during its crucial process of transition to industrialization and urbanization. He started by addressing the stringent problem of alcoholism that affected both rural and urban areas. By encouraging temperance, he brought innovation for the traditional Christian values. Yet, as Hadden and Shupe note, Beecher never considered that the legal prohibition of alcohol in this sense would represent a viable solution of the problem. He relied on changing the public attitudes towards this social vice. Hence he founded the American Temperance Society in 1826, a voluntary association that was taken later as a model for other reform movements, and became a “conspicuous feature of American society” (168). His children and wife followed Lyman’s example by trying to reform their society along moral and religious issues.     

Another example is the revivalism of the early Methodists. They organized three to four hundred gatherings annually in the form of camp meetings by offering people opportunities to socialize and communicate (Hadden and Shupe 1989: 177). Further on they also established colleges and theological seminaries for training a more professional ministry. As the authors note, there were only fifty Methodist congregations before the American Revolution and this number skyrocketed to twenty thousand just before the Civil War (180). Again, this is another example where change in society was not sought through political means and did not pose any threat to the secular government as such. Christian revivalism, at least in the American society, took place in the social realm and was embracing change in society rather than in politics.      

            To conclude on this section, the legitimacy of the secular state suffers greatly because of firstly how it was brought to Muslim societies in the first place, but also because of the way it handles the current socio-economic issues. Moreover, the social and cultural transformations brought by modernity have also been attributed to the secular state. Yet, we see that the Christian societies suffer from the same decay in traditional values but religious revivalism here did not attempt to blame the secular state for these changes.

Religious Rule - A Surrogate for the Secular Governance

             

            Religious revivalism in the predominantly Muslim societies poses a serious threat to the secular governance and to the established political process. This threat is conditioned by the viable alternative to secular governing which is being offered by the Muslim religion. Thus, differently from the Christian religion, Islam establishes a set of norms doomed to administrate not only the moral and social relations but also offers a model of political community organization. Consequently, Islamic ideology is not a simple virtual model, which could be potentially implemented but is a pattern of a successful ideology associated in the collective memory with the potent state of Mohammed and the Golden Age of the Arab world. Thus, the politicization of Islam is not a consequence of the Islamic revivals of the twentieth century but constitutes a part of the Islamic tradition. Consequently, as Bergesen (2007) rightly mentions “Muhammad was active among warring tribes and had to take political action if he was to accomplish his mission. The religion could not survive without communal embodiment, and the community could not survive without defense. Hence it had to have political organization” (11-12). Thus, by embedding political practices into the Islamic religion provided the political leaders with a high level of popular credibility. This deistic legitimacy was massively applied both to justify their military actions and to establish a coagulated system of administration of communal social relations. Moreover, as Bergesen (2007) maintains, “thanks to the environment in which it originated, Islam was thus embodied in a political organization almost from the start: umma was a congregation and state together” (12).

The conditions were essentially different in the Christian case. Christianity developed as a religion of opposition, which had to challenge the central authority of the Roman Empire. Therefore, when accepted as an official imperial faith it had to accommodate itself to the state ideology thus acquiring only the administration over the souls, while Caesar continued to maintain the political authority. Islam in the same time did not have this dilemma as it originated without this division.

            The high capacity of the Islamic rule to create a viable alternative to the secular form of governance is also due to the divine nature of the legitimacy the system is sanctioned with. In this sense, any political system that legitimizes its existence on legal or rational reasoning is perceived by a Muslim to be of an inferior quality comparing to the holy character of the rule in the name of God.  For that reason, Qutb mentions in one of his religious writings the special role, which should be attributed to God in the hierarchy of social relations (Bergesen 2007). Hence, by emphasizing the distinction between the creator and his creation, Qutb implies that any kind of lawful legitimacy could be sourced only from the highest levels of the ladder of authority, which in the case of the Muslim states is Allah. In other words, the construction of the state apparatus based on secular principles and mainly the exercise of the legal system, which do not rely on, or breach the holly writings, usurps God’s sovereignty. Thereby, for Qutb any form of democratic regimes is doomed to destruction, as it does not hold the mandate of sovereignty. Even if Qutb is highly criticized for presenting an idealized and unsustainable model of governance, which does not provide the reader with an intelligible explanation of how the legitimacy could be practically transferred from the holy authority to the mundane administration he, nevertheless, shows that the civil administration should strictly follow the word of Qur’an, hadith and sunnas. These writings, according to him, contain all necessary norms and rules necessary to regulate the social conduit. In this regard, the emerging question is how applicable are the sharia rules established in the following centuries after Mohamed’s death to the present complex social relations?

            The Sharia legislative system is a continuously modernizing system, which could successfully replace the existing modern legal system based on rationalization of the legal procedures. In this context, we should look at two major components, first Sharia’s authority in comparison to the authority of the present secular system and secondly, its capacity to face the multitude of existing social relations which were not mentioned in the religious texts as they did not exist to the time of Mohammed’s life and the codification of holy texts.

            Consequently, I will proceed to the second part as the first argument was already thoroughly explained in the previous section. In Islam, Qur’an constitutes the apex of hierarchy of religious texts. Nevertheless, speaking in strictly legal terms, it could barely be called a book of law since it is comprised of a very limited number of bounding commands. According to Zubaida (2005), only about five hundred verses contain a sense of legal content. This small number of regulations could be treated equivocally. On the one hand, the small number of regulations is insufficient to create a sense of justice or could establish this justice only in undeveloped societies, which have a very limited variety of social relations. On the other hand, they determine the meaning of law, which establishes the moral context based on which the action should be judged. In the same time, the flexibility of interpretation is a good platform to be filled in with the necessary set of laws that would respond to the current necessities and which would not enter in contradiction with those clearly stipulated in the Qur’an.

            Concurrently, the sharia system incorporates also the prophetic tradition of hadith as well as the saying of Prophet sunna which were included in an unified system of sharia only after two centuries. All of them, as Crone and Hinds (1986) argue, trace their sources from pre-Islamic society. Furthermore, they are continuously modernized with the support of legal schools interpretations and istihsan (the preferences of lawyers), ‘aql (reason) and ra’y (lawyer’s opinion). Thus, the modern sharia system cannot be compared in its content with the Islamic law that existed just after the death of the prophet Mohammed. Therefore, the current version of sharia could guide a much larger number of social relations and could face the needs of modern societies.

To conclude on this section, Islam does provide a viable alternative to the secular political governance unlike Christianity which only offers a pattern for moral and social conduct. Because it has the necessary components to regulate a society or the necessary framework to create additional institutional structures to sustain its existence, the Sharia law represents oftentimes the only alternative to the political opposition in Muslim societies living in secular states with weak democracies or authoritarian regimes that do not permit the development of a secular political opposition. 

Conclusion

In this paper I analyze the different effects that religious revivalisms have upon the political structures in states with predominantly Christian and Muslim societies. Consequently, I have argued that the Islamic revivalism threatens the state central authority and tends to substitute the secular rule with an Islamic one due to the low legitimacy of the laic political systems and high legitimacy of the religious institute. A totally different perspective could be observed in the case of Christian revivalist movements. Unlike the Muslim cases, they do not challenge the state political structures because they accommodate themselves to the extant political settings and consequently use them in order to fill the social moral vacuum left outside the political discourse.

In order to establish the difference between the effects of both types of revivalisms I explored the existing scholarly literature and identified the main criteria, which best describe the features for the investigated Islamic and Christian revivals. Thus in my argumentation by revivalism I mean a sudden intensification in religious activity in the public sphere as a reaction to the radical social changes taking place in society, aiming to restore traditional values and norms either by using the political mechanisms available, if these permit, or otherwise by overthrowing the existing political system.

My first argument is that the Muslim secular states were extremely fragile in the face of religious revivals because, first they faced a very low level of popular legitimacy and second, the legitimacy of the Islamic jeremiads were based on the idealized understanding of the value of Mohamed’s state. The second argument shows that the secular governments experience a major threat on behalf of Islamic revivalist movements because the Muslim religious mode of governance constitutes a viable alternative to the secular political systems. Consequently, both the religious authorities endowed with political attributes and the legal system of sharia pull their legitimacy from the divine sources. And finally, I argue that in addition to its sacral source of legitimacy, the Islamic legal system of sharia is able to compete with the rational-based secular legal systems because it has also passed through a long path of modernization and is able to respond to the multivariate types of social relations of modernity.

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