The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

coup d’état

During the 1950s and 1960s, numerous Muslim countries saw secret cliques of officers successfully conspire to overthrow the incumbent civilian government. In Egypt, for example, the Free Officers abrogated the monarchy after their 1952 coup. Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) then advanced to the leadership position, replacing the original figurehead of the coup, General Muhammad Naguib. Nasser did not rely on the army simply to seize power; he inserted loyal military personnel at all levels of the state apparatus to consolidate his control. In contrast, military rule in Syria proved more difficult to institutionalize, with three successive coups in 1949 alone; civilian government was reestablished in 1954 when a military faction overthrew the authoritarian military ruler. Syrian officers opposed to Nasser later forced an end to Syria’s political union with Egypt in 1961, while the Arab Socialist Ba‘th Party installed itself as Syria’s new ruler in the coup of March 8, 1963; factional struggles resulted in additional coups in 1966 and 1970. Iraq witnessed its first coup in 1936, but the monarchy was not permanently overthrown until July 14, 1958. A 1963 coup by the Iraqi Ba‘th Party was reversed the same year; the Ba‘th Party seized power more decisively in July 1968. In Iran, royalist forces supported by the United States overthrew nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh (1882–1967) in the coup of 1953. Coups also occurred in Libya (1969), Yemen (1955, 1962), Turkey (1960, 1971, and 1980), and Pakistan (1956, 1977, and 1999).

In the Arab Middle East, this wave of military coups is perhaps best understood as the reassertion of local political forces following a period of more or less direct European rule. Upon independence, political life was typically dominated by traditional elites whose positions were bound up in the distorted patterns of socioeconomic order inherited from colonialism. Unwilling to accommodate increasingly vocal demands from below and unable to respond effectively to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the old elites lost all credibility and were unable to contain the mounting pressure for change. As military service had long been disdained by these elites, the army provided a unique channel for the mobilization of political actors from traditionally marginalized social strata.

Western scholarship has passed through several stages in its efforts to explain what appears to be a recurrent tendency of Muslim countries to produce military rule. Early work highlights the long tradition of military government in Islam, as exemplified by the Mamluk dynasties. However, deterministic claims regarding political culture have difficulty explaining cases where civilian regimes remain in power. Other social scientists note the institutional fragility of postcolonial Muslim states and conclude that the army’s political strength was positive. Military regimes generally advocated radical socioeconomic reform, leading some scholars to identify them as prime agents of modernization. The decline in military interventionism since the 1960s has been explained by the notion of “coup proofing,” which proposes that the expanding size and complexity of the military apparatus has made it virtually impossible for conspirators to turn the whole organization against the chain of command.

While much academic attention has been devoted to military rule, far less has been given to the question of whether it is appropriate to call military seizures of power in the Arab-Muslim world “coups.” The conceptual distinction between “coup” and “revolution” may be evident in English, but it is less clear-cut in Arabic. Since the radicalization of politics in the 1960s under the influence of Nasser, thawra has been used to imply the depth of social and political change associated with “revolution.” (Prior to this, its meaning was closer to “revolt.”) In contrast, the change of personnel involved in a coup is dismissed as a “mere” inqilāb. Yet in the 1940s and 1950s, the meaning of the words was almost the reverse. Officers who carried out Iraq’s first military coup in 1936 called it an inqilāb; thawra still had a strong negative connotation in contemporary writings. Early Ba‘thist texts describe the party as “revolutionary”—inqilābī, not thawrī. Not until 1963 did Ba‘thists adopt the Nasserist tradition of calling their coups thawra.

The evolving lexicon of military politics highlights the extent to which social phenomena are constructed by linguistic convention. The distinction between coup and revolution hinges on the presence or absence of mass participation when the new regime comes to power but says little about the policies, programs, or practices of those regimes. Drawing a line between coup and revolution on these grounds arguably expresses a normative preference for popular participation in politics more than it determines a difference of sociological kind.