Gellner devoted a very large part of his considerable energies to the study of Islam. The great labour which went into Saints of the Atlas was the mere tip of an iceberg, for his interest in Islam fanned out thereafter in many directions. This led to an engagement with French intellectual life, narrow at first but later with implications for his general social theory. As a teacher – at the LSE, as co-organizer, first with Ioan Lewis and then with Michael Gilsenan, of a postgraduate seminar for London University, and later at Cambridge – Gellner trained, as has been noted, a large number of researchers, the impact of whose work is only now being felt. He tirelessly supported research on Islamic societies. He served as president of the Maghreb Society, wrote two influential and widely cited books and more than thirty articles, reviewed more than fifty books, wrote prefaces for many monographs, fought for articles on Islam to be published in journals where he had influence, spoke at countless conferences and edited four collections of articles. He showed great interest in a series of Muslim societies, visiting and lecturing in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey and Lebanon, most notably, and took shorter trips to West Africa, Egypt, Jordan and Kazakhstan. His occasional pieces on some of these societies had a decisive intellectual impact.1 All of this led to the synoptic essay ‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’ that forms the core of his Muslim Society. This was nothing less than a general theory of the workings of a whole civilization, that of the arid Mediterranean heartland of Islam – and in modern as well as pre-modern circumstances.2 The political circumstances of the time, most notably the revolution in Iran and the apparent ‘revival’ of Islam elsewhere, led to the book receiving considerable attention – and this fact also accounts in part for the hostility it provoked in some quarters. Finally, he sought to generalize about the condition of nomads in the rest of the world. The most obvious expression of this was his analysis of the way in which this mode of production had been treated by Soviet Marxist thinkers. At the time of his death, he was actively planning a conference on neglected Orientalist questions, including that of the role played by nomads from the East when moving into the West.
This is an impressive record of engagement, clear indication of both the importance in itself of Gellner’s study of Islam, and as part of his general social theory. A contrast should be drawn here with his work in the sociology of nationalism. The constant fine-tuning of his view of nationalism is not matched in his work on Islam. Rather, his extensive writings mostly involve the spelling out of a single position; one has the feeling of a consistent theory rather than one replete with internal tensions.3 This chapter begins by concentrating on Gellner’s general theory of the workings of Islam, then considers the ways in which he sought to defend himself against his critics, and finally turns to an assessment of his contribution to this area of study. That review will consider his fieldwork in Morocco, as a standard charge against his general theory is that it is far too heavily based on the situation in North Africa.
‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, the long synoptic essay that opens Muslim Society, offers a general theory of the classic core of the Islamic world.4 In a sense it is curious that the formal presentation of this model came so late. Saints of the Atlas shows keen awareness of key elements of the social formation in question. More importantly, as early as 1964 David Hume’s sociology of religion was part of Gellner’s thinking as the key device for both understanding and presenting the nature of Islam. ‘A Pendulum Swing Theory of Islam’, published in 1969, served as a first version of the fully fledged theory published twelve years later.5 The fact that Hume is not even mentioned in Saints of the Atlas perhaps indicates Gellner’s desire to separate the particular from the general, his fieldwork from his more ambitious theorizing. The period after the publication of his first book – and particularly the academic year 1979–1980 at the Centre de Recherche et d’Études sur les Sociétés Méditerranéennes in Aix-en-Provence – was well spent, allowing for considerable deepening of his position. He absorbed many anthropological (but fewer historical) works on the Muslim world.6 Still more important were the lessons learned from studying the reformist movement in Algeria, a topic that occupied Gellner a great deal in the early 1970s. We will see in a moment how this affected his account of Islam in the modern world. But before looking at how the pendulum became unhinged, it is necessary to understand the way in which allusion to this piece of machinery helps us, in Gellner’s view, to understand pre-modern Islamic civilization.
We have already seen how important the work of David Hume was for Gellner’s analysis of knowledge and social development. At the core of Gellner’s ingenious use of Hume in the context of Islam is the view put forward in A Natural History of Religion of a ceaseless movement between monotheism and polytheism.7 The rigour of monotheism gives rise to the mediations of polytheism, the excessive corruption of which then makes the purity of monotheism attractive again – but only for a while, of course, before the pendulum swings back again. This notion fits with the binary opposition between doctor and saint, and with the sociological principles of Ibn Khaldun, allowing Gellner a particular theory of oscillation within pre-modern Islam. But let us also recall the way that Gellner explores a tension in Hume’s mind. On the one hand, Hume, as a member of the Enlightenment, admires polytheism, which is so close to paganism, on the grounds that it encourages toleration. On the other hand, he cannot bring himself, a Protestant Scot, to accept what he felt to be the corrupt polytheism of Catholicism, his own theory of knowledge resting upon an utterly rigorous, inner-directed sifting of impressions. Hume tried to find a way around this conflict when seeking to explain a certain anomaly – the fact that the puritanical enthusiasm of the English and the Dutch did not lead to political intolerance.8 Gellner refuses to accept Hume’s view that this was due to the ‘steady resolution of the civil magistrate’.9 He turns instead to ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’ for guidance, not least because Hume was himself ill at ease with his initial argument. The key phrase in Hume’s essay contrasting enthusiastic monotheism with pluralist superstition is, as we have seen, that ‘superstition is an enemy to civil liberty, and enthusiasm a friend to it’.10 This, of course, directly and absolutely contradicts the earlier view, not least by suggesting that much more is involved than the attitude of the state. Gellner proposes a resolution to this dilemma, never discovered by Hume, which depends upon knowing the context within which enthusiasts are set: their views are labile, so to speak – they take on different political complexions according to different circumstances.
[A]n ‘enthusiastic’ (monistic, puritan, scripturalistic) bourgeoisie may indeed be an enemy of liberty and a friend to the state, when caught between the state and tribesmen; while it may become a friend of liberty when it is weak enough to abandon hopes of imposing its forcible views on others, and yet has nothing other than the state monopoly of religion to fear, when the state has tamed or eliminated both baron and tribesman. It was perhaps this specific constellation which converted European enthusiasts to the value of liberty.11
A lack of this opposition at the level of social structure meant that the only movement within Islam was cyclical rather than developmental.12
‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’ joins together Hume’s pendulum swing theory with the political sociology of Ibn Khaldun. The great fourteenth-century Muslim diplomat and scholar had noted a circulation of elites, such that a tribe, blessed with the solidarity that resulted from the rigours of pastoral life, was able to resist the selfish asociality of urban life – but only for about three generations, before it too succumbed to corruption. Still, this circulation of elites was not fully explained in The Muqaddimah, despite occasional perceptive comments about the role of religion. A ruling house becomes vulnerable when it is weak and corrupt, but it is only doomed when it comes to be seen as impious.13 An unending political cycle gains its dynamic from the swing between religious styles. A learned doctor, revolted by the moral laxity of a city’s rulers, can go out to the tribes, shame them into abandoning their ecstatic rituals, and so unite them.14 If feuding is put aside, the united tribesmen become an impressive military force capable of attacking the city’s rulers, and commanded to do so for religious reasons. A single tribe can then take over the urban government. But the social solidarity engendered by the harshness of desert and mountain life cannot be maintained in the city – nor can education serve to inculcate equivalent virtue. Thus the stagnant cycle of Muslim politics is set to begin once again.
Gellner sums up his position by saying, accurately, that the formula of Islamic civilization is that of a culture which is stronger, more extensive and more continuous than the political life of any state within it. He sought to explain the strength of that culture, especially in light of its surprisingly strong hold over tribesmen with entrenched heterodox practices. If one element at work here was the fact that Islamic norms were purportedly fixed once and for all, that the ‘gates of interpretation’ had been closed in such a way as to make the doctrine non-manipulable for political purposes, Gellner nonetheless stressed that sociological factors best explained the situation. A minor factor was the centrality of the pilgrimage. But the major sociological variable, in Gellner’s eyes, was that the circulation of elites perpetually renewed the norms central to Islam. Certainly the cycle discouraged political interference with the ulama – so, of course, reinforcing their authority.15 The main form of social change that existed in the Muslim context helped to renew rather than to challenge its central normative tenets.
Gellner was well aware that the principles of Ibn Khaldun and Hume did not describe every social formation that existed within the traditional world of classical Islam.16 The Ottoman Empire was long-lived, stable and powerful. This was made possible by a system of rule that had nothing to do with the solidarity of a particular ruling kin group. To the contrary, the rulers of society, both military and bureaucratic, were specially recruited and trained, and they were in theory cut off from their kin backgrounds as slaves recruited by a special levy, the devshirme, from the Christian communities within the empire.17 Gellner suggests an explanation for this curious system of rule by slaves, anticipated by the Mamluks and still symbolically practised in the French Protectorate when Gellner first travelled to Morocco. Bluntly, this system of rule does not refute the model that he had sketched. Ibn Khaldun had noted that government could work in a rather different way in the absence of tribesmen. Differently put, states developed real capacity when they were able to gain stable tax revenues from peasants tied to the land.18 Indeed, the Ottomans had a political theory wholly different from that stressed by Ibn Khaldun. The ‘Circle of Equity’ stressed the importance of paying taxes so that the state could establish order – the essential precondition for the creation of the prosperity upon which taxation rested. The point about this theory was that tribesmen did not feature at all, whereas peasants were its very essence. All of this is to say that Gellner recognized the presence of an alternative model within Islam. But this did not mean that he felt it to be dominant. He rejected both Perry Anderson’s view that Ottoman-style rule replaced the imperfect system described by Ibn Khaldun, and Marshall Hodgson’s view that the Khaldunian system was confined to the middle periods of Islamic history, that is, that it was a mere interlude between more settled periods of imperial rule.19 The Ottoman system was unusual, but serious investigation often uncovered Khaldunian principles at work just beneath a veneer of stability.
This understanding of traditional Islam comprises only half of Gellner’s general theory. Given that his work as a whole is best seen as an interpretation of modernity, it is scarcely surprising to find that his views – themselves partly the product of his experience in North Africa – are systematic about the relationship of Islam to modernity. Let us examine the evolution of those views, before turning to their treatment in Muslim Society.
From the start, Gellner’s work expressed the realization that the puritanical option might be the more fruitful one in modern conditions, that the doctor might have a better hand to play than the saint. One crucial change was the greater effectiveness of the state: blessed with new military and transportation techniques, genuine penetration and control of an entire territory became a real possibility for the first time.20 The second important change was ideological. He had witnessed the impact of Egypt’s reform movement whilst undertaking his fieldwork in Morocco.21 A long 1963 review essay considered the life and times of an urban saint, Shaikh Ahmed al-’Alawi (1869–1934), who witnessed epochal social change.22 Al-’Alawi was under intense pressure to become more puritanical. The most significant source of this pressure was the fact that opposition to the French came to be led by puritanical ulama, whose nationalism included the idea that traditionalist, superstitious Islam should be reformed.
This is not to say that Gellner felt that the transition to modernity had only a single character. In ‘Post-traditional Forms in Islam’ he suggested that Islam itself comprised an ideological spectrum with strict adherence to the book at one end, and personal charisma at the other. In the early period of Islam, the puritanical extreme had been exemplified by the Kharejites, personal rule by the Shi’ites. In time, these extreme heresies were avoided, the tension between them represented by the contrast between ulama and sufior saint. When addressing Islam in modern circumstances, Gellner’s general concentration was on the legalistic and puritanical end of the spectrum, as we shall see, but the essay in question explored two successful versions of personal leadership within Islam. The economic success of the Shi’a Ismailis is explained in terms of the political connections established by the Aga Khans through mixing with upper-class British society. In contrast, the success of the sufi-led Mourides of Senegal owed everything to the political vacuum which allowed a group blessed with strong leadership to take advantage of particular economic opportunities.23
Nor did Gellner suggest that the triumph of puritanism was inevitable. He argued in 1962’s ‘Patterns of rural rebellion in Morocco during the early years of independence’ that the oddity of rural movements – the speed with which they collapsed, the leniency with which they were treated, and the fact that they were often directed against a leader who the rebels approved – could only be understood as posturing prior to a decisive battle that would determine who would take power and transform society.24 This is, of course, a prime example of the general thesis that forced modernization has an elective affinity with non-democratic regimes.25 But after seven years of Moroccan independence, it was clear that a decisive outcome was not imminent. Royal patronage was so skilfully handled that the forces of opposition were neutralized.26 Tunisia was equally an exception to the general notion that modernity would lead to a clear and final victory for the puritan and reformed end of the spectrum.27 Like Morocco, Tunisia had been a protectorate rather than a colony of France, and it scarcely had to struggle for its independence. In consequence, its atmosphere was relatively liberal. The middle class managed to survive the transition between regimes, and this continuity set the tone for society as a whole. Even the trial of Ahmed Ben Salah, the leftist politician in charge of socialist experiments in the countryside, was seen by Gellner as insufficient to qualify the regime, for all the effectiveness of its one-party rule, as genuinely totalitarian. The sentence handed down was lenient, whilst there was irony – especially in comparison to the contemporaneous trial of Dubček in Czechoslovakia – in the fact that laissez-faire rather than socialist policies were inaugurated by a show trial.28 In general, Gellner considered Tunisia to be effectively Kemalist and secular. He felt that Tunisians were at ease with their own identity, a condition that might well help bring about the eventual liberalization of their society.29
But these cases were seen as exceptional. The relations of Islam to modernity were better illustrated by developments in Algeria – which he visited on several occasions, taking care also to maintain contact with officials of the newly independent country who were posted abroad. Recording his initial impression of independent Algeria, Gellner noted that the state was bound to dominate society given the huge exodus of the pied-noirs and the resulting need to nationalize much of industry.30 A decade later, Gellner found that Algeria was still marked by the brutality of its independence struggle. In contrast to Tunisia, the single-party regime was relatively weak, and the tone of society set by the ulama – still benefiting from the fact that they had played a crucial role in national liberation. Two broad interest groups could be identified, a capitalist middle class and a military-industrial complex, but curiously these did not seem to come into conflict. This suggested to Gellner a continuation of the historic pattern, with the army comprising a new form of Mamluk rule. Beyond this he noted that the programme of forced Arabization faced a considerable difficulty in that those members of the elite who could afford it made sure that their children became fluent in French.31 These considerations, combined with a further visit and reflections on recent historical research, led to an important article on ‘The Unknown Apollo of Biskra’. It begins with an account of André Gide’s visit to a decidedly non-puritanical saintly shrine in Biskra, but rapidly shifts its attention to the Islamic reform movement in Algeria. If the intellectual leader of this movement was Ben Badis, a considerable role was also played by Tayyib Uqbi. This firebrand began his career preaching against the very laxity of morals in Biskra that Gide had so much enjoyed. Gellner sought to explain why the reform movement succeeded. The fact that the saints were implicated in colonial rule certainly helped turn the tide against them, but this was scarcely the key consideration – political opportunism was also evident amongst the reformers. Equally, the fact that more than a century of colonial rule had destroyed local elites enhanced the position of the ulama: they filled a social vacuum.32 But most important was a change in the social function of religious leaders. Tribesmen had respected saints when their activities – from mediation to the protection of the market, and in combination with a relative lack of puritanism – had been useful in their daily lives. Colonial rule left the saints with privileges whilst depriving them of their social function – thereby replicating the resentment directed, at least in the eyes of Tocqueville, at the aristocrats of late-eighteenth-century France.33 In these circumstances the heterodox and lax style of the saints became generally offensive, not least as the colonialists themselves made fun at their expense. Further, the fact that saints were locally based means that they were incapable of creating any sort of national consciousness. But that is exactly what the ulama could provide. Further, they could inspire pride by pointing to the dignity of a great civilization, and make it clear that its general ethic not only is not backward, but is eminently suited to modernity.
The obligatory prayers and the fast may be a bit of a nuisance, but, unlike ecstatic festivals or reliance on saintly intercession, they do teach a man a bit of discipline, which is a most desirable trait in an industrial worker. They teach him that rules in books are there to be obeyed, and that bringing donations to shrines will get him nowhere. Why not try orderly literate prayer and work, instead? For good Weberian reasons, it seems that modernisation may just as well be done with Islam as against it – provided it is the right kind of Islam …34
Gellner concludes that Algeria has become a modern society, but insists that it is modern in its Islamism, not in its secularization. He liked to illustrate the key general change with reference to the position of women, veiled more often in urban than in rural conditions.35 This view of Algerian developments has been challenged by Hugh Roberts, as will be seen later in this chapter.
These cases demonstrate that Gellner’s theorizing was not always conducted at an abstract level. In the case of Islam, this was most certainly not the case: he knew North African societies extremely well, and we will see in a moment that he made striking guesses about other Muslim societies.36 Still, Muslim Society does cite the findings from Algeria in order to underline a series of abstract considerations. It does so essentially by reference to the classical difficulties of later modernizers – difficulties he had first encountered when dealing with the ideology of the earliest Moroccan nationalists. The desire to catch up in developmental terms creates a terrible dilemma. Those who choose to Westernize can find their own feelings of inferiority enhanced by the fact that they adopt so much from the world they rebelled against. But the alternative populist position, seeking roots internal to the native tradition, has the dreadful drawbacks of implausibility and inefficacy.37 Islam, in Gellner’s view, avoids this dilemma. Adoption of the high tradition of law, literacy and discipline is seen as a route to modernity. Muslims can be modern since their religion serves as a superb protestant ethic. Gellner puts the matter in the strongest possible terms:
The distinctive pattern of distribution of scripturalist puritanism and of hierarchical ecstatic mediationist styles in Islam may help to explain both why industrial society failed to be born within it, and why Islam may be in the end so adaptable to industrial society, perhaps more so than the faith which provided it with its historical matrix. Egalitarian scripturalism is more suited to a mobile technical society than ascriptive, mediationist, manipulative spiritual brokerage. To engender industrialisation, it is presumably best if the scripturalism is insulated and protected in a more or less peripheral part of the older society, within which a new world can emerge in a relatively undisturbed way. But to survive in conditions of emulative industrialisation, it may be better if the scripturalism is at the very centre rather than at the periphery, and can slough off the peripheral styles as superstitions and unworthy accretions – thereby simultaneously affirming its own continuity and local roots and explaining away its political and economic retardation. It can then simultaneously affirm an ancient identity and justify a strenuous Leap Forward.38
The success of Marxism had been explained by its capacity to act as a modern Weberian ethic; the survival and transformation of Islam is equally explained by its capacity to act as a protestant ethic suited to modernity.
Gellner’s claim is that the puritanical option is dominant within Islam, thereby making Islam, alone amongst the world religions, secularization-resistant. A series of observations followed from this framework. To begin with, a contrast is drawn between the fundamentalism of traditional elites and that of social radicals. In the former camp belong both Saudi Arabia and Northern Nigeria, unsurprisingly since both regimes were created as a result of the last turn of the Khaldunian cycle.39 He thought that the latter camp was exemplified by the Libya of Muammar Gaddafi, whose power is seen as resulting from a combination of the old regime’s collapse and the availability of oil monies.40 The key point that Gellner makes about the Libyan situation is that it is potentially very radical indeed. Despite the fact that in the traditional world the ulama had been dependent on tribes, their role as sole representatives of the law and their ability to call in tribesmen meant that they provided some counterbalance to the state. In Libya, this may no longer be the case: the attempt to undermine the tribes in the name of the people might lead to the state becoming utterly pre-eminent. Gellner suggests a different character for each of these two versions of fundamentalism – the one more confident as the result of indirect rule, the other born of powerlessness as the result of direct colonial rule; the former may be more obviously political, but the latter is likely to be more austere and inwardly-directed.41 He made a final, theoretical suggestion, perhaps as a reaction to the Iranian revolution: there may be two stages to the fundamentalism of those countries that had experienced direct colonial rule. If the first was nationalist in its opposition to foreign domination and against lax traditional Islam, the second may be a genuine and altogether less restrained movement of the dispossessed directed against internal enemies.42
All of this is set against the awareness that there were indeed Westernizers within the Muslim world. Here again, there is a distinction that must be made. Morocco represents, of course, less Westernization than a moderate version of Islam – but its traditionalist dislike of social radicalism makes it otherwise akin to Saudi Arabia. The fate of the Ottomans was very different. Unlike in other parts of the Islamic world, religion had been shackled to the imperial state: this meant that religion could not drive nationalism. But nationalist questions remained vital. The communities preserved by Ottoman rule were able to secede and thereafter to nationalize their own territories – with the Lebanon proving to be an exception in that rival communities destroyed the state and faced each other in perpetual conflict.43 Kemalist Turkey itself was led by a state strengthened in military victory; in consequence, it was able to combine social radicalism (changing the alphabet and the position of women) with an insistence on secularism – or at least a determination to make religious belief a private matter. Gellner stressed that the Turkish attempt to combine democracy with secularism seemed doomed to instability, at least until a full transition to industrial society had been made. If elections led to the success of Muslim parties, the army was prepared to step in and secure Turkey’s secular route to modernity. He noted with amusement that Nur Yalman, a particularly sophisticated Turkish anthropologist, was prepared to consider rural and permissive Islam as a progressive alternative to the military. This was akin to the urban middle classes wearing traditional costume, for ‘refined, urban-apartment Sufism is no longer the same as the annual pilgrimage/festival of a tribal segment’.44
Gellner did not undertake more fieldwork in North Africa after the early 1960s, in part due to health reasons and in part because permission to undertake such anthropological research became more difficult to obtain. His continuing interest in Muslim societies was largely expressed through exercises in intellectual history and through vigorous attempts to defend his views.
He showed particular and long-standing interest in debates about the nature of pastoral nomadism – going back to the distinction drawn in Saints of the Atlas between marginal and primitive tribalism, that is, between those with and those without knowledge of an alternative social world.45 He pleaded for comparative studies of nomadism, and especially for particular attention to be paid to the history of the Far East.46 All of this guaranteed that Gellner’s research on Soviet thought would include attention to the place of pastoral nomadism in the Marxist scheme of historical development.47 His particular focus was on those writers who were examining pre-modern Central Asia, massively transformed under Soviet rule. Pastoral nomads present a problem for Marxism in possessing private property in herds whilst at the same time sharing pasture land and professing basic egalitarian attitudes. Moreover, their political organization presents a further problem in being either too small (stateless even though private property exists) or far too large (the empire of Genghis Khan can scarcely be explained by examining settled property relations). Finally, relatively brief moments of imperial activity are often reversed, leaving no trace in the historical record; the conundrum for Marxism is that empires rose and fell without much development taking place.
Gellner noted various stages to the debate. B. Y. Vladimirtsov’s classic position saw pastoral nomadism as a combination of patriarchalism and feudalism. There were considerable difficulties with this view: the stage was seen as transitional between modes of production without much specification of those modes, let alone of the mechanisms of transition involved. Accordingly, the work of L. P. Potapov was more impressive to him as a piece of Marxist scholarship. Nomads were here seen as passing through three clearly specified stages, with the transitions between each of them resting securely on material factors. This was a political position, especially in light of how the barbaric Soviet treatment of nomads was justified in terms of the necessities of historical progress. As it happens, dissenting views that were more intellectually interesting did not prove to be as dangerous as had been the case in the debates on the Asiatic mode of production.48 This allowed S. E. Tolybekov to produce various studies of Kazakh nomads which made a permanent contribution to the literature. At the heart of Tolybekov’s work was a reiteration of the way in which nomads combined some private property with fierce egalitarianism, together with a realization that this mode of production was not ‘progressive’ in the requisite Marxist sense – something which justified, for Tolybekov, benign intervention by Soviet authorities. This view would become mainstream, even though it could not – given its essential contradiction of Marxist doctrine – be much bruited about. It is present in the work of G. E. Markov and especially in that of A. M. Khazanov, first in his book on the Scythians and then in his later Nomads and the Outside World. This pleased Gellner, but it would be a mistake to see his involvement with Soviet scholars on this issue as merely a search for confirmation of his own views. He was deeply impressed with Khazanov’s scholarship, and delighted by the Malinowski Memorial Lecture in which Khazanov compared Muhammad with Genghis Khan.49 The 1994 conference on the Muslim states of Central Asia was to have been followed by a more ambitious undertaking dealing with the other Orientalism – that is, the impact of nomads on the polities of Eastern and Central Europe.
A second work of intellectual history was that of establishing the proper genealogy of ideas which were crucial to understanding the study of North Africa. He had read Masqueray’s Formation des cités chez les populations sédentaires de l’Algérie as the result of Montagne’s generous acknowledgement of this work, but Saints of the Atlas shows no sign of any fully developed tracing of his own intellectual ancestors. The republication of Masqueray’s book in 1983, nearly a century after its first appearance and with a preface by Gellner’s friend Fanny Colonna, a historical sociologist of Algeria, led him to this genealogical exercise.50 Masqueray provides superb evidence of the swings between fusion and fission in Berber tribal life in North Africa, but he did not fully theorize his own observations. Nonetheless, his work opened up a path to such theorization. One route from Masqueray led to Durkheim, whose Division of Labour in Society makes a distinction between basic lateral segmentation, in which clans are formed of similar groups which happen to be juxtaposed to each other, and vertical segmentation, a more advanced form in which cohesion is created by joining together units of different size. Durkheim was less interested in this second form, but it provided the core of Evans-Pritchard’s theory of segmentation. If that connection was underplayed because of Evans-Pritchard’s opposition to Durkheimian principles, so too was a second lineage – which led from Masqueray to Montagne and thence to Berque and to Raymond Jamous, and, in America, to Carleton Coon and to David Hart. Here the problem was twofold. Intellectually, Montagne’s obsession with the role of leffs, noted in chapter two, underplayed the importance of balance by use of the principles of segmentary organization. Politically, Montagne came to be discredited as the French retreated from empire, especially as new fashions in anthropology were either abstract (the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss) or so convinced of Marxist categories that the Maghreb was deemed feudal.
Establishing this much of a genealogy was simple. Gellner’s full intellectual powers were brought to bear on a matter of much greater complexity, namely that of the relation between Masqueray, the analyst of Berber community, and Fustel de Coulanges, the theorist of ancient Greek and Roman communities in his The Ancient City (1864). Both were alumni of the École Normale Supérieure, but only Fustel returned to teach at that institution (from which position he influenced Durkheim). Despite all this, Masqueray never referred to Fustel. Gellner suggests that he rejected Fustel’s view that the birth of political forms had anything to do with religious development – in this going even further than Durkheim. ‘Fustel had made religion essential and primary. Durkheim had made it essential but not primary. For Masqueray, it was neither’.51 If this view underwrote the secularism of French administration of the Algerian Berbers, with which Masqueray was involved, his work allowed for the possibility that French policy might preserve local Berber culture. Where Fustel’s view that each community had its own system of meaning would have had difficulty with the fact of tribesmen and urban dwellers sharing a religious idiom, Masqueray’s position made it possible to at least recognize the basic two-in-one character of North African Islam. Masqueray could of course have used this material for a direct onslaught on Fustel, but he did not do so – perhaps because of his peripheral position in French intellectual life.52
Another exercise in intellectual history concerned Islam and the nature of civil society. Gellner began by contrasting Machiavelli and Tocqueville.53 Machiavelli noted the ease with which a European feudal kingdom could be conquered, in large part because powerful barons might ally with an invader; but such a kingdom would be difficult to rule precisely because of the continuing sources of resistance in the localities. The situation was reversed in the Ottoman Empire: conquest was made difficult by the greater power of the central state, but rule – should conquest be achieved – was rendered unproblematic by the absence of secondary sources of power. Tocqueville made the exact opposite argument. The removal of the Ottomans from Algeria did not make administration after 1830 easy, for the French faced the prolonged tribal rebellion led by Amir Abd el-Kader. Gellner was delighted by the paradoxical answer that he was able to give – that both had been correct – when seeking to explain the contradiction between the two thinkers, for it supported his key contentions about Islam. Machiavelli was correct because he was writing about the Ottomans, who had indeed created systematic central rule; but Tocqueville’s insights were equally true because they referred to the Khaldunian world, whose centrality to – and mode of operation within – classical Islam he had sought to explain. This interpretation led him to make two interesting points about Islam and the nature of civil society. First, he drew a contrast between, in effect, absolutism and despotism – that is, between the powers of states in the Occident and in the Orient. European absolutism was essentially rule-bound, and so eventually permitted civil society to emerge. In contrast, the altogether more arbitrary rule of Islamic states, whether long-lasting or transient, did much to atomize social relations. This consideration is liable to lead to error unless it is linked to a second one. Traditional Muslim society was not in fact completely bereft of the power of self-organization. Very much to the contrary, extended kinship played a role, and was perhaps necessary due to both the fact that states were not rule-bound and lacked capacity to provide much order in large parts of the territory they supposedly ruled. But the caging quality of the ‘republic of cousins’ was as much a danger to civil society as was despotism. Even the slight check to political power caused by the rotation of the elite did not lead to genuine social innovation. So civil society was different, resting on a particular sort of group – open and elective – whose operations could then balance the state. A corollary of this general view was that Gellner stood apart from many recent theorists of liberalism (such as Berlin) in refusing to give much weight to Benjamin Constant’s essay on ‘The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns’.54
Constant only stressed that ancient liberty was not individual liberty, and in fact opposed such liberty; but he did not specify the role of social sub-groups and their heavy ritualization in the process both of depriving the individual of freedom and of maintaining social order in the absence of a strong coercive centre. It is this perception which makes Fustel the ancestor of modern ‘segmentary’ theory, of the understanding of a society which is plural, but not, in our required sense, ‘civil’.55
In his last years, Gellner drew a further and related contrast between Marxism and Islam. If both ideologies were suited for modernity in their capacity as ersatz protestant ethics, the way that they created moral codes, capable of offering complete guidance for the conduct of social life, was just as important. This view was contested by Talal Asad on the grounds that traditional Islam did not have the capacity, present in most modern states, to actually put its moral project into effect.56 Gellner accepted this point – as he was bound to do given his awareness of the weakness of pre-industrial rule, and his acceptance of a Khaldunian view of loss of moral virtue – but then sought to specify his charge:
But the crucial point is: can one usefully compare the modern socialist state with the traditional Muslim one? One must compare a modern socialist state with a modern Muslim one. Then the comparison becomes more illuminating. In both cases there is an atomised civil society, a strong and moralistic state, committed to the implementation of an overall vision, which is justified as the agency which implements that vision and is charged with leading mankind to a true fulfilment. It has a bias in favour of substantive, rather than merely procedural justice.57
We have already seen that Gellner noted variety within the Islamic world once the pendulum was unhinged: the power of the ulama looked set to be completely undermined in Libya, whilst even in Algeria they did not actually run the state. But the point in question was utterly exemplified for him by the rule of clerics in Iran. If part of the explanation for the success of Khomeini lay in the way that the particular Shi’ite myth of martyrdom could mobilize the people, Gellner’s interpretation stressed that the views of the Ayatollah represented a move within Shi’ism towards a more standard Sunni Islamic position.58 Legitimacy in Shi’ism had been held in abeyance, whilst waiting for the appearance of a hidden Imam. The writings of Khomeini suggested to Gellner that legitimacy had now come to be seen in terms of the implementation of the law; such implementation was possible now, and the arrival of an Imam would simply transfer power rather than change the terms of reference entirely.59 All of this underwrote Gellner’s view of Islam’s strength in the modern world.60 On the one hand, the fact that it was a moral Weltanschauung meant it made no sense of the notion of universal human rights – for here was a civilization which conceptualized morality in terms which were not our own.61 On the other hand, reformed Islam in general looked set to weather those social changes of modernity that had destroyed the Soviet Union. The trouble with Marxism was perhaps not so much its sense of the sacred but rather its lack of any sense of the profane. Differently put, Marxism asked to be judged by its role in this world, and so could be found wanting by means of a clear and absolute test. Islam had not tied its hands in this way, and hence could not be so easily defeated.62
The ingenuity apparent in these extensions of his views on Islam was just as present in his attempts to defend himself against his critics. A first defence concerned the historical record. Gellner admitted that he paid more attention to the social anthropology than to the history of Muslim societies, but he nonetheless sought to defend himself against the charge that his views lacked historical sense.63 One general accusation was that his model depended too much on his North African data, and that he was insufficiently aware of historical diversity within Islam.64 Gellner’s response to this – admitting the Ottomans as an exception, suggesting that Khaldunian features were only just below the surface elsewhere – has already been noted. A more particular matter concerned the history of the saints of the Moroccan Atlas. Historical material was provided by Berque’s important book on the seventeenth-century saint Al-Youssi, and by Magali Morsy’s discovery of an English renegade’s account of early-eighteenth-century Moroccan saints’ political activities – all of which was supplemented by the Moroccan historian Abdallah Hammoudi who drew attention to a series of neglected documents.65 According to Gellner this was a welcome and valuable ‘re-historicisation of the ethnography’.66 This was not really an adequate response; Hammoudi in particular had stressed that the saintly centres came to prominence less as mediators than, so to speak, by favour of one particular tribe, together with the fact that their history showed them to have been at times very far from pacific. As it happens, Gellner could have replied to these specific points. On the one hand, the social origin of the saintly centres by no means necessarily undermined his account of their eventual social role, given that they did not continually favour a single tribe: in this matter, cause and function can be properly distinguished. On the other hand, Gellner always affirmed that the saints were putatively pacifist – which is to say that he knew there had been exceptions, and in any case stressed that unity between the different tribes was sometimes created by a rural saint rather than an urban reformer. A second and more sustained response was forthcoming, however, when dealing with Clifford Geertz’s periodization of Moroccan religious history, particularly when this came to be accepted as established lore.67 Geertz suggested that ‘the maraboutic crisis’ of the seventeenth century, that is, the period marked by charismatic revivals in which one dynasty collapsed and a new one was born, led to fundamental change: pure, miraculous charisma came to be replaced by routinized, hereditary charisma.68 This was a view that Gellner could not accept:
[I]t seems to me most doubtful whether the seventeenth century was such a watershed, whether there is any such tension, whether magic and ancestry were opposed, and whether indeed either of them could, for any length of time, operate on its own. Ancestry alone either overproduces leadership and thus brings about an inflationary devaluation of its currency (as often happens), or, in conjunction with primogeniture or some other form of restrictive rule … becomes too rigid. Magic on its own is too liberal: by permitting free entry into the market … it leads to excessive instability and goes against the grain of a kinship-oriented society. The most viable mix is a judicious blend …69
Gellner also noted how illegitimate it is to draw conclusions about saints in general from evidence derived from Morocco – a corollary of which is that evidence of saintly behaviour elsewhere may allow particular Moroccan events to be put into a larger context.70 This is not to say that Gellner was unprepared to accept that a change in idiom, in terms of a stress on descent from the Prophet, was datable. ‘But this change of idiom of genealogy is something quite different from the alleged confluence of previously separate magical and genealogical principles, an idea which seems both implausible and speculative’.
Gellner spent the most time defending segmentary theory as the essential tool for understanding the sociology of Berber tribal society. There seems to be agreement that Gellner became devoted to segmentary theory at the moment when it was losing its salience within social anthropology in general.71 This did not diminish the vigour of his defence. In order to see what is involved, it is necessary to draw a distinction here, for Gellner rightly felt himself to be assailed from two rather different quarters.
One line of attack was launched by Clifford Geertz in his review of Saints of the Atlas.72 In Geertz’s view, kinship alliance was a mere idiom, an ideological superstructure explaining little about the social reality of North African society. Gellner made at least three counter-arguments. First, he objected strongly to the vague and ineffable ‘cloud-culture-talk’ to which the Geertzian school of anthropologists of Morocco was prone.73 Second, he drew a distinction between a world in which kinship ruled and one in which dyadic patronage relations did indeed come to the fore – and insisted that the latter principle was related to modernity’s increase in the power of the state. The point here was that the very notion of segmentation as mere idiom depended upon the ability to contrast it with a world in which it had once been the dominant form of social organization.74 Third, Gellner noted that the rule of Ahmad Bey in nineteenth-century Tunisia depended upon insulating rulers from contacts outside their own circle. This suggested that segmentation must have been a reality rather than cover for a patronage system. ‘Had optimal, dyadic patronage been the norm, the system as a whole would have been highly unstable and unpredictable, and the insulation of the top ruling group could not have worked at all’.75 It should also be noted that a powerful justification for using the concept of ‘tribe’ is now available; it will stand at the back of the discussion in the rest of this chapter.76
Gellner took much more seriously a second line of attack, initiated by Hammoudi but expressed most forcefully by Munson.77 Argument here was empirical rather than epistemological, the general claim being that segmentary balance had never characterized the tribes of the Central High Atlas. Munson claimed that a re-analysis of the ethnography of the Ait ‘Atta failed to find either a clear tree-like structure at work or any sign of balanced opposition by means of kinship – with a good deal of evidence coming to light of mafia-style behaviour and of alliances born of interest rather than kinship. Gellner objected to this at great length on three counts, after noting that his attention had been concentrated on the saints rather than on the tribes.78 First, he drew attention to Munson’s description of the Ait ‘Atta, pointing out that the strategic location of pastures in different ecological zones was exactly the sort of structural base for social organization by means of kinship that his model would have predicted. Secondly, a series of institutions – above all, collective oaths and feuding – only made sense if a segmentary system was in operation. This was not to say that the system always operated smoothly. Leaders did sometimes accrue considerable power – although it remained the case, in Gellner’s view, that they were unable to cement their advantage. Thirdly, a negative argument was forcefully made. Given that there was relative order in the absence of the state, some principle must have been at work. Gellner suggested that this favoured an endorsement of the principle of segmentation. All that Munson had done was to note practices likely to lead to very violent conflict, without offering any explanation for the maintenance of order.79
A third issue which provoked Gellner to defend himself was occasioned by the notion of Orientalism as pioneered by Edward Said. We will see later, in chapter eleven, that Gellner would attack Said for the use of double standards, for endorsing the views of the politically correct and damning the views of those whose politics he did not like. But his principal earlier comments concerned a different aspect of Said’s critique of ‘Orientalism’, namely its claim that Islamic development had been blocked by Western power. These views were particularly present in the work of his former student Bryan Turner.80 Turner, together with Talal Asad, was a key member for some years of an intellectual cenacle centred in Hull and devoted to the rather dizzying task of combating Orientalism while furthering the concepts of Althusserian Marxism. Gellner was very amused by the fact that many Marxists and Muslims were held to be Orientalists – as was the early work of Turner himself. But he remained critical of the recommended position. Most obviously, he was loath to accept the view that Muslim societies might have developed economically and politically but for the incursions of the West – though those incursions most certainly changed the terms under which development takes place.81 ‘Stagnation’ was historically normal, and so probably not the result of imperialism. Beyond this, Gellner was suspicious of the purportedly Marxist categories favoured by these scholars, not least as conceptual exercises looked set to replace the study of actual societies.
A fourth defensive argument was mounted against Charles Lindholm, the social theorist and anthropologist of the Middle East, who offered a view of the relationship between Islam and civil society that subtly differed from that of Gellner.82 For one thing, Lindholm stresses – following the pioneering work of Patricia Crone83 – that the early history of Islam inscribed in it a deep distrust of political power. This complements Gellner more than it contradicts him. He argues that the weakness of the state inside the classical heartland of Islam results both from doctrine and from the presence of tribes. Accordingly, the belief system is held to have an autonomous impact not just, as Gellner stressed, because of its puritanical and closed scripturalism, but also because of the details of its political theory. Secondly, Lindholm suggests that communities within the city are essentially civic, indeed Tocquevillian in character, but he admits that civil society is as yet impossible because of the generalized distrust of the state. Gellner was unable to accept either point. Drawing on his Moroccan experience, he doubted the absolute hostility to the state, noting instead a curious co-existence of disobedience and religious respect.84 More importantly, he firmly rejected the notion that Tocquevillian ideas helped us understand the urban population within Islam. If one reason for this was his continued belief that the cohesion of tribes contrasted with the atomism of fearful city-dwellers, he also stressed different historical backgrounds. Where the puritans in America sought toleration, having abandoned the idea of imposing righteousness on a whole society, Islamic reformers feel themselves in possession of a truth they are obliged to spread.85
Perry Anderson’s analysis of Islam was one of the influences that had led Gellner, as noted, to consider the place of the Ottomans within his general theory. But Anderson’s sparkling general review of Gellner’s intellectual position as a whole added an insistence that Islam was at once less egalitarian and less secularization-resistant than Gellner imagined.86 Gellner’s rebuttal was straightforward. He insisted that the evidence so far – notably the tendency of fundamentalists to triumph over nationalists – suggests that science and consumerism have not undermined Islam:
Peace in the Middle East has made advances in part just because two nationalisms prefer each other to the fundamentalists waiting in the wings. The fundamentalist option, in a chaotic world, has to be taken seriously, and Islam exemplifies the most powerful form of it. I do find Khomeini’s thought impressive … The fact that an apostate can be hounded strikes me as a sign of strength, not weakness.87
Gellner admitted that he had a penchant for neat, crisp models – and was indeed well known for his skill at producing them.88 The central charge that has been directed against Gellner’s work on the sociology of Islam is that it is clearer than the truth. His close friend Paul Pascon complained of the functionalism that he felt marred Saints of the Atlas.89 Clifford Geertz stressed the ‘mechanical’ quality of Saints of the Atlas, and his praise for Muslim Society as ‘the boldest and most ingenious’ treatise on Islam was quickly followed by the caustic statement that ‘it reminds one of nothing so much as the hidden-hand clockworks of classical economics – all motions and no movers’.90 This charge was echoed by others. Talal Asad queried the very notion of undertaking an anthropology of Islam, a viewpoint that underlay Zubaida’s important assessment of Gellner’s position; both suggested that Gellner ‘essentialized’ Islam to such an extent as to cause harm rather than to encourage enlightenment.91 All of this suggests that assessment must concentrate on what it means to produce a model – turning in this case from the North African to the more general material.
The most striking appreciation of Saints of the Atlas, and to some extent of Gellner’s work on Islam in general, appears in ‘Tribes without Saints’, a brilliant, sadly unpublished paper by Patricia Crone.92 Before turning to some of the main lines of criticism in that paper, its conclusion can usefully be cited.
But this does not mean that Gellner’s theory should be abandoned, for one would hardly expect a theory pertaining to human societies to have precise predictive value. The relationship between abstract theory and concrete reality in the social sciences is not in fact unlike that in medicine. Medical textbooks describe the equivalent of ideal types. The causal connections they propose differ from those of the social sciences in that they can be tested by repeated experiments, formulated with mathematical precision and based on examples so numerous that statistical predictions are possible; but like the theories of social scientists, they lose their precision when they are applied to individual cases; once again too many factors are involved, too many of them historical and too many of them unknown; in order fully to explain the disease patterns exhibited by individual patients one would need a separate account for every one of them. This does not however mean that the patients in question cannot be suffering from the same disease, or that the disease itself has been wrongly identified; it merely means that medicine is not a science. The social sciences are not sciences either, but one would not wish to abandon the search for regularities on that ground. Gellner is surely right that all the holy men of the tribal Middle East should be classified as manifestations of a single syndrome and that this syndrome arises from the dispersal of power characteristic of segmentary organization.
The claim here, that models are useful if they capture a basic phenomenon but then move us to further specification, seems absolutely right as a matter of epistemological protocol. Does Gellner’s work encourage such intellectual growth? Crone’s paper suggests a positive answer. To begin with it is possible to find a fair number of saintly mediators in the Middle East resembling those studied by Gellner. But there are tribes without saints. The Bedouin of Northern Arabia lack saintly mediators – and, incidentally, are puritanical in style for all their illiteracy, thereby casting doubt on another of Gellner’s central assumptions. Disputes amongst these Bedouin are managed without the creation of Hobbesian anarchy. Crone’s suggestion is that the absolute simplicity of life as lived by these tribes may allow segmentation to produce order entirely by itself. Mediation becomes more important once tribes become semi-nomadic or even settled, for this change in status creates many more issues that require resolution. This insight helps us better understand the particular Berber saints that Gellner studied himself.
Crone’s paper is, in a sense, close to Gellner in specifying the social conditions that give rise to saintly mediation, as well as in allowing a very positive role for segmentation in general. Rather different research can also be seen as inspired by Gellner’s early work, whilst correcting it in a wholly different direction. The single most striking example is the research of Shelagh Weir on the settled tribes of a remote massif of northern Yemen. Order is provided here by entirely different means than those specified by Gellner. Weir discovered many documents, going back for centuries, showing treaties and agreements between different tribes. Weir was one of Gellner’s last students, and he constantly argued with her, suggesting that order must have come from the segmentary principle. But her portrait of political culture as a means to order is convincingly laid out in a book destined to become a classic in its own right.93
The fact that order can be maintained between tribes through mechanisms other than saintly mediators is one consideration that makes us realize that Gellner’s reply to Munson’s critique, clever though it is, does not really convince. In this matter, there is justification in the claim of the Austrian anthropologist Wolfgang Kraus that ‘on the level of generality the model had arrived at in his thinking, it has become immune to empirical refutation, despite his confessed respect for empirical reality’.94 As it happens, there is much to be said for the general notion of segmentation as a pillar of Gellner’s thought, notably that it gave some clear sense of the weakness of pre-modern states – a vital and helpful piece of sociological understanding. But Kraus makes his negative comment only in order to distinguish the later work from the earlier fieldwork, held to be fertile and suggestive.95 He notes that the model of segmentation in Saints of the Atlas is a philosopher’s construct, albeit one hedged with so many qualifications noting likely divergences from reality as to invalidate Munson’s critique. Kraus was clearly inspired by Gellner’s model, but came to realize, through his own fieldwork in the Central High Atlas, that systematic modification was necessary.96 The fact that segmentation did not always explain events did not mean that it could be dismissed entirely. The language of segmentation matters enormously to tribesmen, making it much more than a false view of the world. Accordingly, Salzman’s theoretical position achieves a conceptual advance by seeing ideology as a resource:
[S]egmentation is an organizational ideology that is capable of regulating practical social relations but is only under specific conditions realized in behaviour. When conditions favour other kinds of social relations, different models which may coexist with segmentation come to the fore, but segmentation is nevertheless ideologically reproduced as ‘a social structure in reserve’ to be reactivated when conditions change again.97
With this in mind, Kraus supplies, as Munson did not, a mechanism of order.
Political relations are described by informants as a rather stable structural disposition of segmented groups. A segment’s position in this structure is considered decisive for its collective action, above all in fighting, but it is understood that segments may strategically diverge in action from the given arrangement. Nevertheless, the structure itself is held to be made up of ‘actual’ relations between segments, but these relations themselves may be rearranged. In contrast, genealogical relations are understood as being the ‘original’ and immutable relations between segments. Expectations of individual and collective behaviour tend to follow ‘actual’ political relations, but a plea for support or assistance may also be voiced in terms of an ‘original’ relation, for instance of brotherhood.98
The ability of tribesmen to manipulate their concepts in a manner that improves the workings of their society conveys exactly the image of human behaviour central to most of Gellner’s work. Moreover, the ability to distinguish political alliances from kinship links depends upon a clear sense of the latter’s nature as an objective physical fact rather than a mere cultural construct.
Let us turn to the general model. The cyclical view of pre-modern Islamic politics does work in some places and some periods, not least outside the Mediterranean world which concerned Gellner most – amongst the Pathans, for example, who straddle the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.99 Nonetheless, Gellner does overgeneralize. The Nile allowed for a measure of state strength absent in pastoral areas, and the same is true of the peasant bases of states beyond the Anatolian case that he had acknowledged. Zubaida correctly points out that the ulama were not necessarily puritanical, whilst tribes could be friends rather than enemies of the state.100 One is tempted to say at this point that Zubaida’s interesting comments are precisely the result of his elaborating on Gellner’s general model! But his central contention cannot be dismissed so easily.
What then about the unhinging of the pendulum? Shankland makes a strong case for the usefulness of Gellner’s ideas as an aid to understanding the situation in the Turkish countryside.101 Perhaps the main claim that one can make is that Gellner was characteristically insightful in recognizing so very early that Islam would not fade away but rather become a major force in the modern world. Then there is surely a good deal to be said for his view that high culture is an aspect of modernity, and that Islam has capacities in this regard. Nonetheless, his model of non-secularizable modern Islam does deserve to be challenged. One must follow Perry Anderson, to begin with, in noting the contradiction to Gellner’s general view of the world that follows from his insistence on the ability of Islam to avoid secularization.102 Economic success seems to be possible in this case, even while a total ideology maintains its power. There is no sense that science will undermine traditional belief, indeed no real sense that science is necessary for economic growth in modern Islamic societies. The best that can be said for Gellner here is that he wished to hang on to his central insight, that fundamentalist Islam had real power, even if this led him to contradict some positions that he generally held. The revival of Islam had first helped nation-building, but thereafter became so powerful as to supplant it. What one senses here is fear, of the emergence of a social formation immune to dialogue.
It is still more important to point out that Gellner’s position has serious empirical defects. It is hard to see Islamism as the child of industrialization, as seems to be suggested when he argues that modern Islam is a functional equivalent of nationalism – whose origins he insists lie in industrialization. Further, the view that Islam has replaced national differentiation most certainly deserves to be challenged. To some extent, this is simply because his later work put to one side his earlier careful qualification, that his knowledge was restricted to the classical heartland of Islam. Shared Islamic faith was not enough to prevent the break-up of Pakistan in 1971. Indonesia and Malaysia show that the national principle can triumph over that of the world religion.103 The same point can be made about some countries even within the world with which Gellner was most familiar. Turkey retains its national distinctiveness. Roberts was clearly stimulated by Gellner, but argues convincingly that ulama only had power over the army in Algeria – considered as very different from Morocco – for one short and very particular period.104 Further, severe criticism is surely necessary, given the poor economic performance of many Muslim states, of the idea that modern Islam is serving as a functional equivalent to the protestant ethic. In general, there is justice in the charge that Gellner essentializes modern Islam. Democratization has been more limited in Arab states, for example, than in the Muslim world as a whole, in part because the geopolitical instabilities of that region have produced military regimes, fiscally stretched and prone to suppress their civil societies.105 The same point can be made regarding the central claim that Islam cannot be secularized. Many Muslims are clearly secular in wishing to maintain their religious beliefs as a form of private consolation whilst allowing political matters to be decided on instrumental rather than religious grounds.106 Of course, against this there are powerful revivalist movements seeking to establish godly rule. Gellner implies that the force of such movements derives from the core components of Islam as a belief system. An alternative explanation would suggest that fundamentalism has triumphed in some places because of the failure, in turn, of Arab nationalism and of the nation-building efforts of particular states. This provides a simple and convincing basis for the charge that Gellner essentializes Islam: his account excludes the impact of politics.
Gellner’s explanations for many phenomena are based on his understanding of social structures. There is a great deal to be said for this, though his basic materialism can become crude – as perhaps when he effectively insisted that the ecological circumstances of pastoral life determined tribal politics. But this approach tends to miss the ways in which the character of social movements is derived from the nature of the states with which they interact. An explanation for this claim is in order. An example of this sociological principle is that of working-class movements before 1914. Workers became ever more politicized along the continuum that goes from the United States to Britain, and then from Imperial Germany to Tsarist Russia. The structure of capitalism cannot explain this, but comparative historical sociology can.107 American workers acted at an industrial level rather than against the state for the simplest of reasons: the state was their own, and it permitted union activity. In contrast, workers in Russia gained political consciousness and ‘took on’ the state precisely because unionization was forbidden: they had no choice. Strong political feelings result from exclusion, with liberal integration doing much to diffuse conflict through society. Another example of the same point concerns modern revolutions. A mass of evidence shows that only when there is ‘no other way out’ do actors turn from reformism to risking their lives on barricades.108 One can highlight the general point by saying simply that the social movements with which we concern ourselves are usually those that are effectively political movements.
That this principle seems to apply within the Islamic world is suggested by a brilliant comparison between Iran and Egypt.109 Fundamentalist Islamism does not necessarily follow from some conceptual core of the religion itself. Rather, states that are at once over-mighty in their despotism and weak in their ability to deliver services, obviously two sides of a single coin, push reform movements in the direction of greater radicalism. This does not bring much comfort, for identities created by exclusion are often resistant to change. More striking still is the difficulty of reforming many regimes in the Middle East, exacerbated by the fact of their oil wealth. Engineering such change from the outside is extremely difficult, though the transformations of Kurdistan and Iraq may yet be consolidated, with consequences that would surely then be felt within Iran.
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1Recent examples include H. Roberts, ‘Ernest Gellner and the Algerian Army: The Intellectual Origins of the Problem of Algerian Studies in Britain’, The Journal of Algerian Studies, vol. 2, 1997, and The Battlefield: Algeria, 1988–2002, Studies in a Broken Polity, Verso, 2002; D. Shankland, ‘Integrating the Rural: Gellner and the Study of Anatolia’, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 35, 1999.
2This is a careful formulation. Gellner insisted that his generalizations only applied to the arid zone of the classical core in which pastoralism played a major role; he suspected that Islam in Africa and Asia ran on entirely different lines. We will see that he sometimes ignored this careful specification.
3It is thus possible to recognize the core of his general treatment of traditional Islam in the opening pages of Saints of the Atlas, London, 1969. This is not to deny the impact of his appropriation of David Hume’s sociology of religion, merely to stress that this was a tool allowing for the construction of a particularly elegant model of traditional Muslim civilization. Equally, his early work shows awareness of the impact of reform within Islam, though here sustained attention to Algerian history clearly deepened his analysis of Islam’s encounter with the social conditions of modernity.
4Muslim Society, Cambridge, 1981.
5‘Hume and North African Islam’, in Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, Religion in Africa, Edinburgh, 1964, and ‘A Pendulum Swing Theory of Islam’, in R. Robertson, The Sociology of Religion, London, 1969.
6Muslim Society, p. vii.
7‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, pp. 7–16.
8Irish Catholics might well find this view complacent.
9D. Hume, A Natural History of Religion [1777], Oxford, 1976, chapter 12.
10D. Hume, ‘Of Superstition and Enthusiasm’, in Essays Moral, Political and Literary [1777], Oxford, 1963. Gellner notes accurately that the ideas of this essay also inform Hume’s A History of England, Chicago, 1975.
11‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, p. 15.
12Gellner’s model of stagnation was consciously designed as an equivalent to the Marxist notion of the Asiatic mode of production. Gellner was very clear indeed that Muslim societies could not themselves be explained in terms of Wittfogel’s hydraulic society thesis – making his point on several occasions with reference to R. Fernea, Shaykh and Effendi, Cambridge (MA), 1970 – which he reviewed in Sociology, vol. 5, 1971. See also ‘Introduction’, in B. O’Leary, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Oriental Despotism, Historical Materialism and Indian History, Oxford, 1989.
13Gellner admits (‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, pp. 31–2) that oscillation between tribes and cities characterized the pre-Islamic world of North Africa, and he noted that the Soviet anthropologists Khazanov and Markov, whose work is discussed below, felt that this was also true for parts of Central Asia and Iran. But he insisted (p. 32) that the possession of a shared moral language mattered: ‘One might say that Islam provided a common language and thus a certain kind of smoothness for a process which, in a more mute and brutalistic way, had been taking place anyway’. On this point, see P. Crone, ‘The Tribe and the State’, in J. A. Hall (ed.), The State: Limited Concept, vol. 1, London, 1993, pp. 472–3, footnote 128, for an argument that tribes had not had much impact before Islam, and could do so thereafter because the idiom of this religion originated in a tribal context and remained suitable for tribal use – suggesting that the impact of Islam was much greater than Gellner allows.
14Gellner notes complexities to the picture (‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, p. 49). Just as an urban cleric can become a missionary to the tribes, so a successful rural thaumaturge may acquire urban followers.
15‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, pp. 79–80.
16This paragraph draws on the discussion in ibid., pp. 73–7.
17‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’ is structured around a discussion of Platonism, the key tenets of which were noted in chapter 3. Platonism 1 is the worship of pure concepts, and Platonism 2 the worship of concepts given substance by codification in a world religion. The Ottomans are seen as Platonism 3: here education and training rather than loyalty to concepts was the base of social cohesion.
18Gellner notes (‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, p. 75) that this factor helps explain this type of rule’s success in the Fertile Crescent, in Anatolia, in Egypt and Tunisia. But he also noted that this rendered the success of Ottoman rule in Algeria all the harder to explain.
19P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London, 1974, pp. 496–520 and M. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Chicago, I974, discussed in ‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, p. 77 and pp. 84–5 respectively.
20But Gellner drew on the work of his research student Shelagh Weir to note an exception (‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, p. 57). The power of the state in Yemen declined as outside parties provided arms and finance to competing tribes.
21Saints of the Atlas, p. 17, where he cites J. Abun-Nasr, The Tijaniyya, Oxford, 1965.
22‘Sanctity, Puritanism, Secularisation and Nationalism’, reprinted in Muslim Society.
23‘Post-traditional forms in Islam: the turf and trade, and votes and peanuts’ (published in 1973 and reprinted in Muslim Society) – in effect a review article of H. S. Morris, The Indians in Uganda, London, 1968, and D. B. Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal, Oxford, 1970. Gellner’s Weberian assumption was of course that the urban and legalistic end of the spectrum was most conducive to economic success. This led him to review, with great interest, J. Waterbury, North for the Trade: The Life and Times of a Berber Merchant, Berkeley, 1972 in Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 13, 1977. The economic success of the Swasa confounded his view in that they were tribesmen – although they were at least attracted to the reformist end of the continuum.
24This essay – but, curiously, not the self-critical companion piece ‘The Great Patron’ (European Journal of Sociology, vol. 10, 1969) – was reprinted in Muslim Society.
25Thought and Change, London, 1964, and ‘Democracy and Industrialization’, in Contemporary Thought and Politics, London, 1974. Gellner’s argument on this point is noted above, in chapter 5.
26‘The Great Patron’.
27‘A Tunisian Visit’, New Society, vol. 1, 1963. This essay suggests that Tunisia might become the Denmark of the Maghreb. It contrasts the relaxed style of the Kerkennah islands with the Weberian puritanism characteristic of the sectarian Ibadis of Djerba.
28Gellner (as ‘Philip Peters’), ‘Tunisia: A System on Trial?’, New Society, vol. 16, 1970.
29‘Cohesion and Identity: the Maghreb from Ibn Khaldun to Emile Durkheim’, in Muslim Society, p. 95.
30‘Thy Neighbour’s Revolution’, New Society, vol. 1, 1963.
31Gellner (as ‘Philip Peters), ‘Algeria after Independence’, New Society, vol. 20, 1972.
32‘The Unknown Apollo of Biskra’, in Muslim Society, p. 166.
33Ibid., p. 161. Tocqueville’s analysis is in The Old Regime and the French Revolution, New York, 1955. Cf. H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York, 1958, ‘Part One: Anti-Semitism’.
34‘The Unknown Apollo of Biskra’, p. 170.
35Ibid., p. 173. He made continual use of V. Maher, Women and Property in Morocco, Cambridge, 1974, not least in this essay, pp. 162–5.
36He claimed a sense of ease when dealing with Muslim societies (J. Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, Current Anthropology, vol. 32, 1991, p. 70).
37In this context he notes that the populists of Islam are not Muslim city-dwellers, but Westerners admiring ‘noble’ tribesmen (‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, p. 63).
38Ibid., p. 65.
39Ibid., pp. 65–6.
40Ibid., pp. 63–4 and ‘Revolution and Revelation’ (a review of L. Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830–1980), New Republic, vol. 195, 1986.
41‘Flux and Reflux in the Faith of Men’, pp. 65–6.
42Gellner notes that class conflict only turns revolutionary if it can conceptualize itself in ethnic or religious terms (ibid., pp. 66–7). Iran had not formally been colonized, but Gellner argued that the cosmopolitan and Westernizing style of the Persian ruling class made it seem as if this had been the case.
43Ibid., p. 59.
44Ibid., p. 60. The analysis of the Ottoman exception and of Kemalism is spelled out in more detail in ‘Kemalism’, in Encounters with Nationalism, Oxford, 1994, and ‘The Turkish Option in Comparative Perspective’, in S. Bozdogan and R. Kesaba (eds), Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey, Seattle, 1997.
45Saints of the Atlas, pp. 1–2.
46‘Introduction: Approaches to Nomadism’, in C. Nelson, The Desert and the Sown, Berkeley, 1973, notes the book’s lack of consideration of the work of Owen Lattimore. Gellner followed the work of many scholars of nomadism, amongst them G. Dahl and A. Hjort on East Africa, T. Ingold on the herding of reindeer, and, most importantly, the Soviet scholars to whom our attention now turns.
47Discussion of Gellner’s untangling of this debate is drawn from his ‘Introduction’ to A. M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World, Cambridge, 1984 (reprinted as ‘The Nomadism Debate’ in State and Society in Soviet Thought, Oxford, 1988).
48‘The Nomadism Debate’, p. 104.
49A. M. Khazanov, ‘Muhammad and Jenghiz Khan Compared: The Religious Factor in World Empire Building’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 53, 1993.
50‘The Roots of Cohesion’, in Culture, Identity and Politics, Cambridge, 1987.
51‘The Roots of Cohesion’, p. 39.
52Hugh Roberts, an LSE colleague, challenged Gellner on this point, to the latter’s considerable irritation, when the first of his two papers was read in 1991 at a meeting of the Society of Moroccan Studies at the School of Oriental and Africa Studies, chaired by Gellner who was then the president of the society. See H. Roberts, ‘Perspectives on Berber Politics: On Gellner and Masqueray, or Durkheim’s Mistake’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 8, 2002, and ‘De la segmentarité á l’opacité: Á propos de Gellner et Bourdieu et les approches théoriques à l’analyse du champ politique algérien’, Insāniyāt: Revue algérienne d’anthropologie et de sciences sociales, vol. 8, 2003. Roberts endorsed Gellner’s findings on Morocco, including its explanatory base in the theory of segmentation. But he felt that these did not apply to Algeria. These papers argue that the Berbers of Algeria had a political culture that allowed for the provision of order and stability, that is, that segmentary theory did not apply to the Kabyles. Crucially, he felt that the tradition that went from Masqueray to Montagne was aware of Kabyle political culture, making Gellner’s account of Masqueray’s work misguided.
53Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals, London, 1994, pp. 81–6.
54B. Constant, Political Writings, Cambridge, 1988.
55‘The Importance of Being Modular’, in J. A. Hall (ed.), Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison, Cambridge, 1995, p. 54.
56T. Asad, ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’, reprinted in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie (eds), The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam, 1996, p. 396.
57‘Human Rights and the New Circle of Equity’, in F. D’Agostino and I. C. Jarvie (eds), Freedom and Rationality, Dordrecht, 1989, p. 139.
58‘Inside Khomeini’s Mind’, New Republic, vol. 190, 1984 (reprinted in Culture, Identity and Politics) and ‘Human Rights and the New Circle of Equity’.
59The most powerful critique of Gellner’s sociology of Islam – S. Zubaida, ‘Is There a Muslim Society? Ernest Gellner’s Sociology of Islam’, Economy and Society, vol. 24, 1995 – argued that Gellner was absolutely wrong in this matter, stressing instead the personalism of Khomeini’s claim to power.
60It is impossible to resist a moment’s digression to compare Gellner’s response to Khomeini with Foucault’s. Gellner opened his article with a series of quotes, many of them anti-Semitic, designed to show that the force of Khomeini was allied to vicious intolerance. Foucault’s articles for Corriere della sera, Le Monde and Le Nouvel Observateur (collected in J. Afary and K. B. Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, Chicago, 2005) show by contrast a dreadful – and orientalist! – naïvety.
61‘Human Rights and the New Circle of Equity’, p. 140.
62This point was made several times in Gellner’s late writings, e.g., ‘Islam and Marxism: Some Comparisons’, International Affairs, vol. 67, 1991; ‘Homeland of the Unrevolution’, Daedalus, vol. 122, 1993; Conditions of Liberty, London, 1996; and ‘Fundamentalism as a Comprehensive System: Soviet Marxism and Islamic Fundamentalism Compared’, in S. Appleby and M. Marty (eds), Fundamentalisms Compared, Chicago, 1995.
63Muslim Society, p. vii.
64This was a very general charge, as in the reviews of Muslim Society by Berque, ‘The popular and the purified’, Times Literary Supplement, 11 December 1981, and F. Halliday, ‘Muslim Society’s Model World’, Manchester Guardian Weekly, 26 July 1981.
65M. Morsy, Les Ahansala, Paris, 1972 (reviewed by Gellner in L’Annuaire de l’Afrique du Nord, vol. 11, 1972), J. Berque, Al-Yousi: Problèmes de la culture marocaine au XVIIeme siècle, Paris, 1958 and A. Hammoudi, ‘Segmentarity, Social Stratification, Political Power and Sainthood: Reflections on Gellner’s Theses’, reprinted in Hall and Jarvie, The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner.
66‘Reply to Critics’, in Hall and Jarvie, The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, p. 656.
67Gellner, ‘Saints and Their Descendants’, in Muslim Society. This piece is largely a review of P. Rabinow, Symbolic Domination: Cultural Form and Historical Change in Morocco, Chicago, 1975, a book which Gellner considered to have uncritically accepted Geertz’s position. Further comments on the dangers of ‘culture-talk’ are contained in an unpublished piece in the Gellner Archive entitled ‘L’Année dernière à Meknes’. This piece is of especial interest in that the author of whom Gellner is critical, Vincent Crapanzo, had – in his Tuhami, Portrait of a Moroccan, London, 1980 – relied on the assistant formerly employed by Gellner and by David Hart. Gellner drew a contrast between the Moroccan’s love of clarity and the narcissistic epistemological cloudiness of the Western anthropologist.
68C. Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, Chicago, 1969, p. 44.
69‘Saints and Their Descendants’, p. 210.
70‘The Marabouts in the Marketplace’, in Muslim Society, p. 217.
71W. Kraus, ‘Contestable Identities: Tribal Structures in the Moroccan High Atlas’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, vol. 4, 1998, and the various works of Munson cited below, make this point. Gellner did not cite nor address the criticism of segmentary theory made by Emrys Peters – ‘Some structural aspects of the feud among the camel-herding Bedouin of Cyrenaica’, Africa, vol. 37, 1967 – even though this appeared before the publication of Saints of the Atlas.
72C. Geertz, ‘In Search of North Africa’, New York Review of Books, vol. 16, 1971, p. 20. It is not at all clear why Geertz’s praise for Gellner’s work in Islam Observed – which cites Gellner’s doctoral thesis (p. 51) and refers to it as ‘a fine study of a saint cult in action’ (p. 124) – had been abandoned a mere two years later, especially since there was no fundamental difference between Gellner’s doctorate and Saints of the Atlas. For the review was essentially hostile, considering Gellner ‘an old believer’ in some simple view of the facticity of external reality, possessed of a finished theory of segmentation that he sought to apply mechanically. The review rankled, and Gellner later fought back (‘Reply to Critics’, pp. 640, 645), insisting that there was, contrary to ‘subjectivist-relativist fads’, an external reality to be investigated and that he had not gone into the field possessed of any pre-conceived theory.
73‘The Marabouts in the Marketplace’, p. 218. He clearly enjoyed pointing to an inconsistency within this school’s attack on the notion of social structure (‘Reply to Critics’, p. 654). The varied works of L. Rosen paint a picture of clever individuals making up their world as they go along; this sits uneasily with ‘the culturalism which dismisses structure altogether as the invention of the conceptually imperialist anthropologist unwittingly serving, abetting and even aiding colonialism’ – not least, it might be added, since the latter view sees human beings as passive concept-fodder for systems of meaning.
74‘The Marabouts in the Marketplace’, p. 216.
75‘Trousers in Tunisia’, in Muslim Society, p. 176.
76Crone, ‘The Tribe and the State’ and (partly in response to critics of that essay) ‘Tribes and States in the Middle East’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 3, 1993.
77Hammoudi, ‘Segmentarity, Social Stratification, Political Power and Sainthood’. Munson began his assaults on the segmentary theory in ‘On the Irrelevance of the Segmentary Lineage Model in the Moroccan Rif’ (American Anthropologist, vol. 91, 1989) – which made use of the ethnography of D. Hart, The Aith Waryaghar of the Moroccan Rif, Tucson, 1976, to disprove that book’s theoretical underpinning. Hart broadly accepted Munson’s charges in ‘Rejoinder to Henry Munson, Jr., “On the Segmentary Lineage Model in the Moroccan Rif’” (American Anthropologist, vol. 91, no. 3, September 1989). Munson’s attack on Gellner’s use of segmentation, ‘Rethinking Gellner’s Segmentary Analysis of Morocco’s Ait ‘Atta’ appeared in Man, vol. 28, 1993. Gellner responded to this in ‘Reply to Critics’, the section mostly devoted to segmentation also appearing as ‘Segmentation: Reality or Myth?’ (Man, vol. 1, 1995) – with a brief response by Munson in the same issue.
78More particularly, Gellner stressed that he had no detailed knowledge of the Ait ‘Atta – having tested his general views by examining the behaviour of the Ait Sokhman (‘Reply to Critics’, p. 641).
79Munson’s comment in 1995 (p. 831) on Gellner’s third and negative point was sharp: ‘If he had a calculator that consistently gave wrong answers, would he keep using it simply because he did not have a better one?’
80Gellner wrote an admiring review of Turner’s thesis when it appeared as Weber and Islam, London, 1974, in Population Studies, vol. 29, 1974. He was fascinated by Turner’s Marx and the End of Orientalism, London, 1978, as can be seen in his very lively review article, ‘In Defence of Orientalism’, Sociology, vol. 14, 1980. But he became impatient with Turner’s Capitalism and Class in the Middle East (London, 1984), which he reviewed in British Journal of Sociology, vol. 36, 1985.
81He noted (‘In Defence of Orientalism’) a key contradiction at work in Turner’s position. A defining characteristic of Orientalism was held to be the belief that development occurs endogenously, but some such notion underlay the view that Muslim societies might have developed without external interference.
82C. Lindholm, ‘Despotism and Democracy: State and Society in the Pre-Modern Middle East’, in Hall and Jarvie, The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner – a view expanded in his The Muslim Middle East, Oxford, 1995.
83See especially P. Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity, Cambridge, 1980.
84‘Reply to Critics’, p. 657.
85Ibid., pp. 659–60. Gellner’s formulation here is a little facile. Some puritan groups, famously those in Salem, wanted the freedom to impose their own doctrine. Nonetheless, it remains true that no attempt to impose uniform beliefs on the whole society was successful.
86P. Anderson, ‘Science, Politics and Enchantment’ in Hall and Jarvie, The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, p. 421.
87‘Reply to Critics’, p. 660.
88Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 70.
89P. Pascon, Capitalism: Agriculture in the Haouz of Marrakesh, London, 1987.
90C. Geertz, ‘In Search of North Africa’, and ‘Conjuring with Islam’, New York Review of Books, 27 May 1982, p. 25.
91Asad, ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’ (which criticizes Geertz as much as Gellner) and Zubaida, ‘Is There a Muslim Society?’
92A version of this paper was first given to the Anthropology Department Seminar at Cambridge. It provoked little reaction, to Gellner’s dismay, leading him to remark that his colleagues simply did not understand how brilliant was the material presented. The version of the paper that I am using was presented to the Mellon Seminar at Princeton in 1991. I am grateful to Patricia Crone for providing me with a copy.
93S. Weir, A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen, Austin, 2007.
94W. Kraus, ‘Unpublished Postscript’ to Contestable Identities. I am grateful for having been shown this short text.
95Kraus, ‘Contestable Identities’, p. 5.
96W. Kraus, Die Ayt Hdiddu: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft in zentralen Hohen Atlas, Vienna, 1991 (reviewed by Gellner in Social Anthropology, vol. 1, 1993); ‘Contestable Identities’; and Islamische Stammesgesellschaften: Tribale Identitaten im Vorderen Orient in socialanthropologischer Perspektive, Vienna, 2004, especially pp. 145–51.
97Kraus, ‘Contestable Identities’, p. 4, referring to P. C. Salzman, ‘Does Complementary Opposition Exist?’, American Anthropologist, vol. 80, 1978.
98Kraus, ‘Contestable Identities’, p. 10.
99F. Barth, Political Leadership Among Swat Pathans, London, 1985; C. Lindholm, Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat Pukhtun of Northern Pakistan, New York, 1982. In the early 1950s Gellner had thought of undertaking a comparative study, wishing to compare the situation in the High Central Atlas with that in Waziristan.
100Zubaida, ‘Is there a Muslim Society?’.
101Shankland, ‘Integrating the Rural’.
102Anderson, ‘Science, Politics, Enchantment’, p. 421.
103T. J. Mabry, ‘Modernization, Nationalism and Islam: An Examination of Ernest Gellner’s Writings on Muslim Society with Reference to Indonesia and Malaysia’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 21, 1998. This powerful paper makes a further point (p. 84), namely that the high tradition in Java was heterodox in Islamic terms, joining together elements of animism, Hinduism and the worship of Muslim saints. My own limited, tourist exposure to Indonesia mostly gave the firm impression of a world utterly different from that of the Middle East. But one cannot entirely dismiss Gellner’s concerns. For some madrasahs did seem puritanical, not least because modern communication systems allowed religious material to be imported for the first time, from Saudi Arabia.
104Roberts, ‘Ernest Gellner and the Algerian Army’.
105A. Stepan and G. B. Robertson, ‘An “Arab” more than “Muslim” Electoral Gap’, Journal of Democracy, vol. 14, 2003.
106B. Turam, Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement, Stanford, 2007; D. F. Eickelman, ‘From Here to Modernity: Ernest Gellner on Nationalism and Islamic Fundamentalism’, in J. A. Hall (ed.), The State of the Nation, Cambridge, 1998; D. F. Eickelman and J. Piscatori, Muslim Politics, Princeton, 1996; Sadik J. al-Azm, ‘Is Islam Secularizable?’, Jahrbuch fur Philosophie des Forschungsinstitut fur Philosophie Hannover, vol. 7, 1996.
107M. Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Volume Two: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914, Cambridge, 1993, chapters 15, 17 and 18.
108J. Goodwin, No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–91, Cambridge, 2001.
109A. Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamic Turn, Stanford, 2007.