LEE KONG CHIAN NUS-STANFORD INITIATIVE ON SOUTHEAST ASIA
SPEAKER SERIES
RETHINKING ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY:
PROSPECTS FOR A PLURALIST MUSLIM POLITICS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND BEYOND
BY
PROFESSOR ROBERT HEFNER
LEE KONG CHIAN NUS-STANFORD DISTINGUISHED FELLOW
Wednesday, 27 August 2008
3.00 p.m.
Seminar Room B, Level 1, The Shaw Foundation Building, AS7, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NUS.
The end of the Cold War raised hopes for liberalization and democratic reforms in the Muslim-majority countries of the world. However, the breakdown of the political process in Algeria during 1991-1992, terrorist violence in the mid-1990s, and the 9/11 attacks in the U.S. led many Western analysts to conclude that Muslim countries are the great exception to the democratizing trends of our age.
In this presentation, I revisit and reassess the prospects for Muslim democratization, some 15 years after Samuel Huntington’s famous thesis on The Clash of Civilizations? In recent years students of Muslim politics have pulled together a new body of empirical materials, the net effect of which is to provide us with a more nuanced sense of democracy’s possibility in Muslim-majority countries. In this paper, I summarize and evaluate these materials, and explore their implications for a pluralist Muslim politics today. The accumulated research suggests democratization is alive and well in the Muslim world, at least in non-Arab countries. However, the evidence also indicates that, where the process moves forward, its accompanying political culture may more closely resemble what can be called a “civil Islamic” or “Muslim” democracy rather than the Atlantic-liberal model favored in most Western policy circles.
Robert William Hefner, Professor of Anthropology and Associate Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University, will be in residence as Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Southeast Asia from July-November 2008. Professor Hefner has been Associate Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs at Boston University, where he has directed the program on Islam and civil society since 1991. Hefner has carried out research on religion and politics in Southeast Asia for the past thirty years, and has authored or edited a fourteen books, as well as several major policy reports for private and public foundations. His most recent books include, Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education (edited with Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton 2007); ed., Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (Princeton 2005), ed., and Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton 2000). Hefner is also the invited editor for the sixth volume of the forthcoming New Cambridge History of Islam, Muslims and Modernity: Society and Culture since 1800. Hefner is currently writing a book on Islamic education, democratization, and political violence in Indonesia. The research and writing locate the Indonesian example in the culture and politics of the broader Muslim world. His book also revisits the the question of the role of religious and secular knowledge in modernity.
All are welcome. As light refreshments will be served after the talk, we will appreciate an RSVP to nusstanfordsea@nus.edu.sg by 22 August 2008.
