One. I think it's time to start. I know it's really exciting to be able to be here today for me.
I would like to welcome everyone to the Middle East Centre at Saint Anthony's.
We're very excited today because we have Professor Malik as they go.
Uh, and she is here to discuss her latest book that has just come out in the UK on the 21st of May, if I'm not mistaken.
And the title of a book is The Making of the Modern Muslim State Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa.
The book is published by Princeton University Press. And you have the code, and it's, uh, you can get a 30% discount.
It's just fantastic. So please let us know if you would like to find out more about the codes.
Professor Ziggo is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic thought and life in the Department of Vignette,
Eastern Languages and Civilisation at Harvard University.
She has published numerous books and articles on Islam and politics.
They include a book published by Science Po on the lemma of Isaiah.
And I think that's definitely a. You've also published an article about the school, uh, kind, uh, a variation of the book.
It's an excellent article. I've learned so much from that article.
In fact, I think I've used your article in my teaching as well as when I was doing my Ph.D. or so excited to refer to that article.
I'm a big fan of those work, as you can tell, so this is really exciting for me.
She's also the author of Islamism in Morocco Religion, Authoritarianism and Electoral Politics.
And like everyone else, I'm thrilled to have you here.
Thank you so much for coming and for visiting us. We feel so lucky that you're here with us today.
And without further delay. I invite professor to go to discuss.
Okay. Well, thank you so much for this, uh, very kind introduction.
Thank you. Uh, like Han for inviting me. I want to also, uh, thank you, Jean Rogan, for inviting me to present my book here at the Media Centre.
Uh, I am delighted and honoured. Uh, I would also like to thank Caroline Davis for organising this event and my travel to come here.
Thank you all for being here. There are some friends in this room that I'm delighted to see and have supported me over the years, and I am grateful.
Okay, so the questions I ask in the book are the following.
First, how has the role of Islam in governance been conceived in the Middle East and North Africa in the modern period by modern period?
I read in strictly chronological period, that is the 19th to the 21st centuries.
Second, how has it been implemented in concrete terms?
By concrete I also mean material terms. And third, what may have changed from pre-modern times?
So how do I respond to these questions in the book?
I find that in continuities with the past, in modern times, the state is generally expected to be the custodian of Islam as the preferred religion.
This means that one of its duties is to preserve the religion that is Islam, the Muslim community and Islamic institutions.
The first principle is the preservation of the religion, for example by guaranteeing worship,
the celebration of Muslim holidays or the organisation of the pilgrimage,
but also by disseminating and enforcing specific interpretations of Islam or limiting freedom of expression.
The second principle is the preservation of the Muslim community,
for example by defending its borders or shoring it up against erosion through forbidding or preventing Muslims conversions.
Third is the preservation of Islamic institutions, for example by upholding Islamic courts or funding Islamic education and places of worship.
I show that this duty is tied to sovereignty, even if exercised by a non-Muslim ruler.
For instance, as I show in chapter two in French occupied Tunisia,
some Tunisians asked what they and French authorities called Islamic friends to be the custodian of Islam.
In fact, in the 1920s there were three competing students of Islam in Tunisia Islamic France, the Tunisian monarch,
the bay and a sovereign independent Tunisia, the state that was exercising sovereignty or aspiring to exercise.
It was expected to be the custodian of Islam.
Moreover, this duty is only one of the state's duties, and it is performed through a state partnership with Olam.
This partnership has endured,
not withstanding fluctuations in the relative strength of any of the partners in its institutional forms and in the vocabulary used to designate.
This does not mean that the state does not protect other religions.
Only that Islam is protected more than the others. It does not mean that there are no domains of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims.
In fact, we do find such domains in modern and pre-modern times.
And it does not mean that religious and political authority are necessarily conflated.
They may or may not be, but it implies that we generally find no separation between Islam and the state,
and no state neutrality toward religions as an aspiration or concrete reality.
But sometimes we find the aspirations to separate Islam and politics.
This has created some confusion in the literature, which argues on that basis that such states are secular.
However, separating Islam and politics often serves to ensure a state monopoly on religious
affairs and sometimes keep at bay the political ambitions of the religious minorities,
as such to ensure that the state remains Muslim.
In the book I retrace the continuity of the Sacred Studentship of Islam.
Essai for short, in the midst of two transformations.
One was the importation of new techniques of governance, which was not unprecedented.
Indeed, there have been significant changes to techniques of governance before the 19th century.
Reforms. The advent of the tansy march in the 19th century should not obfuscate earlier series of reforms or attempts to reform.
However, the importation of constitutions as an institutional form was new.
The other transformation was the expansion of the size and reach of the states in the 19th to from the 19th to the 21st century,
which was truly unprecedented in its magnitude.
So I find that there has been a broad agreement across the political spectrum on
the necessity of the state custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion,
but also, and this is particularly important for my argument, vigorous debates about its meaning and extent.
By attending to the long history of these debates,
we can make legible the political cleavage about the role of Islam in governance in the modern Middle East.
I want to add important points about this broad agreement.
The state custodianship of Islam is an empirical regularity, not an essential feature and not inevitable.
There are several exceptions among Muslim majority countries around the world,
albeit only one in the Middle East today, Lebanon, which is particularly religiously fragmented.
And I will say a few words later about it. I do not argue that Islam is an inherently political religion, or more political than other religions,
or that the political in Muslim states is inherently or predominantly religious.
In fact, I provide a quantitative evaluation of the well bounded domain of states involvement in religion,
public religious expenditures relative to non-religious ones in modern but also pre-modern times, which shows just the opposite.
I also do not make predictions as to whether the expectation that the state is or be the custodian
of Islam as a preferred religion will continue to be prevalent in most must have majority polities.
So in the future, its historical persistence notwithstanding,
I argue that it has been a matter of choice vigorously discussed as to its meaning and extent.
In fact, this choice has been made in the modern period in full awareness of the wide
array of alternative potential options as to the role of religion in governance.
Different choices could therefore be made in the future.
I also find that some voices call or have called for a change in this respect,
although they are rare and seldom express themselves in formal deliberative arenas.
This reinforces the fact that what is prevalent today, as far as the role of Islam in governance is concerned, is by no means ineluctable.
Since there is a broad agreement about the state custodianship of Islam and debates about its meaning and extent,
there is a political cleavage about it. I find that it is organised around four interrelated recurring questions.
First, the thickness of the state. Custodianship of Islam.
That is, the extent to which Islamic principles constrain the state.
It is the commitment of the state to Islamic principles in governance, e.g. in legislation or as a philosophy of governance.
For instance, to call for the implementation of Sharia law is to call for a secure state custodianship of Islam.
Second, the munificence of the state custodianship of Islam, that is,
the extent of public religious provisions that the state should make available to Muslims e.g. mosques,
imams, Islamic education, Islamic courts and personnel.
Islamic forms of public assistance. It is the state's commitment to Islam from a material point of view.
Third, there is the strength of the state, the stewardship of Islam.
That is, the extent to which the state should constrain Islam and its institutions with its coercive and pedagogical apparatus,
e.g. by imposing its own interpretations of Islam.
And finally, there is the relationship between religion and politics.
That is the issue of who can partake in implementing and discussing the state's custodianship of Islam, e.g. should engage with politics,
for example when speaking truth to power and criticising the ruler for not fulfilling his duty to protect the religion,
the community or its institutions. Also, can political competition be organised alongside sectarian lines?
Or can political activism be based on religion? Can mosques serve as fora for political deliberations and competition?
This categorisation, these four questions help make the debates about the role of Islam in governance legible and follow it through time.
It helps separate what these debates owe to historical contingencies, from what they owe, to the persistence of core principles and questions.
In response to this question. So we can discern two camps in a political cleavage.
And I use the term two camps to follow chronicler Muhammad Biram in the 1850s in the regency of Tunis, who used the word for the kind in Arabic I use.
Sometimes acronyms stick in the labels liberal and conservative to capture the gist of what these two camps stand for.
In real life, we also find, of course, the labels Islamists versus secularists.
But I avoid the term secularist because it implies a project of separation or neutrality.
We also find inflammatory or self-serving labels, such as reactionaries versus progressives, enlightened nominal Muslims, and so on.
All these labels are contextual and I do not pay undue attention to them.
Also, the liberal and conservative stances on the cleavage are not fixed,
but depend on the status quo, which evolves as a result of a tug of war between the two camps.
Hence, we stances evolve through time and vary from place to place.
We can find it in authoritarian and democratic contexts.
Most contemporary authoritarian governments have imposed what I call an authoritarian synthesis of liberal and conservative senses.
So why do liberals and conservatives, white conservatives argue for a secure state?
Because studentship of Islam, whereas liberals advocate for a thinner one, that is, for fewer Islamic constraints on the state.
Conservatives also argue for a more munificent state for students of Islam.
They aim to expand the place of Islamic governance by increasing state funded religious provisions,
whereas the liberals adversaries aim to decrease them on the issues of the strength of the state's custodianship of Islam.
The picture is more complicated and contextual.
Liberals who argue for a thinner and less munificent state stewardship of Islam, also often advocate for a stronger one,
that is, for its coercive implementation, and would in that case be better described as illiberal progressives.
For instance, they often advocate for specifying and enforcing a correct Islam and for imposing limits on their conservative political adversaries,
freedoms of expression and association, for example by outlawing the mixing of religion and politics.
However, they seldom argue for separating Islam from the state or for state neutrality converging in this regard with conservatives.
On the other hand, conservatives generally support mixing religion and politics,
since they often argue that policies should be derived from religious doctrine.
They might call for a weaker state custodianship of Islam when facing state repression,
but they might advocate for a stronger one if the state abides by an Islamic philosophy of governance that is to their liking.
Importantly, this political cleavage preceded the emergence of organised Islamist movements such as the Muslim Brothers, founded in 1928.
In Egypt. They did not create it, spoiling a so-called liberal age.
As conventional wisdom has it. I show in chapter four of the book that the Muslim brothers, in fact,
joined a pre-existing political battle about the role of Islam in governance and that they reappropriated pre-existing conservative tropes,
for instance. Islam is the religion of sorry, Islam is religion and state, or the Koran is our constitution.
In a context of mass politics. How does this contrast with received wisdom?
Political scientists and historians often reduce the relationship between Islam and politics
to the antagonism between organised Islamist movements and supposedly secular states.
They focus almost exclusively on such movements when studying Islam and politics, and ignore other protagonists.
They do not replace Islamist movements in the long and broad genealogy of ideas.
Therefore, they often strive to explain the emergence of Islamist movements by socio economic dysfunctions.
I'm sorry, there is a problem with, I would say, by socio economic dysfunctions.
Um, and instead I find that Islam is the Islamist project that is the expansion of the role of
Islamic governance is in continuity with a conservative tradition of political thought.
When the role of Islam in the state is acknowledged, it is assumed to be primarily for legitimacy, identity, or symbolic purposes.
Instead, the state custodianship of Islam as a principle is a concrete state duty,
e.g. in 1923 Egypt it is officially declared, and I quote, one of the accepted necessities of public order.
That means a lot of these,
and I'm and will sell them behalf to be sure it can be used as a political tool in sometimes shameless implementation of the cleavage.
And there are some examples in chapter two of my book, which is set in colonial Tunisia and at independence.
Some attribute the politicisation of Islam to colonisation, nationalism, the formation of nation states and modernisation.
As these political contentions about the role of Islam in governance did not exist before these modern developments.
Intellectual historians go slightly further back,
but often see a puzzling bifurcation from reformist thinkers to Muslim fundamentalists, e.g. from Hamad Abdul Rashid Riddle,
why they rarely focus on debates on governance with multiple sides involved e.g. they often only attend to liberal stances and they
rarely focus on debates in real low key of deliberation e.g. they often look at writings by specific intellectual and political actors.
What I hope the book shows is that focusing on a specific issue the role of Islam in governance,
and following the history of intellectual and political disagreements on this issue.
In real look, I have deliberation. Hence my choice to study constitutional debates tells us a different story.
Rather than a puzzling bifurcation, we uncover an enduring political battle that I describe in the book through a number of examples.
Cultural anthropologists claim that the Middle East has become subject to a ubiquitous and hegemonic Western liberal secularism in modern times,
and that modern Middle Eastern states are therefore secular.
They posit but do not explain nor document a rupture.
In modern times, the claim that religious institutions have been calculated in modern times.
We will see that this is not the case. Some even claim that religious minorities are a modern invention,
and that Western liberal secularism is responsible for sectarianism and for the discrimination of religious minorities in the modern Middle East.
I find instead that in modern times, as in pre-modern times,
the issue of the organisation and management of religious differences and year keys under a muslim state have constituted a political and legal issue.
Let me now turn to the organisation of the book. In chapter one, two, three, I examine the long history of constitutional debates in Tunisia.
Its constitutional history is one of the oldest and longest among Muslim majority polities.
This allows for the study of the constitutional debates about Islam and governance in a particularly wide variety of contexts.
Pre-colonial colonial independent nation states.
After a fight for independence, authoritarian governance and democratic transition, followed by a return to authoritarianism.
Since Tunisia is often deemed one of the most religiously neutral polities of the Middle East,
it is a particularly illuminating case to sustain my argument for the continuity of the
state's custodianship of Islam as a preferred religion in most Muslim majority polities,
and the persistence of a broad agreement about the necessity of this principle.
How exceptional is Tunisia in this regard?
To answer that, I analyse constitutional debates about Islam and governance that took place in the 1920s, a period often described as a liberal age,
and contrasted with later periods of so-called revival or Islamization,
when several Middle Eastern polities in the national first drafted constitutions for their newly sovereign or quasi sovereign states.
1920 Greater Syria and 1926 Lebanon are distinctive because of their large population of non-Muslims.
They allow me to study the impact of the demographic weight of religious minorities on the role religion can play in governance,
and the extent to which there can be a state different religion.
Also 1923 Egypt is important because of its paradigmatic status in the historiography, but also because,
as I indicated already, it allows for a re-evaluation of the Muslim Brotherhood's novelty,
and because in 19 2223 there were deep debates about the tension between the state custodianship of Islam as a preferred religion on the one hand,
and freedom of religion and equality regardless of religion.
On the other hand, in a country with about 10% non-Muslim Egyptians.
I will not have time to delve into that part of the book.
Chapters 1 to 4. Let me just say that we can observe that as of 2010,
all Muslim majority Middle Eastern polities except for already mentioned Lebanon and including Turkey,
despite its constitutional ization of likely secularism, have a state preferred religion, Islam.
Overall, 88% of the population of Muslim majority polities around the world and 99% in the Middle East live under a state that favours Islam.
The fact that there are exceptions to this empirical regularity shows that the state having a
preferred religion is not an inevitable or essential feature of Muslim majority polities again.
Moreover, this feature is not distinctive of these polities, since 45% of other policies have a state preferred religion.
However, it is much more prevalent among Muslim majority polities, and especially so in the Middle East.
What my analysis of constitutional debates since the 19th century shows is that this situation is not the result of a recent revival,
but the long standing, concrete reality and aspiration.
As a world wild, cross-sectional statistical analysis of the factors that might influence the odds of a state having a
preferred religion strongly suggests that it is a variable of choice subject to certain constraints,
notably the demographic weight of religious minorities.
Neither GDP per capita average years of schooling, nor an index of political rights significantly influences these odds.
Whereas the demographic weight of the religious majority does, it increases them in a substantial and statistically significant way.
As I show in the first four chapters of the book, the anxieties of the majority of being governed by the minority,
as such, more often than not trump those of the minorities of not having their rights protected.
Let me now turn to chapter five,
and I want to zoom up on that particular part of the book to the concrete implementation of the state custodianship of Islam.
To do that, I estimated public religious expenditures, i.e. expenditures on public religious provisions, that is,
religious goods made available to the public free of charge, not religious goods produced or distributed within the family.
I do so since the late 19th century or early 20th centuries in four countries Tunisia,
Egypt, Morocco and Turkey, plus an incursion into 1730 Tunisia and 10th century Iraq.
And I analysed debates about their extent, content and form of delivery.
These four countries have significant historical, political and social economic dissimilarities,
as illustrated by their human and economic development trajectories,
their contrasting histories of foreign occupation, and their contrasting political systems over time,
such as monarchical, republican, democratic, and authoritarian.
This notwithstanding, a similar picture emerges which I will talk about in a bit.
Public. Religious provisions can be categorised as infrastructure and personnel dedicated to Islamic worship.
Islamic education that is, specialised Islamic tracks, i.e. madrasas or modern incarnations thereof,
whose primary purpose is the teaching of the Islamic sciences and Islamic instruction in modern schools,
i.e. new schools created to teach important European knowledge.
There is also infrastructure and personnel dedicated to Shariah,
justice and then public works and assistance when delivered in an Islamic form, i.e. through public works, that is, Islamic endowments.
And I estimate, aggregate public religious expenditures using printed and archival material, including yearly fine grained state budgets.
Not restricting myself to ministries of religious affairs, as is commonly done, and including Islamic instruction in modern schools,
using the fraction of the curriculum that is devoted to it and the percentage of enrolments Muslim students represent.
I also use yearly madrassa and public works fine grained budgets when they are kept separate from the central state budget.
I make sure to disaggregate expenditures on public religious provisions from those that go toward operating,
maintaining and managing their revenue generating assets.
These are significant, and at times we present the bulk of total workforce expenditures.
I also estimate enrolments of Muslim students in state and state subsidised schools,
both madrassas and modern schools, as well as hours of Islamic instruction dispensed in both.
I do this for the same for countries over a slightly longer period.
Note here that I am skewing the conventional dichotomy traditional and religious versus modern and secular schooling.
Instead, I track the aggregate number of hours of Islamic instruction in both modern schools and madrassas.
There is a summarised data appendix at the end of the book that explains what sources I use and how I estimated these quantities.
If you are interested. So what are my findings?
First of all, I find that public religious provisions have mainly been a state affair and that civil societies contribution is smaller.
It is often claimed that private voluntary associations provide larger amounts of public provisions in the Middle East,
especially in the religious domains. A claim that often accompanies narratives about an alleged withdrawal of the state.
We will see that there is no evidence of withdrawal of the states in terms of religious expenditures.
On this slide, you can see that even in Egypt, which has one of the oldest and most important private associations tradition,
the relative contribution of these associations to public religious provisions has been very small,
especially after deducting government aid and user fees.
In addition, associations are usually not only significantly state subsidised in cash and other forms of aid,
but they also are tightly regulated, guided and leveraged by the state.
In the book, I provide analysis estimates for the contributions of private wells and Sufi brotherhoods in the first half of the 20th century.
Second, the state's financial support can be decentralised via public works.
We choose to be prevalent or centralised via direct payments from the state budget, which is prevalent today.
However, centralisation waves or efforts are certainly not distinctive of the modern period.
Public provisions by public works have been very much a state affair.
They have been regulated and managed under the purview of the ruler.
To be sure, they were funded not only by rulers and state officials, but also by private, that is, non-state individuals.
However, their contribution was smaller.
As I show in the book, we can see here that the public works used to provide a large fraction of public religious provisions,
whereas today they are essentially delivered through direct state expenditures, that is, from the state treasuries.
In other words, the state sustains religious institutions and their missions, whatever the institutional form or arrangement.
As the general secretary of the Tunisian government wrote in 1950, and I quote,
it is irrelevant whether the budget of the public works is balanced or not.
Since the main thing is to know whether it exhibits a surplus or a deficit,
so that the higher authority may use the surpluses or cover the shortfall as is its right.
This illustrates not only that religious provisions are state affair,
but also that they will be supplied whatever the circumstances and means of delivery.
And more broadly, the state provides its support on its own terms, since it reorganises religious institutions,
such as when Nasser massively expanded the scope and scale of an asset after 1961.
It sometimes marginalises or eliminates some institutions,
such as when Tunisia outlawed religious endowments public and private after independence, and it prioritises religious expenditures.
Let me give you a small example of reprioritization of religious expenditures.
In 1848, Tunis, in the context of the reorganisation of education,
the ruler introduced a new category of professors called second class professors at the Zaytuna.
The madrasa of the Grand Mosque can see here and increase their salaries.
He used the surpluses of works dedicated to the recitation of prayers in praise of the prophet in the same grand mosque.
However, it must have been insufficient because we are told by Ibn and Hodja that with time the prayers were forgotten,
and the two professors who used to recite them joined the rest of the class, unquote.
So let me note here that such representations and reorganisations of Islamic institutions more broadly are,
of course, not distinctive of the modern period.
So these frequent state interventions create political tensions and ambivalence.
You have on the one side who want both autonomy and state financial support.
They lament state control and the alleged hoarding of the real or imagined wealth of the works.
They also sustain the fiction of a past autonomy, self-sufficiency and munificence of the Islamic endowments.
But at the same time they want to be paid directly from the state treasury, not the wharfs.
As for state officials,
they seek to control religious institutions and support the fiction of their autonomy to keep the at a safe distance from politics,
and to better manage the expectations of the Muslim community as to the munificence of the state,
the studentship of Islam, and where the works have persisted even once more.
They help the state support the fiction of autonomy, self-sufficiency and offices of religious institutions.
For instance, Moroccan Islamic endowments.
Net revenues have only contributed about 5% of state religious expenditures in the last decades, but their accounts are hidden from public view.
Whereas public religious provisions may be supported by direct payments from the state budget are advertised as coming from the West,
as in this flashy brochure, with a monarch as the main protagonist surrounded by a llama,
and officials during the Ramadan lessons in the king's palace.
Let us now turn to the extent and evolution of public religious expenditures.
First, public religious expenditures are relatively small, especially in relation to GDP.
But on display as an important duty. This might come as a surprise,
since scholars and political actors alike have often vastly exaggerated the economic importance of religious endowments,
and especially the amount of public religious provisions they used to dispense.
Second, public religious expenditures may have decreased as a fraction of total state expenditures in the long duration.
Third, they drastically expanded in per capita real terms, i.e., adjusted for inflation in the modern period,
with the drastic expansion of the size and reach of the state, especially in education.
And that is central in my argument.
Fourth, there are disputes between the two camps we talked about in the political cleavage, about the munificence of the state,
custodianship of Islam, and therefore short term fluctuations that are often the result of tug of war between the two camps.
These fluctuations certainly feed the narratives of each side of this cleavage.
In his move, Umar Ibn Khaldun writes that the share of religious officials pay in the ruler's budget is generally small.
He uses a highly since the ruler and I quote, gives them their share in accordance with the general needs and the demand of the population for them.
He recounts that it was only after showing a sceptical contemporary stray leaves from the
account books of the government offices in the palace of Abbasid Caliphate and Mahmud,
that he was able to convince his interlocutor.
And I have to say that my experience was not too dissimilar from his when working on this topic, and I hope I can convince you.
As for the importance of the religious professions and institutions, Ibn Khaldun relates them,
and I quote again to the ruler's duty to look after the public interest must always.
So let me show you a few graphs to illustrate, uh, what I have just explained.
So, as you can see here, as a percentage of GDP, state religious expenditures are and have been relatively small.
My estimates for 18th and 19th century Tunisia are in the 0.3 to 0.4% range, close to where we are today.
In the 20th century, they have fluctuated the trend between, for instance, close to 0% in 1940s Turkey,
the result of the communist reforms to 1% in 2015, Egypt, after which they decreased under President Sisi.
That is also where they are in 2020.
Morocco, the result of more attention to religious infrastructure by the Moroccan monarchy after the Casablanca terrorist attacks of 2003.
You can also see that in Tunisia, they peaked during colonisation at the eve of independence,
and that would give us reforms half them, whereas in Morocco they doubled in the decade after independence.
Also of note are the fluctuations in Egypt.
We see a peak in the 1930s, a trough writer up right before the officers coup, followed by a peak up under Nasser.
Although it is conventionally thought of as a secular rise.
To put these numbers in perspective, in the US,
expenditures on public religious provisions amount to 2% of GDP, but civil society is the main contributor.
Of course. Finally, in this metric state, religious expenditures pretty much continues the increase in Turkey since the mid 1940s,
with some reversals in the 1980s and 1990s.
However, note that as we will see in the next slide, as a percentage of total state expenditures,
they are today slightly below where they were in the early days of the report.
So we're going to move to, uh, from statement of expenditures as a percentage of GDP to state,
which is expenditures as, um, a percentage of total state expenditures.
So if we now examine state religious expenditures as a percentage of total state expenditures,
we can see for Tunisia that since the late 19th century, they have been a lot smaller than they were in the 18th century.
It seems that in the 19th century, they had decreased relative to other state expenditures to make room for them.
On the other hand, in per capita real terms, that is adjusted for inflation, I display them here in purchasing power parity adjusted 1,990 USD.
They have massively increased, and the majority of this increase occurred in the 20th and 21st century, especially after 1950.
We therefore see a double trance story, a story of relative secularisation seen from the point of view of the state,
combined with a story of absolute expansion of religion seen from the point of view of society,
that is, the individuals receiving religious provisions.
The fluctuations in state religious expenditures also show how fiscal and Islamic ranking using this metric would be, in per capita, real terms.
In 1955, Turkey came last and Tunisia first.
In 2020, this ranking was reversed.
However, as remarkable as these fluctuations and reversals are,
they are dwarfed by the massive increase of states religious expenditures in per capita real terms in the last century or so.
So let us now try to understand why we may have this two pronged long term threat.
To do this,
let us turn to the evolution of the size of the economy measured by GDP and of the state measured by its total expenditures in the long duration.
I have borrowed the expression and even centuries from Surfcat Pamuk, 2018 study of the Economic Performance of Turkey since 1820.
We see two periods. First, the 19th century, during which the size of the state as a percentage of GDP started to expand significantly.
I show it here for Tunisia, where it increased more than five fold from about 2% to 11% of GDP,
but during which GDP per capita in real terms only increased slightly across the region.
Second, the 20th century,
when the size of the state as a percentage of GDP and GDP per capita in real terms both drastically increase across the region.
Let us now see how our story of relative decrease and absolute expansion of state
religious expenditures can be interpreted in relation to these two and even centuries.
During the first period, the 19th century only displayed here for the case of Tunisia,
state religious expenditures as a percentage of total state expenditures decreased due to
the significant increase of the size of the state we have seen in the previous slide.
But in per capita real terms, they essentially remained constant as it increased its fiscal capacity,
the state continued to provide the same amount of religious provisions per capita,
some sort of minimal threshold, and gave priority to its non religious expenditures.
Given the economic challenges of the time, it is as if hard choices had to be made in the face of new needs of a secular nature.
During the times we met in a context of low economic growth.
This is a hypothesis, of course,
and it would require more archival work to fully understand what happened in Tunisia and to generalise the study to other countries,
given that they experienced a similar trajectory of expansion of their state's fiscal capacity.
However, the second period, the 20th century, is one in which, for the four countries I studied states,
religious expenditures fluctuated within a relatively small range as a percentage of total state
religious expenditures and state religious expenditures greatly increased per capita real terms,
especially after the 1950s, as if there was not enough economic growth,
and a double whammy of expansion of GDP per capita and expansion of state fiscal capacity to invest in religious expenditures.
As we will see, this massive expansion has been in great part related to the expansion of Islamic education,
and it has often been seen by policymakers as contributing to human development.
As you can see, in the beginning of the period I study states religious expenditures were mostly devoted to Islamic worship, close to two thirds.
They are now mostly devoted to Islamic education, also close to two thirds.
This is due to the massive increase in Muslim student enrolments per capita in our four countries,
which all follow the same trend with some leading others.
This massive expansion of school enrolments,
coupled with the continuous presence of Islamic instruction in curricula except in Turkey, as you can see there in the 1940s,
led to a massive increase in state expenditures on madrassas and Islamic education in modern schools in per capita terms,
and as a fraction of state religious expenditures, which is displayed here.
As we already saw, this fraction converge at the end of the period to about two thirds in our four countries,
the rest being essentially devoted to worship, infrastructure and personnel.
If we now unravel state expenditures in specialised Islamic tracks from those devoted to Islamic instruction in modern schools,
this is where we are now. In some countries, such as Tunisia and Morocco,
Islamic education expenditures are mostly devoted to Islamic instruction in modern schools, whereas in others,
such as Egypt and Turkey they are mostly devoted to specialised Islamic tracks
and as in Egypt and hadith schools in yet and Islamic institutes in Turkey.
Since the establishment of modern schools in the 19th century,
the extent of specialised Islamic tracks in terms of expenditures or enrolments has been an important object of debates.
After independence in Tunisia, for instance, President Bourguiba and his allies, when radically shrinking the enrolments at the Zaytuna,
argued that it was an archaic institution and that the French colonial authorities had been at fault in giving it too many resources.
Similarly, debates about the fraction of the curriculum Islamic instruction should constitute in modern schools,
and hence the extent of state expenditures it entails,
have been the object of vigorous debates in all four countries before, during and after foreign occupation where it occurred.
Now, if we look at the history of enrolments in specialised Islamic tracts as a percentage of all enrolments for Muslim students,
we can see that until the end of the 19th century,
madrassas provided the bulk of state and state subsidised education,
with Egypt being much more advanced in the mid-19th century and its development of modern schools than Tunisia,
in part because it repurposed specialised Islamic tracts.
Also, we can see that the share of enrolments in specialised Islamic tracts decreased since then,
with the development of modern schooling to become insignificant in all four countries.
In the 1970s, however, starting in the 1970s, we see that in Turkey and especially Egypt,
they increased to reach almost 10% of total school enrolments in 2020.
In sum, it is clear that by the early 20th century there are those who teach in the specialised Islamic tracts had lost the battle of education,
although after the 70s they have been given more space in the education system in Egypt,
which I studied for my PhD dissertation and my first book, and somewhat in Turkey, in fits and starts.
As a result, in the 20th century, most of the Islamic education hours dispensed annually,
and virtually all of them in today's Tunisia and Morocco have been dispensed in modern schools.
As you can see in this chart, which is a mirror image of the previous one, and as a result of the massive expansion in school enrolments,
the annual hours of Islamic instruction dispensed per capita has massively increased across the board,
despite significant fluctuations and country to country differences.
It is remarkable that this massive expansion has occurred.
While the percentage of school hours of Islamic instruction dispensed in modern schools and specialised Islamic tracks combined has decreased.
As you see here, this decrease is due to the fact that the education as a whole has secularised.
We have less Islamic education hours in modern schools as a fraction of their curriculum.
I have not displayed that chart. Only the combined fraction.
And we have fewer enrolments in specialised Islamic tracks relative to modern schools.
As a result, note that the first data point displayed on this graph for Turkey comes after
a drastic reduction in the share of Islamic instruction in modern schools,
and after the closure of the metric system before the Republic.
It would look more similar to the other countries. But this is a project I have to, uh, carry out.
Um, after, um, in the coming years, hopefully.
So the secularisation of education did not go without debates even before the introduction of modern schools.
I did say to Allah in 1871, as we saw in the previous slide, only about 30% of the lessons were on religious topics.
This is an excerpt from an official report on the Satan that published in the Official Gazette of Tunisia in 1871,
that complains that there is too much grammar. 666 lessons out of 148 148.
Whereas there are only 38 lessons of Islamic law and one lesson in the hadith.
So the debates, you know, uh, was there and has continued over the years.
So in a nutshell, the history of Islamic education in state and state subsidised schools followed that of state religious expenditures.
We see a secularisation of the education system.
The share of Islamic instruction has decreased relative to other subjects, and the bulk of Islamic instruction is dispensed in modern schools,
while the per capita exposure to Islamic instruction has massively increased.
What can we conclude from all of this from the material point of view?
The state custodianship of Islam is well entrenched, contrary to those who claim that Islamic institutions have been ameliorated.
It is also vigorously discussed as to its extent and content,
often polarising further the cleavage on Islam in governance that I described more fully in the first part of this presentation.
In fact, the state custodianship of Islam has massively expense expended, sorry,
in per capita state religious expenditures and per capita hours of Islamic instruction thanks to the expansion of education.
However, this absolute expansion has taken place despite a relative secularisation,
with the decrease of the percentage of state religious expenditures and of the percentage of Islamic construction in the education system,
since, the state has increased its secular endeavours as well.
To be sure, the form of delivery of public religious provisions has changed.
Works are much less prevalent today, and there are more modern schools and madrasas.
And there might be nostalgia about this, but we should not confuse this transformation with the secularisation of the state and society.
One important aspect of the story I told you today is that choices have been made.
Islamic instruction must be preserved in the public school system,
and worship infrastructure and personnel must be financially supported by the state.
These choices have kept the state custodianship of Islam alive, and mechanistic effects,
such as those resulting from the unprecedented expansion in its magnitude of the size of the state and from mass education,
have in fact solidified it and has given it a new scale.
And we see rich and vigorous debates around the long historical cleavage on the state, custodianship of Islam's thickness, strength and munificence.
With mass politics given, giving to the debate a new scale starting in the 1920s 1930s.
We should study, I think, and historic sites, these debates and cleavages, if possible,
by studying all sides in actual loci of deliberation in terms of policy implications.
I would say that it is important to keep the debate alive, preferably under democratic conditions,
and not predict that either side will moderate its stances or fade away.
Thank you.