# Ep. 16 | The Making of the Modern Muslim State | Prof. Malika Zeghal ## expand\_more ![M](/sites/g/files/omnuum9396/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/malika.jpg?itok=a4M1aZv4) In her recent book, [*The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691134369/the-making-of-the-modern-muslim-state) (Princeton University Press, 2024), Professor Malika Zeghal shows how Muslim states negotiated the role of Islam in governance in the 19th-21st centuries by exploring the history of constitution making, the impact of religious minorities on debates about Islam and democracy, and state expenditures on Islamic public provisions in the *longue durée* in Middle Eastern and North African countries. Through her qualitative and quantitative research, Professor Zeghal demonstrates that the modern Muslim state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion has continued from the premodern to the modern period, with vigorous debates as to how it should be implemented. [**Malika Zeghal**](https://scholar.harvard.edu/malikazeghal/home) is Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. Embed [Harvard Islamic Studies](https://soundcloud.com/harvard-islamic "Harvard Islamic Studies") · [Ep. 16 | The Making of the Modern Muslim State | Prof. Malika Zeghal](https://soundcloud.com/harvard-islamic/ep-16-the-making-of-the-modern-muslim-state-prof-malika-zeghal "Ep. 16 | The Making of the Modern Muslim State | Prof. Malika Zeghal") ### Credits expand\_more **Episode 16** **Release date**: August 16, 2024 **Hosts**: Meryum Kazmi and Harry Bastermajian **Recording location**: Media Production Center, Harvard University **Sound engineer**: Jeffrey Valade **Audio editing**: Meryum Kazmi **Audio elements**: Taksim Arabi, oud solo by Bichi Slama (public domain) **Photo**: Zaytuna Mosque, old medina, Tunis / photo credit: Kajicom via Alamy **Transcription**: Otter (modified for readability) ### Transcript expand\_more **Meryum Kazmi** 00:08 Welcome to the Harvard Islamic Podcast. I'm Meryum Kazmi, **Harry Bastermajian** 00:11 and I'm Harry Bastermajian. We're honored to be joined today by Malika Zeghal, Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard University. She is the author of many books and articles, including *Gardiens de l'Islam*, and *Islamism in Morocco: Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics*. **Meryum Kazmi** 00:39 We're here today to discuss Professor Zeghal's new book, *The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa*, published in 2024, by Princeton University Press. Welcome Professor Zeghal. **Malika Zeghal** 00:52 Thank you so much, Harry, and Meryum for hosting me at the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program podcast today. I'm thrilled and honored. **Harry Bastermajian** 01:02 We're honored to have you here. To get us started, can you tell us a bit more about your academic background, and what brought you to the study of the making of the modern Muslim state in the Middle East in the 19th, \[20th\], and 21st centuries? **Malika Zeghal** 01:19 So my new book, *The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa*, examines the role of Islam in governance and debates about it in Muslim-majority countries of the Middle East in the modern period, and there is an obvious continuity with my previous work. My PhD dissertation dealt with the role of the 'ulama of al-Azhar in Egypt in the second half of the 20th century. It led to my first book, which I published in French in 1996. It was titled *Guardians of Islam: The 'Ulama of al-Azhar in Contemporary Egypt*. Based on ethnography, and printed material, I showed the importance of the 'ulama in Egypt, the moral and political role they play within and beyond the state, whereas they had been considered as politically passive by the secondary literature. And since early in my academic career, I have been interested in issues of religious authority and religious institutions in Muslim-majority countries, in part because I thought there was too much emphasis on Islamist movements, and not enough attention paid to the issue of Islam and the state. Since then, I have worked on other Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, especially Morocco and Tunisia. And I have examined the role of Islam and governance more generally. The conventional approach to this topic is to focus on organized Islamist movements and their opposition to the authoritarian and supposedly secular states of the region. My approach is broader, not confined to Islamist movements and not confined to the present. Studying the history of constitutional debates and state expenditures allows me to explain and to historicize one of the most important political divides in contemporary Middle Eastern societies. So let me say a few words about constitution making, and how and why I came to study it for this book. These are moments of deep introspection and deliberation. Even under authoritarian conditions, it is possible to identify lines of divide on specific issues. When the Arab Spring came, constituent assemblies were elected in Tunisia and Egypt and constitutions were drafted. Tunisia between 2011 and 2014 became particularly interesting. There were vigorous debates about Islam and governance during the constitution-making period, the Constituent Assembly had been democratically elected, it was politically diverse from Islamists to liberals, and its debates opened an extremely interesting window into how Tunisians debated the issue of Islam and governance after authoritarianism. In addition, I was now looking at the Muslim-majority country with the longest history of constitution making in the world. Tunisia had had two constitutions before that, one that was drafted between 1857 and 1861 in pre-colonial times, the Constitution of 1959, drafted between 1956 and 1959 at independence, and the democratic Constitution of 2014. After the end of the democratic experiment, a new constitution was drafted by the President and proclaimed in 2022. So I had to delve into the Tunisian National Archives to go back to the beginnings of Tunisia's constitutional history, and follow the debates about Islam and governance through constitution making in the *longue durée* for more than a century and a half. Paradoxically, the effervescence of constitution making in the 21st century with the Arab Spring, which I could observe in real time, led me to investigate the 19th century from the vantage point of what I found in the archives, which revealed interesting continuities and differences. But this work is not just about Tunisia. I complement the study of the long history of constitutional debates about Islam and governance in Tunisia with other important cases, the 1920 Greater Syria draft constitution, the 1922 constitutional debates that led to the drafting of the 1923 Egyptian constitutions, and the debates in the drafting of the 1926 Constitution of Lebanon. These three cases are important, because there were important demographic differences with Tunisia when it comes to the religious makeup of the populations at the time of constitution making. Moreover, they took place right before the emergence of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt. And we already find conceptions and tropes about Islam and governance used later by the Muslim Brothers, which helps re-evaluate the ideological contribution of the Muslim Brothers. **Meryum Kazmi** 05:54 Thank you. So, in your book, you argue that the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion is something that continues from pre-modern times into the modern period. What does it mean for the state to be the custodian of Islam as the preferred religion and what are the questions at the heart of the debates around the role of the state that you identify? **Malika Zeghal** 06:20 So, in the book, I ask the following questions. First, how has the role of Islam in governance been conceived in the Middle East and North Africa in the modern period and by modern period, I mean a strictly chronological period that is the 19th to the 21st centuries. Second, how has it been implemented in concrete terms and by concrete I also mean material terms, and third, what may have changed from pre-modern times. And so, in continuity, with the past, in modern times, I find that 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 organization of the pilgrimage, but also by disseminating and enforcing specific interpretations of Islam, or by 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. And third is the preservation of Islamic institutions, for example, by upholding Islamic courts or funding Islamic education and places of worship. And I show that this duty is tied to sovereignty, even if exercised by a non-Muslim ruler. Moreover, this duty is only one of the state's duties. Of course, the state has many other duties of a secular nature, and this particular duty is performed through a state partnership with 'ulama. And what I found is that this partnership has endured, notwithstanding fluctuations in the relative strength of any of the partners, in its institutional forms, and in the vocabulary used to designate it. Now, the existence and the continuity of the state custodianship of Islam does not mean that the state does not protect other religions. It only means that Islam is protected more than the others. It also does not mean that there are no domains of equality between Muslims and non-Muslims. In fact, I do find such domains in modern and pre-modern times. And it does not mean that religious and political authority are necessarily conflated, but what it implies and what I generally find in my study is that there is no separation between Islam and the state. There is no state neutrality toward religions as an aspiration or concrete reality. But sometimes we find aspirations to separate Islam and politics and this has created some confusion in the scholarship, 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-- we see that quite often from Chapter One to Chapter Four-- and sometimes keeps at bay the political ambitions of the religious minorities as such to ensure that the state remains Muslim. 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 vigorous debates about its meaning and extent. And I want to add some important points about this broad agreement. The state custodianship of Islam is an empirical reality, regularity, not an essential feature, and it is not inevitable. In fact, 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 moreover, this feature is not distinctive of these polities, since as of 2010, 45% of other polities have a state-preferred religion. However, it is much more prevalent among Muslim-majority polities, and especially so in the Middle East. But 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 state involvement in religion, public religious expenditures, relative to non-religious ones in modern but also pre-modern times, which shows just the opposite. And I do not make predictions as to whether the expectation that the state be the custodian of Islam as the preferred religion will continue to be prevalent in most Muslim-majority polities 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, and that this choice has been made in the modern period in full awareness of a wide array of alternative potential options as to the role of religion and governance. And this means that different choices could therefore be made in the future. And I also find that some voices call or have called in the past for a change in this respect, although they are rare and seldom express themselves in formal deliberative arenas. So 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. So you asked about the questions at the heart of this debate about the meaning and extent of the state custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. I find that the debate is organized 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 and governance. For instance, in legislation, or as a philosophy of governance. For example, to call for the implementation of shari'a law is to call for a thicker state custodianship of Islam. Then there is the munificence of the state custodianship of Islam, that is the extent of public religious provisions that the state should make available to Muslims, that the state supports financially, for instance, mosques, imams, Islamic education, Islamic courts and personnel, Islamic forms of public assistance. So it is the state's commitment to Islam from a material point of view. Then there is the strength of the state custodianship of Islam. To what extent should the state constrain Islam and its institutions with its coercive and pedagogical apparatus, for instance, by imposing its own interpretations of Islam? And then there is an issue related to process, the relationship between religion and politics. Who can partake in implementing and discussing the state's custodianship of Islam? For instance, should the 'ulama engage with politics, for example, when speaking truth to power, and criticizing the ruler for not fulfilling his duty to protect the religion, the community or its institutions? Another example, can political competition be organized alongside sectarian lines? Or can political activism be based on religion? This is a question we find today in the Middle East in many cases. Can mosques serve as fora for political deliberations and competition? So this categorization around these four main questions that overlap from time to time helps make the debates about the role of Islam in governance legible and it helps follow these debates through time. And it also helps separate what these debates owe to historical contingencies, from what they owe to the persistence of core principles and questions. **Harry Bastermajian** 15:01 Thank you. Taking us to your first chapter, and going back to the middle of the 19th century, thinking about the period of the Tanzimat Reforms in the Ottoman Empire and, in particular, thinking about your treatment of the Regency of Tunis, how did we get to the creation of the Regency of Tunis's 1861 Constitution and what was the state's custodianship of Islam? How was it decided at that time? **Malika Zeghal** 15:39 Okay, so it's a complex story, so I won't be able to give you all the details, which are in the book, but let me say that the idea of the creation of a constitution in the Regency of Tunis emerged in the mid-1850s. It was in fact co-produced by Tunisian governing elites and the European consuls in Tunis, in particular the British and French consuls. The 1861 Constitution was not created because of constitutional ideals on the part of the Europeans or Tunisians, although they would have perhaps liked us to believe that. But it was created, in fact, as a concrete solution to concrete problems. And this is the reason why, in Chapter One, I devote a whole section to explain the economic and legal context of that time to highlight the very concrete and even prosaic reasons for the creation of the Security Pact of 1857 and the Constitution of 1861. And I also make sure to rely on the Tunisian and the European points of view combined to explain what happened. In the scholarship, you have versions of this history from the European point of view or from the Tunisian point of view but no one, to my knowledge, had combined those two vantage points together. But what becomes very interesting is that you have a new technique of governance that is introduced in 1857, 1861, and the state custodianship is therefore reaffirmed. And what I show, you know, from Chapter One to Chapter Four, is that in spite of, or perhaps because of, new moments, new contexts, new techniques of governance that are introduced, then the custodianship of Islam as the preferred region has to be reaffirmed. And this, in a way, tells us about continuities in the midst of, of course, very important differences. **Meryum Kazmi** 17:57 Thank you. So in 1881, France occupies Tunisia in a more official capacity. So how did conceptions of the role of Islam in governance change after that and what were the expectations of France as a foreign colonial power? And I'm fascinated by this idea of Islamic France. **Malika Zeghal** 18:19 Yes, indeed. So let me say first, that the 1861 Constitution doesn't last very long, and it doesn't last very long because the French are not very happy about this idea that they have to submit to the country's jurisdiction. And because of the fiscal crisis in 1863, the bey doubles the taxes, and there is a very important revolt that takes several months before it is pacified. And the French request from the bey that the Constitution be suspended, which it is in 1864. So it doesn't last very long. During the revolt, the rebels asked for implementation of shari'a and going back to the older system, the previous legal system, which, in fact, combined shari'a on the one hand, siyasa on the other hand. Shari'a being the shari'a court, and siyasa, the court of the bey. So they're very dissatisfied by the new legal system, perhaps because it's not functioning very well. Perhaps because also the state doesn't have the means to really develop all these new courts. And so it is interesting that you can see a debate going on in 1861, 1864, not just between the 'ulama and the governing elites, but also between rebels and the government of the Regency of Tunis. And so what I discovered and really surprised me when I looked at the archival sources was that the debate was very broad. It was deep, but also quite broad. The number of participants was very large, including rebels, Tunisian government officials, consuls, and I might have not touched on, you know, other actors. But it's interesting that under such a system, that's not a parliamentary democracy at all, you could identify all those participants in such an important discussion. So this is for 1861. So let me now move to 1881. So the 1861 Constitution is at the time suspended, but Tunisians after 1881 did not waste an opportunity to demand its reinstatement. And so in the early 20th century, for instance, a group of Tunisian elites demands the reinstatement of the 1861 Constitution, a constitution they argue that will go without sovereignty, so they accept the sovereignty of France, but they still want the Constitution and they discuss issues of Islam in governance. Now, what is interesting is that France, at the time, claimed to be or called itself, an Islamic power or a Muslim power. And what we see until 1956, is a competition, a competition between different understandings or ideals of the state custodian of Islam. For some, it is a future independent state for the nationalists, of course, for the anti-nationalists who oppose the Dustur Party, it is France. And so I was able to discover the case of an anti-nationalist who really claimed France to be the custodian of Islam, and was instrumentalized by the French authorities to bolster this idea that France was protecting Islamic institutions in Tunisia. And finally, I also show that the monarch, the bey at the time, also tried to institute himself as the custodian of Islam in Tunisia. And so, this competition continues in the 1920s. And then it is the nationalists that really formed the vanguard of opposition against the French and they of course instrumentalize Islam and use it politically to oppose the French authorities. And when Tunisia becomes independent, we see the opening up of vigorous discussions about the future constitution of Tunisia in the Constituent Assembly between 1956 and 1959 and also some discussions about Islam in governance. So, from this point of view, it is interesting to see that the discussions about Islam were already quite muffled. Bourguiba was becoming already quite authoritarian. But I was able to locate some opposition to his own understanding of the state custodianship of Islam. And so here you can see that, for instance, he was opposed by some 'ulama in the Constituent Assembly who wanted a thicker custodianship of Islam. For instance, they wanted family law to be founded on shari'a law. And, in fact, even before the Constituent Assembly started, Habib Bourguiba had published the personal status code, a family code in which he penalized polygamy, unilateral repudiation, and only kept one sliver of shari'a legislation related to inheritance. And so this, of course, provoked the ire of some conservatives who, in turn, argued in favor of a thicker custodianship of Islam. But what you could see already happening is the strength, the strength of the custodianship of Islam, with Bourguiba gradually imposing, in a very authoritarian way, his own understanding of what the \[state\] custodianship of Islam should be. Another clause that was very important to Bourguiba, when Article One about the official religion of Tunisia was passed, another clause that he brought in immediately and he insisted that it had to be immediate, was related to minorities and to the Jewish minority in Tunisia. So, he insisted immediately, and I quote him, that “Since we have proclaimed that the religion of the Tunisian state is Islam as the religion of the majority, and since there are Israelites, it is urgent to immediately guarantee freedom of belief and the protection of religious rites and rituals in the Constitution and to proclaim it to the whole world.” So why is this important? It is important because we see these two principles always being combined together, the state custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion, often in the clause that Islam is the official religion of the country, or the state, or the people, and another clause that is also as important and states that there is freedom of religion and equality, regardless of religion. And what I found also in 2011, 2014, is the same desire to hold these two principles together. And we will find that again in 1920 Greater Syria, in 1923 Egypt, in the 1923 Egyptian Constitution. So it doesn't mean that to have the custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion is completely trumping any minority rights. Not at all. There is a desire to have both. And the tension is what makes this particularly interesting, because, of course, then it provokes debates about how to hold these two principles together, whereas they are obviously in tension. The debates that oppose liberals and conservatives is opened at independence, but it is closed and frozen very quickly by Bourguiba. And it will be reopened much later during the Arab Spring because during authoritarianism under Bourguiba and his successor, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the debate was completely frozen and even forbidden. And so Tunisia lived with that frozen authoritarian synthesis for several decades. **Harry Bastermajian** 27:57 Thank you. So, now that we've come to the Arab Spring in our discussion today and your third chapter, thinking about, how did past conceptions of the role of Islam and governance change in Tunisia with the 2014 Constitution-- the Arab Spring, and then the 2014 Constitution, and then also with Tunisia's transition to democracy after that? **Malika Zeghal** 28:30 Okay, so with the Arab Spring, we have a new challenge, which is how to constitutionalize a Muslim and democratic state. And, again, the principle of the state custodianship of Islam, as the preferred religion continues to be affirmed, it lives on, but in a radically different environment. And this means that we are now in a context of full freedom of expression. We are not in a context of national liberation anymore. And we are building a political transition. And it's important to say that since the political transition was not brought on by an Islamic revolution or by a pact between Islamists and their political adversaries but rather by uprisings that were caused by severe economic problems, it simply removed the lid on the debate about the role of Islam in governance that had been frozen under authoritarianism. So what the assembly worked at was to establish Islam and democracy together to make them coexist without compromising on their substance in the Constitution. And what we see is very vigorous debates about the thickness and the strength of the state custodianship of Islam and also about the legitimacy of mixing religion and politics. So the three questions I talked \[about\] in a more abstract way in the beginning of the podcast, we see them really being re-initiated, fully re-initiated and discussed between 2011 and 2014. And the most salient debate was about introducing shari'a law in the Constitution in imitation of other constitutions in the Middle East, such as shari'a being the source of legislation, one of the sources of legislation or the source of legislation. But in the end, because the discussions were so polarized, the Islamist party, Ennahda Party, compromised on this. And what I show also in Chapter Three is that, although they accepted to let go of mentioning shari'a law in the Constitution, they stated very clearly that this didn't mean that they abandoned their project of implementing shari'a law. And, in fact, they acknowledged that they could continue to pursue the idea of a democratic state constrained by Islam without invoking shari'a in the Constitution. And, in fact, all the constituents acknowledged that the thickness and the strength of the custodianship of Islam could fluctuate according to future electoral outcomes. And everyone seems intent on implementing their own conception of the custodianship of Islam if they were to govern. So what this puts into question is the hypothesis that we find in the scholarship that democratization leads to the moderation of Islamists. What I find, in fact, is that very logically, democratization leads to a diversity of positions on the part of Islamists but also on the part of liberals and non-Islamists, and so you find the most moderate, and the most extreme on both sides. So what the constituents did during the drafting of the Constitution of 2014 was organize a framework to continue to debate after the Constitution would be passed. So they did not moderate themselves, but they moderated the debate or the framework that would serve to continue the debate. So everybody accepted Article One, as it was in the 1959 constitution, although they added that it cannot be modified. But they placed limits on what would be acceptable from the two sides of the debates with a new article called Article Six, which was new. So let me read it to you. It's a very complex article, and then I can try to explain what it means. And there is more detail also in the book. So this is what it says, "The state is a custodian of the religion (*ra'iyat al-din)*. It guarantees freedom of belief, of conscience, and of religious worship. It ensures the neutrality of mosques and places of worship and protects them from partisan instrumentalization. The state shall commit to spreading the values of moderation and tolerance, to protecting sacred things (*muqaddasat)*, and to preventing attacks on them. It shall also commit to prohibiting accusations of apostasy (*takfir)*, and incitement to hatred and violence and to confronting them." So this is a very complex article that in fact owes to the very concrete context, political context of the transition, where you had a lot of, not only debates in the Constituent Assembly, but clashes in the streets between different groups, etc. And, of course, radical Islamism also emerging in Tunisia now that we had freedom of expression, and a democratic context. And so the idea was to guarantee freedom of belief, \[and\] of conscience, which was quite important and quite new. It's quite exceptional to have the idea of *hurriyat al-damir*, freedom of conscience, in the Middle East. And then you have two important elements in this complex article. First, the state protects sacred things *muqaddasat*. So this means that liberals cannot go too far to put into question or harm any sacred principles-of course, this is left very abstract, for a good reason-and to preventing attacks on them. And then also the state prohibits accusations of apostasy and incitement to hatred and violence, right? So this is the other side. So \[each\] side, the liberals and the Islamists, or the non-Islamists and Islamists, as I prefer to call them, is limited in how far it can go to the extreme of each position. So in a way, this article could be used in future adjudications, litigations, to try to limit your adversaries in what they are trying to do. And so this is an interesting way to organize the compromise, although it delays the solution, of course. We haven't had time to examine what has happened in courts based on this particular article, because the transition was ended after 2021. But if it were to come back, it would be interesting to see how it could be implemented and help the debate continue. **Meryum Kazmi** 36:22 Thank you. So in looking at other countries in the region, how did the constitutions of other states in the region including Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, compare with that of Tunisia in the so-called liberal age of the 1920s? **Malika Zeghal** 36:38 Alright, so, since Tunisia in the 1920s did not have open and public deliberations related to the drafting of a constitution, I look at other places in the Middle East when we see polities taking shape in the Levant, Greater Syria in 1920 and Lebanon in 1926, when constitutions were being drafted. And I also look at the case of Egypt in 1923, which gained quasi-independence in 1922. So this helps me compensate for the absence of open deliberations in the 1920s in Tunisia. So 1920 Greater Syria and 1926 Lebanon are distinctive because of their large proportion 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 on the extent to which there can be a state-preferred religion, and the debates we see in Lebanon in 1926 show that because of the highly religiously fractionalized population in Lebanon, there was no question, no possibility, of course, of having a state-preferred religion, but that there were very important debates about proportional representation of religious communities in legislative assemblies and government posts. 1923 Egypt is particularly important because of its paradigmatic status in the historiography. And also, because there were deep debates about the tension between the state custodianship of Islam as the 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, which is a percentage much, much higher than what we had in Tunisia. So here in 1922, Egypt during the discussions or debates of the Constituent Assembly, there are very, very deep and vigorous debates about the issue of mixing religion and politics and representing-- proportional representation of non-Muslims, religious minorities in legislative assemblies. And I can't go into too many details, but what I found is that liberals as well as conservatives in the Constituent Assembly, in their majority, were against the proportional representation of Copts in legislative assemblies. And they argued that this was not possible because they would be represented politically, starting from a religious foundation, and that would in fact mix religion and politics and would be impossible because the majority religion was Islam and because Islam was the religion of the state. So here you could see a very, very strong tension between the idea of representation, proportional representation of religious minorities in legislative assemblies and the idea of the state custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. Now, the 1922 debates that led to the 1923 Constitution are also very important for the argument in the book, because what we find is debates that involve, on the conservative side, tropes and conceptions of the custodianship, the state custodianship of Islam, that we will find later among the Muslim Brothers. And so what I show is that the Muslim Brothers did not innovate ideologically, but that, in fact, when they appeared at the end of the 1920s, and started to grow in the 1930s, as a mass organized political movement, they, in fact, rehearsed tropes that had been already circulating during the debates in the Constituent Assembly of 1922 in Egypt. And you find such tropes in the press, but also when you read the transcripts of such debates. And so what we find is not the invention of a cleavage between conservatives and liberals, with the emergence of the Muslim Brothers, but the exact opposite. We have already a long-standing debate between liberals and conservatives that expresses itself during those constitutional debates. And the contribution of the Muslim Brothers, their political contribution, is to insert those conservative tropes, for instance, that Islam is religion and state, that Islam is religion and politics and other similar tropes, to insert them in their mass political movement. So they do not invent mass politics, mass politics is a phenomenon of the moment, the 1920s, the interwar period, you see other parties also participating in mass politics such as the Wafd Party. But what the Muslim Brothers do is really combine, put together, bring together those conservative tropes that we see expressed before they emerge, and mass politics. And this becomes \[the\] very potent movement of the Muslim Brothers, but we should not think of them as having invented those tropes or being at the origin of these conservative ideas. And, in fact, we find quite a lot of 'ulama of al-Azhar participating in that conservative side of the debate, but there were also very liberal 'ulama who participated in the liberal side. We should not think of the 'ulama as being necessarily all conservative. They, in fact, were quite divided on that spectrum as well. So Egypt is particularly important, the moment of 1922 to 1923, to insist \[on\] and highlight the importance of the cleavage before the emergence of the Muslim Brothers. **Meryum Kazmi** 43:19 So can you tell us about your quantitative analysis of the munificence of the modern Muslim state? How did you conduct this research and what does it reveal about state expenditures on Islamic public provisions in the *longue durée*? **Malika Zeghal** 43:35 Thank you, Meryum, for this question. So yes, I asked in Chapter Five, how has the state custodianship of Islam been implemented in material terms, and what may have changed from pre-modern times? And to do that I examined public religious provisions and the expenditures devoted to them. And what do I mean by public religious provisions? I mean religious goods made available to the public free of charge, and not religious goods produced or distributed within the family. And I categorize them as infrastructure and personnel dedicated to Islamic worship, Islamic education, that is specialized Islamic tracks \[i.e., madrasas or modern incarnations thereof\] and religious instruction in state, and state-subsidized modern schools, infrastructure and personnel dedicated to shari'a justice, and public works and assistance when delivered in an Islamic form, that is through public waqfs, Islamic endowments. And what I do is estimate aggregate public religious expenditures from printed and archival material that include yearly state budgets, and I do not restrict myself to ministries of religious affairs, as is commonly done. I include Islamic instruction in modern schools, and so that is usually not done. Scholars have looked at madrasa education, or what I call the specialized Islamic tracks. I have used fine-grained central state annual budgets, which are very long because I needed them to be very detailed. And I have used yearly madrasa and public waqfs' budgets when they are kept separate from the central state budget. And this is important, I make sure to disaggregate expenditures on public religious provisions from those that go towards operating, maintaining, and managing their revenue-generating assets. It's important because these are significant and at times represent the bulk of total waqfs' expenditures. And I have a summarized data appendix at the end of the book that explains the sources I used and how I estimated these quantities. So what do I find? When I look at this data, I find that public religious provisions have mainly been a state affair, and that civil society's contribution is smaller. And this goes against conventional wisdom. It is often claimed that private voluntary associations provide large amounts of public provisions in the Middle East, especially in the religious domain, a claim that often accompanies narratives about an alleged withdrawal of the state. And in fact, what I find is that there is no evidence of withdrawal of the state in terms of religious expenditures. 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, and associations are usually not only significantly state subsidized in cash and other forms of aid, but they're also tightly regulated, guided and leveraged by the state. In the book I also provide analogous estimates for the contribution of private waqfs and Sufi brotherhoods in the first half of the 20th century. So, second, the state's financial support can be decentralized via public waqfs, which used to be prevalent, or centralized via direct payments from the state budget, which is prevalent today. However, centralization waves or efforts are not distinctive of the modern period, there were such efforts in the past. And I want to say here that public provisions by public waqfs have been very much a state affair as well. They have been regulated and managed under the purview of the ruler. And they were funded, of course, not only by rulers and state officials, but also by private individuals. However, the contribution of such private individuals was smaller. And I quantify that in several cases in the book as well. So it is mainly a state affair. It is also a fact that the state provides its support on its own terms. So what I find is that, very often the state reorganizes religious institutions regularly. It sometimes marginalizes or eliminates some institutions, and it also re-prioritizes religious expenditure. So just to give you a few examples that are recent, Tunisia outlaws religious endowments, public and private, after independence but the state continues to provide and financially support mosques, imams, and religious education in particular. In Egypt, to talk about an example of reorganization of religious institutions, Nasser massively expands the scope and scale of al-Azhar after 1961, which was part of the topic I studied in my first book, *Guardians of Islam*. So there are very frequent state interventions related to reprioritizing expenditures for this aim, rather than that aim, reorganizing religious institutions, even sometimes removing them, marginalizing them, but what is interesting is that this creates political tensions, it creates ambivalence. What you see is, for instance, that the 'ulama-- and this is part, of course, of their public role-- they often want more autonomy, they want less strength of the \[state\] custodianship of Islam, they want to be left alone, basically. They want to be able to say what they think, but they also demand more support financially. So they lament state control and at the same time, they want to be paid directly from the state treasury. And as for state officials, they seek to control religious institutions, but they also want to support some sort of a fiction of the autonomy of these religious institutions. And this is why sometimes they decide to maintain the institution of the awqaf. Because it helps maintain the fiction of some sort of an autonomy even if the awqaf, and you will see some figures in the book, \[today\] provide only a sliver of what the state provides directly from a financial point of view. So the state provides its support on its own terms. And from a quantitative point of view, public religious expenditures are relatively small, especially in relation to GDP, but on display as an important duty. And 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. So, it is small, but it is a very important duty that is displayed by the state. Second, what I also find is that public religious expenditures may have decreased as a fraction of total state expenditures in the *longue durée*. And third, they drastically expanded in per capita real terms, that is, adjusted for inflation in the modern period. And so, this means that there is more and more individual exposure to religious provisions. And fourth, there are disputes between two camps in the political cleavage about the munificence of the state custodianship of Islam. So, some would claim there is too much and others would say, there is not enough. And what we see also, in the tables I provide in the end of the book, is that there are significant short-term fluctuations in the amount that is provided in absolute or relative terms because of these debates. **Malika Zeghal** 52:53 So what we see is a double-pronged story, a story of relative secularization, seen from the point of view of the state, a state that is expanding in size, from the point of view of its expenditure. So that's the story of the emergence of the modern state, combined with the story of absolute expansion of religion, seen from the point of view of society, that is the individuals receiving religious provisions. So, we have a two-pronged story here: relative secularization and absolute expansion \[of public religious provisions\]. And scholars have been disputing if the modern period is a period of secularization or Islamic revival. And in fact, what we see is that it depends on the point of view you take to look at that. So what we see, therefore, is that the state custodianship of Islam is very well entrenched, if we look at it from the quantitative point of view, but that we should be careful to distinguish between what I call the mechanistic aspects of this evolution, this two-pronged evolution. And one important mechanistic aspect is a story that is very banal, but still very extraordinary, which is the story of the modern state growing, growing from the point of view of its expenditures. So this is part of the mechanistic aspect. Now, it is also important to note that the massive expansion of the per capita state religious expenditures, especially after the 1950s, has been in great part related to the expansion of Islamic education, and especially Islamic education in modern schools, whose enrollments have really exploded after the 1950s. And so, this expansion is, in fact, not mechanistic, it is related to two choices. The first choice is to expand and democratize education, something we've seen everywhere in the world, and especially in the Middle East, but it is also related to the choice to keep religious instruction, Islamic instruction in the curricula of modern public schools that are state subsidized or state financed. And so here, what we have is a combination of mechanistic aspects related to the growing of the state, and choices that have been made that relate, of course, to the principle of the state custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion, and to this continuity of Islamic instruction in modern public schools. And, by the way, the expansion of Islamic education is due to the expansion of the modern school system, not the madrasa education system, although we find it remaining quite important in two countries, the madrasa system education, what I call the specialized Islamic tracks, in Turkey and in Egypt. But it is generally the modern, the public modern school system that really explains this per capita expansion. **Harry Bastermajian** 56:50 That kind of takes us to my next question, which I hope to sort of frame from the perspective of maybe the non-specialist reader, or perhaps the Western American or European reader of your work. So, how does this book sort of inform, or even challenge, the understanding of the secular and how it has changed in Muslim states and societies in the modern period? I guess what I'm trying to get at is, as you said, the modern period is often seen as this period of secularization, and you just said, it's not as clear cut as that. So, what sort of presupposition is this challenging, does your work challenge in the mind of your typical Western reader? **Malika Zeghal** 57:49 So, it definitely challenges this idea that states in Muslim-majority, Middle Eastern countries are secular, meaning that they separate religion and state or that they are neutral towards religion. It also challenges the idea of a long story of secularization in the modern period. Cultural anthropologists have claimed that the Middle East has become subject to a ubiquitous hegemonic Western liberal secularism in modern times and that modern Middle Eastern states are therefore secular. So they posit a rupture in modern times in which religious institutions have been annihilated. And so in the book, I show that this is not the case at all. And what I show is that, in the past, as in modern times, there was a well-bounded domain of state engagement and involvement with religion and religious institutions. The state has had religious and secular ambitions in pre-modern and modern times. And so I think there is an assumption that in pre-modern times, religion was everywhere, the state was entirely religious, when, when you look at pre-modern budgets, and I looked at some, that's not the case. And so the quantitative aspect of the book helps me show that there has been a well-bounded domain of state involvement with religion. But when you go look at the long constitutional history of Tunisia, you also realize very quickly that this was the case from a legal point of view as well. So just to give you an example from 19th century Tunisia, shari'a law was not, in fact, encompassing all jurisdictions, although it was expressed as an ideal. Siyasa and shari'a have formed a combination, and a couple, if I may use that term. There was, on the one hand, the jurisdiction of the shari'a court, but also the ruler's court. And the power, the legal power, the margin of discretion of the ruler was called siyasa. And so even from a legal point of view, shari'a did not encompass every jurisdictional domain in the Regency of Tunis. And this paradigm of siyasa, and shari'a was not a Tunisian one, it was something quite prevalent in the long tradition of Islam. And so I think, the concrete aspects of state financial support, in fact, confirms what can be seen also, from a legal point of view. And I think it is, in my view, a mistake to think that modern times have changed or modified this in radical ways. Of course, we don't have the same vocabularies. Of course, our institutions have changed, right? But the principles in many ways have remained and the debates about them have remained. And if I have one note of hope here it is that, although the Arab Spring has ended in the Middle East, if it were to come back, or if some modicum of democratic debate could come back, it would be very important to continue to debate these issues related to Islam and governance in the region. **Harry Bastermajian** 1:01:56 Thank you. **Meryum Kazmi** 1:01:58 Thank you. This has been really interesting, especially the quantitative analysis. So just to close us out, we would love to hear what's coming up next in your research. **Malika Zeghal** 1:02:09 Okay. So, as you can imagine, this book has produced many other interests, many other questions and one point I would really like to explore is the point of view of minorities on this principle of the state custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. This is something that has intrigued me and that I would like to pursue. I would also like to open up my quantitative analysis to other configurations, going even beyond the Middle East, looking at non-Middle Eastern Muslim majority countries, but also some European countries. And so there are a number of cases that might be different from the ones I have studied in the book that I think would be worth studying. **Harry Bastermajian** 1:03:15 Thank you. **Meryum Kazmi** 1:03:16 Thank you so much. **Malika Zeghal** 1:03:17 Thank you for having me.