 started momentarily. Welcome to the second panel on non-state religious actors and authority. As I said before, my name is Sarah Yerkes and I'm a fellow here at Carnegie and I have the pleasure of moderating this session. I'm going to introduce our four panelists who will each present their work and then we will turn to question and answer. And I just wanted to note that one of our original panelists, Yusuf, unfortunately had some travel issues and will not be here but we have Kadir who will fill in to speak about the Turkey case. Our first panelist will be Sharon Grewal who is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings. His research examines democratization, security studies, and political Islam in the Arab world, especially in Egypt and Tunisia. Miriam Conkler is a professor at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study where she works on Iranian and Indonesian politics. She's published on comparative relations between religion and state in the two countries on questions of law and constitutionalism, Islamic authority, religious education, and religious political parties. Tarik Masud is a professor of public policy and the Sultan of Oman professor of international relations at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government where he is also faculty chair of the Middle East Initiative. His research focuses on political development in Arabic speaking and Muslim majority countries. And finally, Kadir Yildirim is a fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute. His main research interests include politics and religion, political Islam, the politics of the Middle East and Turkish politics. Now I'll turn for Tusharan to start us off. Great, thank you Sarah and thank you everyone for coming. I'm gonna talk about Tunisia which was the subject of my country report. So we did a survey of 800 Tunisians in 2017 to try to figure out who do Tunisians think is the most popular religious authority? Who do they trust to speak for Islam? So we asked Tunisians about 13 religious figures from state authorities like the Grand Mufti and the Grand Imam of Zaitouna Mosque to mainstream Islamist figures associated with Anatha to Salafis, to Jihadists, to Sufis. And we asked in a couple different ways to try to get at who is the most trusted as a religious authority. We asked two direct questions. So of these 13 figures which do you approve of, of these 13, how much do you trust them as a religious authority? And so in those direct questions, as you might expect, there is very low support for the Salafi or Jihadi figures, some of the more extreme figures. Now it could be that people, that there is genuinely low trust or support for these figures, but it could also be that people are not willing to state that they support Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State, for instance. So what we also did in the survey was to implement some endorsement experiments. Now there are some new faces in the room, so let me briefly explain what an endorsement experiment is. Basically we try to indirectly measure how much support there is for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for instance. So rather than directly ask, do you trust him? We associate his name with a statement and we see does your support for that statement increase when his name is associated with it? So for instance, if we divided up the room into two groups and we asked this side of the room just the statement, for instance, how much do you agree that democracy and Islam are incompatible? And so let's say on this side of the room it was about, your level of agreement was about three on the one to five point scale. And then we asked this side of the room the same question, but with Baghdadi's name. So how much do you agree with this statement by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi? And so the statement is the same and so given that this group was randomly chosen and so should be similar to that group, we would expect there to be the same level of support for that statement. But now that statement is associated with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. And so if you have negative feelings towards him your support for that statement should be less. And if you have positive associations with him your support for that statement should be higher. So with this endorsement experiment we can back out this indirect effect of his endorsement. So for instance, if support for this statement is 3.5 now instead of three, that would suggest there's some positive association with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's name. So that's the endorsement experiment. So with these methods, both the direct questions and this indirect question, what did we find in Tunisia? We had three main findings. The first is about Anatha. So Anatha is very powerful politically as a political party. But what we found is that it was not seen generally as a religious authority. So we asked about two figures from Anatha. We asked about the head of Anatha, Sheikh Rashid Ghanoushi, as well as one of their more conservative or religious members, Sheikh Habib al-Luz, who is now more involved in their preaching and proselytizing and not involved in the political sides of Anatha. So Anatha, as you know, is the mainstream Islamist party in Tunisia. It has been around since the 80s, was largely repressed under the former regime of Ben Ali. But now after the Arab Spring, it's one of the strongest political parties. It won in 2011, came second in 2014, was the top party in the municipal elections last year and is likely to do very well this coming fall in the elections. So Anatha politically is very powerful and so we would expect that perhaps it is also popular in terms of religious matters. What we find is that that's not the case. So both Ghanoushi, the head of Anatha and Habib al-Luz, which kind of represents the more religious wing of Anatha, neither of them were trusted as a religious authority. So we asked them on a one to five point scale, how much do you trust these figures as a religious authority? They both came in very low, one point seven and one point eight out of five. So they were not trusted as religious authorities. Similarly, in the endorsement experiments, when Ghanoushi or Habib al-Luz's names were associated with a statement, support for that statement decreased, suggesting that overall there's negative feelings towards Ghanoushi and Habib al-Luz. Perhaps among a segment of Tunisians, there is support for them, but overall this suggests that on average they have a negative effect when their name is associated with a statement. So that is somewhat surprising if you think of Anatha performing so well politically, but then perhaps is not seen as a religious authority. Now we only have one snapshot in time, which was in December, 2017. We haven't done this survey before, so we cannot say that Anatha's religious authority has declined per se since we only have this one snapshot in time, but qualitatively I think we can come to the conclusion that their religious authority has declined over time, and for a couple of reasons. After the Arab Spring, once they were the head of the government and drafting the new constitution, they made many compromises on issues of religion. For instance, they agreed not to put Sharia into the constitution as the basis of legislation. They accepted gender equality to enshrine that in the constitution. They accepted freedom of conscience, not just freedom of religion, but conscience allowing atheists as well into the constitution. So they made these compromises on religion, which may have hurt their religious credibility among their base, especially among the more hard-liners among their base. And so that may have contributed to this decline in religious authority. But in addition, in 2016, Anatha formally specialized into politics, separating off its preaching and proselytizing and charitable activities. And in that process of separating or specializing into politics, they announced that they no longer wanted to be considered Islamists and now wanted to be considered Muslim Democrats. They no longer wanted any conflation of religion and politics. And so that separation as well, distancing themselves from religion, may also have contributed to this decline in religious authority for Anatha. So that's surprising finding number one that Anatha is not seen as a religious authority. The second finding that the state authorities, the state religious authorities in Tunisia are surprisingly popular, both the Grand Mufti of Mandir and the former Grand Imam of Zetuna Mosque, Peshama Baydi. Both of them were surprisingly popular, both when you ask directly, how much do you trust them as a religious authority? And when you use these indirect endorsement experiments when these state religious authorities, when their names are associated with a statement, support for that statement increases and significantly so. So that suggests that these state religious authorities are considered authorities, which is also surprising because these state religious authorities are generally seen as co-opted by the state. For instance, the Grand Mufti of Mandir he at first opposed equal inheritance publicly in 2016 when it was proposed by an independent member of parliament. But then when President Assebsi proposed equal inheritance he came out in favor of it, right? And so very clearly he is taking the state line and so normally we would think that because he is so tied to the state or co-opted by the state that he wouldn't be popular, but surprisingly our data suggests otherwise that these state authorities are surprisingly popular. So that was finding number two which echoes findings from elsewhere, from Jordan and Morocco and elsewhere in the region as Kedir mentioned earlier. And the final somewhat surprising finding was that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was quite popular in Tunisia, not when you ask directly, remember if you ask directly, who do you approve of a trust as an authority? Very few people say Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, but in the endorsement experiments where we associated his name with a statement, there we saw huge support for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that support for a statement on average increased by 0.5, half of a point, on the one to five point scale, more than any other figure when their name was associated with it. So that was normatively troubling but in some ways corroborates the fact that Tunisia has sent the highest number of foreign fighters per capita to fight in Syria and Iraq for ISIS. So in that sense it corroborates, it has some external validity and in addition what we find elsewhere in the survey is that Bakr al-Baghdadi also does well in Morocco and Jordan to other countries that have sent a number of foreign fighters as well. And this would also validate the assumption that the reason Tunisia sends so many foreign fighters is not because it's a democracy now and therefore it's easier to travel or that those governments at the time were encouraging foreign fighters but rather it validates the assumption that there is also genuine support for Bakr al-Baghdadi which is why Tunisia is sending the foreign fighters. It's not because of easier ability to travel for instance. On the other hand there is one bright spot or silver lining to this finding which is that the Salafi jihadi groups that operate within Tunisia itself. So we asked for instance about the head of Ansara Sharia Abu Ayyad as well as one Salafi sheikh Hataba al-Drisi who is seen also as helping recruit for extremist groups domestically. Both of them had the lowest approval of any of the figures in the Tunisian survey. So that suggests that these domestic Salafi or jihadi groups don't have any support among Tunisians both in the direct questions and among these indirect endorsement experiments. So the silver lining then is that while Tunisians appear to support foreign fighters abroad they don't appear to support violence or extremist ideologies at home and so that at least is a silver lining to those findings on Salafi jihadis. So finally let me conclude with one perhaps analytical conclusion from these and then one more policy implication. So the analytical conclusion would be that if we view these different religious actors as competing with each other for religious authority then it somewhat makes sense that we see support for the extremes the state authorities on the liberal side and the Salafi jihadis the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on the other as a result of the middle and not the the modest perhaps the middle of the spectrum being delegitimized. So as enough that doesn't have religious authority perhaps that increases support for the extremes. So that would be one conclusion we may be able to draw if we take this assumption that these different religious actors are competing with each other on a spectrum. And that would then help us to explain how Tunisia can on the one hand lead the region on women's rights and then on the other hand send the highest number of foreign fighters per capita because there's support for both of the extremes rather than the moderate middle. Let me then also make one policy implication which is that of course these findings on Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi are very surprising and so they would suggest that Tunisia still has much work to do in terms of preventing and countering violent extremism and so the policy recommendation of course would be to invest more and double down in your investment into these P and CVE strategies. But perhaps one takeaway not only of the Tunisia case but of these reports more generally is that state religious authorities given that they are so popular may be able to play a role as well in countering violent extremism and providing a counter narrative that may have some credibility surprisingly to counter ISIS narratives for instance. Both the Grand Mufti but also the local AMAMs that are trained by the Ministry of Religious Affairs may be able to have some weight in providing a counter narrative but of course let me caution us also based on for instance what Scott had said in the previous panel that involving these state religious authorities to politically, so for instance meeting directly with the US embassy if a religious figure meets directly with the US embassy it undermines their religious legitimacy but also if they are seen as too political domestically so for instance if they are seen as openly supporting the government or even openly criticizing the government it also undermined their religious authority and so to underscore what Kadir said in the opening that empowering the state authorities has to be done delicately that if they're gonna play a role on CVE it must be done and must be seen as an organic initiative on their part as opposed to something imposed by the US or by the state. Thank you very much. Very good. Okay great. I'd also like to thank very much to the Baker Institute as well as Carnegie for the invitation to speak with you today and I'm speaking about the Iran part of the survey which I just have to point out is a little bit different in some ways from the survey on the other countries. First of all it's much larger it's an end of more than 2,000 respondents so that's really fantastic that we have such a large survey I should also mention that there's never been a survey done of this kind since the founding of the Islamic Republic. It's incredibly difficult to ask about support for religious leaders it's politically very touchy and the fact that we've been able to ask these questions by sort of implicitly, implicitly gargling support through the endorsement experiment you have heard a lot about it already has really been a wonderful opportunity and so I think the results of the survey will make us Iran scholars sort of rethink some of our conceptions of religious authority in Iran if we trust the results because it upsets some of the dominant literature including some of my own writings which is unfortunate but I have to deal with it. So it's a much higher end and it's also a survey that was conducted nearly a year later so we just got most of the individual level data two weeks ago and the survey itself was conducted in December 2018 in most of the other countries a year earlier. Of course the context of Iran is also quite different not only because it's a Shiite context but also because it's a highly state dominated context we have of course a similar situation in Saudi Arabia but I would say in Iran the state intrusion in questions of religious authority and religious training and religious certification is even on a higher level and is more systematic and here I just would have to point out that some of these issues are inherent to what it means to follow a Shiite leader and some of these issues are inherent to the way the state has organized the religious field in Iran so let me just elaborate briefly on these two issues. As you may or may not know as a Shiite believer you should follow a source of emulation right? You should choose a marja and it has to be a living marja whose religious injunctions you follow so you have to if in doubt you should study the fattwas of this religious leader that you've chosen and it always has to be somebody who's at the very very top of the Shiite religious hierarchy you choose the fattwas of this particular person and you should follow this leader really and cross all areas. In most areas believers won't ask themselves what the fattwa is on a particular issue of a leader but for example with regard to family law these issues are often quite prevalent. Are you allowed to engage in in vitro fertilization? What are the inheritance rights in case of adoption? All sorts of issues, surrogacy. There are now a number of biomedical issues that are really current and on these affairs a believer would have to look for example at the fattwa collection of Khamenei. Khamenei is a source of emulation chosen or of Sistani in Iraq if that is a source of emulation chosen and the believer should follow these injunctions. In addition if you are a trader if you are in the private business you should also donate one fifth of your profit to that religious leader from which he will then again finance social institutions, hospitals, orphanages as well as shiite seminaries. So there's a political economy to who you choose and there's really a sort of a binding relationship because you should theoretically follow the fattwa of this leader in all issues and you shouldn't pick and choose. Now that also means that some of the individuals we talked, we asked about are not compliments but are substitutes, right? So if you're asked about Khamenei in Sistani you can really only choose one whereas in some of the other contexts that we had you could find two leaders trustworthy and you could follow a leader and read his writings on some issues but follow another on other issues and that theoretically shouldn't really be possible if you're an orthodox, a 12-a-shiite believer. So these two dimensions make the Iranian context a little bit different. I should also just mention that with regard to the extent of the state domination of the religious field, one, there are two dimensions to this. One is the fact that a state-dominated council in Rome keeps a list of people who are officially recognized as Ayatollahs, as Grand Ayatollahs, as Hoja Tolleslam so the hierarchy is if you have sort of achieved something equivalent to a doctorate in shiite law you become a Hoja Tolleslam, you're allowed to engage in itch-tea heart which means then you're also allowed to issue fatwas and you can then rise to become an Ayatollah and a Grand Ayatollah and eventually you can become to rise a source of emulation or marja. So where somebody stands on this list traditionally was affected by first of all how many believers one would be able to gather which is a matter of charisma and popularity and secondly the extent to which colleagues would recognize one as a religious authority. However, since the state has really prompted the authority of this home-based institution that keeps an official list, the natural or the traditional way of certifying and rising in the hierarchy has been upset a little bit, right? So one has to keep that in mind that believers may be impacted in their choice by where somebody is on the official list and you can be demoted if you're politically critical for example. The second issue is that especially under Khamenei so the successor of Khomeini who became supreme leader in 1989, a process has set in where the state has very systematically and very comprehensively aimed to incorporate the religious seminaries into the state's fear up to a point where the state now decides what are the issues that are being taught, how are the curricula put together, who is hired as teaching personnel, who's even allowed to apply and then be admitted to which religious seminaries, how high the stipends are, all of these issues used to be decentralized and used to be decided by the individual leader of a religious seminary, the Mutawali. So the situation today is very different where the religious seminaries are state-dominated to extent that has never been the case in the Iranian context. One has to really be aware of that, that it is under an Islamic republic that the religious landscape is more state-dominated than it ever has been before. Okay, so turning to the survey, just to give you some figures in terms of representativeness, 37% female, so slightly fewer than the census would suggest. Also our sample is slightly less educated, 39% have a BA degree, 50% an MA degree, 2% have a PhD degree, unemployed 50%. So a slightly less educated, a slightly more unemployed sample than would be a representative. It is representative with regard to levels of religiosity if we believe the World Value Survey. So that's really the other one survey that we can trust with regard to how much religion plays a role in people's lives, how religious people are. The World Value Survey has it at 66%. Religion is very important in my life and our survey has it at 63%, so very similar figures. Only about 20% read the Quran daily, but that also gels with the general impression that we have in terms of religiosity. And then 66% are in favor of clerical influence, which is also again something about two thirds that is similar to what the World Value Survey indicates. And 40% indicate that they are pro-democracy, which is something very difficult to gauge. We have a number of surveys, but I would not venture to sort of want to interpret what it really means in this context to be pro-democracy. So we asked about 15 religious figures in Iran. Nine Iranian and six foreign, which is already quite extraordinary because there is a strong tendency within Iran to follow only Iranian figures, and if not Iranian, then surely Shiite figures, of course, but we have 10 Shiite figures and five Sunni figures that we included. Significantly, among the Shiite figures, so the 10, they're only six clerical. And four are rather religious intellectuals. So you have to think of the six clerical ones as substitutes. Again, you can only follow, you know, Mezbayas di Orchamene, or Wahid Khourasani, but you could follow at the same time or you could find trustworthy some of the religious intellectuals. So those are rather compliments and substitutes. And interestingly, what I did mention is, you should theoretically, of course, follow always only a living Marja, so you cannot really follow Khomeini anymore. But nevertheless, Khomeini was included in the survey and he does in one instance where people are likely to have had the Marja question in the back of their mind. He's coming up at the top figure so that it's a really, really interesting finding and I will come to that in a moment. So I'll just walk you quickly through three slides. In terms of, so we have levels of approval, levels of trust, and then the endorsement experiment which has this more indirect gouging of support for religious figures. So what's surprising in terms of level of approval is that in the top eight ranks, not all are Iranian. There's also Sistani, which is not surprising, but there's also Nasrallah, the leader of his Bola. And that's really something that one wouldn't have expected because he's not highly trained, he's not considered a high ranking religious figures and he's not Iranian and he's really more of a political than a theological leader. What's also surprising is that among the top eight not all are clericals. So we actually have in rank three and four, Shariati sociologist who died before the revolution in 1977, who's still very popular, who's considered to be sort of a representative of the Islamic left. Somebody who argued for emerging of Islamic ideology and Marxism and who's still invoked today as sort of a strong proponent of welfare policies, redistribution, really the representative of Islamic leftist ideologies, which I think explains most of his high performance on these charts. So he always comes up as a third or fourth, most popular figure, which is quite surprising. And right next to him is Rom Shei, who is a scholar of literature and mysticism. He's the most popular scholar on Iranian TV, he runs a number of TV programs, but he really is not a religious leader and he's not clerically trained. So it shows sort of the attractiveness of thinking about religion beyond the state sphere and beyond the official authority sphere, right? To think about mysticism and sort of plays and invocations of the very, very important Iranian literary figures who are often invoked in terms of wise statements and so on and about whom also a number of sermons both by clerical and non-clerical figures focus. Then we have also a surprising finding in the top six figures, only two status figures and I will come back to that. And this reformist figures rank surprisingly low. So we have one clerical reformist, Ayatollah Sani, who actually was officially demoted, he shouldn't be and he is not by the official newspapers, refer to as a grant Ayatollah anymore because he supported the Green Movement in 2009 and heavily criticized the regime for its very weak human rights record. He actually figures quite low, so in terms of levels of approval, he's only in rank nine, as you can see from the charts that they have been handouts, they're also outside. And Surush, the religious intellectuals who have sort of been very much identified with a vision of Iran as a religious country but no longer a clerically dominated polity, also ranks very low only on place 10. So it makes one think to see that the reformist figures rank relatively low. Just one final thing I want to point out on this first chart is that the nuns, so who do you trust, level of approval, none ranks just as high as the bottom six figures. So that could also be interpreted as a protest vote, it's a very interesting finding. Now moving to level of trust, and I think it is here that a believer would most likely have in mind who would you choose as a marjor. Because you can approve of somebody and we actually see that the Sunni figures don't do too badly, Al Tayyab, the Imam of Al-Assad does surprisingly well, so that might be because people approve of him, he's a well-trained religious figures, but trust is something that I think people might associate with a choice for the marjor yet, who do you choose as a source of emulation. And here, again, surprisingly among the top 10 figures we actually have two Sunni figures, so you could interpret this as a protest or as a turning away from status, religious authority, and we actually only have among the top 10 figures a five Shiite clerics. So that really makes one think if who enjoys your highest level of trust if among the top 10 only five Shiite clerics come out, then that shows a lot of support for notions of religious authority beyond the state and beyond the clerical field. Again, the reformist figures come out very low, Sunni and Surush in the bottom third. And as I indicated earlier, most surprisingly in terms of this chart, Khomeini comes out on top even though you shouldn't be able to choose Khomeini as a marjor anymore today because you cannot follow a deceased marjor. Now, moving to the endorsement question and then I will come to conclusions. The endorsement effects I think have been across the whole country surveyed really the most surprising findings. In Iran, we have to say that overall the endorsement effects are lower, are weaker than in the other countries and where they do matter, they are predominantly negative, which is also interesting. Khomeini is actually the only one who where the association of a statement with his name makes it more likely that a believer will approve of that statement. So Khomeini is the only one who has a positive endorsement effect. Then there are three figures, Khomeini, Sistani, Shariati, where the naming, the mentioning of their names doesn't really seem to impact the perception of their statement at all. And then the other six figures all are negatively, have a negative impact on whether a person would approve a statement associated with their name. So that is quite soft-provoking. And again, the reformist figures, Sudosh and Sana'i here have very negative effects, nearly as negative as the two Sunnis who are included in this list, Karadawi and Erdogan. That really turns their literature on religious authority and approval of it in the Iranian context on its head. Now to move to some preliminary conclusions. First of all, just five quick points. So overall, we see actually a lack of strong support for status figures other than the supreme leader. So Khomeini and Khomeini always come out on top. But beyond them, Bahid Khurasani, Mesbayazdi, others that we included, really range in the middle field or the bottom third. And that's quite interesting. So it does show that to some extent, the very, very strong apparatus that is put in place to regulate the religious sphere and to really influence curricula and what is taught and who's teaching and who are the most important figures, what is being distributed on the market, who's being censored, who is not, that that really has only a moderate impact. So there's a lot of support for figures beyond the status sphere. Believers remain independent in their choice. That's really a major finding that I find personally very attractive. And again, it upsets the dominant literature on religious authority in Iran. The second preliminary conclusion is that there's a surprising appreciation for those Sunni authorities who are associated with high-ranking institutions. Again, Al-Tayyab is a Sunni authority who repeatedly comes out on top among the Sunni authorities who always rank very low in terms of approval. But I think that indicates sort of an appreciation for solid training and an appreciation for the institution he's associated with. And it's surprising. If I'm not mistaken, Al-Tayyab actually comes high, out higher here in a Shiite dominant context than any of the Shiite authorities in the Sunni context where we are. So I would interpret this as more appreciation for high training irrespective of sectarian questions in the Iranian context than in the Sunni context. Third preliminary conclusion, again, what I mentioned, the surprisingly low support for reformist figures such as Sunni and Surush, for Surush that can be considered maybe to be expected because he lives in exile, he doesn't have a clerical background. But for Sunni, it's really quite surprising. One wonders whether that means that there's sort of a lack of hope now for internal reform, that those who once pinned their hope until 2009 until the Green Movement in internal theological reform have now moved away and believe, well, either we support regimeist figures or we turn away from religious authorities altogether. It's a question that has to be answered. The fourth preliminary finding, Rom She'i's success, again, this mystic who's neither clerical nor really not at all from a fichry, sort of from a background that highlights elements of Islamic law in experiences of faith, but somebody who's very much about mysticism and alternative notions of religious experience that he has such success always coming up third or fourth after the supreme leaders, I think must be interpreted as in the fact that he's a compliment. Again, that he's not a substitute to having a marja but he's a compliment as a religious authority, as a religious intellectual as opposed to a cleric. And finally, the fact that Shariati's success is so significant, this Islamic leftist points or is I think reminiscent of the sort of political dynamics that we have observed in Iran in the last two to three years which is really a focus in political demonstrations, not on political issues but on bread and butter issues, economic redistribution which has become a key issue, poverty alleviation and here Shariati as someone who really highlighted how much economic justice is part of Islam, is a core of Islam. The fact that he's highlighted in this context I think brings us back to sort of these pressing socioeconomic issues in Iran right now. Just to close with a final sentence, I think I completely agree it would be wonderful to have cross time series data. If we could conduct this poll again in three years it would be fascinating to test the robustness of our findings now and to see to what extent there have been Islamic shifts. I really think it would be marvelous if we could include a question on a write-in. Who do you support as a write-in rather than the only choices, this is really difficult to do but I've recently done work on female religious figures and you will have noticed that none of us has included any female leaders which is realistic because hardly any believers choose to follow a female leader. Nevertheless, in Iran and elsewhere there's growing support and appreciation for the fact that there are women who are highly trained in Islamic law who have become important figures in interpreting religious law and therefore might also rise with the next generation with changing socio-cultural attitudes as alternatives to the male figures that we have on our survey. So write-in questions would at least allow us to gauge whether anybody would consider a woman as a religious authority. And then finally just for the Shiite context of course it would be great to see how many people really believe the marja yet is important in the first place. Do you really have to choose a marja or can you just only follow someone or find attractive someone like Romshi or Mystic and leave the status and clerical sphere out of your religious experience? And related to that whether it's okay to switch. We don't have an answer to this until today whether believers do switch and say well I follow Khamenei and in vitro fertilization but I follow Sistani on his ideas on income tax. That would be really fascinating. We have no data on this whatsoever. Eric. Great. I'm wondering if it's possible if I could stand up. Sure. My coherence is inversely proportional to how comfortable I am and those are very comfortable chairs. So thank you everyone for coming and thanks to Qadir for involving me in this project. So I'm gonna talk about Egypt and the conventional wisdom about Egyptian politics over the last decade has basically been of a place that has been involved torn apart really by an epic bloody struggle over the proper role of Islam in public life. There's many variants to this narrative. The dramatic personae differ slightly in each of them but the broad contours of the story are fairly fixed no matter who tells you the story. First you had so-called Islamists also referred to as religious conservatives, fundamentalists, Islamic radicals, whatever who are led by a 90 year old pietist movement called the Society of Muslim Brothers who ally in 2011 with non-Islamist forces, variously called secularists, liberals, leftists or just non-Islamists to overthrow the regime of Muhammad Hassan Mubarak. But as soon as they achieve this desired goal do they fall upon each other in mutual recriminations? Their differences and the reason this is supposed to have happened is that their differences over the future and fundamental identity of their country proved too profound for them to paper over. Free and fair elections only deepened the divide as Islamists deployed their superior organizational prowess to capture the commanding heights of government and consequently so in their opponents' minds a suspicion of democratic processes and procedures in the non-Islamist telling the reason that democracy was problematic was because the brotherhood and its fellow travelers schemed to use democratic processes to alter Egypt's very character, to transform it from a place where an easy piety suffused public life into one where the harshest strictures of the most regressive interpretations of Islam would reign. In the Islamist gloss on the same basic facts their story is that their opponents were simply frustrated with their repeated losses at the ballot box that these so-called liberals could simply not bring themselves to accept the freely made choices of a newly liberated people. Ultimately the armed agents of the state sided with the non-Islamists, swept the Muslim brotherhood from such power as it held and inaugurated the regime that presides in Egypt to the present day. There's lots of reasons for us to quibble with this basic narrative. I, for example, question the extent to which Egyptians really did disagree over the things like the application of religious law. Nathan Brown is written during the Egyptian Revolution like look nobody's calling for a secular state. But conventional wisdoms are conventional for a reason, right, they're fundamentally true. That said, the dichotomization of the Egyptian political and religious landscape that this narrative assumes, i.e. of Egyptian society divided on the one hand into Islamists and on the other hand into non-Islamists has largely outlived any analytical usefulness it may have held. And it's worth noting, for example, that the military intervention in politics that overthrew the Egyptian president, Muslim brotherhood president Muhammad Morsi in 2013, that was supported by the country's leading Orthodox Islamic party called the Hezbo'nor and by basically the entirety of the country's religious establishment. In today's Egypt, it does not look like the secular paradise of the non-Islamist dreams to the extent that they might have had that, but much more like the regressive Islamist place of their most fevered nightmares. So for example, in the Egyptian state has been taking several measures that really display a kind of adherence to a much more conservative brand of Islam in 2017 and 2018. For example, the parliament discussed proposals to criminalize atheism and homosexuality and the former of these actually does seem to be making its way through the legislative process. Since 2013, several Egyptians have been thrown into jail for offenses against the state. In 2015, one television personality was sentenced to a year in jail for questioning the authenticity of some sayings of the Prophet Muhammad. And in 2016, four young Christians were imprisoned because an anti-ISIS video that they made strayed close to, or the regime said, or the police said it strayed too close to displaying contempt for religion. So if there is a battle over religion in Egypt today, it is not a battle over whether religion should have any political authority, but rather over who gets to wield that authority. And the camps in this battle are the ones that we've been hearing about in all of these other countries, right? The first and most important are the religious scholars who are associated with the religious institutions of the state. This includes primarily an Ushad, which I describe as a publicly funded institution with a religious institution that is the Muslim world's oldest seed of religious learning and a somewhat mediocre university. Mediocre would be charitable. The Ministry of Religious Endowments, which is a government ministry that oversees mosques and religious charities. And the daughter, if that, or house of religious rulings, which basically issues interpretations of Islamic law when the government asked them to do it. These institutions collectively are generally seen as providing the state with religious cover for its policies, but it would be an oversimplification to think of them as unified or even as universally supine to state authority. And other scholars have actually shown that the legitimizing function served by these clerics actually gives them leverage over government policy and enables them to intervene and sometimes retard or even reverse government attempts at modernization or social liberalization. So that's the official religious establishment. Vying with the official religious establishment for primacy in the religious realm are two major grassroots movements. The first is the one that I mentioned previously, the Society of Muslim Brothers, Yumaat al-Khwan al-Muslimun, which was established in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna and has really since the mid 1950 served as the principal organized opposition to the military backed regime that has dominated Egypt, except for one brief year where the Muslim Brotherhood actually had a share of power. The Muslim Brotherhood ideologically is hard to pin down. I would say that they do not necessarily represent a coherent school of Islamic thought. They certainly are conservative. They, the application of Sharia certainly is a central plank in their platform, but I would much more describe them as having a broad religious nationalist orientation than adhering to any particular school. And furthermore, I'd say that today after what took place in Egypt in 2013, the focus of the Brotherhood's activity is less on the pious reform of Egyptian society or the care of its poor, which are things that they had been engaged in, than it is on confronting the Egyptian state both domestically and internationally and calling for an end to what the Brotherhood sees as Egypt's military dictatorship. So that's one. The second major movement is the Salafi movement. And there I would say it's both more extreme than the Muslim Brotherhood in its adherence to Islamic structure and more moderate than the Muslim Brotherhood in its adherence to the status quo. Courtney described Salafism as basically an approach to Islamic thought and practice that emerges primarily from the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence and that seeks to derive Islamic dictates from original sources, namely the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him and his companions, collectively referred to as the Salafi Salih, the righteous forebearers. And Salafi preachers have over the last 30 years become extremely influential in Egyptian life, we particularly through their use of satellite television, where many preachers have very popular television programs. But the Salafi movement as a political force is actually relatively new and that's really only after the Egyptian revolution, when they decided that this opening in the political system was going to open up certain basic questions about the character of the state and they needed to be at the table as these questions will resolve. And so they participate in elections so that they could have a role in writing the constitution, et cetera. But then immediately upon the abrogation of that democratic experiment, they completely accommodated themselves to the existing regime for the most part. And so here I'd say that the Salafi's emphasis on really cultivating personal adherence to a notion of Islamic orthodoxy renders them basically more willing than, for example, a group like the Muslim Brotherhood to accommodate power as long as they're just allowed to preach and proselytize. I should also say that although I have kind of framed these two groups as competitors to al-Azhar, they would not really describe themselves that way. They would make loud and insistent noises about the legitimacy of al-Azhar as an institution but they would say that al-Azhar needs to be freed from subordination to the Egyptian state, just as, for example, like select Sheikh al-Azhar and this should instead be given to some kind of democratic process, et cetera. Ideologically, al-Azhar's relationship to these two groups is interesting. In 2013, surely before the military's intervention in politics, Sheikh Ahmed Atayyib explained that from the standpoint of thought or creed, there isn't really anything to fear about the Muslim Brotherhood and he described a hypothetical person who could be completely saturated with the thought of al-Azhar and yet also be a member of the Muslim Brothers. Al-Azhar stands towards Salafists as much more confrontational. And in another television interview, I've seen Sheikh Atayyib basically decry that Salafism tries to eliminate the natural pluralism that exists within Islam and has a tendency to label as infidels or blasphemers anybody who does not comply with their particularly narrow view. So in addition to those three groups, the official religious establishment, I'm really gonna talk about al-Azhar when we look at the data, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, there is, of course, also a fourth actor and that is violent, what we might call jihadist groups. And I think all of these other three actors are suspicious to varying degrees of these violent groups. Atayyib of al-Azhar has referred to them as the Khawarij of the modern era, a reference to the seventh century schismatic group that assassinated Islam's fourth caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib. But what I really wanna emphasize is that I think that ideologically, this jihadist camp really does represent a fringe camp within Egyptian society. And so even though we lavish a lot of attention on it, I think it's relatively fringe. Now, in order to think about these groups more easily, it might help, and I don't know if the slides that I made were circulating, I have not given a talk without PowerPoint for 15 years. This is new terrain for me. So you might think of dividing these, or putting these groups in a kind of two-dimensional space where on my vertical axis, we can think about your orientation to politics. So groups can be revolutionary, wanting a dramatic change of the status quo, or they can basically be status quo. They don't really wanna change anything. And on the horizontal, we can think of groups that are highly textual, scripturalist, literalist, their interpretation of Islam. They have an idea that there is only one proper interpretation of Islam. And then on the other extreme, we can think of groups that take a more easygoing or what I'm calling consensual view of Islam. And this is the idea, I mean, to kind of illustrate this dimension, one thing that Salafis always get upset about is that Muslims, many Muslim mosques have tombs in them, right? So there will be like a cenotaph of some saint or some Islamic personage who is buried in that mosque. And some Salafists have said, you cannot pray in a mosque that has the cenotaph of a interred person, because that gets you close to venerating that person. It leads or bleeds into a shirk or associating partners with God. And the response of people like Ahmed Atayyub, for example, is to say, look, in Islam, we have the concept of alaykum bejama'ah. Basically, when there is disagreement among you and there's some question, just look at what the majority of Muslims are doing. And if that's what they're doing, that's probably fine. And the majority of Muslims happen to pray all the time in Mosque of Cenotaph, so get over it, right? So that's the dimension, right? The people who say, don't pray in Mosque of Cenotaph and the people who say, it's totally fine. Okay, you can think of that dimension. So how would we sort these groups, right? Well, we would have an azhar, is a status quo power, right? A status quo group, it wants to support the state, but it also has this easygoing relationship to Islam. And I think this is slide two in my handout. So that would be the lower left-hand quadrant. In the upper right-hand quadrant, we have a group that's also kind of relatively easygoing with respect to Islamic practice, et cetera, but more revolutionary, wants a change in the status quo. And there I would put the Muslim brotherhood, okay? On the other side, right? Groups that have a scriptural interpretation, literalist interpretation of Islam and our status quo is where I'd put the Salafis because they accommodate whatever power is dominating. They just want the freedom to preach and proselytize. So the Salafis I put in my lower right-hand corner. And then finally, groups like ISIS, I would put in the upper left-hand corner, both revolutionary and literalist. Now, like any two-by-two table, this one leaves out a lot of important information. For example, both the Muslim brotherhood and ISIS in my categorization are revolutionary, but of course they're revolutionary in very different ways. The Muslim brotherhood, as far as I know, still supports peaceful alternation of power through the ballot box, whereas ISIS wants some kind of apocalyptic event to bring about a religious theocracy. But I take comfort in the saying that it's told in graduate school, look, models are to be used, not believed. And there's a good model for thinking about how to divide up these groups. So what I want to do for the rest of the limited time I have left is to explore how many Egyptians fall into these four camps that I have just described. And then what I want to do is I want to look at what kinds of views about politics and society are associated with each of those four camps. And I'm particularly keen on understanding whether these four camps are correlated with some attitudes towards democracy, which ultimately is the thing I care most about. I don't want to belabor too much the data. I'm sort of the E.R. of this group in terms of the data. It's an enormous project. It's tremendous data. There are many ways in which it is unrepresentative. So we don't have a lot of females. My colleague said that 37% females a little less, that's a lot less than the percentage of females in the society. And that definitely alters results in ways that we can't quite predict. Another big source of non-representativeness that we have to deal with is the fact that everybody in this survey is impaneled by a company. They get paid to fill out these surveys. And so you might ask yourself, are they going to be representative of the broader population? I don't think that it makes the data non-usable. All kinds of data, particularly data in the Middle East is bad in many ways. And this is way, way less bad than most of the data that Middle East folks have been forced to use. But it's nonetheless important to think about some of the ways in which there is unrepresentativeness in our data. And I can talk more about that later. So if you look at my slides, the first thing I wanted to do is just think about how many, what percentage of Egyptians fall into these different camps? So one question basically, Egyptians are asked, or everybody in this survey has asked, how would you describe yourself? And you could describe yourself in Islam as the centrist, the socialist, et cetera. And 26% of Egyptians describe themselves as Islamist. Now the sample of Egyptians here is actually huge, okay? So it's 2,941 Egyptians in Egypt, plus 1,337 Egyptians abroad. In fact, many of my colleagues in studying attitudes in the Gulf, as for example, Courtney mentioned, a lot of it is Egyptian attitudes in the Gulf, right? A lot of those samples are also Egyptians, which makes sense. Like who's gonna need to get paid, living in the Gulf by you, Gulf, Egyptian guy. So he'll sign up. So 26% of Egyptians in total call themselves Islamists, a smaller percentage in Egypt, say, of those who are in Egypt, say that, 22%. If you look at the most trusted religious figures, and there's a slide there where I've showed the most trusted religious figures by their average trust rating, the number one is Ahmed Atayib, the Sheikh of Al-Azhar. Everybody was asked how much do you trust them, right? I don't trust at all, or I trust completely. Ahmed Atayib, 35% of the Egyptians in the sample trust him completely. Shaqi Al-Lam, who is the Mufti of the Republic, he's the guy who's responsible for issuing the Fatwas that say the government can do this or do that. About 22% trust him completely. And then in terms of the other groups, the Salafist, Mohamed Hassan, who's a Salafi preacher, he was trusted by about 14% of people who trusted him completely. I'm just reporting to you the figure of the people on the extreme. Amr Khalid, who doesn't really fit into my categorization, he's basically like Muslim Joll Austin, kind of mixture of self-help and Islamic piety. About 11% trusted him completely. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, was trusted completely about 13%. And Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, a Muslim scholar, the chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, Qatar-based, but emerging out of the Muslim Brotherhood, was only trusted completely by 11%. And it's important to note that for both Qaradawi and Erdogan, there was huge polarization. So they had massive negatives. 47% of people of Egyptians didn't trust Qaradawi at all. And 36% didn't trust Erdogan at all. Now, one thing I should note is that some of the figures that are on that slide, on slide six, were asked in Egypt only, and some were asked in Egypt and elsewhere. And so that actually, if we can find the ones that were asked in Egypt and elsewhere, that can actually give us a sense of what differences there are between Egyptians at home and Egyptians abroad. And basically, what we find that is that, and that's on slide seven, Qaradawi, Erdogan, and Ranushi, who all I would categorize as kind of Muslim Brotherhood figures, are significantly more favored among Egyptians abroad than they are among Egyptians at home. And that's consistent with two stories. It's consistent with Sharangarwal's story of Islamists going into exile after 2013. So they go to these Gulf countries, and about 600 of them are in Saudi Arabia, about 400 in the UAE, 130 in Qatar, about 200 in Kuwait. So it's consistent with that, or it's also consistent with this idea that, there are just more conservative, the conservative norms that exist in those places influence them more. Or it could be that if you're living in Egypt, you're much more worried about saying good things about these people, you're worried the Egyptian state is going to get you. Okay, so how do Egyptians sort into the four camps we described? This is basically on slide eight. Sorry, sorry, we're gonna have to wrap up the second. Okay, so basically, I will wrap up right now, and I will just say that basically, here's what we find. The official state category of Islamism, those people who represent the Azhar and the official state institutions are the most popular. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists are much less popular than those groups. So that is, I think, consistent with something we've been hearing a lot. I would say if we look at their attitudes, some surprising things emerged. I was expecting the Muslim Brotherhood, people who supported the Muslim Brotherhood personalities more than any other personality. So these people who you could actually identify in the survey as being Muslim Brothers, I expected them to be much more pro-democracy than others. That is not really the case. There's some contradictory evidence, but they're certainly not more pro-democracy, significant more pro-democracy than people who support the state. And they are much more pro-sharia, which is not surprising, and surprisingly much more pro-violent. So what are the policy implications? Basically, I had a few, but I will just say the one. It's my strong belief that some of these concerns that we might have that emerge in the survey about the attitudes of people who are Muslim Brotherhood supporters, that they may be more likely to justify violence against civilians, et cetera. These are concerning. I think that any turn to violence is fundamentally a function of restrictions in the political system. But it's also true that if what we find in this data, and this is preliminary finding, but if what we find in this data is true, then it makes the political incorporations of a political incorporation of Islamists in Egypt, in some future democratic Egypt, much harder to affect and much harder to justify. I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you. So, Kadeer, we only have 10 minutes left for the whole panel, so if you could... I'll wrap it up. Yeah, thank you. Okay, well, I'm gonna do my best impression of Yusuf in his absence. Well, you can read his report. We have available outside and online, but these are gonna be essentially my observations from the data on Turkey that we have. Like some other countries, but unlike some others, Turkish respondents have a largely positive view of domestic actors and international figures, international names that we have, non-Turkish names that we have, have little traction among the survey respondents. So Erdogan and state-defilated religious leaders are pretty well-liked, especially Erdogan is well-liked among respondents. International figures, whether this is Amit El Tayyip or Badadi, have almost no traction whatsoever. One reason for that might be the language barrier. Unlike many other countries in our survey, Turks predominantly don't speak Arabic. And this is in some way similar to what we find in Iran, where the domestic names have much more traction than the international figures. Some other observations, like in Egypt, where the political scene, political conditions make a big difference, where the brotherhood leader, Badadi, is not well-liked at all according to survey results. Same thing happens with someone who was well-liked until recently, when political conflict in the country has essentially turned him into sort of a villain character across the board. Gulen is not liked, and his unpopularity is to an extent that's comparable to Islamic State leader, Badadi. So this is, I found, pretty interesting. And this is true both in the direct questions we ask in terms of trust in these religious leaders, in terms of approval of these religious leaders, but also in the endorsement experiment. So both Badadi and Gulen lead to much lower sort of agreement with any given statement. And this contrast sharply with how, for example, Erdogan performs significantly well in both cases. So Erdogan is pretty popular. His view as widely popular in all different kinds of questions that we ask in Turkey. And this has a number of reasons why that's the case. Looking literally into the data, his personal religiosity is one of the factors that people like him because he likes depicting himself as a person of religion, observed in Muslim. Every now and then he's gonna cry in the reading of some religious text, or he's gonna recite Quran publicly. So that's one of the attractions of him as a person. Attachment to public displays of religiosity is also important, not only by Erdogan, but also in terms of statements by other AKP leaders, draws people to Erdogan because he represents the party. His charisma surpasses everyone else within the party. He is the party. So that's why there's a significant overlap between the two. His anti-Western, anti-U.S. sentiment, which is pretty strong, brings in a lot of support for him as an individual. Every now and then you will see some religious, related issue, topic, conflict, tension emerging in the Western world, for example, or somewhere in the Middle East. And you will find Erdogan among the first to criticize what's happening with his anti-Western, anti-U.S. sort of vitriol. And this is a pretty significant, often that we tend to think that this is irrelevant or exaggerated, but it resonates with a lot of people. And this is not just among conservatives, among sort of AKP support base, but also a significant chunk of people in the left, secular leftists, will buy into this discourse, anti-American, anti-Western discourse because that resonates with their anti-colonial sort of rhetoric. Yes, and another factor I think that plays into Erdogan's popularity is his being viewed as an economic success case. He delivers as a leader in his term, time as a prime minister in Turkey in the first decade, he delivered on his promises. So a Turkish economy in size of Turkish economy, GDP per capita increased three to four fold within a decade, which is incredible. And a lot of people, both in Turkey and also outside of Turkey, look up to this as a model. Currently, Turkish economy is not doing well in the last several years. It's not going in a good direction, but still Turkey is doing well as a country in the eyes of a lot of people. This is one of the reasons for Turkish Erdogan's popularity region-wide. He is viewed as someone who can deliver the number of Arab tourists, for example, from the region has increased dramatically in the past decade into Turkey. And a lot of people want to see sort of the beauty, the riches, the wealth, the prosperity of Turkey. And this is very important in a region where you have very staunch cases of authoritarianism, dictatorship. Turkey represents as a model of democracy that's compatible with Islam. Regardless of its flaws, and there are many of them, and last several elections, probably were unfair. They were manipulated and everything. But nonetheless, he is viewed as someone who is democratically elected. And this is very important to recognize and that resonates with a lot of people because especially among the conservatives, Islamists throughout the region, the notion of democracy for them is a majoritarian one. So what matters is being elected into the office and not so much what you do in the office, whether you uphold democratic values, pluralism, minority rights, that's secondary. That can be sacrificed for political purposes. What's important is that he continues to be elected into that particular office. So that has a lot of attraction among people, especially among conservatives in Turkey and outside of Turkey. And one thing that's kind of marginal, but I want to emphasize that, the spread of Turkish dramas across the region is really something to reckon. It expands Turkey's, especially AKP's and our own soft powers, soft influence throughout the region. In one particular example, never expected this to happen when I was in Morocco back in 2009. It's almost a decade. I'm walking in the streets of a city in the north and I'm walking by, this is like 11 o'clock at night, I'm going to my hotel and I see, I pass by a very small coffee shop in the middle of nowhere essentially and I saw a Turkish drama playing, Valley of the Wolves and this is just incredible. I mean, whoever you talk to in the Arab world, people are watching one or another kind of Turkish drama and this is pretty significant. This gives this or conveys this positive image of Turkey, Turkish politics and who is responsible for this? The party that's in power for the past 16, 17 years and this is very important to recognize. And Erdogan builds on this by coming out at critical junctures, when you move the US embassy to Jerusalem. What happens, Erdogan is the most strong, strongest opponent of this move and he's going to try to rally people around this particular issue. Same thing, just a few days ago, the New Zealand mosque shooting, he used this as an opportunity to rally against the West, against the, not US, but against the West in terms of Islamophobia in the West and the inaction that's taking place in the West in very broad strokes. Whether that's empirically accurate or not is irrelevant. That's a rhetoric, that's a discourse that resonates with a lot of people and that's why it's important, I think, to recognize the pillars of his influence in the region, not only in Turkey. So what are some of the implications? Anti-Americanism, anti-Western discourse is, believes into religious discourse often times and that's something to be careful. One last point I wanna raise before it's too long is, especially in the case of Turkey and Erdogan, the sloppy use of religious discourse by the West, by the US or non-careful use of religious discourse or ideas is gonna come back to hound US policy in the news. It doesn't have to be a religious policy, it doesn't have to sort of relate to any kind of religious actors in the region but this is a rallying point, any and all US policies that will run afoul of religion in one way, whether intentional or unintentional, it's gonna come back to hound US policy and this is why it's very important to take this seriously, this very deep seated, especially in Turkey but also in the rest of the region, anti-American, anti-US sentiment, anti-Western sentiment and how that overlaps largely with the religious inclinations of people in the region. I'll stop here, maybe more in the Q&A. Great, thank you. So we just have time for a couple of questions but I do wanna take a few, maybe we'll take two at once, one right here. And if you could please identify yourself once you get your microphone, thank you. I am originally from Buenos Aires, I'm a national defense expert here, study at the National Defense University in Washington DC and I have a question here that calls my attention. Is Pakistan was not mentioned here? The situation of Pakistan was not mentioned here and I gave a quick look to this book or let's say magazine, The New Guardians of Religion and I saw that it was conducted on a public opinion and among 12 countries and Pakistan was not mentioned. Is there any kind of, you just keep Pakistan or is there any kind of issue do you do it? Let's say Islam policy or sometimes religion intolerance. What is going on here that was not taken into account Pakistan? Thank you, we'll take another question as well. John Anderson, independent analyst. Yeah, the question to direct the product must have, finding his overall description narrative with regard to Egypt and the political and social actors there and referring particularly to the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand and the Salafists on the other. I don't wanna put out a counter narrative here because I think you've captured it quite well but with regard to quote external influences there has been a lot of discussion regarding funding and obviously the, I mean, are an international movement. I don't mean that they have direct funding to activities within Egypt. I kind of doubt it myself. More of the talk has been of course in terms of the Salafis and funding from Gulf Saudi, et cetera. Again, not that that's the major influence on what makes Egyptians move politically but can you comment at all with regard to external influences and funding? I think we'll take one more and unfortunately this was our last one. Any other questions, yes? This is a little bit outside your scope but there was a reference to anti-Americanism and so on in the Middle East policy and I'm wondering whether the speakers might be able to comment on phenomena such as the recent election to Congress of several, a couple of Muslim women and their positions on the Middle East. Maybe you've seen Ilhan Omar's column in the Washington Post on Monday. Thank you. Okay, so we are standing between these good people in their lunch so if we can have very brief responses if you want to. Let me respond to the first comment. So we wanted to geographically limit what we can do with our survey because I mean, we have limited resource and we wanted to focus on in the Middle East and North Africa region primarily. Sometimes Afghanistan, Pakistan are included in the Middle East region but that's oftentimes a little bit of a stretch so that's why we did not want to include countries that are conventionally accepted within the Middle East and North Africa region. That's the only region Pakistan was not included in the survey but I'm sure the results would be quite interesting in Pakistan because of the tremendous sort of diversity in the religious realm in Pakistan. Thoughts on the congressional question? Sure, I mean, just very quickly from my personal experience with friends in the region and activity I've seen on Twitter, it seems like a very positive response to the Muslims with an elected office kind of showing, kind of reaffirming their faith in American democracy to see that Muslim immigrants including refugees can become Congresswomen in the US and so in general the outcoring I've seen from the region but again it's my, based on the audience I interact with has been very positive in terms of reaffirming their faith in democracy and in the US. That's an external question. So I will just, you know, I think the question that both of you asked is so I think one a shortcoming particularly of my contribution is that I have tended to view Egyptian politics as sort of hermetically sealed and you are correctly pointing out that there are lots of very important international influences. The Salafi movement in Egypt has received a lot of support and funding from the Gulf and particularly Saudi Arabia. The Muslim Brotherhood as you know is embedded in a kind of broader international network and one of the interesting questions for us going forward and Courtney is more qualified to talk about than I am as is as Saudi Arabia seems to be abandoning an extreme form of kind of exporting, exporting an extreme form of Salafism, what does that mean for their clients in some of these other places? On the Ilhan Omar question, I think I've seen a lot of what Dr. Garoual is talking about but I've also seen the opposite. It's not lost on me that one of the great takedowns of the Ilhan Omar and Roshid al-Falib was published in a Saudi funded news outlet and in part because it was seen as these people have Muslim Brotherhood sympathies and are consequently anti-Saudi, et cetera. Of course there are also LGBT activists so if this is the kind of evolution of the Muslim Brotherhood then maybe we're all for it. Please join me in thanking all four panels for a really fascinating presentation. And lunch will be served outside and we'll reconvene at one o'clock. Thank you.