 Thank you very much indeed for this warm introduction. I am very pleased to be here I'm very privileged to be here. It's a it's a wonderful occasion also to see old friends and members of my family and quite a number of others whom I hadn't met before and the the topic is Islamism the Arab destiny I think might Might Lead some of you to think that an invocation of destiny this evening might well be meant in jests After all Despite all appearances to the country and despite the insistence of some that we actually live in the 15th century It is after all 1434 for the hijra. We do in fact live in the 21st We live at a time when the fortunes the fates the nons Elder destiny and other occult forces controlling our lives with a hand at once firm and playful Are no longer supposed to have the free run of our wills and of our capacity and of and to incapacitate our clear thinking Already in ancient times The Stoics had derided what they called our was logos The lazy argument that we are captive to the play of preternatural forces over which we have no control and That one had therefore better neither think nor act as everything is already predetermined one would expect that two millennia hence one might be able to do better Irony notwithstanding. I do believe that the quaint notion of destiny still has more purchase than some might be willing to admit I shall resist the temptation to speak about this in general terms But I need to say that we now have the fates and the nons and the Under the sociological garb of discourses on the necessity persistence and Ineluctability of traditions particularly with regard to muslims and It is indeed to the dire predictions made for the immediate and longer term future of the Arabs Premised on the inevitability of traditions that my comments this evening are directed Now that islamism is the destiny of the Arabs because Islam is the past by which they are ensnared or By which they are blessed according to taste is a refrain that we hear every day from very many quarters We are some and platitudinous. It may be it is nevertheless well-worn familiar predictable Formal ache and effortlessly repeatable in other words It has all the attributes that make for the popularity of a lazy argument this cliche Derives sustenance from both conservative cultural politics and from Communitarian politics with their restricted horizons of expectation in which are complicit quite a number of actors of These actors one would need to mention European policies in the Arab world for 200 years now Which is yielding concrete results and turning the societal model of a mosaic from a political desire to a reality This success is unsurprising as these policies are now welded to various levels of disintegration Overcoming many Arab politics as well as to the global regime that having short notions and policies of development is expressed in the policies and guiding principles of International and non-governmental organizations speaking for locality voice indigenism and other terms of retrogressive social engineering The assumption of a debit backwardness yields the notion of difference with a capital D as an element in both international relations and the internal politics of many polities Added energy is infused into the strand by the choleric style in politics Emblematized in Islamic fundamentalism and its European and North American multiculturalist echoes and mirror images But of course in addition to such structural elements We also have a considerable body of academic and public policy discourses that provides reasoned apologies for this condition of these I should like to single out post-colonialist and post-modernist Apologetics for Communalism and indeed in many cases for religious obscurantism These supply a ready sociologic template Complementing fundamentalist politics of various hues Served up to the public by members of the ruling parties in let us say Tunisia or Turkey or by independent advocates of a conceptually nebulous a Humanical socio-political Islamism such as Tariq Ramadan in the United Kingdom The very same template is used by a number of Arab intellectuals who implicitly or explicitly hostile to Islamism How for some years now thought it best to concede what is said about an Islamist destiny for the Arabs a View which they like others sustain on assumptions of congenital deficiencies in Arab societies and incapacities for change Hence the invention of these intellectuals of the meaningless term a civil states Daulah Medaniya designed to avoid the term secular states To a chorus of approval by fundamentalists Montsephal Marzouk the president of Tunisia is one of the prime Persons who are associated with this with this particular tendency Now this being an academic setting I Proposed to discuss Predestinarian Islamism as catched by a number of colleagues Basically Charles Taylor Jose Casanova Antalal asset In order to gain some clarity concerning the terms in which the apologetics I mentioned is conducted This will also allow me to develop further a number of arguments that I had put forward in my slums and modernities and in other writings Those of you who may have read the preface to the third edition of Islam's modernities which appeared in 2009 Will have noted the claim that over a decade after the book's appearance its arguments had been vindicated by subsequent developments Let it be noted that the plural form used in the title is slums and modernities is Intended both with a certain irony which seems to have escaped many readers and To reinstate and encourage a critical properly historical analysis of the themes treated The plural form was not intended to dissolve the categories of Islam and modernity into a skittish revelry of difference or A ponderous or otherwise distempered redemption of authenticity Islam's and modernities was intended in contrast to reaffirm the purely nominal category Nominal character of the category Islam and to argue against its use as an explanatory or causal concept But before I do so I shall need to give a name to and briefly to offer general Characterizations of the sociological redaction of destiny Later on I shall need to consider what relation to historical and social realities this reduction might bear This redaction is in fact the outcrop of a doctrine that has a specific name and a global history It is called vitalism The idea that societies are held together by trans historical dispositions such as tradition or the national spirit Which despite historical change always come to constitute and abiding and never changing initial condition Which trumps change and renders it ineffectual? Vitalism is constituted metaphorically on analogy with biological organisms whom your static entities which might rebalance tempers and humors called roots But which do not change in effective ways Thus the idea that Arab societies being in essence Muslim societies Need inevitably to return to a prior condition of purity after confrontations challenges and periods of contamination With extraneous agents that had acted as viral conditions in the body politic and the body social But did not sully origins Thus Arab societies being congenitally predisposed to an ethnological destiny Express in what is generally known as Islamic culture or Islamic civilization are captive to a cultural incapacity for change of real consequence any change is ever captive to the parameters of origin of the initial condition incidentally The notion of an initial condition was wonderfully sketched by Sudipta Kaviradj who is sadly no longer at service We have here a notion of culture as a prison of social instinct Rather than as a field of human improvement in many ways This culturalism is the precise analog of earlier notions of race Which is no longer a respectable topic of conversation Vitalism is a crudely bestial form of social Darwinism which regards social collectivities on Analogy with animal species and the twain of course shall never meet Now elaborated in reaction to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution Vitalism was associated with populist nationalism and with nativism especially of subaltern or tardy national formations and Has usually been associated with right-wing movements It is interesting and telling to note that the international rhythm of vitalism has been associated with the downward curve of radicalism following 1792 1848 1871 1917 which was followed by national socialism fascism action, France's Hindu nationalism the Society of Muslim Brothers and many analogs and of course after 1989 All vitalist movements speak of a return to origins all invoke redactions of destiny Considered as inevitable forces of nature compelling societies to regress to Initial conditions prevailing before the fall now called colonialism and to invoke traditions instead of considering the capacity of humans for advancement all invoke native voice at The present moment they prefer a program of what Charles Taylor calls a politics of recognition a Communi communitarian templates Premised on the self-enclosure of human collectivities and their cultivation of origins as expressed in traditions that yield Particularistic ethics and particularistic politics Culture comes to be regarded as irreducible and so we generous and therefore beyond the reach of Sociological and historical analysis Explicitly counterposed to what is taken for a teleology of the Enlightenment. This is a teleology which paradoxically works backwards With these initial remarks noted. Let me look closely at the way in which the secularization thesis is considered in vitalist terms At how this might color considerations of modern the modern history of the Arabs and How recent political developments in Egypt and Tunisia particularly Revolution and counter-revolution might be taken to be the final coup de grace to the secularization thesis Now following Weber and later sociologists the classical secularization thesis proposed That secularism an outcrop of modernity might be accounted for by the dual action of the confinement of religion as ideas values Institutions or rather at its clear demarcation as a sphere of social political and individual individual action and by social differentiation The assault on this thesis is directed principally not at the characterization and description of secularism in terms of social differentiation, but at its extent and It is here that post-colonialist and post-modernist reason comes to assert itself I hope to show that in the final analysis the impulse behind this criticism would transpire to be not so much cognitive as Apologetic an ideological justification of the downward curve that I mentioned a moment ago Much was made initially of the lack of evidence for the decline of religion in the United States and later in Latin America and among Muslims This might be true to the extent that some enthusiasts have thought that the decline in the social salience of religion and in rates of religious observance was a necessary corollary to secularization But this particular idea was always auxiliary It has no necessary structural or analytical connection with the process of secularization itself But matters indeed are more interesting properly considered the secularization thesis Does not entail such a corollary what it does entail instead is that many modern forms of religiosity Especially fundamentalism are themselves corollaries of secularization it is only with social differentiation and with the demarcation of religion as an autonomous sphere of social action that Religious discourses on society polity and personal ethics can come into their own and start making claims on society at large They no longer they no longer being enmeshed with life and textured within it It is only with a disembodiment of religion that religion can become differentiated as an autonomous social actor and It is only when religion is marginalized that it can be reconstituted as an autonomous fear and spawn social and political claims and programs It would be good to bear in mind that What one might call secular reason or to use the term preferred by Talal Assad the reason of the secular That is to say sociological and historical reason is capable of explaining religion Whereas religion itself does not have these conceptual resources to account for secularism except by the use of the usual mythopoetic notions in View of this secularization cannot reasonably be regarded in cavalier manner as the absence of religion or its Subtraction this is a lazy thought for Malayik and effortlessly repeatable Taylor's subtraction model model in which the secular is merely the space left behind When this worldly reality is freed from religion rests upon false premises first of all Subtraction is only an auxiliary feature of secularization One in which activities once performed under the signature of religion or by religious bodies are taken over by secular bodies A case in point is the secularization of ecclesiastical properties This notion of secularization by subtraction belongs to the early modern periods Activities previously performed by religious authorities such as education or elaborating and disseminating a cognitive regime regarding nature are Under secular regimes activities that developed ab initio by secular authorities not taken over from religious authorities Originally in parallel with them ultimately causing Religious activity in these fields to be no longer Sustainable in societies that no longer are no longer prepared to countenance them as sustainable The fact is that the anachronism of the subtraction model is based on a prior underlying Analytical premise that of the relation between secularism and Christianity and this will bring us back to culturalism and Traditionalism and the joint rhetorical trope that of the return of religion as To an initial condition of purity unadulterated by secularism and modernity at moment of awakening and clarity which removes the illusions of change There are two volleys to this prior analytical premise Which is conducted in the form of historical narrative the one represented by Kazanova and Taylor The other called genealogical with an explicit claim to anthropology by Tala Lasset For the first we are told that secularization is and I quote identified with a particular civilizational trajectory One which is described by Taylor at length to which he adds on Psycho-historical factors of the embedding and disembedding of individuals and so on and so forth without any reference To the overarching Roman Catholicism of this particular position Reference to criticisms of capitalism by Marx when speaking of fetishism of the commodities of alienation and of religion Would have enriched considerably this attitude of discontent and disenchantment to a civilization and taken it in a more constructive direction Yet for all the high-grade philosophical skills one would expect from Taylor Discussion of separate civilizational trajectories remain pseudo-historical Guided by the conflation of historical dynamics with an essential Ethnology of the West as grounded in Christian traditions The same sort of conflation widely disseminated by the Catholic Church arises with Kazanova Who claims that secularism is the product of a specifically Western modernity and that therefore and I quote fundamentally and inevitably post-christian I Should come to this particular posture of post-ism in a moment Kazanova claims further that secularism first arose as a Western theological category This conveys a close fit with the traditionalist and civilizational discourse But this meaning is very uncertain. I am not aware of secularism as a Christian theological category and Kazanova will know this very well having studied theology at Innsbruck while still a member of the society of Jesus I am not aware of secularism as a specifically Christian category either What we are left with is a drift That we can see more clearly when we speak of Islam namely a drift presented as common sense Towards identifying past with future and identifying culture civilization and religion and indeed Towards rendering religion the defining element in both in in all in other words a drift in lazy thought In this way the idea of secularism one outgrowth of social differentiation Differentiation arising from global modernity might have common global characteristics is made to devolve to an illusion and a lie at best a colonial or elitist imposition For there are according to Kazanova multiple modernities dominated denominated as post Hindu post Confucian and post Muslim it will be evident to clear-headed persons that the relationship between secularism and modernity Would need to start with the latter term not the former It will be equally clear that the notion of multiple modernities Attractive as it is to some in a multiculturalist setting makes little sense By preserving the term modernity it gives the impression of conceding nominal universality But at the same time it deprives this universality of any Determinant historical content and indeed robs it of any analytical relevance Ultimately, this is not an argument from history, but one for incommensurable historical itineraries Driven by culture or civilization and all such arguments put the cart before the horse It is an argument for contrastive histories, and this is of course an argument that flies in the face of historical reality and by historical reality I refer to the reality of a universal global history, which Disruptive as it certainly has been is not an illusion Modernity and secularization are objective historical dynamics uneven certainly but with an uneven unevenness tempered with combination Under the signature of a form of domination that has transformed all societies beyond recognition Domination first by mercantile capitalism later by colonialism and imperialism yielding the present stage of globalization This is a dynamic of European origin and impulse certainly But it is one that has been internalized and made local everywhere in a variety of forms and in varying contexts This would lead one to say that ideas about provincializing Europe are in fact Fantasmatic as Eurocentrism in regarding modern history has a very strong empirical foundation There may well be ethical and political foundations for contesting Eurocentrism, but it is clearly illegitimate to transpose ethical imperatives into cognitive ones or to opt for posters of denial In this perspective any talk of an initial condition Christianity Islam Hinduism Confucianism loses any analytical or interpretative force The well-worn points often made about Islam and secularism need to start from conditions of the present not from ancient Muslim texts and traditions Further this perspective renders notion of multiplicity under Christian Muslim and Hindu signatures experience and irrelevant analytically The upswing of Islamism in the Arab world in the forms both of piety and of political fundamentalism Would need to be regarded with this in mind Before I turn to this as I return to the question of destiny Let me take up the second volley of the prior analytical premise conducted as I suggested in The form of historical narratives underlying the rhetorical trope of return to religion in the Arab world This second polemical volley is perhaps best represented by Talal asset It is at bottom an apology for nativism and relativism Grounded in a rhetoric of attachment investment and reverie systematically transposing what is perceived to be ethical and Some and sentimental imperatives into cognition and knowledge thereby Sliding from the sociology of politics to self-indulgent sentimentalist Psychopolitics with footnotes added It comes from a side of the multicultural spectrum in which disenchantment with Europe upon discovering that Europe Was imperfect is taken for its historical invalidation Provincialization according to some it gives absolute credibility and primacy in Contrastive recent emo and perhaps in atonement and contrition to what is perceived as Europe's other As that calls this procedure genealogy rather than history for reasons I cannot quite fathom Maintaining that one should break with what he takes to be the coercive constraints of sociological truth These are of course constraints on self-indulgence and imperatives of socio-historical rationality as It suggests that we should learn to treat enlightenment assumptions as belonging to what he calls specific kinds of reasoning and not as the ground from which an understanding of non enlightenment traditions must begin much concerned with the operations of power and ideology and anthropology in cultural translation what he does is use the notion of Fashtain that is to say sympathetic understanding Wielded in such a way as to yield ultimately much sympathy and very little understanding Witness for instance one of his students Sabah Mahmood's plea that hyper pietist Practices by some Egyptian women should not be judged in liberal terms, but should rather be seen as technologies of the self Undoubtedly true in a banal way, but nevertheless structurally these are technologies for the production of compliant selves Which would in scientific terms qualify as procedures of re-socialization by an authority? It does not bear mystification Ultimately genealogy therefore devolves not to historical or anthropological understanding, but rather appears as an act of historical reparation the advocacy counterpart of apology Having made these general comments, I should be more concrete Trying to find my way through assets sinuous reservations nuances and caveats Which incidentally often escape those of his readers who are less talented than he and I do this in Order to get at the essentials and especially to capture the operational direction of his ideas as expressed in their possible consequences and the circumstances of their reception As that questions the notion of religion and correlatively the idea of the secular He proposes that the idea of religion is one that is irretrievably Manacled by its European conditions of emergence and may not legitimately be used elsewhere This is yet another effortlessly repeatable formulaic statement And if one were to admit such a view one would have to disallow concepts used in economics sociology politics Anthropology and concepts such as gravitation and the speed of light Quite apart from the counterfactual nature of such a genealogy of religion the assertion that the conditions of emergence of scientific ideas in Validate their general applicability Results not only in the inadmissibility of using concepts in the social social sciences of humanities But in boundless relativism and a cognitive nealism This is of course Culturalist solipsism par excellence building upon this position asset proposes a nativist rhetoric of attachment Religion he declares with the solemnity Appropriate to the gravity and summeriness of the statement as a result of and I quote a discursive process Apparently without roots in a general anthropological category of religion an Anthropology of Islam Should begin Where Muslims begin its with the concept of a discursive tradition relating to the Muslim canon and The practice of what he calls appropriately apt performances driven by the Islam which as a brightly maintains is not a distinctive social structure is thus made to escape sociological and anthropological It is liberated from the social moorings of its practices and becomes mystified as Tradition with a capital T that is discourses giving correct form to given practices precisely because they are established They were established in the past Assets criticism of Geertz not withstanding his Islam is a mentalist constructs with associated Performances very much in the spirit of Geertz whom it is whom he decries All be a chod of its status as an anthropological Category and it is I must say not sufficiently well informed by readings in Muslim religious traditions anyway We therefore return to incommensurable traditions Encaged in a polite protocol of mutual recognition about which asset incidentally is not very optimistic between Untranslatable registers expressing themselves in indigenous voices, which are ultimately effective aesthetic and political choices unrelated to cognitive categories Native voice is irreducible and therefore not open to analytical reason resting upon assertion without recall or recourse Being matters of political ethical or traditionalist choice all voices But the native are liable to corrosion Including the voice of scientific reason that expresses itself in the social and human sciences and nothing remains admissible But to take discourses on their own Thus for instance and once again I refer to Sabah Mahmood Building upon asset skepticism over the notion of religion while studying networks of feminist or feminine piety in Egypt Mind-utely and illuminatingly with its rituals reflections habit formations and corporeal disciplines Insists that rather than conceptualizer material and turn her subjects into objects as a researcher might Insists that the prop that the project should lead to the parochializing of the researchers One always welcomes calls for self-reflexivity But the dos would need to be a conceptual self-reflexivity rather than an ethical discipline of subjectivity Counterposed to cognitive purpose or a form of contrition parents and Confession studied in great detail by Talal Assad with reference to medieval letter Christianity cliches including self-parodic cliches described but not interpreted Come to have greater salience than sociological reason in this scheme of lazy thinking Similarly in a long discussion of the Saudi Nasiha texts that is to say letters written by the clericy to the kings of Saudi Arabia asking them to mend their ways Assad advocates that we shed any assumptions of a singular rationality as an imposition and Interprets limitations on these on this material as due not to incapacity for contemplating change Nor to an intrinsic contradiction between reason and religion but as arising from and I quote particular discursive traditions and It's associated this Nasiha is therefore not only repressive and patrimonial But assumes a moral order of virtuous individuals With neither qualification Nor analysis in terms of political sociology or anthropology the line between anthropology of modernity as Assad terms it and Advocacy of tradition is nowhere apparent this Irrationalist doctrine Attendant upon vitalism seems in this case to be tailored to an apology for contemporary Identitarian Islamism It is also one that is imperfect fit with the advocacy of tradition For Assad uses the very conception of religion. He decries so much to speak of Muslims in Europe or rather to Reconstitute them as such a Reconstitution that many would resist he advocates a society of estates of millets And by all be it without dominance a geographical coexistence of minorities in European societies For he maintains Muslim immigrants. Incidentally, he still calls them immigrants rather than citizens Cannot be satisfactorily represented in Europe given Europe's ideological construction What is in fact at issue is not representation which all citizens have But citizenship which is nowhere addressed by Talal asset Asset seeks to represent Muslims as Muslims That is as a minority not so much defined as characterized by historical narratives embodied memories feelings and desires to which one needs to add the very considerable amount of politically induced false memories as well in addition To Muslims asset attributes ways of life and practices are calculated in books ancient books It is reason rather than really existing Muslims that need political institutions to represent them in the way that asset Presents this case. I think that it is clear that this whole argumentative edifice is geared towards traditionalist forms of The deliberate construction of minorities and specifically of Muslim minorities in Europe and the politics of recognition which involves not so much the apprehension of reality as categorization and stereotypification and It is specifically to this that I now turn in the hope that you will agree with me That this brief discussion of asset was not a detour but rather a waste station in the argument I'm offering to whose conclusions. I will now wind down as I reconnect with what I started I should maintain that what asset takes for Muslim identity or what Kazanova or Taylor or Taylor take for Civilizational paths are not forces of nature that predestined human collectivities to specific outcomes or to restricted horizons of possibility British and Egyptian Muslims cannot summarily be reduced to homogenous community living according to books Local voice be it in Riyadh or in London is not a voice of nature It is a habitus elaborated by app performance however naive and seemingly spontaneous and however sincerely performed in Both Jakarta and Cairo what goes for local Muslim voice is the result of a recent historical development Deploying much political and social engineering after all when signs and tokens of authenticity are truly authentic Then they are a like full claw a medley of vestiges with varying degrees of attractiveness and happiness so are also social and cultural Islamization and Salification in the Arab world in recent decades With exceptions, these are not in substantive continuity with the past and this applies most specifically to fundamentalism and stringent pietism or What is what might be known as social Salafi occasion? Identity it must be stressed is less an indicative concept than a performative enhance political designation In the context discussed here the Identitarian conception of Islam as a total socio-political and ethical super structure Corresponding to the nature of society makes perfect sense It is after all the secularization thesis with this stress on social differentiation That is able to account for the emergence of religion as an independent instance that makes total claims to represent society The question of secularism is not one that defines the relations between Islam and the West It is in fact a struggle within Muslim majority countries themselves between what the French would call sociological Muslims as Elsewhere in the Arab world and over a period of a century and a half Religion was objectively and gradually disengaged From its implication with various areas of life crucially education law social organization culture politics and the cognitive instance Seeding the way to civil law civil courts state and private educational institutions including universities modern natural scientific geographical and historical disciplines and Modern ideas of social and political organization Including the modern ideologies of constitutionalism nationalism liberalism socialism and many others religious personnel and their institutions and Their institutional bearings no less than religious culture and indeed Religion-driven norms of personal and ethical behavior retreated to the margins Despite having a symbolic official presence making way for new ones emerging under prevalent conditions Not by subtraction and without this yielding an ideology of secularism centrally placed however There was a parallel development arising from social differentiation associated with the secularization thesis This was a formation of pietistic civic organizations Organized as clubs ultimately with a decided political twist and at certain moments when national socialism became the global paragon of national regeneration of paramilitary formations the society of Muslim brothers is a very good case in point Such organizations acted to condense reformulate and guide religious symbols and sentiments into well-defined and well organized channels Giving them form and a programmatic political and social direction yielding networks of organizational and ideological circulation and a self-referential consistency Thus from the possibilities offered by social differentiation accounted for by the modernization secularization thesis religion as such was to become a specific Identifiable and independent social and cultural actor like other instances emerging From the margins the logistical conditions for moving to the center on the presumption of providing a self-contained Template was made possible religion became a program for total transformation It was not only a logistical possibilities that made this possible, but a crucial conceptual shift as well Whereas before the end of the 19th century the Quran was apart from devotional purposes rarely if ever read on its own apart from commentaries and Then only fragmentarily an important shift towards a protestant notion of scripture as a Stand-alone object appeared on the horizon a bookish tradition in the sense favored by asset It is thus that fundamentalism became possible Now in tandem with the modern ideology of populism The pop and populism incidentally is not to be confused with the magegi all with pandering to the demos Although this is of course not absent. It is rather a specific ideological orientation With an imagined construct of the essence of a people now diminished and diluted and in need for restoration In effect creating a people or a community according to a romantic template in tandem with populism Scripturalist fundamentalism becomes a heady sentiment and an impulse of formidable force What some call the Islamist tsunami following the Arab Spring? derived from what has been said facilitated by formidable educational information ideological and logistical networks first from Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 60s at a time when these networks acted as a component in the Cold War as The cultural and social plank of the Truman doctrine for the containment of communism This was directed towards creating and socially generating conservative anti-modernist and antisocialist forces in the region in Conjunction with this was a policy of communalization the idea of mosaic societies and Anti-modernist political imaginary become a political program that has had signal success It is one which converts sociological groups into political actors Finally and speaking of logistical networks of mobilization Organization one should not forget the role of petro Islamic cable and satellite television and the culture that is produced by them in recent decades From then on fundamentalist sentiments Acquired sufficient momentum to be self-sustaining Apart from the rest of modernizing and secularizing society and attempting to move to its center They built upon conditions of social disaggregation The decline in the efficacy of educational systems The recession of the Arab states modernizing missions and their drift towards social archaization Including the positive if unofficial encouragement of Islamist groups including in Egypt and including the Muslim brothers principally They also built upon increasing gaps between rich and poor the devastating results of neoliberal economies and the kleptocracies they produced and the host of other matters They built upon the recession of positivist modernizing nationalist ideologies attendant upon military defeat More recently among educated elements They built upon post-colonialist and post-modernist anti-enlightenment modules and upon and also upon the universal phenomenon of Identity politics in which religion is often given priority over nationality in the process Islamization came to influence a broadsway the social groups which had previously had no truck with political religion and Islamic identity within the parameters outlined earlier road initially on a natural tendency to social conformism First as an affectation in time become a second nature and a habitus and in due course Imagine as pre-existing Islamic nature anti-dating modernization and I thought you might wish to Just to follow this somewhat graphically By a series of four photographs Which will show you this process over a period this one There we are Some of you have seen this before I apologize now. This is caro university the graduating class Scroll down to 1995 We have a very very good proportion with covered heads I mean, I'm telling you I'm showing you these in order for you not to assume that Kyrene women were born with their heads covered. Yeah happens over time 2004 the head coverings Despite different colors are becoming more uniform. The clothing is becoming more uniform Finally 2012 men and women standing separately These are social and political developments. They are not forces of nature. They are by no means predetermined and whatever head coverings women wore at the beginning of the 20th century was actually local dress not an ideological uniform now the contrived and Profoundly political Character Islamization is evident now in the results of the recent elections in Egypt and in Tunisia as well Where in October 2011 the Islamist Nahdha party won 1.5 million votes out of the 3.5 million castes from a total electoral body of 7.5 million Majorities as predicted came from expatriate Tunisians living in multiculturalist countries Islamist forces in both Tunisia and Egypt are now making claims to speak exclusively for the revolutions on which they in fact piggybacked in the case of Egypt, especially most reluctantly piggybacked the Feta Complee of an Egyptian Constitution with Islamist booby traps article 7 and 219 won the ascent of 63.8 percent of the 32.9 percent of the electorate who turned out to vote in December 2012 on a text written hastily and carelessly By an assembly in fact an Islamist conclave elected by seven percent of the electorate and declared illegal by the constitutional court Constitutional Islamization is therefore the product of a political party the Muslim brothers This is a somewhat sinister organization with many jizz-whittical twists to its ways long hungry for power and exercised by a keen sense of entitlement entitlement because of a special relationship to God entitlement because of the populist supposition that Islam and archaic Muslim law Correspond in vitalist mode to the nature of the Egyptian people and entitlement finally because of a long history of clandestinity and repression although We must all be aware of the fact that the repression was always very partial because it was the state Under Sadat and under Mubarak that had sustained the social networks not sustained but had permitted and quite encouraged the social and Other networks that the Muslim brothers knitted throughout Egyptian society Deploying the tyranny of form and majority it is unsurprising that the party and its representative in the office of president Or there's a brother. It's representative in the presidency Elected incidentally by a very no margin low margin are hijacking the recent Egyptian revolution Trying to masculine the judiciary If one if I'm the state apparatus if one if I'm from a one that is to say the brothers if one if I'm the state apparatus as well as the media using the enormous Traitorian and repressive potential and disposition of the Egyptian state in tandem with street action by party mobsters That is to say my brotherhood mobsters This included at one point incidentally what is known as the harrush sharia Sharaist sexual harassment the harassment of unveiled women on the streets When president Morsi opened the Cairo book fan recently in January Unveiled women and women wearing trousers were told by his bodyguard to stay well away from Unsurprisingly, I don't need to dwell much on this women are on the defensive in both Egypt and Indonesia and Seem to be recommending struggles for social advancement that had already been won and whose recession you can see in this What we are what we are witnessing there for and what we see from the images just shown is not a Predestined return These images speak for societal For active societal regression not a return to something native natural or abiding They are rather highly resher she deliberately belabored by political and social agencies They speak for De-secularization regressive social engineering working together with the spiritualization of the public sphere in Which politics becomes in the words of one prominent Muslim brother now dead social devotions This involves the emergence of new elites Systemic re-socialization The subversion of modern education and culture the infiltration of the state bureaucracy the police Armed forces and the judiciary and last but not least The re-socialization of citizens and a redefinition of national culture according to a novel religious template School curricula in Egypt and Turkey are now in danger of introducing American style creationism into biology lessons a Photo of the noted description feminist Doria Shafiq was removed From civics textbooks for schools for secondary schools in January because it showed her unveiled To restate the question of my title without mincing words are historical regression and social retrogression fated for the Arabs My answer would be no They are certainly in progress Not as forces of faith, but rather as facts of politics society and social engineering palpably intensifying social engineering there are resistances and In many instances particularly Egypt and in Tunisia especially given the events of today These resistances are very evident and might well be effective But of course on this matter the jury is still out. Thank you very much