 Welcome to the first centenary lecture of the Department of Politics and International Studies here at SOAS, delivered by Professor Alfred Steppen from Columbia University. We're very happy to have you here tonight. Now, my name is Michael Bueller. I'm chairing tonight's lecture, which basically means I'm going to say a few things about house rules before I give over to Regina Butch by who will introduce our speaker. Now, this is the first centenary lecture. The second one will be delivered by Professor James Scott from Yale University on the 12th of May at 5.30 in this room here as well. If you're interested in event updates, you can like the SOAS Facebook page, or you can also go to the SOAS Department of Politics website, and we basically update our events there. The third lecture will be delivered by Professor James Piscatori from Durham University. We do not yet have a date for that lecture, but it's likely going to be in November here in this room as well. So what I also need to talk about quickly is that tonight's talk is co-sponsored by the Center for International Studies and Diplomacy, CISD, and we're very happy and grateful for their support. But the person I particularly like to mention is Marina English, who has worked many, many hours to actually make tonight's event happening. And so she has really invested many weekends as well to basically organize this talk tonight. I would also like to thank the technicians who are filming this event so you can actually watch it later on YouTube or again on the SOAS Facebook page. Now on that issue, your presence here tonight basically implies that you give us your permission to be in filmed. If you do not give us this permission, the only way to basically do so is by leaving now, which I hope you don't. But on that note, we'll also have a reception at some point after the talk right in this building one floor up. And we hope we'll start probably about 7.15. Now about the format of the talk, Professor Steppen will talk for about 45 minutes to 60 minutes followed by a 30 minute Q&A. And then finally, Professor Steppen has kindly agreed or actually expressed his interest to meet students or faculty to talk about their research with them. If you're interested, he would have time tomorrow Tuesday or on Wednesday after 3 PM. Email me and I'll put you in touch with him and I'll organize a room as well. But basically, this is what I had to say in terms of the format of the evening. And so Dr. Rojana Bachmai will introduce our speaker. Thank you. Thank you, Michael. And again, to echo what Michael said, a warm welcome to the first centenary lecture of the SOAS Politics series. We are delighted to have, as our speaker today, Professor Alfred Steppen, who's the Wallace-Sayer Professor of Government Emeritus at Columbia University and one of the foremost theorists and comparative analysts of democracy in the world today. It's a great privilege and a personal pleasure to introduce Professor Steppen, although selecting achievements from his CV has not been an easy task. Professor Steppen began his teaching career at Yale in 1970. He's taught at Columbia. James Scott is an assistant professor, isn't that true? He has taught at Columbia University since 1993, where he was Dean of the School of International and Public Affairs and subsequently Founder Director Center for the Study of Democracy, Tolerance, and Religion, as well as Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. Professor Steppen has also had a distinguished teaching career outside the US, having taught at the University of Oxford, where he was Gladstone Professor of Government and Fellow of Old Souls College from 1993 to 1996. Al has also served as the first rector and president of the Central European University at Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw from 1996 to 1999, where he played a key role in setting up the institution. His many honours and awards include the Karl Deutsch Award, given by the International Political Science Association once every three years. It's an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the Study of Politics. The Kalman-Silvert Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Study of Latin America by the Latin American Studies Association are among his other honours. Professor Steppen is Fellow of the British Academy, as well as of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, perhaps the only scholar to be elected as Fellow of both academies. He has received fellowships and research grants from a range of organizations, including the Ford Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, the Guggenheim, and the Social Science Research Council. He's lectured at more than 150 institutions in approximately 40 countries, which I will not try to list. Professor Steppen has also been a highly successful journalist as special correspondent for the Economist in the 1960s. He filed his story about the impending military coup in Brazil in 1964, a few days before it happened. And he's also had a long-standing column with the Prague Syndicate. His columns and articles have been printed in as many as 85 different countries and over 100 newspapers. In his research, Professor Steppen started out as a Latin Americanist, focusing on state institutions and political regime change in Brazil in his 1977 book, which challenged the dominant view that the military was a force for modernization and national integration. Brazil is the country to which he has continued to return over the years for intellectual renewal. He was also an early contributor to the development of state-centered approaches of the 1980s. His 1978 book anticipated many of the themes which would emerge later, focusing on the role of state elites, criticizing both pluralist and Marxist approaches for neglecting the role of state actors in molding societal interests. The abiding concern that runs through all of his work has been with the conditions that contribute to the breakdown of democratic regimes, as well as their sustenance. His pioneering books of the 1980s and 90s, such as Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation, co-authored with his long-term collaborator Juan Linz, highlighted the role of political parties, electoral systems, and civilian institutions in contrast with the prevailing emphasis on social movements and civil society organizations. These also expanded the frame of comparison to include countries of Southern Europe and the post-communist states, alongside those of South America. His subsequent work, in his subsequent work, Al has continued to reinvent himself very successfully, focusing on the relationship of democracy to federal institutions on the one hand and religious identities in multinational societies on the other, drawing on cases from Asia, what he calls big, complex countries like India and Indonesia that he had first visited in the 1960s after his PPE degree at Oxford and before his time in the Marine Corps. The central question that this body of work has addressed is what types of constitutional arrangements and political regimes help different nationalities live together peacefully? And this is a question that's very much with us today. The answer or one answer that Linz and Stepan have provided is that the concept of a state nation is significant in this regard, and that's distinct from a nation state, in offering an important way to think about how citizens with different national identities can identify with a common state. His contribution to the federalism literature, the distinction between coming together and holding together federations, and to the secularism debate in the form of the twin tolerations thesis, have remained influential contributions in these literatures. The books that have resulted from this engagement include an edited volume with Charles Taylor entitled Boundaries of Toleration in 2014, a co-edited volume with Miriam Kunkler on democratization and Islam in Indonesia in 2013, and Democracy, Islam, and Secularism, Turkey in Comparative Perspective in 2012. I just learned from Al that he was invited by 15 rebel armies in Myanmar to draft an alternative constitution and an initiative that was emulated by the military, and which he then subsequently advised on their constitutional design. He's had an insider's view of the constitution-making processes of more. I did not advise the military, I argued. Right. Right. At their request. An introduction to Professor Stepan's work would be incomplete without mention of his deep interest in India that has informed his recent work, and it's the country to which he continues to return, as he did to Brazil earlier. His book, Crafting State Nations, India and Other Multinational Democracies, which came out in 2011, continues to stimulate scholarship and debate in India, where he has helped to design perhaps the largest ever survey of over 27,000 respondents that was conducted for the state of democracy in South Asia in 2005. Here's after Myron Wiener, perhaps the foremost comparative scholar of India. There's a lot more to Al Stepan, a keen interest in opera and painting, for instance, but I will conclude with his quote from Max Weber that captures his own approach very well. No scholarly work is worth pursuing unless it's worth being known and pursued with passionate devotion. Over to you. Thank you so much, Fritjana, for your far too generous introduction. And thank you, Sowez and Michael Buehler, for the honor of inviting me to give a centennial lecture. And thank you all for being here. I mean, what can a speaker want more than all of those good things? Samuel Huntington, in his unfortunately influential book, The Clash of Civilizations, dismisses the idea of democracy in Islam because in Islam, God is Caesar. Thus, for Huntington, quote, the underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism, it is Islam. Now, in the current context of Beheadings by Isis in the name of Islam, many people consciously or unconsciously increasingly are assuming that the fundamental principles of Islam and of democracy are simply in inevitable conflicts. Given that even many thinkers of good will will accept some version of this incompatibility argument, it seems to me particularly useful to evaluate the degree to which many of the contemporary arguments about democracy, secularism, and Islam are or are not based on solid evidence. I'll give five of the most influential theses that I just come across constantly. I'll later give an, in essence, counter theses to them. The first thesis is there are no or at best only a few and anyway deeply flawed democracies in Muslim majority countries because the fundamental principles of Islam stated in the Quran, such as the obligation for good Muslims to create an Islamic state in which Sharia is compulsory public law for everyone, is in tension with democracy. Thesis number two, the attainment of an overlapping consensus on liberal principles requires that religion be taken off the political agenda. And if it is not, this hurts liberalism and democracy. This was the argument of John Rawls, the Harvard professor, who is arguably the most influential philosopher in the English language in the last 35 years. Thesis three, in regard to thesis two, thesis three argues that the 1905 French style of aggressive secularism, known as Leosite, much of what was also adopted by the founder of the Turkish Republic, Kamal Adatürk, is particularly appropriate for Muslim majority countries because it keeps religion, especially Islamic religion, robustly out of the public sphere, therefore helping democratization and modernization. Thesis four, the standard of religion state relations in modern Western democracy, such as the wall of separation that came out of the American Revolution and French Leosite with its roots in the French Revolution, correctly prohibits the active cooperation of the state and religion and public policymaking because cooperation violates the democratic necessity of separation of religion and state. Thesis five, Islamic political parties cannot make credible commitments to respect democracy because Islam as an organization is decentralized and without any centralized commitment and enforcement capability. Now, in my judgment as a specialist about varieties of democracy in the modern world, all five of these feces are profoundly misleading, both conceptually and empirically. Unfortunately, the two most cited and normally, I think unfortunately the two most cited and translated general works on democratization, Guillermo Donald, Fleepe Smitter and Lawrence Whitehead's transitions from authoritarian rule and Juan Linz and my problems of democratic transition and consolidation do not devote a single chapter to Islam. Not because we agree with Huntington, but because the time we wrote no full democratic transition in a Muslim majority country had yet occurred in the world. They have now and it's absolutely incumbent upon me as a comparative democratization specialist to attempt to redress this issue. This talk, this task is especially intellectually important because relatively successful democratic transitions in Muslim majority countries have been under documented and under theorized in the comparative literature on democracy. Let's evaluate thesis number one. Are there no or only a few deeply flawed democracies in the Islamic world? Let's begin by looking at the status of democracy in the 11 countries in ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asia Nations. If I happen to be giving a public affairs lecture in the United States and Southeast Asia, I might occasionally remind the audience of the names of the 11 members countries of ASEAN and then casually ask them, which of these countries for the last 10 years do you think has been the most democratic? Roman Catholic Philippines, normally gets the most gases as the strongest auction, followed by Theravada, Buddhist Malaysia and then the somewhat Confucian Singapore. I then surprise them by saying that for every year in the last 10 years, a very good case can be made that the correct answer is the world's most populous Muslim majority country, Indonesia. Of course, assessing the role of quality, of a democracy, of democracy in countries has a subjective component, but it's interesting that all three democracy ranking organizations, polity four, the economists in freedom house, that every year rank every country in the world. Basically, despite the fact that they have slightly different definitions of democracy, they have different ideologies and different experts, they're absolutely in a substantial agreement that they rank the four best democracies the same way I would, and that's Indonesia first, Philippines second, Malaysia third, then Singapore. But let's shift to the Arab countries. Is there even one Arab Muslim majority democracy? And if there is, is it of low quality? I have two Tunisian diplomats sitting in the front row and they know the answer to this. The economists on December 14th, 2014, selected Muslim majority Tunisia as their country of the year. Interesting for our discussion this evening, the runner up for the country of the year was Indonesia. The economists praised Tunisia for having its fairly elected constituent assembly consensually pass with 92% of the vote. A progressive, woman-friendly constitution, and because the Muslim inspired another party allowed a democratic alternation of power by peacefully leaving office when their coalition lost their parliamentary majority. Further recognition came in January, 2015, when the world's most cited democracy ranking organization, Freedom House, for the first time in their more than 40 year history awarded an Arab country a one for political rights. That's the highest category that they can give. That's what Sweden gets and so on. When we shift to West Africa, there are 12 countries in West Africa, but only two, Muslim majority Sufi Senegal, which I'll discuss later, and mixed religion Ghana had been democracies for every year in the last decade. Thus on the evidence, Islam is associated with several robust democracies. I believe it's also useful for our rethinking of democracy in Islam in global terms to include some observations about India. Because before independence, India had the world's largest Muslim population of any country in the world. Even today with its 177 man Muslims, India is in a virtual tie with Pakistan for having the world's second largest Muslim population. That's Mahatma Gandhi, Jwala Nehru, the Congress party in Mulana Sad, a Muslim who was elected president of the Congress party in 1923 at 35 years of age, and again for every year through World War II, 1940 and 1945, and was minister of education from 47 until his death in 1958. All of them had to think hard about how to create a democratic political culture and democratic political practices that incorporated their large Muslim minority population. They made many decisions actually 40 years before independence, but they thought along about this. Now, when we look at our survey, Muslims are not non-democratic outliers in India. For my book with Juan Lenz and the great Indian survey specialist, Uganda Yadav, Crafting State Nations, we carried out a survey of 27,145 Indians, including large samples of Hindus and Muslims. We did 10,000 in Pakistan and 10,000 in Sri Lanka. The results for India were surprising in their similarity. 71% of Hindu respondents and 71% of Muslim respondents affirmed that democracy was always preferable to an authoritarian regime. By the way, when the same question was asked in Brazil by me about four times, the highest score ever given was 51%. And South Korea did a bit better than Brazil, 58%. So Muslims in India, it's interesting. Now, when we discuss these results with scholars and activists in India, a number of them tended to dismiss our results concerning Muslims because they felt we did not examine authoritarian attitudes among intensely practicing Muslims, who they assume would be much less supportive of democracy. Well, that's a test for hypothesis, right? So we divided our set into Muslims and Hindus and measured their, we divided them into low, medium, and high intensity of religious practice and measured their support for democracy. The results for Hindus, Muslims seeks were the same. The greater the intensity of religious practice, it goes up like this. The greater the intensity of religious practice, the greater the intensity of support for democracy. By the way, according to a Pearson-Chai Square test, the probability of this happening by chance with a sample of our size was less than one in a thousand. Now, Indonesia's leading survey specialist, Saiful Mujani, did a comparable survey but for Muslims alone. His results for Muslims in Indonesia were similar to our results for Muslims in India, but more suggestive than ours were, frankly, about why this might have occurred. In Indonesia, he found that the greater the intensity of religious practice, the greater the likelihood of joining other organizations, the greater the likelihood of joining other organizations, the greater the trust in government and the greater the trust in government, the greater the support for democracy. So he works it through four things that are observable and it's quite important. The Pew Research Center in 2010 in the study of populations of the world's religions estimate there are 1.1 billion Muslims in the world. If we exclude Muslims from Western Europe, the Americas and China from our calculation because there's so little variance in these areas, there's no democracy in China, and most the countries of Western Europe and the Americas are non-democracies, we still have 870 million Muslims in the rest of the world. What does this look like? Of these, there are 204 million Muslims in Indonesia, 177 million Muslims in India, 12.3 in Senegal, 10.3 in Tunisia. Therefore, a not insignificant 44% of the total population of Muslims living in this large part of the world live in democracies. Now, a key component of the misleading thesis number one builds on the assertion, of course, of the doctoral incompatibility between democracy and Islam. Yet, partly building on my earlier time as a correspondent for the economists, I've interviewed again and again major political actors in all of these countries. I mean all the countries that the most politically prominent and important Muslim thinkers in Indonesia, Tunisia, Senegal and India, I found that they spend much of their intellectual and political efforts arguing from within Islam for democracy and against authoritarian interpretations of Quran. For example, when I was teaching at Oxford, Rashid Ganucci, the founder and president of Anada in Tunisia, and I participated in John Keane's secularism seminar at Westminster College. We participated quite regularly. And eventually, I interviewed Ganucci for what became part of my, quote, religion, democracy in the Twin Tolerations article. Now, one of the first questions I asked Ganucci was what he thought about Sharia. He answered by reciting one of the shortest and most powerful verses in the Quran, quote, in matters of religion, there can be no compulsion. Surah two, two, five, six. For him, working from within Islam, this meant if non-Muslims or even Muslims in Tunisia or anywhere else did not want to live under a state imposed Sharia law, it would be an act of morally unacceptable religious compulsion to impose Sharia on them. He then went on to argue that one of the reasons no state should forcibly impose Sharia in the name of Islam was that a close reading of the Quran reveals that the Quran says nothing about the content of or obligation to create an Islamic state with Islamic laws. I explore this further, this question further by asking, look, if God did not actually make the laws, but we need laws to live together in society, how are laws made? He began his response about talking how the prophet in Medina demonstrated that he valued Sharia, consultation, in each one, consensus, in making decisions about public life. But we both agreed that Medina was a very small town. He then quickly went on to say that in the contemporary conditions of cities with millions of citizens, the traditional Islamic virtues of Sharia and Idra are best realized by consulting the citizens of the polity, both Muslims and non-Muslims in open competitive elections. He argued that therefore there was no modern alternative to democracy for the making of laws that we need. He ended with a long analysis about the obligation of the Muslim community to try and work with allies from any religion and to establish a just government in a democratic system. Later, I interviewed multiple times two major leaders who made contributions to Indonesia's democratization, Abdulrahman Wahid, University known as Gastur and Amin Rice, both of whom advanced arguments about Islam and democracy, extremely similar to those made by Kanuchi. Their arguments were politically very influential in Indonesia because Gastur and Amin Rice were the heads of the two major Islamic civil society organizations in Indonesia, NU and Muhammadia. NU and Muhammadia respectively have approximately 70 million members. Furthermore, Indonesia's best public opinion survey specialists indicated that roughly 50% of Indonesian respondents identified themselves as part of or close to NU and another 20% about the same for Muhammadia. Gastur later became president of Indonesia and Amin Rice, the chair of the People's Consultative Assembly, which rewrote the Indonesian constitution. Amin Rice, who has a PhD in political science in the University of Chicago on Islam and the state, elaborates in a long published interview with Miran Konkar and myself, which was a very frank one and it was circulated in Indonesia, that given the absence of, insisted on this, given the absence of any detail in the Quran about the content of a state, the actual content of a modern and democratic state is a legitimate and necessary area for Ishtihad independent reason. In Senegal, Bashir Suleiman Jigni is a Sufi Imam. He chaired the major Senegalese state institution for relations between Islamic organizations in the secular state from 1993 to 1999. Bashir has two PhDs from Sciences Po in Paris, one in Bouillon algebra, which I haven't studied closely, and the other in Islamic political philosophy, which I study much more closely. In his public talks, his extensive writings and in a so far 90 page interview with me, he is constantly developing a democratic Sufi political theology, which is widely shared in Senegal. Like the Tunisian and Indonesian Islamic Democrats I already mentioned, he often starts with the quote, can you see started with, that in matters of religion, there can be no compulsion. He insists that the essence of religion for Sufis is loving consent to the divan, to the divan. Thus for him, it makes absolutely no epistemological sense to force someone to join Islam or to force them for that matter to stay inside Islam. He cites as the Quranic base for the right to exit Islam verse 29, chapter 11, quote, the truth is from the Lord. Let him who will believe it believe and let him who will reject it reject it. He thus argues that even calling someone an apostate, much less executing them for being an apostate is a profound violation of the fundamental Quranic and junction against compulsion and religion. He says to the best of his knowledge, no one's ever been executed in Senegal for being an apostate. He links the above arguments with chapter five from the Quran, which he calls the verse of pluralism. It is the verse that says, quote, if God had so willed, he could have made one single community, but he wanted you to be different so that you could know each other in your differences. Unquote, concerning an Islamic state, he insists there is no description of any type of mechanism that hints about organizing a state that would be Islamic. None. He also insisted nothing like a world-fied caliphate has any Quranic justification. Indeed, among the few times the word caliph as mentioned in the Quran, according to him, is only to talk about the individual human beings who should think of themselves as simply a caliph of God, a personal lieutenant of God. Now, what do Indonesia, India, Tunisia, and Senegal have in common? The fact that none of them have a state religion, none of them, these three Muslim majority countries, in this mention the word Sharia in their constitution, and the fact that all of them are democracies that in many ways demonstrates to us, should demonstrate that thesis one is misleading. However, before evaluating thesis two, I want to insert a cautionary note that struck me forcefully only three days ago when I was going through the ASEAN calculations that I gave earlier. Of the three democracy-ranking organizations, one, Freedom House, makes separate evaluations for political rights and civil liberties. Where one is the best possible score for each and seven is the worst possible score. For the last 10 years, the average score for political rights, which largely assesses whether elections are free, fair, and inclusionary, and the results of which serve with the constitution as the basis for democratic rule, is a quite good 2.0 for Indonesia, 2.0 for India, and 2.4 for Senegal. But the 10-year average for civil liberty, which is different, it largely assesses whether the state enforces the rule of law and helps ensure that all citizens can exercise their constitutionally embedded liberties. This is much less good in each one of the three countries. Indonesia's 3.3, last year was even worse, India's 3.0, and Senegal's 2.8. Why? Well, I have to think about this and maybe you can help me in the Q&A. But one possible explanation is that in elections and democracies, political parties have incentives to police the state and their party rivals to ensure that they are clean elections and that their party has a fair and equal opportunity to win electropower. All of these democracies now have robust domestic and international election monitors to help ensure this fairness. In contrast, when we analyze civil liberties, the Muslim majority, national and local governments in Indonesia and the Hindu near fundamentalist BJP majority government in Modi's India to further their own political power often yield to the temptation to tolerate or at the very least to be slow to prevent some majoritarian attacks against minorities. I have in mind, for example, a failure in Indonesia to stop threatening demonstrations against the Amati religious minority or to use the legitimate powers of the state to block unconstitutional local laws imposing Sharia. Michael Buis great on this. In India, the BJP government has a single party majority in the lower house for the first time ever and is allowing some of its more militant Hindu followers to intimidate Muslims from exercising their constitutionally granted civil liberties. Furthermore, unlike election observers were normally seen as legitimate, criticism by international human rights observers about religious and gender norms is simply not seen as legitimate. So you don't have that other dimension that you have if you're only looking at political rights. Now, my first few books were about the authoritarian military regimes in countries like Chile and Uruguay which in the mid 1970s and early 90s correctly received sevens and sixes for political rights and civil liberties when the worst possible illness is seven, right? But for more than 10 years in a row that cheers me up, Chile and Uruguay now always get a one one rating. That is a one for political rights and a one for civil liberties. However, no Muslim democracy has ever received a one one. Some have received a one for political rights but not a one one. Now, if the quality of the existing Muslim majority democracy is to improve even more and it has improved immensely in the last two decades. This is not a constraint. This is just an observation of a challenge. Civil society, political society in the judiciary in Indonesia, India, Senegal and Tunisia must devise creative and effective ways for minorities to exercise their constitutionally embedded civil liberties. Evaluating the thesis too. This is John Rawls' injunction to take religion off the public agenda. Is this a reasonable and democracy enhancing recommendation? John Rawls. He of course is the Harvard political philosopher and he argued that religion must be taken off the public agenda. At least in his early writings he maintained that in order to help develop an overlapping consensus in society about liberal values, religion should be taken off the political agenda because even reasonable people do not fully agree on religion. Rawls' injunction might possibly be a useful informal ground rule for arguments in faculty meetings among Harvard philosophers. But it is unreasonable and democratic inhibiting rule to apply in most countries, particularly in Muslim majority countries where religion is already on the public agenda. And what are you gonna do about it? Consider the following. If democracy inhibiting public arguments have already been made in the name of Islam, such as that only God, not man makes laws, or that the content of an Islamic state and shari law is spelled out in the Quran and is compulsory for all people, or that a worldwide Islamic caliphate is the only state to which Muslims should owe obedience, or that women are not equal to men and should have no role in public life, should potential Muslim Democrats be silent? Should they follow Rawls? Or is it tolerant and democratic policy much more likely to develop and persist if some prestigious local figures develop and put on the political agenda largely from within Islam democratically friendly alternative political theology. It's hard to believe, I find it impossible to believe, that Muslim majority Indonesia, Tunisia, and Senegal would be as tolerant and democratic as they are if democratic Muslim leaders like Ghanuchi, Kastur, I mean Rice, and Bashir Suleiman Diagni, and many others had followed Rawls in Junction and not talked about religion in the public sphere. Let's talk about another thesis. Is French style laicite an especially helpful form of secularism in Muslim majority countries if the goal is democracy? Now the first conceptual question we must raise is whether we should see laicite as a relatively fixed ideal type strongly associated with democracy and modernization, or as an extremely long continuum going from rights enhancing democratic regimes to rights inhibiting authoritarian regimes. If we look at state controls of religion it clearly makes sense to me to see laicite as a continuum. The opening articles in the constitutions of France, Turkey, and Senegal are virtually identical in their reference to their laicite type of secularism but if we use Jonathan Fox's data set of scores for restrictions over majority and minority religions it is clear that on this dimension laicite must be seen as a continuum going from state imposed restrictions score in Turkey of 15, six restrictions on majority religions and nine on minority religions to score five in France, zero restrictions for majority religion but five on minority religions to a score of only one in Senegal. One restriction on majority religion and zero for minority religion so we've got a 15 to one continuum. Senegal is clearly close to the rights enhancing democracy support of pole of laicite. There are no state imposed restrictions on any minority religion. Like the democracies of Indonesia and India unlike France Senegal's religious leaders are allowed to participate in the public sphere. In fact the phrase one hears frequently in Senegal is that we do have laicite in Senegal but our laicite is well understood and well practiced meaning not French. The Turkish variety of laicite with attitude origin has a rhetoric of being pro modernization but it is in fact a state imposed form of modernization with strong rights inhibiting features. For example the president and prime minister control the director of religious fairs, Diyanet which appoints all imams in the 80,000 mosque and writes and records all sermons given in them. In Turkey private Islamic education has roughly been impeded has normally been impeded and all religious education in schools must be designed and supervised by the Diyanet. In the Republican period since 1923 significant minority religions probably pushing more than 35% of the population maybe such as Alevis, Orthodox skeptics and Sufis have been denied many rights and are only allowed to call their buildings cultural not religious centers. In Turkey roughly half the women wear headscarves. In Atatoc's version of laicite and modernization and until quite recently women who wore headscarves were forbidden to go to universities to be employed by state institutions or in many cases to enter a state owned building to collect a pension. This meant that half the women in Turkey were victims of rights inhibiting legislation in the name of laicite. Now the relative insensity of even human rights advocates for this rights inhibiting secularism has made clear when we reflect on the fact that the European Court of Human Rights in a 2005 ruling quote said that secular advocates have the right to ban them wearing of headscarves at universities as long as the present constitution is in place. This isn't 2005. What was a present constitution? It should be noted that the constitution in question was written by a body of legislatures all appointed by the military after the 1980 coup. The upper house in fact was composed only of four members. They were the only citizens in Turkey who had four stars on their shoulder. The four senior generals appointed every single member of the lower house who would draft the constitution but nonetheless reserved the right to change any article they weren't in agreement with. From independence in 1956 to the fall of Ben Ali in 2011 Tunisia was also at the rights restricting authoritarian supportive poll of Laicite continuum. After Tunisia became independent from France the country formed part of what I call the iron triangle of aggressive Laicite secularism. The three points in the triangle were made up from France from 1905 to 1958 that's before De Gaulle allowed the state to subsidize Catholic schools at a Turks Turkey and Tunisia under Bourguiba and Ben Ali. This is 1956 to 2011. The form of Laicite imposed in Tunisia was used to eliminate Islam from the public sphere to a degree not found in any democracy and also to legitimate what I call a constituency for coercion against Muslims in public life not found in any democracy. As in Turkey the Tunisian regime had important modernizing dimensions indeed modernizing secularism such as the versions of Laicite posed by Kamal Ataturk and Bourguiba are seen by many to this day as part of their progressive legacy. Attempts to alter any aspects of this legacy are often attacked as a medieval war of civilization and social scientists and historians who criticize this legacy are few and often marginalized. From independence in 1956 until the Arab Spring in 2011 Tunisia's only rule by two presidents Bourguiba, 56, 87 and then Ben Ali, 87, 2011. Bourguiba to this day not Ben Ali but Bourguiba is widely admired as a modernist and a avant-garde secularist even though Bourguiba like Ataturk never allowed one free and fair election. Now Bourguiba's most admired legacy correctly concerns his rights expanding policies towards women. He passed the most progressive family code concerning women's rights in the Muslim world and at that time one of the most advanced in the entire world. Polygamy is banned and polygamous subject to imprisonment men's right to divorce unilaterally their wives was abolished and women's right to initiate divorce receive alimony and have greater trial custody rights put into law. Abortion was legalized under some conditions as early as 1965. Women's access to higher education soon rival men. Now Bourguiba, all of that's fine but Bourguiba and Ben Ali skillfully used the progressive family code and women-friendly educational policies to help shore up and legitimate their constituency for coercion. They crafted this constituency by regularly arguing that should there be free elections Muslim extremists would win and curtail freedoms so it was better not to push too hard for elections. Parties with religious affiliations were forbidden and many Muslim leaders were accused of being terrorists and then often imprisoned and tortured. The Tunisian autocratic state discourse about Muslim terrorism was intensified after the Algerian war between the military and Islamists from 1992 to 1997 in which over 100,000 people died. In 1956 in Tunisia, in the name of modernization and laicite, Bourguiba attempted to remove religion from the public square from most programs of higher education which in essence closed the progressive Zaituna Mosque University which was founded in Tunisian 737 Common Era more than two centuries before Cairo's Al-Azhar University and have more progressive theological statements to its credit than Al-Azhar at that time. And Bourguiba also abolished the endowments that had supported Islamic education. From Bourguiba's day until now, Tunisia has never had an Islamic theological seminar or a serious regular television or radio program on Islam. In 2013 to 14, in the last years of the coalition led by the Pluralist and Democratic Islamist Party and other, that party sought to religialize endowments so that Tunisia could rebuild doctoral training in Islam of the sort that was so critical in the modernization and democratization of Islamic thinking and practice in Indonesia. It's very impressive, the Islamic universities and their PhD programs in Indonesia. However, when the endowment project came up for consideration in the parliament, the secular legacy of Bourguiba simply triumphed and the whole thing had to be taken. So if young people in Tunisia want to hear about Islam, they get their news and sermons not from Tunisian clerics and intellectuals trained in the most democratic country in the Arab world, Tunisia, but via satellite from fundamentalist stations in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. We have to ask ourselves, is this rights expanding or rights inhibiting secularism? Given a great variety of multiple secularisms of democracies, including Indonesia and Senegal, is the best secularism for rights and democracy in most majority countries always? 1905 French Stylicity, I think certainly not. Evaluating the thesis number four, is it actually a violation of democratic theory and practice to have some active cooperation between religion and the state in public policymaking? Once again, a comparative frame of reference might be useful. Many observers often accuse most majority government of violating democratic requirements if they allow or suggest any active cooperation between Islam and the secular state. Some secularists, especially those who adhere to an aggressive version of laicite, insist that democracy requires a complete separation of religion in the state. But do democracies actually require this? Such a strict separation. Actually, not if we examine the European Union. Listen carefully to the following and think of that. 100% of the current members of the European Union fund religious education in some way. 89% of them have religious education in state schools as a standard offering, many, not all, with the option not to attend. 44% of every country in the European Union fund some clergy. 37% collect taxes for religious organizations. 19% have officially established religions, often still with some constitutionally embedded prerogatives. Now obviously, many of these set of policies like this in the EU democracies entail some degree of accommodation and cooperation of the state with religion. In Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium, this is even what is called a form of positive accommodation between the state and religion that is often the result of intense negotiations. In Germany, for example, the state collects taxes for Protestant and Catholic churches, and the state will not build a new hospital in the region if a Lutheran or a Catholic church has indicated that it would use its tax money to build and run it. Now in Muslim, so if this is our standard, we have to look carefully at what's actually happening in real democracies, and this is sort of this idea of total separation, this is simply unsustainable intellectually or empirically. In Muslim majority democratic Indonesia and Senegal, as well as India, there are common practice that actually go beyond what I've just called positive accommodation, and are better called positive policy cooperation. Jeremy Michnik in his important new book, Islam, Indonesia, Islam and Democracy in Indonesia, argues that positive policy cooperation between the state and key religious organizations has led to some progressive and democratically friendly social policies. For example, in Indonesia for the last 30 years, there has been a growing cooperation between religious officials and secular state officials to provide more family planning for women. Many of the most progressive workshops advocating family planning were originated by Islamic and you women's groups, the Muslim women groups in and you. Many of the most widely distributed how to type of family planning publications, in fact, bear the joint imprint of state medical agencies and the Islamic and you women's group. This is policy co-cooperation. In Senegal, despite a 1999 law banning female gentlemen mutilation, it helped make the law a social reality only when authoritative religious leaders in the countryside campaigned against the practice. So the practice was increasingly delegitimated both in religious norms and in social practices. Now, to help advance this crucial goal, Professor Abdul Aziz Kibe, coordinator of the largest Sufi order in Senegal, the Dijinia, wrote a powerful 45 page attack on female gentlemen mutilation. The report systematically argued that FGM is a violation of women's rights, bodies in health, with absolutely no justification in the Quran or in approved hadiths. He then argued that not only was there no Islamic justification for FGM, but that given current medical knowledge and current Islamic scholarship, there's a moral obligation for communities and individuals to bring a halt to FGM. The report was distributed out by Sufi networks, secular ministries in the World Health Organization and FGM was reduced in Senegal substantially. It's not eliminated, but it's been reduced substantially. These Indonesian and Senegalese cases I've just examined obviously violate French and US norms for separation of religion and state, but they do not actually violate core democratic norms. Let's analyze thesis number five. Muslim leaders cannot make credible commitments to pursue politically democratic policies if elected to power. This is a heavy charge. In December 1991, in the first free election in Algeria's history, the Islamic Salvation Front, FIS, won the first round. Rather than risk FIS winning the second round, the Algerian military with the implicit support of the French and US governments carried out a coup d'etat and stopped elections. A long civil war resulting in over 100,000 deaths inserted. Six months after the coup, in an official address in Washington, Edward DeGerion, the top US State Department official for the Middle East, gave his famous justification for the US policy toward the coup. We are a suspect of those who would use democratic process to come to power, only to destroy the very process in order to retain power and political dominance. While we believe in the principle of one person, one vote, we do not support one person, one vote, one time. That's the US doctrine. No, Democrat does, okay? But Democrats should not give such blanket support to preemptive coups against the possibility that a party with strong Islamic identification may win electrical power and then automatically follow a policy of one person, one vote, one time. Unfortunately, many commentators, including Democrats, accept the argument that Islamic organizations cannot make credible commitments to do or not do something because Islam as an institution, unlike the Roman Catholic Church, is very decentralized and has no hierarchy that can enforce commitments. A famous article often misused by analysts as opposed to the argument that Muslims cannot make credible commitments is by the major political scientist, Stasius Kalevis, at Yale, called Commitment Problems in Emerging Demoxies, The Case of Religious Parties. Kalevis shows that the Catholic Party in Belgium won the 1884 elections and was allowed to assume power partly because Pope Leo XIII is a hierarchical head of the Roman Catholicism, could give credible guarantees to the Belgium state because everyone knew he could remove any bishop from office if they violated his papal order. And he wanted the respect for the liberal secular constitution. In contrast, in Algeria, Kalevis argues, no one in the decentralized Islamic organization was able to negotiate and enforce any credible guarantees that the Islamic Party feasts would act moderately so the military was less constrained. I say misuse Kalevis's article because Kalevis intended the article to address the specific differences between Belgium in 1884 and Algeria in 1901 and not to imply that no Muslim majority country, whatever the circumstances could ever become democratic. Fortunately, an Islamic political leader of a reasonably disciplined political party can actually help create self-binding, self-binding democratic arrangements that can easily generate, that can actually generate credible guarantees. Some skeptics may argue that talking the talk of a democratic Islamic political theology is not sufficient, the walk in the walk by negotiating credible guarantees and power sharing with some non-Islamic parties is what is normally reported. Now, in my six long interviews with Ganucci in Tunis since Ben Ali fell in 2011, well, some of them have been in New York and some of them have been in England, it became clear that he understood and accepted this crucial task. The first question Ganucci asked me, he kept a diary, I didn't know this, first question he asked me when we were alone in his office on March 28th, 2011, was whether I remembered the subject of our last conversation. I said that I remembered all of our conversations, but I didn't remember exactly what was important about, what was he referring to? I've lost the page. He said, I said, give me a word, he said Algeria. It all came back immediately. What he was arguing about Algeria was that in Algeria, the Islamist party was very majoritarian and actually won by too much and terrified the secularist parties and that directly contributed to the coup d'etat. And he said, I probably will never have a chance to go back to Tunisia and be an active in political life, but if I do, if I do, my major goal is to help with our party and other people to build a democracy, a democratic Tunisia out of what's now an authoritarian Tunisia. Then we talked about how he might do it. And he said, well, what sort of electoral system should I create if I need this, if I want this? Well, I began to settle down in my chair. I'm a professor. I was gonna give him a 45 minute answer on what type of electoral system. It was absolutely clear he didn't want a 45 minute. He already had thought out what it was gonna be and he just wanted me to hear it and then we'll talk about it. That's fine. So what did he want? He said, look, a lot of people want me to create a British first pass the post system, which is a single member district and you get the seat whoever gets the largest plurality. So you can even get 18%, but that's more than anyone else, you get the seat. So he said, what's actually gonna happen here is that there are gonna be tons of new parties, tons of people going in, they'll be very undisciplined, but we're still pretty disciplined. We're actually gonna win 90% of the seats. By the way, I later checked it, six months later after the elections, he would have won 91% if they had first pass the post. So I said, well, what are you gonna do about it? And he said, this would be a disaster. Demoxy would never go forward. I said, well, what are you gonna do about it? He says, I'm gonna really argue for proportional representation. I said, what's the advantage of that? He says, well, because we won't win more than 40%. So we'll only get 40% of seats. And it will be parliamentary in its understanding that you need 50.1%. So we're not gonna have 50.1%. So we're gonna have to have a coalition. And I assure you, the coalition I'll reach for will be with the two secular parties, Saddlef, who have been negotiating, arguing with me since 2003. Every year after 2003, totally unlike Egypt, there were negotiations and discussions. So he knew this. They would have to form this coalition. And he didn't put his hands like this. But he said, and you know, that's gonna constrain me because we have to, we're not gonna have 50.1%. We're gonna have to work in the context. Now, what does the above arguments and actions by Genuchi demonstrate is that you can actually create self-binding set of laws in many very different ways. And he understood this, but he said my biggest problem is gonna be with women. Because despite the fact that I've said again and again that we're gonna respect the equal equality of men and women, they don't believe me. So, and he gave me a tiny wink, he never gives me a wink, but he gave me a tiny wink, he said, do you have a, but I've got a credible guarantee. I said, you got a credible guarantee, what? He said, I'm going to advocate in the body that was negotiating about what the electoral rules would be. That every, that it's what's called a closed list, ranked, that every other name will be a woman. And this will mean, this will force me. So that they, to have a large amount, so 41 of the 51 women in the constituent assembly are from, 40 of them are women from Inada. But they have a higher percentage than most places. Now, the fact that Genuchi made such credible commitments to increase the role of women and represented publics and not to have majoritarian Islamic government is one of the many reasons for not to accept thesis five. Now, time's running out, how much more time do I have? Five, okay. Time's running out, but I want to say, conclude two observations about twin tolerations. In general, I find it useful in discussing democracy and the world's religions to speak of the twin tolerations. By this, I simply mean that the religious actors must give some sufficient space to Democrats so that they can carry out their necessary functions. But I also mean the twin tolerations part of it, that in a democracy, particularly if you follow Robert Dahl's sort of what he calls key demands for democracy, eight institutional guarantees, religious people should have the right not only to worship, it normally stops there. But if you follow Dahl, it's the freedom to worship of religious individuals and groups to advance their values in society. As long as their public advancement of these beliefs does not impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens or violate democracy and the rule of law by other means. Now, within this broad framework, what's important for us to take on is that there can be many, many types of secularism. I mean, all of these debates in Tunisia that I was constantly hearing, that there's one type of secularism and it's French type of secularism, that's dangerous democratic nonsense. I mean, in our brief discussion of the EU, we talked about French laitite pattern, positive accommodation pattern, established religion pattern. So conceptually, we have to think about secularism not in a singular but in multiple secularisms of the modern world. And we have to recognize that all of them can be, they are different and all of them are now twin tolerations friendly and compatible with democracy. But we can't do it, particularly if you're starting your academic career and thinking about this. Don't limit yourselves to the existing 19th century Western European and US conceptual repertoire about secularism. We can invent new models. This is what's really, this is what important and vivacious democracies do. I think the one I've talked about in Tunisia, India and so on is what I call co-celebratory about religious festivals and co-participatory in some public, the co-celebratory, this is wildly different than the Western European. The Western European has 60 religious holidays in France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland. 60 religious holidays, all of which are compulsory and all of which are paid off for the workers. But every single one of the 60 are for the majority Christian religion. What do we have? Zero for non-Christian religions. In sharp contrast, Senegal and India are co-celebratory. Muslim majority Indonesia has six holidays for Muslims but seven for minority religions such as Hindus, Buddhists and Christians. India follows the same pattern, even more so. Because there are so many important minority religions, there are five for Hindus but 10 for minority religion Muslims seeks in Christians. In Senegal, the population is over 90% Sufi Muslim but 40% of the religious holidays are for Christian and Roman Catholics and the secular state subsidizes pilgrimages for Catholics to Rome. No, I think that you can convent nude forms of secularism. There may be one that was created since 2003 in Tunisia. Both Islamists and the secular parties feared each other but the Muslims said, look, the Arabic word secularism is hostile to religion. So they had a negotiate a long time and they came up with another word, another phrase, civic state. So in the 2003 and 2004 documents, one of them, they say again and again, a civic state that any future democratic state would have to be a civic state drawing its soul legitimacy from the will of the people for political practice as a human discipline without any form of sanctity. And now it's signed off on this. Finally, the manifesto reasserted there can be no compulsion of religion and the agreement that citizens were the sole source of legitimacy helped weaken any anti-democratic claim against elections along the lines that only God, not men make laws. Let me just finish by saying something about, we've talked about a lot of countries and so on but I'd be remiss if I didn't try and say something about the international context. The international context matters immensely. The magnitude of Tunisia's future democratic tax become clear when we situate Tunisia in a comparative geopolitical framework. When the Warsaw Pact disintegrated, nine central European countries suddenly found themselves in a supportive neighborhood of peace and prosperity and were rapidly able to join the European Union and NATO. Poland alone received over $20 billion of aid in the first five years after the war came down because of its strategic importance for the West. That's part of the definition of a good neighborhood. Unfortunately, Tunisia is what Jack Snyder, and now he's convinced me, an international nation theorist, Tunisia's in a difficult neighborhood. It has ISIS recruiting, training and arming camps close to its poorest desert borders with stateless Libya. Tunisia also is close to authoritarian and economically troubled Egypt and Algeria. It has no hope of ever joining the European Union and the United States, no matter how authoritarian the Egyptian military is, always gives to the army itself $1.3 billion a year in aid with no strings attached. Only obviously to Egypt's great geopolitical weight and its recognition of Israel. In sharp contrast, no matter how democratic Tunisia has been in the period 2011-2015, it has never actually received more than $70 million a year in aid from the US and an aid moreover that was highly tied to the purchase of US goods. Now, ISIS-inspired attacks launched from Libya killed 60 people in the spring of 2015 at two of Tunisia's most popular tourist destinations, the Bardo National Museum in Tunis and the Beach Resort in Seuss. However, no ISIS-related group in Tunisia has yet been able to hold any territory in the country or set up a ruling council to implement the ISIS version of Islamic law. And thus, it is not one of the 11 ISIS-recognized provinces of their caliphate spreading from Iraq to Nigeria. But the ISIS attack on March 8th, 2013 on Tunisia, army and police posts near the southern border with Libya, though repulsed, was unprecedented, in that ISIS seemed to have had the intention of holding territories within Tunisia. Such attacks may not destroy Tunisia's democracy, but economically and politically, will make full consolidation of democracy much more difficult to achieve. We have to think about, and when I advocate inside the United States to policymakers, I say, look, if the Arab country in the world that has the absolute best chance of becoming a democracy fails, democracy everywhere fails. And we can't continue our policy of virtually ignoring Tunisia. Thank you all very much. Thanks so much. Now, we have plenty of time for Q&As. There's microphones going around. If you could please identify yourself before you ask a question. That'd be great. Any questions? Yeah? Thank you, Charles Humphrey, Chairman of the Anglo-Indonesian Society. Thank you for a much needed and beautifully explained corrective to simplistic views on Islam and democracy. I'd like, if I may, though, to explore your view, views on twin toleration as a principle for moving forward. One of the problems we face, presumably, with the principle of twin toleration, is the extent to which toleration goes. And in particular, in relation to the rule of law. In other words, should law be common and indivisible for all the citizens of the state? Or would it be reasonable, in terms of toleration, for particular religious groups where people freely subscribe to a different form of law? In other words, just as you have Sharia courts in Britain able to give judgments on family matters, which are not prohibited, you can then take that much further to the whole argument over the original Jakarta phrase in the original Indonesian constitution, which effectively said that Muslims, but only Muslims in Indonesia would be expected to follow Sharia law. So very quickly, how do you extend twin toleration to the extent of its allowing deviations in the observance of law by different religious communities? Okay, could you tell us quickly who you are? Take a couple of questions. Well, that's a very good and important question and it's very difficult. In my thinking about the twin tolerations, I have, I understand there's gonna be tension here, but what I first wanted to do was put on the agenda that it's not only for democratic officials to act, they had some obligations to tolerate a range of religious officials. Now, then how far does it go? And I think that there is obviously different laws and different norms in almost every country, but what's interesting, and we'll go to the Jakarta Charter, which Miriam's written about. There's some discussion because we are talking about politics, how do we live together reasonably? So in this type of twin tolerations, I mean, here I'm somewhat Isaiah Berlinish, good values can be in tension. And in a democracy, a lot of good values. The United, the US Supreme Court and the Citizens Versus United is absolutized individual freedom and they marginalized equality and fraternity. Okay, that's the danger of absolutizing any values. So I think in this case, the twin toleration, both are important and what was fascinating in the Jakarta Charter is, as you know, it only lasted for 48 hours because people rushed in on boats from Bali in the discussion and Bali is, you know, more than 85% Hindu. If they had compulsory Sharia law and then some of the outer islands are Catholic and Protestant. If this compulsory Sharia law, another value which is holding together a country with some degree of peace is gonna be impossible. So they were looking at, they're certainly, so this demand, and I don't know whether they said, later when I talked to Gustur, he argued again and again against Sharia being imposed because it would violate and he would use the same idea in matters of religion, there can be no compulsion. This, if in fact 85% of the people in Bali don't want Islamic law, this would be compulsion. So it's bad for justice within Islam and it's bad for another value which is a reasonably functioning state in Indonesia. So they backed off on it without totally giving up on either the legitimate space for the state or the legitimate state for religion. But it's a constantly negotiated, it's a constantly debated and I think I find people get in more trouble when they absolutize one or the other. But thank you for the question. There's one right behind you, always. Thank you very much for your insightful comments in your talk. My name's Katarina Schmoll, I'm a PhD researcher here at SOAS. Sorry, can you understand me? Bear with it, bear with it. No, no, fine. Fine, okay. So you were talking about Tunisia as probably the most likely country to become democratic in the next years. And you were also talking about that Tunisia has a very difficult geographical setting and difficult neighbors. And I was wondering in that context why you did not speak about Morocco that also has had a long way of becoming a democracy and has done a lot of positive transformations in the last years, thank you. I completely agree with you, there are many positive things about Morocco. But I was talking about established democracies. So I used, if I went back to these, and I wrote an article about which monarchy in the Arab world is most likely to do what European monarchies often did. And that is in crisis, the thing about a monarchy is it has an exit strategy. You can exit, you can tell the king or the queen that she can have their palace, they can have a whole range of things, but you no longer exercise power. Well, that's a lot less threatening than we're gonna kill you or something else. And that's normally been the European pattern of exit. So Morocco could, it has, and you need a relatively small number of people who think that they're gonna be the king because otherwise they'll fight over it. And you need to have some tax base that puts pressure on the government. Of the Arab monarchies, it's more likely that you're gonna have a peaceful exit option while maintaining the monarchy in Morocco, I think, than any other place. However, if we're just talking, why didn't I talk about it now? I was tempted to, but the fact is it's each one of these democratic ranking organizations, none of them has ever for a year ranked Morocco fairly high on political rights. I mean, the king still has a whole range of prerogatives that are off the agenda even after the revised June 2011 constitution. So it's a very attractive place. It has a high degree of liberalism, but it's, in my mind, it's rather like Malaysia. It's a place that's pretty peaceful, could make a transition, but it's not in Moksi now. There was a question right here in the front. Hello, yes. Thank you very much. I'd like to echo the words about it being very refreshing to hear stories which we don't often hear in the media about the relationship between Islam and democracy. My question, though, speaks to your conclusion that the US might do more to engage with Tunisia, given its status as, if you like, the most promising democracy. And the question is whether that might not be the kiss of death, right? If we look at the ways in which US engagement has played out in the Middle East, it seems at least one of the factors in the rise of ISIS and other organizations that style themselves as anti-imperialist has been precisely the perception that the US has been tinkering too much or has had the governments too much in their pockets for one reason or another. If we think about Saudi Arabia and Egypt as two examples of that. So I was wondering whether you might reflect on that conclusion that less, not more intervention might be democracy-friendly. Well, it's an absolutely crucial question. The, I think what's crucial is that Tunisians should legitimately ask for it and have organizations and they, their border, it's always been a porous border, high smuggling borders, a lot of sand. And to have the country be stateless and they have ISIS and selected this as a base where they're recruiting people out of Tunisia in their training them, giving them arms, giving them money and then sending them back. It's in that sense that Tunisia is incredibly vulnerable and they're partly vulnerable. These attacks, why are they attacking Tunisia? Why are they attacking those posts? Is it to attack the border and those posts? It was an effort to really begin to hold ground permanently and the other ones were to attack the two most important tourist centers. They see, ISIS were so close to Tunisia now, sees that it's incredibly threatening to them that a democracy exists. So all of a sudden Tunisia has become a bigger target and a more dangerous place for ISIS and they're gonna invest hugely in it. Now in that context, and if you're seeing the trenches that they've tried to build, they've asked for some helicopters, only five. They specifically asked for certain types of helicopters. The United States so far said, well give them, but it'll take four years. Well, I don't think there'll be a democratic government left in Tunisia in four years if they don't get any support whatsoever. So I hope it doesn't mainly come from the United States. I would love to see it come from Europe, but I would really love to see it be asked and have an organization that ideally is multiparty and comes from civil society also and then talks about what do we need to defend ourselves? I mean the attack, the museum is the greatest mosaic museum in the world. In the beach, Seuss is the closest really attractive beach to Tunis. So they understood that they were going at the heart of the tourism industry. And so I think that I hope someone else will be. I think you're absolutely right. I mean any student of America involvement in most of this, it's disastrous and most of my early books are about against American intervention of various sorts. The Americans supported the coup d'etat against Salvador Allende. They supported the military coup d'etat in Brazil in 64. That's where I come from. And so I know that's a painful thing, but I still, despite that personal history, am worried. I think it's appalling that Egypt gets $1.3 billion every year to the army alone. Zero questions asked. And there's hardly been a year that's been worth 60 million for Tunisia. And when I was, I knew some people in the American government, I talked before I went there and they said, well, Egypt's really important for us. It recognizes Israel, it's geopolitical. Tunisia's not important. But Tunisia better become important because really if democracy fails in Tunisia, I think the aspiration, the belief that people can build a democracy in the Arab world is going to be suffered, it will hurt greatly. And I'm not just for democracy, but I know that dictatorships kill a huge amount of people in prison in the years of 22,000 people in one of the countries I studied well, Argentina in 80, 80, 182. 22,000 people were last seen in photographs in the arms of the army. And not a single one of those souls has ever been seen again. So the cost of some types of dictatorships is very high. We're a few hands on this side, yeah? Good evening. I'm one of Michael's students. So for you tonight, I have two questions. Regarding Tunisia, first of all, many thanks to address such a small country where I'm coming from. So, can you hear me? I can hear you, but I don't quite understand, I'm sorry. Sorry, excuse my French accent, sorry. No, I can't, excuse my aged ears. So, between us, we're gonna get to this question. So I'm going, my question, take two parts. First of all, how can you explain that Kanushi blocked the constitution establishment because of its secularism form and refused during three years to address the daily demonstration taking place on the Bardo Square, as you know, and that the situation has been only resolved because of the civil society which received the Nobel Prize recently. So first of all, how can you explain that Enahda is such an authoritarian party? Sorry for that, but to my point of view, Enahda is not a democratic party. And secondly, how can you explain that Enahda gave rise to a framework in which youth Tunisian radicalized and joined massively ISIS. As you know, Tunisia is the first country in the world that gave foreign fighters to ISIS and fighters who attacked the Bardo Square, the Bardo Museum, sorry, and the beach of Sus were Tunisian. So how can you explain that Enahda, which is a party that claimed to be democratic, is actually giving rise to radicalism and radical Islam that it supports? Okay, these are two complex questions. Obviously, we don't agree on some of them, but that's fair enough, there's a political discussion. I think you, I mean, many people I hear it all the time believe that Enahda is a deeply non-democratic organization. But they were the head of a coalition from October 2011 until they stepped down in January 2014. And by most standards, they didn't violate democratic rules on a whole range of things. You may think that they're deeply, and there's always a question of the double discourse that Kanuchi has and so on, but the fact is, when he talked about these credible commitments that he chose, he didn't have to. A lot of people in this party wanted him to go towards a first pass to post, and they're gonna win 90%. He's the person who said, this is gonna be a disaster for the creation of democracy in our country. I mean, I have this in my notes and recorded it, and this is two months after the fall of Ben Ali, and he's saying, I don't want, the key thing is to build a democracy. And if we can't, and so we won't build a democracy if we win by too much. And we won't build a democracy unless people feel safe. So we should not be absolutists, we should not be majoritarian, and I should create something that will constrain me like a different electoral law that I know I'm only gonna win 40%. So he created constraints on himself. A total authoritarian wouldn't do that. If you don't want to hear that, okay, that's fine that you don't want to hear it. But it's something that one has to come to. The other question of why so many people are on ISIS from Tunisia. You conflated a number of things there. You were assuming that, I mean, it is a very high number. France is a very high number, by the way. No, France is higher than Tunisia. But some of them came from the Ben Ali period and went and involved in, so they weren't all created in the post-Ben Ali period during another government. And so I think what I just said about ISIS having a base less than 60 kilometers away from this porous border and putting all of their effort to erode democracy, to bring people in, pay them, and they'll either send them to Syria or send them back into Tunisia. So there are a set of reasons why this has happened. It's partly how long the Ben Ali period lasted and how authoritarian it was. And so people did different things. So there's a legacy from that period. So it's not all another period. And no, it's, do I wish there were far fewer? Yes, but I wish that for, my wife is British. She's gonna come here later. It breaks people's hearts when 17 year olds and 16 year olds leave from England, from France, from Spain, and from Tunisia, to go in to support something that most of the ideology are nihilistic. And it's not as my quotes from Suleiman Joghni said, this is, there's nothing in Islam to legitimate any form of ideology like this. So we have time for maybe two more questions. So there's one, yeah, please? Just a second, sir. I saw you. I think this will be a relatively quick question to answer. I'm an undergraduate student from Kings College London and thank you for that brilliant speech. I really enjoyed it. So since I'm from an Asian country, not from a Muslim country, so my perception might be a very, might be like an outsider-ish one. So do you agree that even with the separate movements, let's say in Senegal or in Tunisia, it's still relatively difficult for the Middle East to share a democratic culture since the exercise of democracy somehow debilitates fundamentalist ideological parties that holds authority within the region. So do you agree with that notion? Okay. I'm going to a little test. How it's still very difficult to have democracy, to share a democratic culture within the wider region since this somehow debilitates the fundamentalist ideological parties within the region. Well, the reason why I gave this talk, I mean, I think it's really important in a period when so many people are getting depressed, there's a lot of violence. If there's a number of countries that are almost overperforming by world standards, it's really important to study them carefully and see how they did it. There are a number of things that really are emerging from my study of these four. And I don't think that there can't be other cases. There have been. Mali was a reasonably well-ranked democracy and this same collapse of Libya with all the weapons stored in the ground and many of the nomadic tribes knew exactly where they were and they took guns from Libya into Northern Mali and basically a fairly highly ranked democracy is hurt by international conflict and it's never fully recovered. I hope that doesn't happen in Tunisia. But also there are a couple of other countries that sounds Albania. It's not a two-two, but it's a three-three. Albania is, I've been there twice, asked people how, what is the, and this is Roman Catholic, Muslim and Orthodox Catholic. There's very few riots between those religions. Albania might, could make it. And I think that, I think it's impressive that when we take a look at, it's not the ideology implicit in many people's approach. I'm not saying you, but it is a question that this ideology is rather essentialist. It's rather fixed. I work in my writings. I at least entertain the contextualist possibility. For example, a contextualist example in our survey that we've had here before, 27,000 people in India, 10,000 in Sri Lanka, 10,000 in Pakistan. The religion in this set that scored the highest for support of democracy and that scored the lowest was the same religion. It was Islam. Islam was the highest of any place in Sri Lanka, higher than the 71% in India. It was about 78, 79%. Why? Well, when we in-depth interviews with people, Muslims in Sri Lanka about this, why they said, look, hey, before this damn civil war between the Tamil Tigers and the Visinalis, Buddhist, between the Buddhist and the Hindus, hardly anyone ever attacked us. We were doing all right, but once this civil war came, everyone began to kill us. So what's not to like about democracy? We really want it. So the remembered past that is most cherished by Muslims in Sri Lanka is the democratic. And the aspired future, there's absolutely no doubt the aspired future is democracy. And why then is it the lowest in Pakistan? It's 27%. And it was between 87% and 27%, given a same survey, it's just flabbergasting. Well, in you have, the context is, where in the United States contribute to this in some ways, but we helped create attack forces to go in against the Taliban, no, to go in against in Afghanistan. But we never got control of them. But basically there's elements of statelessness in Pakistan. The military often are in control and know they don't have any street power. So the military as happened in Egypt in 1981, both countries, if you look in their history, the passage of the law making Islam the only, the major source of legislation is done by military dictatorships in 1981 in Egypt and it's done in Pakistan. Because they know they don't have much street power. So they want to get some street power and some allies and so on. But it's not, but that's out there. They've embedded it in the constitution. So they are working with a nasty situation and they feel that democracy's never worked. But it's a fascinating example. One is take a look at one of the most important Islamic Muslim organizations of educational one. It started with the same founder and the same ideology. In the 40 years of their development, the organization in India has become more and more democratic particularly when they saw the BJP becoming a fundamentalist. Then they said, we should participate in politics. Democracy's good. And then they began to argue for what is important for democracy. And so they, so democracy is a conquest. It's highly contextual. And people made for their own reasons want it in very, very different ways. And so I think it's extraordinary that this same organization, lovely book written about it, evolved ideologically in such profoundly different ways. Very, in Pakistan and India. And there are a lot of things like this. So I'm very sorry we have to leave the room in five minutes. So one last question, which goes to the gentleman who has been very patient. Questions, no statement. My question is not hypothetical. Please. A part of my question is that had the superpowers been very serious about the business of setting up two states, Palestinian state, along with the Israeli state, and should have given it first preference and priority. I think things in the Middle East and to some extent in the Muslim world would have been different. And the noxious air of extremism would have been taken out of the sales of the sales of extremist thinking. Secondly, Pakistan had been struggling for democracy as far as people are concerned. But the Pakistan military, though being patriotic, I won't say unpatriotic, but they've been supporting the extremist elements. For example, Jamaat-e-Islami or Maulana Maududi was ahead, you know, opposing democracy. And later on, Saudi Arabia and some other powers, even CIA, American CIA, were supporting them financially. Sir, we will all be escorted out of the room in about four minutes. So if you want to have an answer, you probably have to come to a question. I think it would have been much better if two states were implemented, seriously. And secondly, if the American Pentagon does not support dictators anywhere in the world. All right, thank you. I would love it if America didn't support dictators anywhere in the world. That would be very good. Well, that's one of the biggest questions from democracy. I go to Israel and Palestine occasionally. Israel has an annual survey given every year about attitudes towards democracy. And what's sad about it is that after Intifada II, not after Intifada I, but after Intifada II, in answer to the question, do you think in the state of Israel, state of Israel, Muslim should be given full equal citizenship. No year in the last eight years has majority of the Jewish population of Israel answered yes to that. So this intellectually is a huge problem for Jewish thinkers, non-Jewish thinkers, but it's really right. And then the constant capitulation, I mean, one of the most shocking things ever, really embarrassing, to see the American, to see Netanyahu come and speak to the American Congress and they stood up and applauded maybe a hundred times. And when Netanyahu was, among other things, criticizing brutally the president of the United States who had for opening up the possibility of a serious peace process. So, as I said, there's a reception upstairs, one floor up, and thank you so much for coming and thank you so much for an excellent presentation. Thank you all, really, it's marvelous.