| Review of: |
Faith in Moderation by Jillian Schwedler
Cambridge University Press, 2006
|
| Reviewed By: |
Anthony Chase |
| Reviewed in: |
The Journal of Politics |
| Date accepted online: |
14/01/2008 |
| Published in print: |
Volume 69, Issue 04, Pages 1210-1230 |
Book Reviews
What is moderation in politics? How do we recognize moderation and the circumstances under which radical ideological groups might moderate? And, bringing this to a fine point in terms of pressing policy issues, when are Islamist groups "moderate" in their acceptance of democracy, and when are they simply feigning moderation (and acceptance of pluralist democracy) as a path to a proverbial "one man, one vote, one time" hold on power? Jillian Schwedler's excellent Faith in Moderation addresses these questions in a manner that somehow manages to be both precise in its focused field research and yet, simultaneously, broad in its methodological and intellectual sweep. Schwedler's precision grounds the book's broad insights in substance rather than theoretical flights of fancy, and her conceptual breadth keeps the book from being bogged down in the important yet perhaps not ever-so-scintillating details of case studies that track Islamist parties in Yemen and Jordan (Islah and the Islamic Action Front (IAF), respectively), their participation in pluralist public spheres, and how this has affected their ideological worldviews.
Using these case studies as the basis to address important academic and policy questions turns Faith in Moderation into a complex and multidimensional (though, at times, unnecessarily dense) read. This complexity comes from Schwedler's refusal to be limited by status quo boundaries in policy and academic debates. For example, Schwedler complicates distinctions between what is "moderate" and what is "radical," instead showing how these broad categories are, at best, insufficient and, at worst, misleading in that many "radical" Islamist groups have always been closely tied to Jordan and Yemen's "moderate" regimes against which they are often falsely counterpoised. Schwedler is particularly critical of what she terms "transitologists" who posit a false continuum that needs to be traveled in the so-called transition between specific, yet often ill-defined, radical, and moderate positions. Similarly, Faith in Moderation complicates and crosses methodological divisions. The book is grounded in extensive field research and comparative politics paradigms, yet also fruitfully borrows theoretical insights from the international relations literature, particularly regarding the importance of norms.
Indeed, this focus on norms is the most interesting of what Schwedler terms Faith in Moderation's three dimensions for examining the political opportunity structure that impacts on movement (or lack thereof) toward moderation among Yemeni and Jordanian Islamists. These three dimensions include state managed political openings-i.e., the experiments in liberalization that have occurred in both Jordan and Yemen. Schwedler aptly notes the very real limits to these openings and how they serve the purposes of keeping political elites in power, but for her purposes a more inclusive public sphere allows her to test if this has had a moderating effect on Islamist parties. Particularly in Yemen, she finds, the continued monopoly on power by the regime means a strong incentive for Islamists to continue ongoing cooperation with the state rather than embrace pluralist coalition politics in concert with elements of the opposition.
This leads into Schwedler's second dimension, the internal group structure of Yemen's Islah party and Jordan's Islamic Action Front (IAF). Their differing reactions to a restructured public space allow her to show that the political field is more complex and multi-faceted than a moving (or "stalled") point along a continuum between authoritarianism and democracy. While both Islah and the IAF engaged with a more open public sphere, their internal structures meant very different reactions to the opportunities it presented. Islah's fragmented and hierarchical coalition left it somewhat paralyzed and, therefore, cautious in its cooperation with leftist and liberal groups. The IAF, on the other hand, "evolved from shunning cooperation with ideologically rival parties. ...to engaging in sustained cooperative bodies with Leftists and liberals" (p. 116). The IAF's more unified and democratic internal structures made it more liable to dynamically change in response to shifting opportunity structures. The Joint Meeting Group (JMG) ad-hoc coalition during recent elections in Yemen would indicate that Islah, too, may be more capable of such change than Schwedler indicates in Faith in Moderation. The JMG did include, after all, Islah in a coalition with Yemen's socialist party as well as a number of smaller parties of differing ideological predispositions.
In any case, accepting Schwedler's characterization of the differing dynamics within Jordan and Yemen's Islamist politics, why this variation? In answering her question, Schwedler intermingles her first two dimensions with a third, normative dimension-what she calls the "ideational dimensions of public political space." It's worth noting, first, her definition of moderation as "movement from a relatively closed and rigid worldview to one more open and tolerant of alternative perspectives" (p. 3). This is obviously a normative definition of moderation, as opposed to one focused on particular structural location or political behavior. This definition may strike some as overly broad but, to the contrary, Schwedler defines moderation in the only possible meaningful manner: the true question is not if a group takes a particular position (pushed by any number of circumstantial forces), but if there an acceptance of pluralism instead of an insistence that one group has a totalizing monopoly on political truth. Thus it makes sense for Schwedler to focus on the normative and, more precisely, on whether structural shifts in her first two dimensions have flowed out of and informed reconceptualizations of Islamist worldviews of what are "justifiable actions"-i.e., what is both imaginable and normatively legitimate. Jordanian Islamists, unlike their Yemeni counterparts, didn't just enter into pluralist coalitions, but also substantively articulated an ideological worldview that shifted to include a democratic narrative as fully consonant with Islamism.
Schwedler's conclusion that Jordan's Islamists have moderated while those in Yemen have not is revealing both to specialists in these countries, as well as those with a general interest in Islamism's dynamics. These conclusions also feed into debates on broader questions regarding Islamists and circumstances in which they might accept a pluralist political playing field. Faith in Moderation is a distinctive contribution to the argument that the relation between Islamists and democratic pluralism is not fixed and that, indeed, Islamism itself is not a fixed project. Flowing out of that, we can both recognize the intolerance and immoderation of many Islamist groups and also be aware of the possibility (though not inevitability) both of their engaging in pluralist coalition-building and normative moderation.
