Reconciling democratization and secularization in the Middle East: Tunisia and Egypt in comparative perspective
Keywords: Secularism
Egypt
Middle East
Tunisia
Religion
Democracy
Islam

This thesis evaluates the potential for democratization in the authoritarian states of the Middle East and North Africa. It takes, as its starting point, the immense debate about the compatibility of Islam with democracy. That intellectual discussion has interrogated notions of secularism, and weighed whether societies with deep conceptions of faith can embrace democracy. In this milieu, this thesis argues that democratization can indeed be reconciled with Islam, and thus become not only possible but plausible in Muslim settings. Comparing Western tradition with the classical Islamic experience, it contends that taking secularism as a precondition to democratization is fallacy, because it recapitulates outdated theories of modernization. Political Islam, given its prevalence as a popular opposition force in many authoritarian states in the MENA region, reacts to this tension with the inverse demand to infuse politics with more religious norms and principles.
By contrast, this thesis argues that communities of faith can pragmatically adapt to new political circumstances and embrace the core institutional tenets of democracy, namely electoral competition and popular sovereignty – even if conflicts emerge around the role of religion and politics, as is likely in many countries where Islamists forces are active. The only requirement for democracy is mutual accommodation between the religious sphere and political authority. This accommodation can be reached through political pacts and bargains made in transitional moments, when autocratic order has collapsed and different actors attempt to formulate new rules of the political game.
This theory of pacted democracy, which this thesis rejuvenates from comparative theories of democratization, proceeds by analyzing how rational actors competing for power can learn how to compromise and tolerate one another under conditions of intractable conflict. For the sake of mutual survival, ideological rivals can recognize that democracy represents the least costly option, for the only other outcome is collective demise. In contexts of extreme polarization, political parity, and normative diversity, competing actors can move beyond endless interpretive debates about religiosity and instead engage the practical task of negotiating new constitutions, elections, and laws.
This thesis applies such a theory of pacted democracy to the contrasting case studies of Tunisia and Egypt after the Arab Spring. It shows that the relative success of Tunisian democratization can be explained by the pacts and bargains made between Tunisian Islamists and secularists during periods of difficult transition and political tension. Egypt represents a case of failed pacting; its structural parameters were not as favorably predisposed to pacting as in Tunisia, and so Islamists and secularists failed to reach negotiated compromises that could have created a more positive outcome.
Careful comparisons between these two cases show that while not all political settings are equally amenable to pacting, such a pathway of bargains can lay the foundation for viable democracy. Moreover, with the advance of new democracies, as the Tunisian case shows, Islamist actors can learn to shift their own position within the religious sphere, and in so doing can produce new theological innovations that draw upon the rich heritage of Islamic traditions.