On Civil Society and "Imams Crowding into the Public Square"
A recent thread and an article from 2011 occasion reflection on religion and politics in the Sahel.
Tommy Miles had a good thread on Twitter last week reflecting on the military-ruled Sahelian states and in particular the revisions to the Family Code in Burkina Faso (which made headlines in part for criminalizing homosexual acts, although there is more to the revisions than that). Miles argues that the military regimes are not necessarily ideologically motivated but are more interested in gaining room to maneuver, a process that necessitates, in Miles’ words, “throwing off much of the apparatus of previous governments, particularly the restraints imposed upon them by France & the EU.” His argument then touched on the broader history of twenty-first century debates over family law in the Sahel; he linked to an interesting article that I had not read before, Thomas Kelley’s 2011 “Wait! That's Not What We Meant by Civil Society!: Questioning the NGO Orthodoxy in West Africa.” I ended up spending a lot of time reflecting on Kelley’s article, more even than on Miles’ original thread.
Kelley writes (pp. 993-994):
I assume, and this Article argues, that when we - people and institutions from the Global North - envisage civil society in Africa, we picture citizens forming voluntary non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”) and then sitting around conference tables (perhaps the most culturally attuned among us include visions of people sitting in circles under village trees) debating and passing resolutions that will advance women’s rights, the rights of minority groups, protections for children and other vulnerable members of society, environmental justice, freedom of expression, due process, and the rule of law.
What we of the Global North do not picture in our collective conception of civil society, and what we are not prepared to deal with, is groups of Islamic imams crowding into the public square agitating for norms and laws that would, among other things, deny women equal inheritance rights or the right to marry without elder males’ permission. Yet, this is precisely what has happened across Islamic West Africa, partly as a result of Western-inspired reforms that were intended to bolster civil society. The civil society sector that we envisioned and helped engineer in poor countries across Africa has been occupied by nongovernmental actors whose visions of a just society diverge radically from our own. The question that this Article begins to answer is what if anything we in the Global North ought to do about it.
Kelley traces the history of civil society, the debate over how to define the term, and the contours of how civil society evolved after Niger’s liberalization in the 1990s, including in terms of debates over the family code. He concludes (p. 1009-1010):
There is little that western governments and aid organizations can do to prevent the civil society sphere in West Africa from evolving in its own direction. Having supported the implementation of structures that permit, even encourage, open, society-wide debate about the nature of justice and governance, it is impractical, and frankly, unseemly for westerners to attempt to intervene when we disapprove of the principles and structures that our ostensible tutees have devised.
[…]
In sum, there is an emerging Muslim public sphere in West Africa and a general, society-wide reconsideration of the role of Islam in these emerging democratic societies. The end result of the open debates will very likely not result in a civil society dominated by NGOs dedicated to protecting universal human rights. Nor, however, is it likely to result in closed, repressive Islamic societies. Having jumpstart a dynamic process of democratic change, civil society proponents from the West are probably going to have to allow it to play out. They can attempt to influence the debates. They can even insist that the NGOs that they fund adhere to western values and to western conceived “best practices” for civil society actors. But, as recent struggles in West Africa have shown, they are very unlikely to succeed in determining the outcomes of the processes that they set in motion, and they probably should not try. We can hope that the promotion of civil society will lead toward just and stable societies, but we should accept that this may look little like our own.
There is much here and in the article that I agree with, especially the following crucial points:
Western government/think tank/NGO conceptions of “civil society” are narrow and patronizing
Western governments etc. cannot control the contours of civil society, let alone wider political mobilization, in other countries
There are alternative paths to “just and stable societies”
But I also have some reservations about some of the language Kelley uses - language that was so common at that time, and still common enough now, that it often goes unnoticed. Perhaps Kelley is being deliberately ironic in his word choices and that irony went over my head, but let’s proceed by taking key phrases at face value. I’ve italicized the words and phrases I find most problematic in a few sentences:
“groups of Islamic imams crowding into the public square agitating for norms and laws…” (p. 994)
“the US and its Global North allies encouraged law reform that would create a social space for the growth of a civil society sector, but Muslim social reformers rushed into that social space” (p. 994)
“What Nigerien democracy activists and their Western sponsors did not anticipate was that Islamic religious organizations, which had only been peripherally involved in the earliest struggles for democracy, would see a valuable opportunity in this new civil society space, and would aggressively seize it” (p. 1005)
“Islamic organizations took advantage of the new civil society infrastructure to organize themselves and to loudly proclaim, and mobilize public support for, the notion that the supposedly universal rights enshrined in the proposed family code were un-Islamic and/or part of a Western neo-imperialist project” (p. 1008)
“The end result of the open debates will very likely not result in a civil society dominated by NGOs dedicated to protecting universal human rights. Nor, however, is it likely to result in closed, repressive Islamic societies” (p. 1010)
To me, these phrases and others build a deeply distorted picture of “imams” (more on that in a second) as reflexively conservative and aggressively exploitative. Kelley repeatedly uses phrases that suggest these “imams” (always plural) act as a bloc, and he uses verbs connoting either speed and/or force to depict their presence in public life - the “imams” do not think, they “crowd,” “rush,” and “seize.” These verbs, in an article that on one level lays out a pluralistic vision of what civil society can mean, on another level suggest that the “imams” are interlopers in public life. When a door is opened to them, they “rush” in; once in the space, they are “loud” and “aggressive,” and they aim for a society that is “closed” and “repressive.”
Note that in the article, “imams” are always moving, always out of place. Kelley gestures to a few spaces, real and metaphorical, in the article. Note that in his opening, there are the NGO staffers “sitting around conference tables” and the “people sitting in circles under village trees” (another problematic image that we’ll leave aside for reasons of time here) - the phrasing suggests that thoughtful discussion happens while people sit in the spaces they belong, in contrast to those “loud” imams who are “crowding” into debates.
Now for the term “imams” - which is problematic to me because not all religious leaders or even religious conservatives in Muslim societies are necessarily imams of mosques. Why “imams” and not “jurists” or “scholars” or “shaykhs”? The phrase “imams” calls up the stock image of the firebrand preacher supposedly radicalizing the masses from the pulpit - again, an image of thoughtless motion. What about the scholar in his study or his halaqa, the judge in his courtroom or in his library, the shaykh initiating a new aspirant or composing a poem?
I’m picking on this article by Kelley precisely because he’s offering such an important critique of narrow, top-down, Western imperialist definitions of “civil society” - and because it’s so telling that stereotypes of wild-eyed imams crop up even in an otherwise thoughtful critique. To be blunt, this kind of imagery, which is so widespread, constitutes a latent Islamophobia that obscures the deep thinking that undergirds the Islamic tradition even in its most conservative manifestations. And that latent Islamophobia is yet another barrier to being able to truly empathize with alternative forms of civil society in the Sahel or elsewhere.
To return to Miles’ thread and the question of today’s Sahelian military regimes (which, I think, don’t ultimately given much of a damn about what the “imams” want), I certainly agree with Miles’ conclusion that the Sahelian regimes are “anti-imperialist” in the sense of wanting to throw off restrictions imposed from the outside; this is anti-imperialism as pragmatism and self-interest, then, rather than as ideology. Miles adds, “The governments & whole regimes they overthrew failed precisely because of such restraints. These governments may also fail from the restraints on their policy making - like Bretton Woods institution orthodoxy - which they can’t or do not wish to challenge.” He makes a good point here. I also think the regimes are already failing, simply measured by fatality levels due to insurgencies and by the percentage of the national territories that are outside of government control. In any case, in both Miles’ thread and Kelley’s article there is much opportunity for reflection about the ruptures the new military regimes are trying to create, but also the long-term continuities evident in the issues that keep cycling back around, such as the family codes. And whatever follows this phase of military rule is, as Kelley’s now almost fifteen-year-old but still relevant article suggests, very unlikely to resemble “democracy” and “civil society” in the way a Western government or NGO might wish.