Abstract:

What explains variation in secular and Islamist political identity and behavior? I argue that local variation in colonial settlement encouraged the development of distinct Tunisian political identities across localities. Using data on political mobilization at the moment of independence, I find that differential colonial investments in local land and schools produced divergent secular and Islamist political identities. This relationship operates through two mechanisms; first, high local land expropriation by the French weakened the religious land tenure system (the waqf system) and traditional Islamic schools in those areas. Second, the increased presence of agricultural colonial settlers is also correlated with a greater presence of local French schools and higher enrollment of native Tunisians in French primary education. This variation in colonial experience also informs contemporary patterns of partisanship and social cleavages in Tunisia.

Speaker Bio:

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Alexandra Blackman is a Ph.D. candidate in the Political Science Department at Stanford University and a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law.

Abstract:

The Islamization of universities has been the cornerstone of the Iranian regime’s higher educational policy since its ascent to power in 1979. Since the victory of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) has relentlessly attempted to control and suppress dissident students and professors in an effort to train a new generation of ideologically driven students. Although the Islamic Republic was successful in co-opting a group of university students by means of ideological and materialistic incentives, a majority of students became less ideological and more critical of both the regime and its staple ideologies. These continuous struggles between the state and universities have given rise to several important questions: Why and how has the Islamic Republic Islamized and controlled universities? To what extent have these strategies succeeded or failed? Why and how have students responded to state domination?

Speaker Bio:

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Saeid Golkar is a visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and Public Service at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and concurrently, a non-resident Senior Fellow on Middle East Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA). His research focuses on international and comparative politics of authoritarian regimes with an emphasis on the Middle East. His book, Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Post-revolutionary Iran (Columbia University Press, 2015), was awarded the Washington Institute silver medal prize.

This event is co-sponsored with The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

ABSTRACT

This talk expounds a book project to study various questions related to the long-standing socioeconomic inequality across non-Muslims and Muslims in the Middle East. The book draws on novel primary data sources including medieval papyri, historical population censuses, and tax registers, in order to document the socioeconomic advantage of non-Muslim minorities in the region and how it evolved over time and varied across groups and territories. It then examines how inter-religion socioeconomic inequality was impacted by European influence and state-led development since 1800. Finally, it explores the historical roots of this inequality and the role of Islamic taxation in its emergence, and how the Islamic tax system itself evolved in response to it. Overall, the planned manuscript is part of a larger project that attempts to write a new evidence-based economic history of the region that draws on the digitization of various primary unexplored data sources at local and European archives, and that combines the quantitative approaches of the social sciences with the historical literature. In doing so, it builds on earlier work of pioneering economic historians of the region, while attempting to go beyond the conceptual and methodological divisions that separate economic historians from historians as well as those that separate nationalist from colonial narratives.

SPEAKER BIO

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Mohamed Saleh is an Assistant Professor at Toulouse School of Economics and Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, France. In 2017-2018, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, Stanford University. His research interests are in economic history, empirical political economy, and development economics, with a focus on the economic history of the Middle East, and particularly Egypt. His research agenda focuses on understanding the historical origins of the socioeconomic differences between religious groups, the effects of state industrialization and public mass education on these differences, and the historical role of the Islamic tax system in the formation of religious groups. Another area of his research examines the long-term evolution of the institutions of labor coercion and land tenure in the Middle East. He approaches these questions using novel micro data sources constructed from archival and secondary data sources.