For the final lecture in the 2024 – 2025 series on Religion and Politics, the Religious Studies Program is excited to welcome Professor Tarek Masoud of Harvard University to campus to present his lecture, “Religious Nationalism and Democracy in the Muslim World.” Free and open to the public.
Throughout the Muslim world, political parties rooted in religious nationalism—which typically espouse the application of Islamic law and a general return to traditional, often illiberal, social mores—have over the past 50 years proven the most electorally successful and ideologically charismatic. Scholars have long asked whether these so-called “Islamist” parties and politicians—which include such groups as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda (Renaissance) Party—are hostile to democracy, or at best harbor a purely instrumental interest in it. The recent ascent to power of Syria’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham–an Islamist militia-cum-political party that grew out of al-Qaeda—has only added urgency to the question. Is the fear that such parties believe not in “one person, one vote,” but in “one person, one vote, one time” a valid one? Drawing on empirical studies of historic patterns of democratic emergence and breakdown in Arab- and Muslim-majority countries, and of democratic attitudes among Muslims of different partisan stripes, this presentation attempts to make progress on a question that will continue to occupy scholars and concerned citizens for decades to come.
Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the co-Editor of the Journal of Democracy of the National Endowment for Democracy, and serves as the Faculty Director of the Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative and the Initiative on Democracy in Hard Places. His research focuses on governance and development in Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries. He is the author of Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2014), The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform with Jason Brownlee and Andrew Reynolds (Oxford University Press, 2015), and several articles and book chapters. He holds an AB from Brown and a Ph.D from Yale, both in political science.
Co-sponsored by Political Science, the Middle East Studies Program, the Law School, the African Studies Program, and African Cultural Studies.
