Religion Is Not Always What Rulers Want: Official Islam in Post-Ottoman States

• In Event: Religious Institutions, the State, and Society in Muslim-Majority Countries

Abstract

While political scientists have shown increasingly interest in religion—and in religious structures and bureaucracies and not simply doctrine, belief, or identity—they often tend to treat religious authority (especially in authoritarian systems) in a very functionalist manner: religious structures are seen to operate the way they do because rulers or regimes built them that way in order to secure their rule or reproduce themselves over time. While regimes do indeed make religious structures, they do not do so as they please; the existence and nature of key structures is often far better explained by historical evolution and the nature of state building in the modern era than it is by regime needs. By examining how religion is taught and how religious property is administered in the post-Ottoman world, we can see how historical institutionalist approaches can shed more light on current structures that may be difficult to steer or control (and that might even by dysfunctional from regime perspectives).

Author

• Nathan J Brown, George Washington University