[Engaging Books is a monthly series featuring new and forthcoming books in Middle East Studies from publishers around the globe. Each installment highlights a trending topic in the MENA publishing world and includes excerpts from the selected volumes.This installment involves a selection from Syracuse University Press on the theme of parliamentary politics in the Middle East. Other publishers’ books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Iran’s Experiment with Parliamentary Governance: The Second Majles, 1909-1911
By Mangol Bayat
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Hakibbutz Ha’artzi, Mapam, and the Demise of the Israeli Labor Movement
By Tal Elmaliach
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
The Autocratic Parliament: Power and Legitimacy in Egypt, 1866-2011
By Irene Weipert-Fenner
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media/Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Iran’s Experiment with Parliamentary Governance: The Second Majles, 1909-1911
By Mangol Bayat
About the Book
For the past several decades, scholars have studied and written about the Iranian constitutional revolution with the 1979 Islamic Revolution as a subtext, obscuring the secularist trend that characterized its very nature. Constitutionalist leaders represented a diverse composite of beliefs, yet they all shared a similar vision of a new Iran, one that included far-reaching modernizing reforms and concepts rooted in the European Enlightenment. The second national assembly (majles), during its brief two-year term, aspired to legislate these reforms in one of the most important experiments in parliamentary governance.
Mangol Bayat provides a much-needed detailed analysis of this historic episode, examining the national and international actors, and the political climate that engendered one crisis after another, ultimately leading to its fateful end. Bayat highlights the radical transformation of old institutions and the innovation of new ones, and most importantly, shows how this term provided a reasonably successful model of parliament imposing its will on the executive power that was primarily composed of old-guard, elite leaders. At the same time, Bayat challenges the traditional perception among scholars that reform attempts failed due to sectarian politics and ideological differences.
About the Author
Mangol Bayat has taught Middle Eastern history at several universities, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Iowa, and Harvard University. She is the author of Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Thought in Qajar Iran and Iran’s First Revolution: Shi’ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1909.
In the Media
Stanford University’s Iranian Studies Program hosted Mangol Bayat for a book talk on March 25, 2021.
Scholarly Praise for Iran’s Experiment with Parliamentary Governance
Bayat’s study has enriched Middle Eastern and more so, Iranian studies. Students of history, political science, and perhaps sociology, have much to gain from her outstanding attention to detail and breadth of coverage of the second session of the Majles.”—Middle East Journal
“Bayat’s latest contribution to Iranian Studies is groundbreaking. Her work is a must-read for those who study the period of the Constitutional Revolution.”—International Journal of Asian Studies
“Bayat offers a detailed history of the second Majlis (parliament) following the early 20th century constitutional revolution in Iran, which she thoroughly studied 30 years ago. Highly recommended.”—Choice
“A tour de force revealing both how the imperial powers undermined democracy and how eager the early reformers were in striving to establish parliamentary government in Iran. This groundbreaking work—a worthy continuation of her earlier work on the First Majles—helps debunk the widely accepted notion that early twentieth-century Iran was not yet ready for parliamentary government.”—Ervand Abrahamian, Baruch College, City University of New York
“By providing a rich and much needed account on the intricacies of the Majles, Bayat expertly demonstrates how it was the interference of Britain and Russia rather than any intrinsic deficiencies in Iran’s capacity for democracy that continually undermined and eventually crushed the country’s ‘experiment with parliamentary governance’.”—Middle Eastern Studies
Additional Information
August 2020
520 Pages
$45.00 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780815636762
Paper ISBN: 9780815636861
Digital ISBN: 9780815654995
Excerpt
Preface
During the past three decades, champions of cultural and religious authentic identity throughout the non-Western world and even in Europe, not to mention the United States, have tended to de-legitimize the secular legacy of the Enlightenment. Such an onslaught is noticeable in some studies of the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11 in Iran written with the Revolution of 1979 as a subtext in mind, obscuring or downplaying the strong underlying secularist trends that characterized the very nature of the constitutional movement. To a great extent shaped by French revolutionary ideology, the Constitutional Revolution followed a pattern common to most nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century revolutions elsewhere in the world. Its history is part of the history of the age, inextricably linked to its time.
Undoubtedly some of its champions in the period from 1905 to 1909 referred to Islamic texts and laws in defense of their ideas and programs. However, as I demonstrated in my previous study, Iran’s First Revolution, the Islamic rhetoric by no means displayed a genuinely innovative trend orig- inating from within the olama’s ranks and distinct from the lay modernists’ argument. It merely adopted modernist views, accommodating them to religious principles. In fact, the mojtahed (high-ranking cleric) Fazlollah Nuri and other olama who actively opposed the Constitution, regardless of their respective motives, represented the contemporaneous authentic voice of mainstream Islamic jurisprudence at that time.
Iranian constitutionalist leaders held diverse beliefs, but they all shared a similar conviction, rooted in the Enlightenment, that the olama’s functions in the New Iran had to be curtailed. Freedom, they also believed, entailed equality of all Iranian citizens irrespective of their sectarian affiliation. In the early stages of the revolution, a formidable coalition of religious and secular forces compelled the reigning shah to promulgate the Constitution of 1906 and his successor to sign the Supplement of 1907.
In the second Majles (National Assembly or Parliament) and the Lesser Despotism interlude, conservative and constitutional olama played a role in determining the fate of Iran’s experiment with parliamentary governance. However, I argue that once the Constitution was restored in 1909, its ardent olama champions eventually reversed course, even though nominally still in favor of the idea of constitutional government and combating its adversaries at home and abroad. Some of the legislated reforms had provoked their ire, which was then manipulated by conservative politicians to undermine, if not to defame, prominent Majles deputies, mostly Democrats. Religion was then used as a weapon to crush the constitutional movement, targeting so-called extremist, secular-nationalist constitutional leaders and thus facilitating a second assault on the Majles.
The period of the second Majles represents the second but most import- ant Iranian experiment with parliamentary governance. My study consists of a much needed chronological examination of the second Majles’s reforms from within its sociopolitical and financial context. It offers a detailed analysis of the important episodes, their main national and international actors, and the intricate political climate that engendered one crisis after another and ultimately led to the fateful end of the second Majles. I chose to focus on how a truly social revolution aimed at building new modern institutions alienated the country’s traditional religious and political elite as well as the European powers with geopolitical and economic interests in the country. The conjunction of an innovative and highly centralized government in the capital and strong enforcement of the tax system, normally rife with corruption, was too new in the ruling elite’s experience, hence intolerable.
In the second Majles (National Assembly or Parliament) and the Lesser Despotism interlude, conservative and constitutional olama played a role in determining the fate of Iran’s experiment with parliamentary governance. However, I argue that once the Constitution was restored in 1909, its ardent olama champions eventually reversed course, even though nominally still in favor of the idea of constitutional government and combating its adversaries at home and abroad. Some of the legislated reforms had provoked their ire, which was then manipulated by conservative politicians to undermine, if not to defame, prominent Majles deputies, mostly Democrats. Religion was then used as a weapon to crush the constitutional movement, targeting so-called extremist, secular-nationalist constitutional leaders and thus facilitating a second assault on the Majles.
The period of the second Majles represents the second but most import- ant Iranian experiment with parliamentary governance. My study consists of a much needed chronological examination of the second Majles’s reforms from within its sociopolitical and financial context. It offers a detailed analysis of the important episodes, their main national and international actors, and the intricate political climate that engendered one crisis after another and ultimately led to the fateful end of the second Majles. I chose to focus on how a truly social revolution aimed at building new modern institutions alienated the country’s traditional religious and political elite as well as the European powers with geopolitical and economic interests in the country. The conjunction of an innovative and highly centralized government in the capital and strong enforcement of the tax system, normally rife with corruption, was too new in the ruling elite’s experience, hence intolerable.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Hakibbutz Ha’artzi, Mapam, and the Demise of the Israeli Labor Movement
By Tal Elmaliach
About the Book
Israel’s 1977 political election resulted in a dramatic defeat for the ruling Labor movement, which had enjoyed more than four decades of economic, political, and cultural dominance. The government passed into the hands of the rightwing nationalist movement, marking a tumultuous episode in the history of both Israel and Jewish people at the start of the twenty-first century. Elmaliach chronicles the fascinating story of Israel’s political transformation between the 1950s and the 1970s, exploring the roots of the Labor movement’s historic collapse.
Elmaliach focuses on Mapam and its allied Kibbutz movement, Hakibbutz Ha’artzi, a segment of the Israeli Labor movement that was most committed to the synthesis of socialism and Zionism. Although Mapam and Hakibbutz Ha’artzi were not the largest factions in the Israeli Labor movement, their ability to combine an economic organization, a political party, and cultural institutions gave them a strong foundation on which to build their power. Conversely, the Labor movement’s crisis was, in large part, due to the economic upward mobility of the middle class, the emergence of new political orientations among supporters of the working-class parties, and the rise of cultural protests, which opposed the traditional workers’ parties. Offering an innovative analysis, Elmaliach argues that, ultimately, the sources of the Labor movement’s strength were also the causes of its weakness.
About the Authors
Tal Elmaliach is lecturer in the Department of Jewish History at the University of Haifa.
Praise for Hakibbutz Ha’artzi, Mapam, and the Demise of the Israeli Labor Movement
“A genuine contribution to the development and expansion of research on the evolution of the Israeli political system and the ways in which the deep processes of Israeli life should be understood.”—Meir Chazan, Tel Aviv University
“Dr. Elmaliach embeds his analysis of Kibbutz Ha’Artzi and MAPAM with many instances of cooperation and conflict with the other two left-Zionist movements, and their functioning within the Histadrut trade union federation, which MAPAI more or less dominated in periodic elections.” —History News Network
“Elmaliach describes and interprets the historical forces leading to the kibbutz movement’s birth, growth, maturation, and death, and in doing so, Hakibbutz Ha’Artzi peels away the romantic notions of kibbutz life taught in American Hebrew and Jewish day schools, laying bare history’s messy reality: Leaders failing to change with new technologies, new immigrants, and different generational thinking are doomed to fail.”
—San Diego Jewish World
Additional Information
January 2020
328 Pages
$34.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780815636588
Paper ISBN: 9780815636649
Digital ISBN: 9780815654889
Excerpt
Introduction
Socialism, which arose as a political and social current in the mid– nineteenth century and became a major force during the first part of the twentieth, went into decline—indeed, collapse—in the last quarter of that century. By some accounts, its economic, social, and ideological principles had been tried and found wanting. In the early 1980s, a tide of conservative neoliberalism eroded the welfare state, most notably in the United States and Great Britain. The Socialist parties of France and Sweden and the German Social Democratic Party suffered electoral defeats during this decade, and the Communist bloc dissolved in 1989. In Israel, the change came at the time of the political upset of 1977. That year’s election saw the defeat of HaMa’arakh (the Alignment), a slate that united virtually all the parties of the country’s socialist–Zionist Left, collectively referred to in Israeli parlance simply as “the labor movement.” Government passed into the hands of the right-wing nationalist party Likud (Consolidation) after forty years in which the labor movement had enjoyed hegemonic status in the Zionist movement and Israel. It had come to power in the Zionist movement in 1933, when it emerged as the largest force in the Zionist Congress; after the founding of Israel in 1948, it held the reins of government for twenty-nine years.
The labor movement’s ejection from power in Israel had two immediate results, which were evident by the beginning of the 1980s. The first was a spurt of construction of Israeli settlements in the territories Israel had occupied since the Six-Day War of 1967. Israel first established civilian outposts in these territories while the labor movement was in power, but the numbers were small, and their locations limited, in keeping with the movement’s hope of achieving a territorial compromise in the future. The second result was economic liberalization, aimed at reducing state over- sight of the economy and empowering free enterprise. A major reform program was implemented in 1985, ironically under a national unity government led by Shimon Peres of the Labor Party, in which he and Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir held the prime minister’s post for two years each in rotation. The Economic Stabilization Program, as it was called, was neoliberal in spirit and demonstrated that a significant segment of the Israeli labor movement had adopted the economic views of the Right and was prepared to put them into practice. In the second half of the 1980s, crisis hit the Histadrut (General Organization of Workers in Israel), the labor movement’s economic base. The Histadrut was both a national labor union and a concern that owned and ran a large range of factories, businesses, and social services. In 1995, it was finally dismantled—during the tenure of a government led by Yitzhak Rabin and the Labor Party, leaving only its labor-union core intact. At the same time, the kibbutzim, one of the labor movement’s most important emblems, sank into a severe debt crisis, and over the course of the 1990s many of them began to privatize and to adapt their way of life to the capitalist environment in which they found themselves. The crisis of the kibbutzim, the dismantling of the Histadrut, and the Likud’s rise to power epitomized the collapse of the Israeli labor movement, at least as the public saw it.
This book claims that the roots of this collapse are to be found in the economic, social, political, and cultural transformations the labor movement underwent in the two decades from 1956 to 1977. I begin in 1956, a year marking the beginning of the crisis of the Left, not just in Israel but around the world. A new Israeli economic era began during the second half of the 1950s, marking the transition from emergency and austerity to accelerated growth. The same happened in other Western countries as a result of the economic boom of the post–World War II era. The boom set off a strident debate in Israel and around the world about the future of socialism in the era of the capitalist welfare state. But 1956 was not just an economic turning point; it was also a year of ideological crisis in the socialist world. The text of Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress was published in the West in June, and at the end of October labor-led Israel invaded the Sinai Peninsula with the support of Britain and a French government headed by a Socialist, Guy Mollet. The worldwide socialist Left viewed the Sinai Campaign as a patently colonialist and imperialist military operation. In Israel, the late 1950s were also the years of a crisis in the pioneering ethos of the socialist Zionist Left, when the labor movement’s leaders began to find it difficult to mobilize younger members of the movement to carry out national and movement missions. In 1977, the labor movement lost power to the Right. Following that, the Left in Israel and the rest of the world faced the series of other crises mentioned earlier.
A systematic, comprehensive, and in-depth examination of the history of Hakibbutz Ha’artzi (Kibbutz Movement) and Mapam (United Workers Party) contributes to the understanding of the decline of the Israeli labor movement. These two names refer collectively to a movement in the sociopolitical meaning of that term. In this sense (as opposed to the more general use of the term movement to designate any group of people acting together), it refers to an amalgamation of linked organizations and institutions that together constitute a self-contained environment that provides a specific public with everything from ideology, political representation, housing, health care, and employment to entertainment, newspapers, books, theater, and sports leagues. Although such movements could be nationalist and right-wing populist in nature, they were especially prominent on the socialist left.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
The Autocratic Parliament: Power and Legitimacy in Egypt, 1866-2011
By Irene Weipert-Fenner
About the Book
When protests erupted in response to the 2010 Egyptian parliament elections that were widely viewed as fraudulent, many wondered. Why now? Voters had never witnessed free and fair elections in the past, so why did these elicit such an outcry? To answer this question, Weipert-Fenner conducted the first study of politics in modern Egypt from a parliamentary perspective. Contrary to the prevailing opinion that autocratic parliaments are meaningless, token institutions, Weipert-Fenner’s long-term analysis shows that parliament can be an indicator, catalyst, and agent of change in an authoritarian regime.
Comparing parliamentary dynamics over decades, Weipert-Fenner demonstrates that autocratic parliaments can grow stronger within a given political system. They can also become contentious when norms regarding policies, political actors, and institutions are violated on a large scale and/or at a fast pace. Most importantly, a parliament can even turn against the executive when parliamentary rights are withdrawn or when widely shared norms are violated. These and other recurrent patterns of institutional relations identified in The Autocratic Parliament help explain long spans of stable, yet never stagnant, authoritarian rule in colonial and postcolonial periods alike, as well as the different types of regime change that Egypt has witnessed: those brought about by external intervention, by revolution, or by military coup.
About the Author
Irene Weipert-Fenner is a senior research fellow at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF). In 2019 she served as a visiting professor of Middle Eastern politics at Philipps-University Marburg, Germany. She is the coeditor of Clientelism and Patronage in the Middle East and North Africa: Networks of Dependency and Socioeconomic Protests in MENA and Latin America: Egypt and Tunisia in Interregional Comparison.
In the Media
Read an interview with the author on Jadaliyya.
Scholarly Praise for Is There a Middle East?
“The Autocratic Parliament is far more than an in-depth and rare empirical case study that illuminates on politics in Egypt: It provides knowledge and inspiration on how parliaments function in a global economic and political context.”—German Journal of Comparative Politics
“The book is a must reading not only for those interested in Egyptian politics but also for all those interested in the working of parliament under authoritarian regimes.”—Mustapha Kamel Al-Sayyid, Cairo University
Additional Information
March 2020
288 pages
$29.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780815636786
Paper ISBN: 9780815636885
Digital ISBN: 9780815655015
Excerpt
Introduction
Why would one study the parliament in an authoritarian regime? I was recurrently asked this question when I mentioned my topic while doing field research in Cairo in the first half of 2010. Many people tried to convince me not to spend too much time focusing on Egypt’s parliament because, as I was repeatedly told, parliament cannot possibly matter in a country that is not a democracy. But when a new Egyptian parliament was elected in December 2010, there was a huge outcry that these were the most fraudulent elections ever witnessed under the Mubarak regime. Former opposition members of parliament (MPs) founded a shadow parliament for the first time in the history of modern Egypt, and a considerable level of frustration fueled a general feeling of discontent that ultimately led to the mass uprising in January and February 2011. Why did these particular elections cause such outrage at the time, considering that votes had never been cast freely and fairly at any previous time? In 2005, in response to US pressure for democratization, opposition MPs were allowed to assume 25 percent of seats in parliament. Yet although that year’s elections were still marked by a massive degree of vote buying and brutal repression at the polling stations, the 2005 elections did not garner much public criticism. Public reactions to the elections of 2005 and 2010 might appear contradictory upon first consideration; all the more so since the parliaments of authoritarian regimes are usually regarded as meaningless, democracy- imitating institutions that only serve the ruling elite as an instrument for co-optation and legitimization. So why would any Egyptian have bothered to criticize the parliament elected in 2010?
To provide a short answer, it was because, for years, private businessmen, as one part of the ruling elite, had been unwilling to share power and benefits with other groups within the broader ruling coalition. They had also miscalculated the consequences of violating the norms of state- economy relations, which were deemed essential by a large portion of the Egyptian elite and public during a time of growing socioeconomic protest. The actions of these businessmen in parliament had contributed to a growing legitimacy crisis that spread from the economic policies in place to the identities of political actors and institutions. The manipulation of the 2010 elections was a manifestation of the unbalanced manner in which they wielded power, silencing opposition MPs as well as critical voices from within the ruling party and violating the norms of representation that had been developing for decades.
After the uprising of 2011, former members of the ruling elite spoke publicly about the intra-elite conflict. Yet it would have been possible to predict this crisis beforehand by analyzing parliament’s nature as an intermediary institution, in terms of its relations with the public and constituencies on the one hand, and its relations with the government and the head of state on the other. Understanding these relations in an authoritarian context provides us with a new theoretical approach for understanding the autocratic parliament that can serve as a key for assessing power relations and legitimacy beliefs in an authoritarian regime.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com.
