States in the Middle East have a key role to pay in curtailing religious extremism, according to Atlantic Council report. But some of the short term measures that states have employed have indirectly helped groups like ISIS and al Qaeda gain recruits. “Short-term measures, such as clamping down on opposition forces, policing religious space, and persuading senior religious officials to endorse official policy, often backfire in the long term,” the report’s authors warn. The analysis is the outcome of working group under the Middle East Strategy Task Force, convened by Geneive Abdo, a Senior Nonresident Fellow at the Atlantic Council, with support from Nathan Brown, Director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at The George Washington University. The following are excerpts.

RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN A SHIFTING WORLD
 

The vast majority of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims understand and practice their religion in ways that eschew violence. Few have respect for the barbarism of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). However, this does not mean that state-sponsored institutions speak for the world’s Muslims. Ministers of religious affairs, state muftis, and chief judges of religious courts exercise tremendous institutional authority, but that does not always translate into moral authority. Authoritarian rulers in the Middle East have used state-sponsored institutions as the primary method to control religious interpretation in mosques at Friday sermons, school textbooks, official media, religious courts, and elsewhere. …

As a bottom-up, grassroots search for religious identity and guidance evolves, so too does a top-down campaign of state repression to counter extremism and also public protest of any kind in many countries across the region. …

For the foreseeable future, the most extreme voices—what one scholar in the working group called “the road rage” of ISIS and similar movements—are likely to jostle more moderate ones, whether online or in the public square; not because they are the more numerous but because they are the loudest, most ideological, and most technologically sophisticated. With so many voices compromised and co-opted, radical ones can seem authentic or sincere. This does not necessarily make them the most persuasive, but in a region with human security so deeply threatened, they can more easily earn a hearing.

THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF AUTHORITY WITHIN ISLAM
 

The long-standing crisis of religious authority, particularly among the Sunni Muslim majority, is a central reason why Middle Eastern states have generally lacked control over the way Islam is interpreted and practiced by their Muslim citizens, even though some states have tried to regulate religious preaching and practice. …

The Impact of Social Media

At the same time, new communication technologies, from satellite television to Facebook and Twitter, began to provide a platform for many non-traditional religious figures to get their message out to a broader audience. The rise of social media and its rapid adoption across the Muslim world provided new avenues to circulate ideas and thus further diffuse religious authority. The existence of such networks has not only led to the spread of ideas but also to the creation of like-minded communities and thus a degree of polarization and an exacerbation of sectarian tensions amid a renewed focus on religious difference. …

The broad effects of this democratization can be illustrated by the rise of varieties of Salafism, an intellectual trend that was virtually unknown in the West outside of narrow specialized circles until very recently. Salafist Islam is predicated on an attempt to recover the purported original practices of the early Muslim community, stripping away the accretions and layers of interpretation that centuries of learned figures have developed. While Salafist leaders might be highly learned, they focus their efforts on original texts and feel less bound to understandings that have emerged in standard interpretive traditions among scholars.

THE RISE OF THE ISLAMIC STATE OF IRAQ AND AL-SHAM
 

A confluence of inter-related factors has led to unprecedented instability and violence throughout much of the region, all relating back to the weakening of political and religious authority. These include state collapse in some cases or outright failure in others, both leading to a lack of security. With existing regimes faltering and even some states collapsing, an opportunity opened for violent extremist groups that had earlier seemed marginal or contained, including those now proclaiming fealty to ISIS and al-Qaeda, to fill the resulting vacuum and come to the fore. In such an environment, such groups appear well-placed to articulate political, social, and economic grievances in a shared idiom of religiosity. …

CONTEMPORARY SHIA-SUNNI RIVALRY AND THE ERUPTION OF VIOLENT SECTARIANISM
 

Sectarianism—often a factor in the politics of some Arab societies but one that has been contained and manipulated—also becomes a more powerful force when states decay and populations are forced to draw on their political and religious identities to knit together webs of security and mutual assistance. As regimes reach across borders in decaying states to cultivate allies, sectarianism can be a useful tool.

On a geopolitical level, the Middle East is the scene of an increasingly bitter rivalry between two of its most powerful states—Shia-ruled Iran and Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia—that has served to exacerbate the societal conflict on the ground.

STATE RESPONSES
 

To date, governments in the Middle East, threatened by the onslaught of extremism, have tried to clamp down, but few have succeeded. Regimes that have highly developed security sectors have placed them in the lead of the response. That has generally led to poor results. Technology has made controlling the messenger and the message nearly impossible. Governments have adopted a variety of measures— some new, but most borrowed from the past—to try to address the threat of terrorism and religious extremism—including: requiring government ministry approval for clerics to speak in mosques; permitting only state-sanctioned imams to issue fatwas, or religious decrees; requiring state approval for mosque construction; and having state authorities educate and train imams. However, the evolution of religious ideology, with the proliferation of so many diverse, heterodox interpretations of the faith, together with the advent of new communication technologies, has limited the effectiveness of such measures. …

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