In the wake of the 2009 dispute over the presidential election in Iran, the regime and the opposition started a tug of war to bring the high rank shi’i clergy or “grand ayatollahs” on their side. Grand ayatollahs responded to the campaign by the opposition and government in three ways, some of them sided with the pro-democracy Green Movement, a few supported the regime, and many of them kept silent. After introducing the organization of the shi’i clergy and a historical background on the interactions between the grand ayatollahs and the Islamic Republic of Iran, this paper investigates different factors influencing different political stances taken by these grand ayatollah in the 2009 episode onward. While the scholarship about religious actors and democratization stress political theology in its explanations, we find that political theology cannot present a satisfactory explanation of the position of the all supporters of the prodemocracy movement in Iran. Instead, this paper argues that the political network of each grand ayatollah was crucial for the position that he took in the 2009 contentious episode. Grand ayatollah who supported the movement either had pro-democratic theology or had ties since 1980s or before to reformists who were leaders of the opposition in 2009. The paper also explains why those who kept silent were outspoken for supporting the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain. Shi’i high rank clergy has been concerned about the domination of Muslims by non-Muslims and Shi’as by Sunnis. Wherever these dichotomies overlapped with democratic struggles of the people they have supported the prodemocracy movements. Besides, whereas some of the grand ayatollahs have been unhappy about the brutal crackdown of the Iranian regime on protestors, they have remained silent because they are afraid their support of the opposition may lead to the collapse of the Islamic government, which has been promoting the shi’i religious practices in Iran.

Religious leaders consistently come to the fore in Lebanon when political change or instability looms. In a country synonymous with sectarian politics, how do religious actors in different sects relate to the state? This paper will identify a national clerical elite made up of official “heads of sects” with a common vision of the nation-state. This case will be made with particular reference to the 1975-1990 civil war, fought substantially between Christians and Muslims over reform of the political system. The confessional state recognises a senior cleric in each community as its official head and representative with special privileges. These include the (Sunni) Mufti of the Republic, the President of the Higher Shi‘i Council, the Druze Sheikh al-‘Aql, and the Maronite Patriarch, as well as a number of others from smaller sects. Many of these offices pre-existed the modern state in some form, and each is therefore constituted differently, but all have legislative sovereignty and considerable independence of action. Although not constrained by the state, each of these official religious leaderships has bought into a vision of nationhood and statehood based on the “Lebanese formula” of inter-religious coexistence and power-sharing. This common vision finds expression when the state, or the political and social order it represents, comes under threat. The civil war, as a prolonged period of threat to this order, provides particularly clear evidence of this, as the official religious leaders pursued consistently statist politics throughout. This they did despite the prevailing sectarian logics in their respective camps, and in the face of considerable danger from within their own communities. Rather than seeing religious actors in a divided society like Lebanon simply as products of their religious differences, this paper exposes cross-cutting structural cleavages in the religious sector. The national clerical elite are differentiated from other clerics, whether competing unofficial religious leaders or lower-level employees in the official religious hierarchies. During the war, this manifested in stark opposition within each community between the statist line of the official religious leaders and other clerics who gave material and moral support to the militias. Using the scholarship on militia hegemony, this paper advocates an alternative reading of the war as centred not on military front-lines but on a nationwide struggle between civil and uncivil politics. Whereas religious actors are often marginal to military confrontation, they were central to this ideological confrontation.

My paper gives a brief genealogy of the “political theology” of the Muslim Brotherhood from its founding to when Mohammed Morsi took power on June 24, 2012 in Egypt, focusing on how the group has leveraged a religiously-inflected rhetoric of “authenticity” to advance its political aims. Compared to religious political groups to the “left” of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the current leadership of Al-Azhar, the Muslim Brotherhood continues -- despite challenges that are deepening as we speak -- to dominate populist religious rhetoric in Egypt. I argue that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, has enjoyed massive success as an opposition movement in large part through appeal to an “authentic” Islamic and pan-Islamic identity. Early in Egyptian history, by 1936, the Brotherhood took an official stand against British colonialism and coupled this opposition with a defense of traditional (Islamic) values against a liberalism ushered in starting in the era of the 1919 constitution. The Brotherhood characterized this social mood and its attendant reforms as a form of cultural imperialism. The Muslim Brotherhood’s reputation for “authenticity” is especially strong because of what we know of Hassan al-Banna’s influences, which include Muhammed Abduh and Rachid Reda, famous Muslim reformers of the late 19th and early 20th century al-Nahda (the awakening) era. Moreover, the Brotherhood’s rhetoric of both staunch opposition to Israel (declaring, for example, Al-Aqsa mosque a waqf) and willingness to soften that rhetoric in cases deemed necessary for Egypt’s security allowed them to sound both regional and domestic notes of authenticity. The question is whether the rhetoric of “authenticity” works in the current context of state power. There is evidence that attending Morsi’s ascent to power is a massive reduction in the pathos engendered by the rhetoric “authenticity”. If Egypt functions in a similar way to Northern Nigeria (which I examine in other work) after their 1999 sharia revolution – which is to say that the practicalities of governance and the persistence of Islamist self-interest caused those groups to lose credibility -- than I argue that the effectiveness of the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of the rhetoric of religious “authenticity” is tied to the group’s oppositional status. In the final analysis, I show -- “to oppose” in contemporary Egypt is the most authentic affect of all, and this “authenticity,” rather than outward displays of piety, is where the populist power actual lies.

It is undoubtedly the case that the revolutions of 2011, popularly known as the “Arab Spring” did much to upset prevailing paradigms used to understand events in the region, particularly the relationship between Religious and Political Authorities and democracy. In that context, it is the striking rise of Qatar’s geo-political influence, along with the added attention now being paid to the power of Arabic media that has naturally led many scholars and analysts to look to the role of al-Jazeera, along with the iconic figure of Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. As the Arab uprisings gathered pace in 2011, al-Qaradawi’s popularity rose even further on the basis of his perceived independence and support for democracy, while other figures of similar stature appeared to be constrained by their complex relationships to the varying regimes throughout the region. However, it was the case of Bahrain, and later Syria, that al-Qaradawi’s portrayal of the uprisings there as sectarian led many to question his apparent neutrality and commitment to democracy, put further in doubt for some by his unflinching support for the Muslim Brotherhood during their time in government. This case demonstrates that the picture is far more complicated, and the paper will explore the relationship between Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Qatar's foreign policy and the Muslim Brotherhood by outlining the networks of special interests that impact upon the Shaykh, along with the most notable of his fatwas issued between 2011-2013 including his call for the killing of Muammar al-Gaddafi, the declaration of Jihad in Syria, and the affirmation that it was the duty of all Egyptians to support the recently deposed Egyptian President, Muhammad Mursi.