The Making of the Modern Muslim State: Islam and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa | Malika Zeghal
Please join the Institute for Middle East Studies for an in-depth discussion about Malika Zeghal’s work, The Making of the Modern Muslim State. Together with discussant Mona Oraby, Malika Zeghal will share her innovative analysis that traces the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion in the Middle East and North Africa.
In The Making of the Modern Muslim State, Malika Zeghal reframes the role of Islam in modern Middle East governance. Challenging other accounts that claim that Middle Eastern states turned secular in modern times, Zeghal shows instead the continuity of the state’s custodianship of Islam as the preferred religion. Drawing on intellectual, political, and economic history, she traces this custodianship from early forms of constitutional governance in the nineteenth century through post–Arab Spring experiments in democracy. Zeghal argues that the intense debates around the implementation and meaning of state support for Islam led to a political cleavage between conservatives and their opponents that long predated the polarization of the twentieth century that accompanied the emergence of mass politics and Islamist movements.
Examining constitutional projects, public spending, school enrollments, and curricula, Zeghal shows that although modern Muslim-majority polities have imported Western techniques of governance, the state has continued to protect and support the religion, community, and institutions of Islam. She finds that even as Middle Eastern states have expanded their nonreligious undertakings, they have dramatically increased their per capita supply of public religious provisions, especially Islamic education—further feeding the political schism between Islamists and their adversaries. Zeghal illuminates the tensions inherent in the partnerships between states and the body of Muslim scholars known as the ulama, whose normative power has endured through a variety of political regimes. Her detailed and groundbreaking analysis, which spans Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, makes clear the deep historical roots of current political divisions over Islam in governance.
We hope you will join us for this thoughtful discussion. You can participate in the conversation with Malika Zeghal in-person or virtually. The event is open to the public.
Speakers
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Malika Zeghal is the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor in Contemporary Islamic Thought and Life in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at Harvard University. She is also a member of the Committee on the Study of Religion and a Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. Her research focuses on the interaction between Islam and politics in the modern Middle East. She is particularly interested in studying modern Muslim states and their religious institutions, as well as the intellectual and political genealogies of Islamist movements in the region. She also has an interest in modern Islamic intellectual history in the Middle East, Europe and North America.
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Mona Oraby is a scholar and editor whose research explores religion and society in comparative and interdisciplinary perspective. She is the author of Devotion to the Administrative State: Religion and Social Order in Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2024) and coauthor of A Universe of Terms: Religion in Visual Metaphor (Indiana University Press, 2022). For eight years (2017–2025), Oraby was editor of The Immanent Frame, curating and editing more than forty public-facing and experimental projects that advanced scholarly debate on secularism, religion, and the public sphere globally. She is an associate professor of political science at Howard University.
