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| Thursday, January 11, 2007 |
| Strength in Numbers? The Political Mobilization of Racial and Ethnic minorities. |
By Jan E. Leighley. Princeton : Princeton Press, 2002. 216 p. $49.50
Reviewed by Asmer Beg
Jan E. Leighley tries to look at the emerging scenario in the US, when whites would no longer be in a majority. She analyses the implications of this for institutions, for the groups which are part of this changing electorate and for the political science literature which has based its theoretical findings on research on Anglos. Leighley explores the mobilization of groups, how American political institutions have responded to and how they mobilize racial and ethnic groups, and she reviews several different types of literatures’ analyses of political participation and mobilization as she offers a rational choice interpretation of the subject. This is a complex book, which helps increase our understanding of the variety of issues, conceptual, and measurement based, which scholars must address in order to broaden knowledge in this area.
Leighley undertakes review, comparison, and integration of the various literatures that have analyzed racial and ethnic political participation, including those based on historical and analytic case studies of racial and ethnic political participation, and on survey research of individuals drawn from specific racial and ethnic groups. She then compares the findings in these studies with assumptions based in rational choice models of voter turnout and collective action.
She examines three types of contextual influences that reduce costs and/or increase benefits: elite mobilization (efforts by elites to engage political activity), relational goods (incentives enjoyed by members of groups), and racial and ethnic context (the composition of the individual’s context, which she interprets as the size of the group). She then uses her assumptions to model mobilization of racial and ethnic groups by political elites, using several data sets, and to compare her findings with previous literature. The data sets are two national surveys and two Texas-based surveys. She sues the American National Election Study from 1956 through 1996, and the Citizen Participation Study conducted by Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995), which oversampled black and Latino political activists on their participation skills, to which Leighley added political empowerment evidence. She also sued her own Texas Minority Survey (conducted with Vedlitz, 1999), a public-opinion telephone survey that also oversampled African Americans, Mexican Americans and Asian Americans. Finally she draws upon the Texas Country Party Chairs Survey; this telephone survey queried Texas Democratic and Republican party officials about their efforts at mobilizing voters.
The comparison of various approaches is an interesting exercise for rational choice analysis, one which allows for a clearer understanding of the strengths and limits of the different literatures, and there are important ones that frame and limit the significance of some of the author’s findings. She has clearly broadened the assumptions of rational choice since she explores the importance of group-based variables, framed in terms of contextual variables. Since she is using a rational choice theoretical framework, she tends to limit her exploration for understanding the meaning of context more than she should. Her discussion of the political and institutional issues associated with African Americans refers primarily to the very recent past and to segregation, but never to slavery and its powerful impact on American political history, society, and institutions, including those of Texas. Obviously, it is highly problematic to define the impact of these forces quantitatively, but they shape American society even in contemporary politics. Taking note of them is an important way of acknowledging some of the limitations of data analysis, whether in surveys or in models of white, African American, and Latino participation and mobilization.
Several conceptual issues also affect the analyses. First, while acknowledging Latino diversity, Leighley tends to de-emphasize the complexity of the Latino population, perhaps because of her use of Texas-based surveys. She might have addressed this by using data from the Latino National Political Surveys, which distinguished Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Mexican Americans, in her own analysis. Race is also somewhat problematic since she does not address the issue of racial differences among Latinos. That issue, framed by the U.S. Census as “Latinos may be of any race”, is also an important underlying distinction in the way I which Latinos tend to see the world, and it may in time begin to have an impact on race-based American politics. Moreover, she defines “mobilization” as public officials reaching out to racial and ethnic groups, and she assumes it occurs. Within the racial and ethnic literature, most studies emphasize the work of racial and ethnic civic-mobilizing institutions at encouraging participation. This literature finds little mobilization of racial and ethnic groups by party or elected officials. Finally, the author’s definitions of contextual variables are, because of their rational choice framework, overly narrowly defined. Relational goods, drawn from Carole Uhlaner, are oriented toward the organizational and institutional networks of racial and ethnic groups. Leighley fails to recognize the differences that inhere in these spaces.
There are also important issues with the data sets Leighley employs. A number of other surveys might also have been incorporated, as comparisons. The Survey of Texas Party Chairs was an intriguing study on efforts at mobilizing various racial and ethnic groups, Leighley assumes they responded accurately. Her survey instrument confirms that they were asked to give information on their racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic background, but there is no discussion of the results in the text. Since she verifies survey respondents’ reports of how they are contacted with country party officials’ reports of their efforts to mobilize, it is vital to know more about their demographic and ideological characteristics.
This work is a welcome addition to the existing studies in this area. Her findings would surely lead to more productive debate on this subject. [Future Islam.Com, September / October 2004]
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| Monday, January 08, 2007 |
| Islam Under Siege: Living Dangerously in a Post-Honor World |
By Akbar S. Ahmed. Oxford, UK: Polity, 2003. ix + 172 pages. Notes to p. 184. Refs. to p. 196. Index to p. 213. BP 45 cloth; 12.95 paper.
Reviewed by Omid Safi
Akbar S. Ahmed’s provocative new book, Islam Under Siege, features a blurb on the cover by Professor Tamara Sonn proclaiming the book as “the most important book to date on life in the post 9/11 world.” Though generally skeptical of such lofty praises, after having read the work closely I concur wholeheartedly with Sonn’s assessment.
Islam has been an almost endless topic of discussion since 9/11, through a multitude of parallel (yet independent) discourses: There are the large number of Islamophobic voices (Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Steve Emerson, etc.), some Muslim-sympathetic perspectives by non-Muslim scholars (Karen Armstrong, John Esposito, etc.), apologetic Muslim voices (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Asma Gul Hasan), and Christian triumphalists (Robert Spencer, Franklin Graham, Jerry Vines, Pat Robertson, etc.). Rare has been the project that attempts to document these various perspectives and simultaneously rise above them. This is precisely what Akbar Ahmed succeeds in doing, and he does so brilliantly.
Ahmed is almost perfectly suited for such a task. A scholar of the highest caliber from a background in anthropology, Ahmed is able to combine the astute observations of a scholar with the heartfelt pleas of a believer who, rightly so, remains committed to the fact that Islam itself can and does offer possibilities for pluralistic, inclusive interpretations that would allow Muslims and non-Muslims to live in peace and harmony. Ahmed is able to call on a vast array of Islamic sources, ranging from the Qur’an and the humanist interpretation of South Asian Sufis and Rumi, to the statements of the Prophet Muhammad. What astonishes this reader is the fluid and graceful way in which Ahmed is equally at home in the contemporary debates about the so-called “Clash of Civilizations.” He takes the tiresome Samuel Huntington, the bombastic Frances Fukuyama, and the former-scholar-turned-polemic-master Bernard Lewis to task. He wisely recognizes that much of the contemporary situation of what Mark Juergensmeyer has termed “the global rise of religious violence” is inseparable from the narrative of globalization, and fully contextualizes contemporary Muslim responses to the West in light of anxieties about globalization.
Ahmed realizes that religion is an important part of the narrative, and does not shy away from it. Yet he also recognizes that the full story is one that needs to involve political, economic, sociological, and yes, anthropological explanations and frameworks. One of his many original contributions in this volume is in resurrecting the concept of “honor” and “post-honor” societies to analyze contemporary manifestations of violence. Ahmed proposes that one of the characteristics of both developed” and “developing” societies in this era of post-modernity/high-modernity is one of excessive identification with a group (‘asabiyya) defined ethnically, religiously, tribally, or nationally. The term ‘asabiyya was first coined by the noted Muslim sociologist Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), and it is entirely appropriate that Ahmed now hold the Ibn Khaldun chair at American University in Washington, DC. Ahmed posits that as a result of the vast reach of globalization, many people all over the world now feel themselves to be under siege. Globalization is an ambivalent process defined culturally, economically, politically, and technologically. This siege mentality is often expressed through the language of loss of honor. These hyper-‘asabiyya groups direct their blame at contemporary communities who are held to be descendants of a mythical past enemy. The last step is to inflict violence upon this constructed “other” in an effort to recover the groups’ honor.
Ahmed does not try to come up with a “one explanation fits all” model. However, it is astonishing how useful this fluid paradigm is to explain situations as diverse as the Bosnian genocide, the BJP-led massacre of Muslims in Gujarat, Usama bin Ladin’s masterminding of the 9/11 atrocity, and yes, George W. Bush’s never-ending “war on terrorism” that increasingly is targeted at Muslims, even if Bush insists that this is not a war against Islam.
Ahmed has a marvelous gift for a narrative, and an astonishing ability to weave together the perfect citation, concise synopses of complex theories, personal reflections, etc. It is rare to find a book that is so theoretically sophisticated and yet so readable. On almost every page there are nuggets of information that even a seasoned reader will be surprised to learn. It is a book that one can give to a friend or neighbor who wants to make sense of Islam and the world today as well as assign to graduate students in Islamic studies and political science. It is insightful without being dogmatic, and upholds a proud tradition of humanism. Ahmed manages both to report the contemporary situation of Muslims today as well as to chart hopeful directions for an inclusive tomorrow for all of us. If there is a better book about our post-9/11 world, this reviewer has not yet seen it. Hopefully, it will receive the widest possible readership.
Omid Safi, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Colgate University, Co-chair for the Study of Islam Section at the American Academy of Religion, and Editor, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003). [Future Islam, September / October 2004]
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| posted by e-tafakkur @ 9:07 PM |
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| About Me |
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Name: e-tafakkur
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About Me: I, "Musafir Riau" (b. 22 Dzulhijjah 1400 H.) am a dynamic Malay youth of Riau and former President of Indonesian Students' Association in India (2002-2003) holding a B.A. degree in Islamic Studies from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi (2004) and M.A. degree in Political Science from Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India (2007).
At present, I am enrolled in postgraduate program at the Department of Philosophy & Religion in Madurai Kamaraj University, India. The topics related to Religions, Politics and Global Studies are my special interest. Everybody are welcomed to e-mail me at izamsh@ yahoo.com.
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