Secular Muslim rulers co-opted Islamic symbols to counter Islamist challengers.

Evidence

The strength of the Resurgence and the appeal of Islamist movements induced governments to promote Islamic institutions and practices and to incorporate Islamic symbols and practices into their regime. At the broadest level this meant affirming or reaffirming the Islamic character of their state and society. In the 1970s and 1980s political leaders rushed to identify their regimes and themselves with Islam. King Hussein of Jordan, convinced that secular governments had little future in the Arab world, spoke of the need to create “Islamic democracy” and a “modernizing Islam.” King Hassan of Morocco emphasized his descent from the Prophet and his role as “Commander of the Faithful.” The sultan of Brunei, not previously noted for Islamic practices, became “increasingly devout” and defined his regime as a “Malay Muslim monarchy.” Ben Ali in Tunisia began regularly to invoke Allah in his speeches and “wrapped himself in the mantle of Islam” to check the growing appeal of Islamic groups. In the early 1990s Suharto explicitly adopted a policy of becoming “more Muslim.” In Bangladesh the principle of “secularism” was dropped from the constitution in the mid 1970s, and by the early 1990s the secular, Kemalist identity of Turkey was, for the first time, coming under serious challenge. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 315

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the readers’ interests in how regimes perform legitimacy via symbols — parallels the sumptuary/immodesty dress signaling article and the sacrifice-as-stabilizer work on how elites deploy ritual. — connects to: European populists co-opt Christian symbols to cloak political aims in religious morality. — Andrew L. Whitehead; Samuel L. Perry, Taking America Back for God, 537
• SEED: An essay angle: rulers who had never been devout suddenly donning religious costume to outbid their radical challengers — the performative piety of threatened elites across Islamic states in the 1970s-90s.