In The Varieties of Religious Expression, Ani Sarkissian seeks to explain the variation of state repression vis-à-vis religion in non-democratic contexts by combining rational choice theory and studies on authoritarianism. Such an approach is new because it aims at filling in a gap in the existing literature: on one hand, scholars' adepts of the rational choice theory do not explore political situations outside the West and on the other hand, scholars of authoritarian regimes do not pay attention to religion. In order to bridge this gap, the author presents a typology of non-democratic regimes according to: (a) their level of repression of religion; and (b) their religious divisions (measured by the Social Hostility Index from the Pew Forum). The use of these two dimensions leads to four classification types: (1) Regimes that repress all religions — with Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and Azerbaijan being the relevant case studies; (2) Regimes favoring one and repressing all others such as Turkey, Russia, Georgia, and Indonesia; (3) Regimes operating a selective repression of religions like Kyrgyzstan, Bahrain, and Singapore; and (4) Regimes with no repression of religion which includes Albania. Cambodia, Senegal, and Peru.
The author's intention to bridge the gaps in study of religion of politics is her most significant contribution to the existing literature. Her implementation of such a perspective, however, raises crucial questions.
First, repression is defined as restriction of worship, festivals, or restrictions on places of worship. Such a definition is too narrow and does not take into account more nuanced and gradual aspects of repression that sometimes blur the line between repression and control. Because of this lack of nuance, the category of “repressing all religions” does not reflect very important differences between the regimes which appear side by side under this rubric. More specifically, putting Iran and Saudi Arabia in this category is problematic, because it gives the impression that Islam is repressed as much as minority religions, while that is far from being the case. Actually Iran and Saudi Arabia are better defined as religious states (Political Secularism, Religion, and the State: A Time Series Analysis of Worldwide Data) or states with a hegemonic form of religion (The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State). In these countries, the state certainly controls and regulates Islam but does not repress it. In fact, the dominant Islamic institutions, clerics, and schools, have been absorbed within state institutions, while all other religions (including other denominations of Islam) are discriminated, repressed, or oppressed.
Additionally, all the Muslim states listed in the different categories are actually characterized by hegemonic forms of Islam, since all of them, including Turkey, have nationalized a particular brand of Islam by turning their clerics into civil servants absorbing all endowments and mosques into the state institutions without providing the same status to all other religions or even recognizing them. Indonesia, Senegal, and Lebanon are the only exceptions to this very specific situation. In these conditions, the question worth rising is: Why are most Muslim majority countries characterized by hegemonic forms of Islam? The author somewhat points to it when she wonders why most of Muslim countries are repressing religions, but her framework of analysis does not fully allow her to respond to the question.
In the same vein, some of the countries discussed by the author, like Senegal, Turkey, or Indonesia, cannot actually be considered non-democratic since they experience free and fair elections, division of power, and rule of law. In this regard, it would have been relevant to make better use of the growing literature on hybrid regimes in order to overcome the sharp divide between democratic and non-democratic regimes, which does not reflect a more fluid and complex reality.
Additionally, the author apprehends religious divisions through the social hostility index of the Pew Forum. Relying on this sole indicator is problematic because religious divisions and social hostility do not automatically line-up. Social hostility vis-à-vis religion can happen even with no religious divisions (for example, repression of all religions in communist regimes or laïcité in France). Religious divisions on the other hand, refer to religious differences that are institutionalized by law and state policies without automatically entailing social hostility. In fact, state actions are crucial in institutionalizing social divisions and creating hierarchies between groups that then turn hostile to each other. Scholarly work (The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power) has shown that these social divisions among religions are the direct outcome of the policies of the post-colonial states that emerged on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In these conditions, religious divisions are not a variable but an outcome of the state repression.
In sum, the overall goal of the book is very important and timely but the findings are constricted, if not biased, by the limits of the existing theories of political science, which is a problem far beyond the undeniable expertise of the author. It leaves the reader with no clear understanding of the factors that could efficiently explain why states repress religions. To do so, a more in depth investigation of state-society interactions based on an historical approach of the continuous interactions between state religion, and society, is needed.
