Coping with Defeat

The surprising similarities in the rise and fall of the Sunni Islamic and Roman Catholic empires in the face of the modern state

Coping with Defeat presents a historical panorama of the Islamic and Catholic political-religious empires and exposes striking parallels in their relationship with the modern state. Drawing on interviews, site visits, and archival research in Turkey, North Africa, and Western Europe, Jonathan Laurence demonstrates how, over hundreds of years, both Sunni and Catholic authorities experienced three major shocks and displacements—religious reformation, the rise of the nation-state, and mass migration. As a result, Catholic institutions eventually accepted the state’s political jurisdiction and embraced transnational spiritual leadership as their central mission. Laurence reveals an analogous process unfolding across the Sunni Muslim world in the twenty-first century.

Identifying institutional patterns before and after political collapse, Laurence shows how centralized religious communities relinquish power at different rates and times. Whereas early Christianity and Islam were characterized by missionary expansion, religious institutions forged in the modern era are primarily defensive in nature. They respond to the simple but overlooked imperative to adapt to political defeat while fighting off ideological challenges to their spiritual authority. Among Laurence’s findings is that the disestablishment of Islam—the doing away with Islamic affairs ministries in the Muslim world—would harm, not help with, reconciliation to the rule of law.

Examining upheavals in geography, politics, and demography, Coping with Defeat considers how centralized religions make peace with the loss of prestige.

Well-constructed, detailed, and thought-provoking.

"Scholarship of the first water."---Joseph Prud’homme, The Journal of Church and State

"Extensive, highly learned, meticulously researched."---Jared Rubin, International Journal of Middle East Studies

"a provocative work, one that puts a new spin on an old question and illustrates it with original research .... Laurence has created an invaluable reference for scholars of both traditions as well as any public interested in the operations and aims of religious institutions in the age of national sovereignty."---Charles Häberl, The Berlin Journal

"This is an ambitious but brilliant work underpinned by disciplined use of archival data."---Steven Simon, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

"A closely argued, contrarian piece of scholarship . . . by an eminent American observer of Islam."

"This refreshing, provocative work explores how the two largest religious planets in the political solar system adjusted to the birth of an entirely new celestial body—the state."---Alan Mikhail, Wall Street Journal

"Winner of the Hubert Morken Best Book in Religion and Politics Award, American Political Science Association"

"Illuminating, with important lessons for the present."—Mark Lilla, Columbia University

"Examining how Catholic and Islamic authorities effectively traded places in their relationship to the state, this ambitious book is a provocative contribution to the debates over the rise of secularism, the future of Islam, and church-state relations."—Anna Grzymala-Busse, Stanford University

"With rich historical detail, Coping with Defeat offers an outstanding perspective on the evolution of Roman Catholicism and Sunni Islam. It is hard to think of a social scientist who could match Laurence’s breadth and depth of expertise in both religions, along with his sensitivity to political contexts. His book will spark vigorous debates."—Andrew C. Gould, University of Notre Dame