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Islam and Democracy
With Turkey having flirted with democracy, it seems appropriate to examine how . . . or if . . . Islam can exist under the same roof as democracy. This post examines the debate on the relationship between Islam and democracy. It begins by tracing the historical roots of the debate. It then considers the so-called establishment view of the debate, which comes from Western scholars whose writings reach a large audience by virtue of their dissemination by mainstream and influential newspapers, intellectual journals, and publishing houses. We will then shift to examine the reasons behind the emergence of secularism in the West but not in Muslim societies, the origins of political secularism in the Anglo-American tradition, and the modern Muslim experience with secularism.
The 2011 Arab Spring has placed the issue of Islam and democracy back on top of the international agenda. While these democratic revolts were initially celebrated in the West, the popularity and rise of Islamist parties, with their frequent references to Shari‘a, after the demise of longstanding dictators, has cast a shadow of doubt over the future democratic prospects for the Arab-Islamic world as well as the Islamic immigration into Western Europe and the United States. Has the Arab Spring turned into an Islamist Winter?
Pessimism about compatibility between Islam and democracy is perhaps best captured by the following anecdote. Over twenty-five years ago, Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former American United Nations (UN) ambassador and Republican Party foreign policy advisor, was asked to comment on the topic. She paused for a moment, thought about the question, and then replied: “The Arab world is the only part of the world where I’ve been shaken in my conviction that if you let the people decide, they will make fundamentally rational decisions” (1992).
This sentiment is not new or unique. It is a reflection of a longstanding, widespread, and deep-rooted anxiety in the West about the relationship between Islam and modernity. Such frustration reached new heights and was thrust to the top of the global agenda after September 11, 2001, giving this topic a pressing new urgency.
Writing at this time, Francis Fukuyama articulated a broad intellectual concern when he noted that “there does seem to be something about Islam . . . that makes Muslim societies particularly resistant to modernity. Of all contemporary cultural systems, the Islamic world has the fewest democracies (Turkey alone qualifies), and contains no countries that have made the transition from Third to First World status in the manner of South Korea or Singapore” (Fukuyama 2001). Similarly, Bernard Lewis has asked:
“There is an agonizing question at the heart of the present debate about democracy in the Islamic world: Is liberal democracy basically compatible with Islam, or is some measure of respect for law, some tolerance of criticism, the most that can be expected from autocratic governments? Is it possible for the Islamic peoples to evolve a form of government that will be compatible with their own historical, cultural, and religious traditions and yet will bring individual freedom and human rights to the governed as these termsare understood in the free societies of the West? (Lewis 2010).”
While questions about the relationship between Islam and democracy are sometimes dismissed as a result of an entrenched Eurocentric and Orientalist view of Islam and Muslim societies, hard empirical facts cannot be easily ignored. In 2001, Freedom House, a respected nongovernmental organization that monitors global democratic development, released a major study on the “Islamic World’s Democracy Deficit.” The core findings of this report documented an expanding gap at the dawn of the twenty-first century between Muslim-majority countries and the rest of the world in terms of basic: levels of freedom and democracy. A non-Muslim country, this report concluded, was three times more likely to be democratic than a Muslim one. The most recent statistics from Freedom House in 2010 show no discernible change in the global Muslim democracy gap (Freedom House 2001, 2010).
During the same time period, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) confirmed the Freedom House findings in a series of widely discussed reports on Arab human development. The region is at a crossroads, the first report concluded, and is “hampered by three key deficits that can be considered defining features:
- The freedom deficit;
- The women’s empowerment deficit; [and],
- The human capabilities/knowledge deficit relative to income.”
Compared to the rest of the world “the Arab countries had the lowest freedom score in the 1990s” and “the Arab region . . . [had] the lowest value of all regions of the world for voice and accountability” (UNDP 2002). In terms of the status of women, the Arab world ranks next to last based on the UN gender empowerment measure (GEM); only sub-Saharan Africa had a lower score.
Empirical evidence and arguments to the contrary, however, can also be cited to challenge this pessimistic picture. Relying on the most recent rankings by Freedom House, nearly half of the global Muslim population (over 800 million) is located in countries that are listed as “free” or “partly free.” Indonesia, for example, the most populous Muslim country in the world, receives very high scores for human rights and democratic development, a remarkable achievement for a country that recently has undergone a democratic transition. Furthermore, the research firm Gallup published in 2007 the most comprehensive survey of global Muslim opinion based on six years of polling that represented more than 90 percent of the world’s Muslim population. It not only found widespread support for democracy but also found that substantial majorities, including the most conservative Muslim societies (73 percent of Saudis, 89 percent of Iranians, 94 percent of Egyptians), believe that men and women should have equal rights and that “substantial majorities in nearly all nations surveyed . . . say that if drafting a constitution for a new country, they would guarantee freedom of speech, defined as ‘allowing all citizens to express their opinion on the political, social, and economic issues of the day’” (Esposito and Mogahed, 2007). Finally, in his recently published magnum opus, The Life and Death of Democracy, the renowned scholar of democracy John Keane locates the origins of democracy not in Greece but in the ancient tribal assemblies of the Middle East. In calling for a rethinking of the roots of democracy he argues that “democracy of the Greek kind had eastern roots and that therefore in a very real sense today’s democracies are indebted to the first experiments in self-government by assembly of ‘Eastern’ peoples traditionally written off as incapable of democracy in any sense.
How does one begin to make sense of this data and the conflicting interpretations that go with it? To what extent is the theology of Islam a barrier to liberalization and democratization? Are Muslim societies disadvantaged by a set of enduring and exceptional qualities, rooted in their civilizational ethos, that are preventing them from democratizing or are the roots of political authoritarianism and the general absence of democracy to be located elsewhere? This essay seeks to engage with these questions by providing a broad historical overview and assessment of the debate on Islam and democracy. The focus will be on how to objectively frame an analysis of the relationship between Islam and democracy. In the course of doing so, key debates, schools of thought, and arguments that have shaped an understanding of this topic will be surveyed with special attention to historical background and the question of secularism and its discontents in Muslim societies. This chapter will not address the broader theme of the various obstacles to democratization and the persistence of authoritarianism in the Muslim world. Several excellent studies are available that already do this (Salamé 1994; Brynen et al. 1995; Niblock 1998; Hunter and Malik 2005; Posusney and Angrist 2005). Here, the focus is on the scholarly and intellectual debate on the compatibility between Islam and democracy as it emerged during the post-Cold War era.
At the outset two clarifications are in order. It is often stated that democracy is a contested concept and that no universal definition of it exists. While historically this may be true, today the term “democracy” is utilized in intellectual debates at a global level to refer to “liberal democracy.” This understanding of democracy now enjoys a broad consensus and consequently will be employed in this essay (Sen 1999). In other words, a political order where legitimate authority is rooted in the consent of the governed based on the institutional guarantees of political freedom as defined by Robert Dahl’s concept of “polyarchy” and where basic human rights, as enshrined in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are upheld (Dahl 1989, 220–221).
Similarly, the concept of “secularism” is deeply contested and no universal understanding of the terms exists. This is because secularism has multiple histories both within the Western tradition and in non-Western societies. In this essay, references to secularism are to “political secularism,” which refers to the separation between religion and state, not to the more robust and popular understandings of secularism that speaks to the philosophical or sociological distancing from religion based on the understanding of secularism as defined by Harvey Cox and Peter Berger (Hashemi 2010, 326–328).
Religion and Democracy: Historical and Theoretical Caveats
Before entering into a discussion about Islam and democracy, a deeper historical and theoretical grasp of the topic is required. The debate on the compatibility between Islam and democracy is rooted in the larger historical conflict between religion and democracy; Islam is not the first religious tradition that has grappled with the question of democratic governance (Casanova 2001; Woodberry and Shah 2004; Diamond et al. 2005). Indeed the tension between the two is as old as the study of politics itself. Recall that democratic Athens brought Socrates to trial and sentenced him to death on two accounts: corrupting the minds of the young and religious impiety.
In the modern period, all the key thinkers in the Western canon who have shaped our understanding of democracy and liberalism, from Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to Hegel, Mill, and Marx, were deeply concerned about the role of religion in public life. Alexis de Tocqueville, in Democracy in America (1835), noted that the “organization and the establishment of democracy in Christendom is the great political problem of our times” (Tocqueville 1990, 325), and some of the most difficult disputes among the founding fathers of the American Republic were over the place of religion in the new democratic order that was emerging (Witte 2005, 21–69).
On a theoretical level and at first glance, religion and democracy speak to two different aspects of the human condition. Religion, especially the Abrahamic faiths, is fundamentally (but not exclusively) concerned with the relationship between human beings and the divine, whereas democracy’s core definition is concerned with the secular realm and the regulation of inter-human relationships. When these lines become blurred conflict arises (Straus 1938). On a political level, the tension between religion and democracy is rooted in a debate on the proper location of legitimate political authority. In other words, where does sovereignty ultimately lie; with the people or a smaller subset of them: the clerics, the monarch, the wealthy, the majority religion/ethnicity, or the military? The history of democracy and the broader process of modernization are indelibly intertwined with resolving this question.
The dominant mainstream view, based on the received wisdom of the Enlightenment, is that religion is a problem for democracy and the less we have of it the better. This is, however, a superficial and limited view of the development of democracy. Sociologists from Tocqueville and Durkheim to Robert Bellah and José Casanova have written about the critical role that religion has played in the development and social construction of democracy in civil society. Jean Jacques Rousseau famously noted that “we should not . . . conclude from this that politics and religion have a common object among us, but that in the beginning stages of nations the one serves as an instrument of the other” (Rousseau 1987, 41). More recently, Jean Bethke Elshtain, in her ruminations on the topic, has noted that “every major social movement in American history (until recent decades, perhaps) has been interlaced with religious language, inspiration, and enthusiasm: the American Revolution itself (“No King but King Jesus” was one of its rallying cries); abolitionism; women’s suffrage; many of the social reforms of the Progressive Era; labor organizing; the Social Gospel movement; and the civil rights movement, which was, after all, headed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In the United States, religion has never been an exclusively ‘private’ matter” (Elshtain 2009, 8).
Finally, Alfred Stepan has drawn attention to various “maps of misreading” in the history of religion-state relations in Europe. He is critical of an ahistorical approach to this topic, which erroneously suggests that the development of democracy requires a hostile and rigid separation between religion and state. A closer reading of the topic reveals that virtually “no Western European democracy now has a rigid or hostile separation of church and state. Indeed, most have arrived at a democratically negotiated freedom of religion from state interference and all of them allow religious groups freedom, not only of private worship, but to organize groups in civil society.” It is in the “constant political construction and reconstruction” of what he terms “the twin tolerations” — whereby the institutions of the state and religious authorities learn to respect certain minimum boundaries of freedom of action — that a scholarly understanding of the relationship between religion and democracy must be rooted (Stepan 2001). Recent empirical work on democracy and religion-state separation by Jonathan Fox confirms and reinforces Stepan’s theoretical claims. He concluded that the “empirical results strongly indicate that SRAS [separation of religion and state], no matter which operationalization of the concept one uses, is not necessary for a functioning democracy or liberal democracy” (Fox 2007, 19; 2008).
In short, the normative role of religion in any emerging democracy is a source of deep conflict and political tension. No religious or civilizational tradition is born with a pro-democratic orientation. Ideas and new arguments need to be developed and unavoidable contradictions resolved based on a democratic bargain and a negotiated consensus. A large part of the history and struggle for democracy, often ignored in retrospective reflections on the subject, is how to resolve the question of religion’s role in the polis. Muslim societies have only recently begun to grapple with this topic on a mass level.
Islam And Democracy: Historical Overview
While modern debates on democracy in the West can be traced back to the seventeenth century, principally to the writings of Baruch Spinoza and John Locke, in the case of Muslim societies, a serious engagement with democracy and Islamic tradition did not begin until the twentieth century. “Historically speaking,” according to one prominent scholar, “democratic ideals of free opinion, free speech, free assembly and representative government impressed themselves on the Muslim mind as corollaries to the goals of national independence and unity” (Enayat 1982, 125). On the eve of World War I, most of the Islamic world was either directly or indirectly controlled by European powers, and the primary focus of political debate and energy among Muslims was directed toward ending foreign rule and promoting self-determination.
Normatively, Islam does not mandate or prefer a particular political system. In the Qur’an the idea of mutual consultation (shura) is praised and in classical jurisprudential theory governance should be based on a civil contract (’aqd) between the ruler and the ruled, while a pledge of support (bay‘a) from influential members of the community should be obtained. There are also longstanding Islamic juridical concepts of consensus (ijma‘) and independent interpretive judgment (ijtihad) that have political connotations conducive to the social construction of democracy.
Institutionally, the dominant form of political regime for most of Islamic history was the caliphate. Legitimacy was embodied in the ruler who pledged to preserve the legacy of the Prophet Muhammad and the teachings of the Qur’an, to protect the community from outside attack, and to promote spiritual and political unity, worship, education, and the upholding of Islamic law. The legitimacy of the ruler was also enhanced by the support given by Islamic jurists (fuqaha), who often played an advisory or consultative role, some of whom were appointed to judicial positions to administer justice. Over time, however, the caliphate system became increasingly dynastic, corrupt, and authoritarian, not unlike the various authoritarian monarchial regimes that dominated the European landscape for over a millennium (Lapidus 2002, 45–66, 215–218; Abou El Fadl 2003).
Constitutionalism preceded a discussion of democracy in Muslim societies. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these political experiments (in Tunisia 1861, Egypt 1868, Ottoman Empire 1876, and Iran 1906) sought to limit the authority of rulers, establish the rule of law, and allow elite groups an opportunity to participate in governance. Coincidentally, the trajectory of democratization in the West proceeded along similar lines. While the Iranian constitutional experience was unique in that it resulted from mass action, the questions, themes, and points of political conflict that emerged from this experience prefigured democratic experiments and debates in other Muslim societies throughout the twentieth century, especially those related to the role of religion in government and the debate on sovereignty, the power of the existing state, the role of elite groups in politics, and the pivotal role played by external powers in shaping internal developments.
In Abdelwahab El-Affendi’s scholarly survey of political themes in the Muslim world during the twentieth century, he identifies three categories of Muslim attitudes toward democracy: those who enthusiastically supported it and tried to prove its compatibility with Islam, those who rejected it as alien to Islamic norms, and those who accepted democratic procedures but voiced philosophical objections to aspects of democracy and proposed limits on it to conform with Islamic law. It is this last group, which is arguably the largest in number and is most closely identified with mainstream Islamist organizations, whose intellectuals and leaders have extensively written about and wrestled with question of democracy (El-Affendi 2004, 2010).
One point of contention that emerges in their writings is the tension between popular sovereignty and God’s sovereignty. As religious believers, God is ultimately sovereign, yet democracy is rooted in the idea of popular sovereignty. How can this apparent contradiction be reconciled? A common approach was to support popular sovereignty but to limit it by a council of religious experts who could ensure the Islamic authenticity of legislation. This is most clearly evident in Iran’s clerical-controlled Guardian Council, which oversees and has the right to veto parliamentary bills. Similarly, the 2007 draft party platform of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood called for a similar council of religious experts and for similar reasons: fear that left unchecked the masses might pass legislation that violated Islamic values.
Broadly speaking, these mainstream Islamist groups have also supported crucial elements of democracy such as political pluralism and human rights but always within the framework of Shari‘a — a key element of their political platforms. Those liberal aspects of democracy that are associated with personal autonomy and freedom of action, belief, and association, as understood in the West today, are not values upheld by these groups. The question of citizenship based on equal rights for all members of society, regardless of religious affiliation, has also been a bone of contention as has the question of full gender equality. Finally, these groups are also explicitly against notions of secularism, a complicated topic that will be explored below (Krämer 1997, 71–82; Esposito and Voll 1996, 21–34; Euben and Zaman 2009, 29–35).
Summarizing the weakness of Muslim writing on democracy in the late twentieth century, Hamid Enayat has noted that what “is blatantly missing from contemporary Muslims writings on democracy . . . is an adaptation of either the ethical and legal precepts of Islam or the attitudes and institutions of traditional society, to democracy. This is obviously a much more complex and challenging task than the mere reformulation of democratic principles in Islamic idioms. It is because of this neglect that the hopes of evolving a coherent theory of democracy appropriate to an Islamic context have remained largely unfulfilled” (Enayat 1982, 135; Abou El Fadl 2004).
It is important to remember that the early debates on Islam and democracy did not occur in apl:.iThey developed gradually against the backdrop of the struggle against colonialism and the emergence of new states from old empires. The debate was also shaped by and deeply intertwined with the rise of nationalism and the processes of modernization and Westernization. Regional and international events such as Israel-Palestine conflict, the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the demise of the Soviet Union, and ongoing Western intervention in Muslim societies, culminating in the US-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan in 2001 and 2003, respectively, have significantly influenced the debate as well. But most significantly, the increasing authoritarianism and despotism of the modern state, which has dominated the political landscape of Muslim societies in recent decades, has most immediately shaped the moral context in which the debate on Islam and democracy has unfolded.
Islam And Democracy: The Establishment View
The intellectual debate on Islam and democracy has been shaped by an “establishment” perspective. This refers to a group of academics who are located at elite universities in the West and whose writings reach a large audience by virtue of their dissemination by mainstream and influential newspapers, intellectual journals, and publishing houses. Also, this group has been most closely associated with advising the US governments on foreign policy toward the Muslim world. Collectively, but for different reasons, they are pessimistic about the prospects for democracy primarily due to problems that they claim are endemic to Islamic history, culture, and theology. The “idea of democracy is quite alien to the mind-set of Islam,” noted Elie Kedourie (London School of Economics), because “there is nothing in the political traditions of the Arab world — which are the political traditions of Islam — which might make familiar . . . the organizing ideas of constitutional or representative government” (Kedourie 1992, 1, 5). A common motif among these writers is that contemporary Muslim societies are shaped by an essential core set of beliefs, rooted in early Islamic and medieval history, which are resistant to change by modern socioeconomic and political forces.
The most prominent member of this group has been the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis. He is not totally dismissive of the prospects of democracy and recognizes that aspects of Islamic tradition may have a democratic potential. In this context, he lists a rich literature in Islamic law on the nature of political power, the strong disapproval of arbitrary rule based on the social contract features of the caliphate system, and the recognition of diversity and political pluralism in Islamic history. On the negative side, however, he notes a long tradition of autocracy that has been strengthened by the rise of the modern state. The absence of the notion of citizenship and the absence of a tradition of elected assemblies are listed as key features of Islamic political history that mitigate the prospects for democracy. Most significantly, however, it is the “absence of a native secularism in Islam” that tips the balance for Lewis (Lewis 1996, 52–63; 2003a, 96–116; y2010, 55–74).
Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has addressed this topic as well. In an early work he examined the statistical correlations between various religious traditions and democracy whereby he noted that “significant differences in their receptivity to democracy appear to exist among societies with difference cultural traditions” and that in particular “Islam . . . has not been hospitable to democracy.” His explanation was that “in Islam, no distinction exi*sts between religion and politics or between the spiritual and the secular, and political participation was iîíihistorically an alien concept.” He developed this idea further in a later, more popular book by claiming that “God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture,” in contrast to other civilizations, Islam in particular, that are devoid of this feature. This was all leading to a “clash of civilizations” in the post-Cold War era, he argued. “The underlying problem for the West,” Huntington concluded, “is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam” (Huntington 1984, 208; 1996, 70, 217).
Other prominent scholars who subscribe to the “Islamic exceptionalism” thesis and who have been influential in shaping the debate on the topic include Ernest Gellner (University of Cambridge), who wrote of an elective affinity between Islam and Marxism while advancing a sophisticatedly anthropological thesis that sought to explain why Muslim societies mwere modernity resistant. The following scholars can also be listed:
- Fouad Ajami (Johns Hopkins University)’
- Martin Kramer (Harvard University);
- Patricia Crone (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University); and,
- Daniel Pipes (Hoover Institute, Stanford University); (Gellner 1991; Ajami 1998; Kramer 1996; Crone 2005; Pipes 2002)
The newly formed Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) institutionally represents this school of thought. While over the years they have advanced different arguments, they coalesce around the point that democracy is unlikely to emerge from within Muslim societies based on their own internal traditions and political convictions. This pessimistic reading has sparked the emergence of a rival interpretative school that has a more optimistic outlook on the topic.
Islam And Democracy: Responses To The Establishment
The leading advocates of this school have a more confident and sympathetic reading of Islamic civilization and the prospects for democratic development. Its most prominent members are also senior scholars and public intellectuals who teach at elite universities, but the thrust of their reading of Islamic theology and Islam’s political heritage is rooted in an ecumenical, tolerant, and constructively critical approach to the topic.
Professors John Esposito and John Voll (Georgetown University) are two leading scholars from this perspective. They have written that the “Islamic heritage contains both broad concepts of potential positive significance for democratization” as well as “many concepts and traditions that could provide the foundation for concepts of ‘constitutional opposition’ and limits on arbitrary government power.” However, they are careful to note that “none of these . . . represent an explicitly democratic conceptualization of opposition as understood in the modern era, but they do provide some basis within the heritage on which such formulations can be based.” They also have critiqued the negative interpretations of Islam’s democratic potential because they are based on “two faulty assumptions . . . that democracy is possible in one form, and that Islam can be expressed in only one way.” Their approach is rooted in a comparative study of religion, history, and politics and a criticism of the mainstream scholarly and media’s one-dimensional representations of Islam/Muslims that suggest that Muslim societies and political movements are monolithic and a threat to the West. A core argument from this group is that violent elements on the fringe of society do not represent or reflect the moderate mainstream (Esposito and Voll 1994, 3; 1996, 51, 42). In their work, they have sought to highlight the diversity of Muslims societies and political movements by focusing on their evolutionary character and the points of commonality between evolving Islamic traditions and the modern demands of politics.
Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori have also written extensively on the relationship between Islam and politics. In a jointly authored book, Muslim Politics (1996), they sought to challenge the Islamic exceptionalism thesis by exploring the nature of Muslim political behavior via a focus on the intersection of values, symbols, and political change. “Doctrinal change, like all change,” they have written, “is complex and is often tied to rearrangements in political structures.” Criticizing the establishment school’s claim of Muslim essentialism they have argued that assertions “that credos, beliefs, or traditions are timeless and immemorial should not obscure the fact that they are subject to constant modification and change.” In this Islam is no different from any other religious tradition. Their emphasis is on the socioeconomic, political, and historical context that shapes debates on Islam and democracy, and they categorically reject the idea that there is a fossilized Islamic “blueprint” that shapes Muslim attitudes toward democracy today (Eickelman and Piscatori 1996).
A more recent contribution has been advanced by Noah Feldman. Rejecting both an extreme Eurocentric and a Bin Laden interpretation of Islam that emphasizes Islam’s alleged pristine and unchanging nature, he argues that both Islam and democracy are “mobile ideas” with sufficient elasticity to develop a synthesis to meet the demands of the modern age and promote political development: “The question is not whether that ‘democratic’ structure is ‘really there’ in early Muslim history or classical Islamic political theory; that is an interpretive question for Muslims to address. What matters is that the potential democratic readings of Islamic tradition are possible and that Muslims today are reading their tradition that way” (Feldman 2004, 54).
Abdulaziz Sachedina, Khaled Abou El Fadl, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, and Abdou Filali-Ansary have also written extensively, insightfully and optimistically on the topic in ways that challenge the establishment perspective (Sachedina 2001; Abou El Fadl 2004; El-Affendi 2006; Filali-Ansary 2003).
Three Points Of Contention In The Islam And Democracy Debate
While the above schools of thought are not monolithic, their members do share common assumptions and advance similar arguments on Islam and democracy thus meriting these broad schools of interpretation. The two schools clash, however, on three issues that have been central to the debate on Islam and democracy:
(1) The question of Islamism;
(2) The role of Western policy; and,
(3) The question of liberalism.
The global processes of religious resurgence at the end of the twentieth century have led to the rise of various Islamist movements and religious-based political parties across the Muslim world. In many countries they are the leading voices of opposition and important players in domestic politics with substantial grass roots sympathy and support. The establishment scholars interpret this development as proof that Islam is incompatible with democracy. They view these movements as authoritarian movements at best, totalitarian at worst with a proclivity toward violence, terrorism, and a hidden antidemocratic agenda best captured in the famous statement by Edward Djerejian, the veteran American Middle East ambassador that these Islamists groups believe in “one man, one vote, one time” (Djerejian 2008, 17–29). In short, they are viewed as posing a threat to both the societies in which they operate and to Western interests in the Middle East. The case of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Sudan are frequently cited as proof of this claim (Tibi 2008; Kramer 1996, 265–278; Lewis 2003b, 109–112; Skelly 2009; Berman 2010).
Their critics respond that mainstream Islamism, in contrast to its extreme manifestations, is compatible with democratization over the long term. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Ennahda Movement in Tunisia are contrasted with al-Qa‘ida and the Taliban with special emphasis on their evolving attitudes toward democracy. Characteristics of these mainstream Islamist groups that are highlighted include their rejection of violence in obtaining political power (in contrast to the regimes that rule over them), their enthusiastic participation in elections (when allowed to do so), and the important social welfare role they play in civil society in meeting the needs of the poor. These groups are viewed as organically connected religious nationalist movements deeply engaged with the problems in their own societies who should not be judged uniformly but contextually, with a sense of history and sensitivity both to the repressive context they inhabit and the variation among and within these groups (Ayoob 2008; Wickham 2002; Esposito 1998; Fuller 2003; Lynch 2010).
Western policy toward the Muslim world, both in the past and in the present, is another point of conflict between these rival camps of interpreters. The establishment school views the history of Western intervention as having a benign influence at worst on political development in Muslim societies. They generally downplay or ignore criticism of the legacy of colonialism while focusing on internal factors that have impeded democratization. Generally, they have been supportive of US policy and Western intervention in the Middle East. This was brought to light during the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami publicly supported the invasion and became key advisors to the Bush administration on US Middle East policy (Shatz 2003; Waldman 2004; Ajami 2006). According to Bernard Lewis, “Either we bring them freedom, or they destroy us” (Lewis 2010, 168).
Critics of this establishment perspective highlight the negative legacy of Western colonialism and imperialism in undermining Muslim political development. They extend their criticism to the modern period with an emphasis on US policy that has supported dictatorial regimes and opposed popular social movements. A key issue that demarcates both schools is the Israel-Palestine conflict. The establishment school strongly supports Israel and its security needs, while their critics are sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians and the destabilizing effects that flow from the non-resolution of this conflict on Islam-West relations and the politics of the Middle East more generally (Ayoob 2005; Nasr 1999).
Finally, there is the question of liberalism. The establishment perspective argues that democratic elections that bring illiberal Islamists to power are a setback for political development. They warn against the “tyranny of the majority” and argue that the goal in the debate on Islam and democracy should be liberty for Muslim societies, along the lines that exist in the West, not mere elections per se. The building of democratic institutions and the development of a political culture that can sustain liberal democracy over time are viewed as necessary preconditions to holding free and fair elections (Clawson 1994; Zakaria 2007, 89–159).
Their critics respond that liberal democracy, along a Western model, is not necessarily a universal aspiration for all societies and that fundamentally Muslims should be allowed to determine their own social and political norms, which may or may not be liberal. They also point out that any discussion of liberalism and its discontents in Muslim societies requires a sense of history. In the post-September 11 euphoria about the superiority of Western values, it is useful to recall that Western history did not begin with human rights, democracy, and free markets but rather that the manifestation of these ideals took centuries to evolve, often by experimentation and setback and with considerable bloodshed, violence, and injustice. These scholars argue that to expect Muslim societies to follow a less acrimonious trajectory of modernization is a judgment that is both historically unfair and analytically distorting (Parekh 1993; Bulliet 1993; Hashemi 2009, 31–66).
The debate on liberalism reintroduces the question of secularism and its relationship to Islam and Muslim societies. It is widely recognized that modern liberal democracies require the existence of a form of political secularism to sustain themselves, yet seemingly most Muslim polities today are characterized by political trends that are deeply anti-secular. Skeptics often point to this fact as evidence that the future democratic possibilities look bleak for Muslim societies.
The 2007 comprehensive Gallup survey of global Muslim opinion is relevant here. Notwithstanding the widespread compatibility of values between Western and Muslim societies in terms of support for basic human rights and democracy, the West and Islamic world parted ways on the relationship between religion and state. Muslims overwhelmingly do not believe that greater democracy requires a Western-like separation of church and state (Esposito and Mogahed 2007, 35). Untangling this problem requires an appreciation for history and a sensitivity to the different historical lessons bequeathed to the West and the Islamic world with respect to religion-state relations over the past 500 years.
Secularism And Religion-State Relations Across The Islam-West Divide
The standard explanation as to as why secularism has emerged in the West, but not in Muslim societies, is that profound differences in theology and early religious experience between these civilizations has made all the difference. According to a famous formulation by Bernard Lewis, the “reasons why Muslims developed no secularist movement of their own, and reacted sharply against attempts to introduce one from abroad, will thus be clear from the contrasts between Christian and Muslim history and experience. From the beginning, Christians were taught by both by precept and practice to distinguish between God and Caesar and between the different duties owed to each of the two. Muslims received no such instruction” (Lewis 2003a, 103). Variations of this perspective have been advanced by other scholars over the years highlighting the uniqueness of Islam and its alleged secular-resistant essence (Gellner 1992, 5–22; Huntington 1996, 69–71).
This view has been widely popular for three reasons: it reinforces preexisting biases about Islam and Muslim societies, prominent scholars have given it an academic stamp of approval, and prominent Islamist voices have routinely decried secularism as a concept that is essentially anti-Islamic. While space does not allow for a comprehensive treatment of this topic, a brief alternative reading reveals that while history is important to understanding religion-state relations and the crisis of secularism in the Muslim world, it is not the early seventh century history of Islam that is significant. Rather events in the West and in the Islamic world in the early modern and late modern periods (the seventeenth through twentieth centuries) that have made all the difference. An analysis of the origins of political secularism in the Anglo-American tradition sheds considerable light on this topic (Hashemi 2010, 325–328).
The Origins of Political Secularism In The Anglo-American Tradition: Lessons For The Muslim World
In his widely acclaimed book The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, Mark Lilla observes that historically almost every human civilization based its original understanding of legitimate political authority on the divine nexus between God, man, and the world. A close union between politics and theology, Lilla suggests, is the original condition of all civilizations as they try to make sense of the relationship between religion and politics and the natural order of the world that surrounds them (Lilla 2007). The questions that are germane for this discussion are how did this divine nexus between God, man, and society gradually erode in the case of Latin Christendom, thus leading to political secularism, and what are the comparative lessons today for Muslim societies?
In an authoritative overview of the history of secularism, José Casanova identifies four broad social trends that had secularizing consequences for the West:
- The rise of modern capitalism;
- The rise of modern nation-states and nationalism;
- The scientific revolution; and, most importantly,
- The Protestant Reformation and the Wars of Religion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Casanova 1994, 11–39).
It is this latter development that is central to the rise of political secularism, especially in the Anglo-American tradition, and that is particularly helpful in illuminating the question of religion-state relations in Muslim societies.
Post-Reformation Europe saw the emergence of new debates about religious toleration, not only between Catholics and Protestants but also, critically, among the various Protestant sects. In an age of gross intolerance, most Christian denominations were interested in enforcing religious uniformity on their societies, each of them claiming exclusive knowledge of God’s will on earth and warning of the dangers of social disorder and chaos if religious toleration were allowed to flourish. In brief, religious toleration and political stability were thought to be negatively correlated. Uniformity of religious practice in the public sphere and the need for an established state religion were widely believed to be a prerequisite for peace, order, and prosperity. This was the dominant view at the time, right up to the late seventeenth century (Zagorin 2003).
It was left to John Locke to rethink the relationship between toleration and political order. In his famous A Letter Concerning Toleration (1685), he rejected his earlier support for the firm union of church and state and posited a new solution to the core political problem that was plaguing Europe. Religious pluralism in the public sphere and political stability were indeed compatible, Locke argued, on the condition that we can “distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other” (Locke 1983, 26). In other words, a soft form of secularism was required. The key interpretive point here is that political secularism emerged in England as the direct result of an existential crisis that was tearing the country apart. This conflict raged for many years and without a solution, Locke believed, Europe would know neither peace, prosperity, nor stability. The colossal size of this crisis cannot be overstated. Without a resolution of this issue, the self-immolation of the West was a very real possibility. Quite literally, the future political stability of the Western world hung in the balance. Political secularism thus emerged in the Anglo-American tradition as the result of a critical crisis of survival. It was intimately and indelibly connected to these transformative events in the early modern period of Europe, or as Charles Taylor has noted, “The origin point of modern Western secularism was the Wars of Religion; or rather, the search in battle-fatigue and horror for a way out of them” (Taylor 1998, 32). In short, the idea of a separation between church and state originated as a political solution out of an existential dilemma. A contrast between this picture and the case of the Muslim world, with respect to the relationship between religious toleration and political order, is most illustrative.
Muslim Toleration And Its Political Consequences
Historians are in broad agreement that comparatively speaking, in the premodern era, Muslim societies were more tolerant of religious pluralism than Christendom. The fact that until the mid-twentieth century, for example, the city of Baghdad had a population that was one-third Jewish speaks to this point. It is not claimed here that the Muslim world was a bastion of liberal tolerance as we understand this concept today or that minorities and dissidents were never persecuted; far from it. The claim is simply that Muslim societies and empires at their zenith were historically more tolerant than Christendom during this time period, and consequently they did not face the same all-consuming Wars of Religion and debates over religious toleration and political order that were so central to European political history in the early modern period (Russell 1972).
The key political point that flows from the fact of relative Muslim tolerance (in contrast to centuries of Christian intolerance, especially during the early modern period) is that no burning political questions emerged between state and society where religion was the key, all-consuming and overriding bone of political contention. As a result, no inner political dynamic emerged within the Middle East that would necessitate the development of intellectual or moral arguments in favor of religion-state separation (political secularism) as a way out of an existentialist political dilemma in the same way these arguments developed and were so critical to the rise of secularism in Europe during the seventeenth century.
The primary political problems facing Muslim societies that threatened sociopolitical order were the corruption and nepotism of the royal court, rival dynastic claims, natural famines and disasters, and most importantly, foreign intervention and invasions such as the crusades of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, the Mongol invasion of 1258 (which sacked the Abbasid caliphate), the Castilian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula, and increasingly in the modern period growing Russian, French, British, and later American penetration, colonialism, and imperialism (to varying degrees depending on the country, region, and time frame in question; Lapidus 2002; Hodgson 1974). Due to this significantly different historical experience with respect to religious toleration — and this is key to understanding the relationship between Islam and secularism — Muslim societies never had the need to think about secularism — in the same way the West did, as there was no existential crisis that resulted from debates on religion-state relations where secularism might be posited as a solution to a pressing political dilemma.
Moreover, as Noah Feldman has recently argued in The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State, religion-state relations in the Muslim world were far more stable and amicable than they were in the West. For over a millennium, religion often played a constructive role as an agent of stability and predictability. In contrast to the European experience where religion in the post-Reformation period became a source of deep conflict, in the Muslim world religion and the scholars who interpreted it managed to place restrictions on the personal whims and ambitions of the caliphs and sultans by forcing them to recognize religious limits to their rule in exchange for conferring legitimacy on the state. In short, the rulers were not above the law — as they later became during the twentieth century — but they were often constrained by it, thus limiting autocracy and arbitrary rule. Religion-state relations in the Muslim world have thus bequeathed different historical lessons and memories to the faithful where religion is viewed by large segments of the population not as a natural ally of political tyranny and a cause of conflict but, much more positively, as a possible constraint on political despotism and as a source of stability. According to Feldman, this partly explains why demands for a greater role for religion in politics have a sympathetic hearing in the Muslim world today (where Islamists are not in power). This brings us to the modern period (Feldman 2008).
The Modern Muslim Experience With Secularism
In the past 200 years, the Muslim world’s experience with secularism has been largely negative. It is important to appreciate that in Europe secularism was an indigenous and gradual process evolving in conjunction with socioeconomic and political developments while supported by intellectual arguments — and critically by religious groups and leaders — that eventually sunk deep roots within its political culture. By contrast, the Muslim experience has been marked by a perception of secularism as an alien ideology first imposed from the outside by colonial and imperial invaders and then kept alive by local elites who came to power during the postcolonial period. In short, secularism in Europe was largely a bottom-up process that was intimately connected to debates from within civil society, whereas in Muslim societies secularism was largely a top-down process that was driven first by the colonial state and then by the postcolonial state. As a result, secularism in the Muslim world has suffered from weak intellectual roots, and with few exceptions, secularism has never penetrated the mainstream of Muslim societies.
Furthermore, by the end of twentieth century most states in the Muslim world were developmental failures. A pattern of state-society relations unfolded in the postcolonial era that further impugned the reputation of secularism. An autocratic modernizing state, often with critical external support, suffocated civil society, thus forcing oppositional activity into the mosque, inadvertently contributing to the rise of political Islam. A set of top-down, forced modernization, secularization, and Westernization policies by the state — within a short span of time — generated widespread social and psychological alienation and dislocation. Rapid urbanization, changing cultural and socioeconomic relationships, coupled with increasing corruption, economic mismanagement, rising poverty, and income inequality undermined the legitimacy of the state. These developments reflected negatively on secularism because the ruling ideologies of many postcolonial regimes in the Muslim world were openly secular and nationalist (Nasr 2009, 85–115).
Thus, for a generation of Muslims growing up in the postcolonial era, despotism, dictatorship, and human rights abuses came to be associated with secularism. Muslim political activists who experienced oppression at the hands of secular national governments logically concluded that secularism is an ideology of repression. This observation applies not only to Iran (under the Shah) but also to Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Iraq (under Saddam), Yemen, and to a certain extent Turkey in the latter half of the twentieth century. Summarizing this trend, Vali Nasr has noted, “Secularism in the Muslim world never overcame its colonial origins and never lost its association with the postcolonial state’s continuous struggle to dominate society. Its fortunes became tied to those of the state: the more the state’s ideology came into question, and the more its actions alienated social forces, the more secularism was rejected in favor of indigenous worldviews and social institutions — which were for the most part tied to Islam. As such, the decline of secularism was a reflection of the decline of the postcolonial state in the Muslim world” (Nasr 2003, 69).
Thus, a different set of historical experiences, both in the premodern and modern eras, has produced a situation whereby secularism is today a deeply controversial concept in Muslim societies. There is infinitely more to this story, but with respect to the development of democracy it is interesting to note that in those Muslim societies that have in recent years registered the largest gains for democracy this development have been accompanied by the cultivation of an indigenous and organic form of “Muslim secularism” (Hashemi 2009, 152–169). This suggests that in Muslim societies the process of democratization cannot be separated from the debate on political secularization. The cases of Turkey and Indonesia come to mind and more recently Iran, where the rise of the reformist Green Movement has advanced arguments firmly rooted in Iran’s Shiite Islamic and post-1979 revolutionary heritage while simultaneously calling for, as they did in their recently released charter, “maintaining the independence of religious and clerical institutions from the government” (Hashemi and Postel 2011).5
These intellectual transformations are closely related to the rise of what Asef Bayat has called the “post-Islamist” turn in Muslim politics. This emerging trend “represents an endeavor to fuse religiosity with rights, faith and freedom, Islam and liberty. It is an attempt to turn the underlying principles of Islamism on its head” by former Islamists themselves “by emphasizing rights instead of duties, plurality instead of a single authoritative voice, historicity rather than fixed scriptures and the future instead of the past. It wants to marry Islam with individual choice and freedom, with democracy and modernity…to achieve what some have termed an ‘alternative modernity’” (Bayat 2005, 2007). Politicians such as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, and Mir Hossein Mousavi in Iran represent this political trend that has distinct parallels with the rise of Christian democratic parties in Europe. Firmly rooted in a conservative political theology, they have gradually reconciled tradition with modernity, in particular the principles of democracy, human rights, pluralism, and political secularism, and today they represent a very encouraging trend for the promotion and development of democracy in the Muslim world (Nasr 2005; Kalyvas 2003).
Conclusion
The debate on Islam and democracy has generated considerable controversy and acrimony over the years. It has been one of the key political and intellectual debates of the post-Cold War era, rising in importance after the tragic events of September 11, 2001 and then again after the 2011 Arab Spring. One reason it remains of interest is due to its perceived connection to several important issues on the international agenda: the debate on immigration and multiculturalism in Europe, the universality of human rights, Turkey’s admission into the Europe Union, the Israel-Palestine conflict, US foreign policy toward Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed the future political trajectory of the Arab and Islamic world, whose total population now constitutes almost a quarter of humanity.
Objectively examining this topic is difficult because this is not a neutral part of the world to study. When Westerners approach it, they often do so with unexamined cultural baggage rooted in a long and complicated history of Islam-West relations that distorts internal Muslim politics (Hentsch 1992; Sells and Qureshi 2003). Critical thinking on the topic of Islam’s compatibility with democracy needs to be aware of these ideological constraints and should keep the following points in mind.
Religion is not a monolithic and unchanging category that speaks with one voice throughout history. It is shaped by changing political and socioeconomic contexts and can be interpreted in a myriad of different ways. One need only think about the multiple uses to which the Bible has been put throughout history: justifying both the divine right of kings and democracy, slavery and abolitionism, misogyny and gender equality, colonialism and third world struggles for self-determination, and Jim Crow laws and the US Civil Rights Movement.
Like other religious traditions whose origins lie in the premodern era and that are scripturally based, Islam is neither more nor less compatible with modern democracy than Christianity or Judaism. Not too long ago it was argued that Catholicism was an obstacle to democracy and that only Protestant majority countries respected popular sovereignty. The key interpretive point here is that religious traditions are a highly complex body of ideas, assumptions, and doctrines that, when interpreted in a modern context 1,500 years later, contain sufficient ambiguity and elasticity to be read in a variety of different ways—both in support of and in opposition to democracy. This is not to suggest that religious doctrine should be completely ignored when discussing democracy in the Middle East but rather that Islamic political thought is not fossilized in some premedieval essence.
Gudrun Krämer has astutely noted that “it is not possible to talk about Islam and democracy in general but only about Muslims living and theorizing under specific historical circumstances.” In the debate on Islam and democracy sometimes one encounters arguments that “the Islamic position is” such-and-such regarding democracy, human rights, or pluralism, rejecting alternative formulations. This is misleading because while all religions have basic tenets, the rest is subject to debate and interpretation, particularly the structure of a modern political system and the role of religion within it. The point here is that Muslim societies are diverse and one cleric, group, or political leader cannot justly claim to represent all Muslims. Likewise, internal debates on democracy are vastly different when one moves from Saudi Arabia to Turkey to Iran to Indonesia to Muslims living with the United States. Required in this debate are not generalities but specificities (Krämer 1997, 72).
Asking the right questions is important as well. Graham Fuller has suggested that rather than asking whether Islam is compatible with democracy, the more appropriate question to ask is what do Muslims want? If it is a political system that is rooted in the ideals of liberal democracy and that is simultaneously compatible with their religious heritage then it is up to Muslims themselves to invoke and produce the necessary moral arguments, interpretations, and sacrifices that can bring this vision into reality (Fuller 1999). There is no fait accompli here—only interpretive possibilities and opportunities.
Similarly, Asef Bayat has suggested that “the pertinent question is not whether Islam and democracy are compatible…but rather how and under what conditions Muslims can make their religion compatible with desired notions of democracy.” He notes that the congruence between Islam and democracy is not a philosophical question but a political one, thus debate on the topic should be less abstract and more rooted in solid empirical analysis of the social conditions that can promote political change (Bayat 2007, 197). The domestic, regional, and international economic and political context is highly relevant here in shaping internal political struggles in Muslim societies.
Sadly, this context for most of the past century has not been conducive to internal struggles for democratization. Most of the postcolonial states of the Muslim world continue to be plagued by problems that affect all developing societies in the global south: poverty, high unemployment, rapid population growth, environmental decay, political corruption, and illegitimate and repressive regimes, some but not all of whom have been supported by the West. The ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have further destabilized the Middle East, inadvertently strengthening political authoritarianism throughout the region. Thus, the social conditions for democratization have been far from optimal and Western policy, significantly driven by the vast petroleum resources of the region, have made matters worse.
Finally, a sense of history is needed. The development of democracy is a historical process that is evolutionary and gradual. Democracy, in other words, requires patience. It should be remembered that the United States of America, one of the oldest democracies in the world, maintained the legal institution of slavery for the first ninety years of its republic and that it took another hundred years before African Americans could achieve meaningful levels of civil rights protection and a further forty-three years before the first African-American could be elected president. In the same vein it should be recalled that for the first 150 years of American democracy, women did not have the right to vote. This raises the question of whether the United States can be considered a democracy, given that half its population was legally disenfranchised for most its history.
In Muslim societies, the debate on Islam and democracy is relatively recent and the topic does not emerge as a major theme in its own right before the 1980s. In this sense, the journey is just beginning for Muslims. In contrast to the Western experience with democracy, the Muslim experience — of which there are many — ,is unfolding in a rapidly different and more complicated domestic, regional, and international context. In the end it should be remembered that one of the most difficult issues for any emerging polity to resolve is the normative role of religion in politics. There are no easy formulas to follow or exact models to emulate. Trial, error, and experimentation are the only ways forward.
Islam And Democracy
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Last Updated: 12/2021
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