Muslim Heretics Conference

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Robin Wright "Islam and Liberal Democracy: Two Visions Of Reformation," Journal of Democracy 7.2 (1996) 64-75

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Of all the challenges facing democracy in the 1990s, one of the greatest lies in the Islamic world. Only a handful of the more than four dozen predominantly Muslim countries have made significant strides toward establishing democratic systems. Among this handful–including Albania, Bangladesh, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Mali, Pakistan, and Turkey–not one has yet achieved full, stable, or secure democracy. And the largest single regional bloc holding out against the global trend toward political pluralism comprises the Muslim countries of the Middle East and North Africa.

Yet the resistance to political change associated with the Islamic bloc is not necessarily a function of the Muslim faith. Indeed, the evidence indicates quite the reverse. Rulers in some of the most antidemocratic regimes in the Islamic world–such as Brunei, Indonesia, Iraq, Oman, Qatar, Syria, and Turkmenistan–are secular autocrats who refuse to share power with their brethren.

Overall, the obstacles to political pluralism in Islamic countries are not unlike the problems earlier faced in other parts of the world: secular ideologies such as Ba’athism in Iraq and Syria, Pancasila in Indonesia, or lingering communism in some former Soviet Central Asian states brook no real opposition. Ironically, many of these ideologies were adapted from the West; Ba’athism, for instance, was inspired by the European socialism of the 1930s and 1940s. Rigid government controls over everything from communications in Saudi Arabia and Brunei to foreign visitors in Uzbekistan and Indonesia also isolate their people from democratic ideas and debate on popular empowerment. In the largest and poorest Muslim countries, moreover, problems common to [End Page 64] developing states, from illiteracy and disease to poverty, make simple survival a priority and render democratic politics a seeming luxury. Finally, like their non-Muslim neighbors in Asia and Africa, most Muslim societies have no local history of democracy on which to draw. As democracy has blossomed in Western states over the past three centuries, Muslim societies have usually lived under colonial rulers, kings, or tribal and clan leaders.

In other words, neither Islam nor its culture is the major obstacle to political modernity, even if undemocratic rulers sometimes use Islam as their excuse. 1 In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the ruling House of Saud relied on Wahhabism, a puritanical brand of Sunni Islam, first to unite the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula and then to justify dynastic rule. Like other monotheistic religions, Islam offers wide-ranging and sometimes contradictory instruction. In Saudi Arabia, Islam’s tenets have been selectively shaped to sustain an authoritarian monarchy.

In Iran, the revolution that overthrew the Shah in 1979 put a new spin on Shi’ite traditions. The Iranian Shi’ite community had tradition-ally avoided direct participation by religious leaders in government as demeaning to spiritual authority. The upheaval led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini thus represented not only a revolution in Iran, but also a revolution within the Shi’ite branch of Islam. The constitution of the Islamic Republic, the first of its kind, created structures and positions unknown to Islam in the past.

Yet Islam, which acknowledges Judaism and Christianity as its forerunners in a single religious tradition of revelation-based monotheism, also preaches equality, justice, and human dignity–ideals that played a role in developments as diverse as the Christian Reformation of the sixteenth century, the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century, and even the "liberation theology" of the twentieth century. Islam is not lacking in tenets and practices that are compatible with pluralism. Among these are the traditions of ijtihad (interpretation), ijma (consensus), and shura (consultation).

Diversity and Reform

Politicized Islam is not a monolith; its spectrum is broad. Only a few groups, such as the Wahhabi in Saudi Arabia, are in fact fundamentalist. This term, coined in the early twentieth century to describe a movement among Protestant Christians in the United States, denotes passive adherence to a literal reading of sacred scripture. By contrast, many of today’s Islamic movements are trying to adapt the tenets of the faith to changing times and circumstances. In their own way, some even resemble Catholic "liberation theology" movements in their attempts to use religious doctrines to transform temporal life in the modern world. The more accurate word for such Muslim groups is "Islamist." The term [End Page 65] is growing in popularity in Western academic and policy-making circles, since it better allows for the forward-looking, interpretive, and often innovative stances that such groups assume as they seek to bring about a reconstruction of the social order.

The common denominator of most Islamist movements, then, is a desire for change. The quest for something different is manifested in a range of activities, from committing acts of violence to running for political office. Reactive groups–motivated by political or economic insecurity, questions of identity, or territorial disputes–are most visible because of their aggressiveness. Extremists have manipulated, misconstrued, and even hijacked Muslim tenets. Similar trends have emerged in religions other than Islam: the words "zealot" and "thug" were coined long ago to refer, respectively, to Jewish and Hindu extremists. Contemporary Islamic extremists have committed acts of terrorism as far afield as Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York, and they have threatened the lives of writers whom they regard as blasphemous from Britain to Bangladesh.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are proactive individuals and groups working for constructive change. In Egypt, Islamists have pro-vided health-care and educational facilities as alternatives to expensive private outlets and inadequate government institutions. In Turkey, they have helped to build housing for the poor and have generally strengthened civil society. In Lebanon, they have established farm cooperatives and provided systematically for the welfare of children, widows, and the poor. In Jordan, Yemen, Kuwait, and elsewhere, they have run for parliament. The specific motives vary from religiously grounded altruism to creating political power bases by winning hearts and minds. But in diverse ways, they are trying to create alternatives to ideas and systems that they believe no longer work.

Less visible but arguably more important–to both Muslims and the world at large–is a growing group of Islamic reformers. While reactive and proactive groups address the immediate problems of Islam’s diverse and disparate communities, the reformers are shaping thought about long-term issues. At the center of their reflections is the question of how to modernize and democratize political and economic systems in an Islamic context. The reformers’ impact is not merely academic; by stimulating some of the most profound debate since Islam’s emergence in the seventh century, they are laying the foundations for an Islamic Reformation.

The stirrings of reform within Islam today should not be compared too closely with the Christian Reformation of almost five hundred years ago. The historical and institutional differences between the two faiths are vast. Nonetheless, many of the issues ultimately addressed by the respective movements are similar, particularly the inherent rights of the individual and the relationship between religious and political authority. [End Page 66]

The seeds of an Islamic Reformation were actually planted a century ago, but only among tiny circles of clerics and intellectuals whose ideas were never widely communicated to ordinary believers. At the end of the twentieth century, however, instant mass communications, improved education, and intercontinental movements of both people and ideas mean that tens of millions of Muslims are exposed to the debate. In the 1980s, interest in reform gained momentum as the secular ideologies that succeeded colonialism–mostly variants or hybrids of nationalism and socialism–failed to provide freedom and security to many people in the Muslim world. This sense of ferment has only grown more intense amid the global political upheaval of the post­Cold War world. Muslims now want political, economic, and social systems that better their lives, and in which they have some say.

The reformers contend that human understanding of Islam is flexible, and that Islam’s tenets can be interpreted to accommodate and even encourage pluralism. They are actively challenging those who argue that Islam has a single, definitive essence that admits of no change in the face of time, space, or experience–and that democracy is therefore incompatible or alien. The central drama of reform is the attempt to reconcile Islam and modernity by creating a worldview that is compatible with both. 2

Two Middle Eastern philosophers symbolize the diverse origins of Islamist reformers and the breadth of their thought. Abdul Karim Soroush is a Shi’ite Muslim and a Persian from Iran. He is a media-shy academic who has experienced almost a generation of life inside an Islamic republic. Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi is a Sunni Muslim and a Tunisian Arab. He is the exiled leader of Hezb al-Nahda (Party of the Renaissance), a movement intent on creating an Islamic republic in Tunisia. Over the past three years, Soroush and Ghannouchi have produced some of the most far-reaching work on the question of Islam and democracy.

Abdul Karim Soroush

Soroush supported Iran’s 1979 revolution and took an active role in revising university curricula during its early years. Since then, however, he has articulated ideas that the regime considers highly controversial. Ranking officials such as Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the successor to Ayatollah Khomeini, now Iran’s Supreme Guide, have increasingly framed public remarks as implicit but unmistakeable responses to Soroush’s articles and speeches. Some of Soroush’s ideas amount to heresy in the regime’s eyes, and the tenor of Khamenei’s statements has become increasingly hostile. In a November 1995 address commemorating the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover, Khamenei spent more time condemning Soroush’s ideas than lambasting the United States or Israel. [End Page 67]

The degree to which Soroush now frames the debate in Iran was revealed by two unusual events that took place in the autumn of 1995. At Tehran University, more than a hundred young members of Ansar (Helpers of the Party of God) physically attacked and injured Soroush as he attempted to give a special address that the Muslim Students’ Association had invited him to deliver. Some among the two thousand students who had assembled to hear him were also injured. The attack then sparked a pro-Soroush demonstration on campus. A new law imposing severe penalties on anyone associating with critics and enemies of the Islamic Republic was widely thought to be aimed at undermining Soroush’s growing support.

Educated in London and Tehran in both philosophy and the physical sciences, Soroush has recently taught at the Institute for Human Research and at Tehran University’s School of Theology. His columns have been the centerpiece of Kiyan (a Farsi word that can mean "foundation" or "universe"), a bimonthly magazine founded in 1991 primarily to air his views and the debate that they have sparked. For years he also gave informal talks at Tehran mosques that were usually packed by followers ranging from young clerics to regime opponents, intellectuals, political independents, and government technocrats. But in the fall of 1995, the government banned him from giving public lectures or instruction and from publishing. He has been effectively forced from public view, and his academic career in Iran has been ended.

Soroush’s writings on three subjects are particularly relevant. At the top of the list is democracy. Although Islam literally means "submission," Soroush argues that there is no contradiction between Islam and the freedoms inherent in democracy. "Islam and democracy are not only compatible, their association is inevitable. In a Muslim society, one without the other is not perfect," he said in one of several interviews in Tehran and Washington, D.C., in 1994 and 1995.

His advocacy of democracy for the Islamic world rests on two pillars. First, to be a true believer, one must be free. Belief attested under threat or coercion is not true belief. And if a believer freely submits, this does not mean that he has sacrificed freedom. He must also remain free to leave his faith. The only real contradiction is to be free in order to believe, and then afterward to abolish that freedom. This freedom is the basis of democracy. Soroush goes further: the beliefs and will of the majority must shape the ideal Islamic state. An Islamic democracy cannot be imposed from the top; it is only legitimate if it has been chosen by the majority, including nonbelievers as well as believers.

Second, says Soroush, our understanding of religion is evolving. [End Page 68] [Begin Page 70] Sacred texts do not change, but interpretation of them is always in flux because understanding is influenced by the age and the changing conditions in which believers live. So no interpretation is absolute or fixed for all time and all places. Furthermore, everyone is entitled to his or her own understanding. No one group of people, including the clergy, has the exclusive right to interpret or reinterpret tenets of the faith. Some understandings may be more learned than others, but no version is automatically more authoritative than another.

Islam is also a religion that can still grow, Soroush argues. It should not be used as a modern ideology, for it is too likely to become totalitarian. Yet he believes in shari`a, or Islamic law, as a basis for modern legislation. And shari`a, too, can grow. "Shari`a is something expandable. You cannot imagine the extent of its flexibility," he has said, adding that "in an Islamic democracy, you can actualize all its potential flexibilities."

The next broad subject that Soroush addresses is the clergy. The rights of the clergy are no greater than the privileges of anyone else, he argues. Thus in the ideal Islamic democracy, the clergy also have no a priori right to rule. The state should be run by whoever is popularly elected on the basis of equal rights under law.

Soroush advocates an even more fundamental change in the relationship between religion and both the people and the state. Religious leaders have traditionally received financial support from either the state (in most Sunni countries) or the people (in Shi’ite communities). In both cases, Soroush argues, the clergy should be "freed" so that they are not "captives" forced to propagate official or popular views rather than the faith of the Koran.

A religious calling is only for authentic lovers of religion and those who will work for it, Soroush says. No one should be able to be guaranteed a living, gain social status, or claim political power on the basis of religion. Clerics should work like everyone else, he says, making independent incomes through scholarship, teaching, or other jobs. Only such independence can prevent them–and Islam–from becoming compromised.

Finally, Soroush deals with the subject of secularism. Arabic, the language of Islam, does not have a literal translation for this word. But the nineteenth-century Arabic word elmaniyya–meaning "that which is rational or scientific"–comes close. In this context, Soroush views secularism not as the enemy or rival of religion, but as its complement: "It means to look at things scientifically and behave scientifically–which has nothing to do with hostility to religion. Secularism is nothing more than that."

Modernism, according to Soroush, represented a successful attempt to challenge the "dictatorship of religion" by increasing the emphasis placed upon unaided reason in the conduct of human affairs. He maintains that [End Page 70] the tension between reason and religion since the sixteenth century has been "welcome and beneficial for both" and has opened the way for an eventual postmodern reconciliation between the two.

Soroush’s thought has wide-ranging implications. His work often echoes themes that lay behind the Christian Reformation. He shows how to empower Muslims by establishing a role for the individual–as a believer and as a citizen. Soroush refines, even downgrades, the role of the clergy–a particularly sensitive topic in Iran, for Shi’ite Islam stresses the doctrinal and interpretive authority of clerics far more than does Sunni Islam. Soroush also redefines, and to some degree separates, the relative roles and powers of the mosque–religious jurisprudence–and the state. The adoption of his ideas would signify a stunning shift for the only major monotheistic religion that provides a highly specific set of rules by which to govern society as well as a set of spiritual beliefs.

In a spirit similar to the one that characterized the Christian Reformation, he argues against rigid thinking and elitism. Soroush is a believing Muslim and has no wish to abandon the values of his faith; rather, he wants to convince his fellow Muslims of the need to face modernity with what he calls a spirit of "active accommodation . . . imbued or informed with criticism." By pointing the way to innovative interpretations of the Koran and the shari`a, he provides a foundation for a pluralist and tolerant society.

Excerpts from Notes by Robin Wright on Lectures and Interviews Given by Abdul Karim Soroush, April-May 1995

Rachid al-Ghannouchi

While Soroush prefers the cosmic overview, Rachid al-Ghannouchi’s thinking is rooted in his experiences in Tunisia, and then applied to other Muslim societies. He has also been heavily influenced by Third World nationalism and the views of intellectuals from the global South who see their region as locked in a struggle against Northern "neocolonialism." A popular philosophy teacher and speaker educated in Damascus and Paris, Ghannouchi founded the Mouvement de la Tendance Islamique (MTI) in 1981 during a brief interlude of Tunisian political liberalization. Tunisia’s government refused to legalize the MTI, however, citing laws that excluded religious parties from politics. Ghannouchi persisted in calls on the regime to share power by introducing political pluralism and economic justice. He was jailed from 1981 to 1984; after his release, the authorities forbade him to teach, speak in public, publish, or travel.

In 1987, Ghannouchi was again arrested and charged with plotting to overthrow the government. He was released after a bloodless coup in November 1987, which led to another brief political thaw. The MTI, renamed al-Nahda in early 1989 to remove religious overtones, was promised a place at the political table. But by the time of the April [End Page 71] [Begin Page 73] 1989 legislative elections, the thaw was over. Reforms were stalled and confrontations mounted. Ghannouchi went into voluntary exile. The government charged al-Nahda with plotting a coup; the party was outlawed and Ghannouchi was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment. Britain granted him political asylum in 1993, and he is now the most prominent Islamist leader living in the West.

Ghannouchi is controversial. In speeches and interviews, he often declares himself to be "against fundamentalism that believes it is the only truth and must be imposed on all others," yet he has visited Tehran, has traveled briefly on a Sudanese passport when he went into exile, and has condemned Zionism and Westernization. His 1993 book Civil Liberties in the Islamic State is dedicated to dozens of people, including "the forerunners of Islamic liberalism in the women’s movement" and prisoners of conscience of every creed. But it is also dedicated to an imprisoned Hamas leader, to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, and to Malcolm X.

Of all the major Islamist leaders, however, Ghannouchi seems to have expanded his thinking the most in recent years. In Tunisia, his understanding of democracy was a matter of theory only. He used to say that, as an Islamist, he was not afraid of ideas and wanted a free dialogue with believers in different faiths and political systems. Since the beginning of his exile in 1989, he has traveled in Europe and the United States, come into contact with a wide range of policy makers and opinion leaders, and experienced the workings of different demo-cratic systems firsthand. His years of exile have tempered some of the well-worn jingo common in Islamist parlance. Although the field of comparison is small, Ghannouchi now ranks among Islamism’s most accessible and mature thinkers on the issue of democracy. Whatever happens in Tunisia or to al-Nahda, his contributions will remain important to Islamic thought.

Ghannouchi advocates an Islamic system that features majority rule, free elections, a free press, protection of minorities, equality of all secular and religious parties, and full women’s rights in everything from polling booths, dress codes, and divorce courts to the top job at the presidential palace. Islam’s role is to provide the system with moral values.

Islamic democracy is first the product of scriptural interpretation. "Islam did not come with a specific program concerning our life," Ghannouchi said in one of several interviews between 1990 and 1995. "It brought general principles. It is our duty to formulate this program through interaction between Islamic principles and modernity." Believers are guaranteed the right of ijtihad in interpreting the Koranic text. Their empowerment is complete since Islam does not have an institution or person as a sole authority to represent the faith–or contradict their interpretations. The process of shura, moreover, means that decision [End Page 73] making belongs to the community as a whole. "The democratic values of political pluralism and tolerance are perfectly compatible with Islam," he maintains.

Second, Islamic democracy is also a product of recent human experience. The legitimacy of contemporary Muslim states is based on liberation from modern European colonialism, a liberation in which religious and secular, Muslim and Christian, participated together. "There is no room to make distinctions between citizens, and complete equality is the base of any new Muslim society. The only legitimacy is the legitimacy of elections," he said. "Freedom comes before Islam and is the step leading to Islam."

Ghannouchi concedes that Islam’s record in the areas of equality and participation has blemishes. Previous Muslim societies were built on conquest. But he contends that the faith has also traditionally recognized pluralism internally, noting the lack of religious wars among Muslims as proof of Islam’s accommodation of the Muslim world’s wide diversity. Citing the Koran, he explains that Islam condemns the use of religion for material or hegemonic purposes: "O mankind! We created you from a single [pair] of a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other, not that ye may despise [each other]" (Sura 49:13).

Ghannouchi calls the act of striking a balance between holy texts and human reality aqlanah, which translates as "realism" or "logical reasoning." Aqlanah is dynamic and constantly evolving. As a result Ghannouchi, like Soroush, believes that Islam and democracy are an inevitable mix. In a wide-ranging address given in May 1995 at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, he said: "Once the Islamists are given a chance to comprehend the values of Western modernity, such as democracy and human rights, they will search within Islam for a place for these values where they will implant them, nurse them, and cherish them just as the Westerners did before, when they implanted such values in a much less fertile soil." He pledged al-Nahda’s adherence to democracy and the alternation of power through the ballot box, and called on all other Islamist movements to follow suit in unequivocal language and even in formal pacts signed with other parties.

Ghannouchi’s acceptance of pluralism is not limited to the Islamic world. Responding to Samuel P. Huntington’s widely discussed essay on the "clash of civilizations," 3 Ghannouchi contends that cultural or religious differences do not justify conflict, but instead can provide ground for cooperation rooted in a mutual recognition of complementarity. "We appeal for and work to establish dialogue between Islam and the West, for the world now is but a small village and there is no reason to deny the other’s existence. Otherwise we are all doomed to annihilation and the destruction of the world," he said in a 1994 interview. 4 [End Page 74] In his 1995 London address, he added: "Islam recognizes as a fact of life the diversity and pluralism of peoples and cultures, and calls for mutual recognition and coexistence. . . . Outside its own society, Islam recognizes civilizational and religious pluralism and opposes the use of force to transfer a civilization or impose a religion."

Excerpts from a Lecture by Sheikh Rachid al-Ghannouchi Chattam House, London, 9 May 1995

A Long Way To Go

Christianity’s Reformation took at least two centuries to work itself out. The Islamic Reformation is probably only somewhere in early midcourse. And the two movements offer only the roughest of parallels. The Christian Reformation, for example, was launched in reaction to the papacy and specific practices of the Catholic Church. In contrast, Islam has no central authority; even the chief ayatollah in the Islamic Republic of Iran is the supreme religious authority in one country only.

But the motives and goals of both reformations are similar. The Islamic reformers want to strip the faith of corrupt, irrelevant, or unjust practices that have been tacked on over the centuries. They are looking to make the faith relevant to changing times and conditions. They want to make the faith more accessible to the faithful, so that believers utilize the faith rather than have it used against them. And they want to draw on Islam as both a justification and a tool for political, social, and economic empowerment.

The Islamic reformist movement has a very long way to go. Although there are a handful of others besides Soroush and Ghannouchi making serious or original contributions to the debate, they still represent a distinct minority. The changes that they seek to promote will experience bumps, false starts, and failures, and may take a long time. Yet the Islamic Reformation represents the best hope for reconciliation both within Islam and between Islam and the outside world.

Robin Wright is global-affairs correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and former Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Times of London. Her books include Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (1985) and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade (1990).

Notes

1. Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, trans. Carol Volk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), esp. 1­27.

2. See John Voll, Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995).

3. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72 (Summer 1993): 22­49.

4. "Dr. Rachid Gannouchi: Tunisia’s Islamists Are Different from Those in Algeria," interview by Zainab Farran in Ash-Shiraa (Beirut), October 1994, 28­32.

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Robin Wright "Islam and Liberal Democracy: Two Visions Of Reformation"

The Atlantic Monthly | Feburary 1993

Islam and Liberal Democracy

Is Islam by its very nature antithetical to the development of democratic institutions? A distinguished historian contemplates this difficult question, one whose answer is fraught with consequence for several troubled regions of the world
by Bernard Lewis
…..

here has been much discussion of late, both inside and outside the Islamic world, about those elements in the Islamic past and those factors in the Muslim present that are favorable and unfavorable to the development of liberal democracy. From a historical perspective it would seem that of all the non-Western civilizations in the world, Islam offers the best prospects for Western-style democracy. Historically, culturally, religiously, it is the closest to the West, sharing much—though by no means all—of the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman heritage that helped to form our modern civilization. From a political perspective, however, Islam seems to offer the worst prospects for liberal democracy. Of the forty-six sovereign states that make up the international Islamic Conference, only one, the Turkish Republic, can be described as a democracy in Western terms, and even there the path to freedom has been beset by obstacles. Of th

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e remainder, some have never tried democracy; others have tried it and failed; a few, more recently, have experimented with the idea of sharing, though not of relinquishing, power.
Can liberal democracy work in a society inspired by Islamic beliefs and principles and shaped by Islamic experience and tradition? It is of course for Muslims, primarily and perhaps exclusively, to interpret and reinterpret the pristine original message of their faith, and to decide how much to retain, and in what form, of the rich accumulated heritage of fourteen centuries of Islamic history and culture. Not all Muslims give the same answers to the question posed above, but much will depend on the answer that prevails.

The Prod of Weakness

n December 14, 1909, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed V, in a speech from the throne delivered to the Ottoman parliament, spoke of the commitment of his administration to "constitutional and consultative government … the way of security and salvation prescribed by the noble shari’a and by both reason and tradition." The content of the speech and the manner of its delivery reflected the new situation after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and the suppression of the counterrevolutionary mutiny in the spring of 1909. Under the restored constitution the Ottoman Empire had become a constitutional monarchy, and the speech that the Sultan presented, British-style, to his parliament was written for him by his ministers, whose policies it expressed. The language used is interesting and revealing. "Constitution" is mesrutiyet, a term coined in the nineteenth century to denote a new procedure; "consultation" is mesveret, an old term with many associations derived from both Ottoman political usage and Islamic political literature. The Islamic association implied by the use of this term is made explicit by the citation of "the noble shari’a" and of "reason and tradition," akl ve-nakl, a formula commonly used by Muslim theologians. The desire to borrow or imitate Western institutions perceived as useful, and to present them as somehow representing a return to authentic and original Islamic principles, is characteristic of most nineteenth-century and some twentieth-century Islamic reformers. The desire for such change arose in the main from a growing awareness of Western strength and wealth contrasted with Muslim weakness and poverty. The discovery or invention of Islamic antecedents was seen as necessary to make such political changes acceptable to the people of a proud and deeply conservative society with old and strong religio-political traditions of its own—these last including a profound contempt for the unbeliever and all his ways. It is not easy to accept instruction in matters as fundamental as the conduct of state from those one has long been accustomed to regard as benighted and unenlightened.
Muslim awareness of weakness and defeat first achieved significant expression in the early eighteenth century, following the disastrous failure of the second siege of Vienna (1683) and the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), the first imposed by a victorious enemy on a defeated Ottoman government. There had been earlier defeats and setbacks—the final expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the ending of the Tatar yoke in Russia, the establishment of the Western European maritime powers in the Muslim lands of South and Southeast Asia. But all these were in a sense peripheral and seem to have had little impact on the heartlands of Islam and the Middle East, where the Ottoman Empire, the last and in many ways the greatest of the Muslim military empires, continued to perform its task as the sword and shield of Islam in the long struggle against Christendom. For a while the awareness of weakness was in the main limited to the Ottoman governing elite, the first to bear the brunt of the changed balance of forces, while the rest of the population was still protected from both invasion and reality by the armed might of the Ottoman state, even in its decline a formidable military power. The terms of the discussion were similarly limited to military matters, to weapons and training and military organization, since for some time it was in these alone that Muslims experienced the growing superiority of the West. The events of the late eighteenth centuries—the Russians in the Black Sea, the French in Egypt—made European superiority painfully obvious. This succession of military defeats was the more galling to the people of a religious society with a long history of political and military triumph, starting in the lifetime of its founder, and with a proud awareness of that sacred history.
In time there arose some among the reformers who argued that European military superiority derived from nonmilitary causes, and two in particular—one economic, the other political. Some identified the sources of Western power more specifically as industrialization and constitutional government. The Arab failures in the struggle against Israel, particularly in 1948 and in 1967, revived the great debate on what is wrong with Arab and, more broadly, Islamic society, and what can be done to put it right. Like the Turks after their failure to capture Vienna, so the Arabs after their failure to capture Jerusalem began by seeing this as a primarily military problem for which there was a military solution: bigger and better armies with bigger and better weapons. And when these bigger and better armies also failed, there was a growing willingness to listen to those who sought deeper causes and offered more-radical solutions.

Fundamentalists and Democrats

here are many who see no need for any such change and would prefer to retain the existing systems, whether radical dictatorships or traditional autocracies, with perhaps some improvement in the latter. This preference for things as they are is obviously shared by those who rule under the present system and those who otherwise benefit, including foreign powers who are willing to accept and even support existing regimes as long as their own interests are safeguarded. But there are others who feel that the present systems are both evil and doomed and that new institutions must be devised and installed.
Proponents of radical change fall into two main groups—the Islamic fundamentalists and the democrats. Each group includes a wide range of sometimes contending ideologies.
The term "fundamentalism" derives from a series of Protestant tracts, The Fundamentals, published in the United States around 1910, and was used first in America and then in other predominantly Protestant countries to designate certain groups that diverge from the mainstream churches in their rejection of liberal theology and biblical criticism and their insistence on the literal divinity and inerrancy of the biblical text. The use of the term to designate Muslim movements is therefore at best a loose analogy and can be very misleading. Reformist theology has at times in the past been an issue among Muslims; it is not now, and it is very far from the primary concerns of those who are called Muslim fundamentalists.
Those concerns are less with scripture and theology than with society, law, and government. As the Muslim fundamentalists see it, the community of Islam has been led into error by foreign infidels and Muslim apostates, the latter being the more dangerous and destructive. Under their guidance or constraint Muslims abandoned the laws and principles of their faith and instead adopted secular—that is to say, pagan—laws and values. All the foreign ideologies—liberalism, socialism, even nationalism—that set Muslim against Muslim are evil, and the Muslim world is now suffering the inevitable consequences of forsaking the God-given law and way of life that were vouchsafed to it. The answer is the old Muslim obligation of jihad: to wage holy war first at home, against the pseudo-Muslim apostates who rule, and then, having ousted them and re-Islamized society, to resume the greater role of Islam in the world. The return to roots, to authenticity, will always be attractive. It will be doubly appealing to those who daily suffer the consequences of the failed foreign innovations that were foisted on them.
For Islamic fundamentalists, democracy is obviously an irrelevance, and unlike the communist totalitarians, they rarely use or even misuse the word. They are, however, willing to demand and exploit the opportunities that a self-proclaimed democratic system by its own logic is bound to offer them. At the same time, they make no secret of their contempt for democratic political procedures and their intention to govern by Islamic rules if they gain power. Their attitude toward democratic elections has been summed up as "one man, one vote, once." This is not entirely accurate, at least not for the Iranians. The Islamic Republic of Iran holds contested elections and allows more freedom of debate and criticism in the press and in its parliament than is usual in most Muslim countries, but there are exacting and strictly enforced limitations on who may be a candidate, what groups may be formed, and what ideas may be expressed. It goes without saying that no questioning of the basic principles of the Islamic revolution or the republic is permitted.
hose who plead or fight for democratic reform in the Arab and other Islamic lands claim to represent a more effective, more authentic democracy than that of their failed predecessors, not restricted or distorted by some intrusive adjective, not nullified by a priori religious or ideological imperatives, not misappropriated by regional or sectarian or other sectional interests. In part their movement is an extension to the Middle East of the wave of democratic change that has already transformed the governments of many countries in Southern Europe and Latin America; in part it is a response to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new affirmation of democratic superiority through victory in the Cold War. To no small extent it is also a consequence of the growing impact of the U.S. democracy and of American popular culture in the Islamic lands.
For some time America was seen merely as an extension of Western Europe—part of the same civilization, speaking the same language as the greatest of the empires, professing the same religion, damned by the same fatal flaws. Closer acquaintance revealed profound differences between American and Western European democracy, giving the former an attraction that the latter never possessed.
There is, of course, the obvious difference that the United States has never exercised imperial authority over Arab lands. A consequence of this is the less obvious but in the long run vastly more important difference that Americans in general—albeit with some well-known exceptions—have not developed the imperial attitude that colored, and to some extent still colors, human relations between Britons and Frenchmen on the one hand and the peoples of their former possessions on the other. This has made possible for Americans the kind of informal, equal, person-to-person relationships with Middle Easterners that were, and to some extent still are, rarely possible for Europeans.
American popular culture and mores have penetrated far more deeply and widely in Middle Eastern society than was ever possible for the elitist cultures of Britain and France. This kind of relationship is further encouraged by westward migration. There are now millions of Britons of South Asian, and Frenchmen of North African, origin. But it will probably be a long time before they achieve the level of integration and acceptance already achieved by new Americans from the Middle East. These have already become an important part of the American political process; they may yet find a role in the political processes of their countries of origin.
It is precisely the catholicity, the assimilative power and attraction, of American culture that make it an object of fear and hatred among the self-proclaimed custodians of pristine, authentic Islam. For such as they, it is a far more deadly threat than any of its predecessors to the old values that they hold dear and to the power and influence those values give them. In the last chapter of the Koran, which ranks with the first among the best known and most frequently cited, the believer is urged to seek refuge with God "from the mischief of the insidious Whisperer who whispers in people’s hearts…" Satan in the Koran is the adversary, the deceiver, above all the inciter and tempter who seeks to entice mankind away from the true faith. It is surely in this sense that the Ayatollah Khomeini called America the great Satan: Satan as enemy, but—more especially and certainly more plausibly for his people—also as source of enticement and temptation.
n these times of discontent and disappointment, of anger and frustration, the older appeals of nationalism and socialism and national socialism—the gifts of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Europe—have lost much of their power. Today only the democrats and the Islamic fundamentalists appeal to something more than personal or sectional loyalties. Both have achieved some limited success, partly by infiltrating the existing regimes, more often by frightening them into making some preemptive concessions. Successes have in the main been limited to the more traditional authoritarian regimes, which have made some symbolic gestures toward the democrats or the fundamentalists or both. Even the radical dictatorships, while admitting no compromise with liberal democracy, have in times of stress tried to appease and even to use Islamic sentiment.
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? The democratic world contains many different forms of government—republics and monarchies, presidential and parliamentary regimes, secular states and established churches, and a wide range of electoral systems—but all of them share certain basic assumptions and practices that mark the distinction between democratic and undemocratic 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 terms are understood in the free societies of the West?
No one, least of all the Islamic fundamentalists themselves, will dispute that their creed and political program are not compatible with liberal democracy. But Islamic fundamentalism is just one stream among many. In the fourteen centuries that have passed since the mission of the Prophet, there have been several such movements—fanatical, intolerant, aggressive, and violent. Led by charismatic religious figures from outside the establishment, they have usually begun by denouncing the perversion of the faith and the corruption of society by the false and evil Muslim rulers and leaders of their time. Sometimes these movements have been halted and suppressed by the ruling establishment. At other times they have gained power and used it to wage holy war, first at home, against those whom they saw as backsliders and apostates, and then abroad against the other enemies of the true faith. In time these regimes have been either ousted or, if they have survived, transformed—usually in a fairly short period—into something not noticeably better, and in some ways rather worse, than the old establishments that they had overthrown. Something of this kind is already visibly happening in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The question, therefore, is not whether liberal democracy is compatible with Islamic fundamentalism—clearly it is not—but whether it is compatible with Islam itself. Liberal democracy, however far it may have traveled, however much it may have been transformed, is in its origins a product of the West—shaped by a thousand years of European history, and beyond that by Europe’s double heritage: Judeo-Christian religion and ethics; Greco-Roman statecraft and law. No such system has originated in any other cultural tradition; it remains to be seen whether such a system, transplanted and adapted in another culture, can long survive.
Leaving aside the polemical and apologetic arguments—that Islam, not Western liberalism, is the true democracy, or that Western liberalism itself derives from Islamic roots—the debate about Islam and liberal democracy has focused on a few major points.

God’s Polity

very civilization formulates its own idea of good government, and creates institutions through which it endeavors to put that idea into effect. Since classical antiquity these institutions in the West have usually included some form of council or assembly, through which qualified members of the polity participate in the formation, conduct, and, on occasion, replacement of the government. The polity may be variously defined; so, too, may be the qualifications that entitle a member of the polity to participate in its governance. Sometimes, as in the ancient Greek city, the participation of citizens may be direct. More often qualified participants will, by some agreed-upon and recurring procedure, choose some from among their own numbers to represent them. These assemblies are of many different kinds, with differently defined electorates and functions, often with some role in the making of decisions, the enactment of laws, and the levying of taxes.
The effective functioning of such bodies was made possible by the principle embodied in Roman law, and in systems derived from it, of the legal person—that is to say, a corporate entity that for legal purposes is treated as an individual, able to own, buy, or sell property, enter into contracts and obligations, and appear as either plaintiff or defendant in both civil and criminal proceedings. There are signs that such bodies existed in pre-Islamic Arabia. They disappeared with the advent of Islam, and from the time of the Prophet until the first introduction of Western institutions in the Islamic world there was no equivalent among the Muslim peoples of the Athenian boule, the Roman Senate, or the Jewish Sanhedrin, of the Icelandic Althing or the Anglo-Saxon witenagemot, or of any of the innumerable parliaments, councils, synods, diets, chambers, and assemblies of every kind that flourished all over Christendom.
One obstacle to the emergence of such bodies was the absence of any legal recognition of corporate persons. There were some limited moves in the direction of recognition. Islamic commercial law recognizes various forms of partnership for limited business purposes. A waqf, a pious foundation, once settled is independent of its settlor, and can in theory continue indefinitely, with the right to own, acquire, and alienate property. But these never developed beyond their original purposes, and at no point reached anything resembling the governmental, ecclesiastical, and private corporate entities of the West.
Thus almost all aspects of Muslim government have an intensely personal character. In principle, at least, there is no state, but only a ruler; no court, but only a judge. There is not even a city with defined powers, limits, and functions, but only an assemblage of neighborhoods, mostly defined by family, tribal, ethnic, or religious criteria, and governed by officials, usually military, appointed by the sovereign. Even the famous Ottoman imperial divan—the divan-i humayun—described by many Western visitors as a council, could more accurately be described as a meeting, on fixed days during the week, of high political, administrative, judicial, financial, and military officers, presided over in earlier times by the Sultan, in later times by the Grand Vizier. Matters brought before the meeting were referred to the relevant member of the divan, who might make a recommendation. The final responsibility and decision lay with the Sultan or the Grand Vizier.
One of the major functions of such bodies in the West, increasingly through the centuries, was legislation. According to Muslim doctrine, there was no legislative function in the Islamic state, and therefore no need for legislative institutions. The Islamic state was in principle a theocracy—not in the Western sense of a state ruled by the Church and the clergy, since neither existed in the Islamic world, but in the more literal sense of a polity ruled by God. For believing Muslims, legitimate authority comes from God alone, and the ruler derives his power not from the people, nor yet from his ancestors, but from God and the holy law. In practice, and in defiance of these beliefs, dynastic succession became the norm, but it was never given the sanction of the holy law. Rulers made rules, but these were considered, theoretically, as elaborations or interpretations of the only valid law—that of God, promulgated by revelation. In principle the state was God’s state, ruling over God’s people; the law was God’s law; the army was God’s army; and the enemy, of course, was God’s enemy.
Without legislative or any other kind of corporate bodies, there was no need for any principle of representation or any procedure for choosing representatives. There was no occasion for collective decision, and no need therefore for any procedure for achieving and expressing it, other than consensus. Such central issues of Western political development as the conduct of elections and the definition and extension of the franchise therefore had no place in Islamic political evolution.
Not surprisingly, in view of these differences, the history of the Islamic states is one of almost unrelieved autocracy. The Muslim subject owed obedience to a legitimate Muslim ruler as a religious duty. That is to say, disobedience was a sin as well as a crime.
Modernization in the nineteenth century, and still more in the twentieth, far from reducing this autocracy, substantially increased it. On the one hand, modern technology, communications, and weaponry greatly reinforced the rulers’ powers of surveillance, indoctrination, and repression. On the other hand, social and economic modernization enfeebled or abrogated the religious constraints and intermediate powers that had in various ways limited earlier autocracies. No Arab Caliph or Turkish Sultan of the past could ever have achieved the arbitrary and pervasive power wielded by even the pettiest of present-day dictators.

Money and Power

he impediments to the development of liberal institutions were not merely political. The small-scale autocracy of the home, especially the upper-class home, founded on polygamy, concubinage, and slavery, was preparation for an adult life of domination and acquiescence, and a barrier to the entry of liberal ideas. Women—particularly the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of rulers—have played a much more important role in Muslim history than is usually conceded by historians. But they were until very recently precluded from contributing to the development of their society in the way that a succession of remarkable women have contributed to the flowering of the West.
The economic basis of Western-style liberal democracy was early recognized in the West. British, American, and French democrats alike insisted on the right to property as one of the basic human rights that safeguard and are safeguarded by free institutions. It also forms an essential component of civil society as conceived by European thinkers. For some time the rise of socialist ideas, parties, and governments weakened the belief in private property as a liberal value. Recent events have done much to restore that belief.
Islamic law unequivocally recognizes the sanctity of private property, but Islamic history reveals a somewhat different picture, in which even a rich man’s enjoyment of his property has never been safe from seizure or sequestration by the state. This chronic insecurity is symbolized in the architecture of the traditional Muslim city, in which neighborhoods, and even the houses of the wealthy, are turned inward, surrounded by high blank walls. Marx and Engels themselves recognized that their canonical sequence of ruling classes defined by production relationships might not apply to non-Western societies. They sketched the theory of what they called "the Asiatic mode of production," in which there was no effective private ownership of land, and consequently no class war—just a simple opposition between the terrorized mass of the population and the all-encompassing state power, bureaucratic and military.
Like many of their other insights, this is a caricature, not a portrait, but also like their other insights, it is not without some basis in reality. Comparing the relationship between property and power in the modern American and classical Middle Eastern systems, one might put the difference this way: in America one uses money to buy power, while in the Middle East one uses power to acquire money. That is obviously an oversimplification, and there are significant exceptions on both sides. The misuse of public office for financial gain is not unknown in the United States; the use of money to buy into the political process is not unfamiliar in the traditional Middle East. But these are marginal, in the main small-scale departures from the norm. In the vast American political and economic system the money made through the actual exercise of power is relatively unimportant—no more than small-time peculation. In the Middle East money can buy only the power of intrigue, not of command.
Perhaps the most striking manifestation of this difference between the two systems is in the merchant class, and its place in the society and polity. Muslim societies, both medieval and early modern, often included a rich and varied industrial and commercial life, and evolved a wealthy and cultivated merchant class. But with brief and insignificant exceptions—as, for example, in a disputed borderland between rival states, or in an interregnum between the collapse of one regime and the consolidation of another—they were never able to match the achievement of the rising European bourgeoisie in the creation of the modern West. One reason is that a large proportion of them were non-Muslims, principally Christians and Jews, and therefore precluded from any decisive role in the political process. But far more important was the chronic, permanent insecurity, the sequence of upheavals and invasions, the ever-present threat of expropriation or destruction.
hese traditional obstacles to democracy have in many ways been reinforced by the processes of modernization, and by recent developments in the region. As already observed, the power of the state to dominate and terrorize the people has been vastly increased by modern methods. The philosophy of authoritarian rule has been sharpened and strengthened by imported totalitarian ideologies, which have served a double purpose—to sanctify rulers and leaders and to fanaticize their subjects and followers. The so-called Islamic fundamentalists are no exception in this respect.
Self-criticism in the West—a procedure until recently rarely practiced and little understood in the Middle East—provided useful ammunition. This use of the West against itself is particularly striking among the fundamentalists. Western democracy for them is part of the hated West, and that hatred is central to the ideas by which they define themselves, as in the past the free world defined itself first against Nazism and then against communism.
The changes wrought by modernization are by no means entirely negative. Some, indeed, are extremely positive. One such improvement is the emancipation of women. Though this still has a long way to go before it reaches Western levels, irreversible changes have already taken place. These changes are indispensable: a society can hardly aspire realistically to create and operate free institutions as long as it keeps half its members in a state of permanent subordination and the other half see themselves as domestic autocrats. Economic and social development has also brought new economic and social elements of profound importance—a literate middle class, commercial, managerial, and professional, that is very different from the military, bureaucratic, and religious elites that between them dominated the old order. These new groups are creating their own associations and organizations, and modifying the law to accommodate them. They are an indispensable component of civil society—previously lacking, yet essential to any kind of democratic polity.
There are also older elements in the Islamic tradition, older factors in Middle Eastern history, that are not hostile to democracy and that, in favorable circumstances, could even help in its development. Of special importance among these is the classical Islamic concept of supreme sovereignty—elective, contractual, in a sense even consensual and revocable. The Islamic caliphate, as prescribed and regulated by the holy law, may be an autocracy; it is in no sense a despotism. According to Sunni doctrine, the Caliph was to be elected by those qualified to make a choice. The electorate was never defined, nor was any procedure of election ever devised or operated, but the elective principle remains central to Sunni religious jurisprudence, and that is not unimportant.
Again according to Sunni doctrine, the relationship between the Caliph and his subjects is contractual. The word bay’a, denoting the ceremony at the inauguration of a new Caliph, is sometimes translated as "homage" or "allegiance." Such translations, though no doubt reflecting the facts, do not accurately represent the principle. The word comes from an Arabic root meaning "to barter," hence "to buy and to sell," and originally referring to the clasping or slapping of hands with which in ancient Arabia a deal was normally concluded. The bay’a was thus conceived as a contract by which the subjects undertook to obey and the Caliph in return undertook to perform certain duties specified by the jurists. If a Caliph failed in those duties—and Islamic history shows that this was by no means a purely theoretical point—he could, subject to certain conditions, be removed from office.
This doctrine marks one of the essential differences between Islamic and other autocracies. An Islamic ruler is not above the law. He is subject to it, no less than the humblest of his servants. If he commands something that is contrary to the law, the duty of obedience lapses, and is replaced not by the right but by the duty of disobedience.
Muslim spokesmen, particularly those who sought to find Islamic roots for Western practices, made much of the Islamic principle of consultation, according to which a ruler should not make arbitrary decisions by himself but should act only after consulting with suitably qualified advisers. This principle rests on two somewhat enigmatic passages in the Koran and on a number of treatises, mainly by ulama and statesmen, urging consultation with ulama or with statesmen. This principle has never been institutionalized, nor even formulated in the treatises of the holy law, though naturally rulers have from time to time consulted with their senior officials, more particularly in Ottoman times.
Of far greater importance was the acceptance of pluralism in Islamic law and practice. Almost from the beginning the Islamic world has shown an astonishing diversity. Extending over three continents, it embraced a wide variety of races, creeds, and cultures, which lived side by side in reasonable if intermittent harmony. Sectarian strife and religious persecution are not unknown in Islamic history, but they are rare and atypical, and never reached the level of intensity of the great religious wars and persecutions in Christendom.
Traditional Islam has no doctrine of human rights, the very notion of which might seem an impiety. Only God has rights—human beings have duties. But in practice the duty owed by one human being to another—more specifically, by a ruler to his subjects—may amount to what Westerners would call a right, particularly when the discharge of this duty is a requirement of holy law.

Two Temptations

t may be—and has been—argued that these legal and religious principles have scant effect. The doctrine of elective and contractual sovereignty has been tacitly ignored since the days of the early caliphate. The supremacy of the law has been flouted. Tolerance of pluralism and diversity has dwindled or disappeared in an age of heightened religious, ethnic, and social tensions. Consultation, as far as it ever existed, is restricted to the ruler and his inner circle, while personal dignity has been degraded by tyrants who feel that they must torture and humiliate, not just kill, their opponents.
And yet, despite all these difficulties and obstacles, the democratic ideal is steadily gaining force in the region, and increasing numbers of Arabs have come to the conclusion that it is the best, perhaps the only, hope for the solution of their economic, social, and political problems.
What can we in the democratic world do to encourage the development of democracy in the Islamic Middle East—and what should we do to avoid impeding or subverting it? There are two temptations to which Western governments have all too often succumbed, with damaging results. They might be called the temptation of the right and the temptation of the left. The temptation of the right is to accept, and even to embrace, the most odious of dictatorships as long as they are acquiescent in our own requirements, and as long as their policies seem to accord with the protection of our own national interests. The spectacle of the great democracies of the West in comfortable association with tyrants and dictators can only discourage and demoralize the democratic opposition in these countries.
The more insidious temptation, that of the left, is to press Muslim regimes for concessions on human rights and related matters. Since ruthless dictatorships are impervious to such pressures, and are indeed rarely subjected to them, the brunt of such well-intentioned intervention falls on the more moderate autocracies, which are often in the process of reforming themselves in a manner and at a pace determined by their own conditions and needs. The pressure for premature democratization can fatally weaken such regimes and lead to their overthrow, not by democratic opposition but by other forces that then proceed to establish a more ferocious and determined dictatorship.
All in all, considering the difficulties that Middle Eastern countries have inherited and the problems that they confront, the prospects for Middle Eastern democracy are not good. But they are better than they have ever been before. Most of these countries face grave economic problems. If they fail to cope with these problems, then the existing regimes, both dictatorial and authoritarian, are likely to be overthrown and replaced, probably by one variety or another of Islamic fundamentalists. It has been remarked in more than one country that the fundamentalists are popular because they are out of power and cannot be held responsible for the present troubles. If they acquired power, and with it responsibility, they would soon lose that popularity. But this would not matter to them, since once in power they would not need popularity to stay there, and would continue to govern—some with and some without oil revenues to mitigate the economic consequences of their methods. In time even the fundamentalist regimes, despite their ruthless hold on power, would be either transformed or overthrown, but by then they would have done immense, perhaps irreversible, damage to the cause of freedom.
But their victory is by no means inevitable. There is always the possibility that democrats may form governments, or governments learn democracy. The increasing desire for freedom, and the better understanding of what it means, are hopeful signs. Now that the Cold War has ended and the Middle East is no longer a battlefield for rival power blocs, the peoples of the Middle East will have the chance—if they can take it—to make their own decisions and find their own solutions. No one else will have the ability or even the desire to do it for them. Today—for the first time in centuries—the choice is their own.

The Atlantic | Feburary 1993 | Islam and Liberal Democracy | Bernard Lewis

Technorati Tags: jews,jewdism

Islam and Judaism

 

It is important to expose this historical fact to let the Muslims know that some Jewish groups have an objective perspective and were fair in building relationship with Islam. They are not like what the Muslims think.

By: Abd Moqsith Ghazali

Relationship between Islam and Judaism is often described in a bad way. Most of Muslims assumed that Jews are dishonest, stubborn and evil people. This perspective is based on the fact that Jews of Medina in the days of the Prophet has broken the political treatise, namely Medina Charter. It led to a conflict between Muslim and Jews. The Jews of Bani Mushtaliq had planned to murder prophet Muhammad under al-Harits bin Abi Dlirar’s command. Prophet heard about this information and therefore battle occurred. Until now, Palestine has not been a safe zone for its citizen, since Jews and Muslims have been fighting each other.
Based on these evidences, some Muslims concluded and generalized that the Jews are not to be trusted. To support this argument they took Quranic verse, “And the Jews will not be pleased with thee, nor will the Christians, till thou follow their creed” (QS al-Baqarah: 120). Another verse said: “Many of the People of the Scripture long to make you disbelievers after your belief, through envy on their own account, after the truth had become manifest unto them" (2: 109). In fact this verse specifically responded the attitude of Jews such as Ka`ab ibn al-Asyraf, Hayy ibn Akhthab, Abu Yasir ibn Akhthab, Syas ibn Qais al-Yahudi who wanted to convert Muslims into Jewish. Unfortunately, this social-political verse was regarded as theological verse.
We know that generalization means simplification. History proved that not every Jews treat the Muslims badly. First, when prophet Muhammad was twelve years old, (585), he accompanied his uncle Abu Thalib in a business trip to Syam. As they reached Boshra, they met a Jewish rabbi named Buhaira. This rabbi asserted that there are three eminent persons namely Buhaira, Rubab al-Syana, and the expected one, who is a young man beside him, namely Muhammad. When Muhammad and Maysarah went to Syam on the other day to run Khadijah’s business (before he married her), Nestor (a Jewish rabbi) testified on Muhammad’s prophethood. Nestor said that he is a prophet. It means that recognition upon Muhammad’s propethood came for the first time from the Jews, namely Buhaira and Nestor.
Second, Mukhayrîq, a Jewish man from Bani Tsa’labah who was smart and rich (he owed many farms and date palm gardens) was a victim of Uhud war. As he listened that there will be battle between Meccan polytheists against Muslim, Mukhayrîq told his fellows to support the Medina Charter. In the Medina Charter, defending Muslims is the right thing. When his fellows protested because the battle was taking place on Sabbath, Mukhayrîq replied that helping Muhammad does not disgrace the Sabbath, and affirmed that Muhammad is his heir. “If only I die in this battle, all of my treasures will go to Muhammad for a matter which God shows him”. Mukhayrîq asserted. Afterward he prepared his sword, went to Uhud hill, fought the polytheists and got killed there. Mukhayrîq was a prototype of Jew who strongly uphold the agreement.
Third, the Jews had helped Muslims in conquering the city of Andalus in Spain. In the age of Abbasid Empire, the Jews –beside the Christians and Sabeans- helped the government’s administration. They were also involved in translating Greek works into Arabic. It is important to expose this historical fact to let the Muslims know that some Jewish groups have an objective perspective and were fair in building relationship with Islam. They are not like what the Muslims think

Liberal Islam Network

By Mona Eltahawy

This essay first appeared on Saudi Debate and then on Muslim WakeUp!, a Muslim blog which “seeks to bring together Muslims and non-Muslims in American and around the globe in efforts that celebrate cultural and spiritual diversity, tolerance, and understanding.” On Muslim WakeUp! it was titled “Copenhagen Sharia Conference Celebrates ‘Heresy.’” Mona Eltahawy has worked for Reuters and is a commentator and an internaitonl lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues who is based in New York.

The views and opinions expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect those of the creator of this blog and are the sole responsibility of the author. Essays expressing opinions similar to and counter to those of the creator of this blog are strictly for diversity and to start thoughtful and meaningful discussion.

This summer at the end of a day-long conference in Copenhagen on freedom of expression in the Arab world a young man with slightly faltering Arabic asked to speak to me.

“Would you give me one example of why freedom of expression and democracy are good things?” he asked after introducing himself as Abdel-Hamid. He apologized for what he described as his basic Arabic, explaining that he was born and raised in Denmark to Arab parents.

At first I thought his question was a joke. The other conference speakers and I had spent hours explaining how the sorry lack of freedom of expression had harmed Arab civil society. And surely as a Dane he appreciated the democracy and freedoms he enjoyed?

“No, really, tell me,” he persisted. “Democracy is the rule of the people. Islam is the rule of the Sharia. So what’s good about democracy and freedom of expression?”

When I realized he was serious – and when I began to see the direction his argument was heading – I dragged out my usual defense to his line of thinking: whose version of Sharia, I asked him? Iran? Turkey? Saudi Arabia? Egypt, my country of birth?

“The Sharia of God,” he adamantly replied.

“There is no such thing,” I told Abdel-Hamid.

That was essentially the message at another conference that took me back to Copenhagen in November at which speaker after speaker bemoaned the Muslim fundamentalist reduction of Sharia to a set of laws.

It has become fashionable among radical Muslims in the West to long for the application of Sharia. Abdel-Hamid, my summer Copenhagen interlocutor and adherent to the idea that there was only one kind of Sharia – that of God -, identified himself as a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the radical Islamist group that wants to reestablish the Caliphate and does not believe Islam is compatible with democracy.

In many parts of the Muslim world, what the State has deemed Islamic is slapped with the label “Sharia”. So when a murderer or a drug dealer is beheaded in Saudi Arabia, it is ostensibly out of adherence to Sharia.

When a dictator or a regime feels the need to burnish their Islamic credentials – often at a time of growing radical Muslim opposition – they make their country’s legislation “more Islamic”. Take Pakistan’s late President General. Zia ul-Haq who in 1979 introduced the Hudood Ordinances, notorious not so much for making Pakistan “more Islamic” but for punishing rather than protecting women who have been raped.

Under the Hudood Ordinances, a rape victim had to produce four male witnesses to prove the crime or face the possibility of prosecution for adultery. President Gen. Pervez Musharraf on Dec. 1 signed into law an amendment to the controversial rape statute to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault cases. Thousands of Islamists gathered at separate events throughout Pakistan to protest the changes.

One has to wonder what kind of Islam those protestors follow and how it came to be so shamefully reduced to an obsession over sex and women.

As the Associated Press reported, under the new law, called the Protection of Women Bill, judges can choose whether a rape case should be tried in a criminal court - where the four-witness rule would not apply - or under the old Islamic law, i.e. the Hudood Ordinance.

And that is exactly the lie at the heart of the calls for Sharia. Why are there criminal courts in which the old Islamic law does not apply? In many Muslim countries, the justice system has been modernized and has adopted either Roman or Napoleonic law, with the exception of one area which stubbornly remains caught in the cobweb of edicts issued by Muslim scholars who lived centuries ago – family law. In other words, in many Muslim countries Sharia is used only to govern the lives of women and children with regards to marriage, divorce and custody of children.

How refreshing therefore it was to hear Emory University law professor Abdullahi An-Nai’m point out that lie at the heart of the calls for Sharia by saying it was essentially an attempt to “protect a patriarchal system by calling it Sharia”.

“I need a secular state to be the kind of Muslim I need to be,” he told the conference.

As Egyptian liberal Muslim scholar Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid noted, “Sharia” these days means nothing more than the “haram” (forbidden) and the “halal” (permissible).

The definition of Sharia as law is based on 500 verses of the Quran, Abu Zeid reminded us – that is just 16 percent of the Quran.

It was a relief to hear Abdel-Hamid’s adamant theory debunked in his own city – and how I wish he was there to hear. But more importantly, Abu Zeid, An-Nai’m and their fellow speakers were crafting the instruments by which all of the Muslims who were present could take the Sharia argument apart.

In a climate of growing right-wing anti-Muslim rhetoric, particularly in Europe, some in the Muslim community find it difficult to stand up to radical Islamist posturing on Sharia. Such hesitation is often based on a mix of reluctance to openly criticize fellow Muslims – so as to not contribute to a further demonization of Muslims – and ignorance as to exactly what the word Sharia means and what the concept entails.

The conference, called “Sharia in a modern context”, was organized by Democratic Muslims, a liberal Muslim group that was launched as an alternative to the voices of radical imams in Denmark during the controversy that surrounded publication of cartoons featuring Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten.

If the talks given by each speaker represented the tools which we could use to dismantle the Sharia argument, then the lives of the speakers themselves were the starkest examples of the danger of Islamist ideology run amok.

None of the speakers lives in his country of birth. That is a sad testament to the dangerously conservative environment in many Muslim countries today. But the speakers’ presence at the conference and at the various western universities where they teach were testaments to their courage and determination to continue their fearless work.

Abu Zeid, Ibn Rushd Chair of Humanism and Islam at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands, is former Professor of Arabic literature at Cairo University. In 1995 a Cairo appeals court sided with Muslim fundamentalists who raised a case to demand Abu Zeid divorce his wife on the ground of his alleged apostasy. The fundamentalists accused Abu Zeid of apostasy because of his liberal theories on Islam.
The day the appeals court issued its verdict, I was a correspondent with Reuters News Agency in Cairo. I clearly remember typing an urgent bulletin announcing the verdict while thinking it was time to buy a one-way ticket out of my country.

After the court’s verdict against Abu Zeid, Ayman al-Zawahri – who is today al-Qaeda’s number two but in 1995 was head of the Egyptian terrorist group Islamic Jihad – called for the scholar’s murder. Abu Zeid and his wife, fellow academic Ibtihal Younes, left for The Netherlands where they have lived and taught since.
An-Nai’m, an internationally recognized scholar of Islam and human rights, and Mohamed Mahmoud, who teaches comparative religion at Tufts University in Boston, were both students of Sudanese Muslim reformer Mahmoud Taha who was publicly executed for his liberal views by then President Jaafar Nimeri whose introduction of Sharia was opposed by Taha.

Bassam Tibi, a Syrian-born German political scientist who is Professor of International Relations in Goettingen, received a death threat in Karachi when he told a conference that Sharia was not divine.

His points were particularly pertinent to a Europe increasingly struggling with ways to react to radical Islamists. While lamenting European governments’ habit of turning to the most conservative in the Muslim community to speak on its behalf he vowed “In the name of multiculturalism I will not accept cultural rights as a cover for Sharia”.

“I believe in Sharia as morality not as state law,” he said. “I am not willing to shut up about human rights abuses by Islamists just because of the right wing. They are my enemy too.”

“Islamophobia is the weapon of Islamists to silence critics. I do not believe Europe will become Islamist – that is the fantasy of both Islamists and the right wing,” Tibi said. “Are European Muslims committed to democracy or political Islam and Sharia? The debate should take place in Europe.”

One of the best ways to stimulate such a debate is to highlight the views of the scholars who spoke at the conference both within the Muslim community and outside it.

It is imperative that non-Muslims hear the vigorous debates that are taking place between Muslims over controversial issues such as Sharia. The argument between Abdel-Hamid and me is the best proof that Muslim thought is not monolithic.

How representative are we? That is the question most often asked of those of us who call ourselves liberal Muslims. I will let An-Nai’m and Abu Zeid reply:

“Is my voice the minority or the majority? That is a value judgment,”An-Nai’m said. “The question instead should be is my voice loud enough? Islamists blow themselves up and they make the news. My lecture on human rights doesn’t make the news.”

“Islamic transformation is underway,” he added. “My view is demographically representative of the majority of Muslims but it is not very loud……Who defines what Islam is? Islam is what Muslims make of it. Heresy? I celebrate heresy.”

Abu Zeid simply asked “Who said reformation comes out of the majority?”

“We shouldn’t be ashamed of being the minority,” he added. “Mohammed and his people were a minority at first.”

And if you’re wondering what example I gave to prove to Abdel-Hamid that democracy and freedom of expression were good things, all I had to do was point to him and say “you are my proof”.

Hizb-ut-Tahrir is banned in most Muslims countries whereas in Denmark the organization is legal and operates openly.

Muslims and Sharia: The Real Sharia, Democracy, and Patriarchy « The Mustard Seed

Political Islam and The Future of Democracy in the Middle East

By Radwan A. Masmoudi
President, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy

Since 2003, the Bush administration, and President Bush in particular, has talked constantly about promoting democracy in the Middle East but has actually done very little to achieve this objective.  The Iraq war notwithstanding – democracy promotion was actually an afterthought in Iraq – U.S. foreign policies continue to support oppressive regimes in the region and reward authoritarian rulers who falsify elections and oppress their people, with more economic and security assistance.  While the ‘hyper-talk’ about democracy promotion initially raised the hopes and expectations of many in the region, it later only served to discredit the intellectuals, leaders, and activists who have been struggling for freedom and democracy for decades.  If we hope to achieve long-term peace, stability, and development in the Middle East, and in the world, we must end our double standards and stop supporting oppressive and illegitimate governments in the Middle East.

Deep Crisis in the Muslim World

There is a serious crisis in the Muslim world, one that has manifested itself in many ways:  from rising levels of poverty and unemployment, to lack of education, to growing corruption, violence, and wars.  Terrorism is, of course, the most violent form of this rage and anger, which finds its roots in the terrible conditions that millions of people, especially young people, find themselves in today.  Western and American media pundits increasingly blame Islam for the rising violence in the Middle East, but the reality is that the roots of violence and extremism lie in the despair, anger, frustrations, and humiliation that most Arabs and Muslims feel and which they believe is caused by their corrupt and inefficient governments, and the West which continues to support them.  Yes, some extremists use Islam to justify their crimes against humanity, but the governments also “use” this violence to suffocate any genuine efforts or calls for reforms and accountability.  Most of all, this crisis in the Muslim world is the result of bad governance, poor strategic thinking and planning, and lack of freedoms, dignity, and respect for inalienable human rights.  First and foremost, it is the twin curse of corruption and oppression that is at the core of all these problems.  As global citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims who are concerned about the future of the Muslim world in this increasingly interconnected “global village,” it is imperative that we develop and implement a strategy for resolving this crisis.  Of course, there is no short-term magical fix to all these problems, but the most important and urgent component of this strategy must be good and participatory governance. 

Why Democracy, and Why Now?

Change in the Middle East is inevitable, and the only question is what kind of change:  will it be slow, peaceful, and progressively move us toward real democracy, or will it be violent and revolutionary, and lead us toward another form of dictatorship.  To guard against anarchy and the possibility of a theocratic state, we need a strong coalition of moderate reformers and democrats (both moderate Islamists and secularists) who trust one another and work together for the public interest.  Arab democrats need to develop a consensus on what democracy means, how it can work in their societies, and how to encourage progressive, modern, and moderate interpretations of Islam.

Real democratization requires pressure from inside and out.  Pressure from within at this time is coming mostly from Islamic movements that have the popular support needed to push for reforms in their respective countries, but pressure from the outside is also important to prevent violence and radicalization, and to give hope to millions of people who want an elected, representative and accountable government.  This means that the US must accept and support democracy even if moderate Islamic movements, and not secularists, receive the majority of votes.  Supporting dictators is not only morally wrong, it also undermines peace and stability, and promotes violence and extremism in the region for decades to come.

Secularity or Secularism?

With few exceptions, most Arab countries are ruled by a corrupt and secular elite that is benefiting from the status quo.  This elite is afraid of what democracy might bring, so they do everything they can to scare the US and the West of what democracy may bring.  The secular elite is increasingly marginalized, isolated, authoritarian, and corrupt.  They are neither genuine secularists nor democrats, but they raise these flags to seek support from the West.  Being elitist, they have no grassroots or popular support, and they discourage popular participation in the political system because they do not trust the people to keep them in power.  External pressure is absolutely necessary to convince them that democracy is the only way to bring about economic development, stability, and rule of law.

Secularity was developed in Europe as a reaction to the Church’s control of governments during the Middle Ages.  The Muslim world was never ruled by a religious clergy, with the exception of modern-day Iran where the clerics took control after the Iranian people overthrew the Shah’s oppressive government.  Complete separation between religious values and politics is impossible in the Muslim world, while separation between religious and political institutions is necessary.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when democracy was being developed and implemented in Europe, there was fear that the Catholic Church would be an obstacle to democracy, but the “Christian Democratic” movement grew and defended the idea that democracy was compatible with Christianity.  In the Muslim world, we are seeing the birth of “Muslim democrats” who are advancing and advocating similar ideas.

We must come to accept and understand that it will indeed take time for people to discern the proper relationship between religion and politics, and between religious scholars and elected political leaders.  Ultimately, people are smart and do not want to live under any form of tyranny, whether secular or religious.

How to engage and support Moderate Islamists: 

What does “Islamist” mean and what do Islamic movements stand for?  While extremist and radical fringe groups exist, the overwhelming majority of those who call themselves “Islamists” reject violence and theocracy, and simply want to reform their societies based on Islamic values of justice, equality, and accountability. In short, they want a democratic form of government that respects Islamic values without imposing them on citizens or on society.  Moderate Islamic movements today range from the Justice and Development Parties in Turkey and Morocco, to the reform Islah or Wasat parties in Kuwait, Yemen, and Jordan.  Prominent moderate Islamist leaders include Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, Saadeddine al-Othmani in Morocco, and Abdulwaheed in Indonesia.  A Gallup Poll conducted in 2006 in ten Muslim-majority countries showed that the overwhelming majority (between than 70-90% in Egypt and Pakistan) want a democratic government, but also want Shari’ah (Islamic law) to be either the main or the only source of legislation in their countries.  This means that they want a democracy governed by Islamic principles, and they reject both theocracy and secular democracy. The majority wants “religious leaders” to be advisors to the lawmakers, and not become lawmakers or politicians themselves.

One of the main challenges for democracy in the Arab and Muslim world is the growing popularity of Islamic movements and/or political Islam, and the relative weakness of secular groups and movements.  The concern that many people have is that Islamist movements will not respect democracy and abide by its rules, if and when they come to power. It is important to remember that the support Islamist parties enjoy today did not exist 20 or 30 years ago and is clearly the result of the despair and hopelessness to which these failed states have led their populations.  Out of despair, people, and especially young people, are turning to Islam, and sometimes to a distorted and extremist interpretation of Islam, as their last hope to unite, mobilize, and cure the ills of their societies.

There are many positive and encouraging signs that Islamic parties and movements are now convinced of the necessity of political participation, democratization, and reforms as the only way to resolve the myriad of problems and challenges that their societies face (such as 30% unemployment rate, 50-60% illiteracy rate, while more than 50% of the population is under the age of 20).  There are also indications that when Islamic parties come to power or parliament through the ballot box, they become more pragmatic, and much less ideological or intransigent.  Politics, after all, is the art of compromise, and Islamists learn this art when they get involved in politics.  Certainly the experience of the Justice and Development party in Turkey is a good model for other Islamist parties to follow.  This is why what Daniel Pipes, and others like him, recommend (to consider all Islamists as enemies) is not only wrong but will lead to disastrous results. It will swell the ranks of the Islamists and even of the extremists, and it will turn the entire Muslim world against us.  Talk about “self-fulfilling prophecies!”

Three facts can prevent and guard against the danger of monopolization of Islam by Islamic movements.  First, since there is no organized clergy (at least in Sunni Islam), no one individual or group can claim to represent God on Earth. Second, we actually need multiple Islamic parties in each country so that none of them can claim to speak on behalf of Islam.  Islamic movements represent various interpretations (conservative or otherwise) of Islam and competition among them would provide for healthy debate and interaction. Finally, secular forces and groups need to develop a better understanding for the importance of religion in their countries, and must understand that being portrayed as anti-Islamic or anti-religious will severely hurt their prospects of gaining sufficient political representation. They must develop a new paradigm that makes it clear that it is possible to be secular and religious at the same time.

Islamist parties have evolved tremendously within the past 10 to 15 years and we can no longer continue to judge their intentions.  There are ambiguities in the platform of every group, Islamist or otherwise, and there is no guarantee that secular parties will be democratic either.  In fact, some of the worst oppressors in history and in the Arab world were secular.  In democracy, the only safeguard is to build strong institutions and educate the public about their rights and duties as active citizens; constitutional guarantees are worthless without an educated and mobilized citizenry. We need to establish clear mechanisms to guard against abuses.  Normative consensus on issues such as definitions of democracy, rules of the game, and the idea of pacts also need to be articulated. 

The participation of Islamist parties in the political process is essential for strengthening political reforms and democratization — it is impossible for democracy to prosper while 30 to 40 percent of the population is excluded from the political process.  The agendas of Islamic parties now focus on economic development, fighting corruption, reducing illiteracy, building an independent judiciary, and not the implementation of Shari’ah punishments (hudud).  Most Islamist parties no longer call for the implementation of Shari’ah punishments as they did 15 or 20 years ago.  Their main priority is good governance, transparency, and fighting corruption, poverty, and illiteracy.

Recent experiences in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan have been disappointing, and Muslims find themselves searching for different and more positive democratic models in the Arab and Muslim world. Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia are now becoming the models for both Islamists and secularists.  Modern Islamists today look at Turkey as a model, much more than they look at Iran, which has unfortunately become a theocracy and restricted the freedoms and choices of its citizens.  Turkey, on the other hand, is a model of a very progressive and democratic Muslim state, where the state itself is secular but the society is deeply religious.  The state is not and should not be in the business of imposing religion or forcing people to practice any particular religion; imposing religion is, in Islam, strongly discouraged as it generally turns people away from religion instead of bringing them closer.
Political parties become popular when they reflect the values and principles of the people — and religion is a big part of those values.  Islamic parties should not be excluded from the political system, but should be allowed to participate actively and peacefully in the democratization process of their societies and countries.  This process will take time — years and perhaps decades — but it is the only way to bring real tangible peace, stability, and development to the Muslim world.

What can the US do?

For the past 40 to 50 years, different US administrations have supported secular dictators in the Arab and Muslim world, and this has produced dysfunctional political systems, in which both corruption and oppression are prevalent. As a result, the idea of secularism has been discredited in popular eyes as it is now associated with corruption and tyranny. Hence the current choice is almost between a “secular tyranny” (i.e., the status quo in the Arab world) or an “Islamic democracy.”

One of the most disappointing developments occurred after the 2005 elections in Egypt and the 2006 elections in Palestine when the US seems to have suddenly lost its appetite for democracy in the Middle East for fear that the Islamists were going to win.  For more than 20 years, Arab governments have been using the “Islamist threat” as justification for the lack of accountability, freedoms, and democracy.  It is shameful for the West, and truly catastrophic for the region, to continue to support discredited regimes under the belief that they provide stability or the promise of reforms and development.  The real lesson of the last 40 to 50 years in the Arab world — and much of the Islamic world — is that neither long-term development nor stability is possible without real democracy, transparency, and accountability.  It is time for the US and Europe to support voices for genuine reforms, freedoms, and democracy in the region.  Democracy in the Arab world and in the foreseeable future will have a more or less “Islamic flavor”.  This is normal, natural, and in the long run, a healthy development which will ultimately lead to the modernization and reinterpretation of Islamic principles for the twenty-first century.

Ijithad and the Reinterpretation of Islamic Texts:

The effort to re-open the door of Ijtihad (rational thinking), to reinterpret Islamic texts and modernize Islamic thought is not new.  It started at the end of the nineteenth century with famous reformers, such as Al-Afghani, Abduh, al-Kawakibi, and many other prominent scholars.  It was delayed or slowed down by the struggle for independence for about 50 years, and then by oppressive and corrupt regimes for another 50 years.  However, it is now back on track and is moving at a much quicker pace, and it is on the agenda everywhere — in the United States, in Europe, and in every Muslim country.  I believe that American and European Muslims are called upon to lead in this effort as we enjoy the freedom, the means, and the opportunity to create the atmosphere necessary to foster democratization.

The relationship between religion and the state needs further investigation and clarification. Religious beliefs and practices should not be controlled by the state as this damages both the state and religion. In CSID conferences, we make it a point always to bring both secularists and Islamists together and encourage them to develop joint objectives and strategies.  They all agree, for example, that they want a democracy governed by Islamic values, but one in which individual rights are protected and equal rights and duties are accorded to all citizens, irrespective of their ethnic, religious background, or gender.  “Equal rights for all citizens” is an essential component of real democracy, and of justice, which is a basic tenet in Islam.  The Qur’an clearly states:  “ And say: “The truth is from your Lord.” Then whosoever wills, let him believe, and whosoever wills, let him disbelieve.” And Prophet Muhammad told his governor/emissaries:  “Don’t speak by the name of God.  Don’t speak as a representative of God.  Speak as a human not as a God.  You don’ know exactly what the will of God is”

There are many political and religious questions that need to be studied and clarified today, and they require Muslim leaders and scholars to come up with new answers and interpretations of Islamic texts.  However, Ijtihad cannot happen under dictatorships that stifle dissent and forbid free debates and discussions.  This is another reason democracy is and should be a priority for the Muslim world because without it, there can be no real or meaningful Ijtihad, and consequently Muslims will continue to live in ignorant and backward socities.

What can all we do?

It goes without saying that democracy and good governance cannot and should not be imposed or imported, but they certainly can and must be supported.  Reformers in the Arab and Muslim world have been working and pushing for democracy and good governance for decades, but they have received little support or encouragement from the outside world.  It is time for this to change, and it is our duty and obligation to provide Arab and Muslim democrats with as much support and encouragement as needed.  Our support begins by providing the intellectual and philosophical support for the simple and basic truth that Islam and democracy are indeed compatible.  Without doing so, democracy will not become accepted by the masses and democratic cultures and ideals will not become imbedded in local cultures and traditions.  The Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) is in the best position to demonstrate this. 

Second, we need to convince the US and European governments and policy-makers that they must stop their support for oppressive and authoritarian rulers in the Arab and Muslim world.  Even though these dictators claim that they are providing stability for the region, the reality is that they are creating the perfect conditions for despair and hopelessness that will only lead to further violence, extremism, and turmoil. 

Third, we need to engage and support moderate Islamists who are trying to be both true to their religion while adopting and accepting democracy, modernity, and development.  Building strong coalitions between moderate Islamists (i.e., those who reject violence and accept democracy) with secularists is the only way to challenge the status quo and provide a real democratic alternative to the untenable and discredited rulers and regimes.  Most of the Islamists in the Arab and Muslim world are in fact moderate, and it would be a wrong and dangerous to lump all Islamists together, and to call them extremists or terrorists.

Since 1999, CSID has developed and implemented a strategy for achieving these objectives, by:

Organizing conferences and seminars to bring democrats together (both moderate Islamists, secularists, and others),
Educating the masses about democracy, how it works, and its compatibility with Islam,
Establishing a Network of Democrats in the Arab World (NDAW) and providing them with training and support,
Lobbying the US government and policy-makers to stop supporting dictators and to engage and support democrats.

CSID has organized conferences on Islam and democracy in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, Nigeria, and Tunisia, and more than 20 other countries.  The reason we have been able to organize such activities has to do with the huge credibility and connections that CSID has established throughout the Arab and Muslim world during the past eight years.  Our credibility and strong network of friends and colleagues (among Arab and Muslim reformers) is unmatched.  This growing network — which again includes both secularists and moderate Islamists — is capable of pushing for significant dialogue and reforms in their respective countries.
As a result, we are making a difference.  More than 1,500 political and religious leaders and scholars have attended our workshops and conferences, and more than 2,000 people in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, and Jordan have been trained through our “Islam & Democracy — Toward Effective Citizenship” textbooks and workshops.  The demand for both, however, is much greater, and our dream is to train 5,000 people per country, per year, for the next ten years. 

For the first time in history, secular leaders and moderate Islamist leaders are starting to work together in many countries, learning to build trust and strong coalitions for positive and meaningful reforms.  The Network of Democrats in the Arab World is growing and has provided training on leadership skills, communication skills, consensus building, and conflict-resolution skills to hundreds of members and NGO leaders.  US and European governments are beginning to realize that it is against their interests (not to mention their values) to promote oppressive regimes in the Arab/Muslim world and are starting to put real pressure on these regimes to reform and democratize. 

Our long-term goal is that both the US and European governments, with the help of the international community as a whole, will work with and support governments that are serious about democracy and are achieving real progress toward it, while isolating governments that reject democracy and continue to oppress their people.

Conclusion

Violence and terrorism cannot prosper or exist in democratic societies or countries.  The calls for freedom and democracy are not new in the Arab and Muslim world.  Arab and Muslims have struggled for freedom and democracy for decades (there were close to 200,000 political prisoners in the Arab world in 2000, according to Amnesty International). For decades, the US and the West have turned their back to democrats and reformers in the Arab and Muslim world and have supported authoritarian and oppressive regimes, believing that short term stability is better than long term development and progress.  It is hypocritical for the US, the “great supporter of democracy” to be so supportive of dictatorships that are harmful to their people.

Democracy is coming to the Arab and Muslim world, whether we know it or not, and with or without our support.  These regimes and governments are too weak, too discredited, and too corrupt to last much longer.  The only question, then, is whether we as Americans and as free people of the world will support the aspirations for freedom, democracy, and dignity in the Arab and Muslim world, or whether we will go back to supporting Arab dictators and “doing business as usual” with corrupt and unpopular regimes.  It is in the long-term interest and benefit of the US to support the Arab and Muslim people’s aspirations to freedom and democracy so that we can build future relations based on respect, dignity, and mutual understanding.

We have made significant progress in the democratization of the Arab and Muslim world, with some disappointing and significant setbacks in 2006 and 2007.  Nonetheless, it is likely that we will see real and successful democracies in the Arab world within the next ten years if we pull our resources together as an international community.  In any case, we have no choice but to do our best to make sure democratization does come about because the alternative is more violence, more extremism, and less stability.

© Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy, 2004. All rights reserved.

Please visit the Center for the Study of Islam & Democracy site at http://www.csidonline.org

The American Muslim (TAM)

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Rowan Williams - the titular head of the 77-million strong worldwide Anglican Church - ignited a huge controversy last week when he suggested in a lecture in the Royal Courts of Law that Britain should adopt certain aspects of Shariah law. This was done with the benign intention of integrating into British law the practices and beliefs of Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims.

However, the archbishop’s apparent suggestion that Muslims could opt out of secular common law for separate arbitration and judgement in Islamic religious courts created the impression of one law for Muslims and another for everybody else.

This incendiary idea (subsequently corrected by the archbishop) provoked a furor about states within states and a widespread fear that any license granted to Shariah law would also license its more extreme aspects. Unfortunately, the media storm masked the real message of the speech, which concerned the authority of the secular state and its impact on religious minorities in general and Muslims in particular.

For the genuine target of the archbishop’s lecture is the increasingly authoritarian and anti-religious nature of the modern liberal state. Militant secularism has forbidden head scarves and wall-mounted crucifixes in France. It has also banned Roman Catholic adoption agencies in Britain for not selecting same-sex couples as potential foster parents. Under the banner of free speech, secular Italian leftists recently prevented Pope Benedict XVI from addressing La Sapienza University in Rome on the subject of rational enquiry.

Williams’ legitimate religious concerns with freedom of conscience tie in with wider Western worries about the consequences of failing to integrate a growing, devout and alienated Islamic minority within a relativistic and increasingly aggressive secular culture.

However, the solution proposed by the archbishop repeats the errors of 1960s liberal multiculturalism. In conjuring up the idea of communities sharing the same space but leading separate lives, he unwittingly endorses a scenario that entrenches segregation and fractures any conception of a common good binding all citizens. Despite this, Williams at least recognizes that Britain is struggling to find a way of accommodating its increasingly ghettoized and radicalized Muslim population.

Clearly, the integration of Islam into secular democracies is a challenge that confronts the Western world as a whole and Europe in particular. Regrettably, there are problems with all the existing secular models of integration. British and Dutch versions of multiculturalism hoped to ensure the equal rights of all citizens, but both countries - in abandoning the cultural cohesion based around religion - lost the very medium in which majorities and minorities could share.

Germany eschewed its own Christian legacy in favor of an ethnic account of its identity. Though it grants generous socio-economic rights, the German model still refuses Muslim "guest workers" citizenship and thus participation in civic life.

In France, the Republican ideal appeals to immigrants, but its secular reality denies the primary religious form of their identity. Moreover, the Muslim population is discriminated against in the labor market and tends to be confined to the banlieues. The French model’s refusal to accommodate religion prevents France from broadening its concept of French identity.

The trouble with all the European models is that they enshrine the primacy of secular law over and against religious principles. Far from ensuring neutrality and tolerance, the secular European state arrogates to itself the right to control and legislate all spheres of life; state constraints apply especially to religion and its civic influence. Legally, secularism outlaws any rival source of sovereignty or legitimacy. Politically, secularism denies religion any import in public debate and decision-making. Culturally, secularism enforces its own norms and standards upon all other belief systems. In consequence, the liberal promise of equality amounts to little more than the secular imposition of sameness. As such, contemporary liberalism is unable to recognize religions in their own right or grant them their proper autonomy.

By contrast, the United States offers a strong integrated vision that allows for the public expression of religion under the auspices of a state that guarantees not just individual rights but also the autonomy of religious communities. Even though minorities in the United States have suffered discrimination, the American model of religious integration explicitly shields religion from excessive state interference. Thus loyalty to the state is not necessarily in conflict with loyalty to one’s faith. Perhaps this explains why American Muslims appear more integrated and less alienated than their European counterparts. In part, this is because the European Enlightenment sought to protect the state from religion, whereas the American settlement aimed to protect religion from the state.

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Integrating Islam into the West - International Herald Tribune

Freedom and Islam in Turkey

By SOLI OZEL
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
February 15, 2008

ISTANBUL, Turkey

These are tumultuous times for Turkey. Even in a land accustomed to turmoil, the head-spinning developments of the past few weeks are phenomenal — and, for some, unsettling. On the line are Turkey’s credentials as a secular, liberal-democratic country with a majority Muslim population.

Foremost among these developments was the move to allow women to cover their heads in universities. The change engendered fierce opposition, including from hard-core secularists whose commitment to liberal democracy is at best suspect. The judiciary, most university rectors and many academics predicted catastrophe and a return to dark ages for women, as uncovered students may feel pressure to toe the line. Some opponents argued that the freedom to wear the headscarf would be extended to secondary education, de facto if not de jure, in due time.

More interesting was the impact of the move on secular circles, including academics who have a deep commitment to liberal values and democracy and who supported the lifting of the headscarf ban in principle. Over the last five years, these groups have supported every major effort by the ruling party to expand the space of individual freedoms and deepen Turkish democracy.

Yet some of these secular democrats expressed concern at the way the ruling party, the religiously conservative AKP, pushed the matter through the parliament as a constitutional amendment. They argued that the draft of a new more liberal constitution that would end all infringements on fundamental rights was already at hand. And there were other long-pending laws to change — notably the notorious Article 301 of the penal code against "insulting Turkishness" — that were also directly related to fundamental rights and liberties.

As if to underline these secular democrats’ point, the AKP is acting as if it has run out of breath for further reform, even EU-related changes, despite its overwhelming electoral victory in last July’s elections. Instead, AKP leaders seem more interested in promoting their own idea of piety. Together, these impressions have bolstered secularists’ assessment that the AKP cares only about religious freedoms.

The unconditional supporters of the headscarf move in the secular-democrat camp accused their former comrades-in arms, still staunchly opposed to lifting the ban, of not being true liberals. For them, a true democrat would rejoice whenever and wherever liberties flourished. To suggest otherwise would mean that there is a hierarchy among different causes. In their minds, this attitude would betray a residual Kemalism among the protagonists, with all the authoritarian-secularist and modernist implications of the term in today’s Turkey.

The story is more complicated still. "Lifting the ban" is actually a misnomer: The "ban" stemmed from constitutional court decisions in 1989 and 1991 that struck down a law permitting the headscarf in universities. However, there is no statute that specifically outlaws the wearing of the headscarf at universities.

In fact, Atatürk’s much-celebrated efforts to modernize Turks by governing their attire were limited to men. Out went the fez and in came the top hat — but the father of the Republic imposed nothing on women. That said, women were expected to go along with the Westernization. In time, "looking Western" became as much a sign of the elite as it was a symbol of modernity. And here lies the crux of the headscarf controversy.

As Turkey modernized, traditional segments of the population began to partake of urban life and created their own forms of integration. The modern headscarf, or turban, which exposes no hair and unlike other scarves covers part of the face, facilitated the appearance of women in public spaces. They attended universities and became professionals, public intellectuals, journalists. In time, a wide variety of dressing styles and colorful outfits, including tight blue jeans, flourished among them. Modernity for them no longer meant looking like a Westerner. Equally, to be pious did not negate modernity.

This fundamental shift in Turkey’s social composition and understanding of modernity must be understood in order to make sense of what is happening now in the country. Ultimately, such a confrontation is necessary if there is to be a liberal-secular-democratic synthesis in a Muslim society.

Obviously, lifting the ban is a case of fundamental freedoms: The state should have no right to prohibit students from wearing a particular outfit. Many observers also saw the matter as a clear case of religious freedom against coercive secularism. This part of the argument is incontrovertible.

Yet there is also no doubt that the ruling party mishandled the issue, generating much unnecessary tension. This is why it is highly likely that the political storm will continue. President Abdullah Gül has yet to sign the changes into law, and the courts are eagerly waiting to rule on the new statute’s compatibility with the principle of secularism. Because of the government’s carelessness, students who don headscarves may remain in a limbo for a while longer.

Turkey is trying hard to deepen its democracy and liberalize its secularism. The political class must rise to the occasion — particularly the AKP, whose fate is much more tightly linked to political liberalization and the EU membership process than its leadership realizes. Keep watching.

Mr. Ozel teaches international relations at Bilgi University.

Freedom and Islam in Turkey - WSJ.com

CAIRO (AFP) — Egyptian authorities on Thursday arrested 36 members of the opposition Muslim Brotherhood in dawn raids, a security source said, ahead of key local elections in April.

The arrests were made in Manufiya and Sharqiya in the Nile Delta and in Fayum, south of Cairo, the source said.

“They are accused of belonging to an illegal organisation,” the source told AFP.

The Brotherhood says a continued clampdown by the authorities is aimed at preventing its members from running in local elections in April.

The Muslim Brotherhood is officially banned in Egypt, but it holds more than a fifth of the seats in parliament although its representatives sit as “independents” because of its illegal status.

Traditionally controlled by the ruling National Democratic Party, the municipal polls are now expected to draw fierce competition after a constitutional amendment was passed in 2005.

The amendment requires independent presidential candidates to also secure the backing of municipal council members.

It stipulates that candidates who do not belong to an official party must gather signatures from 250 elected officials, including 65 from parliament’s lower house, 25 from the upper house and from 10 municipal council members.

The municipal elections were postponed for two years in 2006, in what observers say was a way to avoid another Muslim Brotherhood election success following the Islamist group’s shock gains in the 2005 legislative polls.

Egypt police arrest 36 Muslim Brotherhood members (AFP)

By Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst

Published: February 14, 2008

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Rowan Williams - the titular head of the 77-million strong worldwide Anglican Church - ignited a huge controversy last week when he suggested in a lecture in the Royal Courts of Law that Britain should adopt certain aspects of Shariah law. This was done with the benign intention of integrating into British law the practices and beliefs of Britain’s 1.8 million Muslims.

However, the archbishop’s apparent suggestion that Muslims could opt out of secular common law for separate arbitration and judgement in Islamic religious courts created the impression of one law for Muslims and another for everybody else.

This incendiary idea (subsequently corrected by the archbishop) provoked a furor about states within states and a widespread fear that any license granted to Shariah law would also license its more extreme aspects. Unfortunately, the media storm masked the real message of the speech, which concerned the authority of the secular state and its impact on religious minorities in general and Muslims in particular.

For the genuine target of the archbishop’s lecture is the increasingly authoritarian and anti-religious nature of the modern liberal state. Militant secularism has forbidden head scarves and wall-mounted crucifixes in France. It has also banned Roman Catholic adoption agencies in Britain for not selecting same-sex couples as potential foster parents. Under the banner of free speech, secular Italian leftists recently prevented Pope Benedict XVI from addressing La Sapienza University in Rome on the subject of rational enquiry.

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Williams’ legitimate religious concerns with freedom of conscience tie in with wider Western worries about the consequences of failing to integrate a growing, devout and alienated Islamic minority within a relativistic and increasingly aggressive secular culture.

However, the solution proposed by the archbishop repeats the errors of 1960s liberal multiculturalism. In conjuring up the idea of communities sharing the same space but leading separate lives, he unwittingly endorses a scenario that entrenches segregation and fractures any conception of a common good binding all citizens. Despite this, Williams at least recognizes that Britain is struggling to find a way of accommodating its increasingly ghettoized and radicalized Muslim population.

Clearly, the integration of Islam into secular democracies is a challenge that confronts the Western world as a whole and Europe in particular. Regrettably, there are problems with all the existing secular models of integration. British and Dutch versions of multiculturalism hoped to ensure the equal rights of all citizens, but both countries - in abandoning the cultural cohesion based around religion - lost the very medium in which majorities and minorities could share.

Germany eschewed its own Christian legacy in favor of an ethnic account of its identity. Though it grants generous socio-economic rights, the German model still refuses Muslim “guest workers” citizenship and thus participation in civic life.

In France, the Republican ideal appeals to immigrants, but its secular reality denies the primary religious form of their identity. Moreover, the Muslim population is discriminated against in the labor market and tends to be confined to the banlieues. The French model’s refusal to accommodate religion prevents France from broadening its concept of French identity.

The trouble with all the European models is that they enshrine the primacy of secular law over and against religious principles. Far from ensuring neutrality and tolerance, the secular European state arrogates to itself the right to control and legislate all spheres of life; state constraints apply especially to religion and its civic influence. Legally, secularism outlaws any rival source of sovereignty or legitimacy. Politically, secularism denies religion any import in public debate and decision-making. Culturally, secularism enforces its own norms and standards upon all other belief systems. In consequence, the liberal promise of equality amounts to little more than the secular imposition of sameness. As such, contemporary liberalism is unable to recognize religions in their own right or grant them their proper autonomy.

By contrast, the United States offers a strong integrated vision that allows for the public expression of religion under the auspices of a state that guarantees not just individual rights but also the autonomy of religious communities. Even though minorities in the United States have suffered discrimination, the American model of religious integration explicitly shields religion from excessive state interference. Thus loyalty to the state is not necessarily in conflict with loyalty to one’s faith. Perhaps this explains why American Muslims appear more integrated and less alienated than their European counterparts. In part, this is because the European Enlightenment sought to protect the state from religion, whereas the American settlement aimed to protect religion from the state.

Thus, the real reason for Europe’s failure to integrate Islam is the European commitment to secularism. Only a new settlement with religion can successfully incorporate the growing religious minorities in Western Europe. Secular liberalism is simply incapable of achieving this outcome. Paradoxically, what other faiths require for their proper recognition is the recovery of the indigenous European religious tradition - Christianity. Only Christianity can integrate other religions into a shared European project by acknowledging what secular ideologies cannot: a transcendent objective truth that exceeds human assertion but is open to rational discernment and debate. As such, Christianity outlines a non-secular model of the common good in which all can participate.

Rather than trying to defend religion through the guise of secular multiculturalism, the Archbishop of Canterbury should have been defending religious pluralism through Christianity. What Muslims most object to is not a difference of belief but its absence from European consciousness. Thus the recovery of Christianity in Europe is not a sectarian project but rather the only basis for the political integration of Muslims and peaceful religious coexistence.

Phillip Blond is a senior lecturer in philosophy and theology at the University of Cumbria. Adrian Pabst teaches religion and politics at the University of Nottingham and is a research fellow at the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies.

Integrating Islam into the West (The International Herald Tribune)