The following two articles address the question “Is Islam Compatible with Democracy?” from two different perspectives. The authors reach the same conclusion, though their attitudes about the meaning of that conclusion vary greatly.
By Daniel Pipes, www.FrontPageMagazine.com
There’s an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen – and it’s accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly (”Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?”) concludes that “In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights.”
The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy.
I disagree with that conclusion. Today’s Muslim predicament, rather, reflects historical circumstances more than innate features of Islam. Put differently, Islam, like all pre-modern religions is undemocratic in spirit. No less than the others, however, it has the potential to evolve in a democratic direction.
Such evolution is not easy for any religion. In the Christian case, the battle to limit the Catholic Church’s political role lasted painfully long. If the transition began when Marsiglio of Padua published Defensor pacis in the year 1324, it took another six centuries for the Church fully to reconcile itself to democracy. Why should Islam’s transition be smoother or easier?
To render Islam consistent with democratic ways will require profound changes in its interpretation. For example, the anti-democratic law of Islam, the Shari‘a, lies at the core of the problem. Developed over a millennium ago, it presumes autocratic rulers and submissive subjects, emphasizes God’s will over popular sovereignty, and encourages violent jihad to expand Islam’s borders. Further, it anti-democratically privileges Muslims over non-Muslims, males over females, and free persons over slaves.
For Muslims to build fully functioning democracies, they basically must reject the Shari‘a’s public aspects. Atatürk frontally did just that in Turkey, but others have offered more subtle approaches. Mahmud Muhammad Taha, a Sudanese thinker, dispatched the public Islamic laws by fundamentally reinterpreting the Koran.
Atatürk’s efforts and Taha’s ideas imply that Islam is ever-evolving, and that to see it as unchanging is a grave mistake. Or, in the lively metaphor of Hassan Hanafi, professor of philosophy at the University of Cairo, the Koran “is a supermarket, where one takes what one wants and leaves what one doesn’t want.”
Islam’s problem is less its being anti-modern than that its process of modernization has hardly begun. Muslims can modernize their religion, but that requires major changes: Out go waging jihad to impose Muslim rule, second-class citizenship for non-Muslims, and death sentences for blasphemy or apostasy. In come individual freedoms, civil rights, political participation, popular sovereignty, equality before the law, and representative elections.
Two obstacles stand in the way of these changes, however. In the Middle East especially, tribal affiliations remain of paramount importance. As explained by Philip Carl Salzman in his recent book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, these ties create a complex pattern of tribal autonomy and tyrannical centralism that obstructs the development of constitutionalism, the rule of law, citizenship, gender equality, and the other prerequisites of a democratic state. Not until this archaic social system based on the family is dispatched can democracy make real headway in the Middle East.
Globally, the compelling and powerful Islamist movement obstructs democracy. It seeks the opposite of reform and modernization – namely, the reassertion of the Shari‘a in its entirety. A jihadist like Osama bin Laden may spell out this goal more explicitly than an establishment politician like Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but both seek to create a thoroughly anti-democratic, if not totalitarian, order.
Islamists respond two ways to democracy. First, they denounce it as un-Islamic. Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna considered democracy a betrayal of Islamic values. Brotherhood theoretician Sayyid Qutb rejected popular sovereignty, as did Abu al-A‘la al-Mawdudi, founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami political party. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Al-Jazeera television’s imam, argues that elections are heretical.
Despite this scorn, Islamists are eager to use elections to attain power, and have proven themselves to be agile vote-getters; even a terrorist organization (Hamas) has won an election. This record does not render the Islamists democratic but indicates their tactical flexibility and their determination to gain power. As Erdogan has revealingly explained, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”
Hard work can one day make Islam democratic. In the meanwhile, Islamism represents the world’s leading anti-democratic force.
And for a different perspective on the same question…
By Amir Taheri
www.BenadorAssociates.com
I am glad that this debate takes place in English.
Because, were it to be conducted in any of the languages of our part of the world, we would not have possessed the vocabulary needed.
To understand a civilization it is important to understand its vocabulary.
If it was not on their tongues it is likely that it was not on their minds either.
There was no word in any of the Muslim languages for democracy until the 1890s. Even then the Greek word democracy entered Muslim languages with little change: democrasi in Persian, dimokraytiyah in Arabic, demokratio in Turkish.
Democracy as the proverbial schoolboy would know is based on one fundamental principle: equality.
The Greek word for equal isos is used in more than 200 compound nouns; including isoteos (equality) and Isologia (equal or free speech) and isonomia (equal treatment).
But again we find no equivalent in any of the Muslim languages. The words we have such as barabari in Persian and sawiyah in Arabic mean juxtaposition or leveling.
Nor do we have a word for politics.
The word siassah, now used as a synonym for politics, initially meant whipping stray camels into line. (Sa’es al-kheil is a person who brings back lost camels to the caravan.) The closest translation may be: regimentation.
Nor is there mention of such words as government and the state in the Koran.
It is no accident that early Muslims translated numerous ancient Greek texts but never those related to political matters. The great Avicenna himself translated Aristotle’s Poetics. But there was no translation of Aristotle’s Politics in Persian until 1963.
Lest us return to the issue of equality.
The idea is unacceptable to Islam.
For the non-believer cannot be the equal of the believer.
Even among the believers only those who subscribe to the three so-called Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Ahl el-Kitab) are regarded as fully human.
Here is the hierarchy of human worth in Islam:
At the summit are free male Muslims
Next come Muslim male slaves
Then come free Muslim women
Next come Muslim slave women.
Then come free Jewish and /or Christian men
Then come slave Jewish and/or Christian men
Then come slave Jewish and/or Christian women.
Each category has rights that must be respected.
The People of the Book have always been protected and relatively well treated by Muslim rulers, but often in the context of a form of apartheid known as dhimmitude.
The status of the rest of humanity, those whose faiths are not recognized by Islam or who have no faith at all, has never been spelled out although wherever Muslim rulers faced such communities they often treated them with a certain measure of tolerance and respect ( As in the case of Hindus under the Muslim dynasties of India.)
Non-Muslims can be, and have often been, treated with decency, but never as equals.
(There is a hierarchy even for animals and plants. Seven animals and seven plants will assuredly go to heaven while seven others of each will end up in Hell.)
Democracy means the rule of the demos, the common people, or what is now known as popular or national sovereignty.
In Islam, however, power belongs only to God: al-hukm l’illah. The man who exercises that power on earth is known as Khalifat al-Allah, the regent of God.
But even then the Khalifah or Caliph cannot act as legislator. The law has already been spelled out and fixed forever by God.
The only task that remains is its discovery, interpretation and application.
That, of course, allows for a substantial space in which different styles of rule could develop.
But the bottom line is that no Islamic government can be democratic in the sense of allowing the common people equal shares in legislation.
Islam divides human activities into five categories from the permitted to the sinful, leaving little room for human interpretation, let alone ethical innovations.
What we must understand is that Islam has its own vision of the world and man’s place in it.
To say that Islam is incompatible with democracy should not be seen as a disparagement of Islam.
On the contrary, many Muslims would see it as a compliment because they sincerely believe that their idea of rule by God is superior to that of rule by men which is democracy.
In Muslim literature and philosophy being forsaken by God is the worst that can happen to man.
The great Persian poet Rumi pleads thus:
Oh, God, do not leave our affairs to us
For, if You do, woe be to us.
Rumi mocks those who claim that men can rule themselves.
He says:
You are not reign even over your beard,
That grows without your permission.
How can you pretend, therefore,
To rule about right and wrong?
The expression “abandoned by God” sends shivers down Muslim spines. For it spells the doom not only of individuals but of entire civilizations.
The Koran tells the stories of tribes, nations and civilizations that perished when God left them to their devices.
The great Persian poet Attar says:
I have learned of Divine Rule in Yathirb (i.e. Medinah, the city of the Prophet)
What need do I have of the wisdom of the Greeks?
Hafez, another great Persian poet, blamed man’s “hobut” or fall on the use of his own judgment against that of God:
I was an angel and my abode was the eternal paradise
Adam (i.e. man) brought me to this place of desolation
Islamic tradition holds that God has always intervened in the affairs of men, notably by dispatching 124,000 prophets or emissaries to inform the mortals of His wishes and warnings.
Many Islamist thinkers regard democracy with horror.
The late Ayatollah Khomeini called democracy “a form of prostitution” because he who gets the most votes wins the power that belongs only to God.
Sayyed Qutub, the Egyptian who has emerged as the ideological mentor of Safalists, spent a year in the United States in the 1950s.
He found “a nation that has forgotten God and been forsaken by Him; an arrogant nation that wants to rule itself.”
Last year Yussuf al-Ayyeri, one of the leading theoreticians of today’s Islamist movement, published a book (available on the Internet) in which he warned that the real danger to Islam did not come from American tanks and helicopter gunships in Iraq but from the idea of democracy and rule by the people.
Maudoodi, another of the Islamist theoreticians now fashionable, dreamed of a political system in which human beings would act as automatons in accordance with rules set by God.
He said that God has arranged man’s biological functions in such a way that their operation is beyond human control. For our non-biological functions, notably our politics, God has set rules that we have to discover and apply once and for all so that our societies can be on autopilot so to speak.
The late Saudi theologian, Sheikh Muhammad bin Ibrahim al-Jubair, a man I respected though seldom agreed with, sincerely believed that the root cause of all of our contemporary ills was the spread of democracy.
“Only one ambition is worthy of Islam,” he liked to say,” the ambition to save the world from the curse of democracy: to teach men that they cannot rule themselves on the basis of manmade laws. Mankind has strayed from the path of God; we must return to that path or face certain annihilation.”
Thus those who claim that Islam is compatible with democracy should know that they are not flattering Muslims.
In fact, most Muslims would feel insulted by such assertions.
How could a manmade form of government, invented by the heathen Greeks, be compared with Islam which is God’s final word to man, the only true faith, they would ask.
In the past 14 centuries Muslims have, on occasions, succeeded in creating successful societies without democracy.
And there is no guarantee that democracy never produces disastrous results. (After all Hitler was democratically elected.)
The fact that almost all Muslim states today can be rated as failures or, at least, underachievers, is not because they are Islamic but because they are ruled by
