Daniel Pipes: Islam and democracy can coexist
Posted: April 22, 2008, 11:08 AM by Marni Soupcoff
Daniel Pipes
There's an impression that Muslims suffer dispro****tionately 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, "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
cir***stances 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 was painfully long. If the transition
began when Marsiglio of
Padua published Defensor pacis in the year 1324, it took another seven
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. Turkey's first president Mustafa Ataturk frontally did
just that in his
country, but others have offered more subtle approaches. Mahmud Muhammad
Taha, a Sudanese
thinker, dispatched the public Islamic laws by fundamentally
reinterpreting the Koran.
Ataturk'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 citizen****p 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 im****tance. 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,
citizen****p, 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
unIslamic. 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 Jamaate-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.
— Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum and the Taube/Diller
Distinguished Visiting
Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. ©All rights
reserved by Daniel Pipes.
www.danielpipes.org
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