Authors: Cornel West
A central conceptual problem is that modern democracy evolved over centuries within the distinctive context of post-Reformation, market-oriented Christian Europe. Does it make sense to look for points of contact in a remarkably different context? My answer begins from the premise that democracy and Islam are defined in the first instance by their underlying moral values and the attitudinal commitments of their adherents—not by the ways that those values and commitments have been applied. If we focus on those fundamental moral values, I believe, we will see that the tradition of Islamic political thought contains both interpretive and practical possibilities that can be developed into a democratic system.
To be sure, these doctrinal potentialities may remain unrealized: without will power, inspired vision, and moral commitment there can be no democracy in Islam. But Muslims, for whom Islam is the authoritative frame of reference, can come to the conviction that democracy is an ethical good, and that the pursuit of this good does not require abandoning Islam.
The first step in discerning prophetic energies in Islam and forging an Islamic democratic identity is to put forward a persuasive genealogy of the subtle developments of Islamic legal thought (
Usul al-fiqh
and
fiqh
), theology (
Kalam
), mysticism (
Tasawwuf
), and philosophy (
falsafa
). This is an enormous task. This genealogy would lay bare the variety of interpretations and possibilities of thinking about Islam in relation to democratic practices. For example, those who stress Islamic law often espouse very different views than those who highlight Islamic mysticism. The dominant tendency in the Islamic revitalization movements today is to put a wholesale premium on Islamic law—Islam as Shari‘a. This emphasis already reduces the complexities and possibilities of Islam. This is especially so in regard to the crucial question of contemporary Islamic women, since patriarchy is an integral part of Islamic law.
Yet there are both prelegalistic and postlegalistic forms of Islam that sidestep this patriarchal limit in Islam. It is the legalistic conception of Islam that often authorizes an antidemocratic rule of Muslim jurists. This version of Islam is dominant in the world today, but it does not exhaust the forms of Islam in the past, present,
or future. Clerical Islam and legalistic Islam have a history, and their history resurfaces with power at specific moments. The present form of clerical Islam is an authoritarian effort to secure an Islamic identity and to run modern nation-states given the collapse of secular nationalism and the defeat of earlier European imperialisms in the Islamic world. Like rabbinical Judaism or Catholic Christianity, clerical Islam is in no way the essence of Islam—or its only form. Similarly, Islam, like all religions, has always incorporated non-Islamic and nonreligious sources that often appear to the believer to be purely Islamic. No modern religion can survive without learning from modern science, modern politics, and modern culture. Every modern religion accepts Newton’s law of gravity, Weber’s role of bureaucracies, and contemporary musical instruments in its rituals. All religions are polyvalent—subject to multiple interpretations under changing circumstances. Islam must be understood, by both non-Muslims and Muslims, as a fluid repertoire of ways of being a Muslim, not a dogmatic stipulation of rules that govern one’s life. Or, to put it another way, every dogmatic set of rules now espoused by the dominant clerics was once a challenge to an older dogmatic set of rules.
The new dogma has simply become so routinized and ossified that it conceals its former contingency and insurgency. In this way, even to be a dogmatic traditionalist is to be part of a dynamic history and ever-changing tradition. This understanding of the fluidity of Islam is required in order for a democratic Islam to challenge the authority of Muslim clerics and Islamic jurists who attempt to naturalize and fossilize their prevailing edicts and decrees. The clerics and jurists themselves constitute forms of authority that result
from earlier struggles over the role of clerics and who can be a jurist. The fundamental aim of authoritarian clerical Islam today is to procure an identity and secure a stable society over against the bombardments of the modern West, and the internal failures of past nationalist and imperial regimes.
The key to Socratizing Islam is to understand precisely what kinds of authority present-day clerical Islam was a response to and to show that the new democratic Islamic responses to clerical Islam can promote Islamic aims in a more spiritually and politically effective manner. In short, modern clerical Islam was a response to the imperial European authorities that degraded Islamic religion, plundered Islamic resources, and cast the Islamic way of being and living as inferior to that of the modern West. The dominant secular response to imperial Europe was nationalism (be it Arab, Asian, or African nationalism)—itself an imitation of European nationalisms that revolted against empires inside Europe (like that in nineteenth-century Germany and the Italian nationalist revolt against Napoleon). This secular nationalism has failed in the Islamic world. And the grand example of Turkey—where secular nationalism, the religion of the elites, is imposed by an autonomous and repressive military on an Islamic populace—is what the Islamic world wants to avoid. (Ayatollah Khomeini’s clerical Islam overthrew the shah’s U.S.-backed nationalism in 1979 for the same reason.) Why? Because, like Israel, Turkey is a satellite country of the American empire generally willing to do imperial America’s dirty work in the Middle East, even as America looks the other way regarding Turkey’s vicious treatment of Islamic Kurds.
Many Muslims see Turkey’s model as a form of U.S.-supported, anti-Islamic nationalism to be shunned and rejected. Turkey’s militaristic nationalism supported by the American empire represses Kurdish nationalism with a vengeance. This replay of European nationalist ideologies does not bode well for the Islamic world. The same dynamic holds in Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Egypt—all allies of imperial America. It is no accident that when these countries, like Israel, violate international law, imperial America looks the other way. The examples of Turkey’s seizure of two-fifths of Cyprus, Indonesia’s of East Timor, Morocco’s of Western Sahara, and Israel’s of Palestinian lands make the point. Such colonial conquests do not generate a mumbling word from imperial America in the United Nations or anywhere else. Only when the interests of the American empire are at stake—as in Saddam Hussein’s barbaric actions in Kuwait or Kim Jong Il’s vicious threats in Korea—does U.S. moral rhetoric about freedom surface. The repressive clerics in the autocratic Islamic states know this—and they are right. Yet even as this clerical Islam is attractive to many Islamic peoples in comparison to failed secular nationalism, this same clerical Islam is ruthlessly and horribly autocratic and is suffocating the democratic energies in the region.
Therefore, the present task is to undermine the authority of the Muslim clerics on Islamic and democratic grounds. Western-style democracy has no future in the Islamic world. The damage has been done, the wounds are deep, and the die has been cast by the hypocritical European and nihilistic American imperial elites. There is simply no way to turn back the hands of time. The West had its chance and blew it. Yet the future of democracy in the Islamic world
may be bright if democratic notions of voice and rights, community and liberties, rotation of elites and autonomous civic spaces are couched in Islamic terms and traditions. Western-style democracies—themselves in need of repair—are but one member of the family of democracy. Yet all democracies share certain common features, such as the voices of the demos; rotating elites; free expression of religion, culture, and politics; and uncoerced spaces for civic life. But we can encourage the Socratizing of Islam and the prophetizing of the Muslim populace even as we dismantle empire at home.
There are three basic efforts to democratize the Islamic world by Muslims themselves. The first endeavor is to show that Islamic legalistic conceptions of justice (‘
adl
, or procedural justice, and
ma‘ruf
, or substantive justice) are compatible with democratic conceptions of justice. This is a fascinating and pioneering attempt to show that the Qur’an can be interpreted to support democracy. The complex relation of justice to revelation looms large. Does justice flow from divine revelation, or does justice exist apart from divine revelation? Furthermore, is justice an abstract ideal that puts forth rules that regulate a society (as the great political philosopher John Rawls would argue), or is justice one virtue among others to be balanced with them in the lived experience of Islamic peoples? What if these other virtues—like piety and temperance—downplay, contradict, or curtail democratic conceptions of justice? The pioneering work of Khaled Abou El-Fadl here in America best exemplifies this important tendency in contemporary Islam, in works such as
The Place of Tolerance in Islam.
His article in the
Boston Review
is a good place to begin:
A case for democracy presented from within Islam must accept the idea of God’s sovereignty: it cannot substitute popular sovereignty for divine sovereignty, but must instead show how popular sovereignty—with its idea that citizens have rights and a correlative responsibility to pursue justice with mercy—expresses God’s authority, properly understood. Similarly, it cannot reject the idea that God’s law is given prior to human action, but must show how democratic law-making respects that priority.
The second effort does away with all appeals to Islamic law—it is an Islam without Shari‘a. As noted earlier, Islamic women often promote this endeavor in order to undercut the deeply patriarchal character and content of Islamic law. On this view, Islam is more an open-ended way of life and less a set of rules to obey. It harkens back to the early days before the rise of clerical Islam. It also allows a more free-flowing connection with democratic sensibilities, much like the practice of tolerance in the first Islamic state in 622, established by the Prophet Muhammad himself in his compact of Medina, which insisted on mutual respect and civility between Jews and Muslims. He enacted a constitutional rule that was based on a principled agreement between the Muhajirun (Muslim immigrants from Mecca), the Ansar (indigenous Muslims of Medina), and the Yahud (Jews). This federation authorized that the different communities were equal in rights and duties. In this way, the first Islamic state stands in stark contrast to the anti-Semitic practices of most of the autocratic Islamic states of our day.
The last major effort is found in the rich and revolutionary writings of Mahmoud Mohamed Taha (himself murdered by the Nimeiri regime in Sudan for his visionary and courageous works). For example, in his manifesto,
The Second Message of Islam
, Taha conceives of Islam as a holistic way of life that promotes freedom—the overcoming of fear—in order to pursue a loving and wise life. As in the second effort, he and his disciple Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im discard the Shari‘a and replace it with the Meccan revelation. Taha’s conception of the good society rests upon economic equality (egalitarian sharing of wealth), political equality (political sharing in decisions), and social equality (no discrimination based on color, faith, race, or sex in order to provide equal opportunity for cultural refinement). Similar to the Prophet Muhammad, Taha revels in difference—or promotes diversity—in order to constitute a more fair and equal society. Anouar Majid’s superb text
Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World
is a must-read. In that book he writes:
My examination of postcolonial theory and the Arab identity deployed by nationalists to counter imperialism might…help explain why a progressively defined Islam—one that is democratically available to all—may be a desirable option for Muslim peoples…. Islamic cultures—like many of the world’s cultural traditions—could help “provincialize” the West and offer other ways to be in the world….
More broadly, this book tries to challenge secular academics to include the world’s nonsecular expressions
as equally worthy of consideration and valid alternatives, and Muslim scholars to rethink their attachments to texts and canons that have obscured the egalitarian and viable legacies of Islam.
At the moment, those views are but voices in the wilderness. Yet they are also a delicious foretaste of the new wave of Socratic questioning, prophetic witness, and tragicomic hope ascending within the Islamic world. These prophetic voices constitute a leaven in the Islamic loaf—and much hangs on whether social forces in the Islamic world can enact their democratic visions. And there is more to come—calls to reconfigure institutional structures that jettison the colonial nation-states and establish more cosmopolitan educational systems that highlight the rich links between the Judeo-Christian, Judeo-Islamic, Christian-Islamic, and secular traditions. The future of democracy matters in the world depends in part on these heroic and imaginative efforts—and not only in Islamic regions. Dismantling empire is a multifaceted affair, and our gallant attempts to do so require all the vision and courage we can muster here and abroad.
Yet the colossal presence of the American empire in the Jewish and Islamic world—especially its dependence on oil—muddies the water. It silently condones autocratic Islamic states and openly green-lights Israeli hard-line colonial policies. And even as it embarks on an imperial-monitored democratization in Iraq, its heavy hand is felt among those who are glad that the dictatorial Hussein is gone, but suspicious of U.S. strategies and goals. The ugly effects of this heavy-handedness were expressed eloquently by the moderate
Iraqi cleric Ghazi Ajil al-Yawar, who is quoted in an article in the
New York Times Magazine:
“The U.S. is using excessive power. They round up people in a very humiliating way, by putting bags over their faces in front of their families. In our society, this is like rape. The Americans are using collective punishment by jailing relatives. What is the difference from Saddam?” The recent revelations of U.S. atrocities in Iraqi prisons (especially Abu Ghraib) confirm this heavy-handedness.