Can Religious States Be Democratic?
Islam is not inherently opposed to democracy.
By Karen Armstrong
Democracy is not created by an act of will. The form we know today emerged
very gradually in the West. It was not simply dreamed up by political
scientists or inspired statesmen but appeared as the result of a process of
trial and error. Over time, weve found it to be the best way to run a modern
society.
In the 16th century, Europe and, later, what would become the United States
began to create an entirely new kind of society. In what we call the pre-modern
world, all civilizations were based economically on a surplus of agriculture,
which could be used for trade. But at the time of the scientific revolution,
the West began to create a society founded on technology and reinvestment of
capital, enabling Europe and America to replicate its resources indefinitely.
This involved major change at every level of society, and it was a painful
process. Modernity did not come fully into its own until the 19th century, and
during that time the Western countries experienced revolutions, violent wars of
religion, exploitation of workers in factories, the despoliation of the
countryside, and great distress as people struggled to make sense of this
profound change. (Similar upheavals are going on now in developing countries,
including the Islamic countries, as they make this difficult rite of passage.)
The new order demanded change on every level: social, political, intellectual,
scientific and religious. And the emerging modern spirit had two main
characteristics: independence and innovation.
There were declarations of independence in nearly all fields. The American
Declaration of Independence was a modernizing document, and the war with
Britain a modernizing war. But people also demanded independence
intellectually: scientists could not permit themselves to be impeded by a
coercive state or religious establishment; the Protestant Reformers who
declared their independence of the Catholic Church were also forces for
modernization. And innovation figured in this: constantly people were making
something new, breaking unprecedented ground, discovering something fresh.
There was excitement as well as the distress that inevitably accompanies major
change.
It was found that in order to be fully productive and thus provide a sound
basis for the new civilization, more and more people had to acquire the modern
spirit and therefore a modicum of education, even at a quite humble level.
Printers, clerks, factory workers and finally women were brought into the
productive process. As the populace became more educated, they quite naturally
demanded a share in the decision-making process of society.
Similarly, to make full use of its human resources, governments found they
had to draw upon minority groups such as the Jews, which had been either
persecuted or confined to ghettos in Europe. In England, Catholics were
emancipated. Those societies that were secular and democratic seemed to work
best. In Eastern Europe, countries that reserved the fruits of modernity for an
elite, and that used more draconian measures to bring Jews into the mainstream,
fell behind.
Its important to note that this modernization took about 300 years. New
ideas and ideals had time to filter down to societys lower echelons, under the
dynamic of its own momentum. This has not been the case in the Islamic world.
Here modernization has been far more accelerated, leaving no time for the
trickle-down effect. Consequently, society has been polarized: only a
privileged elite has been educated to take part in modern politics, while the
vast majority find their society changing in ways that seem incomprehensible
and bewildering. It has been compared to the trauma of watching a beloved
friend changed by mortal illness. Religion has been a solacebut of course
religion too has to change in the modern world.
In some Islamic countries, furthermore, modernity has not been accompanied by
independence, but by colonial subjugation. Even after colonialism, powers like
Britain or France, and latterly the United States continued to control the
political destiny of these developing nations. Instead of independence, weve
seen an unhealthy dependence. Secondly, instead of innovation, the Islamic
world has had to settle for imitation. We are simply too far ahead.
Islam is not inherently opposed to democracy, however, and the attack of
September 11th was not a war against democracy or freedom. There are principles
in Islamic law, such as the need for shurah (consultation) before passing new
legislation, which would be very compatible. And it is not strictly true that
Islam is incapable of separating what we in the West call church and state.
In practice, Muslims have perforce kept religion and politics separate. In
the Shiite world, this separation of religion and politics was a sacred ideal,
because all states were seen as corrupt. In the Sunni world, there was a de
facto separation of religion and the political life of the caliphal court. The
shariah, the Islamic legal system, began as a counterculture, as a white
revolution against what they saw as the corruption of the court. The ulama
(religious scholars) promoted a more egalitarian, principled and just system of
law than was actually feasible in the realpolitik of the court, which had its
own aristocratic culture, known as the adab. Some Muslims do have semantic
problems with the Western definition of democracy: Government with the people,
for the people and by the people, is not tenable, because in an Islamic
perspective God and not the people is sovereign.
And there are historical difficulties to contend with. Early last century in
Iran, the leading intellectuals and progressive ulama demanded a modern
constitution and representational government. A parliament majlis was duly set
up by the Qajar shahs, but never allowed to function properly. First the
Russians helped the shah to close it down; later the British, who were trying
to make Iran a protectorate during the 1920s, rigged elections to ensure a
result favorable to themselves. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence were
instrumental in restoring to throne the deposed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who not only
closed down the Majlis to effect his modernization program, but systematically
denied Iranians fundamental human rights.
In Egypt, there were 17 general elections between 1923 and 1952, all of which
were won by the popular Wafd party, but the Wafd were permitted to rule only
five times. They were usually forced to stand down by either the British or the
king of Egypt. So democracy has got a bad name, and sometimes even seems like a
bad joke.
Nevertheless, as modernization progresses, some Muslim states may realizeas
Western countries did before themthat a degree of democratization and
secularization are essential. This seems to have been Irans experience. The
Islamic Revolution of 1978-9 did give Iranians forms of representational
government for the first time; admittedly these institutions were flawed and
often highly unsatisfactory, but a start had been made.
At the very end of his life, Khomeini made an important declaration of
independence, proclaiming that the state must have a monopoly in such
practical matters as urban affairs, agriculture or the economy, and must be
emancipated from the constraining laws of traditional religion and the
conservative mullahs. Government, he said, must not be impeded in its
utilitarian pursuit of the interests of the people and what he saw as the
greater good of Islam. He also seemed to support the radical sermon preached on
January 12th, 1988 by the Speaker of Parliament, Hojjat ol-Islam Rafsanjani,
which announced that Iran must strive for a form of Shiite democracy, rooted in
God.
This move towards the democratic ideal is continuing today, under President
Khatami, elected in 1997 in a landslide. Khatami still has to struggle with the
conservative clerics, but Iran seems on creating their own kind of cake,
forming a democratic ideal in a Shiite package. Instead of being a foreign and
discredited export, it would be grafted onto Iranian traditions.
So the achievement of a full democracy is not simply a matter of setting up a
parliament, and it is nearly always contested. Religion can sometimes
facilitate the struggle. After the American Revolution, the prophets of the
religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening used the New Testament to
demand an equality and a greater share of power for the people than some
aristocratic Founding Fathers had envisaged. Religion can be a modernizing
factor, and some forms of fundamentalism in the Middle East can be seen as
enabling people to make the painful rite of passage to modernity more easily.
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