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By Root 1525 0

Muslim religion and the Islamic state are cocreated and inseparable, and some observers argue it has less room for secularism than any other major world religion. Thus, while there are fundamentalist tendencies in every religion, in Islam, such tendencies have played a leading political role since the eighteenth century. This has created special problems for democracy and human rights in predominantly Muslim countries throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia. Moreover, in such countries the struggle of Jihad against McWorld has been much more than a metaphor for tribalism or a worried antimodernism. It has been a literal war on the values, culture, and institutions that make up liberal society. Even Arab friends of the West feel constrained to raise doubts about Western values. In an advertisement intended to allay the worries of Americans about its Saudi Arabian ally, Ambassador Prince Bandar Ibn-Sultan nonetheless felt compelled to write: “Foreign imports are nice as shiny or high-tech ‘things.’ But intangible social and political institutions can be deadly.”2 An official of the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance can afford to be less oblique. About satellite programs being beamed in to Teheran, he says: “These programs, prepared by international imperialism, are part of an extensive plot to wipe out our religious and sacred values.”3 With Dynasty, Donahue, Dinky Dog, and The Simpsons being beamed in courtesy of Star TV to compete with what Iranian skeptics call “the man on the balcony” (the late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini delivering interminable speeches), it is hardly surprising that the Iranian state believes “the satellite is exactly against the honorable Prophet” and is trying to ban the import, manufacture, and use of satellite dishes.4

Jihad has been a metaphor for anti-Western antiuniversalist struggle throughout this book. The question here is whether it is more than just a metaphor in the Muslim culture that produced the term. An empirical survey of existing governments in Islamic nations certainly affirms a certain lack of affinity between Islam and democracy. In nearly all Muslim nations, democracy has never been tried or has been pushed aside after unsuccessful experiments. In Algeria, following elections that, because fundamentalists triumphed, were annulled, it is in deep peril; in Egypt, where democracy has not really been fully tried, minimal liberties are being eroded by a fearful government trying to track down fundamentalist enemies; in Kuwait, even after the war to “liberate” it from the Iraqi oppressors, democracy is invisible. Nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan and Sudan have become or seem likely to become even less democratic than they were as Islamic fundamentalists become more powerful, while American allies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the oil emirates are hard-pressed to keep up the pretense of being democratic as they pursue their antifundamentalist struggle, even though it is in the name of democracy that they do battle.

Indeed, fundamentalism may have a better record as an enemy of despots in the Middle East than have had the secular systems constructed to put down fundamentalism and to realize Western aspirations. Yet though fundamentalism has often stood against tyranny, it has never created democracy. The historical record is poor enough to have led some observers like John Waterbury to credit an “exceptionalist” thesis: that Islam creates an exceptional set of circum stances that disqualify Islamic countries from becoming democratic and fates them to an eternal struggle against the Enlightenment and its liberal and democratic children.5 Hilal Khashan says simply, “All of the … democratic prerequisites are lacking in the Arab world. Arab democracy along Western terms is wishful thinking.”6

Yet as one might expect, there are rival interpretations of Islam within the Islamic world, and no single monolithic argument goes unchallenged. Although Islam has no word for democracy and uses the Greek term (but then, as it happens, so do we) and though