• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1467 0

it often regards democratic political systems as unique to the West—what in Arabic is denominated as the strange, dark, fear-inspiring “Gharb” where the sun sets on the home of alien and aggressive peoples—it is not without its own Islamic Enlightenment sources. In at least one version of its history, Islam too is a story of the struggle between reason and belief, between consent and authoritarianism, between resistance to tyranny and tyrants. The Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi insists that “throughout its history Islam has been marked by two trends: an intellectual trend that speculated on the philosophical foundations of the world and humanity, and another trend that turned political challenge violent by resort to force.” The first trend offered a meditation on reason akin to Western humanism; the second “simply thought that by rebelling against the imam and sometimes killing him they could change things.”7 Both traditions “raise the same issues that we are today told are imports from the West,” issues of resistance and accountability—that is to say, of democracy.

There is thus a sense in which Islamic fundamentalists are genuine resisters against corrupt worldly political authority, much as the early Christians were. The zealots who assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981 were members of a group called literally “Jihad” and when, their bloody deed done, they shouted, “I have killed Pharaoh, and I do not fear death,” they were speaking the language of martyrs of liberation.8 In Algeria, fundamentalists came to power by the ballot in 1991 and it was the secular party of national liberation under the tutelage of the army that shut down democratic institutions rather than turn them over to its adversaries, who had vanquished them in the polls. Observers thus continue to believe that Islam and democracy have a future together. At a 1992 conference held by the United States Institute on Peace, conferees spoke of a “new synthesis” in which the “clash of opinions on the relationship between Islam and democracy could yield a new synthesis view in which Islamic notions enhance and give new meaning to democratic concepts beyond their current western-dominated usages.”9

How real is this promise? Is democracy in Islamic countries more a victim of colonial repression and postcolonial exploitation than of indigenous Islamic forces, as critics like Edward W. Said contend?10 Or is Islam an “exception” that rules out a free civil society and thus precludes real democracy? If democracy means Western democracy and modernization means Westernization, there would seem to be little hope for reconciliation since Islam regards Western secular culture and its attending values as corrupting to and morally incompatible with its own. But if democracy takes many forms, and is an ancient as well as a modern manifestation of the quest for self-governing communities, then perhaps it can be adapted to notions found in the Koran such as umma (community), shura (mutual consultation), and almaslaha (public interest). As other Islamic scholars have argued, understood this way, Islam may not be “antithetical to the telos of democratic values.”11 Islamic fundamentalists may insist that since Allah’s will is sovereign, the people’s will cannot be, but moderates point out that this still leaves ample room for the majority to exercise political authority as long as it does so within a framework that acknowledges the ultimate hegemony of divine power. Neither France nor Italy has a formal constitutional separation of church and state and both have constructed relatively viable democracies. Ultimate obedience to God can act as a brake on authoritarian and licentious worldly government, while affording a moderate people, constrained by faith, room to govern themselves democratically in the manner of Calvinist Geneva or Puritan Massachusetts before the Revolution.

The trouble with this path to reconciliation is that fundamentalist Islam is not first of all opposed to democracy but to modernization, particularly as manifested in Westernization. Democracy has ancient