The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Conceptions of Democracy

Conceptions of democracy generally accepted in the discipline of political science vary from the procedural to the substantive. While procedural conceptions are limited to electoral processes, substantive conceptions include civil liberties and individual rights, separation of powers with checks and balances, and the rule of law. Maximalist conceptions also consider the provision of social justice a requirement for democratic politics. Most conceptions of democracy by 20th-century Islamic thinkers concur with the electoral aspect of democracy but diverge on the question of civil liberties.

While minimalist/procedural definitions view democracy as little more than a competitive struggle for the people’s vote, their proponents concede that such a struggle requires a certain amount of freedom of expression (in particular, freedom of the media). The requirement of civil liberties is formalized in Robert Dahl’s more substantive conception of democracy, which consists of six institutional guarantees: free, fair, and frequent elections (political rights); elected representatives; the freedom to form and join organizations; the freedom of expression (civil liberties); alternative sources of information; and inclusive citizenship. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan expand Dahl’s notion by insisting on the existence of the state as a democratic precondition (the Palestinian territories therefore could not democratize until they form a state), as well as the existence of a vibrant civil society (consisting of guilds, trade unions, and professional and other associations), political society (mainly political parties), and economic society (a market-based economy with protected property rights). Established indexes of whether a country can be deemed democratic include Polity IV, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index, the World Bank Government Indicators, the Goteborg Quality of Government Index, and for civil liberties and political rights, indexes by Freedom House.

The Output of Democracy

Economist Amartya Sen has pointed to the intrinsic, instrumental, and constructive value of democracy. Democracy has intrinsic value insofar as political and social participation contribute to a person’s quality of life. Further, democracy has instrumental value in enhancing political attention to people’s claims and (economic) needs. Finally, democracy has constructive importance in helping societies form their values and priorities.

Empirically, the notion of democratic citizenship, of those who enjoy the political rights and civil liberties to be safeguarded by the democratic state, has expanded over time as limits based on property (first in 1824–28 in the United States), race (in 1866 and 1965 in the United States), and gender (first in 1893 in New Zealand) have gradually been eliminated. Like other political regimes, democracies may break down. Similarly, the quality of democratic citizenship may decrease over time, for instance, due to rising economic inequality or the failure of the state to “monopolize the legitimate use of force.”

The Place of Religion in Democracy

Democracy does not require a strictly secular order in institutional terms. Indeed, most long-standing democracies entertain relations of cooperation rather than strict separation between organized religion and the democratic state. Democracy in Muslim-majority societies can, and in the five Muslim-majority democracies mentioned later often does, involve religious instruction in public schools, state funding of private religious schools, state support for mosque construction, and tax breaks for religious organizations. Neutrality toward religious views, however, is a democratic precondition. A democratic state needs to guarantee both positive and negative religious freedom—that is, the freedom for its citizens to practice any religion as well as the choice not to practice any religion. Religious freedom also includes the freedom to change one’s religious affiliation, to enter interreligious marriages, and to freely discuss religious views in public without needing to fear state sanction.

Democracy in the Muslim World

In 2007, about half of the world’s Muslim population lived in democratic states and about a third enjoyed democratic citizenship. About 150 million lived as Muslim minorities in democratic societies, with the largest numbers in India, the United States, and Western Europe. Further, about 300 million lived in democratic Muslim-majority societies, in Indonesia, Turkey, Mali, Senegal, and Albania. None of the Arab states could be classified in 2007 as a democracy. Political scientists therefore speak of an “Arab-democracy gap.” Identified causes for the Arab-democracy gap range from the prevalence of rentier economies among the gulf states to the Arab-Israeli conflict that allows authoritarian incumbents to suppress internal dissent in the name of security concerns. Other explanations highlight international support for authoritarian rulers (particularly by the United States and European Union) through commercial ties and military cooperation and few international incentives to democratize. Cultural and religious reasons to explain the Arab-democracy gap tend to be dismissed. In the words of Sen, “A country does not have to be deemed fit for democracy; rather, it has to become fit through democracy.”

Islamic Law and Democracy

From the viewpoint of Islamic legal history, most of the core criteria of democracy delineated previously are acceptable: electoral politics are often juxtaposed to the Islamic principle of consultation and deliberation (shūrā). They are per se easily compatible with various traditions and interpretations of Islamic law (shari‘a). The core conflict between 20th-century proponents of procedural notions of democracy and those of a substantive notion lies in the question about the scope of divine law. On the one end of the spectrum stand thinkers such as Mawdudi, with a maximalist view of divine law, in whose model a democratically elected parliament is commissioned only with “identifying God’s law,” not with making the law. Even to thinkers like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who sees democracy as an effective antidote to despotism, a core element of democracy remains limited by the parallel basis of the polity on both God’s and popular sovereignty. “There can only be voting on matters of human judgment,” Qaradawi writes, without specifying who will determine what precisely lies beyond human judgment. At the other end of the spectrum are thinkers like Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, who fully subscribe to the idea of popular sovereignty and view the place of religion in the polity as subject to public deliberation.

Three aspects of Islamic legal traditions in particular are often conceptualized as being irreconcilable with civil liberties: the legal inequality of men and women, the legal inequality of non-Muslims in relation to Muslims, and corporal (ḥudūd) punishments.

Attempts to engage with this normative conflict over the role of religious law in a modern polity chiefly involve one of three approaches. One focuses on international human rights standards and international covenants to which most Muslim-majority states are parties. Most Muslim-majority states have signed and ratified without reservation the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Many have also signed and ratified the Convention against Torture as well as the Convention on Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the latter notably often with reservations that allow these states to abide only partially by the covenant’s legal standards. Human rights lawyers and activists often try to press states to fully harmonize their legal systems with the standards of the covenants they have ratified and thereby eliminate inegalitarian legal provisions.

Other approaches concentrate on renewed engagements with religious sources and legal traditions, one to privilege established egalitarian over inegalitarian interpretations, the other to generate new legal maxims. Various jurists, theologians, and philosophers of the 20th century have reexamined the legal traditions, the Qur’an, and the hadith in order to derive interpretations that mitigate the legal inequality between men and women, as well as Muslims and non-Muslims, and limit the applicability of ḥudūd punishments. Some, like Pakistani philosopher Riffat Hassan and Iranian jurist Seyyed Mohsen Sa‘idzadeh, argue for a methodological reorientation to emphasize the primacy of Qur’anic injunctions over more inegalitarian views in the hadith literature. Others focus on developing more contextual readings to “make Islam democratic” (Bayat). For instance, Indonesian Islamic thinkers like Ahmad Siddiq, Nurcholish Madjid, and Abdurrahman Wahid have generated interpretations that necessitate religious tolerance from an Islamic perspective and, by extrapolation, the legal equality of Muslims and non-Muslims. Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi places Qur’anic verses of gender-inegalitarian content into their historical context and calls for the adjustment of such verses to today’s socioeconomic conditions.

Those who do not subscribe to the view that legislation in the modern state needs to proceed within the framework of Islamic legal traditions do see religion as an important source of a political culture. They emphasize that democracies rely on the existence of a certain ethos for citizens to obey laws and for rulers to prioritize the public good over individual pursuits. In the words of Soroush, “Democracy cannot prosper without commitment to moral precepts. It is here that the great debt of democracy to religion is revealed: Religions, as bulwarks of morality, can serve as the best guarantors of democracy.” While democracies need to be neutral toward worldviews, including religious views, they do rely on morality, of which religion may be a source, as well as constitutional and republican values.