4

Islamism and Democracy

IS ISLAMISM COMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY? This question has aroused a heated debate among supporters and critics of Islamism.1 The analysis of Islamist antisemitism provided in the preceding chapter offers little cause for hope. If one accepts Hannah Arendt’s reasoning in The Origins of Totalitarianism that any ideology that includes antisemitism is totalitarian, then Islamism clearly qualifies as a totalitarian, hence undemocratic, ideology.2 But this formulation is indirect. In this chapter we will listen directly to the founders of Islamist ideology and their heirs to hear what they say about democracy. It is important to read the major writings of Islamist leaders in their own language. Scholars who fail to do so cannot distinguish between statements made for convenience, intended for Western audiences, and those that express what Islamists really think.

The relation of Islamism to democracy has sparked some heated debates. One of these appeared in 2008 in the Journal of Democracy, to which I contributed an essay subtitled “Why They Can’t Be Democratic.”3 Among the chief opponents of such a view are Andrew March, who advocates accommodation of peaceful Islamists “who are motivated by explicit religious faith,” and Marc Lynch, who writes that if one doubts the Islamist commitment to democracy, then one risks being accused of “a profound insult” to the “faith and identity” of Muslims.4 As I have emphasized, these positions overlook the distinction between Islamism and Islam. The dispute is not about faith but about religionized politics.

Part of the debate centers on the difference between institutional and jihadist Islamists. Let us set aside, for the moment, how porous the boundary is between these two groups. While it is not difficult to label the latter undemocratic, the former pose a challenge because they frequently advocate and participate in democratic processes. Even though I mistrust the honesty of Islamists who declare support of democracy, I approve the politics of engagement and oppose outlawing nonviolent Islamists. But the distinction between engagement and empowerment, always highly pertinent, has become critical with the recent uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa. I shall return to this issue later in this chapter.

In a review in Foreign Affairs of Paul Berman’s book on Islamism The Flight of the Intellectuals, Lynch characterizes any linkage of the institutional and jihadist strains of Islamism as “lumping Islamist groups together.” He is aware of the problem posed by nonviolent Islamists: these movements “are committed to working within democratic institutions, but promote values at odds with progressive standards of freedom, equality, and tolerance.”5 How are democrats to deal with this dilemma? Having been active in debates on this subject in both the Western6 and Arab Muslim worlds,7 I argue that democracy is based on two pillars: first, the values and the political culture of democracy, and second, electoral politics. You cannot separate the two—yet this is what Lynch seems to want to do. He argues that though the Islamist vision of democracy “may not be a classically liberal one, it is a fully legitimate guide for how Muslims … can participate in a liberal and democratic system.” This separation allows Lynch to describe the Islamist leader Yusef al-Qaradawi as “a fierce advocate of democratic participation … an icon to mainstream non-violent Islamists.”8

There is no disputing that Qaradawi is an “icon” of Islamism.9 The question is whether being such an icon, or a follower of one, is in any way compatible with a commitment to democracy.

Three Islamist Authorities and Three Western Confusions

The best place to begin is with Sayyid Qutb’s most influential book, Ma’alim fi al-tariq (Signposts along the road). Here Qutb diagnoses why the “sick West” is falling apart along with its democracy. The West is to be replaced by an imagined Islamic power that will take over the world in a “return of history” that is synonymous with a return of Muslim glory. Such thinking is manifest in most Islamist writings. Qutb writes: “Humanity is at the brink … most clearly in the West itself … after the bankruptcy of democracy, which is finished … the rule of the Western man is about to break down.… It is only Islam that possesses the needed values and method.… It is now the turn of Islam and its umma community in the most tense time to take over.”10 This is the hall Islami, the Islamic solution, that Qaradawi preaches as well.

Second to Qutb among the founding fathers of Islamism, but of much the same caliber, is the Indian Muslim Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, who articulates his rejection of democracy in much stronger words: “I tell you Muslim brothers in all frankness that democracy … stands in contrast to what you embrace as religion and its dogma. The Islam that you believe in and according to which you identify yourself as Muslims differs in its substance from this hateful system [of democracy].… Where this system of democracy prevails Islam is in absence, and where Islam prevails there is no place [la makan] for this system of democracy.11

Qutb was executed in public in 1966, and Mawdudi died a decade later. The foremost Islamist alive today, in terms of impact, is Yusuf al-Qaradawi, widely considered the heir of Qutb. Al-Jazeera television so extends his reach that he has been nicknamed “the global Mufti.” Qaradawi first became known after the devastating Arab defeat in the Six-Day War of 1967; his writings contributed to the deligitimation of secular regimes. His book al-Hall al-Islami wa al-hulul al-mustawradah (The Islamic solutions and the imported solutions) is the first volume of a trilogy advocating the rejection of Western values for “Islamic” ones. Qaradawi issues all kinds of fatwas, which make a great impact. (A fatwa is simply a legal judgment that includes teachings and instructions for right behavior. It is not, as has been widely believed in the West since the Salman Rushdie affair, a death sentence.) Qaradawi dismisses and even ridicules all cultural borrowings, including democracy, as “imported solutions.” In one of his fatwas, Qaradawi writes that “the term liberal democracy reflects its European origin.… Liberal democratic thought entered into the life of Muslims through colonization.… What looms behind this thought is the wicked colonial notion that religion is to be separated from politics and from the state.” Behind this wickedness are the familiar villains: “The colonial crusaders and world Jewry are the instigators of this fitna within Islam.”12 There is a double meaning involved in the notion of fitna: literally, the word means sexual danger, but it is also used by Muslims to connote violent fighting among Muslims (fitna wars), with the implication that the fighting has been instigated by a non-Muslim.

In Qaradawi’s view, Islam presents “shari’a as the alternative to the imported solutions.” The Islamist shari’a state must replace “liberal democracy [which] failed in the world of Islam” because the latter is imported and “alien to Islam.” Like all other Islamists, Qaradawi does not speak like this when he visits Europe and talks to Westerners. There he voices approval of democracy. This Islamist double-speak is a great obstacle to the West’s understanding of Islamism.

If we take these statements by the three foremost authorities of political Islam at face value, we may conclude without further discussion that Islamism, by its own declaration, is not compatible with democracy. Why, then, am I writing this chapter?

Despite the evidence, the job is not that easy. Many Western scholars quote and take at face value different Islamist pronouncements about democracy—those specifically designed for Western ears—and on these grounds reach different conclusions.13 The major source of their confusion is the missing distinction between Islam and Islamism. Islam itself, as a faith and system of religious ethics, could be made compatible with democracy if combined with the will to religious reform. The Koranic term “shura” means in Arabic “consultation,” not democracy. However, one can refer today to shura in the course of helping to resolve the Islamic predicament with cultural modernity14 and introducing democracy to Islam, and thus view shura in a new interpretation as a democratic ethics.

A second source of Western confusion is the postmodern objection to the universalization of modernity. From this comes the view that Islamism is a kind of “other modernity” whose relation to democracy will necessarily be different from what Westerners expect. In practice, this amounts to an apology for political Islam’s use of the ballot box solely to seize power and its renunciation of democratic principles once that goal is achieved. Such an instrumental use of democratic forms—with none of their substance—grows increasingly likely as the Islamist movement gains appeal and its ideology becomes elevated to a public choice. Today, no Middle Eastern democracy can afford to exclude Islamism without sliding into authoritarian rule. But since Islamism is not compatible with democracy, its participation in democratic institutions raises a dilemma.15

The final source of confusion comprises American policymakers who today are attempting to democratize the Middle East with Islamists as allies. They have apparently never learned from the past. American support of the Afghan-Islamist mujahidin against the Soviet invasion in the 1980s was a grave error that gave rise to the Taliban.16 After 9/11, the Bush administration’s disastrous “war on terror,” conducted against these same Islamists, succeeded in alienating all Muslims suspected of supporting jihadist terror but failed to deter jihadism. Then followed a bit of pure madness sold to the public as “the politics of democratization,” which brought Islamists to power in Iraq and Palestine and may soon do so in Egypt. Those efforts at “regime change” have utterly failed to bring democracy. Why? The ignorance of Western policymakers about Islam and its civilization has certainly been a major factor. While the Obama administration has pursued a markedly different and more conciliatory approach, it, too, has demonstrated no clear understanding of democracy and democratization in the Arab world, and no proper assessment of Islamism. Islamist parties are presented by Islamists and their Western apologists as comparable to the Christian Democratic parties of Western Europe, but this is utterly wrong. Unlike those parties, the Islamist parties are not secular—they have, in fact, an agenda of desecularization—and their commitment to democratization ends with the ballot box. In this upside-down world, speaking the truth about Islamism is a Sisyphean task.

Two Cases of Institutional Islamism: AKP and the Muslim Brothers

The current politics of democratization depends on the entirely fictitious concept of “moderate Islamists,” coined by policymakers and some scholars to justify a changed assessment of institutional Islamism. There has been a shift from a rejection of “radical Islam” to an excessively positive sentiment toward those Islamists who forgo terror and pay lip service to democracy. The notion of “moderate Islamists” entertains the illusion that any Islamist leader who is not openly jihadist is a potential democrat. Such Islamists are approved as replacements for ruling autocrats and their authoritarian regimes. In Iraq, the Sunni Ba’thists who supported Saddam Hussein have been replaced by Shi’ite Islamists, who have conspicuously failed to become paragons of democracy. In this section I shall focus on the Turkish AKP and on Egypt’s Muslim Brothers, the latter said to represent “Islam without fear,”17 because they are ready to take over political power since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Not surprisingly, this takeover may take place with the blessing of American policymakers who imagine that the Brothers’ rule over Egypt will resemble that of Turkey under the AKP, itself a regime idealized by some in the West.

Among the Americans supporting Turkey as a “moderate Islamic republic” one finds Stephen Larrabee of the Rand Corporation, who argues that “under the AKP, Turkey has emerged as an important actor in the region.… [The] banning of the party could undercut efforts to promote reform and democracy.”18 Such a ban, on grounds that the AKP threatened to undermine the secular constitution, was considered by Turkey’s Constitutional Court in July 2008 but ultimately not imposed. Nonetheless, Larrabee is concerned that if the court succeeded in abolishing the AKP, “the United States would lose an important partner.” This is an example of an unexamined assumption posing as news analysis. The real foreign policy of AKP-ruled Turkey belies this assessment. A more knowledgeable account comes from the Turkish-American analyst Zeyno Baran, who documents the “creeping Islamization” of Turkey, an ongoing desecularization disguised as democratization. Baran writes:

Increasing evidence suggests that AKP leaders … use state institutions to shape public opinion in favour of Islamism.… Statistics showing declines in gender equality and respect for religious and ethnic minorities seem to corroborate the Kemalists’ fears about the erosion of the boundary between religion and public life—and with it, the weakening of secular democracy. Such statistics counter the AKP’s insistence that it is simply implementing reforms and other domestic policies that reflect the will of the Turkish voter.19

Events since the publication of this book support Baran’s warnings on the Islamization of the secular Turkish state. With the referendum of September 12, 2010, which approved a change of Turkey’s secular constitution, the AKP has successfully launched an initiative that promises to weaken the secular pillars of the republic, in particular the judiciary, which a New York Times article described as “the traditional safeguard of a staunchly secular state,” and the Western-trained and -educated military. President Obama praised the referendum as a sign of a “vibrant” democracy, but critics—as the New York Times piece notes—“have considered this referendum as the latest round in a power struggle” between the AKP Islamists and the Turkish secular elite.20 The revamping of the constitutional court and the restructuring of the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors are, says the Times, efforts “to undermine the independence of the judiciary and to install (AKP) supporters in senior judicial posts, as a part of a long-term strategy to roll back secularism in Turkey.”21 These changes reflect an orchestrated power grab aimed at undermining the secular order established by the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, in 1923. This process of desecularization and de-Westernization of the Kemalist republic is occurring in a country that not only is a NATO member but also has noncombat troops in Afghanistan and hopes to join the European Union.

The increasing closeness of AKP, and thus Turkey, to Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah calls its commitment to the West into question. One is inclined to credit the Times for identifying the AKP as a party that leads “the Islamist-rooted government” of Turkey, thus acknowledging the distinction between what is Islamic and what is Islamist. In contrast, the European press, for instance Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, prefers self-deception: it labels the AKP “Islamic-conservative.” But by laying the groundwork for a “whole new constitution,” the AKP is working toward bringing secular institutions under Islamist control. Equally disturbing is “the rising number of prosecutions against journalists” cited by the European Union, which sharply criticized Turkey for its “attack on Turkey’s press freedom.”22 These policies do not indicate a democratic mindset.

The view that the AKP is not an Islamic-conservative but rather an Islamist party seems to be shared by many American diplomats. Following the release of masses of U.S. State Department cables by the internet organization WikiLeaks in late 2010, the German news magazine Der Spiegel published a special issue devoted to the disclosures. Since Turkey’s proposed entry into the European Union is a major topic of discussion in Europe, the issue included an article on these diplomats’ views about the AKP.23

The cables revealed an intriguing contradiction between official U.S. statements on Turkey and what its closest observers reported. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have described the AKP as committed to democracy and have supported the admission of Turkey under AKP rule to the EU. But U.S. diplomats based in Ankara have been highly critical. According to the documents published in Der Spiegel, “AKP politicians are favourable to Turkey’s entry to the European Union … because they believe Turkey should spread Islam in Europe.” One AKP politician is quoted as saying, “We want al-Andalus [Islamic Spain] back, and we are going to take revenge for the defeat in Vienna 1683.” (The European Balkans were occupied by the Islamic Ottoman Empire for about five centuries. In 1683 Ottoman troops were repulsed in an effort to take over and Islamize Vienna.) The documents refer to what is called the “Davutoğlu approach,” after the Turkish minister for foreign affairs, the Islamist Ahmed Davutoğlu, who also has a great influence on Erdoğan’s foreign policy views. They quote Davutoğlu as saying: “We shall restore the Ottoman Balkans.” The Der Spiegel reporter comments, “This neo-Ottoman approach of Davutoğlu is a worrying concern for the United States,” a concern expressed in several reports from Ankara in which “the Islamist impact of Davutoğlu on Erdoğan” is made clear. According to Der Spiegel, “These documents include assessments that stand fully in contradiction to all the U.S. administration statements in public about Turkey … and above all its prime minister Erdoğan.” In one report from the U.S. embassy in Ankara, Erdoğan is said to “get[] his information almost exclusively from Islamist newspapers” and from a small circle of Islamist advisers identified as “stubborn, arrogant and subordinate to Erdoğan.” The leader of the AKP is quoted as saying, “Democracy is like a train: we take a ride in it and we get off when we reach the station of our destination.”24 The reader should be reminded that with the exception of Morocco, all Arab lands—both in the Middle East and in North Africa—were subdued for many centuries under Turkish Ottoman rule. Neo-Ottomanism aims to revive this tradition. In his “Muslime an die Front” the Instanbul-based German journalist Michael Martens reported in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of August 26, 2011, a Turkish AKP plan that demonstrates Turkey’s claim to be—in a neo-Ottoman mindset—the new regional power of the Middle East. The AKP is using the power vacuum caused by the Arab Spring to support the bid for Turkish leadership. The plan is not only political but also military. The Islamist AKP government makes an arbitrary comparison between the Arab Middle East—in particular Libya—and Bosnia: if “Muslim troops” had replaced the international ones in Bosnia in 1995, the AKP argues, the massacre in Srebrenica could have been averted. Martens reports that “Turkey views itself as a regional power.… In this context the formula of Muslim peace troops is reinforced.… Some not only see these not being complementary to the U.N. but rather as a substitute to international peace troops.”25 Islamist neo-Ottomanism thus evolves from political ideology to military state strategy: to support the rising Islamist movements in the transition from opposition to political rule.

In January 2011 the global edition of the New York Times/International Herald Tribune published a front-page article in which the “Davutoğlu approach” is described in some detail. According to the Times reporter, “Mr. Davutoğlu has shaped Turkey’s ambitious foreign policy,” and “Mr. Erdoğan and Mr. Davutoğlu share a grand vision of a renascent Turkey, expanding to fill a bygone Ottoman imperial space.” This is not a vision of ordinary nationhood but rather one of imperial ambition. The AKP’s Neo-Ottomanism is a curious mix of Turkish Nationalism with Islamist internationalism. As we shall see, the links between the AKP and the Muslim Brothers support this assessment.

One is inclined to ask why President Obama chose AKP-led Turkey as the first place from which he addressed the world of Islam in his pursuit of intercivilizational bridging. Had he been briefed on his diplomats’ opinions? One must also question the suitability of institutional Islamism as a partner for the West. Turkey is a member of NATO and wants U.S. support for becoming a full member of the EU, but its foreign policy is at the same time drifting away from compatibility with the West. Some blame the EU’s reluctance to admit Turkey for this shift, but the WikiLeaks cables raise the possibility that the AKP’s attitude is more a reflection of the “Davutoğlu approach” than the policy of a disappointed would-be ally.

In the face of a popular uprising in early 2011, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak ceded power to his vice president, Omar Suleiman.26 The military took effective control of the country, and as this book goes to press, Egypt’s future remains uncertain, but one can safely assume that any honest election in Egypt will hand over considerable power, and possibly a ruling majority, to the Muslim Brothers.27 This will not, however, bring the democratization Egypt has awaited for so long. Islamist rule will not involve any power sharing, only the replacement of secular authoritarianism with religious totalitarianism. Unlike their predecessors at the party’s founding in 1928, the Muslim Brothers of today pay lip service to democracy and present their Islamism as a version of “moderate Islam” willing to coexist in a context of alleged multiple modernities. Is this simply an expression of iham (deception) or does it truly represent a new mindset? What actions of the Muslim Brothers suggest that their ideology is now compatible with the civic culture of democracy? Well-informed observers know of the growing connections between the Muslim Brothers and the AKP, as Turkish-Islamists claim a neo-Ottoman leadership of the Middle East. The Muslim Brothers are also growing outside of Egypt, including in the United States28 and Europe,29 thus becoming a transnational movement.

Recently, a team of experts studied this movement and published a volume, edited by Barry Rubin, entitled The Muslim Brotherhood: The Organization and Policies of a Global Islamist Movement.30 In their case studies, the authors present strong evidence that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a democratic movement. In his study of the group’s activities in the United Kingdom, David Rich argues that “Tariq Ramadan is one of the most influential Islamist voices in Britain.”31 Ramadan, he writes, was not successful in his native Switzerland and left in search of a venue where he could be more influential. In France he failed too, due to the more powerful liberal French Islam represented by the imam of the Grand Mosque of Paris, Dalil Boubakir. Finally he moved to the United Kingdom, where, according to Rich, “The Muslim Brotherhood propagates heresies against liberal democracy; its entire ideology is a rejection of fundamental liberal values.”32 (Another author in the volume, Ana B. Soage, describes the leading Muslim Brother Yusuf al-Qaradawi as a “Favorite Ideological Guide” for the diaspora Islamists.33 Ramadan has high regard for Qaradawi: Paul Berman calls him “Ramadan’s admired hero.”) Ramadan’s institutional Islamism pays lip service to democracy and forgoes violence, but his vision of European inclusion does not mean that Muslim immigrants should become “European citizens of the heart.” Instead, Ramadan wants, as Berman rightly states, a “Muslim counterculture in the West to assume a shape of its own, under the name of Western Islam.”34 Liberal Muslims refuse to join forces in this venture, which looks very much like a politics of Islamization. There are two competing options: the Islamization of Europe, or a Europeanizing of Islam.35 The extension of the Muslim Brotherhood into Europe portends the former.

One may argue that institutional Islamism treats Western Europe as an Islamist asylum. Islamists enjoy in Europe the civil rights denied to them in the world of Islam itself. In a recent study based on fieldwork in several European countries, Lorenzo Vidino provides strong evidence for the power the Movement of the Muslim Brothers has obtained in Europe. He cites critics of institutional Islamism who see the Muslim Brothers as “deceitful actors seeking to destroy the very same freedoms that have allowed them to flourish.” Vidino agrees, but opposes a politics that would outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood. On the one hand his study presents “ample evidence showing that the aims of the New Western Brothers do not necessarily correspond to those publically stated in dialogues with Western establishments.” On the other hand, these “nonviolent Islamists are a reality that cannot be ignored.”36 How should democracy respond to this challenge? I share Vidino’s view that no democrat would deny nonviolent Islamists the right of engagement. But the difference between engagement and empowerment has to be kept in mind when democracies develop an approach for dealing with institutional Islamism, whether in the world of Islam or in its diaspora in Europe and the United States.

These insights are most pertinent for Egypt after Mubarak. A seizure of power by the Muslim Brothers, whether by election or other means, would create an Islamist regime. The alternative order is the civil Islam of Indonesia.37

The Islamist Use of Democracy

“Moderate Islamism” is a delusion based on the assumption that institutional Islamism is a pro-democracy movement. There would be no contradiction, and hence no delusion, if Islamism were rooted in Islamic ethics,38 which, if combined with religious reforms, actually could make Islam compatible with democracy. But the political ideology of Islamism does not operate on either Islamic ethics or the democratic values of pluralism and power sharing. The major political concern of Islamism is to establish the nizam-Islami, the Islamic system.

Today, one of the greatest problems of Islamic civilization, particularly in its Middle Eastern core, is the lack of democracy and individual human rights. As the Egyptian liberal Muslim Saad Eddin Ibrahim has put it, “we are twisted between ruling autocrats and the theocrats opposing them.”39 The implication is that Islamism is not the needed alternative to authoritarian and despotic regimes in the Middle East: Islamists would merely replace one malaise with another. For expressing such thoughts, Ibrahim was prosecuted and jailed in his own country and lives today in exile. But his remark requires us to question the unproven assumption that institutional Islamism is compatible with the political culture of democracy.

The distinction made earlier between institutional Islamism and jihadism provides a far more informative set of categories than the standard distinction between “radical” and “moderate” Islam or Islamism. When paired with “Islam,” the political terms “radical” and “moderate” are largely meaningless; when paired with “Islamism” they suggest doctrinal differences that simply do not exist. It is also wrong to reserve the term “Islamism” for “radicals,” “fanatics,” or “extremists.” “Radical” implies a minority acting on the fringes. The reality is that Islamism is the most popular public choice in the world of Islam. Organized Islamists are a minority in numbers, but they receive financial support from wealthy Gulf donors and have considerable facilities at their disposal. The difference between institutional and jihadist Islamists is a difference in tactics, not in doctrines or fundamental goals concerning Islamist governance.40

Institutional Islamists do not engage in the violence of jihadism but instead play the game of democracy and agree to go to the ballot box. They still share the common goal of the Islamist movement, to establish al-nizam al-Islami, the shari’a-based Islamic order. The Islamist worldview includes a belief in siyadat al-Islam (supremacy of Islam) based on a universal rabbaniyya (theocentrism). Islamist religion-based internationalism stands in sharp contrast to a pluralist democracy and to power sharing.

If democracy were merely a voting procedure, then no one would have a reason to object when totalitarian movements use the ballot box as an instrument for the soft seizure of power. But it is more than this. There is a political culture of democracy in which civic pluralism and power sharing in society and state are essential. No democracy, of course, can exist without voting, but equally no democracy can prevail if the necessary political culture and public institutions are not in place. Thus the norm of diversity applies to democracy, but only up to a point. Despite the many variations in democratic practice, democracy, like human rights, has a certain irreducible universality. Liberal Arab democrats approve in their reasoning the core values of democracy.41

It is abundantly clear that Islamism is a political opposition in the world of Islam that no one can afford to overlook. Islamist movements are not only a potent opposition to existing autocratic rulers but also the only ones ready to take over. In many places the question is not whether Islamists will come to power but what they will bring to it. The opinion expressed in the Financial Times that “the participation [of Islamists] in the political process remains the best hope of moderating their often radical views”42 represents established wisdom in the West. But putting Islamists in charge will not give rise to a new politics of inclusion in a participatory democracy. Hamas, for instance, came to power through election in 2006 and soon put all its PLO opponents in jail without trial. One year later, Hamas followed its electoral victory with a military coup.

The test of Islamism’s compatibility with democracy rests on the Islamist idea of nizam Islami (Islamic system of government) based on hakimiyyat Allah (God’s rule). The core contention of Islamist ideology is that only God, not man, is entitled to rule the world. Can this truly be reconciled with the popular sovereignty of secular democracy? How can democracy grow out of a commitment to the shari’atization of politics?

Throughout the world of Islam, conflicts occur not only between authoritarian regimes and Islamist opposition but also between Islamism and liberal democracy. In what follows I shall focus on Sunni Islam, because the terms of the debate over Islamism and democracy are often set by Arab Sunni thinkers. Political Islam first flourished in the Arab Middle East and rippled outward from there.

A look at the practices of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, and the Islamist parties in Iraq does not offer reassurance that the inclusion of Islamists in government tends to moderate them. In all three places, political Islamist parties are represented in the elected parliament and in the government, yet maintain their terrorist militias and nonstate military networks, which are often used to intimidate opponents of Islamism. There is little evidence that Islamists’ electoral victories are transforming them into moderate democratic parties.

In Iraq the Islamist Da’wa party reflects an institutional variety of Islamism. It rules the country in coalition with two Shi’ite jihadist movements: the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, earlier SCIRI), whose military wing is the Failaq Badr or Badr Brigade, and the faction allied with Muqtada Sadr and his equally jihadist al-Mahdi army. The line in Iraq between institutional Islamism and jihadism is blurred. The “U.S.-led liberation” that brought the Shi’ite majority to power has been described as the “foreigner’s gift.”43 It brought liberation from the tyranny of the Sunni minority, but it replaced Saddam’s dictatorship with a tyranny of the Shi’a parties, which came from their exile in Iran. This is not democratization. One can hardly proclaim democracy when the Mahdi army forbids posting the pictures of parliamentary candidates competing against the Sadrists.

The Palestinian Hamas44 movement won an absolute majority in the elections of February 2006. In a Financial Times commentary, Carl Bildt and Anna Palacio, respectively the foreign minister of Sweden and the former foreign minister of Spain, applauded this as a democratic result.

The behavior of the Hamas Islamists, who ousted the autocratic secular Fatah and its Palestinian National Authority in Gaza, shows no evidence of a willingness to share power. This stance deepened the existing tensions between Islamist and secularist Palestinians in the occupied territories,45 with the result that Fatah, fearing a repeat of what happened in Gaza, now resists joint rule with Hamas in the West Bank. In Gaza, Hamas went to the ballot box while continuing its terrorist assaults against civilians, both Israeli and Palestinian. A year after the election Hamas used its militias to seize full power in Gaza through a military coup. It is considered a “terrorist” movement by both the United States and the European Union, and the free election did not transform it into a democratic party. Hamas has abolished the constitutional court created by the PNA and routinely jails political opponents without trial.

The Islamist AKP in Turkey is free of bullets (it has no private militia, though it does control the oppressive local police), but it was the first government to receive a delegation from Hamas after the 2006 election and to support it in the Gaza war of 2008–9. Only Iran followed its example. None of the Arab states did. The AKP has resisted establishing freedom of faith and freedom of expression in the Turkish constitution and continually replaces secular judges and university presidents with Islamist ones from its party ranks.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah46 as of this writing controls 14 of the 128 seats in the parliament and 11 of 30 cabinet posts, but it continues to maintain its own irregular army, which acts as a militia in Hezbollah-controlled territories. In July and August 2006, the Israeli Defense Force could not dislodge this militia; in fact, Hezbollah received a great boost from the war with Israel.47 The Lebanese air force is not allowed to fly over the military zones controlled by Hezbollah, nor is the Lebanese army permitted to enter. These zones constitute a state within the state. The question is: is Hezbollah now a democratic power or a jihadist movement?

What conclusions are to be drawn? This depends on where you stand. All of these parties participate in elections (at least until they gain power), but none is practicing democracy as it is commonly understood or, I would argue, as it must be understood in order to mean anything at all.

There is no doubt that democracy and democratization offer the best promise for a better future in the world of Islam. But given the azmat al-democratiyya (crisis of democracy) in the Arab world, the best examples of Islamic democracy are to be found outside the Middle East. In the past three decades, I have had the chance to study Islam and democracy not only in the Arab Middle East but also outside of it,48 and thus escape the confines of its Arabocentrism. Living, pursuing research, and teaching in several countries in West Africa and in Southeast Asia, I encountered a “civil Islam” that belies the common contention that Islam and democracy “meet in Europe.”49 The Islamic diaspora in the West is caught up in a culture of apology and defensiveness, the hallmark of identity politics in a gated community. Other sources of Islamic democracy are, unfortunately, not gaining but losing influence.

The civil Islam of Indonesia, for example, is highly favorable to democracy, but this country has never affected thinking in the Arab world. I have lived and worked in Indonesia and have seen Arab preachers (some with American Ph.D.’s) teaching Indonesians that their version of Islam is based on incorrect views. But I have never met a single Indonesian Muslim preaching civil Islam in the Middle East. At al-Azhar University in Cairo, I met Indonesians learning Salafi Islam with the intention of bringing it home, to the detriment of civil Islam.

The Paradox of Democratic Shari’a

Is there a specific Arab or an Islamic democracy? Perhaps Western patterns of democracy cannot succeed or be properly applied in the world of Islam, and despite its universal roots, democracy must adopt some authentic Arab and Islamic features. Is shari’a perhaps necessary to the success of democracy in the Islamic world? Is it necessary that the political order of that world comes not from the outside but from within? I shall address these issues more fully in Chapter 6, but for now it is important to understand that the Islamist shari’a is not the classical version, but rather an invention of tradition. The Islamist shari’a is a totalitarian concept rather than an Islamic adoption of democracy.

Postmodernism and cultural relativism put aside the political culture of democracy, focus on the ballot box, and suggest a positive assessment of Islamism and its ideology of an Islamic state based on the shari’a. Democracy, one might argue, is understood by the Islamists in a different way, and it would be both futile and patronizing to impose specific Western ideas onto Muslim cultures. Enlightened Muslims50 answer that despite different understandings of the concept of democracy, there must remain a distinction between democracy and its opposite. The Islamist shari’a state is that opposite.

One of the three Islamist voices with which this chapter opened was that of Yusuf al-Qaradawi; he rightly notes that secularism, democracy, and cultural modernity entered the world of Islam in a civilizational encounter with the West shaped by power and hegemony, but he then draws the wrong conclusions. His ideology of “Islam under siege” forces one to ask why India, despite its colonial past, succeeded in becoming a democratic state and rising power, while Arab and Muslim states that were never colonies (such as Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan) have never managed to do so. Islamists have no satisfactory explanation. Instead, they argue that the introduction of democracy to the Arab world was doomed to failure because democracy, like secularization, is alien to the world of Islam. This assertion would elevate Islam’s resistance to external ideas from a normative principle to a sociological fact: that Islam, uniquely among all the world’s civilizations, is somehow immune to outside influence. Like so many other Islamist ideas, this one relies on an invention of history.

In fact, democratization is not a recent issue in the civilizational interaction of Muslims with Europe. In a positive kind of cultural borrowing, the adoption of democracy was often on the agenda. Islamic civilization not only absorbed Hellenic thought long before Europe rediscovered it but adopted its legacy into the Islamic heritage and acted as a mediator in passing this legacy on to the West. The historian of civilizations Leslie Lipson writes that “Aristotle crept back into Europe by the side door. His return was due to the Arabs, who had become acquainted with Greek thinkers.”51 In the classical heritage of Islam one finds a rich historical record of this cultural borrowing. Hellenist philosophy became an essential part of the classical Islamic falsafa (rationalism) as opposed to the fiqh (orthodoxy). (I address this issue further in Chapter 7.)

The adoption of a kind of democracy suitable to the Middle East was a major concern of early Arab liberalism.52 Nineteenth-century Arab-Muslim liberals who went to Europe were impressed by French democracy. The first was the reformer Rifa’a al-Tahtawi; he lived in Paris and advocated cultural borrowing from the West, provided that it did not contradict Islamic law.53 The Arab Muslims who followed were not only liberal but also secular. Convinced that democracy and shari’a are not compatible, they abandoned shari’a altogether.

Decolonization during the mid-twentieth century, the period of nation-state formation in the world of Islam,54 was followed by efforts at democratic rule. Arab-Muslim elites in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq faced the challenge of modernity, despite having been exposed to it in a colonial context, by setting up systems of parliamentary democracy. The only remnant of this democratic tradition is Lebanon, where democracy is now threatened by the Islamist party Hezbollah. Everywhere else, these infant democracies failed to take root and quickly gave way to praetorian nationalist military regimes like that of Nasser in Egypt and the Ba’thists in Syria and Iraq. The pan-Arab nationalists appealed to populist sentiments but abandoned democracy on the pretext that it is alien to the Arab people. Populist rule by the military55 was presented as a remedy for the corruption of democratic multiparty systems. The secular ideology of pan-Arab populist nationalism emphasized the unity of the nation against both pluralism and multiparty democracy, which were seen as divisive and thus as promoting the fragmentation of the Arab nation. Those who did not openly reject democracy advocated a specific Arab democracy based on unity. But this was a deception offered in the name of Arab authenticity.

It is important to note that the failure of democracy was not due to a conspiracy by Westerners but rather was a consequence of underdevelopment. Development is not merely a matter of economics; it has to include institutional and cultural development. The concept of “developing cultures”56 is critical to establishing democracy in the world of Islam. The Muslim liberals failed to establish a culture of democracy and individual human rights. Qaradawi points at this failure not only to shift responsibility for failed development onto outside powers and paint the Arab nations as victims, but also to discard democracy itself.

The secular nationalists are now being replaced by Islamists whose goal (in, for instance, Iraq and Palestine) is to bring back the shari’a in the name of democratization. As I have noted, the humiliation of the secular nationalist regimes in the Six-Day War of 1967 created a crisis of confidence throughout the Arab world. One consequence was an opening for an “enlightenment” launched by disillusioned Arab intellectuals, who engaged in a process of self-criticism that was unprecedented for Arabs,57 who tend to equate criticism with disparagement. This effort did not last long. What Qaradawi named al hall al-Islami, the Islamic solution, became the mobilizing ideology, poisoning the seeds of the intellectuals’ enlightenment. Political Islam is today the foremost political power in the Arab world, even where it is not yet in power.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 removed the most powerful of the remaining secular nationalist regimes. With the ensuing experiment in democratization, Islamist movements began to adopt the institutional way to power. In Iraq it became clear that regime change did not equal democratization. Democracy might be universal, but still one cannot escape local constraints and cultural peculiarities. By contesting the universality of democratic values, the Islamists end up legitimating particularism as an expression of Arab authenticity. The notion of asalah (authenticity) as a cultural underpinning for purity serves as an excuse to discard the liberal experiment. The next step is then to argue that the shari’a must be reintroduced in the name of democracy. This is done in the service of establishing the Islamist dawla Islamiyya (Islamic state),58 a state order not at all consonant with democracy and individual human rights.

The new Iraqi constitution does not mention shari’a by name, but it contains the rule (as paraphrased in the Wall Street Journal) that “no laws may contradict the fixed principles of Islam.… A supreme court is to be created, composed of experts in Islamic law, that will have the power to strike laws down as unconstitutional.”59 A similar provision exists in the Afghani constitution, written, like the Iraqi document, with American advice. There are many fine-sounding guarantees of rights and freedoms in these constitutions, but should these be alleged to contradict Islamic law, it will be up to a court to decide which provisions shall prevail. This is a model not for democratization but for the shari’atization of the state, a prospect that threatens not only Iraq and Afghanistan but many Islamic countries, above all Egypt if the Muslim Brothers come to power. With the intensification of the “Arab predicament” after the 1967 war, one of the factors in the rise of political Islam has been its opposition to all al-hulul al-mustawradah (imports from the West). Secular democracy is at the top of the list of such “imports.” All Islamist parties—like Turkey’s AKP—use democracy as their access to power. As Zeyno Baran notes, “Democratic elections … [have] proven to be the easiest and most legitimate path to power.”60 Islamists accept the procedure as a way of legitimating their rule but reject the pluralist culture of democracy. In their propaganda the nonviolent Islamists approve democracy, but among themselves, they refer to democracy’s ancient Greek origins to show that it is among the hulul mustawradah (imported solutions) that must be rejected. Instead they propagate the formula al-hall huwa al-Islam—Islam is the solution—except that by Islam they mean the Islamic shari’a state, based on the principle of hakimiyyat Allah, God’s rule. This is anything but democracy.

Given the long history of Islamic engagement with Western ideas, why couldn’t Muslims today adopt the heritage of democracy as an outcome of cultural modernity, much as their ancestors were able to adopt the accomplishments of Hellenism? Democracy’s claim to universality is acceptable to those Muslims who subscribe to a civil Islam, but a genuine embrace of its spirit would require cultural reforms that are in opposition to the agenda of Islamism. The lip service Islamists pay to democracy is both recent and instrumental; it does not reflect a shift of mindset. Hamas61 went to the ballot box and won an election, but the political system it represents does not conform to any understanding of democracy, “Arab” or otherwise.

The Illusion of Multiple Democracies

By now it should be clear that Islamism is not an achiever in the field of democracy and that mere opposition to existing autocratic regimes does not qualify it as a pro-democracy movement. The politicization and shari’atization of Islam are not compatible with democracy. On the other hand, Islam—given certain reforms—could be made a source of democratic legitimacy. Thus my criticism in this chapter of political Islam and its agenda of an Islamic state based on shari’a is not a judgment about Islam itself.

In civil society, the rule of law is an essential part of democracy, but there are ideological and civilizational differences in the understanding of law. Hence the idea of multiple democracies has arisen alongside that of multiple modernities. Can shari’a law provide the basis for a democratic order? Let us put aside for a moment the tensions within Islam, particularly those between Sunna and Shi’a, who have different views about shari’a law, and focus more abstractly on the concept of shari’a law, which Islamists view as the basis of the Islamic state. Is the envisioned shari’a state just an expression of cultural differences, or is it a constructed civilizational ideology incompatible with democracy? In the West, such a question creates two opposing camps: the universalists and the cultural relativists. Neither side, however, has much feel for non-Western cultures.

The particular features of Middle Eastern life and custom are partly determined by Islam in its manifestation in local cultures. Some of these create obstacles to the acceptance of democracy. One may argue that those particularities need to be limited, even though one has to consider cultural differences seriously. But these differences must first be identified and discussed freely. The core question is to what extent Islam is to be democratized through reform and to what extent democracy is to be adjusted to an Islamic environment. It is not an either/or question. Given the prevalence of Sunni Islam, Arab debates on these issues are highly influential in determining what forms democracy might take in the Islamic world, and whether shari’a can really be viewed as constitutional law.

To understand the issues that underlie the lack of political freedom in Arab societies, it is important to move beyond ideological contentions, attitudes of victimization, and ritual accusations of the West. In this venture, some Arab debates that took place more than a quarter of a century ago are worth reviewing. In October 1980 a group of Arab intellectuals assembled in Tunis to address the future of their region, including the options for democracy. The occasion was titled Les Arabes face à leur destin, or Arabs face their future.62 The major question related to whether Arabs would act with a sense of responsibility or engage in self-congratulation while blaming others for their misfortunes. (Edward Said’s “Orientalism” had helped feed the latter sentiment.) The participants were unanimous on two points: there was no political freedom in the majority of Arab countries, and creating such freedom would require cultural change. Two decades later, in 2002, this self-critical observation was restated less rhetorically in a report completed by Arab experts for the United Nations Development Program.63 The same lack of freedom prevents Arab intellectuals from expressing their commitment to liberty or working openly to establish any authentic framework for democracy in their own countries. Most fear imprisonment if they reveal their pro-democracy political commitments. Those who are not imprisoned are often denied access to the means of cultural and political expression. The system of surveillance by the state allows freedom of action only to mercenary intellectuals. The Islamic Middle East exists in a system of homemade neopatriarchy.64 What President Obama told Africans in July 2009 applies to Arabs as well: “The legacy of colonialism is not an excuse for failing to build … democratic societies.” Obama compared the country his father came from, Kenya, with South Korea, pointing out that while both had colonial legacies, they had very different records of accomplishment.

Does contemporary Islamism, as the only visible opposition to authoritarian repression, provide the needed alternative? Or, to repeat the formula of Saad Eddin Ibrahim, are we entangled between autocracy and theocracy? The autocrats say that democracy is alien to Arabs, and the Islamists say that democracy is alien to Islam. The political order envisioned by the Islamists is by no means a democracy and cannot be considered a remedy for the existing malaise. Yet there is a need for a change. The complete failure of the Bush administration’s “regime change” in Iraq, an effort to create a democratic culture by military force, led some to speak of an incompatibility between Islam and democracy. One cannot simply dismiss such speculations as “Orientalism.” Even some Arabs entertained these thoughts, earning criticism from Sadik al-Azm for practicing “Orientalism in reverse.”65

The lack of democracy in the world of Islam cannot be explained by reference to imperialism and its colonial legacy, or by the imagery of a mu’amarah (conspiracy).66 Such ideas lead nowhere, but they have to be taken into consideration because they are powerful. The bottom line is that political Islam’s insistence on presenting shari’a as constitutional law is a symptom of a larger issue. The invention of tradition, the use of a distorted or even imaginary history to justify present political ambitions, is a widespread practice. What Muslims need instead is Islamic rationalism, an honorable if neglected part of Islamic tradition. The Hellenization of Islamic civilization under the rationalists’ influence during the Middle Ages was an extensive cultural borrowing that led to significant advances. Muslim societies need to borrow from the West again to create the structural and institutional underpinnings of democracy. Human rights as well as the freedoms of expression and assembly can exist only if guaranteed by both cultural and legal safeguards. Muslims must recognize that these are not Western impositions but universal goods.

Civic pluralism is the criterion for determining what is democratic and what is not. The compatibility of Islamism and democracy falters on the Islamists’ rejection of democratic pluralism as a part of their general rejection of Western values. Pluralism cannot be reconciled with the religionization of politics: the universality of democracy conflicts with the authenticity of the “Islamic solution.” For Islamists, democracy is not universal but only a source of tactics; its European origin serves to legitimate their limiting its role to shura (consultation) and the adoption of certain procedures. The institutional safeguards that underpin democracy are reduced to an institutional control mechanism that must be in compliance with shari’a. This is done in the name of authenticity. The obstacles to the establishment of democracy in Islam are different from those in the West, where the issue was largely the painful expansion of participation to previously excluded social groups. The denial of equal protection under the law to different social groups and classes is not the problem with shari’a. The problem is rather twofold: first, there is no single comprehensive shari’a. Reference to it is always arbitrary, though done in the name of God. Second, because it denies equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, shari’a lacks religious pluralism.

In a democracy, power is depersonalized: it resides in institutions, such as courts and legislatures, not in specific individuals. In Islamic tradition, the imam embodies a personalized authority. The late Majid Khadduri, a U.S.-based Iraqi-born scholar, published many books in which Arab politics is reduced to the biographies of Arab politicians. Though this approach is methodologically flawed, I believe Khadduri had a point; power in Arab politics is personalized, not based in institutions. This does not mean, of course, that there are no structures underlying Arab politics. In my study of the Islamic intellectual history, I repeatedly encountered the traditional question asked by the jurists: “who is the imam fadil,” the true Imam?67 Legal issues were resolved on the basis of personal authority. Only rarely were proper and just institutions a relevant issue in the jurists’ reasoning.

There were exceptions. Among them one finds al-Farabi’s classical work al-Madina al-Fadila,68 in which he discussed the proper order of society and state, leaning on ancient Greek philosophy and its adoption into an Islamic tradition of rationalism. Clearly, some universal standards can be usefully accepted by people of different cultures.

In short, institutions matter to democracy. With this in mind, it is helpful to consult Barrington Moore’s classic The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy,69 which provides a comparative analysis of Western and non-Western political development and shows that those European societies that were able to develop a pattern of democracy did so on the basis of some comparatively autonomous medieval institutions. Moore concludes that these institutions contributed to strengthening the civil society vis-à-vis the state. A working democracy presupposes the existence of institutions of a civil state and a civil society, not only an Imam adil (just Imam). In this regard there can be no “multiple democracies.” The Islamist argument that Western patterns of democracy do not apply to Islam is a mere ploy to prevent any democratization that goes beyond the ballot box. Islamist thinking also prevents the expansion of political participation and equal protection to non-Muslims that is possible under institutionalized law. Shari’a is interpretative, not legislative, and thus cannot be institutionalized.

The anti-Western argument also ignores the cultural heritage of Islam. Learning from others within the framework of cultural borrowing not only is not alien to the Arab-Islamic heritage, it is most pertinent to the present. Democracy’s Greek origin does not make it alien to Islam. Hellenism is a part of the Islamic legacy. Of course there are different varieties of democracy—every democratic rule is adjusted to local conditions—but these varieties, to be considered democracies, must all satisfy certain universal conditions.

There is no reason these conditions cannot be made to harmonize with authenticity and identity politics, but this is not what the Islamists have in mind. The successes of Hamas in Palestine, SIIC in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brothers (earlier disguised as the Wasat Party) in Egypt, al-Nahada in Tunisia, the Islamic Action Front in Jordan, and FIS in Algeria are signs not of democracy on the rise but rather of the seizure of power by Islamism wearing democratic camouflage. I say this not as a rebuke of the current “Islamic revival,” but rather to point out that democracy requires something other than a revival of shari’a in an Islamist shape. This path is a dead end.

One may argue for an Islam in line with liberal democracy in the Arab world, as the famous liberal Lebanese professor Hassan Sa’b did in an important book in which he called for a “pro-democracy Islam” as opposed to an “Islam of despotism.”70 Sa’b argues that a “comprehensive spiritual revolution in the soul of Muslims” is needed to foster the cultural change required for achieving democracy in the Arab world. This position acknowledges that culture matters for the introduction of democratic traditions. Liberal Islamic thinkers like Sa’b who are committed to democracy in this ethical understanding are rare. The Islamists, with their return of the sacred, are interested not in ethics or in a postsecular renaissance of religion as a cultural meaning, but rather in the politics of an Islamic order71 based on the din-wa-dawla (unity of state and religion) that they present as the substance of Islam.

Despite the incompatibility of Islamism with democratic pluralism, we are compelled to ponder ways to include the institutional Islamists in the game of democracy, because this is imperative if democracy is to take hold. Yet we must be vigilant to ensure that no undermining of democratization happens in the name of democracy. The American debate on Islam and democracy confuses these imperatives. The problem is the conspicuous lack of knowledge even among those who offer themselves as pundits. One of the few well-informed observers is Zeyno Baran, who writes that Turkey’s AKP pays lip service to democracy while it promotes a creeping Islamization.72 But others, like Voll and Esposito, write books on Islam and democracy that not only overlook basic original sources but also conflate Islam and Islamism, with the result that they end up watering down the meaning of democracy itself.

What Are We Talking About?

With its growing appeal, political Islam is gaining the power to mobilize whole societies. At the same time, Western scholars and policymakers are seeking ways to include “moderate” Islamism in democratic processes. This is a risky strategy. Western assessments of institutional Islamism are often based on poorly defined terms. Research on political Islam needs to be based on clear thinking about the compatibility of both Islam and Islamism with democracy. To reiterate, I have no doubts about the compatibility of a reformed Islam, as a political ethics, with democracy. Islamism is another matter.

Lip service to democracy does not suffice to establish commitment. My interest, as an Arab-Muslim pro-democracy theorist and practitioner, is to establish secular democracy in the Islamic world. Except as it informs a society’s ethics, religion cannot be the basis of a democracy. The foregoing inquiry has made use of secular notions and social-science concepts to advance five major ideas. To review, these are:

1. The pertinence of a well-informed analysis of political Islam. In general, one has to understand what Islamism is all about before one can say anything useful about its relation to democracy. This is both an academic and a political concern. Academic analysis exists to help guide policy. Western responses to Islamism have been faulty because policymakers lacked basic information and their actions did not rest on well-founded assessments. Therefore, the first step is to clarify the nature of Islamism.

2. The varied nature of Islam. It is not monolithic, any more than Christianity is. On all levels, as a faith, local culture, and cross-cultural civilization, Islam is characterized by diversity and change. Though it is not by nature a political religion, throughout its history Islam has been embedded into politics in the sense that it was used—always post eventum—to legitimate the authority and actions of the ruling imam-caliph. Today, however, Islamism uses the tradition of shari’a reasoning73 as a “precedent” (in John Kelsay’s formulation) to legitimate novelties. Islamists would use this combination of religion and politics to create a monolithic Islam that did not exist in the past.

3. Islam versus Islamism. It is highly misleading—and a great service to the Islamists—to blur the terms “Islam” and “Islamism,” to use them interchangeably, or to assume that Islamism is simply a more fervent or extreme variety of Islam, as Voll, Esposito, and others assert. Thus even though I endorse most of his analysis of the shari’a reasoning in Islam, I disagree with Kelsay when he writes that Hasan al-Banna’s Muslim Brothers are an “embodiment of the clerical shari’a vision.”74 Islamists camouflage themselves as the “true Muslims,” but there is ample reason to doubt this self-description. When we speak of compatibility with democracy, therefore, we are in fact asking two different questions of two different objects. To the first question, about Islam’s compatibility with democracy, we can answer yes, conditional to religious reform (Salafist Islam is not compatible). For instance, the Nahdatul Ulama in Indonesia is an Islamic—not an Islamist—party, and it qualifies as a democratic institution that represents a civil Islam. In contrast, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—as well as its offspring such as Hamas—is not democratic but rather totalitarian in its outlook. It is a serious mistake to speak of this movement with the formula “Islam without fear.”

4. “Moderation.” Related to the distinction between Islam as a faith and Islamism as a religionized ideology is the distinction between peaceful and violent Islamists. The latter enact jihad to pursue their political agenda, whereas peaceful Islamists forgo violence for tactical reasons. In short, jihadist Islamism differs from institutional Islamism in means, not in goals. Kelsay is completely right in stating that even though “moderates” and “militants” disagree over practices, they share the same vision:75 the shari’a-based order of nizam Islami. As Baran puts it, the “moderates” consent “instrumentally to democratic elections … the easiest path to power,” forgoing violent “Islamization … in favor of a gradual bottom-up policy.” Despite the occasional resort to legitimate elections, this “creeping Islamization”76 is not democratization.

5. Elections versus democracy. In assessing Islam’s and Islamism’s compatibility with democracy, we must bear in mind a further distinction within democracy itself. Democracy is based institutionally on an electoral procedure, but it is much more than balloting. It is above all a political culture of pluralism and tolerance for reasonable disagreement, based on core values combined with the acceptance of diversity. The procedure of elections and the establishment of this political culture are two parts of the same system and cannot be separated. When institutional Islamists try to separate them, they only substitute bottom-up Islamization for violent top-down Islamization. They agree to balloting but not to the pluralist political culture of democratic civil society. This distinction is lost on pundits who reject as “secular fundamentalism” an insistence on the pluralist civic culture of democracy.

Institutional Islamists and Democracy

In this chapter I have raised four broad issues:

Unity and diversity in Islam and Islamism. Diversity within a category does not mean a lack of all commonalities—otherwise there could be no categories. In Islam, there is a core set of tenets—a worldview, a faith, and a set of ethical teachings—that all Muslims share. In my thirty years of research in some twenty Islamic countries in Africa and Asia, I have seen countless examples of both commonalities and differences. The same applies to Islamism. All Islamists have in common that they shari’atize Islam and flatly ignore the fact that the term “shari’a” occurs only once in the Qur’an, where it refers to morality, not law. All Islamists share an agenda of establishing an Islamic state order, or nizam Islami—not the “global caliphate” as many self-pronounced experts maintain. Neither “dawla” (state) nor “nizam”—both of which are pivotal in the shari’a reasoning of the Islamists—occurs in the Qur’an. What all Islamists share, therefore, is a modern religionized political ideology geared to a remaking of the world on the basis of an inverted tradition of shari’a. All Muslims who subscribe to this agenda can be identified as Islamists. Faithful Muslims with a spiritual understanding of Islam, who do not subscribe to this agenda, are not Islamists. The term “post-Islamism,” which refers to Islamist renunciation of jihadism in favor of democratic participation, makes no sense. How can Islamists be “post-Islamists” if they still aspire to create an “Islamist order”? Only if this goal is abandoned may one talk of post-Islamism. I do not know a single Islamist movement that has abandoned this Islamist agenda. Some parties, such as Turkey’s AKP, deny their Islamism to avoid constitutional banning. This is by no means a sign of post-Islamism.

In any case, the distinction between institutional and jihadist Islamists is often blurred. Several Islamist parties agree to go to the ballot box but retain their militias. Hamas, Hezbollah, and SIIC all want to have it both ways: they claim legitimacy through their elected representation in the parliament but continue the practice of terror.

“Genuine commitment to democracy.” The word “genuine” in this context denotes a liberal understanding based on democratic pluralism. Study of the ideology of Islamism and of its pillars does not support a belief in any such commitment. The nizam Islami is a totalitarian order. One could argue that a change could happen through shifts in the thinking and cultural values of Islamists themselves. In my study of political Islam I have yet to see any such shift. There has been a rhetorical and strategic adjustment to democracy. In all cases, this adjustment happens merely for instrumental reasons, to avoid proscription or, in the case of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt, to avoid prosecution. Of course, there may be individuals who have undergone such a shift.77 One can say that these persons have abandoned Islamism altogether. Neither the AKP nor the Muslim Brotherhood has done this.

The compatibility of Islamist ideology with democracy. The Islamist religionization of politics leaves no room for negotiation, since the sacred is not negotiable. Disagreement is heresy. Pluralism and tolerance of diversity, essential elements of democracy, are rejected as “divisive.” Participation in elections and the ambiguous renunciation of violence are by themselves not indications that Islamists are becoming genuinely democratic. Islamist movements reject power sharing with secular parties or with non-Muslim minorities in the name of shari’a. They admit only what they believe that their totalitarian shari’a allows. Despite the claim of shari’a as constitutional law, constitutionalism and shari’a are completely at odds.78

Inclusion versus exclusion. Despite the incompatibility of the Islamist state order with democracy, no democratic government can ignore the Islamist movements, which represent the major opposition throughout most of the world of Islam. So what can we do? Two approaches exist, one inclusionary, represented by the model of Turkey, and the other exclusionary, represented by Algeria, where Islamist parties are banned outright. I confess that I prefer the Turkish example.

Not that Turkey’s experience with the AKP is reassuring. It has resulted in “a creeping Islamization” at the expense of democratic pluralism. The AKP is an Islamist party, not, as it pretends, an Islamic-conservative party comparable to the German Christian Democrats. It is intolerant of secularists, which it calls dönme (hidden Jews), and of ethnic and religious minorities, like Kurds and Allawis. The politics of inclusion has given power to a party of exclusion.79 The AKP has successfully used elections as the “most legitimate path to power” and has been able “to reshape the republic, chiefly along Islamist lines,”80 but not in the direction of democratization.

The unequivocal conclusion is that Islamism and democracy are deeply at odds. We should never forget that democracy is a novel cultural concept in the world of Islam. Can this introduction be successful as part of a global democratization?81 The introduction of democracy needs institutional and cultural underpinnings, which every civilization develops according to its own calendar. The claim that democracy is universal is questioned not only by Western cultural relativists but also by non-Westerners as a European invention. Yusuf al-Qaradawi describes “secular democracy” as one of the hulul mustawradah (imported solutions) that Islam must reject. Other Islamists play at democracy in a superficial and halfhearted way. There is little sign that Islamists want to (or can) reconcile the universality of secular democracy with their “Islamic solution” of a shari’a order.

All of the civil foundations for democracy are missing in the world of Islam. The only working institution is the mukhabarat, the secret police guaranteeing the oppressive surveillance of the entire population in a culture of fear. Even though Islamists are themselves victims of this oppressive institution, we can be sure that they would continue this system if they came to power. The chief evidence is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Gaza under the rule of Hamas and Turkey under the AKP are not reassuring either.

If Islamists honestly engaged in a shift of mindset and accepted democracy as a political culture, they really would become post-Islamists. But doing so would require them to renounce the core of their political/religious beliefs. The central tenets of political Islam—the belief in an organic entity named din-wa-dawla, unity of state and religion, the concept of a “shari’a state”82 that does not exist in the Qur’an, and, for jihadists, and “Islamic world revolution” that is for them the only means of politics—are all at war with the ideas and political culture of democracy.83

Arab Spring, Democracy, and Islamism

The breathtaking events in the Middle East in the spring and summer of 2011, just as this book was in the final stages of editing, demand some comment even though the dramatic evolution that started then is far from completed. On February 11, President Obama rightly spoke of the “blinding pace” of events. Both Turkey and Iran have presented themselves as models for post-Mubarak Egypt.

So far the “Arab Spring” has brought the unseating of rulers in Tunisia (Ben Ali), in Egypt (Mubarak), and in Libya (Qadhafi) and ongoing uprisings in three countries: Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. The stalemates in Egypt and Tunisia and the bloodshed and unrestrained violence in Libya and Syria dismissed the naïve Western expectation of a swift turn from authoritarianism to democracy. One of the most insightful Western commentators, Thomas Friedman, has described the situation aptly:

There’s one big problem: The Tahrir Square revolution was a largely spontaneous, bottom-up affair. It was not led by any particular party or leader. Parties are just now being formed. If elections … are held in September, the only group in Egypt with a real party network ready to roll is the one that has been living underground and is now suddenly legal: the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Liberal people are feeling some concerns that they made the revolution and the Muslim Brotherhood can now take it.84

Another perceptive Western reporter wrote a late-summer account of this great world-historical event:

The idealism of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia … revived an Arab world anticipating change. But Libya’s unfinished revolution … illustrates how perilous that change has become.… The intentions and influence of Islamists in their ranks are uncertain.… Libya’s complexities suggest[] that the prolonged transition of Arab countries to a new order may prove as tumultuous to the region as Egypt’s moment was stirring.… Uncertainty is far more pronounced today [in] power vacuums.… In Yemen, militant Islamists have found a haven.… Islamists … have emerged as a force in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere.85

These events turn the page, but the new page is blank. Who is going to fill it? A liberal Islamic opposition, or the Islamists? It is fair to say that the road is rocky for all parties. For the Middle East, as the core of Islamic civilization, the events of February 2011 reflect a change of a world-historical significance that is most pertinent to the theme of this book. Therefore, a proper understanding of the watershed is highly imperative.

The point of departure is the fact that the Middle East stood outside history following the breakdown of communism beginning in 1989 and the ensuing global democratization. All Arab states were ruled, with varying degrees of oppression, by authoritarian regimes. In January 2011 this changed. In the Tunisian city Sidi Bouzaid, a street vendor publicly burned himself to protest the arbitrary confiscation of his business. This individual protest triggered a mass upheaval that ultimately compelled the dictator Ben Ali to flee to Saudi Arabia after ten days of mass protest. In the same month, the successful Tunisian protest spilled over to Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, and Syria, and most significantly to Egypt, the hub of the Middle East. Mass protests for eighteen days—January 25 to February 11—ended President Mubarak’s three decades of rule. By the time you read this, the leadership of that part of the world is likely to look very different.

These events put the central subject of this chapter—the depth of the Islamists’ commitment to democracy—into a much different and starker context. The rise to power of Islamist parties in several additional countries has evolved from a theoretical future eventuality to a very near-term prospect. The core of the world of Islam is attempting to move from authoritarianism to democratic rule, and it is therefore imperative to assess the place of Islamist movements in this process.

Three points need to guide our analysis. First, the removal of an authoritarian government will not necessarily lead to democracy, as happened in much of postcommunist Europe after 1989. In Iran, the tyranny of the shah was replaced after 1979 by the tyranny of the Islamist ayatollahs. Second, Islamism has become a transnational movement. The Egyptian Muslim Brothers and Turkish AKP, for instance, are well connected. The International Herald Tribune global edition of the New York Times reported that “Erdoğan’s party has already established ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt—as a result of Mr. Erdoğan’s longstanding and successful campaign to present himself as a dominant and increasingly anti-Israel voice in the Middle East.… Three members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood … were on the Turkish-sponsored ship … that was attacked by Israeli soldiers”86 in May 2010. Third, authoritarian regimes in the Middle East have always presented themselves as secular bulwarks against Islamism. The Mubarak regime was no exception. The effect has been to create a smoke screen in the assessment of Islamism. In 2011 there has been a strong trend in the West to idealize Islamism as a force for democratization. A Times global edition report on the Muslim Brotherhood acknowledges that “among specialists, the degree of uncertainty about the Brotherhood’s future is striking.” This uncertainty extends to the degree of moderation in the movement, which “may prove to have been a convenient false front to be cast off if the group achieved real power.”87

Let us start by noting that the upheavals in the Middle East were not engineered by Islamists and their supporters; they are spontaneous expressions of anger by people who not only endure political suppression but also suffer economically. The Tunisian street vendor burned himself not for democracy but to protest his economic repression. The Islamists step into this amalgam of all kinds of opposition that relates to all walks of life. Could they prevail? Could they hijack the revolt? And how should they be dealt with as a political reality? If nothing else, it is clear that no politics can be designed in the Arab–Middle Eastern part of the world of Islam without engaging the existing Islamist movements. Moreover, no democratic participatory government can specifically exclude these movements and be true to democratic principles. Despite their undemocratic ideology, there is no alternative to engaging those Islamists who forgo violence. Still, engagement and empowerment are distinctly different issues. To engage Islamism is not to empower it, let alone hand over power to Islamists in the name of democracy, as has happened and is happening in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, and even Turkey. The Islamists must be opposed by a counterweight of truly democratic forces, to try to move the transitions in a more liberal direction.

Whatever happens in Egypt in the post-Mubarak era will be more important than what happened in Iran after the toppling of the shah in 1979. Iran is the center of Shi’a Islam, and Egypt is the center of Sunni Islam. The difference is that Sunni Muslims make up 90 percent of the worldwide umma. It seems useful, therefore, to cite two contrasting outlooks that were published in the same edition of the Financial Times of January 31, 2011, at the height of the uprising in Egypt. Emile Nakleh, a former director of the CIA Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program, believes that “a new government can be formed uniting seculars and Islamists.… The Brotherhood has already participated in elections and it is willing to work with other groups.” He concludes that “there are no ayatollahs waiting in the wings to take over.”88 This statement is literally true because there are no ayatollahs in Sunni Islam. The Sunni clergy is based at al-Azhar, in Cairo, and the Muslim Brotherhood did not come from there—unlike the ayatollahs, who emerge from Iran’s Shi’ite equivalent, Qum. Most Sunni Islamist movements are composed of laymen.

The other Financial Times piece is a report by Roula Khalaf acknowledging that the Muslim Brotherhood “has a big head start on anyone else in terms of organization and it can count on what remains a very potent mobilizing tool—religion.” Khalaf is not silent about the Muslim Brothers’ participation in the 2005 elections (they won 20 percent of the seats in the parliament), but she adds this information: the Muslim Brothers “two years later attempted to draft a proper political agenda. The proposed program, however, caused a stir by calling for a ban on women and non-Muslims becoming head of state and creation of a religious council to vet governmental decisions.”89 While the Muslim Brotherhood shelved these demands in the face of public opposition, it never abandoned its Islamist agenda. That agenda raises the likelihood that the Muslim Brotherhood will make pro-democratic noises but, if it gains power, will practice the kind of “Islamic democracy” seen in Gaza and Iran. A hasty election in the post-Mubarak era could therefore be highly damaging. What Egypt needs most is a careful institutional preparation of a transition from authoritarianism to some kind of democracy. At present, all of the democratic institutions needed for the implementation of Western democracy in the Middle East are missing.

In some of the most recent contributions to political theory it is acknowledged that underdevelopment is no longer restricted to underdeveloped economic structures. The low standard of institution building is a basic feature of underdevelopment. Authoritarian rulers in the Middle East have undermined institution building in favor of personal rule. The fall of dictators creates under these conditions a political vacuum that only Islamists can fill, because they are the only opposition that has successfully maintained underground networks stretching beyond the Middle East to become transnational. Liberal-democratic opposition needs time to build its institutions to be able to compete with the Islamists. Thomas Friedman writes that if an early election takes place in the name of democratization, and if the Muslim Brothers win, their movement

could have an inordinate impact on writing Egypt’s first truly free Constitution and could inject restrictions on women, alcohol, dress and the relations between mosque and state. “You will have an unrepresentative Parliament writing an unrepresentative Constitution,” argued Mohammed El Baradei, the former international atomic energy czar who is running for president on a reform platform. “Because the Muslim Brotherhood is ready, they want elections first,” adds Osama Ghazali Harb, another reform party leader. “We as secular forces prefer to have some time to consolidate our parties.”90

To understand these complexities one has to keep in mind that democracy is not merely about elections; it is a culture of pluralism and a philosophy for civil society. The Islamists want “elections now,” but are against the values of democratic pluralism and the lifestyle of civil society.91

The Egyptian revolution was broad-based. Non-Islamist people flooded the streets to demonstrate against three evils of the Mubarak regime: poor development policies, increasing unemployment and poverty, and repression by the ruling secret police. These added up to a deepening lack of legitimacy. Despite what the contested regimes themselves contend, the common view among experts is that the Islamists did not instigate the uprising. On the contrary, in both Tunisia and Egypt the Islamists were taken by surprise. But while no specific movement engineered the outbreaks, which were truly spontaneous, it is also a fact that there is no well-organized opposition able to lead the uprising—with one exception: the Islamist movements. In Egypt this means, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, and in Tunisia it is al-Nahda, built up by Rashid Gannouchi since 1981 in emulation of the Muslim Brotherhood. The authoritarian regimes’ relentless destruction of any viable opposition has left Islamism, with its efficient networks—particularly political asylum in Europe—as the only organized outside political group to survive the oppression.

No one can say what is going to happen in Egypt, but better knowledge about the country would help establish some clarity. Among the dozens of articles and commentaries I have read in the Western press, a piece by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal strikes me as the most insightful. Stephens writes: “If the Brotherhood has its way, Egypt will become a Sunni theocracy modelled on Iran.” This Islamist goal, as Stephens knows, is not yet within reach, but he sketches a scenario that could lead there: “a weak parliamentary system, incapable of exercising authority over the army and a cat’s paw for a Brotherhood … especially since Mr. El Baradei, imagining he has the upper hand, stumbled into a political alliance with the Brotherhood.”92 Mohamed El-Baradei is a respected Egyptian and former United Nations official who has spent most of his professional life in New York and Vienna. He returned to Cairo to become the self-appointed leader of the leaderless opposition. He is not a politician and does not have a constituent base from which to unite the numerous competing groups. Except to call for democracy, he has no clear agenda. Unlike El-Baradei and most of the protestors, the Muslim Brotherhood has both a following and an agenda. In the short run it will—and should—participate in the transition to a democratic Egypt. But the transition from authoritarianism to democracy is not the agenda of Islamism. Though I have little regard for Ayan Hirsi Ali’s views about Islam, she is right when she asks, “Why are the secular democratic forces in Egypt so much weaker than the Muslim Brothers?” For the most part, the non-Islamist protesters are “an amalgam of very diverse elements … and lack common ideological glue” beyond the immediate goal (now achieved) of removing Mubarak. In contrast, Hirsi Ali rightly states, the Muslim Brothers “have a political program and a vision not only until the next election, but in their view, until the Hereafter.… The Muslim Brotherhood whose aim is to install the shari’a … will insist that a vote for them is a vote for Allah’s law.… Without effective organization, the secular democratic forces that have swept one tyranny aside could easily succumb to another.”93 To avoid this scenario one needs to learn from what happened in Iran in 1979. There, the Islamists filled the void, even though the people of Iran, not the Ayatollah, toppled the tyranny. The transition from authoritarianism to democratic rule cannot exclude the Muslim Brotherhood, but it has to be protected from their agenda through democratic measures. Above all, this means building democratic institutions. Democracy in Egypt must not be reduced to mere voting with no underlying democratic political culture. Though the Muslim Brothers cannot be excluded from the democratization process, their vision for the future of Egypt should be countered by all democratic means.

In a telling demonstration of the deceptive pro-democracy “New Islamism,” the general secretary of the Muslim Brothers, Hussein Mahmoud, in an interview with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, expressed approval of a democratic system for Egypt and did not deny that the Muslim Brothers did not comprise the majority of people rebelling on the street.94 He supported the participation of the Muslim Brothers in a pluralist national government. But he unwittingly confirmed Hirsi Ali’s misgivings when he said—responding to the question, Are you going to establish a shari’a state?—“Yes, because the Islamic shari’a law grants all rights and freedom.… Shari’a maintains the security of the people … and it provides the state with the general framework needed for a civilized and happy society.… Egypt is an Islamic state in which Muslims are the majority.… Shari’a is the way of life for Muslims.… Egypt should never be allowed to become a secular state, because this would mean to take the country out of its history and its civilization.” Not only is this view not compatible with democracy, it is—as I will explain in Chapter 6—not true to Egyptian history and tradition. The state order of shari’a that Islamism seeks to impose is not the shari’a of traditional Islam.

There is another dimension of the contemporary events, namely regional peace in the Middle East. The Israeli strategist Yossi K. Halevi wrote in the Times global edition about “the grim assumption that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood takes power.… [The] result would be the end of Israel’s most important relationship in the Arab World. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it comes to power.”95 The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman knows this well, but in an insightful commentary in the same edition, he observes that “Mubarak deserves all the wrath directed at him.” He adds that the post-Mubarak “time is perilous for Israel and its anxiety is understandable,” but Mubarak and Israel itself share in the responsibility for this peril. Mubarak never tried “to fill the void between his authoritarian state and the Muslim Brotherhood.” For his part, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu—today and during his earlier rule in the late 1990s—“has found every excuse for not putting a peace plan on the table,” thus “becoming the Mubarak of the peace process.”96 In these troubled waters the Muslim Brotherhood finds a favorable environment for successful action in the post-Mubarak Middle East. Israel would be as accountable for this as it is for creating the conditions for the Hamas takeover in Gaza.

Finally, the “shari’a state” is not the democracy that the people who flooded the streets in Cairo and Tunis have been yearning for. The unseated authoritarian rulers—and the others still in charge—who falsely legitimated themselves as the only secular alternative to Islamism foisted a distortion on the world of Islam. It is another distortion when Islamists reverse the argument with their slogan: “Islam [by which they mean Islamism] is the solution.” For non-Islamist Muslims, democratic freedom, and not Islamism, is the alternative.

Thus the future of the Middle East is far from certain. It is only Western wishful thinking that predicts a swift transition from authoritarianism to democracy. The participation of Islamist movements in the governments—whatever they are—that succeed the authoritarian rulers only makes democracy more uncertain. The legitimate uprising started in Tunisia and Egypt as a promising Arab Spring, which, however, turned in Libya to a Blazing Summer and to mass murders by the tanks of the Syrian army. The revolt might become a dark Arab Winter by the end of 2011 if Islamists come to power and if the Syrian Ba’th regime turns Syria into a mass grave.

By the fall of 2011 the Arab Spring had taken a distinctly Islamist turn. Local Islamist movements were gaining power. A Libyan democrat quoted in the New York Times said: “The Islamists … seem more influential than their real weight.… Most Libyans are not strongly Islamic, but the Islamists are strongly organized and that’s the problem.”97 In the same story, the Times reported the preeminent influence in politics of the Islamist leader Sheik Ali Salabi and in the military of the jihadist Abdul Hakim Belhaj, commander of the rebel Tripoli Brigade. In Egypt and Tunisia, too, well-organized Islamist groups have come to the fore.

Regionally, Turkey has championed the Arab Spring. The first statesman to visit all three countries that by late 2011 had overthrown dictators—Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia—was Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan. Before the trip, Erdoğan blasted Israel in a television interview, then expelled the Israeli ambassador. He consequently was welcomed as a “hero” by the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo. A news analysis provided this assessment: “Erdoğan has sought to leverage the Arab uprisings into greater influence for Turkey in a region where, as the seat of the Ottoman Empire, it once ruled for centuries.”98 Another analyst argued that Turkey “meant to promote itself as a political power in the Arab region and spread its influence.”99

Is there a democracy at the end of this tunnel? The major Islamist movements claim to have abandoned jihadism in favor of a democratic shari’a state. But their understanding of the concept is shallow at best. Anthony Shadid quoted the following comment from a 26-year-old Islamist in Cairo, Mohammed Nadi: “Is democracy the voice of the majority? We as Islamists are the majority. Why do they want to impose on us the views of the minorities—the liberals and the secularists?”100 Far from the pluralist ideal of democracy, the Islamist version evokes what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of the majority.”101 And the Islamists may not even be a majority.