“IN THE NAME of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,” the IranAir pilot intones as our plane glides to a stop at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport. There is a nervous shifting in the seats around me. The women sit upright, adjusting their headscarves, making sure their ankles and wrists are properly covered, while their husbands rub the sleep from their eyes and begin gathering the belongings their children have scattered in the aisle.
I lift my head to look for the two or three faces I have been carefully observing since boarding the plane in London. They are the younger, single passengers on board, men and women who, like me, are in their late twenties or early thirties. They are dressed in ill-fitting clothes that look as though they were purchased in secondhand stores—awkward long-sleeved shirts; dull slacks; unadorned head scarves—all meant to appear as inoffensive as possible. I know this because this is precisely how I am dressed. When I catch their eyes, I can see a glint of the same anxiety that courses through my body. It is a mixture of fear and excitement. For many of us, this will be the first time we have set foot in the country of our birth since the revolution forced us from it as children.
As part of an effort to reach out to the massive Iranian Diaspora who fled to Europe and the United States in the early 1980s, the Iranian government had issued a tentative amnesty to all expatriates, announcing that they could return to Iran for brief visits—once a year and not to exceed three months—without fear of being detained or forced into completing their mandatory military duty. The response was immediate. Thousands of young Iranians began pouring into the country. Some had never known Iran except through the nostalgic tales of their parents. Others like me had been born in Iran but spirited away when we were still too young to make decisions of our own.
We disembark and slip into the steamy early morning. It is still dark, but already the airport is bursting with arrivals from Paris, Milan, Berlin, Los Angeles. A raucous crowd has gathered at passport control in nothing resembling a proper line. Babies scream. An unbearable odor of sweat and cigarette smoke wafts through the air. Elbows jab me from all sides. And suddenly I am flooded with memories of this very same airport many years ago; of linking arms with my family and shoving our way through a frantic mob, trying to leave Iran before the borders closed and the airplanes were grounded. I remember my mother crying out, “Don’t lose your sister!” I can still hear the terrifying breathlessness of her voice, as though she was warning me that if I let go of my little sister’s hand, she would be left behind. I gripped her fingers so tightly she began to cry, and dragged her roughly toward the gate, kicking at the knees around us to make way.
Two decades and four suffocatingly long hours later, I am finally at the passport window. I slip my documents through a slot in the glass to a young, lightly bearded man in broken spectacles. He flips through the pages absentmindedly while I prepare my well-rehearsed replies as to who I am and why I am here.
“What is your point of origin?” the agent asks wearily.
“The United States,” I reply.
He stiffens and looks up at my face. I can tell we are the same age, though his tired eyes and his unshaven jowl make him appear much older. He is a child of the revolution; I am a fugitive—an apostate. He has spent his life surviving a history that I have spent my life studying from afar. All at once I feel overwhelmed. I can barely look at him when he asks, “Where have you been?” as all passport agents are required to do. I cannot help but sense the accusation in his question.
On the day the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran, I took my four-year-old sister by the hand and, despite my mother’s warning not to venture outdoors, led her out of our apartment in downtown Tehran to join the celebrations in the streets. It had been days since we had gone outside. The weeks preceding the Shah’s exile and the Ayatollah’s return had been violent ones. The schools were closed, most television and radio stations shut down, and our quiet neighborhood deserted. So when we looked out our window on that February morning and saw the euphoria in the streets, nothing could have kept us inside.
Filling a plastic pitcher with Tang and stealing two packages of Dixie cups from our mother’s cupboard, my sister and I sneaked out to join the revelry. One by one we filled the cups and passed them out to the crowd. Strangers stopped to lift us up and kiss our cheeks. Handfuls of sweets were thrown from open windows. There was music and dancing everywhere. I wasn’t really sure what we were celebrating, but I didn’t care. I was swept up in the moment and enthralled by the strange words on everyone’s lips—words I had heard before but which were still mystifying and unexplained: Freedom! Liberty! Democracy!
A few months later, the promise of those words seemed about to be fulfilled when Iran’s provisional government drafted a constitution for the newly formed and thrillingly titled Islamic Republic of Iran. Under Khomeini’s guidance, the constitution was a combination of third-world anti-imperialism mixed with the socioeconomic theories of legendary Iranian ideologues like Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Ali Shariati, the religio-political philosophies of Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb, and traditional Shi‘ite populism. Its founding articles promised equality of the sexes, religious pluralism, social justice, freedom of speech, and the right to peaceful assembly—all the lofty principles the revolution had fought to attain—while simultaneously affirming the Islamic character of the new republic.
In some ways, Iran’s new constitution did not differ markedly from the one written after the country’s first anti-imperialist revolution in 1905, except that this constitution appeared to envisage two governments. The first, representing the sovereignty of the people, included a popularly elected executive heading a highly centralized state, a parliament charged with creating and debating laws, and an independent judiciary to interpret those laws. The second, representing the sovereignty of God, consisted of just one man: the Ayatollah Khomeini.
This was the Valayat-e Faqih (“the rule of the jurist”) that Khomeini had been writing about furtively during his years of exile in Iraq and France. In theory, the Faqih, or Supreme Leader, is the most learned religious authority in the country, whose primary function is to ensure the Islamic quality of the state. Yet through the machinations of Iran’s powerful clerical establishment, the Faqih was transformed from a symbolic moral authority into the supreme political authority in the state. The constitution provided the Faqih with the power to appoint the head of the judiciary, to be commander in chief of the army, to dismiss the president, and to veto all laws created by the parliament. Originally intended to reconcile popular and divine sovereignty, the Valayat-e Faqih had suddenly paved the way for the institutionalization of absolute clerical control.
Still, Iranians were too elated by their newfound independence, and too blinded by the conspiracy theories floating in the air about another attempt by the CIA and the U.S. embassy in Tehran to reestablish the Shah on his throne (just as they had done in 1953), to recognize the dire implications of the new constitution. Despite warnings from the provisional government and the vociferous arguments of Khomeini’s rival ayatollahs, particularly the Ayatollah Shariatmadari (whom Khomeini eventually stripped of his religious credentials despite centuries of Shi‘ite law forbidding such actions), the draft was approved in a national referendum by over 98 percent of the electorate.
By the time most Iranians realized what they had voted for, Saddam Hussein, encouraged by the United States and furnished with chemical and biological materials by the Centers for Disease Control and the Virginia-based company the American Type Culture Collection, launched an attack on Iranian soil. As happens in times of war, all dissenting voices were silenced in the interest of national security, and the dream that had given rise to revolution a year earlier gave way to the reality of an authoritarian state plagued by the gross ineptitude of a ruling clerical régime wielding unconditional religious and political authority.
The intention of the United States government in supporting Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war was to curb the spread of Iran’s revolution, but it had the more disastrous effect of curbing its evolution. It was not until the end of the war in 1988 and the death of Khomeini a year later that the democratic ideals that had launched the Iranian Revolution a decade earlier were revived by a new generation of Iranians too young to remember the tyranny of the Shah yet old enough to realize that the present system was not what their parents had fought for. It was their discontent that fueled the activities of a handful of academics, politicians, activists, and theologians in Iran who initiated a reform movement, not to “secularize” the country but to refocus it on genuine Islamic values like pluralism, social justice, human rights, and above all, democracy. In the words of the Iranian political philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, “We no longer claim that a genuinely religious government can be democratic, but that it cannot be otherwise.”
The election of the reformist cleric Muhammad Khatami to the office of president in the late 1990s galvanized this movement, giving shape and substance to the premise that an indigenous democratic system could be founded upon a distinctly Islamic moral framework. Buoyed by this vision and emboldened by Khatami’s reform agenda, hundreds of thousands of young Iranians began pouring onto the streets in 1999 to demand greater rights, including the right to peaceful assembly and a free press, in what became known around the world as the Tehran Spring.
Frightened by the awe-inspiring spectacle of people power in Iran (which, after all, is precisely what led to the creation of the Islamic Republic in the first place) and viewing the reform movement as a threat to the very existence of the state, the Iranian régime unleashed the full force of its security apparatus on the young protesters. In what has since become a familiar sight, the country’s paramilitary forces (the dreaded Basij), under orders from the Revolutionary Guard, savagely suppressed popular demonstrations on the streets and in the universities, while reformist activists and Khatami’s political allies were systematically silenced, arrested, and murdered. By 2005 and the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the office of president, the conservative forces in the Iranian government were once again ascendant. Analysts across the globe declared the reform movement in Iran to be dead and buried.
What few outsiders understood, however, is that the reformist message did not disappear or go underground. On the contrary, it dispersed and became absorbed into the political mainstream, so that by the end of the first decade of the new century, nearly all Iranians, regardless of their politics or piety, had adopted the reform movement’s assertion that the democratic experiment that gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 had been subverted and must be set right again. Thus, in the wake of the disputed elections that returned Ahmadinejad to power in 2009, despite widespread accusations of electoral fraud, a coalition of students, intellectuals, merchants, and religious leaders (the same coalition that had brought down the Shah thirty years earlier) once again took to the streets, this time under the banner of what became known as the Green Movement, not merely to protest a stolen election, but to revolt against the very nature of the Islamic Republic. And while the brutal response of the Iranian régime to this latest challenge seems to have temporarily quelled the popular protests that brought the country to a standstill, the government’s actions have only further solidified the perception among the vast majority of the Iranian populace that the Islamic Republic, in its current iteration, is neither Islamic nor a republic.
Iran’s previous attempts at democracy were thwarted by foreigners—the British and Russians in 1905–1911; the United States in 1953—whose interests were served by suppressing all democratic aspirations in the region. The revolution of 1979 was hijacked by the country’s own clerical establishment, which used its moral authority to gain absolute power over the nascent state. The reform movement of the 1990s was quashed by a government deathly afraid of its own people and desperate to preserve its political power. The Green Movement’s demand for greater human rights was overpowered by an increasingly militarized régime that has elevated its own survival over all other considerations. Yet the hundred-year quest in Iran to construct a truly indigenous democratic system that provides a place for religion in the public realm without subverting the will of the people continues to this day. In fact, it is a quest that is being replicated across the world, from Iraq and Pakistan to Turkey and Indonesia, from Tunisia and Egypt to Senegal and Bangladesh.
In the half century since the end of colonialism and the founding of the Islamic state, Islam has been invoked to legitimize and to overturn governments, to promote republicanism and defend authoritarianism, to justify monarchies, autocracies, oligarchies, and theocracies, and to foster terrorism, factionalism, and hostility. The question remains: Can Islam now be used to establish a genuinely liberal democracy in the Middle East and beyond? Can a modern Islamic state reconcile reason and Revelation to create a democratic society based on the ethical ideals established by the Prophet Muhammad in Medina fourteen centuries ago?
Not only can it do so, it must. Indeed, it is already doing so in a large number of Muslim-majority states. But it is a process that can be based only on Islamic values and customs. The principal lesson to be learned from both the failure of Europe’s “civilizing mission” and the disaster of America’s “democracy promotion” is that true democracy must be nurtured from within, founded upon familiar ideologies, and presented in a language that is both comprehensible and appealing to the indigenous population. For democracy to be effective and compelling in Muslim-majority states, it must balance the sometimes contentious relationship between faith and government that, as we have seen, has been the hallmark of political culture in Islam for centuries.
There are those in the West who argue that such a democratic system is impossible, that Islam is inherently opposed to democracy and that Muslim peoples are incapable of reconciling democratic and Islamic values. Such a view not only contradicts Islamic history (not to mention observable reality), it flies in the face of countless surveys that reveal overwhelming majorities throughout the Islamic world pining for democracy as “the best form of government.” In fact, a 2006 Pew poll found that while the majority of the Western public thought democracy was “a Western way of doing things that would not work in most Muslim countries,” pluralities or majorities in every single Muslim-majority country surveyed flatly rejected that argument and called for democracy to be immediately established, without conditions, in their own societies. It would seem, therefore, that the biggest obstacles in the path to creating a genuinely Islamic democracy are not only the Traditionalist Ulama or Jihadist terrorists, but, perhaps more destructively, those in the West who stubbornly refuse to recognize that democracy, if it is to be viable and enduring, can never be imported.
WITH THE END of the Second World War, a victorious yet financially devastated Britain, no longer able to bear the cost or justify the ideology of its colonial enterprise in India, finally granted to the greatest symbol of its imperialist ambitions—the jewel in the crown of its dwindling empire—its long-sought independence. On August 14, 1947, hundreds of years of colonial rule in India came to an end. Yet the day that C. E. Trevelyan predicted would be “the proudest monument of British benevolence,” when, “endowed with [British] learning and political institutions,” India would represent colonialism’s greatest triumph, became the day in which the fractious population of the Subcontinent was violently partitioned along religious lines into a predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Belgians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fostered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.
The partition of India was not simply the result of an internal feud between Muslims and Hindus. Nor was it an isolated event. Indonesia’s numerous secessionist movements, the bloody border disputes between Morocco and Algeria, the fifty-year civil war in Sudan between Arab northerners and Black African southerners, the partitioning of Palestine and the resulting cycle of violence, the warring ethnic factions in Iraq, and the genocide of nearly a million Tutsis at the hands of the Hutus in Rwanda, to name but a handful of cases, have all been in considerable measure a result of the decolonization process.
When Britain abandoned India with an overwhelming Hindu majority holding most of the economic, social, and political power in the country, the Muslim minority, educated by the British in the persuasive rhetoric of democracy, came to the conclusion that the only possible means of achieving autonomy was through Muslim self-determination. Hence, the birth of the Islamic state.
Yet beyond the call for self-determination, there was little else that India’s Muslim community agreed upon with regard to the role of Islam in the state. For Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s reluctant founder, Islam was merely the common heritage that could unite India’s diverse Muslim population into a united state. Jinnah regarded Islam in the same way that Gandhi regarded Hinduism—as a unifying cultural symbol, not as a religio-political ideology. For Mawlana Mawdudi, Pakistan’s ideological instigator, the state was merely the vehicle for the realization of Islamic law. Mawdudi regarded Islam as the antithesis to secular nationalism and believed Pakistan would be the first step toward the establishment of a Muslim world-state. While the Muslim League, Pakistan’s largest political party, argued that the Islamic state must receive its mandate from its citizens, the Islamic Association, Pakistan’s largest Islamist organization, countered that the state could be considered Islamic only if sovereignty rested solely in the hands of God.
In the wake of the chaos and bloodshed that followed the partition of India, as some seventeen million people—the largest human migration in history—fled across fractured borders in both directions, neither Jinnah’s nor Mawdudi’s vision of the Islamic state was realized. Despite the drafting of a constitution that envisioned a parliament elected to write the laws and a judiciary appointed to decide whether those laws were in accord with Islamic principles, Pakistan quickly gave way to military dictatorship at the hands of the army’s commander in chief, Ayub Khan. Military rule lasted until 1972, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s platform of Islamic socialism made him Pakistan’s first freely elected civilian ruler since partition. But Bhutto’s socialist reforms, though popular with the people, were denounced as “un-Islamic” by extremist members of Pakistan’s Muslim clergy, clearing the way for yet another military coup, this time by General Zia al-Haq. With the help of the religious authorities, Zia enacted a forced Islamization process in which Islam became both public morality and civil law. After Zia’s death in 1988, a new wave of elections resulted in the reformist governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, both of whom expounded a more liberal ideal of Islam in order to tap into Pakistan’s frustration with nearly a decade of brutal fundamentalism. But in 1999, after accusing the elected government of corruption, the head of Pakistan’s army, Pervez Musharraf, imposed military dictatorship once again over the country. After another decade of military rule, Musharraf was forced to allow Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, both of whom had been exiled from the country, to return to Pakistan, and then pressured to resign from the post of president in 2008. The assassination of Bhutto a few months after her return led to the assumption of the presidency by Bhutto’s estranged husband, Ali Asif Zardari, whose tenuous grip on power has been repeatedly tested by a wave of attacks by Islamist militants centered in the North-West Frontier Province (or Khyber Pashtunkhwa) of Pakistan, who would like nothing more than to transform the country into a “Talibanized” state under their control.
All of this in a span of sixty years.
The experience of Pakistan serves as a reminder that the Islamic state is by no means a monolithic concept. Indeed, there are many countries in the Middle East that could be termed Islamic states, none of which have much in common with one another. Syria is an Arab dictatorship whose ruler serves at the pleasure of its all-powerful military. Jordan and Morocco are volatile kingdoms whose young monarchs have made timid steps toward democratization, though without forfeiting their absolute rule. Iran is a authoritarian country run by a corrupt clerical oligarchy committed to snuffing out any attempts at democratic reform. Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist theocracy that claims its only constitution is the Quran and its only law the Shariah. And yet not only do all of these countries view themselves as the realization of the Medinan ideal, they view each other as contemptible desecrations of that ideal.
But if one were truly to rely on the Medinan ideal to define the nature and function of the Islamic state, it would have to be characterized as nothing more than the nationalist manifestation of the Ummah. At its most basic level, the Islamic state is one in which the determination of values, the norms of behavior, and the formation of laws are influenced by the mores and values of the Muslim-majority population. At the same time, minority faiths would be protected from harm and allowed complete social and political participation in the community, just as they were in Medina. In the same way that the Revelation was dictated by the needs of the Ummah, so would all legal and moral considerations be determined by the citizens of the Islamic state. For as Abu Bakr so wisely stated upon succeeding the Prophet, Muslim allegiance is owed not to a president, prime minister, priest, king, or any earthly authority, but to the community and to God. As long as these criteria, which the Prophet established in Medina nearly fourteen centuries ago and which the Rightly Guided Caliphs struggled in their own way to preserve, are satisfied, then what form the Islamic state takes is irrelevant.
So, then, why not democracy?
Representative democracy may be the most successful social and political experiment in the modern world. But it is an ever-evolving experiment. These days there is a tendency to regard American democracy as the model for all the world’s democracies, and in some ways this is true. The seeds of democracy may have been sown in ancient Greece, but it is in American soil that they sprouted and flourished to achieve their full potential. Yet precisely for this reason, only in America is American democracy possible; it cannot be isolated from American traditions and values.
This is a fundamental fact that was thoroughly ignored by President George W. Bush’s “democracy promotion” agenda, which he vowed would form the foundation upon which relations between the United States and the Middle East would henceforth be based. Bush was ridiculed both at home and abroad for his quest to spread democracy in the Middle East; critics claimed it was little more than an excuse to wage unending war in the region. It was certainly not lost on the peoples of the Middle East that most of their dictators also happened to be America’s closest allies in the region—in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco—all of whom had spent decades convincing the United States that even the slightest weakening of their dictatorial régimes would result in the immediate takeover of their countries by radical Islamists, a specious argument that the United Nations has dubbed a “legitimacy of blackmail.” In any case, Bush’s commitment to his florid talk about democracy was immediately seen as disingenuous and hypocritical once elections in Lebanon, Egypt, and Palestine did not go the way the United States had hoped and the democracy promotion agenda was shut down altogether.
Yet lost in the debate about America’s true intentions in the Middle East was the fact that large majorities in every Muslim-majority state surveyed told pollsters they wanted to see their countries move toward greater democracy. A wave of democratic fervor across the Middle East created a renewed sense of hope for scores of people who had spent their lives in autocratic societies but who now looked forward to the possibility of having a say, even if in the most limited of ways, in their own political destinies. The Green Movement in Iran lit the fuse, employing new social media technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to break the government’s monopoly over the media and to demonstrate to the world their aspiration for freedom and liberty. The spark ignited in Iran quickly flashed across the region. In Tunisia, young protesters, fed up with their lack of political participation and economic opportunities, used the same social media tools to take to the streets and force the country’s long-serving dictator to flee into exile. The fires of freedom then spread to Algeria and Yemen, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, to Egypt, where tens of thousands of young Egyptians poured onto the streets of Cairo, Suez, and Giza, demanding an end to the thirty-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, a dictator who had used some sixty billion dollars in United States funds to create one of the most brutal, most repressive régimes in the Middle East. And the fire is still burning, threatening the other dictatorships in the region—Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria—none of which are immune any longer to the simple notion that all peoples everywhere, regardless of their religious or cultural affiliations, must be free to decide for themselves who will speak for them, who will fight for them, who will lead them.
The fact is that the vast majority of the more than one billion Muslims in the world readily accept the fundamental principles of democracy. Thanks to the efforts of reformists and modernists throughout the Muslim world, most Muslims have already appropriated the language of democracy, recognizing traditional Islamic concepts like shura, or “consultation,” as popular representation; ijma, or “consensus,” as political participation; bay’ah, or “allegiance,” as universal suffrage; and so on. One need only observe the massive demonstrations by democracy activists throughout the Islamic world to recognize how ideals such as constitutionalism, government accountability, pluralism, and human rights are widely accepted by Muslims throughout the world, even if most of the region’s rulers refuse to implement them.
What is not necessarily accepted, however, is the distinctly Western notion that religion and the state should be entirely separate, that the foundation of a democratic society must be secularism. From the inception of the faith in seventh-century Arabia to the birth of the Islamic state in the twentieth, Islam has always endeavored to be more than mere religion. When the Prophet Muhammad created the first Islamic polity in Medina fourteen hundred years ago, he deliberately set the foundations for a comprehensive way of life meant to satisfy the social, spiritual, and material needs of the people, while at the same time fulfilling the will of God. In short, Islam is not just a faith; Islam is an identity. That is true of all religions. In the United States, polls show that some 70 percent of the population identifies itself as Christian. That does not mean that seven out of ten Americans go to church on Sundays, that seven out of ten Americans read the New Testament, that, in fact, seven out of ten Americans know anything at all about Christianity save that Jesus was born in a manger and died on a cross. No, the overwhelming majority of Americans who describe themselves as Christian are making a statement of identity, not a statement of belief. The same holds true for the overwhelming majority of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, etc. Religion has always been more than a matter of beliefs and practices. It is, above all, a perspective, a mode of being. Religion encompasses one’s culture, one’s politics, one’s very view of the world. This is particularly true of Islam, which, like all great religions, has been shaped not only by metaphysical concerns but also by the social, cultural, spiritual, and political milieu in which it finds itself.
This is not to suggest that Islam rejects the separation of “mosque and state.” On the contrary, there are very few Muslim-majority countries in the world in which clerics exercise direct authority over the government. Those countries that have attempted such direct authority—Sudan, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Iran—have been, without exception, devastating failures. Nevertheless, it is true that when it comes to religion the boundary between the public and private realm is far more fluid in Muslim-majority states than it is in the West. This is partly because, having originated in a tribal culture and been reared primarily in the communal societies of the Middle East and North Africa, Islam tends to eschew radical individualism, preferring to stress the needs of the community over the rights of the individual. Whatever the reasons may be, it is a fundamental and unavoidable fact that people in nearly all Muslim-majority states have repeatedly stated their desire for Islamic values and mores to have an influence over their countries’ politics. And since a state can be considered democratic only insofar as it reflects its society, if the society is founded upon a particular set of values, then must not its government be also?
Admittedly, ever since September 11 it has been impossible to ask such questions without immediately conjuring up pictures of Afghanistan under the Taliban. In fact, the image of the Afghan woman enveloped in the burqah and subjugated to the whims of an ignorant band of misogynists has become the symbol of everything that is backward and wicked about the concept of Islamic governance, and such images are not easily supplanted by political philosophies.
Considering how often Islam has been used to rationalize the brutal policies of oppressive totalitarian régimes like the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Wahhabists in Saudi Arabia, or the Faqih in Iran, it is hardly surprising that the term “Islamic democracy” provokes such skepticism in the West. Some of the most celebrated academics in the United States and Europe reject the notion outright, believing that the principles of democracy cannot be reconciled with fundamental Islamic values. When politicians speak of bringing democracy to the Middle East, they mean specifically an American secular democracy, not an indigenous Islamic one. And dictatorial régimes in the Middle East never seem to tire of preaching to the world that their brutally antidemocratic policies are justified because “fundamentalists” allow them but two possible options: despotism or theocracy. The problem with democracy from their point of view is that if people are allowed a choice, they may choose against their governments.
Ignoring for a moment the role these and so many other autocratic régimes in the Middle East have played in creating so-called fundamentalists in the first place, there exists a far more philosophical dispute in the Western world with regard to the concept of Islamic democracy: that is, that there can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy; that the foundation of a genuinely democratic society must be secularism. The problem with this argument, however, is that it not only fails to recognize the inherently moral foundation upon which a large number of modern democracies are built, it more importantly fails to appreciate the difference between secularism and secularization.
As the Protestant theologian Harvey Cox notes, secularization is the process by which “certain responsibilities pass from ecclesiastical to political authorities,” whereas secularism is an ideology based on the eradication of religion from public life. Secularization implies a historical evolution in which society gradually frees itself from “religious control and closed metaphysical world-views.” Secularism is itself a closed metaphysical world-view that, according to Cox, “functions very much like a new religion.”
Turkey is a secular country in which outward signs of religiosity such as the hijab were, until quite recently, forcibly suppressed. With regard to ideological resolve, one could argue that little separates a secular country like Turkey from a religious country like Iran; both ideologize society. The United States, however, is a secularizing country, unapologetically founded on a Judeo-Christian—and more precisely Protestant—moral framework. As recognized nearly two hundred years ago by Alexis de Tocqueville, religion is the foundation of America’s political system. It not only reflects American social values, it very often dictates them. One need only regard the language with which political issues like abortion rights and gay marriage are debated in Congress to recognize that religion is to this day an integral part of the American national identity and patently the moral foundation for its Constitution, its laws, and its national customs. Despite what schoolchildren read in their history books, the reality is that the separation of “church and state” is not so much the foundation of American government as it is the result of a two-hundred-forty-year secularization process based not upon secularism, but upon pluralism.
It is pluralism, not secularism, that defines democracy. A democratic state can be established upon any normative moral framework as long as pluralism remains the source of its legitimacy. England continues to maintain a national church whose religious head is also the country’s sovereign and whose bishops serve in the upper house of Parliament. India was, until recently, governed by partisans of an élitist theology of Hindu Awakening (Hindutva) bent on applying an implausible but enormously successful vision of “true Hinduism” to the state. And yet, like the United States, these countries are considered democracies, not because they are secular but because they are, at least in theory, dedicated to pluralism.
Or consider the State of Israel, a country founded upon an exclusivist Jewish moral framework, which offers all the world’s Jews—regardless of their nationality—immediate citizenship, providing them with a host of material benefits and privileges over its non-Jewish citizens; where the Orthodox rabbinical courts have jurisdiction over all matters relating to Judaism (including who is and who is not a Jew); where religious schools (yeshivas) are subsidized by the state, and marriages are religious rather than civil affairs (meaning no official will marry a Jew to a non-Jew); and where all new citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation, are required to take a loyalty oath affirming Israel’s identity as a “Jewish state.” By every definition of the term, Israel is a “Jewish democracy.” Yet the very same people who praise Israel’s reconciliation of Jewish and democratic ideals, despite the very obvious conflicts it has created both inside Israel and within the occupied Palestinian territories, reflexively deny that a similar reconciliation between Islamic and democratic ideals could be established in any Muslim-majority state. Never mind the enormously successful examples of precisely such a reconciliation in Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Senegal, etc., or the fact that nearly one-third of the world’s Muslims already live in democratic states. Among certain critics of Islam, there can simply be no such thing as Islamic pluralism, no matter how much evidence exists to the contrary.
Yet, as we have seen, Islam has had a long commitment to religious pluralism. Muhammad’s recognition of Jews and Christians as protected peoples (dhimmi), his belief in a common divine text from which all revealed scriptures are derived (the Umm al-Kitab), and his dream of establishing a single, united Ummah encompassing all three faiths of Abraham were startlingly revolutionary ideas in an era in which religion literally created borders between peoples. And despite the ways in which it has been interpreted by militants and fundamentalists who refuse to recognize its historical and cultural context, there are few scriptures in the great religions of the world that can match the reverence with which the Quran speaks of other religious traditions.
It is true that the Quran does not hold the same respect for polytheistic religions as it does for monotheistic ones. However, this is primarily a consequence of the fact that the Revelation was revealed during a protracted and bloody war with the “polytheistic” Quraysh. The truth is that the Quranic designation of “protected peoples” was highly flexible and was routinely tailored to match public policy. When Islam expanded into Iran and India, both dualist Zoroastrians and certain polytheistic Hindu sects were designated as dhimmi. And while the Quran does not allow any religion to violate core Muslim values, there is no country in the world that does not restrict the freedom of religion according to public morality. Pluralism implies religious tolerance, not unchecked religious freedom.
The foundation of Islamic pluralism can be summed up in one indisputable verse: “There can be no compulsion in religion” (2:256). This means that the antiquated partitioning of the world into spheres of belief (dar al-Islam) and unbelief (dar al-Harb), which was first developed during the Crusades but which still maintains its grasp on the imaginations of Traditionalist theologians, is utterly unjustifiable. It also means that the ideology of those Islamic puritans like the Wahhabists who wish to return Islam to some imaginary ideal of original purity must be once and for all abandoned. Islam is and has always been a religion of diversity. The notion that there was once an original, unadulterated Islam that was shattered into heretical sects and schisms is a historical fiction. Both Shi‘ism and Sufism in all their wonderful manifestations represent trends of thought that have existed from the very beginning of Islam, and both find their inspiration in the words and deeds of the Prophet. God may be One, but Islam most definitely is not.
Grounding an Islamic democracy in the ideals of pluralism is vital because religious pluralism is the first step toward building an effective human rights policy in the Middle East. Indeed, as Abdulaziz Sachedina notes, religious pluralism can function as “an active paradigm for a democratic, social pluralism in which people of diverse religious backgrounds are willing to form a community of global citizens.” As with Islamic pluralism, the inspiration for an Islamic policy of human rights must be based on the Medinan ideal.
The revolutionary rights Muhammad gave to the marginalized members of his community have been exhaustively detailed in this book, as have the consistent efforts by Muhammad’s religious and political inheritors to overturn those rights. Yet one need simply recall the Prophet’s warning to those who questioned his egalitarian measures in Medina—“[They] will be thrown into Hell, where they will dwell forever, suffering from the most shameful punishment” (4:14)—to recognize that acknowledging human rights in Islam is not simply a means of protecting civil liberties, it is a fundamental religious duty.
Nevertheless, the Islamic vision of human rights is not a prescription for moral relativism, nor does it imply freedom from ethical restraint. Islam’s quintessentially communal character necessitates that any human rights policy take into consideration the protection of the community over the autonomy of the individual. And while there may be some circumstances in which Islamic morality may force the rights of the community to prevail over the rights of the individual—for instance, with regard to Quranic commandments forbidding drinking or gambling—these and all other ethical issues must constantly be reevaluated so as to conform to the will of the community.
It must be understood that a respect for human rights, like pluralism, is a process that develops naturally within a democracy. Bear in mind that for approximately two hundred of America’s two hundred forty years of existence, black American citizens were considered legally inferior to whites. Finally, neither human rights nor pluralism is the result of secularization, they are its root cause, meaning that any democratic society—Islamic or otherwise—dedicated to the principles of pluralism and human rights must dedicate itself to following the unavoidable path toward political secularization.
Therein lies the crux of the argument for Islamic democracy, which is not intended to be a “theo-democracy,” but a democratic system founded upon an Islamic moral framework, devoted to preserving Islamic ideals of pluralism and human rights as they were first introduced in Medina, and open to the inevitable process of political secularization. Islam may eschew secularism, but there is nothing about fundamental Islamic values that opposes the process of political secularization. The separation of “church and state” of which America is so proud was established in Islam fourteen centuries ago, when it was decided that no Caliph would have religious authority over the community. Only the Prophet had both religious and temporal authority, and the Prophet is no longer among us. Hence, like the Caliphs, kings, and sultans of history’s greatest Islamic civilizations, the leaders of an Islamic democracy can hold only civic responsibilities. Moreover, there can be no question as to where sovereignty in such a system would rest. A government of the people, by the people, and for the people can be established or demolished solely through the will of the people. After all, it is human beings who create laws, not God. Even laws based on divine scripture require human interpretation in order to be applied in the world. In any case, sovereignty necessitates the ability not just to make laws, but to enforce them. Save for the occasional plague, this is a power God rarely chooses to wield on earth.
Those who argue that a state cannot be considered Islamic unless sovereignty rests in the hands of God are in effect arguing that sovereignty should rest in the hands of the clergy. Because religion is, by definition, interpretation, sovereignty in a religious state would belong to those with the power to interpret religion. Yet for this very reason an Islamic democracy cannot be a religious state. Otherwise it would be an oligarchy, not a democracy.
From the time of the Prophet to the Rightly Guided Caliphs to the great empires and sultanates in Islamic history, there has never been a successful attempt to establish a monolithic interpretation of the meaning and significance of Islamic beliefs and practices. Indeed, until the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran, no Islamic polity in the history of the world had ever been ruled by one individual’s reading of scripture. This does not mean the religious authorities should have no influence on the state. Khomeini may have had a point when he asserted that those who spend their lives pursuing religion are the most qualified to interpret it. However, as with the Pope’s role in Rome, such influence can be only moral, not political. The function of the clergy in an Islamic democracy is not to rule, but to preserve and, more important, to reflect the morality of the state. Again, because it is not religion, but the interpretation of religion that arbitrates morality, such interpretation must always be in accord with the consensus of the community.
It does mean, however, that Islam will necessarily play a role in defining what an indigenous democracy in many Muslim-majority states would look like, at least in the early stages. Those in Europe and North America who expect a secular, liberal democracy to arise fully formed in countries that have had little experience of anything other than authoritarian rule are living a fantasy. Even the most cursory study of Islamic history reveals the powerful role that Islam has had in shaping attitudes about government and politics among all Muslim peoples, whether on the left or the right. In Iran, for example, both the reformists and the hard-line conservatives rely on the same symbols, rhetoric, and language to fight either for democratic reform or for theocratic intransigence because both recognize the power that Islam has in mobilizing the masses. In fact, the reason that political opposition in the Middle East is so often religious in nature is not because opposition parties want to build a theocratic state but because it is the language of religion that holds the most currency with the Muslim community.
If democracy is to have a chance in many Muslim-majority states, religious factions must be encouraged to participate in the political process. This is particularly true with regard to moderate Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which has diligently transformed itself over the last decade into a legitimate political party. But even more extremist Islamist groups like Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine must be brought into the political fold. It is true that there are those who have no interest in establishing anything other than an oppressive, archaic theocracy, and who pursue their theo-political ends through violence and terror. They must be opposed by all necessary measures. But when even legitimate religious opposition is discouraged or outlawed, the unfortunate result is that it becomes radicalized. That is what happened in Iran, when the Shah suppressed all clerical opposition to his despotic rule, only to see it radicalize into a wholly new brand of revolutionary Shi‘ism that ultimately cast him from his throne and transformed Iran into the Islamic Republic.
No one doubts the potential danger in allowing religiously conservative groups a seat at the political table. And certainly, problems can arise when religion plays a role in the state; there will always be groups that will try to use their particular interpretation of religion to promote their own social and political agendas, though that is true of all democracies, especially America’s. However, the real danger lies in stifling the political ambitions of such groups. For wherever legitimate Islamist opposition has been suppressed, militant groups and religious extremists have gained favor. Take the case of Algeria, where the rise of the ultra-violent Jihadist organization the Armed Algerian Group (GIA) was the direct result of the Algerian military’s decision to ban political participation by the more moderate and accommodating Islamists of Islamic Salvation Front (FIS). Conversely, wherever moderate Islamist parties have been allowed to participate in politics and government, popular support for more extremist groups has diminished. In Turkey, for example, the political success of the Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, or AKP) has sapped Turkey’s more radical religious groups of their support among the masses. The simple fact is that democracy cannot take root in the Middle East and beyond without the participation of Islamists who are willing to play by the rules, to put down their weapons, and to pick up ballots instead.
Ultimately, an Islamic democracy must be concerned not with reconciling popular and divine sovereignty, but with reconciling “people’s satisfaction with God’s approval,” to quote Abdolkarim Soroush. And if ever there is a conflict between the two, it must be the interpretation of Islam that yields to the reality of democracy, not the other way around. It has always been this way. From the very moment that God spoke the first word of Revelation to Muhammad—“Recite!”—the story of Islam has been in a constant state of evolution as it responds to the social, cultural, political, and temporal circumstances of those who are telling it. Now it must evolve once more. Because the fight for Islamic democracy is merely one front in a worldwide battle taking place within Islam, between those who seek to reconcile their faith and traditions with the realities of the modern world and those who react against those realities by reverting—sometimes violently—to the “fundamentals” of their faith.
Despite the tragedy of September 11 and the subsequent terrorist acts against Western targets throughout the world, despite the clash-of-civilizations mentality that has seized the globe and the clash-of-monotheisms reality underlying it, despite the blatant religious rhetoric resonating throughout the halls of governments, there is one thing that cannot be overemphasized. What is taking place now in Islam is an internal conflict between Muslims, not an external battle between Islam and the West. The West is merely a bystander—an unwary yet complicit casualty of a rivalry that is raging in Islam over who will write the next chapter in its story.
All great religions grapple with these issues, some more fiercely than others. One need only recall Europe’s massively destructive Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) between the forces of the Protestant Union and those of the Catholic League to recognize the ferocity with which interreligious conflicts have been fought in Christian history. In many ways, the Thirty Years’ War signaled the end of the Christian Reformation: perhaps the classic argument over who gets to decide the future of a faith. What followed that awful war—during which nearly half of the population of Germany perished—was a gradual progression in Christian theology from the doctrinal absolutism of the pre-Reformation era to the doctrinal pluralism of the early modern period and, ultimately, to the doctrinal relativism of the Enlightenment. This remarkable evolution in Christianity from its inception to its Reformation took fifteen vicious, bloody, and occasionally apocalyptic centuries.
Fourteen hundred years of rabid debate over what it means to be a Muslim; of passionate arguments over the interpretation of the Quran and the application of Islamic law; of trying to reconcile a fractured community through appeals to Divine Unity; of tribal feuds, crusades, and world wars—and Islam has finally begun its fifteenth century, and with it, the realization of its own long-awaited and hard-fought Reformation. Yet this is a reformation that is not going to be resolved in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, where the message of Islam was first introduced to the world, but in the developing capitals of the Islamic world—Tehran, Cairo, Damascus, and Jakarta—and in the cosmopolitan capitals of Europe and the United States—New York, London, Paris, and Berlin—where that message is being redefined by scores of first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants fed up with the dominance of Traditionalism and militancy in their faith. By merging the Islamic values of their ancestors with the democratic ideals of their new homes, these Muslims have formed what Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born intellectual and grandson of Hasan al-Banna, has termed the “mobilizing force” for the Islamic Reformation.
Like the reformations of the past, this will be a terrifying event, one that has already begun to engulf the world. But out of the ashes of cataclysm, a new chapter in the story of Islam is emerging. And while it remains to be seen who will write that chapter, even now a new revelation is at hand which, after centuries of stony sleep, has finally awoken and is slouching toward Medina to be born.