ALMOST A DECADE ago I helped launch a debate asking how we should we interpret the following set of facts. For more than thirty-five years
not a single Muslim has lived in an Arab majority state that has been considered a democracy by any of the three most utilized social science annual reports on the status of political rights and civil liberties in the world. In sharp contrast, even when we exclude the 160 million non-Arab Muslims living in democratic India, the same three reports indicate that there are more than over
300 million Muslims living in non-Arab Muslim majority countries that are now democracies—Indonesia, Turkey, Senegal, and Albania.
1 These facts lead to a simple but powerful conclusion. If a set of countries shares a major variable (in this case Islam), but can be divided into two different subsets with sharply different political outcomes (in this case democracy), the shared variable cannot explain the variation. This means that Islam, taken by itself, cannot explain why Arabs are democratically “underperforming” or why, from a soci-economic viewpoint, Indonesia, and Senegal are democratically “overperforming.”
2
Since the start of this “Arab, More Than, Muslim Democratic Exceptionalism” debate much has been written to explain the persistence of authoritarian regimes in Arab countries and about Islam and violence. Nevertheless, how
democracies in Muslim majority countries emerge and function remains understudied and undertheorized, and that is my task in this chapter. I am not a specialist on Islam, but I have written extensively on democracy, especially democratization, the growth of human rights in some once authoritarian regimes, and the emergence of interfaith religious tolerance or intolerance. It is from this perspective of democratization that I hope to make some contribution to our still neglected study of democracies in Muslim majority countries. The study of such democracies must begin with a discussion of democracy itself.
WHAT DOES DEMOCRACY REQUIRE AND NOT REQUIRE?
Democracy is a form of governance of a state. Thus no modern polity can become democratically consolidated unless it is first a state. Therefore, the nonexistence of a state or such an intense lack of identification with the state that large groups of individuals want to join a different state or create a new independent state raises fundamental and often unsolvable problems.
3 Democracy is a system of conflict regulation within the territory of a state that allows open competition over the values and goals that citizens want to advance. In the strict democratic sense, this means that as long as groups do not use violence, do not violate the rights of other citizens, and stay within the rules of the democratic game,
all groups should have the right to advance their interests, both in society and in politics. This is the minimal institutional criterion of what democratic politics does and does not entail.
What does this core institutional requirement imply about religion, politics, and what I call the “twin tolerations”? Specifically, what are the necessary boundaries of freedom of elected governments from religious groups, and what are the necessary boundaries of freedom of religious individuals and groups from government? From the perspective of the twin tolerations, democratic institutions must be free, within the bounds of the constitution and human rights, to generate policies. Religious institutions should not have special rights, constitutionally embedded or not, that allow them to unilaterally impose public policies on democratically elected governments. At the same time, individuals and religious communities, consistent with my institutional definition of democracy, must have complete freedom to worship privately. More than this, as individuals and groups, they must also be able to advance their values publicly in society and to sponsor political organizations and movements, as long as their actions do not impinge negatively on the liberties of other citizens or violate democracy and the law.
4 This institutional approach to democracy necessarily implies that no group in society—including religious groups—can a priori be prohibited from forming a political party. For example, Christian Democratic Parties of Germany, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Austria not only participated as key European political actors in the politics of their own countries, but they were crucial builders after World War II of the major new political organization of Europe, the European Union.
5 Constraints on political parties, religious or not, may only be imposed
after a party, by its actions, violates democratic principles and the democratic constitution. The judgment as to whether or not a party has violated democratic principles should not be decided by parties in the government, but by courts interpreting a democratically crafted constitution.
Within this broad framework of the necessary tolerated freedoms of the democratic state from religion, and tolerated freedoms of religious individuals and organizations from the democratic state, an extraordinarily range of quite different patterns of state-religion relations can, and do, coexist with the twin tolerations necessary for a democracy.
Let us explore this argument further by our second question. What are the actual patterns of relations between religion and the state in long-standing democracies? Some classic arguments about the conditions necessary for democracy to coexist with religion resonate powerfully in current political discussions but are dangerously misleading. Until they are corrected, they will continue to have unfortunate consequences. They present a distorted story of how democracy actually emerged and operates in the West and they contribute to increasingly widespread political beliefs that that many non-Western religions, especially Islam, are incompatible with or, worse, systematically hostile to democracy
The first misinterpretation is the mistaken
factual assumption that democracy always requires a strict separation of church and state. Of course, such a separation did emerge from the first two democratizing revolutions in the West, the American and the French Revolutions. But, if we examine the actual practices of the current twenty-seven European Union member states, we discover that
none of them now (even France) has a strict separation of church and state and that
most of them have arrived at collaborative arrangements with religion. Consider the following: 100 percent of EU member states give funding for religious schools or for religious education in state schools, 89 percent have religious education as a standard optional offering in state schools, 37 percent of them help collect taxes or money for (some) religions, 33 percent give some funding to religious charitable institutions, and 19 percent have established religions.
6 These figures alone make it absolutely clear that complete separation of religion and the state is neither a necessary condition for democracy to function nor the norm in contemporary European democracies.
The second misinterpretation of the West is an insufficient recognition that Christianity has had an intolerant past. Indeed, the preeminent historian of Christianity, Diarmaid MacCulloch, categorically asserts that “western Christianity before 1500 must rank as one of the most intolerant religions in world history.”
7 The West was also “multivocal” concerning democracy. By multivocal I simply mean that during and after the Reformation in the sixteenth century virtually all variants of Western Christianity still had antidemocratic voices and doctrines, as well as some democratic voices and doctrines. For example, in the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Pius IX’s 1864 “Syllabus of Errors” condemned the separation of church and state, socialism, and “progress, liberalism and recent civilization.” But in the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), which brought the pope and all the bishops of the church together in reformist discussions, all these condemnations were reversed, and democracy, and even what the council called a “preferential option for the poor” and the “priority and unviolability of human rights,” were endorsed.
8 John Calvin (1509–64) allowed neither inclusive citizenship nor any form of representative democracy in Geneva when he founded Calvinism because, as Michael Walzer writes, Calvin “found no human community capable of organizing itself and appointing delegates…. Particular officers were created only by God.”
9 Yet later Calvinist reformist thinkers—such as Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) helped turn Holland into a leading example of religious tolerance in Europe. Lutheranism, for over three hundred years, particularly in northern Germany, theologically and politically accepted a form of authoritarian direction of government so that a good Lutheran’s concentration on salvation would not be weakened by participation in politics. Indeed, after World War II in Germany there was an extensive critique of the negative political consequences of such a religiously inspired refusal to participate in democratic politics, a critique that came to be described as the path “from Luther to Hitler.”
My central point is that all these major West European Christian denominations had authoritarian dimensions. But other aspects of Christian doctrines and practices more congruent with democratic values were also present. We need to have a careful analysis of how such doctrines and practices became the dominant, but never the only, voices in the multivocal Christian tradition.
The third misinterpretation relates to and/or normative philosophical values. John Rawls, arguably the most influential political philosopher in the English language in the twentieth century, once famously argued that citizens “ought” to take matters of religion “off” the political agenda. For Rawls, such restriction of religion to the private sphere was necessary for the building of the philosophical consensus he argued was required for liberal democracy.
10 But following such advice would make it virtually impossible to socially construct the twin tolerations in those political systems where the citizens are deeply religious but profoundly divided over democracy. An essential part of the historical political process by which Christian multivocal denominations and democracy become reconciled and compatible with the twin tolerations of democracy was precisely through public argument and negotiated agreements about the correct role religion would play in society. Indeed, historically, in every part of the world, democratic thinkers of whatever denomination or religion (including Islam), have had to constantly challenge, in the public arena, the ideas and actions of their antidemocratic co-religionists. To be effective, they had to advance religious, as well as political, arguments for the twin tolerations and democracy.
The fourth misinterpretation, building upon the first three, is to argue that modernization and democracy require the waning of religious faith and the growth of secularism.
11 This was both the empirical prediction and normative prescription of most of the founders of sociology.
12 Democracy and the twin tolerations certainly demand respect by religions of the authority of democratically elected officials and the core institutions they craft. But the twin tolerations do not require less religious belief or practice for either the development of democracy or modernization. Countries like the United States mix modernity, democracy, and some of the highest levels of religious practice in the world. As I shall document later, India for the last thirty years, and Indonesia for the last twenty years have increasingly democratized and modernized while the level of religious belief and practice has intensified. Countries can also be secular but undemocratic, such as Syria, Libya, not to speak of Turkey under Atatürk. Thus strict secularism is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for democracy. Significantly, none of the first three winners of what is called the Nobel prize of political science, the Skypte Prize (Robert Dahl, Juan J. Linz, or Arendt Lijphart) have ever included the word
secularism in their definitions of the requirements of democracy.
13I will use the word
secular in this chapter, but only with a major qualification. As I shall document, there are in Western democracies, and in non-Western democracies such as India, Indonesia, and Senegal, at least four distinctive types of secularism that satisfy the requirements of the twin tolerations and democracy. It thus makes more sense for us to speak of “multiple secularisms” for many of the same reasons that S. N. Eisenstadt and Sudipta Kaviraj use the concept of “multiple modernities.”
14This is a politically important distinction because some non-Western countries are repeatedly urged to conform to
the Western style of secularism before they can be considered real democracies. But in the United States and Western Europe there are three sharply different kinds of secularism: 1) relatively strict separation of church and state, as in the United States and France (but even these two countries have crucial differences because the separation in the USA was “religiously friendly,” whereas in France it was “religiously hostile”); 2) democracies with established churches that by the late nineteenth century respected the twin tolerations (all the Scandinavian democracies and the UK); and 3) democracies, such as Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland, that do not have established churches but follow a constitutionally embedded, religiously friendly model of secularism that is so distinctive and important that it deserves to be given a name. I call it positive accommodation.: “positive” to differentiate it from the French-style hostility to religion and “accommodation” to differentiate it from any form of strict separation of church and state. “Positive,” because, as Germany’s leading analyst of state religion relations in Germany, Gerhard Robbers, has written, “Neutrality … means
positive neutrality. This concept obligates the state to actively support religion and to provide for the space religion needs to flourish in the polity. This makes possible and requires for example that the state include religious needs in planning law. This concept of positive neutrality is predominant in the official discourses and not only in law. It is actively supported and implemented by the courts and state officials.”
15 The word
accommodation is also crucial because this model accommodates the major traditional religions in numerous areas.
16With these important caveats about democracy clear in our minds, let us now explore how democracy has emerged and functions in two Muslim majority countries, Indonesia and Senegal. Both countries, and also India, have a state-religion-society pattern that is consistent with democracy, but quite different from the Western European or U.S. patterns we have just described.
AN EMERGING PATTERN OF DEMOCRACY IN MANY COUNTIES WITH LARGE MUSLIM POPULATIONS
With the exception of Turkey, whose politics for much of the last sixty years was closely related to variations of an often “religiously hostile” French type of
laïcité separation of religion and the state, most of the Muslim democracies I have studied, especially Indonesia and Senegal—like India—have crafted a new “religiously friendly” model of religion-state-society relations.
17 Hindu majority India is not, of course, a Muslim majority democracy, but India does have a “minority” of approximately 160 million Muslims, giving it, after Indonesia and Pakistan, the third most populous Muslim population in the world, and the Indian model of politics toward religion and democracy was constructed partly to respond to this reality.
State-religion relations in Indonesia, Senegal, and India are “twin tolerations”–supportive and have five characteristics that to some extent all of these three countries share.
First, they are more officially co-celebratory of a wider variety of religions than any of the three Western varieties of secularisms we have discussed.
Second, they are close to the “positive accommodation” model found in such countries as Germany, except whereas in Europe accommodation is intra-Christian, in Indonesia, Senegal, and India accommodation is interfaith.
Third, unlike those European democracies where religious homogeneity facilitated democratic coexistence with established churches, in Indonesia, Senegal, and India many key political leaders recognized religious heterogeneity of belief and intensity of religious practice as sociological facts that required the political choice of pluralism and thus all of them, therefore, struggled against the establishment of an Islamic state or any use of shari’a as the obligatory and only source of law.
Fourth, given the opposition of some Islamic leaders to measures necessary for the advancement of rights and the twin tolerations, key reforms are often only made after some religious leaders argued from within Islam or because of the moral necessity of these reforms and worked in alliances with secular state officials to help implement them.
Fifth, given the multivocal, sociological fact of antidemocratic and intolerant elements within Islam, key Islamic activists against such intolerance and for democracy could not afford to follow any early Rawlsian prescription to keep religion “off the public agenda.” Rather, they acted on the conviction that they could best contribute to making pluralism and democracy the consensual option in their Muslim majority states by putting Islamic democratic arguing on their agenda.
In the remainder of this essay I will attempt to illustrate briefly each of these five points:
Since religion is a part of their life that some citizens value deeply, all West European democracies, no matter how secular, and whatever one of the three “multiple secularisms” is preeminent in their country, still have some religious holidays where employers, both state and private, must give a paid public holiday to all their citizens. “Separatist” France has six such holidays, “established” Norway and Denmark and once established Sweden now have a total of thirty-one such compulsory paid holidays, and “positive accommodation” Germany, Netherlands, and Switzerland have twenty-three. However, not one of these sixty religious holidays is for a non-Christian minority religion. All are for the Christian majority religion.
What is the practice in Muslim majority Indonesia and Senegal, and in India with its 160 million Muslims? In all these deeply religious countries, religion is publicly acknowledged by the democratic state as being an important part of the private and public life of all citizens, and there is a great effort for state and society to “co-celebrate” or, in Charles Taylor’s sense, to “recognize” the diverse and intense religious identities. Given the great religious diversity in Indonesia and in India, this means that there are actually
more holidays for minority religions than for the majority religion. In Indonesia there are six mandatory holidays for the religion of the Islamic majority (87 percent) of the population, but a total of seven for the minority religions, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucianism. India is federal, so there is some variation within states, but the majority Hindu religion only has five compulsory, paid religious holidays, and, all together, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, and Buddhists get twice as many, ten. In Senegal, during the nineteenth century, Catholics were a major presence in the four major coastal cities of Senegal, and elaborate “rituals of respect” were developed to create and maintain good relations between Muslims and Catholics, between both religious leaders and laical state officials, and between the four Sufi orders.
18 In the twenty-first century, well less than 10 percent of the population is Catholic, but over 40 percent of the compulsory religious holidays celebrate Catholic feasts. Secular state officials are “co-celebrants” at major Muslim and Catholic holidays, and the Sufi and Catholic religious leaders attend major state functions.
TABLE 9.1 COMPARISON OF PAID RELIGIOUS HOLIDAYS IN FOUR STATE-RELIGION-SOCIETY MODELS
* Individual Swiss cantons and German Länder have additional paid religious holidays, decided on by local governments. In Switzerland eight additional holidays are celebrated by between one and fourteen Swiss cantons (Corpus Christi – 14, All Saints’ Day – 14, Saint Berchtold’s Day – 13, Assumption – 13, Immaculate Conception – 10, St. Joseph’s Day – 6, Epiphany – 4, St. Peter and Paul – 1). In Germany six additional holidays are celebrated in between one and eight German Länder (Corpus Christi – 8, Reformation Day – 5, All Saints’ Day – 5, Epiphany – 3, Assumption Day – 2, Repentance Day – 1).
Significantly, excluding
laïcité Turkey, the other most highly ranked Muslim majority country on these three democracy indexes is Albania, and it has this same pattern of public religious holidays. Albania has large Roman Catholic and Orthodox Catholic religious minorities, which together are accorded five national holidays, whereas the Muslim majority has only three holidays. During the period when Mali was also a democracy it exhibited the same cocelebratory pattern as in Indonesia, India, and Albania. See
table 9.1.
2. INTER-FAITH POSITIVE ACCOMMODATION
In Western Europe the “positive accommodation” pattern was historically constructed and negotiated over hundreds of years, initially as a way to accommodate conflicts
within the Christian religions, and later between Christianity and liberalism, both of which often distrusted, and attempted to curtail, the other. These accommodations often took the form of socially constructed institutional arrangements that, once created, often took on “path dependent” qualities and were even conflated over time with fixed normative values. This model accommodated the major traditional Christian religions in numerous areas. For example, in Germany the state accommodates the two largest Christian churches, Catholics and Protestants, by helping them collect a church tax. According to Robbers, “the rate of the church tax is between eight and nine percent of the individual’s wage and income liability…. Approximately 80 percent of the entire budget of the two major religious communities, the Catholic and the Protestant Churches … is covered by the church tax.”
19 With these monies the social power of the two major churches is not only accommodated, but reinforced. “Hospitals run by religious communities, which in some parts of Germany make up the majority of the available hospital beds, are thus part of the public-run financing systems for hospitals.”
20By the late 1990s many of the positive accommodation countries like Germany, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland experienced growing difficulties accommodating new immigrants from religions, such as Muslims, who had not been a party to the highly negotiated, often even consociational, agreements. A particular, for some no doubt “convenient,” sticking point with Muslims was that a key vehicle for accommodating religions was to give them subsidies and space in the public sphere in their capacity as “hierarchically organized public corporations.” This formula implicitly excluded most Muslim organizations because, owing to Islam’s inherent, but not necessarily undemocratic, structures, most of the Muslims in Europe are not in hierarchical organizations.
Indonesia and India were vastly more religiously heterogeneous than Germany, Holland, Belgium, or Switzerland, so if they were to accommodate religions they had to invent more inclusive formulas than Europe, and in fact they created formulas of accommodation that were inherently more interfaith friendly. Religious holidays for virtually all religions was one such form of interfaith accommodation. There were many others. In India, against a backdrop of the partition, all religious communities could run schools, organizations, and charities are eligible for state financial support. The norms and practices of India’s positive accommodation model are so pervasively accepted that the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party did not dare, when it was head of the ruling parliamentary coalition, not to honor the tradition of giving extensive state subsidies to help Muslim citizens make the hajj to Mecca.
In Indonesia the Ministry of Religion granted official recognition and some subsidies to five different religions. I have talked with the heads of all these different religions and each one stressed that they valued official recognition in one key respect; it means that if Muslim extremists want to burn down their churches, or to thwart their schools, they have the right to immediately call for state police protection.
In Senegal the state extends substantial accreditation to Catholic schools and helps subsidize pilgrimages to Rome for some Catholics.
3. SOCIOLOGICAL FACTS AND POLITICAL CHOICES: THE NONESTABLISHMENT OF ISLAM
No Muslim majority country with reasonably high democratic ranking (Indonesia, Senegal, Turkey, or Albania) has established Islam as the state religion.
21 From the viewpoint of democracy, this was critically important; if shari’a were ever accepted as
the only source of law in a policy, this would be a direct violation of the twin tolerations because elected democratic legislators could not create the constitution of the country or be the fundamental source of lawmaking in the polity.
Each country has a contextually distinctive complex of reasons why it has not become an Islamic state and made shari’a the only source of law. Let us take a look at the reasons why this has been resisted in Indonesia. In Indonesia, with its 240 million citizens, 206 million of whom (86 percent) are Muslim, why did Indonesia never create an Islamic state?
The most influential actors and arguments were Indonesian, and the state-religion model that has emerged is “multivalued” (to use a term from Isaiah Berlin). This includes a positive value attached to a successful and peaceful territorial nationalism in Indonesia itself, which is seen as vastly more important than pan-Muslim nationalism. There is also a positive value—or at least the positive recognition—of Indonesia’s inherent diversity and a positive interpretation of what Islam entails, and does not entail, concerning religion and public life.
In Indonesia, an archipelago of thousands of islands, the island of Bali has a Hindu majority population, and many of the smaller outer islands have Catholic or Protestant majorities; Buddhist and Confucian Chinese businessmen are prominent in the major cities; several varieties of Islam exist in the country; and there are also strong animist traditions. In this context, some Islamist groups demanded a shari’a state, in which Islamic law would be the law of the land and apply to everyone. During the constitution-making moments of 1945, 1955, and again after the recent democratic transition began in 1998, a shari’a state was demanded, but rejected. Shari’a as an obligatory state policy for all citizens in Indonesia was rejected because it was perceived by religious minorities, as well as many Muslims, secular or not, as a policy that would create threats to Indonesia’s territorial integrity, social peace, and way of life. It is legal for a party in Indonesia to campaign in its platform for a shari’a state, but it is a vote loser. Votes for such pro-shari’a parties in the general elections of 1999 were 15 percent, in 2004, 12 percent, and in 2009, only 7 percent.
22 Some parties like the Prosperous Justice Party (Indonesian: Partai Keadilan Sejahtera), which have a normative preference for shari’a law, have not put it on their party platform on the last two elections because they appreciate that it will not help them politically.
The diversity within Islam in Indonesia also prevents any one variant of Islam becoming a state-endorsed version. As part of the resistance to authoritarianism, some Muslims in Indonesia pushed for a shari’a state, arguing that it would put constraints on the military dictatorship. But the democratic struggle itself, and awareness in mainstream Islam that an extreme version of shari’a would tear the country apart, led to the defeat of any proposals for shari’a being the only source of law.
Indonesia certainly has some shari’a laws and is a case of “legal pluralism,” which alarms many observers. However, it is important to note that some long-standing democracies, like England and Canada, also have an element of legal pluralism. John Bowen has documented how and why a form of legal pluralism is used in London where some shari’a family councils can give an Islamic (but not an official English) divorce that would allow, for example, an abandoned wife with children to get a religiously sanctioned divorce, on the one hand, and thus be eligible to possibly remarry and remain a good Muslim, while, on the other hand, seeking legal redress and state enforced payments for herself and her children via a secular British court.
23 In Toronto this informal legal pluralism existed for many years for the Jewish community and in the United States many Catholics, in essence, use a form of legal pluralism in that they seek annulments from the Catholic Church (which will, if granted, allow remarriage in the eyes of the church), but they also seek a legal divorce from the state.
24Indonesia has the two largest member-based Islamic organizations in the world, both of which have taken strong positions against Indonesia as an Islamic state and the establishment of shari’a as the only source of law. Both also were strongly supportive of the democratic transition in 1998. One association, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), has an estimated 35 to 40 million members, drawn from a largely tolerant, rural religious tradition, built upon Javanese layers of animism, Sufism, and a somewhat syncretic Islam. In a survey undertaken in 2002, 42 percent of Indonesian respondents identified themselves as belonging to the NU community and another 17 percent said they felt close to NU although they were not affiliated. Thus what NU argues about policies about the state and religion would seem to be very important because of their large number of followers.
While I was in Indonesia, I spoke twice, for about two hours each, with Abdurrahman Wahid, universally called Gus Dur, the three times–elected president of NU, and later president of Indonesia. He was a broad and brilliant conversationalist. Stretched out on a sofa in his relatively modest house in Jakarta, he looked at me and used a metaphor that I have often heard in Indonesia: if I could imagine a large floor map of Europe and the Middle East, and if I threw a carpet over it the size of Indonesia, I would have covered everything from Dublin to Bagdad.
25 For Gus Dur, the great size and linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity of Indonesia was a
sociological fact that called for a
political choice of pluralism.
26The other large Islamic civic association in Indonesia is Muhammadiyah, a more urban organization having what they call a rational direct engagement with the Qur’an, with approximately 30 million members, thousands of schools, and hundreds of hospitals. Amien Rais, a former president of Muhammadiyah, speaker of the Consultative Assembly, and presidential candidate, is, like Wahid, a public intellectual. He gave the following interview to me, which was relayed to Indonesia on television, about why he opposed Indonesia becoming a shari’a state.
“First of all,” he said “the Qur’an does not say anything about the formation of an Islamic state or about the necessity and obligations on the part of Muslims to establish a shari’a or Islamic state. Secondly, the Qur’an is not a book of law but a source of law. If the Qur’an is considered a book of law, Muslims will become the most wretched people in the world…. We should not establish Islamic justice, as it will create controversy and conflict. Indonesia should be built on the principles of Pancasila to be a modern state and to allow every citizen of Indonesia to pursue his or her aspiration.”
274. ARGUMENTS FROM WITHIN ISLAM FOR REFORMS AND COOPERATION WITH THE SECULAR STATE ON REFORM IMPLEMENTATION
In the cases of Senegal and Indonesia, the constant mutual public displays of respect between religions and the state has facilitated policy cooperation even in some sensitive areas of human rights abuses. It has also facilitated an atmosphere where religious leaders have felt free to make arguments
from within Islam against practices and policies that violate human rights.
When I argued in “The World’s Religious Systems and Democracy” that all religions are multivocal, I drew the conclusion that this necessarily implied,
contra John Rawls, that it would be mistake to “take religion off the agenda.”
28 I did so because proponents of some human rights violating policies often use religious arguments to support their positions. A counterresponse that at least partially employs powerful religious reasons for respecting these threatened rights is thus particularly useful.
Ideally, the response against violations of human rights is not only from abroad, in the name of “universal human rights.” The most effective counterresponse is by a local authoritative figure who, from within the core values of the religion and culture of the country, makes a powerful religiously based argument against the specific practice that violates human rights. Let us look at some examples of Senegalese state/religion policy cooperation in the area of human rights.
The Campaign Against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Senegal
A variety of national and international feminist and human rights movements wanted to ban the practice of FGM, but had been countered by powerful religious-based attacks. In the end, secular movements in the government and some national and international NGOs were greatly helped by religious leaders. The secretary general, N’Diaye, of the National Association of Imams of Senegal (ANIOS), publicly argued that there is nothing in the Qur’an commanding the practice and that there was no evidence that the Prophet had his own daughters circumcised.
29 A law banning female circumcision was passed in 1999. To avoid the law being a dead letter, ANIOS enlisted the help of government health authorities to train imams in how to speak authoritatively about the health problems circumcision presents and to help with anti-FGM talks by imams on radio and television. Since patterns of female circumcision are closely related to perceptions of marriage eligibility, the government, ANIOS, and national and international women’s rights organization worked together with entire adjacent villages to develop policies of “coordinated abandonment” of female circumcision so as to preclude jeopardizing marriage prospects within participating villages.
30Despite this law banning FGM, it helps make the law an increasing social reality if the most authoritative religious bodies in the country continue to campaign against the practice so that it is increasingly delegitimated in the religious norms and social practices of the country. To help advance this crucial goal, Professor Abdoul Aziz Kebe, coordinator for the Tivaouane-based largest Sufi order in Senegal, the Tijans, wrote a powerful forty-five page attack on FGM. The report systematically argues that FGM is a violation of women’s rights, bodies, and health, with absolutely no justification in the Qur’an or in approved hadiths. Kebe argues that not only is there no Islamic justification for FGM, but that, given current medical knowledge and current Islamic scholarship, there is a moral obligation for communities and individuals to bring a halt to FGM. The report was distributed by Tijan networks, secular ministries, and the World Health Organization.
31Female circumcision is still a problem in Senegal, with an estimated 28 percent of women from the ages of fifteen to forty-nine having undergone FGM according to UNICEF. However, the same source lists Egypt at 96 percent. Senegal’s three contiguous Muslim majority countries have much higher rates: Mali, 92 percent, Guinea, 95 percent, and Mauritania, 71 percent. It should be acknowledged that ethnic traditions as well as social policy are important. The Wolofs traditionally have not practiced FGM. However, it is worth noting that among ethnic groups that have a high rate of FGM, the rates inside Senegal are lower. For example, the Pular in neighboring Mali have more than a 90 percent rate and the Pular in Senegal have a 62 percent rate.
32Anti-AIDs Policies in Senegal
Another area of policy cooperation between religious and secular authorities concerns AIDS. A United Nations Development Program report on anti-AIDS policies in Muslim majority countries notes that
in Senegal, when political leaders realized that a change in sexual behavior was necessary to contain HIV/AIDS they undertook multiple strategies, an important one of which was to enlist the support of religious leaders. Religious leaders were given training to equip them with knowledge for advocacy work. HIV/AIDS then became a regular issue of Friday prayer sermons in mosques throughout the country and religious leaders talked about HIV/AIDS on television and radio. Brochures and information were distributed through religious teaching programs. Since the early 1980s, Senegal has managed to keep their HIV prevalence rates low, less than 1%.
33
Some observers may think that the Muslim pattern of male circumcision alone accounts for this low AIDS rate. However, they should bear in mind that AIDS rates in some other Muslim majority African states, where male circumcision is also the norm, such as Chad, Guinea, Eritrea, Mali, and Djibouti, are two to five times higher. This is, of course, not to speak of the extremely high AIDS rates in some non-Muslim states such as South Africa, 21 percent, and Botswana, 37 percent.
34Indonesia: Secular/Religious Policy Cooperation: Education and Family Planning
In Indonesia in particular, but also in Senegal, the combination of positive accommodation toward religions, with some financial aid to religious schools, has opened the way to forms of active policy-making cooperation between the “co-celebratory” secular state and religions. For example, in Indonesia, if a religious school wants official recognition, there has recently been a growing process of consensual co-design of books on the history of religion by state authorities from the Ministry of Education and religious leaders from major Muslim organizations. Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Zaman have recently edited an invaluable book that reviews madrasas in eight different countries. One of the most inclusive and tolerant systems described in the volume, and the one that now works most cooperatively with a democratic state, is in Indonesia. Their article on Indonesia shows how NU and Muhammadiyah have made substantial contributions to this educationally high quality and politically pluralist outcome.
35 The positive engagement of both the state and religious organizations in providing education has resulted in the fact that basic literacy for boys and girls is now virtually universal by the time they reach the age of fifteen. Young women, fifteen to twenty-five, and young men of the same age have achieved virtual parity with 98–99 percent literacy.
36In contrast, in Pakistan, in the same age range, only 79 percent of boys are literate while only 58 percent of girls are: a virtual forty point difference to Indonesia’s literacy rate for girls. Unlike Indonesia, Pakistan has an often a hostile relationship between religion and the state, and cooperation between the state educational authorities and religious authorities is so tenuous that there only fourteen hundred registered madrassas but fifteen thousand unregistered madrassas in the Northwest Frontier Province alone.
37 In fact, the provincial secretary for education in this Pakistani province stated that no one from his office has ever visited any of the unregistered madrasas.
38 In this near “stateless” territory, fundamentalist money, armed insurgents, and teachers, many from outside Pakistan, fuel intolerant, antidemocratic hate factories in a way that is unconceivable in Indonesia or Senegal.
For the last thirty years in Indonesia there has also been a growing cooperation between religious officials and secular state officials to provide more family planning opportunities for women. Indeed, Indonesia is held out by many in the World Bank and the United Nations as having the most exemplary family planning program of any country in the developing world, whether they are Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim.
395. PUTTING DEMOCRACY, TOLERANCE, AND ISLAM “ON” NOT “OFF” THE PUBLIC AGENDA
I have already made theoretical and historical arguments against the early Rawlsian injunction that religion should be taken “off” the public agenda. In the case of Islam and democracy in the contemporary world, I believe the case for some major activists putting Islam and democracy “on” the public agenda is strong in general, and particularly in four arenas: 1) core scholarship within Islam about religion and the state, 2) public intellectuals, 3) civil society, and, 4) political society. Consider the following.
Assume a political situation within a polity where arguments are fairly commonly disseminated in the public sphere by religious and scholarly actors who make the case that modern democracy is incompatible with one or more of the following requirements of a good Islamic society: the need for a worldwide Islamic caliphate (and thus the illegitimacy of any democracy located in only one state); the requirement that God (not citizens or electorates) governs and thus God-given sharia, not man-made laws must be obligatory for all; or the assertion that the content of a Muslim state is spelled out in binding (and democratically restrictive) detail in the Qur’an. If a situation like this exists, and it does in many polities, the chances of tolerance and democracy becoming a consensual sentiment in that polity is much greater if excellent Islamic scholarship is carried out and incorporated into public debates that confront these arguments and help citizens create an “imaginary” of committed Muslims living, indeed, in Taylor’s sense, flourishing, in a democracy.
40Public Intellectuals
The chances for democracy becoming a consensual value in the politics of the polity will be even greater if some of the intellectuals who are engaged in core scholarly or at least conceptual development of a beneficial relationship between Islam and democracy are also public intellectuals. The task of such public intellectuals is to challeng antidemocratic arguments supposedly based on Islam as soon as they are articulated and to offer credible and attractive democratic alternatives in the public sphere via the creative and constant use of popular and elite press, radio, and television.
Civil Society
The chances for winning Gramscian “hegemony” for democratic values and practices, and protecting a possible democratic transition and consolidation with “moats,” will be vastly increased if some of these public intellectuals are also leaders of major civil society organizations active and influential in the public arena. This is so for two reasons. Leaders of such organizations have many followers. This raises the costs for the authoritarian regime of imprisoning, torturing, censoring, exiling, or assassinating major visible civil society leaders. Such leaders, if they are doing their job, might also create massive member networks engaged in activities that can become increasingly supportive of a more inclusive democratic politics and even available for resistance to the authoritarian regime.
Political Society
Finally, if some of these civil society leaders become active in political society, this might increase the impact of their ideas in public life, help legitimate all necessary formal institutions of democracy for their followers, and ideally give them incentives and opportunities for entering into pro-democratic alliances and coalitions with secular activists who share democratizing goals with them.
In my judgment none of the activities by religious actors in these public arenas violates the twin tolerations or democratic practices, indeed, they advance them. Let us look at some actual examples of such activists drawn from the Indonesian case.
INDONESIA AND FOUR MAJOR ISLAMIC AND DEMOCRATIC ACTORS IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
In the Indonesian case there are at least four major actors with a strong base and foundation within Islam who participated in all four public arenas and who played critical roles in transforming Indonesia into a twin tolerations supportive polity and now almost a consolidated democracy: Gus Dur, Amien Rais, Madjid and Maarif.
Abdurrahman Wahid, popularly known as Gus Dur, came from a family of the Islamic elites from East Java. Wahid’s grandfather, Hasyim Asy’ari, was one of the founders of Nahdlatul Ulama while Wahid’s father, Wahid Hasyim, was Indonesia’s first minister of religious affairs. Educated in Indonesian Islamic boarding schools (
pesantren), at Al Azhar University in Egypt, and at the University of Baghdad in Iraq, Wahid’s family and educational credentials gave him significant authority to speak on theological questions. He used that authority to promote religious pluralism on theological questions, to institutionalize that discourse within civil society, and to mobilize the public behind democratic opposition to the authoritarian military regime of Suharto.
In the 1970s Wahid began promoting religious pluralism among Muslims on the grounds that such diversity was a blessing (
ikhtilāf al-umma,
ra’ma) rather than an obstacle to developing a strong community. This vision put him in opposition to the more formal approach to shari’a being put forward by advocates for an Islamic state.
41 Elected to the chairmanship of the 40-million-member NU in 1984, Wahid used his platform to modernize Islamic education, build civil society, and train a new generation of public intellectuals. In doing so, he influenced young scholars who are today at the forefront of promoting religious pluralism and democracy, including Masdar Mas’udi, Ulil Abshar-Abdalla, and Luthfi Assyaukanie.
42 He gave these young intellectuals an institutional platform on which to speak by helping found NGOs: Lakpesdam (Institute for the Study and Development of Human Resources), LKiS (Institute for the Study of Social Knowledge), and P3M (Association for the Development of Pesantren and Society).
43Wahid also mobilized civil society in order to promote political reform. The Forum Demokrasi (Forum for democracy), which he created in 1991, made a point of having a broad base of interfaith and secular members and was important in mobilizing a democratic opposition to Suharto. Wahid himself was one of the most visible voices of democratic reform in 1997. Rather than contributing to political conflict or discord, the political power of Wahid came directly from his authority as an Islamic scholar and his leadership of an Islamic civil society organization.
A note on the NU: the NU has a network of at least 6,840 Islamic boarding schools, many health clinics, a labor union, two of the world’s largest women’s organizations, effective environmental organizations that are part of Indonesia’s green movement, a daily newspaper, a publishing empire, youth and college wings, and influential political parties. Given this base, the arrest or torture of Wahid would almost certainly have caused a grave crisis for the military regime and was virtually sociologically impossible.
Another advocate for Islamic pluralism and democracy is Ahmad Syafi’i Maarif. Maarif defended his dissertation at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of the famous Islamic reformist Fazlur Rahman. Based on the inability of the Pakistani and Indonesian parliaments to incorporate Islamic law into governance, Maarif called for the reformation of shari’a. “As has been stated repeatedly before, the entire edifice of the present shar
ī’a is already too outmoded to be implemented in the present age. Therefore, if the Muslim umma is really serious and sincere in its demand, a comprehensive and responsible ijtih
ād to reformulate the shar
ī’a becomes absolutely imperative.”
44 The bulwark of the dissertation is focused on Islamic reform and not on political reform. Yet in the conclusion Maarif links the two. “This creative development is only possible, when intellectual fear and laziness as evidenced in many Muslim counties not excluding Indonesia, come to an end. Intimately related with this is the fact that the fresh spirit of ijtih
ād ought to be strongly encouraged; and this can only survive and bear fruit in a democratic environment. Indonesia at the present juncture is not a good instance for this, unfortunately.”
45 As one of the country’s most prominent reformists, Maarif’s arguments had significant implications for reformist thought and action.
Maarif was appointed head of Muhammadiyah in 1998, and later elected, and held that position until 2005, thus heading Muhammadiyah throughout the most critical seven years of the democratic transition in Indonesia. In addition to supporting democratic reforms, he institutionalized his arguments for Islamic reform through his NGO, the Maarif Institute. Like Wahid’s work with P3M, the Maarif Institute has helped give young Muhammadiyah intellectuals a voice though the Young Muhammadiyah Intellectual Network (Jaringan Intelektual Muda Muhammadiyah), which supports emerging activists like Hilman Latief, Moeslim Abdurrahman, and Tuti Alawiyah Surandi. These intellectuals are likely to become the leaders of civil society and agents of democratic consolidation in Indonesia’s fledgling democracy.
Maarif has also tried to combat the voices of uncivil movements. He signed on to a 2009 petition by a group of activists who filed a petition asking the constitutional court to revoke a 1965 Blasphemy Law, deemed as discriminatory against certain religious groups. The 1965 law has been used to restrict the rights of the minority groups and other religions outside of the six recognized ones.
While Wahid and Maarif’s leadership in civil society and political society has been crucial to the success of Indonesia’s democratic transition, there is no intellectual voice that has been as influential as that of Nurcholish Madjid. One of the leaders of the intellectual “renewal” (
pembaharuan pimikiran) movement in Indonesian Islam beginning in 1970, these thinkers “embraced the demographic realities of the country through appeals to democracy and pluralism informed by both Universalist ideas and the historical traditions of the region.”
46 The reform movement was sparked by frustration with the stagnation of the Islamic reform movement since the 1950s and relative to the changes among other groups in Islamic civil society.
47 Through letters, newspaper columns, and speeches in 1970–1972, Madjid called for the “desacralizing” of human institutions that were seen as divinely sanctioned, particularly political parties and the state. He became famous for his slogans, “Islam yes, Partai Islam no” (Yes to Islam, no to Islamic parties) and “Tidak ada Negara Islam” (There is no Islamic state). In his writings Madjid argued against those working for an Islamic state, particularly the followers of Muhammad Natsir in Dewan Dakwah Islam Indonesia (DDII). Madjid also developed the concept of
masyarakat madani (civil society), which became influential in the 1980s within the burgeoning NGO community.
Like Wahid and Maarif, Madjid has been supported by civil society organizations and in return created institutions to promote his views. When he began to espouse his idea of desacralizing politics, he was the president of the influential Islamic Students’ Association (Himpunan Mahasiswa Islam). He went on to create the Paramadina Foundation, whose “primary concern has been to preach and develop the notion of an inclusive and tolerant Islam. To serve this purpose, Paramadina offers a series of intensive courses on classical as well as contemporary Islam across difference religious schools (
madzhab), within both the
sunni and
syi’
i traditions.”
48 He has also engaged in public political debates; in the mid-1990s Madjid called for genuine multiparty democracy and later used his platform as a moral voice to personally urged Suharto to step down in May 1998, even while the president tried to rally Muslim support.
49 In a country where Islam is already on the table, Madjid used his religious and political authority to push Suharto out of office.
Amien Rais has also been crucially engaged in the political integration of Islam and democracy. Rais earned a PhD in political science from the University of Chicago with his thesis “The Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt: Its Rise, Demise and Resurgence.” While Rais shares Maarif’s roots in the Muhammadiyah, he is also close to the Islamist DDII and was critical of the
pembaharuan movement’s willingness to accommodate the Suharto regime.
50 Instead, his focus has been on promoting social justice and economic equality though Islamic mechanisms such as the
zakat.
Rais’s activities in civil society include membership in Muhammadiyah’s Majelis Tabligh (propagation committee), after which time he was elected vice chairman of the central board in 1990 and chair in 1995. Politically, Rais was active in the Muslim Scholars Association (Ikatan Cendikiawan Muslim Indonesia, ICMI), which was used to mobilize political support in the Islamic community for Suharto. Yet, despite being a creation of the regime, Rais’s voice was not eclipsed by Suharto; Rais was forced to resign from ICMI in 1997 after his outspoken criticism of the regime. Rais then went on to play a crucial role as one of the leaders and mobilizers of the student movement against Suharto, activities that were instrumental in Suharto’s decision to resign.
In 1998 Rais established the National Mandate Party (Partai Amanat Nasional) to mobilize Muhammadiyah and other plural Muslim voices in democratic politics. The fact that he participated in the creation of a party that competed in electoral politics, and that he also became the chairman of the Consultative Assembly that debated and refused to accept shari’a, was important for the normalization of Islamic involvement in democratic politics in Indonesia.
I could have mentioned many other prominent Indonesian activists who were involved in two, three, or even four of these arenas.
51 However, in sharp contrast, Mirjam Künkler, who has a forthcoming book on the failed democratization movement in Iran and the successful democratization movement in Indonesia, does not think that any person in Iran in the last twenty years has been able to sustain activity in more than one, or at most two, of these arenas. There were in Iran, of course, some outstanding scholars who wrote on the need for more democracy in Islam in general and specifically in Iran, such as Abdolkarim Sorroush, but none has been able to be as active in civil or political society in ways comparable to the Indonesians I have discussed because of credible threats of imprisonment, torture, exile, and sometimes even death. Likewise, I have discussed the analysis of these actors in the five arenas with a number of scholars who have done or are now conducting research in Egypt. To date, no one has made a convincing case that there is a single person who is effective in all five arenas in Egypt. In fact, many of the people who became prominent have rapidly been silenced by censorship, imprisonment, or exile.
NOTES
