Foreword

Modernity stumbled in 1979. The entire Western conceit that societies around the globe were inevitably converging toward liberal, secular democracies suddenly had to be reconciled with a theocratic revolution in Iran. For more than a century, revolutionaries had pointed the masses to the future. Now, the Ayatollah Khomeini seemed to be leading his country toward the fourteenth century (though his successors of late seem more interested in the Age of Voltaire). The resurgence of Islam as a political force in the last twenty-odd years has done more than challenge the prevailing system of international relations; it has called into question the entire paradigm of progress and universalism. Scholars in the West are still trying to come to grips with what this might mean.

Along the way, we have seen a lot of bad theorizing. The shadow of Samuel Huntington stretches across this issue alongside that of Khomeini. Most authors feel obligated to spend a few lines refuting his "clash of civilizations" thesis. Of course, saying that Islam is compatible with democracy requires as much of a generalization as saying that Islam is not compatible. The religion itself is still treated monolithically. Islam seems like a big black box, maybe Pandora's, and few have the courage to look inside.

This issue of SAIS Review does just this, and discovers that the box does not exist. There is no one Islam any more than there is one Christianity. The tenets and even the central texts may be agreed upon, but between belief and practice there is room for a panoply of opinions about "what Islam says" about society and the state. Few would deny this intellectually, but our admission of diversity too rarely translates into policy.

Still, someone must bell the cat. All of the articles in this issue explore, in some way or another, the compatibility of Islam with democracy. Democracy is in fashion, both in theory and in practice, but most Muslim countries are still stubborn redoubts against the crashing "waves" of democratization. This has led some to conclude that, due to some specific traits of culture and character, "Islamic democracy" is an oxymoron.

The same scholars who today say that Muslim countries cannot democratize said the same things about Spain in the 1960s and the 1970s. Conventional wisdom said that Catholic zealotry and authoritarian traditions, which merged during Franco's dictatorship into a bastard child of the Inquisition, would prevent the political and economic "modernization" of the country. History, of course, has proved otherwise, and it continues to do so: Indonesia, which groaned under the weight of a dictatorship for as long as Spain, is now negotiating a democratic transition. In this issue, President Abdurrahman Wahid, while supporting the separation of mosque and state, asserts that the government can still rely on Islam for legitimacy and guidance. He advocates a sort of "mild" secularism for Indonesia. Mark Woodward argues that any Indonesian government will have to rely on Islam; Indonesia's leaders cannot ignore religion, given the importance it has in the lives of its people.

In the eyes of the West, Iran's revolution turned Islam into a fighting faith. Observers who had previously seen pious Muslims as passive and obsequious now saw them boiling across the borders with Christendom in hordes, clutching a copy of the Quran in one hand and a machine gun in the other. The first image is as distorted as the second is. The vast majority of Muslims are moderate and do not view the West as evil. Shireen Hunter contends that the Islamic revival in Central Asia better reflects the schemes and designs of ambitious individuals who have been excluded from power than it does any international plot. Just as ethnicity may be a "coping strategy" in some African nations, religious identity tends to become politicized in places where all other types of civil society are banned. Even where Islam has become militarized, the West has not necessarily recoiled in practice; Olivier Roy mentions how the United States and its allies helped create the Taliban.

Supposedly "religious wars" may have...