The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim World

Chapter 5: Muslim Democracies

chapter 5 Muslim Democracies Democratic forms of governance, imported from the West as part of the colonial experience, are new to Muslim countries, as they are to all postcolonial and non-Western states. As pointed out in chapter 1, the classical tradition of governance in the Muslim world emphasized order for fear of anarchy and the division of the umma. Even those scholars and political actors who stressed the notion of adl (justice) as an important characteristic of rulership did not equate just government with popular rule. They were concerned primarily with the character of rule, rather than with how the rulers were chosen. Popular sovereignty , the precursor of democracy, was a concept alien not only to the classical age of Islam but also to Europe until the French Revolution of 1789. It did not put down intellectual roots in Europe until well into the nineteenth century . Even then, its practice was heavily circumscribed by property, gender, racial, and educational quali‹cations. Some Muslim thinkers had achieved familiarity with the terminology of liberal thought and democratic governance in the nineteenth century, as these ideas spread from Europe.1 But only in the second half of the twentieth century did a considerable number of Muslim countries begin to experiment with representative institutions. Many such experiments were aborted soon thereafter, for reasons having to do more with colonial legacies, social structures, regime characteristics, and regional security environments than with Islam.2 By examining the cases of Indonesia and Turkey, this chapter aims to show that there is no inherent and irreconcilable contradiction between Islam and democracy. Circumstantial variables and contextual factors have constrained the growth of democracy in large parts of the Muslim world. 90 Religion, State Making, and Democracy in the West Liberal democracies, as we know them today, have had a very brief history in the West itself. One can argue quite convincingly that liberal democracies in Europe and North America were established no earlier than the twentieth century and are products of a long process of gestation that began several centuries ago. Moreover, liberal democracies in the West have usually had very violent pasts. These have included domestic and interstate wars of religion and wars of colonial expansion in the case of Europe and the near total extermination of the native population, the practice of slavery and the inhuman treatment of African slaves, and a very bloody civil war in the United States. Such violence, as Charles Tilly points out in the case of Western Europe, has been crucial to the process of state making and nation formation in these regions.3 Modern nation-states, which currently draw their legitimacy from the identi‹cation of the ruled with the rulers, have been constructed largely through policies of blood and iron.4 Nonetheless, the establishment of such nation-states has been an essential prerequisite for the development of democratic forms of governance based on social contracts that bind both the governors and the governed. Contrary to popular belief that modern nation-states are products of the triumph of the secular over the sacred, religion has played a very crucial role in their formation in the Western world. Talal Asad has argued very convincingly: “Religion has been central to the formation of many European identities: Poland, Ireland, Greece, England, and others. In the New World, Protestantism played a vital part in the construction of the new American nation, and religion continues to be important despite the constitutional separation of church and state . . . The established church, which was an integral part of the state, made the coherence and continuity of the English national community possible. We should not say that the English nation was shaped or in›uenced by religion: the established church (called ‘Anglican’ only in the nineteenth century) was its necessary condition.”5 In many cases, shared religious beliefs acted as the bedrock on which political loyalties were constructed and national identities established. The best way for the rulers to cultivate the loyalties of the ruled was to demonize the religious “other.” Anthony Marx points out: “The absolutist French state was . . . built with the crutch of religious exclusion . . . By the time of the French Revolution, expulsion had produced relative religious homogeneity allowing for a liberal rhetoric of more inclusive nationalism .” Marx continues: “The exclusion of Catholics to unify Protestants became Muslim Democracies / 91 the bedrock for English nation-building, reinforced later by foreign wars in which the French...