Democratic Values in the Muslim World (review)

The analysis in the book is primarily based on a public opinion survey with a sample size of 31,380 that covers thirty-two Muslim-majority countries across the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia and minority Muslim communities in the United States, the European Union (EU), and India. The results of this survey are complemented by qualitative data from open-ended focus group discussions. Based on this extensive survey, Moataz A. Fattah’s book offers insights on the Muslims’ commitment to democratic values and institutions, individual determinants of support for democracy, Muslim beliefs on the relationship between democratic governance and Islam, and different political cultures in Muslim societies.

Following the civic culture approach associated with scholars such as Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, and Robert Putnam, Fattah works with the assumption that “popular values structure both the pace of and the possibilities for social and political change. Thus to gauge the potential for democratic reform in the Middle East, one has to understand the values of its citizens” (2). In the first chapter, the author breaks down democratic values into two major components, namely, support for democratic norms, measured by respondents’ commitment to political equality of all citizens and the negotiated settlement of political disputes, and support for political institutions, measured by support for elections and political parties. Putting these two variables into the focus of its analysis, the study analyzes a host of issues regarding democratization in Muslim settings.

The second chapter identifies three main strains within the Muslim populations regarding respondents’ positions toward religion and democracy. These three groups are the traditional Islamists, modernist Islamists, and secularists. Traditional Islamists, who are further divided into pacifists and advocates for political violence, reject democracy on Islamic grounds. Modernist Islamists, by contrast, approve democracy and consider it the most suitable form of government for translating Islamic principles into politics. The secularists, unlike the Islamists, refuse to see Islam as a basis for political authority. This group is further divided into two subgroups according to their position regarding the acceptability of democratic forms of government. Statist secularists prefer a strong nondemocratic government, while pluralist secularists advocate a democracy where every citizen enjoys equal civil and political rights. This categorization, which is also situated within the larger debates occurring among different religious and secular opinion leaders in the Muslim world, serves three main purposes.

First, it shows that Muslims are much more heterogeneous in their interpretation of religion and democracy than they are portrayed in Western popular media and by some scholars. Second, the results show that in most of these countries, the Islamists are in the majority — Turkey, Albania, Tunisia, Mali, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan are the exceptions. Moreover, half of all the respondents are modernist Islamists. This finding shows that religion plays a significant role in prodemocracy arguments. Third, based on these categories, the author is able to calculate the percentages of democrats and nondemocrats in each country sample and gauge how amenable public opinion in each country is to democratic reform (29). Turkey, Senegal, Morocco, Albania, Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, the United States, Mali, Gambia, Turkmenistan, Malaysia, and the EU, where modernist Islamists and pluralist secularists — hence democrats — constitute more than three-quarters of the literate population, are categorized as cases with a high potential for democratization. Countries with less than 65 percent combined pluralist secularists and modernist Islamists are Oman, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Tajikistan, and Saudi Arabia and are put into the category of having a low potential for democratization. The countries in between are placed into the category of medium level of potential for democratic reform.

In chapter 3, Fattah attempts to test a number of hypotheses on democratization by focusing on the individual-level determinants of support for democratic norms and democratic institutions. On the basis of the survey’s individual-level results, Fattah finds that “the typical profile of a prodemocratic Muslim is a female who is affluent and better educated” (64). Moreover, prior experience with democratic processes, the belief that democracy is “an extension or...