Bibliographic Essay

Islam and Democracy

By Edward V. Schneier

lthough scholars were debating the compatibility of Islam and democracy long before 2001, the events following September 11 dramatically increased the scope and intensity of the colloquy. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan brought into sharp focus the efficacy of efforts to build and sustain democratic institutions in Muslim-majority countries and raised the intensity of debate in one of the most polarized areas of scholarly and journalistic writing. It has not been an uncommon practice, as Berna Turam writes in Between Islam and the State: The Politics of Engagement, to assess scholarship in the field according to the ideological side it takes rather than for its scholarly contribution to the understanding of a phenomenon beyond ideology.
The late Samuel P. Huntingtons The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order only indirectly addresses the issue of democratization, and ranges beyond the Islamic world. Together with Sir Bernard Lewiss What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East, however, its shadow falls across the literature. Lewis poses the deceptively simple question of why a region that pioneered in freedom, economic development, and science fell so far behind. To blame Islam as such, Lewis argues, is not very plausible, yet attempts to blame colonialism, Israel, the West in general, or the corruption of Islam by Western concepts of modernization are equally misguided. While Lewiss own answer is murky, his short, readable history of the forces that led to the underdevelopment of a civil society conducive to democracy remains one of the most accessible introductions to Islam in the Middle East and to the divergent answers to his central question. Although Lewis himself confines his discussion to the Middle East, many reviewersincluding those quoted in the cover blurbs of the paperback edition cite the book as a study of the Muslim world. This metonymy that produces a supposed clash between Islam and the West, implicit in Lewis, is manifest in Huntington, who sees a widening gap drawing both civilizations into increasingly polarized cores. Not surprisingly, both Lewis and Huntington have been accused of Orientalism, a term popularized by Edward Said in Orientalism and later essays to characterize those who treat the non-Western world, Islamic countries in

particular, as objects of scorn. While Said sees Orientalism as a reflection of bias, in the most thoroughly documented history of the concept, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despotism in the Middle East and India, Michael Curtis applauds it as essentially correct. Citing such diverse sources as Montesquieu and Marx, Weber and de Tocqueville, Curtis argues that the concept of Oriental backwardness reflects perceptions of real processes and behavior in those systems. In short, the Islamic world is backward, violent, and authoritarian precisely because it is Islamic. The essays in Edward Shyrocks Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend illustrate just how far the gap between perspectives has widened. Although it was Lewis, not Huntington, who first used the phrase clash of civilizations, his early works were scholarly and constrained. A more Manichean side of Lewis surfaces in two newer collections of essays, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror and Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East. What confronts us, he now argues, is not a quarrel between governments but a clash of civilizations in which armed struggle will continue, interrupted only by truces, until all the world either adopts the Muslim faith or submits to Muslim rule." There is plenty of such red meat for neoconservatives in these uneven, often repetitious collections of lectures and articles, though a more prudent and scholarly Lewis can also be found. Lewis aside, no one has done more to introduce the Islamic world to Western

Edward V. Schneier is an emeritus professor of political science at City University of New York City College.

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readers than Georgetown University theologian John Esposito, who has written or coauthored some thirty books on aspects of Islam. His most explicitly political work (coauthored with John O. Voll), Islam and Democracy, has been superseded by The Future of Islam. Esposito is unusual in his broadly comparative scope: he covers Muslim-majority nations as well as Islamic communities in other parts of the world, and the major theological divisions within Islam (his explanation of the Sunni-Shia split is as lucid as can be found); and he compares Islam to other world religions. His discussion of a Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition is, from a theological perspective, persuasive and thoroughly mainstream, but it infuriates the clash of civilizations pundits who place Islam in another world. Groups such as the Middle East Forum, dedicated to protecting the Constitutional order from Middle Eastern threats, see Esposito as a nave apologist, ignorant of both Islamic and democratic traditions. While some may be frustrated by the breadth and objectivity of his work, no Western scholar has done more to explicate the nature and complexity of modern Islam. Few scholars depict the Muslim world as monolithic. Most of the worlds 1.5 billion Muslims, as Esposito notes in The Future of Islam, are not Arab but Asian or African. And because the images and realities of Islam and Muslims are multiple and diverse, an Islamic world exists in only the loosest sense. Islamic society, as Asef Bayat puts it in Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn, becomes a generality constructed by others to describe Muslims and their cultures. It tells how others imagine what Muslims are and even how they should be. This worldview has been perpetuated in part by some Muslim groups (mainly Islamists) who themselves construct a unitary Islamic landscape. The focus of this essay is on recent books that are less about theology than politics, books that are not confined to the Arab world and that give direct attention to governance in general and democracy in particular. Implicit in this selection is the notion that Islamic political thoughtto the extent that there is a coherent body of thoughtis filtered through diverse cultural and political contexts that shape its political

implications. The question of whether or to what extent Muslims in these varied settings are willing to embrace the institutions of democracy or, more importantly, the values of a democratic polity are, as Salwa Ismail writes in Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism, historically situated. Meanings and action are determined in relation to material conditions such as institutional relations and the actors positions of power. The relevant questions are about the ability of Islamic ideals, as filtered through diverse cultures, to sustain democracies. Decades ago, Clifford Geertz argued that to develop the kind of civic culture congenial to democracy it was not essential to displace the primordial sentiments of religion and ethnicity but only to produce an adjustment between them. 1 The books reviewed here address these adjustments, rather than the kinds of hermeneutic or textual analyses better left to theologians. The essay is divided into six sections: Islam and Modernity; Islam and the State; Political Islam; Islam and Democracy; Education, Equality, and Gender; and Islamic Democracies.

summarized the more general findings, there have been negative relations between democracy and Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Confucianism. 2 While Protestants have enjoyed the inside track toward modernization, Islam has lagged. A few petroleum-based exceptions to the contrary, Islamic countries are significantly less affluent than Western countries. Shireen T. Hunter, in her introduction to the essays collected in Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity, points out that with nearly a fifth of the worlds population, the Muslim worlds share of international trade (including oil) is less than 7 percent; its cumulative gross domestic product is oneeighth that of the European Union. The Islamic worlds encounters with modernity came largely in the context of conquest and, as Hunter argues, its responses to modernity have been quite similar to those of other non-European, and even some late-modernizing European, countries. As with these other latecomers, moreover, they can win their cultural, economic, and political autonomy only by modernizing. The question then is not whether but how to benefit from the results of modernity without having to adopt its entire philosophy at the expense of their own cultural identity. Whether such adaptations can be made at all, however, is a major point of contention. In contrast with those of Hunter and others, David Lerners classic argument on the connections between democratization, secularization, industrialization, and education in The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East continues to inform a substantial segment of the literature, including Karen Armstrongs Islam: A Short History; Fatema Mernissis Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World; M. A. Muqtedar Khans edited volume, Islamic Democratic Discourse: Theory Debates and Philosophical Perspectives; Jan-Erik Lane and Hamadi Redissis Religion and Politics: Islam and Muslim Civilisation; and Michael J. Mazarrs Unmodern Men in the Modern World: Radical Islam, Terrorism, and the War on Modernity. In these books, the argument is essentially that the mind-set of Islam itselfnot simply a countrys educational, economic, and political backwardness retards modernization.
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Islam and Modernity

What gives Bernard Lewiss WHAT WENT Wrong? its enduring power is the centrality of the issue it raises: is there something in Islam itself that has retarded the intellectual and economic development of the Middle East in particular and of the Islamic world more generally? Max Weber, in many ways the founding father of the sociology of religion, touched only briefly on Islam. In treating the Islamic and the Arab traditions interchangeably, however, he helped frame much of the current controversy. As JanErik Lane and Hamadi Redissi point out in Religion and Politics: Islam and Muslim Civilisation, [a]lthough Weber never took the time to think and reflect conclusively on Islam, his analysis has nonetheless been elevated to the position of a paradigm. That paradigm, when accepted and combined with a strong correlation between economic modernity and democracy, makes the concept of Islamic democracy a virtual oxymoron. For Weber and his followers, Islam is hardly unique in this regard. Historically, as Seymour Martin Lipset

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In Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: Democratic Peace and Euro-Islam versus Global Jihad, the Syrian-born German author Bassam Tibi takes this argument a step further to describe not simply a conflict of cultures, but fundamentally divergent ways of thinking, and a putative need to convert the worldthrough violence if necessaryto Islamic law (Sharia). His analysis of the rise of contemporary political Islamism, or rather of the dangers of the tendency to religionize cultural and political conflicts, is clearly articulated, his tendency to locate its origins in a clash with modernity less so. But what makes his articles and books most interesting (and controversial) is his call for the Westernization of Islam only implicit in other studies: unless and until Muslims embrace Western concepts of secular rationality, they will remain a threat to themselves and to the world. For all the controversy surrounding Tibi, his argument curiously parallels that of some Arab scholars who attribute the engine of Islamic radicalism to the insidious influence of Western ideas. But it would be a mistake to label all calls for a return to the true faith antimodern. It is neither fully exculpatory nor irrelevant to note that the external

that Islamic fundamentalism is an effect rather than a cause. Some Muslim thinkers implicitly accepted colonial justifications for rule, arguing as Carl Ernst says in Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World, that it was the failure of Muslims to live by Gods commands that caused their subordination. The way back was either through a retreat to the mosque or through the creation of an Islamic state that would become the engine of a more authentic modernizing project. Yet in most cases, those Muslims who seem most likely to have embraced more traditional religious values are not located in cultural and socioeconomic backwaters. They are, according to Nazih Ayubi in Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World, almost all movements of the upwardly mobile, formally educated and recently urbanised youth, who were released, often mobilised, but not completely assimilated and rewarded by the national State, because of incomplete industrialisation and unfulfilled modernisation. Not only have recruits to the more militant variations of political Islam been drawn disproportionately from middle- and upper-class, educated strata, but groups like al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Laskar Jihad have shown themselves quite

and a perceived ongoing threat from the West. The conflict, Roy suggests, is less with traditional societies than with people who have become Westernized (or partially so) and who have to reinvent or rethink their Muslim identities. Western Muslims in particular have lost their culture but not their religion, and it is the loss of the former that deepens their embrace of the latter. By attempting to impose its values on the Islamic world, this argument runs, the West has instead produced an ideological backlash that has become the driving force behind the Islamic revival. But unlike Tibi, who sees the more radical groups as ascendant, Roy sees a growing tendency to accommodation in a post-Islamist Muslim world that is more sacred than profane. The religious revival, seen in many Islamic societies, is just that: a retreat from politics into a more spiritual realm that does not question or contest state power. As a tactic, such a withdrawal is thoroughly modern. To retreat to the mosque, which, in providing a wide range of social services, becomes almost an alternative government, is to abandon a failed political fight in order to become an effective social movement. That similar displacements and backlashes did not take place in, say, the Catholic former colonies and dictatorships of Latin America, however, leads back to the question of Islamic exceptionalism. Jan-Erik Lane and Hamadi Redissi ask in Religion and Politics if it is simply the absence of a formal priesthood or some other set of cultural variables that explains why Muslim civilization is performing worse than other major civilisations, on economics as well as on politics? We suggest that traditionalism in the Muslim civilisation is a stronger factor than colonialism, especially today when colonialism is a thing of the past. Lane and Redissi have a very useful summary and analysis of the literature that, unfortunately, is too challenging for nonexperts. While they rather effectively rebut the religious determinism of the Weberians, their own argument suffers from the same essential defect. They write that [t]he post-modern society reveals the truth from below; but because Islamic truth is received from above, that is from scripture, it restricts the search for truth so necessary for development. Why Muslims should take their scripture more literally than others (if, in fact, they do) is not explained.
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To retreat to the mosque ... is to abandon a failed political fight.

environment for most Islamic countries over the past two centuries has been more a hindrance than a help to modernization. With nearly every Muslim-majority entity colonized or under the tutelage of a great power for the pivotal years of world industrialization, modernization was at best a double-edged sword. While the old developmental model stressed its essential role in democratization, modernization can work in the opposite direction, as the history of totalitarianism shows. In the Middle East, even Lewis (What Went Wrong?) concedes that The cumulative effect of reform and modernization was, paradoxically, not to increase freedom but to reinforce autocracy. Thus, an alternative view of the backwardness of the Muslim world reverses the direction of causality to suggest adept in the use of modern weapons and modes of communication. While the direct correlation between the use of information and communication technologies with democratization is not statistically strong, Philip N. Howard argues in The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam that they are a necessary but not sufficient causal condition for contemporary regime change. Even the most radical of Islamic states, by this logic, can be created only by the embrace of modern technologies. A strong case can be made that modernization, in itself, is not the issue at all. In The Failure of Political Islam, Olivier Roy joins a growing number of scholars who see the conflict less as a return to traditional Islam than as a retrospective reaction to colonialism

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There is an intuitive logic to the argument that the more rapid the rate of social and economic change, the more likely certain sectors of the population will be inclined to embrace simple solutions. But why Muhammad instead of Marx, and why evangelical as opposed to political action? And, most fundamentally, is it religion, culture, economics, or politics that best serves as the explanation? In the seldom-cited words of Ernest Gellner in Muslim Society, Islam is, of the three great Western monotheisms, the one closest to modernity. Why then does it appear so different in practice? Questions such as these have led to a growing recognition that the linkages between Islam and modernity are too complex to be packaged in a single theoretical schema, and that the conceptual linkages among various definitions of modernity and democracy are not as clear as they once seemed. As John Voll notes in Shireen Hunter and Huma Maliks Modernization, Democracy and Islam, Islam, democracy, and modernity are all contested terms. Furthermore, not all Western values are necessarily modern. Or, as Salwa Ismail puts it in Rethinking Islamist Politics: Culture, the State and Islamism, the impact of modernity on Islam cannot be understood without the deconstruction of the relationship between the West and modernity. As empirical studies of modernization proliferate, it becomes clear that it is a world of multiple modernities that make it more difficult to discover whether and under what conditions there is something in Islam itself that leads to or justifies a rejection of modernity, those aspects of modernity that underlie democratization, ormore fundamentallyif there is any real rejection at all. In a very thoughtfully argued, heavily theoretical book, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism, Roxanne Euben suggests that many Islamists in fact have learned the modern lessons of the relationship of knowledge and power quite thoroughly and, furthermore, have incorporated, albeit unconsciously many of the ideas and assumptions of what modernity is and should be. Debates within Islam mirror those in the West, which is itself riven with disagreements and ambivalences about modernity and rationalism.
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Among Muslims who wear the mantle of the antimodern, the literature suggests two dimensions to their position: literal interpretation and integralism. As to literalism, there is a persistent debate within Islamas in all text-based religionson the extent to which scripture should be interpreted in contemporary terms. The reading of ancient texts, even by the most rigid of self-described strict constructionists, is, to be sure, almost always selective. The Quran, for example, was for its time a model of compassion and rectitude on the treatment of slaves, but it clearly justifies the practice. Contemporary invocations of scripture on this issue are rare. While Jews and Christians have read their sacred texts with similar selectivity, they also provide mechanisms of reinterpretation that, in one sense, are lacking in Islam. Because neither its prophet nor its holy book created an Islamic clergy, there is no sanctioned hierarchy or body of scholars charged with formally amending the sacred text. But while there is in theory no such clergy in Islam, recent historyin Iran most notablyindicates otherwise. The clergy that has emerged in many parts of the Muslim world, moreover, may be as much the source of any antimodern ideas as anything in the Quran. The second position that, it can be argued, retards modernization is what in Modernization, Democracy and Islam (edited by Shireen T. Hunter and Huma Malik) Timothy McDaniel calls integralism, a term describing the seeking of clearly defined, immutable truths. What the term captures is the notion, found in some sects of many religions, that the life of the faithful is one in which religious teachings trump all others. To many Muslims, as Asef Bayat argues in Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn, Islam is a complete divine system with a superior political model, cultural code, legal structure, and economic arrangementin short, a system that responded to all human problems. Its hallmark, as Tamara Sonn puts it later in Hunter and Malik, is the claim that Islam is the solution to all problems, from moral to social, political, economic, and environmental. Just as in other religions, however, specific rulings for specific contexts, aside from the basic regulations presented

in revelation, are left for human beings to extract. Although the readings in Hunter and Malik are of uneven quality and readability, the collection is probably the best-balanced discussion of modernity in the enormously diverse corners of the Islamic world.

Islam and the State

Unlike most other world religions, Islam did not emerge as the religion of a persecuted minority but rather in the context of political power. Its prophet was at once a spiritual and a political leader who left no clear theory of governance or plan of succession. Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim writes in Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia, The Quran addresses Moslems as individuals and community, without even mentioning the idea of a state, let alone prescribing a particular form for it. Not surprisingly, The Prophets companions and their successors tore themselves apart in fratricidal wars because there was no rule that could settle their political rivalry and adjudicate their claims to legitimacy, according to Mohamed Charfi in Islam and Liberty: The Historical Misunderstanding. Naim also argues in Islam and the Secular State that because Muslims do not accept the possibility of prophets after Muhammad, no other human being can enjoy [his] combination of religious and political authority. But while no Muslim would claim that the Prophet could have a replacement, it can be argued that some may be endowed with special abilities to interpret the Prophets words. In a split that coincides generally with that between Shia and Sunni Islam, the Shia imam, though not a prophet, is, as Esposito explains in The Future of Islam, the divinely inspired, sinless, final interpreter of Gods will as formulated in Islamic law. And although the Quran ordained no clergy, in many areas the ulama have emerged as a self-perpetuating class and clergyand many wish to keep it that way, according to M. A. Muqtedar Khan in Islamic Democratic Discourse. Both ulama and caliph, of course, must observe, at a minimum, the basic tenets of traditional law, the Sharia. However, since checks on their interpretations are not defined, their powers can approach the absolute.

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Islamic history can be read in the gradations between two poles. According to Naim, at one end is the notion of a complete conflation or convergence, of religious and political authority rooted in the caliphate and the emerging clergy that was once the historic norm. At the opposite, the complete separation between religious and political authorities was rarely, if ever acknowledged because of the perceived need for rulers to enjoy Islamic legitimacy. In fact, Mohammed Ayoob writes in The Many Face of Political Islam (among the most useful single books on this topic), most of the more authoritarian regimes in the Islamic world have achieved a sort of unacknowledged but real separation. While neither the state nor the religious leaders would openly acknowledge it, there are often parallel universes of political rule. In Algeria, much like Egypt, for example, semi-autonomous spheres emerged in the urban setting where the informal economy thrived, according to Salwa Ismail in Rethinking Islamist Politics. Even in an authoritarian regime, as Ismail argues, politics is not confined to the activities of the state. For many Islamists in these jurisdictions, Their political project is formulated in cultural, social and moral terms without necessarily entailing a change in the form of government, Ismail continues. It may be that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was slow to join the 2011 uprisings against then-President Hosni Mubarak in part because they had already carved out their own semiautonomous sphere of political power. Some reformers have argued that Islam in fact embraces this notion of two spheres of authority almost as if it were a separation of powers. The imams, or religious scholars, devote their lives to the study of divine law. Their interpretations, confined to the most basic issues of faith, form the rough equivalent of judicially constructed constitutional law in separation of powers democracies. The key to the scholars resistance against unjust rulers was their ability to insist that the ruler must remain within the bounds of the sharia or risk being stripped of his legitimacy, writes Noah Feldman in The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. It was a power both formidable yet contingent, a power that to many students of Islam has been both

perverted (as in Iran) and subverted (as in Saudi Arabia). The ideal political ruler respects the boundaries of his or her power as determined by the scholars interpretations of the Sharia. Souad Ali writes in A Religion Not a State: Ali Abd al Raziqs Islamic Justification of Political Secularism that there is a long tradition in which true Muslims are enjoined to overthrow the religious authority because the only true relationship in Islam is between the individual and God. Elimination of the power of religious authority sets the human being free. Particularly in this light, perhaps the most extraordinary development in the theory of church/state relations in the Islamic world comes from Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini seems to have totally inverted the widely accepted notion that the state should be governed in accord with Islamic law. In Muslim Politics, Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori explore this inversion. Because the government is, Khomeini argued, the absolute viceregency of the Prophet of God, it has priority over all secondary injunctions, even prayers, fasting and hajj, which it could curtail or prohibit. They quote then-President Khamenei: The preservation of the Islamic regime is a theological order, one that apparently puts state power on top. What has made this debate particularly opaque is the historical post-Quranic emergence of the nation-state. Mohamed Charfi writes in Islam and Liberty that [t]he particularity of Islam is that it was born in a semi-desert, in the midst of a tribal society that lacked any statelike structure. There were only the tribal leaders who, even after a mass conversion, kept their titles and prerogatives. There was, in essence, but one umma or community of believers united in a single faith and state that at the same time embraced residents of often-diverse ethnicities and faiths. The Turkish caliphate at the height of the Ottoman Empire provides a model of a similar, seamless, yet essentially federated community. In modern societies, however, as Mohammed Ayoob writes in The Many Faces of Political Islam, [t]he sovereign state is here to stay, and most Muslims, including most Islamists, have internalized the values of the sovereign state system and are perfectly at ease

working within the parameters of the nation state. Whatever residual agitation remains for the return of a caliphate, it is expressed almost entirely in regional terms, as in the call for a pan-Islamic caliphate uniting the Malay Peninsula, Indonesia, and the southern Philippines, or a similar Muslim community in Central Asia. Mohammed Ayoob writes in Modernization, Democracy and Islam, edited by Shireen Hunter and Huma Malik, that the cavalier construction of colonial borders by imperial power created states that were composed of distinct, sometimes hostile, ethnic groups or that divided previously homogeneous communities into two or more states. Stability could be maintainedoften with the active connivance of the great powers only by a strong government. Visions of both a transnational Islam, within these more limited boundaries, and conversely of an even narrower umma remain vivid in many parts of the world, a problem for many postcolonial regimes. And when those governments collapse, as in the former Yugoslavia, rivalries long thought dormant can reemerge with surprising force.

Political Islam
Muslims throughout the world are more likely than most contemporary believers to report that religion plays a significant role in their everyday lives. Even in the United States, only Mormons, among those surveyed by Gallup in 2007 and 2009, in information reprinted in Espositos The Future of Islam, were more likely (85 percent) than Muslims (80 percent) to say that religion is important. Beginning in the 1970s, moreover, and lasting up to the present day, levels of religiosity have risen in depth and intensity among the Muslim masses all over the world, according to Mehran Kamrava in The New Voices of Islam: Rethinking Politics and Modernity, which also includes some interesting data to make the case. Whether these pious proclivities carry over into politics, and what it means if they do, are different questions. The term Islamist has become almost standard usage to describe those Muslims who are most likely to subordinate aspects
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of their lives, politics specifically, to their religious beliefs. Moataz Fattahs Democratic Values in the Muslim World attempts to determine the extent of Islamism in the Muslim world and includes a survey of more than 30,000 literate Muslims worldwide that provides a useful starting point. Though it does not draw upon a statistically valid sample, the survey, follow-up interviews, and focus groups provide a useful snapshot of elite opinions. Those whom Fattah labels traditionalists are close to a majority (46 percent) only in Saudi Arabia, and average 17.6 percent of the overall survey. Those he counts as secularists, modernists, and pluralists, conversely, comprise clear majorities in most Muslim-majority countries as well as in the diaspora. Whereas most scholars find the themes of Islamism running through a variety of traditional, reform, and radical groups, others attribute Islamism and a penchant for violence to virtually the entire Islamic world. And some journalists, as well as a handful of scholars, have depicted Islamism as an ideology. Despite his own reports to the contrary, for example, Yaroslav Trofimov writes in Faith at War: A Journey on the Frontlines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu, that Islam is analogous to Nazism and Communism because political Islam is grounded in a totalitarian idea of purity, in this case of religion rather than of race or class; this idea unites disparate parts of the Islamic world in a way thats hard to imagine for Christian nations. Some of the authors discussed here (e.g., Michael Curtis, Bernard Lewis, Michael Mazarr, and Bassam Tibi) similarly argue that Islam differs fundamentally from other religions in its conflation of religion and state in an ultimately coercive manner. Beyond the concept of integralism, discussed earlier in this essay, Muslims, as Robert W. Hefner describes this position in Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia, are said to have a unique cultural malady that makes it difficult for them to get noxious religious emissions out of the public air. But it is equally plausible that Islamic piety reflects the same dimensions of religious resurgence evident in radical Christian and Hindu fundamentalism. It reflects a renewed political engagement in public and other political arenas that
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characterizes religious resurgence in general, according to Beverley Milton-Edwards in Islam and Politics in the Contemporary World. Only Turkey and some of the former Soviet republics, among Muslim-majority countries, specifically decree a separation of church and state in their constitutions. To a greater or lesser extent, most others either formally or tacitly acknowledge the special role of Islam. What this means in practice is another story. In John Reudys edited collection of essays on North Africa, Islamism and Secularism in North Africa, most explicitly in Mary Jane Deebs concluding essay, it becomes clear that radical Islamism is best mobilized in explicitly secular, authoritarian states like Algeria and is least successful in those like Morocco that both permit dissent and project themselves as Islamic states. Given the opportunity to participate, even in the limited manner permitted in, say, Jordan or Kuwait, Islamists participate in peaceful ways; violently repressed, as in Yemen, they respond with violence. Within Islamic countries, violence in general appears to be more a function of regime type than tactical choice. In contrast with political Islam, there are voices in the Muslim world that respond with a total rejection of politics. Those whom Salwa Ismail calls conservative Islamists have limited public agendas at best. Their political project is formulated in cultural, social and moral terms without necessarily entailing a change in the form of government, writes Ismail in Rethinking Islamist Politics. In some cases, as with all profoundly religious people, some of the most truly devout Muslims are absolutely apolitical, but those whom Ismail labels conservatives often work with existing regimes in ways that are, in a sense, very political. Thus Ismail argues that Olivier Roys concept of a post-Islamist movement found in The Failure of Political Islam, which suggests a retreat from politics, is based on a too-limited concept of the political. According to Ismail, Islamist movements are assessed differently when politics is understood in terms of practices of power and control and not only in terms of state and government. These alternative, quasi-political structures form the building blocks of an emerging, pluralistic civil culture that, given the

conditions that topple authoritarian rule, can underpin the emergence of democracy. Graham E. Fuller writes in The Future of Political Islam that Islamists are now engaged in functionally privatizing and secularizing society beyond the purview of the state by constructing Muslim space outside the control of government (italics in original). When and if democracy comes, this withdrawal from politics gives its leading Muslim organizations a certain opportunity. In Indonesia, as Robin Bush writes in Nahdlatul Ulama and the Struggle for Power within Islam and Politics in Indonesia, there was room under the repressive Suharto regime to develop a nascent civil society movement that played a vital role in the subsequent transition.

Islam and Democracy

Four collections of essays effectively describe and capture the range of opinions of and on what can loosely be considered Islamic reformers: Reformist Voices of Islam, edited by Shireen T. Hunter; Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestations, Democratization, edited by Robert W. Hefner; The New Voices of Islam, edited by Mehran Kamrava; and Islamic Democratic Discourse, edited by M. A. Muqtedar Khan. The essays in Kamrava are the most philosophically dense, while Hefners are the most accessible. Hunters collection covers an extraordinarily diverse collection of reform voices, but is more about the scope of the movement than its content. Khans most useful volume begins with the assumption that most of the worlds Muslims would prefer to live in democracies, an assertion borne out in surveys in a number of settings. The theological basis of this position, moreover, is sound, if not uncontested. The Quran, and practices of the Prophet, both underscore the importance of shura, or consultation, though there is disagreement as to whether it is obligatory or simply desirable. Whether shura implies support for democratization is questionable on other grounds as well: first, as Abdelwahab El-Affendi points out in Islamic Democratic Discourse, edited by Khan, because shura is a discretionary process that is initiated at the top, it may not be inclusive; second, because it is nonbinding; and third, because, unlike democracy, it

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does not permit modification of foundational texts. And since interpretation of major foundational texts is a central point of contention at present, this could make it unsuitable for resolving the ongoing conflicts. Even if the idea of Islamic democracy is accepted, the role of religion remains contentious. Indeed, most of the essays in virtually all of the reformist literature are focused on this question. Khaled Abou El Fadls short essay Islam and the Challenge of Democracy and the commentaries on it that are contained in this small book succinctly parse the essential dilemma of reformist thinking. Abou El Fadl points out that arguments claiming that God is the sole legislator endorse a fatal fiction that is indefensible from the point of view of Islamic theology. Such arguments pretend that some human agents have perfect access to Gods will, and that human beings could become the perfect executors of the divine will without inserting their own human judgments and inclinations in the process. Fadl, though sharing the reform vision of a state that guarantees human rights and avoids despotism, rather curiously goes only halfway, arguing for popular sovereignty, on the one hand, and for the retention of Sharia, on the other. In Fadls thinking, the Sharia serves as the fundamental law defining the most basic human rights; democratic government is for everything else. In this attempt to combine Islamism and democratic reform, Fadl, as M. A. Muqteder Khan expresses it in his edited volume Islamic Democratic Discourse, puts the philosophical cart before the horse by leaving, if only by implication, a filtering clergy between the people and their government. In practice, it seems as if the experience of participation has a moderating influence on Islamist parties. A growing number of Islamists are concluding indeed that democracy offers the best way of both obtaining faith-based objectives and retaining their individual and collective abilities to sustain and nourish them. There are, to be sure, many democrats-by-default, particularly in secular autocracies such as Egypt, but in their very act of organizing, they are creating new networks of interaction and political practice. Rather than a homogeneous religious movement, Islamist mobilization can be a political process that brings together

new coalitions of people with varied and often highly practical goals, writes Jenny B. White in Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A Study in Vernacular Politics. Democracy works, if only because the alternatives are worse. According to Graham E. Fuller in The Future of Political Islam, Islamists languishing in the prisons of Muslim-majority countries more than any other group are becoming prime advocates of democracy and human rights precisely because they are the primary victims of its absence (italics in original).

Education, Equality, and Gender

One key to understanding the differences among Islamic countries is found in the nature of their educational systems, which Mohamed Charfi examines in Islam and Liberty: The Historical Misunderstanding. Men of religion prefer to monopolize education, writes Charfi, and they confine it to the most orthodox theories. Just as the Council of Paris in 1213 removed Aristotle and later Aquinus from the curriculum in Europe, in the Islamic world the ulema abandoned all the profane sciences. In 1524, when the king created the College of France as a counterweight to the religious establishments, there was no such countervailing authority in the Muslim world. As schools were created and education extended to the masses, for the religious syllabus as well as for the teaching of Arabic, educationists turned to the numerous former pupils of religious institutions, who brought with them their programmes, their methods, and their mentality. The worm was in the fruit from the start (italics in original). It would be simplistic to attribute backwardness to this single variable, but it is odd how little attention the literature gives to school systems. In many Muslim-majority countrieseven relatively progressive Tunisia, where Charfi was minister of education education was, until the founding of a secular university in 1875, purely a matter of studying the Arabic language and the Muslim religion; there was no place for science, mathematics, or technical subjects. As recently as 1970, the government briefly reinstated the old curriculum as a vaccination against the leftist ideas then in vogue at the university.

Similar patterns are found throughout the Middle East and North Africa where authoritarian governments have often, in effect, bought the tacit support of the clergy by giving them control over the schools, just as the United States supported Taliban control in Afghanistan to undermine Soviet influence in the 1980s. In Schooling Islam: The Culture and Politics of Modern Muslim Education, edited by Robert W. Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Gregory Starrett describes a process of reIslamisation in Egypt that was a result of the integration of religious education into the public education system and by the functionalisation of religion as an accessory to public policy. And even in Turkey, where Kemal dismissed madrasahs as degenerated ruins and dissolved the whole system, subsequent state officials realized that this repression was creating a system of underground religious education, according to Hefner and Zaman in the same book. The studies in Schooling Islam show remarkable diversity both within and between countries. Most contemporary Islamic education is neither medieval nor myopic. Nor, despite lurid popular accounts of madrasahs that train suicide bombers and revile everything Western, is it entirely in the hands of narrowly focused clerics. The citizens and rulers of most Muslim countries have become too sophisticated to put up with schools that fail to train their children in useful skills. Few reformers, however, are willing to challenge the moral credentials of traditionally trained religious scholars who tend not to be forces for modernization, equality, and democracy. The veil is a potent symbol of Islam and, in the West, of gender inequality. The irony is that where the veil is near mandatory, as in Iran, women are against it, but in Turkey, where it is virtually outlawed, the majority of women want the law changed. While most of the Islamic world has abandoned or ignored the Qurans teachings on slavery and property law, gender equality, personal status more generally, and penal laws remain highly contentious. Fatema Mernissi argues in Islam and Democracy that the veil, moreover, is not just a scrap of cloth; it is a division of labor. It sends women back to the kitchen and to the extent that it does so undermines the democratic project wherever it is imposed.
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This is not the place for a history of gender discrimination in Western democracies, current laws on capital punishment and individual liberties, or the positions of some Western theologians on these issues. But it is appropriate to recognize that the differences between the West and many Islamic countries on these issues are more of degree than of kind. In Islam and Liberty, Michael Charfi writes that there is little doubt that Some of the discrimination established by the ulema still persists in a number of Muslim countries, and it will certainly become worse whenever one of the existing semimodern, semi-religious regimes gives way to a fundamentalist regime. The issue is not only that Islamic democracies might adopt policies toward women and various religious minorities, in foreign policy, and in respect for civil liberties that Westerners will not like. The greater danger is that some of these policies contain the seeds of the destruction of democracy itself. Abdullahi Ahmed an-Naim argues in Islam and the Secular State that Shariaa principles are basically consistent with most human rights norms, with the exception of some specific and very serious aspects of the rights of women and non-Muslims and freedom of religion and belief. But those are very big exceptions. The fact is that it simply is not known what an Islamist state would look like since there is still no case where an Islamist government has come to power by peaceful means and been allowed to govern peacefully, writes Noah Feldman in The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State. If political Islam has been seriously discredited by the failures of the Iranian, Sudanese, and Afghani experiments, as John Espositio writes in Debating Moderate Islam, edited by M. A. Muqtedar Khan, women and more generally the values of liberty and equality have made significant gains under diverse democratizing regimes in Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, and Mali. Valentine M. Moghadam writes in Modernization, Democracy and Islam, edited by Shireen T. Hunter and Huma Malik, that even in the Middle East, North Africa, and Iran, sociological studies and surveys have found that large sections of the modern middle class in Muslim societies hold values and beliefs regarding gender relations and democratization that would be familiar to their counterparts in North America, Latin America, and Europe.
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Modern communication technologies are combining with greater affluence to open access to a larger world, according to Marc Lynch in Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al-Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today. This opening is causing more and more Muslimswomen by no means exceptedto bring local religious doctrines and practices under comparative scrutiny. Both state-controlled media and local religious leaders increasingly find themselves complemented and even challenged not just by locally rooted understandings of Islam, with which they are familiar, but with rival and alternative articulations of belief and practice, write Dale F. Eickelman and Jon W. Anderson in New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere. With the ulamas loss of their monopoly on sacred authority, there is a marked fragmentation of authority that makes the playing field more level, but also more dangerous, write Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori in Muslim Politics. This can, in the more pessimistic scenario, intensify conflicts, increase violence, and lead to authoritarian clampdowns. But it can also help generate the kind of pluralistic civic culture that democratic theory increasingly recognizes as a key to successful democratization. Because authoritarian regimes have consistently been more tolerant of religious than of secular nongovernmental organizations, it is important to understand that this civic culture, in the short run at least, will be largely Islamic. A key comparative marker on the road to democratic transitions may well be the extent to which the kind of civic Islam that Hefner describes in Indonesia becomes dominant.

off, are changing at different rates and in diverse ways. In Islam and Democracy: The Failure of Dialogue in Algeria, Frdrick Volpe writes that the immediate case of the difficulties of democratisation in Muslim polities is simply the fact that the official institutions of the state participate only minimally in the formation of the political judgments of the citizenry. If, as this suggests, it is the experience with governing that makes democracy work, the test of how well it works is to be found in those countries where, to some degree, it has. If a primary cause of the failure of democracy in the Islamic world is more institutional than philosophical or religious, then it follows that the richer a countrys experience with democracy, the smoother its path to democratic consolidation. There are quite a few recent case studies on the relatively successful democracy projects in Turkey and Indonesia and more problematic cases in Egypt, Algeria, and Malaysia. For a comprehensive history of Turkey, Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey by Nicole Pope and Hugh Pope is a good starting point. While this essay can only scratch the surface of the voluminous literature on the complicated relationships between Islamists and secularists in todays Turkey, M. Hakan Yavuzs Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey, Cihan Tuals Passive Revolution: Absorbing the Islamic Challenge to Capitalism, and Ersin Kalaycioglus Turkish Dynamics: Bridge over Troubled Lands have been most useful. Kalaycioglu argues that Turkey is the exceptional case, off the point to refer to Turkey as an Islamic democracy, as the Turkish record of secularization has been quite sui generis. What perhaps makes the Turkish case unique is that Atatrks revolution was waged against not just foreign domination but also the caliphate that enabled it. In most other Muslim countries, the national liberation movement was directed only against the colonial power, and its leaders did not hesitate to mobilize activists by drawing on the religious sentiments of the population, writes Mohamed Charfi in Islam and Liberty. If the Turkish case is in some ways unique, it also illustrates the extent to which [e]xpanded political participation has been the most important factor in moderating

Islamic Democracies
It seems as if the degree of democratization in the Islamic world is in direct relationship to the countrys distance from Mecca. At its historic core in the Arab world, and particularly in the oil-rich rentier states of the Middle East and North Africa, autocracy has been the norm. Further from this core, countries that missed the first three waves of democratization, or that had their experiments with democracy cut

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religious radicalism. Political participation provides a variety of flexible learning opportunities for religious actors to make trade-offs between their ideology and votemaximization, writes Yavuz in Secularism and Muslim Democracy in Turkey. Yes, the threat of secularist military intervention looms, but it is equally plausible to suggest that it is the dynamics of democratic competition that best explains why Turkeys Islamist party has established itself as a proIslamist party without any overt association to, or discussion of, Islam. While the Justice and Development Party (AKP) may have larger strategic motives in this stance, the more plausible argument is that the coexistence of the AKPs practice and symbols is not an ill-conceived attempt to hide its real Islamic identity, but it is the creative making of a new identity, according to Cihan Tual in Passive Revolution. There are few countries in which the creation of these new identities has been more rapid and widespread than in Indonesia. If Clifford Geertzs distinction from Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia between more and less pure Muslims ever was valid, it is most interesting that Indonesian piety has increased even as democratization has taken hold through more than a decade now of fair and free elections. In Robert W. Hefners classic formulation in Civil Islam, it is a system of civil Islam, religious yet pluralistic, that is creating a Muslim and Indonesian culture of tolerance, equality and civility. The proponents of civil Islam are a key part this renaissance. Of equal importance, in more recent years, has been the development of pluralistic culture of civic organizations, womens groups, and professional associations that are not specifically Islamic in their focus. Where Indonesias attempt to consolidate its democracy has fallen short is in its failure significantly to alter the old power structure and its culture of corruption, collusion, and nepotism. This failure is rooted in the reformers continuing inability to capture state power through a disciplined and even ruthless political party driven and defined by any coherent ideological agenda for liberal reform and transparent governance, write Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz in Reorganising Power in Indonesia: The Politics of Oligarchy in an Age of Markets.

Despite isolated but dramatic and highly visible acts of religious terrorism, the turn of the century saw the eclipse and evisceration of the Islamic project in Indonesia, in a rather sudden and dramatic reversal of fortunes, writes John T. Sidel in Riots, Pograms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia. Through a growing series of legislative and presidential elections, Islamist parties have seldom captured more than 20 percent of the popular vote. In Indonesia, as in Turkey, moderate Islam is the culmination of a long process of passive revolution as a result of which erstwhile radicals and their followers are brought into the fold of neoliberalism, secularism, and Western domination, writes Cihan Tual in Passive Revolution. While the road to democracy in neighboring Malaysia has been somewhat rockier, a sometimes-repressive state has forced the Islamists into volatile but significant alliances with the reformers, if only because when they were arrested they found their only support among democrats, writes Gilles Kepel in Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. Repressive aspects of Malaysian politics have long been justified in terms of the need to control sharp ethnic, religious, and class conflicts. But a relatively free press and the dynamics of economic development have produced a civic culture in which, as Shamsul A. B. argues in The Politics of Multiculturalism: Pluralism, and Citizenship in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia, edited by Robert W. Hefner, besides the old and established communal politics that has long characterized Malaysian politics, there is now a new politics based on interest orientations beyond class and ethnicity. And, by inference, it might be added, beyond religion. Revolutions, whether peaceful, passive, violent, or unsuccessful, do not announce themselves. The future of both democracy and Islam in Egypt, Tunisia, and throughout the Muslim world is in doubt. Whether the route is like the slow but steady path to the civic Islam of Indonesia, the accretion of national and nonethnic political cleavages in Malaysia, the contested one step forward, two steps back of Iran, or the reestablishmentwith or without outside helpof authoritarianism cannot be predicted. In Egypt after Mubarak: Liberalism, Islam, and Democracy in the

Arab World, Bruce Rutherford balances the forces of liberal democratization and Islamic constitutionalism in Egypt, and argues that the Egyptian concept of Sharia is intended to inform but not supplant secular law. But whether a breakthrough to democracy is in the cards will be less a function of these sentiments than of the ability of reformers and Islamists to build the institutions of civil society that sustain the system. The role of outside forcesgiven their far superior economic and military forcesmeanwhile, cannot be gainsaid. Movements toward democracy in the Muslim worldin Iran many times, in Indonesia after World War II and again in the 1960s, in Algeria by the French, in Bahrain and Yemen most recentlyhave been thwarted by former colonists, trumped by the politics of oil or the Cold War, sacrificed to larger regional interests, or overrun by anxious neighbors such as Saudi Arabia. Throughout the world of Muslimmajority countries, the primary obstacle to democratization is less Islamist than political. The legacy of authoritarianism, whether secular or Islamist, is the destruction of civic culture. Absent experience with both the institutions and norms of democratic decision making, revolutions may simply substitute one set of autocrats for another. On balance, the serious books considered heremost of them very goodsee no inherent obstacles to Islamic democracy. What they do see is the emergence of democracies that will vary as much from one another as from non-Islamist countries with respect to their degrees of secularization, respect for minority rights and gender equality, and abilities to sustain and consolidate the democratic impulse.

Notes
1. Clifford Geertz, The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civic Politics in the New States in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 255-310 quoted in Hefner, 2001, 49. 2. Seymour Martin Lipset, The Social Requisites of Democracy Revisited, American Sociological Review 59, no. 1 (February 1995) quoted in Hunter and Malik 2005, 14.
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