The New Nation - Internet Edition

Can Islam accommodate democracy?

Benjamin R. Barber

This paper was presented by the author at the Istanbul Seminars organized by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations in Istanbul from June 2nd to the 6th 2008. It explains many of the prejudices being marketed in the West order to demonise Islam and Muslims.

There is a powerful rhetoric around today that claims Islam - not just fundamentalist or Wahhabist or Safalist Islam, but Islam itself is a religion hostile to democracy. Hostile not only to liberty, pluralism and the open society, but to modernity itself as it is defined by liberal values. The attitude evident in Samuel Huntington's discredited notion of a "clash of civilizations" in which the West and the rest are locked in a struggle for survival, so foreign to discussions like our here in Istanbul, in fact remains ubiquitous in Western politics and media.

It is found not only in Bush's zealous conduct of a disastrous war on the "axis of evil," or Donald Rumsfeld's assertion that Islamic fundamentalism is a "new form of fascism;" or in right wing paranoiac events like David Horowitz's "Islamofascism Awareness Week," but is reflected also in writings of liberals like Paul Berman who talk about how the West is "beset with terrorists from the Muslim totalitarian movements who have already killed an astounding number of people;" or in scholars like Bernard Lewis who announce in hushed tones of sympathy that "the world of Islam has become poor, weak and ignorant;" or in Muslim apostates like Ali Hirsi who combine a seemingly liberal appeal to feminist values with a total rejection of not just fundamentalism but Islam itself.

These arguments may in their polemical zealotry beyond rational rebuttal, but Professor Habermas would I think prefer that they be rationally confronted and refuted. That is certainly my view if we wish to get on with the difficult work of crafting democracy in societies that take religion seriously - nearly all societies. I want to offer six straightforward arguments, some historical, some sociological, and some philosophical - all reasonable and commonsensical in the broader sense of rational - that suggest why it is absurd to think that Islam cannot accommodate democracy or that democracy cannot accommodate Islam. A: It is not Islam per se, but religion tout court that stands in some tension with secularism and with democracy - a tension that is healthy rather than unhealthy in a free society. Augustine's Two Cities and Pope Gelasius's two swords speak to a world of the body and a world of the spirit, of the temporal and the eternal, the worldly and the ecclesiastic. These dualisms do not arise out of theology but inform theology with the deep logic of duality that defines our being. The opposition of morality and politics, and of divine or natural and positive law, is transferred to the opposition of church and state that produces troublesome but healthy tensions for societies everywhere.

B: Sociologists from Tocqueville and Durkheim to that American sociologist of democracy Robert Bellah have insisted free societies have been constructed on a religious foundation that lends them stability and affords them the luxury of political disagreement. It is precisely religion that grounds democratic nations and bonds peoples who might otherwise be fatally divided by their economic and social differences and their political disagreements. As Tocqueville wrote in his Ancien Regime, "Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot…. Religion is more needed in democratic republics than in any others. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is weakened?". Civil society is vital to a pluralistic democracy but its bonds are often thin. Religion can be a powerful source of social capital, which is perhaps why Rousseau understood that in the absence of religion a society might require civil religion - what Habermas called Verfassungspatrioti smus (the American's "civic faith") - to remain free.

C: Like Christianity and other religions, Islam is a religion practiced in many cultures and societies, sectarian, stratified, schismatic and pluralistic. We Christians speak easily of Baptists, Lutherans, Catholics, Methodists, Mormons, Pentacostals, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Mennonites, Jehovah's witnesses, Dutch Reformed, Greek Orthodox, Unitarians, Christian Scientists, Universalists, Evangelicals - 200 sects or more - while Thomas Jefferson said "I myself am a sect"! But we find it hard to comprehend that Muslims are also sectarians and schismatics whose religion looks different culture by culture and society by society. Only around 15% of the world's 1.3 billion Muslims are Arabs but it's hard to tell how many Westerners know that by far the largest proportion of Muslims reside in India and Indonesia. Even Bernard Lewis writes his history of Islam's "decline" through the lens of the Middle East, primarily the Ottamans.

D: While we like to pretend that religion in the modern era is and should be private, parochial and conventionalist, it remains public, universal and moralistic. It is a creature of the Nomos (the universal law) rather than of the Ethnos. It wishes to occupy the public square (though not necessarily City Hall) and its claims necessarily rival the claims of positive law. Even early societies pitted their conventional "sumptuary laws" regulating public behavior against the positive laws of the state, and there is no religion that does not yield a version of Sharia. Are the Ten Commandments that inform the Mosaic Law meant to be private or less than universal?

A seventeenth century Puritan preacher called Prynne wrote a tract instructing parishioners that among forbidden pursuits were "effeminate mixed dancing, Dicing (gambling), stage-plays, lascivious pictures, wanton fashions, face-painting, health drinking, long hair, love-locks, periwigs, women's curling, powdering and cutting of their hair, bon-fires, new year's gifts, May-games, amorous pastorals, lascivious effeminiate musicke, excessive laughter, (and) luxurious disorderly Christmas keeping," all of which are "wicked, unchristian past-times" of a kind that make men "adulterers, whore-masters, bawds, panderers, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, and cheaters… (that is) idle, infamous, base, profane and Godless persons who hat all grace and goodness and make a mock of piety." Such were the Taliban of Puritan's early years around the time they settled New England and set America on the road to a Puritan Commonwealth and in time a democratic republic - one in which today, in many states, it is still impossible to buy alcohol on Sunday.

E: To the degree Islam is fundamentalist, so is religion in many places, because in our secular age religion is under siege and fundamentalism is above all a reaction to religion under siege. As religion was once the air we breathed and the ether in which we moved, today commerce, secularism and materialism are the air we breathe and the ether in which we move. Indeed, there are many who insist democracy is little more than the triumph of commerce and the victory of scientistic materialism - which may be why fundamentalists seeking to secure their religions take aim not only at modernity but at democracy as well. American Protestant fundamentalists who school their children at home are little different than Muslim fundamentalists who oppose encroaching capitalist markets. Both see in Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the consumerist franchises that now encircle the world and dominate the media and the internet a two way sewer - one that carries away their own values even as it spews into their homes the violent, pornographic images of "wild capitalism" that compel consumers to drink from its sewers in order that its markets flourish. In other words, fundamentalism, which is religion under siege, is to some considerable degree reactionary rather than proactive. It responds to exogenous forces that it perceives as weakening its mores, endangering its values, seducing its children, and destroying its communities. There is much hyperbole and misunderstanding in such reactions but there are also truths whose nature I have tried to divine in my Jihad vs. McWorld. The crucial conclusion of that analysis is that Jihad and McWorld both need and produce one another and are alike hostile to democracy. Fundamentalism, unlike ordinary religion, will not support democracy. But neither will the forces of McWorld that drive fundamentalists to the wall or over the precipice.

F: We have seen that the conviction that Islam cannot accommodate democracy is rooted in a shallow and incomplete understanding of Islam. But it is also true that the conviction that democracy cannot accommodate Islam is rooted in a shallow and incomplete understanding of democracy - one that tends to assimilate democratization to Americanization or Westernization or marketization. It is tied to the false view that there is but one kind of democracy, one road to liberty, one formula for translating the theory of justice into just practices. But historically and philosophically, democracy is singular not plural. We would benefit enormously by simply talking about it in the plural rather than the singular: not "democracy" but "democracies." It would require a separate essay to suggest how deeply perverse the typical American understanding of democratization is when it comes to "helping" others achieve liberty. The problem begins with the illusion that others can be helped, that democracy can be "given" or liberty "gifted." No people have ever by liberated from the outside at the point of a gun. An invader may overthrow a tyrant, but cannot create a democracy by doing so. Overthrowing tyranny produces not democracy but instability, disorder, anarchy, often civil war; it tends to lead over time not to democracy but to a new tyrant. President Bush alludes again and again to World War II, but the victory of the Allies over the Nazi regime did not produce democracy. It took re-education, the Marshall Plan, the United Nations and the European Community to do that.

Nor can freedom be given to others; it must be won by those who seek it from the inside. And for them to establish it, it must be constructed bottom up not top down. First educate citizens and do the hard slow work of making a civil society; then build a political infrastructure on top of it. The Americans had a hundred years of experience with municipal liberty and citizen competence before they declared independence. Democracy takes time. The Swiss began in 1291 and gave women the vote only in 1961. The British grounded rights in a Magna Carta in 1215 and fought a Glorious Revolution in 1688 and are still saddled with a House of Lords and a monarchy. The Americans spent the first 80 years of their young Republic trying to figure out how to separate it from slavery, which they ultimately achieved only by dint of a bloody civil war. Yet pessimists expect Iran to get it right in two or three years, while optimists think Iraq needs only another six months.

If patience is required and democracy is built bottom up, then elections come last not first. The rush to vote is generally a sign that the ground for democracy has not been prepared; and when voting occurs in the absence of educated and competent citizens, we can be sure that the prospects for liberty and justice are poor. First come schools, civic education, autonomous civic institutions, and plural civil associations. Then come elections. In helping to enrich and extend civil society, religion can help build a foundation for democratic governance.

Finally, if democracy is plural and distinctive from one society to another, that the road to democracy comes not from imitation and borrowing but from excavation and invention. Every society has democratic tendencies, proto-democratic habits, institutions that foster deliberation, debate and equality. In one place it may be a Loya Jirga that affords negotiation and partial consensus among rival tribes. In another it may be the fraternal and deliberative potentials of tribes themselves: remember how the Founders admired the Mohawk Indians. There are many forms of assembly and many levels of participation any one of which may under the right conditions produce self-government.

In the end, the plurality of democracy mandates that the indispensable condition of democracy is empowerment. And that those who would "help" others learn liberty, learn to leave them alone. As T. E. Lawrence wrote a long time ago, "better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it yourself perfectly: for it is their country, their way and your time is short." If democracy means anything it means the right for people to make their own mistakes. To practice their own religion. To purse their own forms of self-government. I know, I know. That takes time. It can compromise rights. It sometimes allows patriarchy to persist and affords religion the chance to subvert as well as support democracy. But that's how it is, and history suggests the alternatives, however well intended, are usually far worse. Just ask George Bush.

(Benjamin R. Barber is the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York City.)

Saying 'Islamic threat' doesn't make it real

Soumaya Ghannoushi

Pick up any newspaper today in Britain or elsewhere in Europe, switch on the TV or tune in to any radio station, and you're very likely to get the impression that "our societies" - if not western civilisation in its entirety - face an imminent Islamic threat, on a par with the old dangers of fascism. Since the terrorist bombings of New York, Madrid and London, the "fundamentalist peril" has become part of the air we breathe. It has become a rhetorical crutch for everyone from rightwing bigots to opportunistic politicians and repenting "former extremists", each with their own agenda.

Today we live amid an explosion of discourse and imagery around Islam and Muslims. Sparked by al-Qaida's lunatic atrocities, it has since fed on the politics of fear and suspicion. The victims have included objectivity, balance, and the ability to judge issues calmly and rationally. Flawed material is endlessly reproduced and recycled, so it is little wonder that the public's understanding of Islam and the complex political problems of the Muslim world are limited at best.

Years of peddled fear and demonisation have had severe consequences: a widening of ignorance and bigotry, deepening mistrust between individuals and communities, and the resurrection of the pernicious language of racism and fanaticism - as journalist Peter Oborne illustrated in his Channel 4 Dispatches documentary earlier this week.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that Islam is now the religion closest to Europe and remotest from it. Islam is no longer an alien, distant religion. It is now woven into the very fabric of European society. Muslims are the largest of the continent's minorities. Yet their physical proximity does not appear to have made them more familiar or better understood. If anything, to most European eyes they seem stranger, more distant, more ambiguous than ever.

The much hyped Islamic threat is one of the greatest lies of our time. The "Muslim world" - though no such bloc really exists - is politically fragmented and economically impoverished. It is reeling under the weight of crises and a long colonial legacy. Militarily, it is of scant significance. It is laughable that we should be discussing the Islamic threat when in the past seven years alone two Muslim countries have come under direct military occupation, ending hopes that the world had firmly closed this chapter of history decades ago.

I suspect many military experts must struggle to keep a straight face every time the subject of the "Islamic threat" is broached. They know that strategic threats are not founded on mere anxieties, imagination and illusions, but on concrete military and political facts. This is not to play down the seriousness of the dangers presented by al-Qaida and other violent groups. But these constitute a security problem to be dealt with through the intelligence and security services. Whatever its braggadocio, al-Qaida does not amount to a strategic military threat, let alone a menace to "western civilisation".

The security risks posed by al-Qaida, moreover, face Muslims and non-Muslims alike. After all, al-Qaida has perpetrated more atrocities in Muslim countries than western capitals. Attacks in Casablanca, Bali, Riyadh, Algiers, Tunisia, Istanbul and Iraq have outnumbered those in New York, Madrid and London.

In the fog of the so-called war on terror, al-Qaida, terrorism, extremism and Islamism - the list of -isms goes on - have been employed as potent weapons in a range of battles. They have been deployed to demonise vulnerable minorities - their community groups and their leaders, mosques and faith schools. They have been adopted to eat away at civil liberties. And they have been exploited to target mainstream Islamist political parties.

Turkey's ruling Justice and Development party; the Muslim Brotherhood - the largest opposition in the Egyptian parliament; and Anwar Ibrahim's People's Justice party in Malaysia, are among the movements cast in one terrifying category labelled "Islamism", alongside al-Qaida. The huge differences are wilfully ignored to justify this strategy of unrelenting confrontation. The consequences have been devastating for social stability and community coexistence, as well as for relations between the "Muslim world" and the "west" - something which, ironically, has been recognised by President Bush recently.

Political expediency and scaremongering has seen the propagation of the idea of a grave Islamist threat to the status of orthodoxy. But however easy it might be to surrender to this fiction, it remains just that: a myth fabricated by a few, exploited by a few, and consumed by many. No matter how widely circulated, or endlessly regurgitated, a myth remains a myth.

(Source: The Guardian)

The objective of the Islamic economic order

Tamizul Haque

Barrister-at-Law

The objective of Islamic economic order takes a positive view of life considering man not as a born sinner eternally condemned for his original sin, but as the Vicegerent of Allah (Al-Quran 2:30) for whom has been created everything on earth (Al-Quran 2.:29).

Islam is not an ascetic religion as Holy Quran declares that Monasticism which they (other religions) have invented for themselves was not prescribed by Allah Subhanahu Tahla.

But Allah's Kingdom requires also courage, resistance to evil, the firmness, law, and discipline, which will enforce justice among men. It requires men to mingle with men, so that they can uphold the standard of Truth, against odds if necessary. These were lost sight of in Monasticism, which was not prescribed by Allah.

Allah Subhanahu Tahla certainly requires that men shall renounce the idle pleasures of this world, and turn to the Path which leads to Allah's Good Pleasures. But that does not mean gloomy lives, ("they that mourn"), nor perpetual and formal prayers in isolation. Allah's service is done through pure lives in the turmoil of this world. This spirit was lost, or at least not fostered by Monastic institutions. On the contrary a great part of the "struggle and striving" for noble lives was suppressed.

Many of them lost true Faith, or had their Faith corrupted by superstitions. But those who continued firm in Faith saw the natural development of Religion in Islam. Their previous belief was not a disadvantage to them, but helped them, because they kept it free from false and selfish prejudices.

Traditions reveals that, "Once after the Holy Prophet had given a lecture on the certainty of the Day of Judgement and the accountability before Allah, a few of his Companions gathered in the house of "Uthman Bin Mazun and resolved to fast everyday, to pray every night, not to sleep on beds, not to eat meat or fat, not to have anything to do with women or perfume, to wear coarse clothes, and in general to reject the world. The Holy Prophet heard of this and told them".

"I have not been directed by Allah Subhanahu Tahla to live in this manner. Your body certainly has rights over you; so fast but also abstain from fasting, and pray at night but also sleep. Look at me, I pray at night but I also sleep. I fast but I also abstain from fasting, I eat meat as well as fat, and I also marry. So whoever turns away from my way is not from me".

For better understanding of my readers in this regard I would like to mention Ayat 87 of Sura 5 which runs thus:

O ye who believe!

Make not unlawful

The good things which Allah

Hath made lawful for you,

But commit no excess:

For Allah loveth not

Those given to excess.

In pleasures that are good and lawful the crime is excess. There is no merit merely in abstention or asceticism, though the humility or unselfishness that may go with asceticism may have its value. In Ayat 82 of Sura 5, (Al-Maida) Christian monks are praised for particular virtues, though here and elsewhere Monasticism is disapproved of. Use Allah's gifts of all kinds with gratitude, but excess is not approved of by Allah Subhanahu Tahla.

Therefore, action in every field of human activity, including the economic, is spiritual provided it is in harmony with the goals and values of Islam. It is really these goals and values that determine the nature of the economic system of Islam. A proper understanding of these is therefore essential for a better perspective of the economic system of Islam. These goals and values are :-

1) Economic well-being within the framework of the moral norms of Islam;

2) Universal brotherhood and justice;

3) Equitable distribution of income; and

4) Freedom of the individual within the context of social welfare.

This list of goals is by no means complete but should provide a sufficient framework for discussing and elaborating the Islamic Economic system and highlighting those characteristics which distinguish the Islamic system from the two prevalent systems, capitalism and socialism.

Allah has directed us to eat and drink of that which Allah has provided and act not corruptly, making mischief in the world (Al-Quran 2:60). Part of Ayat 60 of Sura Bakara-II runs thus :

There from twelve springs,

Each group knew its own place

For water. So eat and drink

Of the sustenance provided by Allah,

And do no evil nor mischief

On the (face of the) earth

Here we have a reference to the tribal organization of the Jews, which played a great part in their forty years' march through the Arabian deserts (Num, I and ii) and their subsequent settlement in the land of Canaan (Josh. xiii. and xiv.). The twelve tribes were derived from the sons of Jacob, whose name was changed to Isreal (soldier of Allah) after he had wrestled, says Jewish tradition, with Allah (Genesis xxxii.28). Israel had twelve sons (Gen. xxxv. 22-26), including Levi and Joseph. The descendants of these twelve sons were the "Children of Israel.").

The gushing of twelve springs from a rock evidently refers to a local tradition well known to Jews and Arabs in Al-Mustafa's time. Near Horeb close to Mount Sinai, where the Law was given to Moses (Musa Ali His Salam), is a huge mass of red granite, twelve feet high and about fifty feet in circumference, where European travelers (e.g. Breydenbach in the 15th Century after Christ) saw abundant springs of water twelve in number (see Sale's notes on this passage). It existed in Al-Mustafa's time and may still exist, to the present day, for anything we know to the contrary. The Jewish tradition would be based on Exod. xvii. 6:"Thou shalt smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it that the people may drink."

There are many other verses in the Holy Quran on the economic field. Islam urges Muslims to enjoy the bounties provided by Allah Subhanahu Tahla and sets no quantitative limits to the extent of material growth of Muslim Society. It even equates the struggle for material well-being with an act of virtue. In Ayat 10 of Sura Al-Juma 62 Allah Subhanahu Tahla has given clear directive to the believers of the faith that when the prayers is finished then one may disperse through the land, and seek of the bounty of Allah and remember Allah frequently so that he may prosper.

Prosperity is not to be measured by wealth or worldly gains. There is a higher prosperity the health of the mind and the spirit.

The idea behind is that Allah has provided us with an opportunity for earning our livelihood which must not be left unexploited or until it is exhausted. However Islam has prohibited bagging and urged Muslims to earn their livelihood "The hand that is above is better than the hand that is below".

Islam goes even further then this. It urges Muslims to gain mastery over nature because, according to the Holy Quran all resources in the Havens and the Earth have been created for the services of mankind.

Islam on economic well-being springs from the very nature of its message. Islam is designed to service as a 'blessing' for mankind. Ayat 107 of Sura 21 Al-Ambiyaa or Prophet clearly states that the Holy Prophet was sent to this world as a blessing for all mankind.

Again in Ayat 57 of Sura 10 of Youns in Holy Quran declares thus :-

O mankind there hath come

To you an admonition from your Lord

And a healing for the (diseases)

In your hearts, and for those

Who believe, a Guidance

And a Mercy.

In Ayat 185 of Sura 2 that is Sura Al-Bakara among others Allah desires ease for us and desires not hardship for us. Similarly in Ayat 28 of Sura Nisa-IV Allah Subhanaha Tahla has expressed His wish to alleviate our burdens, for man is created weak. .

On the basis of these verses of the Holy Quran the Muslim Jurists have unanimously held that catering for the interests of the people and relieving them of hardships is the basic objective of the Shariah. Imam Ghazali a great philosopher reformer-sufi contended that the very objective of the Sharia Law is to promote the welfare of the people which lies in safe-guarding their faith, their life, their intellect, their posterity and their property; and that therefore whatever ensures the safeguard of these five serves public interest and is desirable.

Other Islamic thinkers also held with the basis of the Shariah is wisdom and the welfare of the people in this world as well as in the Hereafter.

This welfare lies in complete justice, mercy, welfare and wisdom, anything that departs from justice to oppression, from mercy to harshness, from welfare to misery, and from wisdom to folly, has nothing to do with the Shariah.

Acquiring wealth through unfair means, exploiting others, subjecting them to wrong and injustice are un-islamic. Islam also seeks to 'purify' life, the Holy Quran clearly warns Muslims against this danger.

However it is generally understood by Muslim religious scholars that 'remembering Allah much' does not imply spending most of one's time in saying prayers or reciting the rosary, but that it implies living a morally responsible life in accordance with the norms of Islam, earning only by the right methods and abandoning all the wrong ones. In part of Ayat 7 of Sura 57 Al-Hadid or Iron of the Holy Quran declares thus :

Whereof He has made you

Heirs. For, those of you

Who believe and spend

(In charity), -for them

is a great Reward.

Whatever power or wealth or influence or any good thing is transferred from one person or group of person to another, it involves added responsibility to the persons receiving these advantages.

They must be more zealous in real charity and all good works, for that is a part of the evidence, which they give of their faith and gratitude. And, besides, their good deeds carry their own reward.

The worldly possessions are but trifling, it is the Hereafter which is better for those who fear Allah Subhanahu Tahla (Al-Quran 4:77). What is this world when compared to Hereafter? Holy Quran also explains what is bad and what is good. Bad and good are never to be considered equal. (Ayat 100 of Sura 5.

(To be continued)