Posted on 10/17/2001 12:00:27 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
The trickiest one of all
Aug 4th 1994
From The Economist print edition
The chief obstacle to a democratic future for Muslims
THE biggest test of Islam's ability to give its people more of the advantages of the modern world is also the hardest. Of the 39 countries this survey is talking about, only seven can in one degree or another even hesitantly be called democracies.
There is Turkey, where the habit of regular elections open to more or less everybody seems to have survived three rather half-hearted military seizures of power between 1960 and 1980. There is Malaysia, ruled by an apparently everlasting coalition of middle-of-the-road Malays and Chinese, and pretty mean to its Islamic opposition, but still faithful to the practice of multi-party elections.
Apart from that, it is to be hoped that Pakistan and Bangladesh, now roughly where Turkey was in the 1960s, may smoothly proceed to where Turkey is now. Cross your fingers about Lebanon's post-civil-war grope back towards democracy. The hat can be tipped to Jordan's King Hussein for letting his Islamic opposition have a voice in parliament (and in the process showing that a tolerated voice may become a quieter voice). And surprised respect is due to the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran for holding freeish elections that have produced a parliament happy to argue with the government. The other 32 countries, with only a faintly hopeful question-mark over recent elections in Senegal, Niger and Mali, are all, alas, various shades of authoritarian. Yes, Islam has a democratic deficit.
There are the predictable explanations. It is unfair to rebuke Muslims for not having been democrats in the Middle Ages, when nobody else ever had been except for ancient Athenians and a subsequent handful of Swiss. Later on, after North Americans and non-Swiss Europeans started on the long road to democracy about 200 years ago, much of Islam was soon swallowed up into the 19th century's European empires.
When it was regurgitated, some after 1918 and the rest after 1945, it passed into the hands of men who thought that nation-building was more important than political freedom. Most of the Muslim politicians of recent times have been hard-nosed nationalists or semi-Marxist demagogues, or just men out to fill their pockets. Democracy is not made by such people. The economic backwardness of most Muslim countries has been another obstacle (though it is fair to point out that their economic performance could have been a lot better if their politicians had been more economically literate or more honest—or, preferably, both).
All this is true, but it does not really answer the question. The democratic deficit remains embarrassingly large. Nor is the Muslim counter-argument about democracy very convincing. Muslim intellectuals will tell you that the Koran provides its own machinery for discovering the will of the people, and that this machinery will start smoothly rolling into operation once the unfortunate impediments of the past two centuries are out of the way. Unfortunately, the machinery audibly creaks.
It is claimed, for instance, that Muslims have an equivalent of democracy in the concept of shura, "consultation". The government is obliged to consult the people about the policies it is to follow. What could be more democratic? In fact, the Koran has only two fragmentary things to say about shura.
Men "who conduct their affairs by mutual consultation" are one item on the list of those who, according to Chapter 42, verses 36-39, will receive God's blessing. That is good, of less than thunderous in its commendation of the idea that governments exist to serve the will of the people. But what exactly does "consultation" mean? "Consult them in the conduct of affairs. Then, when you have taken a decision, put your trust in God," is the brusque explanation of Chapter 3, verse 159. This is consultation as practiced by the better sort of medieval baron, or by a modern army commander. He asks the others what they think, and then makes up his own mind. There is not much comfort for democrats in shura.
Nor has ijma more to offer. Ijma means "consensus". "The community of God will never agree upon an error," Muhammad is supposed to have said. If the community agrees what is the right thing to do, then it should be done. That sounds democratic enough. The trouble is that ijma was hijacked centuries ago by the scholars who claim to have the right to say, on so many things, what the community thinks. The rest of the community has not yet summoned up the nerve to say them nay.
Is there hope to be found in the fact that there are four different schools of scholastic thought, whose opinions vary on some interesting points? Not really. One of the most gently broad-minded of the scholars this writer talked to—a man from the relatively relaxed East Asian part of Islam, not the harsher Arab part—explained that educated men might choose which scholastic school they wanted to belong to, but "the masses are urged to follow" the one the learned think best for them.
Here is the heart of it all. As that gently broad-minded man went on to say, "You see, Christianity is a religion of love. Islam is a religion of rules." To non-Muslims, the Koran is a splendid mixture of poetry, exhortation and commination, all the manifest product of the seventh century, when it was written. To the Muslim—especially the Muslim consciously returning to the roots of his faith, the Islamic radical of the 1990s—it is the definitive word of God. The word of God quite often needs explanation. So far, the explanation comes only from a small group of men who are certain they are competent to provide it. Islam is still living in the age of oligarchs, because it still believes in certainty.
Democracy arose out of the renunciation of certainty, or at least the renunciation of the idea that one man could impose his certainty on another man. Democracy is the child of the Reformation, that great change within the Christian world which began at the start of the 16th century. The Reformation declared that every individual was responsible before God for the way he lived his life. Priests might say what they thought God wanted, but in the end it was the individual who decided.
It took almost three centuries for that proposition to work its way through into the realm of politics, but when it did the result was, literally, revolutionary. Kings and oligarchs had to cede their claim to decide which was best for the people they governed. It was the people themselves who would decide. Each man and woman would have an equal voice in making the people's decision. That is democracy; and democracy, which first took widespread root in North America and Western Europe, has since the death of the Marxist claim to certainty faced no serious intellectual challenge anywhere in the world.
Except, perhaps, in Islam. The Koran does have one or two apparent assertions of the primacy of individual responsibility: "No bearer of burdens can bear the burden of another." But it turns out that this is not quite what a modern westerner means by responsibility. The dominant mood of the Koran is determinist. God decides, man accepts. From the same chapter as that previous quotation, ten verses earlier, comes: "God lets anyone he wishes go astray.""Islam", after all, means "submission".
There may be a profound difference between the way Muslims have learnt to look at the world and the way the Christian-rooted West looks at it. To go back to those rival accounts of the beginning of everything, the story of Genesis, the Christian version makes it clear that what Adam and Eve did when they ate the forbidden fruit was to discover how to tell right from wrong. To have eaten fruit was Original Sin. But it also brought great responsibilities: "You shall be as gods," the serpent said to Adam and Eve, as the story is told to Christians, "knowing good and evil."
The Koran's version has none of this. This eating of the fruit is just the breaking of a rule; God ticks Adam off, and that is that. There is no Original Sin, and no acquisition of the power to tell right from wrong. But many people would argue that that power is the basis of free will. Only when you can tell the difference between good and evil do you start to have the possibility of choosing between them. And from the concept of free will comes the idea of individual responsibility; and from that, through the curlicues of history, the practice of democracy.
If readers are starting to murmur that this is high-faluting stuff, and The Economist ought to rename itself The Theologist, let them turn their minds back to the original problem. It is highly desirable that as many Muslim countries as possible should become democracies, both for the satisfaction of their own peoples and to improve the chances of Islam and the West living peaceably together. One large obstacle to this desirable outcome is the power of the scholars, that oligarchy of learned men who claim the right to decipher God's will. There is a whiff of the Pharisee about many of these people. They thank the Lord they are not as other men are. They like to announce their own certainty, and then expect everybody else to accept it.
The chief weapon of the scholars is ijtihad, which means "interpretation" or "independent judgment". The Koran may be the voice of God, but only about 80 of its 6,000 verses lay down rules of public law, and not many of those 80 have obvious application to today's world. Interpretation is needed. Unfortunately, most Muslims are still willing to leave interpretation to the little band of self-appointed experts, and to believe that only their judgment is truly independent.
It does not quite add up to a total monopoly. The scholars can, and often do, disagree among themselves. This can make it possible for governments to extract from the scholastic community the sort of decision they want. The Malaysian government plays the market between two scholarly institutions, Pusat Islam and the Institute of Islamic Understanding; in Cairo the liberal mufti of Egypt has his office almost next door to the more conservative sheikh of Al Azhar. But this does not solve the underlying problem. It moves the final decision-making power upwards, to the political bosses, not downwards, to the people, where it should belong.
To change that, something much more serious than playing off one scholar against another has to happen. It has to be accepted that every sane adult human being possesses independent judgment, and should be allowed to use it. The responsibility of the individual needs to be given its proper place: every man must indeed carry his own burden.
It will take time for this to happen; no great shift in ideas comes overnight. But already a number of forward-looking Muslims are starting to argue the case for an opening up of Islam's thought-process. Abdullahi An-Naim, an adventurous Sudanese lawyer, put the point lucidly at a recent seminar in Kuala Lumpur. Muslims must start thinking of ijtihad, he said, not as the special right of a scholastic elite, but as a function of the whole people. The scholars must make themselves accountable to the people. The people have to be able to exercise the right to independent judgment, to the interpretation of what God permits and does not permit.
To move into the world of democracy, in short, Islam needs its Reformation. Is there any reason to think it could be about to have one?
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