The
rulers of Baghdad seem frightened
of Islamic democracy
By
Jonathan
Power
December 19, 2003
LONDON - The White House and Downing Street have
been caught off balance- not so much by the sudden
success of capturing Saddam Hussein but by something more
subtle. Rather than having to gradually introduce
democracy to an unwelcoming body politic in Iraq they are
being paced to introduce it sooner rather than later by
none other than the powerful Shi'ite cleric, Grand
Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani. So much for notions
that Islam and especially the Shi'ite clergy (who hold
sway in Iran's theocracy) are unfertile ground for the
ideas of the European and American Enlightenment. But the
occupying powers are saying an election can't
administratively be held so quickly.
At bottom this is probably an argument about can the
voters be trusted rather than the mechanics of voter
registration. Deep within the White House and Downing
Street lurks a fear that the so-called "fundamentalists"
might do rather well in an early poll and that there
might well be a rather militant anti-Western coalition
that wins a ballot.
At the core of their fear is the conviction that
Muslim nations, and particularly Arab ones, have given
short shrift to democracy. It is said that the Koran lays
down no precepts about democracy. But then neither did
the teaching of Moses or Jesus say much on the subject.
Indeed for many centuries the Christian Church was
intimately allied with dictatorial regimes who believed
they ruled by divine right and the separating of state
and church in the vigorous form is very much a post 18th
century phenomenon. As recently as a generation ago it
was widely held that the culture of Catholic southern
Europe and Latin America was not conducive to
democracy.
The Koran has only about eighty verses out of 6,000
that lay down hard and fast rules on public law and there
is not much guidance on how to run a government of a
major state. Maybe if Muhammad could have imagined the
modern nation state, its political economy and its
propensity to be corrupted my money interests he might
have said something about it, perhaps even advocating a
separation of powers, just as, if he had known the
details of contemporary research on tobacco smoking, he
would probably have disallowed that along with
alcohol.
Tomorrow (Thursday) Freedom House will publish its
evaluation of the pursuit of democracy in 2003. According
to a spokesman the report will underline that the
phenomenal post Cold War upswing in the spread of
democracy and the observance of human rights is still
going strong, even in the Islamic world. As Freedom House
has reported before, if one adds up the population of the
five democratically elected Muslim governments of Turkey,
Mali, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Albania, then add in
Nigeria where over half the population is Muslim and the
Muslims who live in Europe, the Americas and India, a
majority of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims live in
democracies. Muslims are not isolated from the modern day
Zeitgeist on extending human rights.
Islam has been evolving the last 100 years at a
phenomenal rate. In the early twentieth century Islamic
thinkers like Muhammad Iqbal in India and Taha Husayn
wrote of how they saw the need for an Islamic reformation
like the Christian one. Their modernistic ideas about
adapting from the West what was good in the West and
rejecting what was bad has become part of the mainstream
of Islamic discourse today.
Historians of Islam are wryly amused to see that the
heart of this debate over Islamic democracy is now
centered in Baghdad which in the ninth and tenth
centuries was the greatest city in Islam and capital of
the Abbasid Dynasty that raised Islam to its greatest era
of intellectual and artistic glory. It was the home of
the first paper producing factory outside China, without
which the European Reformation and Enlightenment could
never have happened.
This is no comfort to those who fear the
fundamentalist tide in 2003. But the high water mark of
Islamic fundamentalism was under the revolutionary
leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran. Since
his death the tide has ebbed fast. The democratic elected
parliament and president may still be circumscribed by
the power of the religious leaders but it more than
evident that the latter have fast decreasing popular
support at home and almost no resonance abroad. As for Al
Qaeda, in nearly the entire Islamic world it remains,
despite all its bloody bravado, a fringe movement.
We must never make the mistake of confusing Islamic
revivalism, which has been under way since 1970, with
fundamentalism. The revivalists want to take their
religion seriously. They believe, as Christians and Jews
used to, that their religion speaks to all of mankind's
activities not just the private and personal ones. These
new would-be revivalists cum democrats in Iraq may want
an Islamic state. But they seem also to want it to be
democratically elected. Now that Saddam is caught they
should be encouraged to quickly get on with it.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
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