Democracy's
gates open in Iraq
and the Islamic world
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
February 21, 2005
LONDON - Credit should always be
given where credit is due: Bush/Blair have come to terms
with the Shiite ascendancy in Iraq. This was never on
their agenda. At the outset of their war they naively
believed that the secular émigrés would
grab the reins. Gracefully, they are bowing before the
results of democracy.
The Shiites of Iraq too are now
facing the consequences of democracy. Unlike in Shiite
Iran where democracy plays second fiddle to the religious
authorities, the Shiite religious leaders of Iraq, in
particular Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, seem ready to
take a back seat. Like Bush and Blair the Shiites are
being compelled by the Iraqi voters to come to
conclusions they may not at first have contemplated. They
have won at the polls, but they have to deal with their
rivals if it is to mean anything for the long
run.
Islamic democracy gets a bad press
in the West yet the democratic impulse runs deep in the
Muslim world. Although the democracy cause cannot point
to any precise words of Islam's founder, Mohammed came
close to defining the concept when he gave the injunction
to Muslim believers to consult among themselves, which
led to the Islamic tradition of "Shura". Christ, in as
much as he addressed the subject at all, baldly told
Christians to "render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to
God what is God's", at a time when his country was ruled
by the Roman dictatorship. Democracy and human rights in
the West owe more to the evolution of natural law than
they do to Christianity, albeit it was medieval Catholic
theologians who pioneered the thinking on
this.
The idea of justice and the
restraining of tyranny lie deep in Islamic thought. New
York University professor, Noah Feldman, a theorist of
Islamic democracy, observes in his book, "After Jihad",
"that the caliphs never had absolute authority…the
historical roots [for democracy] are there for
modern Muslims who want to draw on the historical
narrative".
Already we can see these ideas
being lived out in democratic practice in Muslim states
as varied as Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia,
Mali, Albania, and Palestine and, to a more controlled
extent, in Iran, Morocco, Kuwait, Bahrain and Jordan.
Saudi Arabia has just held its first local
election.
Sometimes we are in danger both of
overlooking how recent is the blooming of democracy in
the Western world and how far back its roots go in the
Islamic. In 1942, despite the electrifying developments
of 1789- the American Constitution and The Declaration of
the Rights of Man- there were still only four democracies
in Europe- Britain, Switzerland, Sweden and
Ireland.
In the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries Islamic scholars grappled with the
significance, implications and meaning of democracy for
the Islamic world. These days we read so much about the
militant anti-Western teaching of the Egyptian thinker,
Sayyid al-Qutb, supposedly the intellectual godfather of
Osama bin Laden, and so little of the writings of his
fellow Egyptian, Mohammed Abdo, who sought to reconcile
Islam's compatibility with reason and
progress.
Overlooked too is the important
role that Muslims played in the writing of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Although in the December,
1948, UN vote that adopted it Saudi Arabia, along with
South Africa and the Soviet Union, abstained, most Muslim
states voted for it. The Pakistani delegate speaking on
its importance said that he had an "intellectual
conviction that freedom [is]
indivisible".
In the following years the opinion
that fundamental freedoms must be widened to include the
right to political independence, self determination and
democracy was central to the debate on the writing of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a
document meant to give binding force to the Declaration.
Saudi Arabia, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and
Afghanistan pursued this cause in the face of some
Western hostility- the U.S. State Department
disparagingly called it "the Muslim resolution". Yet it
is this covenant that the U.S. is now lobbying so hard
for China to ratify.
In 1993, at the UN World Conference
on Human Rights in Vienna, 171 governments, including all
the Muslim ones, voted in favor of a new declaration that
incorporated the most important commitments of the
original.
Bush and Blair made a profound
mistake in assuming that the path to democracy in the
Middle East could only be cleared by war. It was an
unnecessary step. It could have come about without the
bloodshed, by forceful evolution. Nevertheless, at the
onset of 2005, we stand before the gates of Islamic
democracy and human rights observance. They are
opening.
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Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
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