by Reza Aslan
Frightened by the awe-inspiring spectacle of people power in Iran (which, after all, is precisely what led to the creation of the Islamic Republic in the first place) and viewing the reform movement as a threat to the very existence of the state, the Iranian régime unleashed the full force of its security apparatus on the young protesters. In what has since become a familiar sight, the country’s paramilitary forces (the dreaded Basij), under orders from the Revolutionary Guard, savagely suppressed popular demonstrations on the streets and in the universities, while reformist activists and Khatami’s political allies were systematically silenced, arrested, and murdered. By 2005 and the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the office of president, the conservative forces in the Iranian government were once again ascendant. Analysts across the globe declared the reform movement in Iran to be dead and buried.
What few outsiders understood, however, is that the reformist message did not disappear or go underground. On the contrary, it dispersed and became absorbed into the political mainstream, so that by the end of the first decade of the new century, nearly all Iranians, regardless of their politics or piety, had adopted the reform movement’s assertion that the democratic experiment that gave birth to the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 had been subverted and must be set right again. Thus, in the wake of the disputed elections that returned Ahmadinejad to power in 2009, despite widespread accusations of electoral fraud, a coalition of students, intellectuals, merchants, and religious leaders (the same coalition that had brought down the Shah thirty years earlier) once again took to the streets, this time under the banner of what became known as the Green Movement, not merely to protest a stolen election, but to revolt against the very nature of the Islamic Republic. And while the brutal response of the Iranian régime to this latest challenge seems to have temporarily quelled the popular protests that brought the country to a standstill, the government’s actions have only further solidified the perception among the vast majority of the Iranian populace that the Islamic Republic, in its current iteration, is neither Islamic nor a republic.
Iran’s previous attempts at democracy were thwarted by foreigners—the British and Russians in 1905–1911; the United States in 1953—whose interests were served by suppressing all democratic aspirations in the region. The revolution of 1979 was hijacked by the country’s own clerical establishment, which used its moral authority to gain absolute power over the nascent state. The reform movement of the 1990s was quashed by a government deathly afraid of its own people and desperate to preserve its political power. The Green Movement’s demand for greater human rights was overpowered by an increasingly militarized régime that has elevated its own survival over all other considerations. Yet the hundred-year quest in Iran to construct a truly indigenous democratic system that provides a place for religion in the public realm without subverting the will of the people continues to this day. In fact, it is a quest that is being replicated across the world, from Iraq and Pakistan to Turkey and Indonesia, from Tunisia and Egypt to Senegal and Bangladesh.
In the half century since the end of colonialism and the founding of the Islamic state, Islam has been invoked to legitimize and to overturn governments, to promote republicanism and defend authoritarianism, to justify monarchies, autocracies, oligarchies, and theocracies, and to foster terrorism, factionalism, and hostility. The question remains: Can Islam now be used to establish a genuinely liberal democracy in the Middle East and beyond? Can a modern Islamic state reconcile reason and Revelation to create a democratic society based on the ethical ideals established by the Prophet Muhammad in Medina fourteen centuries ago?
Not only can it do so, it must. Indeed, it is already doing so in a large number of Muslim-majority states. But it is a process that can be based only on Islamic values and customs. The principal lesson to be learned from both the failure of Europe’s “civilizing mission” and the disaster of America’s “democracy promotion” is that true democracy must be nurtured from within, founded upon familiar ideologies, and presented in a language that is both comprehensible and appealing to the indigenous population. For democracy to be effective and compelling in Muslim-majority states, it must balance the sometimes contentious relationship between faith and government that, as we have seen, has been the hallmark of political culture in Islam for centuries.
There are those in the West who argue that such a democratic system is impossible, that Islam is inherently opposed to democracy and that Muslim peoples are incapable of reconciling democratic and Islamic values. Such a view not only contradicts Islamic history (not to mention observable reality), it flies in the face of countless surveys that reveal overwhelming majorities throughout the Islamic world pining for democracy as “the best form of government.” In fact, a 2006 Pew poll found that while the majority of the Western public thought democracy was “a Western way of doing things that would not work in most Muslim countries,” pluralities or majorities in every single Muslim-majority country surveyed flatly rejected that argument and called for democracy to be immediately established, without conditions, in their own societies. It would seem, therefore, that the biggest obstacles in the path to creating a genuinely Islamic democracy are not only the Traditionalist Ulama or Jihadist terrorists, but, perhaps more destructively, those in the West who stubbornly refuse to recognize that democracy, if it is to be viable and enduring, can never be imported.
WITH THE END of the Second World War, a victorious yet financially devastated Britain, no longer able to bear the cost or justify the ideology of its colonial enterprise in India, finally granted to the greatest symbol of its imperialist ambitions—the jewel in the crown of its dwindling empire—its long-sought independence. On August 14, 1947, hundreds of years of colonial rule in India came to an end. Yet the day that C. E. Trevelyan predicted would be “the proudest monument of British benevolence,” when, “endowed with [British] learning and political institutions,” India would represent colonialism’s greatest triumph, became the day in which the fractious population of the Subcontinent was violently partitioned along religious lines into a predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.
In many ways, the partition of India was the inevitable result of three centuries of Britain’s divide-and-rule policy. As the events of the Indian Revolt demonstrated, the British believed that the best way to curb nationalist sentiment was to classify the indigenous population not as Indians, but as Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, etc. The categorization and separation of native peoples was a common tactic for maintaining colonial control over territories whose national boundaries had been arbitrarily drawn with little consideration for the ethnic, cultural, or religious makeup of the local inhabitants. The French went to great lengths to cultivate class divisions in Algeria, the Belgians promoted tribal factionalism in Rwanda, and the British fostered sectarian schisms in Iraq, all in a futile attempt to minimize nationalist tendencies and stymie united calls for independence. No wonder, then, that when the colonialists were finally expelled from these manufactured states, they left behind not only economic and political turmoil, but deeply divided populations with little common ground on which to construct a national identity.
The partition of India was not simply the result of an internal feud between Muslims and Hindus. Nor was it an isolated event. Indonesia’s numerous secessionist movements, the bloody border disputes between Morocco and Algeria, the fifty-year civil war in Sudan between Arab northerners and Black African southerners, the partitioning of Palestine and the resulting cycle of violence, the warring ethnic factions in Iraq, and the genocide of nearly a million Tutsis at the hands of the Hutus in Rwanda, to name but a handful of cases, have all been in considerable measure a result of the decolonization process.
When Britain abandoned India with an overwhelming Hindu majority holding most of the economic, social, and political power in the country, the Muslim minority, educated by the British in the persuasive rhetoric of democracy, came to the conclusion that the only possible means of achieving
autonomy was through Muslim self-determination. Hence, the birth of the Islamic state.
Yet beyond the call for self-determination, there was little else that India’s Muslim community agreed upon with regard to the role of Islam in the state. For Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s reluctant founder, Islam was merely the common heritage that could unite India’s diverse Muslim population into a united state. Jinnah regarded Islam in the same way that Gandhi regarded Hinduism—as a unifying cultural symbol, not as a religio-political ideology. For Mawlana Mawdudi, Pakistan’s ideological instigator, the state was merely the vehicle for the realization of Islamic law. Mawdudi regarded Islam as the antithesis to secular nationalism and believed Pakistan would be the first step toward the establishment of a Muslim world-state. While the Muslim League, Pakistan’s largest political party, argued that the Islamic state must receive its mandate from its citizens, the Islamic Association, Pakistan’s largest Islamist organization, countered that the state could be considered Islamic only if sovereignty rested solely in the hands of God.
In the wake of the chaos and bloodshed that followed the partition of India, as some seventeen million people—the largest human migration in history—fled across fractured borders in both directions, neither Jinnah’s nor Mawdudi’s vision of the Islamic state was realized. Despite the drafting of a constitution that envisioned a parliament elected to write the laws and a judiciary appointed to decide whether those laws were in accord with Islamic principles, Pakistan quickly gave way to military dictatorship at the hands of the army’s commander in chief, Ayub Khan. Military rule lasted until 1972, when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s platform of Islamic socialism made him Pakistan’s first freely elected civilian ruler since partition. But Bhutto’s socialist reforms, though popular with the people, were denounced as “un-Islamic” by extremist members of Pakistan’s Muslim clergy, clearing the way for yet another military coup, this time by General Zia al-Haq. With the help of the religious authorities, Zia enacted a forced Islamization process in which Islam became both public morality and civil law. After Zia’s death in 1988, a new wave of elections resulted in the reformist governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, both of whom expounded a more liberal ideal of Islam in order to tap into Pakistan’s frustration with nearly a decade of brutal fundamentalism. But in 1999, after accusing the elected government of corruption, the head of Pakistan’s army, Pervez Musharraf, imposed military dictatorship once again over the country. After another decade of military rule, Musharraf was forced to allow Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, both of whom had been exiled from the country, to return to Pakistan, and then pressured to resign from the post of president in 2008. The assassination of Bhutto a few months after her return led to the assumption of the presidency by Bhutto’s estranged husband, Ali Asif Zardari, whose tenuous grip on power has been repeatedly tested by a wave of attacks by Islamist militants centered in the North-West Frontier Province (or Khyber Pashtunkhwa) of Pakistan, who would like nothing more than to transform the country into a “Talibanized” state under their control.
All of this in a span of sixty years.
The experience of Pakistan serves as a reminder that the Islamic state is by no means a monolithic concept. Indeed, there are many countries in the Middle East that could be termed Islamic states, none of which have much in common with one another. Syria is an Arab dictatorship whose ruler serves at the pleasure of its all-powerful military. Jordan and Morocco are volatile kingdoms whose young monarchs have made timid steps toward democratization, though without forfeiting their absolute rule. Iran is a authoritarian country run by a corrupt clerical oligarchy committed to snuffing out any attempts at democratic reform. Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist theocracy that claims its only constitution is the Quran and its only law the Shariah. And yet not only do all of these countries view themselves as the realization of the Medinan ideal, they view each other as contemptible desecrations of that ideal.
But if one were truly to rely on the Medinan ideal to define the nature and function of the Islamic state, it would have to be characterized as nothing more than the nationalist manifestation of the Ummah. At its most basic level, the Islamic state is one in which the determination of values, the norms of behavior, and the formation of laws are influenced by the mores and values of the Muslim-majority population. At the same time, minority faiths would be protected from harm and allowed complete social and political participation in the community, just as they were in Medina. In the same way that the Revelation was dictated by the needs of the Ummah, so would all legal and moral considerations be determined by the citizens of the Islamic state. For as Abu Bakr so wisely stated upon succeeding the Prophet, Muslim allegiance is owed not to a president, prime minister, priest, king, or any earthly authority, but to the community and to God. As long as these criteria, which the Prophet established in Medina nearly fourteen centuries ago and which the Rightly Guided Caliphs struggled in their own way to preserve, are satisfied, then what form the Islamic state takes is irrelevant.
So, then, why not democracy?
Representative democracy may be the most successful social and political experiment in the modern world. But it is an ever-evolving experiment. These days there is a tendency to regard American democracy as the model for all the world’s democracies, and in some ways this is true. The seeds of democracy may have been sown in ancient Greece, but it is in American soil that they sprouted and flourished to achieve their full potential. Yet precisely for this reason, only in America is American democracy possible; it cannot be isolated from American traditions and values.
This is a fundamental fact that was thoroughly ignored by President George W. Bush’s “democracy promotion” agenda, which he vowed would form the foundation upon which relations between the United States and the Middle East would henceforth be based. Bush was ridiculed both at home and abroad for his quest to spread democracy in the Middle East; critics claimed it was little more than an excuse to wage unending war in the region. It was certainly not lost on the peoples of the Middle East that most of their dictators also happened to be America’s closest allies in the region—in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco—all of whom had spent decades convincing the United States that even the slightest weakening of their dictatorial régimes would result in the immediate takeover of their countries by radical Islamists, a specious argument that the United Nations has dubbed a “legitimacy of blackmail.” In any case, Bush’s commitment to his florid talk about democracy was immediately seen as disingenuous and hypocritical once elections in Lebanon, Egypt, and Palestine did not go the way the United States had hoped and the democracy promotion agenda was shut down altogether.
Yet lost in the debate about America’s true intentions in the Middle East was the fact that large majorities in every Muslim-majority state surveyed told pollsters they wanted to see their countries move toward greater democracy. A wave of democratic fervor across the Middle East created a renewed sense of hope for scores of people who had spent their lives in autocratic societies but who now looked forward to the possibility of having a say, even if in the most limited of ways, in their own political destinies. The Green Movement in Iran lit the fuse, employing new social media technologies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to break the government’s monopoly over the media and to demonstrate to the world their aspiration for freedom and liberty. The spark ignited in Iran quickly flashed across the region. In Tunisia, young protesters, fed up with their lack of political participation and economic opportunities, used the same social media tools to take to the streets and force the country’s long-serving dictator to flee into exile. The fires of freedom then spread to Algeria and Yemen, and, perhaps most unexpectedly, to Egypt, where tens of thousands of young Egyptians poured onto the streets of Cairo, Suez, and Giza, demanding an end to the thirty-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, a dictator who had used some sixty billion dollars in United States funds to create one of the most brutal, most repressive régimes in the Middle East. And the fire is
still burning, threatening the other dictatorships in the region—Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria—none of which are immune any longer to the simple notion that all peoples everywhere, regardless of their religious or cultural affiliations, must be free to decide for themselves who will speak for them, who will fight for them, who will lead them.
The fact is that the vast majority of the more than one billion Muslims in the world readily accept the fundamental principles of democracy. Thanks to the efforts of reformists and modernists throughout the Muslim world, most Muslims have already appropriated the language of democracy, recognizing traditional Islamic concepts like shura, or “consultation,” as popular representation; ijma, or “consensus,” as political participation; bay’ah, or “allegiance,” as universal suffrage; and so on. One need only observe the massive demonstrations by democracy activists throughout the Islamic world to recognize how ideals such as constitutionalism, government accountability, pluralism, and human rights are widely accepted by Muslims throughout the world, even if most of the region’s rulers refuse to implement them.
What is not necessarily accepted, however, is the distinctly Western notion that religion and the state should be entirely separate, that the foundation of a democratic society must be secularism. From the inception of the faith in seventh-century Arabia to the birth of the Islamic state in the twentieth, Islam has always endeavored to be more than mere religion. When the Prophet Muhammad created the first Islamic polity in Medina fourteen hundred years ago, he deliberately set the foundations for a comprehensive way of life meant to satisfy the social, spiritual, and material needs of the people, while at the same time fulfilling the will of God. In short, Islam is not just a faith; Islam is an identity. That is true of all religions. In the United States, polls show that some 70 percent of the population identifies itself as Christian. That does not mean that seven out of ten Americans go to church on Sundays, that seven out of ten Americans read the New Testament, that, in fact, seven out of ten Americans know anything at all about Christianity save that Jesus was born in a manger and died on a cross. No, the overwhelming majority of Americans who describe themselves as Christian are making a statement of identity, not a statement of belief. The same holds true for the overwhelming majority of Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Jains, etc. Religion has always been more than a matter of beliefs and practices. It is, above all, a perspective, a mode of being. Religion encompasses one’s culture, one’s politics, one’s very view of the world. This is particularly true of Islam, which, like all great religions, has been shaped not only by metaphysical concerns but also by the social, cultural, spiritual, and political milieu in which it finds itself.