Liberalism, Democracy and Islam: looking for the odd man out

The Daily Star

Azzam Tamimi, Visiting Professor, Kyoto University, Japan, Director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, London

On a website, named Scholar of the House and dedicated to him and his works, Khaled Abou El
Fadl is introduced as "the most important and influential Islamic thinker in the modern
age;" as "an accomplished Islamic jurist and scholar;" as a "high-ranking shaykh;" as "a
world renowned expert in Islamic law;" and as "a prolific author and prominent public
intellectual on Islamic law and Islam." There is little more one may aspire to achieve.
However, few Muslims will have heard of Abou El Fadl, let alone read him. Nevertheless, he
seems to be a rising star in the United States where he has managed to persuade a good list
of scholars, thinkers and policymakers to endorse his 'liberal' Islamic project.

In principle, his book on the compatibility of Islam and democracy could not come at a
better, more urgent time. Democracy in the West, as well as all the attendant values of
'liberalism,' is in crisis: inalienable individual rights, a set of liberties, the rule of
law and equality before the law have all been undermined with varying degrees across the
liberal democratic world under a variety of pretexts. I see the pictures of Abu Ghraib and I
weep - because I know they are not the exception but the rule of the new world order.
Perhaps it's time to think what Islamic democracy might offer as an alternative.

Let me lay out my vision of where its prospects now stand. Muslims in particular have been
primary victims because the "war on terrorism" has for all intents and purposes been nothing
but a war on everything associated with the Islamic faith and Islamic culture. Since Sept.
11, 2001 thousands of Muslim men and women have been arrested and detained without charge in
the USA, the UK and other European countries participating in the war on terrorism; laws
have been enacted in all these places to restrict the freedoms of expression, movement and
assembly; and Muslim school girls in France have been banned from entering schools with
headscarves. In the lands of the East, on the other hand, irreparable damage has been
inflicted upon the prospects of democratization. The Americans and their allies have given
such a bad name to democracy that few Arabs or Muslims deem it appropriate to associate
themselves with any talk about bringing democracy to the Muslim lands lest this is seen as
collaborating with the foreign invading powers. Iraqis who loathed Saddam and prayed for an
end to the nightmare they endured under him have regretted the end of his reign because
America's promised democracy has turned out to be an even worse nightmare. 'Further the
cause of democracy in the Middle East?' - America has reversed decades of progress in that
direction.

In light of all of this it is indeed a bold move on the part of Princeton to undertake
publishing the book. And they must know it. "Islam and the Challenge of Democracy" follows
the format of Abou El Fadl's previous "The Place of Tolerance in Islam" - he writes a lead
piece, and others respond. Princeton has amassed a hefty list of names. In the order of
their responses to Abou El Fadl, they are: Nader A. Hashemi; Jeremy Waldron; Noah Feldman;
M.A. Muqtedar Khan; A. Kevin Reinhart; Saba Mhamood; Bernard Haykel; Mohammad H. Fadel;
David Novak; John L. Esposito; and William B. Quandt.

In his 46-page treatise "Islam and the Challenge of Democracy" Abou El Fadl seeks to find
room for democracy in Islam: and he does, with skill and learning. But there are two major
problems with his thesis. One: Abou El Fadl seems incapable of distinguishing between
liberalism and democracy, he cannot split the terms 'liberal democracy' into their two
separate constituent parts. Two, Abou El Fadl makes the suggestion that he, and he alone,
has thought about Islam and its challenge to democracy, when a great many other scholars
have been treading this path for decades. I am thinking of the Algerian Malik Bennabi, the
Tunisian Rachid Ghannouchi and the Egyptian Tariq al-Bishri to name but a few.

Some of his interlocutors, however, do suggest he is part of a movement, mentioning in
particular Ghannouchi (whom they mistakenly assume to be a resident of France), Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, the most authoritative contemporary sunni scholar and Fahmi Huwaidi, the most
widely read and highly regarded Islamic journalist in the Arab world. However, in his own
response Abou El Fadl seems to take offence at the suggestion that his position is shared
with "other 'Islamicists' such as Rashid al-Ghannouchi, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, or Fahmi
Huwaidi." He charges that "Huwaidi's and Qaradawi's proclamations on democracy are dogmatic
at best; they do not exhibit any serious understanding of the doctrinal challenges a
democracy poses for traditional understandings of Islam." It is his assessment that "both
writers speak about Islam and democracy only in the most vague and general sense, without
engaging the particulars of history or doctrine." Abou El Fadl has nothing to say about
Ghannouchi; one is therefore tempted to think that he may have not read him. As for Malik
Bennabi, he does not feature anywhere in the book despite the originality of his thinking
and the enormity of his influence in contemporary Islamic political thought.

The real difference between Abou El Fadl's thinking and the thinking of the aforementioned
'mainstream' scholars and thinkers is that they emanate from within while he comes from
without. Perhaps without realizing it, and he is gently alerted to this by some of his
respondents, Abou El Fadl borders the 'end of history' discourse (as argued by Francis
Fukuyama in his "The End of History and the Last Man") as he presents the case for
democracy. Between the lines there is a message, clearly aimed at Muslims, that 'liberal
democracy' has triumphed and that Muslims have no choice but to join in. This provides a
sense of a final judgment, a last verdict that is more likely to provoke rejection than
evoke sympathy. Why? Because Abou El Fadl does not make the effort to distinguish between
liberalism and democracy. While Bennabi, Ghannouchi, Qaradawi and Huwaidi among others agree
that there is much to be learned by Muslims from the liberal democratic tradition, they
reject the stipulation 'take it all or leave it all' and insist on the right of the Muslims
to carry of the package only that which they believe to be compatible with the values of
their faith.

Democracy is seen by these Islamic thinkers as consisting of two components: a cultural
aspect that is incompatible with Islam and a procedural aspect that Muslims can learn and
benefit from. There is no way the liberal secularist component of democracy can be espoused
by the Muslims because it contradicts the essence of their faith. It is simply a case of two
directly opposed world views: in the Islamic view divine revelation is the source of
reference whereas in the liberal tradition man is self-referential. It is therefore a futile
effort to try and re-formulate Islam in order to espouse liberalism; this would simply be
the end of Islam as a divine revelation. What Bennabi, Ghannouchi, Qaradawi and Huwaidi
believe is that the chronic problem of despotism in the Muslim lands can be remedied in part
by the adoption of some, or all, of the elements of the procedural aspect of democracy; for
after all, it is these elements which are compatible with the Islamic values of vicegerency,
Shura, justice and the rule of Sharia. It is these procedures that may help the Muslims
institutionalize Shura and develop measures appropriate for their own needs and purposes in
order to make governments electable by and accountable to the people and in order to check
and limit the abuse of power.

Abou El Fadl's treatment of the question of compatibility between Islam and democracy
suffers from a number of weaknesses, as rightly noted by some of his interlocutors -
particularly Noah Feldman, Saba Mahmood and Mohammed H. Fadel. The first is his taking for
granted and at face value what liberal democracy stands for. Having chosen to be economical
about what liberal democracy stands for, he gives the impression that he whole-heartedly and
unreservedly supports its values. There is no reference in either his prologue or his
epilogue to the many broken promises of liberal democracy or to the undeniable historical
link between the most liberal democratic nations and imperialism. The second is his
shattering silence regarding the practical impediments to democratization in the Muslim
world. These impediments do not come from within Islam and are not posed solely by the
Muslim peoples. It is true that they were originally precipitated by centuries of decline
and backwardness across the Muslim world. But that decline, in my view (and it is a view
shared by many in the Muslim world), was the product of deviation from rather than adherence
to the true path of Islam. However, that decline and growing inferiority to the West was
later enforced by colonialism and is now sustained by a world order that claims to be
liberal and democratic under the leadership of the US.

My own research, (see "Rachid Ghannouch:i A Democrat Within Islamism," OUP), argues that the
world order, the modern territorial state and the policy of enforced secularization are the
real culprits for democracy's absenteeism in the Muslim world. M.A. Muqtedar Khan in his
response to Abou El Fadl, claims that "democracy must triumph in theory before it can be
realized in practice." This is simply not true. Young Muslim men and women who lost all hope
in a peaceful transition to democracy in the Muslim lands today ask: "What and who aborted
the Algerian people's struggle for democracy in 1991? Who and what provides dictators across
the Muslim world with financial and military support against the wishes of the peoples in
their grip?" It is the USA, leader of the 'liberal democratic' world and its democratic
allies in Europe: France and the United Kingdom. This is not an attempt to blame everything
on the outside. There are, undeniably, local impediments. However, the struggle against
those home-grown obstacles for the past five decades or so has invariably been thwarted by
dictators with the help and under the protection of the powerful West. Saddam Hussein is a
case in point: the least democratic of a motley crew of deeply undemocratic Arab autocrats.
No democracy-loving Iraqi (and there were millions of them) ever had the chance of toppling
him when, throughout the 1980s, he had the full support of the US against Khomeini's Iran.
But beyond Iraq, there is Egypt's autocratic Mubarak, Jordan's King Abdullah, and a host of
other un-elected leaders all of whom receive support from the West.

In the last few pages of his paper Abou El Fadl offers his remedy for the apparent tension
between Islam and democracy. He comes up with a new interpretation of Sharia. Unlike
contemporary Arab and Muslim modernists (or secularists to be more precise), Abou El Fadl is
keen to show respect to the classical jurists who insist on the centrality of Sharia to
Muslim life. However, Sharia for him is an unrealizable ideal. Whatever people claim to be
Sharia is their own imperfect law-making that is nothing more than their understanding or
interpretation of a divine perfection that is well beyond them. Abou El Fadl declares
'absolute' Sharia is impossible to implement because it can always be re-interpreted. He has
a point, but I, and many millions of Muslims, would find it very hard to swallow. If, as I
do, you believe in the Koran as divine revelation, and the Koran, in Surat al-Maidah
(Chapter 5) which deals with the penalty for theft, tells us in the clearest possible terms
"faqtau aydiyahuma" ("cut off their hands"), are we not being dishonest when we try to
relativise this into (as Abou El Fadl would have it) "stop their hands from theft"? Are we
not usurping divine revelation with the dictates of liberalism?

Abou El Fadl does not hide his disdain and contempt for the Wahhabis and what he calls the
fundamentalists. Both terms have become tools in anti-Islamic propaganda to attack a broad
spectrum of people including some of the most respectable personalities in the Muslim world.
Who is a Wahhabi and who is a 'fundamentalist,' in the West's extreme understanding of the
term? Mohammed ibn Abd Al-Wahhab was an 18th century reformer primarily concerned with
cleansing Islamic practice from polytheistic impurities that crept into it with the passage
of time. If two centuries after his death some of the people who claim him as their
inspiration happen to be among the most corrupt rulers on the fact of earth, or happen to
commit atrocities or espouse ideas alien to Islam itself, we cannot blame Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab
directly. Journalists from the West conflating ideas they do not understand are responsible
for the reductive thinking that makes practicing Muslims 'fundamentalists.' Abou El Fadl
should know better.

The cause of democracy in the Muslim lands has not been served by this publication, which
will only be seen by Muslims as another attempt to undermine their religion. It is as if
Muslims have to buy the commodity of democracy at the cost of their own faith and culture or
(as in Iraq and Afghanistan) at the cost of their own freedom and dignity. If democracy is
indeed compatible with Islam, and this is what most Muslims today believe the case to be,
then the last thing Muslims need to be told is that they need to abandon both their culture
and their faith in order to be democratic. For it is a lie, and a lie which undermines the
cause of democracy in the Muslim world.

Far from the assumption of this book Islam is not being challenged by democracy, it is
liberal democracy that is today challenged by Islam. It is not Islam that needs to be
reformed; it is democracy that needs urgent attendance so as to repair the severe damage
caused to it by the liberal democratic states in America and Europe.