By Muzaffar
K Awan, M.D., Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA
“Islam
regards every form of Government which is non-constitutional and
non-parliamentary as the greatest human sin.” 1912: Abulkalam Azad [1]
“Islam” and
“Democracy”, each in its own particular way, mean too many things at one and the
same time. The task confronting us is to minimize them to their simplest
expressions and bring about a rapprochement between them as much as
possible after the simplifying and synthesizing them.
What, in
its simplest form, is the meaning of “democracy”? A dictionary of the language
gives us the etymological meaning of the word, which is: “the power (or
authority) of the people”, or of the masses, as we call them today.
According
to a hadith, “The Prophet one day was with a group of men when he was addressed
by one of them, who asked: ‘What is faith?’ The Prophet replied: ‘Faith is that
you believe in God, in His angels, in your return to Him, in His messengers,
that you believe in the Resurrection.’
“The man
then asked: ‘What is Islam?’ The Prophet replied: ‘Islam consists in believing
in God while associating no other god with Him, in saying the prayers, in paying
the obligatory poor-rate, in carrying out the fast of Ramadan, etc.….” (We will
omit that part of the Hadith, which has no direct bearing on the subject here.)
We now have
an answer to the question from the highest authority: that “Islam” is the
exclusive belief in the only one True God, in the recital of prayer, the payment
of the tax for the benefit of the poor, and the accomplishment of the fast, etc.
We must
still go further in our attempt to establish a definition of democracy
independently of all linguistic connotations and all implied liaison between it
and some concept or other attributable to the term “Islam”. We should endeavor
to consider democracy within the framework of an ontological scheme. In such a
framework―when
its legitimacy can be demonstrated, democracy should be considered from a
three-fold point of view:
1-As the
attitude, or sentiments, of every individual person towards himself.
2- As the
attitude of every person towards others and the society.
3- As the
ensemble of the social, political and spiritual practical conditions
necessary for the complementary formation and development of the collective
sentiments as in the individual person. [2]
Faith or
religion is an inwardly experienced phenomenon and relates to life’s permanent
aspects with which it is primarily concerned and remains as valid today as it
was at the dawn of humanity and will continue to be so in the future.
Believers
can also see their faith as a philosophy, a set of rational principles, values
or mere spiritual aspect.
The
problems and difficulties arise for some Muslims and policy-makers when they
consider and present Islam as a purely political, sociological, and economic
ideology, rather than as a belief system as a whole.
While
analyzing religion, democracy, or any other system or philosophy accurately, we
must focus on humanity and human life. Worldly systems change according to
circumstances and so can be evaluated only according to their times. Belief in
God, the hereafter, the prophets, the holy books, angels, and divine destiny
have nothing to do strictly with changing times. Likewise, worship and
morality’s universal and unchanging standards have very little to do with time
and worldly life.
When
comparing Islam with democracy, we must remember that democracy is a system that
is being continually evolved, developed and revised. It also varies according to
the places and circumstances where it is practiced. The religion has established
immutable principles related to faith, worship and morality. Thus, only Islam’s
worldly aspects are comparable with democracy.
The main
aim of Islam and its unchangeable dimensions do affect its rules governing the
changeable aspects of human life, culture and society. Islam does not propose a
certain unchangeable form of government or attempt to shape it. Instead, Islam
establishes fundamental principles and universal values that orient a
government’s general character, leaving it to the masses to choose the type and
form of government according to time and circumstances. If we approach the
matter in this light and compare Islam with today’s modern democracy, we will
better comprehend the position of Islam and democracy with respect to each
other.
The
democratic ideas stem from ancient times and for more than 4500 years, democracy
has been in flux. John Keane tracks the historical developments of democracy,
“considered both as a way of deciding things and as a whole way of life”. [3]
Assembly-based forms of government existed in Mesopotamia around the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers, over 2000 years before something similar developed in Athenian
Greece. One of the first movements towards representative democracy appeared on
the Iberian Peninsula in the 12th century - "a gift of Islam to the modern
world", as Keane puts it. Keane's aim is, as he puts it himself, to
"democratize" the history of democracy, opening it up to all the unheralded
sources and unlikely experiences that have shaped its fate and ours.
John Keane
objects the most to our western founding democratic myths and the assumptions
that, as an inherently Western origins of democracy, it must have gone into deep
hiding until rediscovered in England/France/the US over 2,000 years later.
Interestingly and indeed, democracy continued to develop in the East, fusing
with Islam from the 7th century to produce strange and dynamic
hybrids of Islamic principles, universal values, market economics and communal
politics for early 400 years of Islamic civilization.
Keane shows
that the re- emergence of democracy in the West was not an attempt to break with
Eastern democratic traditions, but to compete with them. He further locates the
earliest European parliament in 12th-century Spain ("the mother of parliaments",
he says, was discovered at Léon), where it emerged as a direct response by a
Christian king to the threat of democratic Islam, which was threatening to sweep
all before it in Europe. While modern liberal democracy was born centuries later
in The
Glorious (1688) English Revolution,
the American (1776) Revolution and French (1789-99) Revolution.
In
democratic societies, people govern themselves as opposed to being ruled by
someone above. The individual has had some priority over the community in this
type of political system, being free to determine how to live his or her own
life. Individualism is, however, not absolute. As human individual growth,
education (rational & holistic), development, individuation, and
self–actualization (early child development-ECD to human development -HD
discussed elsewhere) must take place thus making a difference in the world in
order to serve each other as complete human beings.
The
principal Islamic and universal value that governs the quality of democracy is
trust. There are seven other Islamic and universal values that must be in place
before masses will trust each other, their politicians and their governments.
Each value is dependent on the adaptation and practice of the previous value.
The sequence of values that guide the quality and eventual success of democracy
are as follows: human free will, equality, accountability, justice, fairness,
openness and transparency. Once all these values are in place then trust can be
surely found. Trust is a singular value that enables human societies to become
internally cohesive.
Richard
Barrett's in his latest book: Love, Fear and the Destiny of Nations; the impact
of the human evolution of consciousness on worldly and human affairs. [4] He
gives his assessment of human society as a whole- as to where we are, what's
working well, the challenges we face and his vision for the next evolutionary
steps into ever-deeper democracy. His model of values driven child/adult human
development, education (rational and creative), and leader-ship development and
conscious evolution has been honed over thousands of leaders and organizations
world-wide. All this can be applied glocally (locally and globally).
There is an
inevitable evolution of human values and consciousness once individual and
collective deficiency needs are met and we are enabled and ready to expand our
consciousness and values into seeking our transcendent growth needs. All
nations, I feel, will evolve their own forms of democracy within a few decades,
as they continue to learn from each other’s experiences as to how to uplift
masses out of poverty and the basic levels of deficiency needs.
It is a
World-wide trend, and we will see our next stage of development to continue to
create conditions in which people's basic needs will be met so that they will go
on evolving from freedom through equality, accountability, openness,
transparency to eventual trust.
The
business leaders are well engaged in developing themselves to make this leap as
they watch successful people and learn sooner than political leaders will. The
political leaders must do the same while the current political culture all over
the globe is holding back our true human progress and development.
Having met
our deficiency needs allows us humans to move from a fear-based way of life to a
love-centered way, driven by our inherent transcendent growth needs. This
enables humans to shift through levels of consciousness as individuals,
communities and leaders from socialized consciousness to self-authoring
(Corrective) leadership on to self-transforming consciousness at which point
people will eventually and comfortably operate at the 7 levels of consciousness
and will be able to lead people at all those levels as appropriate to their
situation, people and task. Barrett described this leap from the "flatland" of
non-judgment and relativism up to an integral level of full spectrum human
consciousness.
It is in
fact evident that democracy cannot be attained as a political reality―for
example, as a government constituting the “power of the masses”―unless
it has first become part and parcel of the individual who is an essential
constituent part and building block of the masses, unless it is firmly imprinted
in his/her “self” and “spirit”, in the components of his/her personality, and
unless it exists in the society as an ensemble of conventions, values, habits,
customs and traditions. It is within this general framework that the problem is,
it seems, brought forward with the greatest clarity, context and best of
outcomes.
Many
observers today speak of a global victory for democracy or claim that democracy
is now a universally accepted common good. Still what the term means and whether
and why democracy is to be preferred over its alternatives continues to be
disputed by others. Opinions are also divided about whether actually existing
democracies like the United States or Britain or India or Argentina will be able
to live up to their democratic ideals. These ideals are also controversial. The
most common disagreement is between the advocates of ‘participatory’ or ‘direct’
democracy, understood as the participation of all citizens in decision making
that affect their lives, for instance by voting and accepting a majority
verdict; and those who favor ‘indirect’ or ‘representative’ democracy, a method
of governing in which people choose (through voting and the public expression of
their opinions) representatives who decide things on their behalf.
John Keane
historically shows how democracy has evolved through at least the following
stages [5]:
Assembly
Democracy:
Began in
ancient Mesopotamia about 2500 BC in Iraq, Syria and Iran: the first phase of
democracy was self-government through public assemblies of equals accompanied by
a variety of governance mechanisms designed to curb the power of kings and
“bossy rulers”. Democracy, like all other human innovations, has had a long
history as pointed out already. Democratic values and institutions were never
immutable; even the meanings of democracy have been evolving and changing
through time in history and had assemblies that had stretched through classical
Greece and Rome to the rise and maturation of Islamic civilization around 950
CE, democracy was associated with the creation and diffusion of public
assemblies.
During
these centuries, nobody knew who had invented the term or exactly where and when
the term ‘democracy’ was first used. It had been commonly thought that it was of
classical Greek origin, but new research has revealed that the democracy
(meaning the rule of the people: from demos, ‘the people’, and kratia,
‘to rule’) has had much older roots in Mesopotamia.
This form
of democracy was “scattered across many different soils and climes, ranging from
the Indian subcontinent and the prosperous Phoenician empire to the western
shores of provincial Europe”. A great many of these innovations happened in the
Islamic world that “poured scorn on kingship” in an attempt to cultivate
“self-governing associations ”, and assemblies (like mosque, waqf and Sufi
networks).
Muslims
historically and to begin with have been pioneers of civil societal
institutions. To quote John Keane: ‘The growth of a swath of social institutions
that Muslims and other scholars later called ‘civil society’ (jamaa’ i madani)
was unknown to the Greeks, Phoenicians and the peoples of Syria-Mesopotamia’.
[6] From Kean’s reading, we can look at endowment (waqf) and mosque as
institutions of civil society, mostly independent of the state, promoting the
common good. Endowments were not just religious; they also advanced public good
by nurturing hospitals, stables, waterworks, caravansaries, libraries, colleges
(e.g., Cairo’s Jamia Al-Azhar). As such they were institutions of civil society
making political participation basic to people’s lives. Likewise, mosque was not
only a worship place. It was also a venue of business, dialogue and discussion
wherein non-Muslims as well as women (segregated) actively participated. To
quote Keane again: “It [mosque] was to the empire of Islam what the assembly was
to the world of Greek democracy”. [7] Sufi orders and bazaars can be similarly
conceptualized as sites of civil society. Also, in many ways Muslims were
pioneer of contract laws.
Representative Democracy:
From around
the tenth century CE, democracy started to enter a second historical phase whose
center of gravity was Spain. Shaped by the discovery (in northern Spain) of the
first parliament, and the conflicts unleashed by self-governing councils and
religious dissent within the Christian Church, democracy came to be understood
as representative democracy. This at least was the term that began later
on to be used in France and England and the new American republic during the
eighteenth century, for instance by constitution makers and influential
political writers when referring to a new type of government with its roots in
popular consent dating back to centuries.
John Keane,
Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster, recently brought out the
strange origins of representative democracy. He explored the role of a 12th-
century institution born in the northern part of modern-day Spain –the Cortes –
and its vital role in the later and more recent formative evolution of
representative democracy.
John Keane
also explored the tremendous and indirect contributions made by Muslim
civilization to the innovation of the Cortes. Keane explained that by the 10th
century, although the goal of Islamic civilization was to become a Universal
(global) way of life but had begun to decline. Many elements of Islamic society,
however, had still continued and endured for several additional centuries.
From this
period onwards, as many institutions still evolved and developed. Islam managed
to live on and contributed positively– including through Sufi networks,
education and the schooling. Quoting the eminent scholar of Islam, Montgomery
Watt, Keane noted for instance that the seeds of the whole idea of universities
in Europe came, in fact, from Islam; Institutions of learning from this period
were later mimicked by the early European universities, which were intended to
be physical and intellectual spaces guided by an agreed set of curricula,
separated from government and acting at a distance from corrupting powers. Keane
referred to the emergence among Christians of a “zone of anxiety” in the 12th
century Northern Spain. This anxiety stemmed from the feeling among many, that
Christianity was still in a terminal decline.
This
perception sparked a movement of re-conquest of lands that were supposedly
belonged to Christians – despite the fact that great many people of the region
considered themselves Mozarabs with cultural customs that were deeply indebted
to Islam. Keane suggested that the Cortes of the Kingdom of Léon was the
first-ever parliament in the genuine sense of the term. Its founding principle
was that a government could only really legitimatize when it was sanctioned by
the governed themselves, specifically by the representatives (procuradores as
they were then called in Spain) of the clergy, the nobility and the urban
commercial interests who sat within the Cortes in the presence of the monarch.
The Cortes,
Keane proposed, was a “strange gift” from the world of Islam, a child of the
strategy of re- conquest in this region. The key figure in the development of
the Cortes, as Keane pointed out, was King Alfonso IX, who, at the age of 17,
who avoided a succession plot by fleeing to Portugal. “In 1188, he agreed to
come back to Léon to assume the crown, and was advised that something dramatic
had to be done.
In response
to this anxiety, the King took an amazing step, based on the principle that the
re-conquest of lands deemed to be Christian required a new peace agreement
within the Kingdom. In March 1188, in the church of San Isidoro, the King
convened the first Cortes meeting or parliament, during which various decisions
were agreed upon, including the promise by the King that he would permanently
seek the advice and consent of three estates – the bishops, the nobility, and
the ‘good men [Buenos hombres] of Leon’. Keane noted that this meeting was
highly unusual for its time. Instead of being a consultative or advisory
council, which was the prevailing custom, it was instead a meeting of equals,
whereby the King was bound to the mutual agreement of the three estates.
In this
regard, the Cortes became a condition and ascertained possibility of what would
later be called a representative assembly, in that the various parties had to
compromise non- violently in order to come to a working agreement. “The Cortes
was a new way of understanding politics as a permanent process of deciding who
gets what, when and how, and ensuring that the process was fair.” In this
regard, the Cortes did not presume a kind of close-knit communitarian
solidarity; instead, it introduced the notion of long distance government by
consent. This is illustrated, as Keane said, by the willingness of those from
the three estates to travel to the Cortes in order to present their case. The
Cortes was a harbinger of a new political form in its own right, one to which
our notions of representative government are deeply indebted.
“What is
most striking and deeply implicit in this ‘world historical’ event in Léon,”
Keane said, “was that representation being seen as the condition and of
possibility of the disembodiment of political power. It was typically contrasted
with monarchy, and if you think about it, monarchy was an embodied form of
political power.” Representative government, Keane said, breaks down
concentrated political power, and introduces the possibility of freedom from the
fear that political power associated with a monarchy degenerated into
retribution, violence and tyranny. While the representative government
introduced the definite possibility of pluralism because the whole point of
government by representatives was that representation is necessary because there
was no straightforward or ‘natural’ unity of interests within the body politic.
Explaining
the relevance of the Cortes to the modern notion of representative democracy,
Keane concluded by saying that representative assemblies of the kind prefigured
in the Léon Cortes highlight the principle that the body politic is permanently
fragmented, and that a key condition of politics was the quest for
reconciliation. Further, he suggested that out of the Cortes sprang the
political ethos of compromise.
The Cortes
was in this sense a basic institution of what later came to be called democracy.
Keane concluded by noting that many institutions of democracy have had pre-
democratic Islamic origins, contributions and know how. His book on history of
democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy, saw this point as axiomatic, as a
basic methodological research tool for thinking in new ways about the history of
democracy and the strange origins of many of its contemporary institutions.
The changes
leading to the formation of representative democracy were neither inevitable nor
politically uncontested. Representative democracy was in fact born of many and
different power conflicts, many of them bitterly fought in opposition to the
ruling groups, whether they were church hierarchies, landowners or imperial
monarchies, often in the name of ‘the people’. Exactly who were ‘the people’
proved to be a deep source of controversy throughout the era of representative
democracy?
The second
age of democracy witnessed the birth of neologisms, like ‘aristocratic
democracy’ (that first happened in the Low Countries at the end of the sixteenth
century) and new references (beginning in the United States) to ‘republican
democracy’. Later came ‘social democracy’ and ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘Christian
democracy’, even ‘bourgeois democracy’, ‘workers’ democracy’ and ‘socialist
democracy’. These new terms corresponded to the many kinds of struggles by
groups for equal access to governmental power that resulted, sometimes by design
and sometimes by simple accident or unintended consequence, in institutions and
ideals and ways of life that had no precedent. Written constitutions based on a
formal separation of powers, periodic elections and parties and different
electoral systems were new. So too was the invention of ‘civil societies’
founded on new social habits and customs – experiences as varied as dining in a
public restaurant, or controlling one’s temper by using polite language – and
new associations that citizens used to keep an arm’s length from government by
using non-violent weapons like liberty of the printing press, publicly
circulated petitions, and covenants and constitutional conventions called to
draw up new constitutions.
This period
unleashed what the French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville
(1805-1859) famously called a ‘great democratic revolution’ in favor of
political and social equality. Spreading from the Atlantic region, this
revolution often suffered setbacks and reversals, especially in Europe, where it
was mainly to collapse in the early decades of the twentieth century. The
democratic revolution was fuelled by rowdy struggles and breathtaking acts, like
the public execution in England of King Charles I. Such events called into
question the anti-democratic prejudices of those – the rich and powerful – who
supposed that inequalities among people were ‘natural’. New groups, like slaves,
women and workers, won the franchise. At least on paper, representation was
eventually democratized, stretched to include all of the population. But such
stretching happened with great difficulty and against great odds. Even then it
was permanently on trial; in more than a few cases, the United States in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included, the definition of
representation was actually narrowed by withdrawing the right to vote from
certain groups, particularly black and poor people.
Not until
the very end of this second phase – during the early decades of the twentieth
century – did the right to vote for representatives come to be seen as a universal
entitlement. That happened first for adult men and later – usually much
later – for all adult women. But even then, as the experiences of
totalitarianism and military dictatorship show, the opponents of democratic
representation fought hard and with considerable success against its perceived
inefficiencies, its fatal flaws and supposed evils. They demonstrated that
democracy in any form was not inevitable – that it had no built-in historical
guarantees.
Future of
Democracy in the 21st Century:
What is
happening to actually existing representative and modern democracies? Do they
have a secure future? Are they suffering from decline, or transformation into
something that resembles ‘post-democracy’? Does democracy remain a viable ideal?
Such
questions today command widespread interest because representative democracies
are subject to new trends and contradictory pressures. In the emerging era of
‘complex democracy’, which dates back roughly from the mid-twentieth century,
and since democracy has become a global force. The case of India, where in 1950
the world’s first-ever large-scale democracy was created among materially
impoverished peoples of multiple faiths, many different languages and low rates
of literacy, was a key symbol of this change.
Data shows
that in the year 1900, when monarchies and empires predominated, there were no
states that could be judged as representative democracies by the standard of
universal suffrage for competitive multi-party elections. By 1950, with the
military defeat of German Nazism and the beginnings of de-colonization and the
post-war reconstruction of Europe and Japan, there were 22 democracies even if
flawed accounting for 31 per cent of the world’s population. By the end of the
twentieth century, waves of democracy had touched the shores of Latin America,
post-communist Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. At least on paper, out of
192 countries, 119 resembled representative democracies (58.2% of the globe’s
population), with 85 of these countries (38% of the world’s inhabitants)
enjoying forms of political democracy respectful of basic human rights, freedom
of the press and the rule of law.
In the era
of complex democracy, not only are the language and ideals and institutions of
democracy, for the first time in history, becoming familiar to people living
within most regions of the earth, regardless of their nationality, religion or
culture. Not only is there new talk of ‘global democracy’ and democracy as a
‘universal value’ (Amartya Sen). For the first time, racial prejudice has also
begun to be extracted from the ideals of democracy, such that many democrats now
find themselves embarrassed or angered by talk of ‘backward’ or ‘uncivilized’ or
‘naturally inferior’ peoples. There are signs as well that the theory and
practice of democracy are gradually mutating, that its significance is changing
because its institutions are being stretched into areas of life in which
democracy in any form was previously excluded, or played little or no role. Once
seen as given by the grace of a Creator, democracy is being viewed pragmatically
as a handy weapon for use against concentrations of unaccountable powers. It
comes to have a new meaning: the public accountability and public control of
decision makers, whether they operate in the field of state or interstate
institutions or within so-called non-governmental or civil society
organizations, such as businesses, trade unions, sports associations and
charities etc.
In the age
of complex democracy, assembly-based and representative mechanisms are mixed and
combined with new ways of publicly monitoring and controlling the exercise of
power. Representative forms of government do not simply wither, or disappear.
Representative democracy within the framework of territorial states often
survives, and in some countries it even thrives, sometimes (as in Mongolia,
Taiwan and South Africa) for the first time ever. Representative government has
also sometimes been enriched, as in the civic involvement and cleanup schemes in
Japanese cities such as Yokohama and Kawasaki during the past two decades. But
for a variety of reasons related to public pressure and the need to reduce
corruption and the abuse of power, representative democracy is coming to be
supplemented (and hence complicated) by a variety of democratic procedures that
are applied to organizations other than states. New combinations of
assembly-based and representative and other democratic procedures begin to
spread underneath and beyond these states. Forums, summits, parliaments for
minorities, judicial review and citizens’ juries are some examples. Others
include public enquiries, congresses, blogging and other new forms of media
scrutiny, as well as open methods of co-ordination, of the kind practiced in the
European Union.
Experiments
with extending democracy within the institutions of civil society, into areas of
life ‘beneath’ the institutions of territorial states, are much in evidence, so
that organizations like the International Olympic Committee, whose membership is
otherwise self-selecting, are governed by executive bodies that are subject to
election by secret ballot, by a majority of votes cast, for limited terms of
office. With the help of new communication media, including satellite television
and the internet (‘e-democracy’), the public monitoring of international
organizations of government is also growing. Bodies such as the WTO, the UN, the
European Commission, OIC and Arab League already find or will certainly find
themselves under increasing, ongoing or intermittent scrutiny by outside bodies,
their own legal procedures, and by public protests.
These
trends towards complex democracy are to a varying degree subject everywhere to
counter-trends. The third age of democracy is plagued by growing social
inequality and troubled by the visible decline of political party membership
and, especially among young people and the poor, fluctuating turnout at
elections and growing disrespect for ‘politicians’ and official ‘politics’, even
boycotts and satirical campaigns against all parties and candidates. Whether and
how democracies can adjust to the new world of campaign mega-advertising,
political ‘spin’ and corporate global media is proving equally challenging. Just
as perplexing is the issue – felt strongly in countries as different as India
and Taiwan, Canada and Middle East and Muslim nations – of whether and how
democracies can come to terms with their ‘multi-cultural’ societies. The coming
of an age of ‘silver democracy’, in which growing numbers of citizens live to
ripe old ages in conditions of growing material and emotional insecurity, is
likely to be just as daunting. Then there are the deep-seated trends for which
there is no historical precedent, and no easy solutions, like the rise of the
United States as the world’s first and solo democratic empire; the spread of
uncivil wars; rising fears about the biosphere; and the proliferation of new
forms of violence, terror and new weapons systems with killing power many times
greater than that of all democracies combined.
Pressured
by such trends, does democracy have a future? The nineteenth-century American
poet and writer, Walt Whitman (1819-1892), famously noted that the history of
democracy could not be written because democracy as he and others knew it was
not yet properly grown up, built or matured. From the standpoint of the early
twenty-first century, and the possible emergence of a more complex understanding
and practice of democracy, the same point can be put differently: Even today, we
do not know what will become of liberal democracy because its fate has not yet
been determined.
To sum up,
in the Islamic context, the Quran addresses the whole humanity and assigns it
almost all the duties and responsibilities entrusted to modern and post-modern
democratic systems.
People must
cooperate with one another by sharing these duties, responsibilities and
establishing the essential foundations necessary to perform them. The government
is composed of all of these foundations. Thus, Islam recommends a government
based on a social contract. People elect the administrators and establish a
council or an assembly to debate common issues. Also, the society as a whole
participates in auditing of the administration.
During the
rule of the first four caliphs (632-661) in Islam, the fundamental principles of
government mentioned above–including free election–were fully observed. The
political system began to transform into a sultanate and Arab imperialism after
the death of Imam Ali, the fourth caliph, due to internal conflicts and due to
the prevailing global conditions at that time. Unlike under the caliphate, power
in the sultanate was passed on through the sultan’s family. However, even though
free elections were no longer held, many societies in the Muslim world
maintained democratic principles and values for early 400 years and those are
still at the core of today’s modern democracy.
According
to Fetullah Gulen and other enlightened Muslim intellectuals, Islam is an
inclusive religion. It is based on the belief in one God as the Creator, Lord,
Sustainer, and Administrator of the entire universe. Islam is thus the religion
of the whole of humanity and the universe. That is, the entire universe obeys
the laws laid down by God, so everything in the universe is “Muslim” and obeys
God by submitting to his laws. Even a person who refuses to believe in God or
follows another religion has this natural perforce to be a Muslim as far as his
or her bodily existence is concerned.
His or her
entire life, from the embryonic stage to the body’s dissolution into dust after
death, every tissue of his or her body, and every limb and organ of his or her
will naturally follow the natural course charted out by God’s law. Thus, in
Islam, God, nature, and humanity are neither remote from each other nor are they
alien to each other. It is God who makes himself known to humanity through
nature and humanity itself, and nature and humanity are two books (of creation)
through each word of which God is known. This leads humankind to look upon
everything as belonging to the same Creator, to whom everything belongs, so
there is nothing in the universe as alien. His sympathy, love, and service do
not remain confined to the people of any particular race, color, ethnicity or
religion. The Prophet summed this up with the command,
“You are
all from Adam, and Adam is from earth. O servants of God are brothers [and
sisters].” [8]
A separate
but equally important point is that Islam historically recognizes all religions
previous to it. It accepts all the prophets and books sent to different peoples
in different epochs of human history. Not only does it accept them, but also
regards belief in them as an integral principle and requirement of being
Muslims. By so doing, it acknowledges the basic unity of all faiths. A Muslim is
at the same time a true follower of Abraham, Moses, David, Jesus, and of all
other Hebrew prophets. This belief explains why both Christians and Jews enjoyed
their religious rights under the rule of Islamic governments throughout history.
The real
issue globally today is not if the political system of any country should
proceed along the path of democracy because no sane person in the Muslim or the
rest of the world can disagree with the spirit of democracy or spirit of Islam.
The spirit of Islam and democracy is one and the same. The roots and spirit of
democracy historically are Islamic as clearly shown in this writing. The
epigraph from the Indian Muslim intellectual-philosopher Abulkalam Azad
–articulated in 1912 – about the spirit of Islam and democracy being the same is
the testimony of the above. The pertinent question, then, arises: why did the
spirit of democracy vanquished in the Muslim world? This question is enormous
because there is a ‘democracy promotion’ industry about Middle East and
elsewhere. Take, for instance, the 2010 conference ‘US Democracy Promotion in
Middle East’ we hear about and read about. It is hard not to notice its
patronizing title –Middle East is incapable of democracy for it requires a
benign promoter like the US and the West. Thus, instead of responding to the
agenda of democratization the USAID and IMF discourses have set, should we not
talk about de-democratization?
It is not
the culture of Islam that makes democracy absent; rather it is the culture of
de-democratization by the Western powers that renders Middle East undemocratic.
There are several modalities and instances of this de-democratization. For our
purpose here, three will suffice: The July 3, 2013 unconstitutional deposition
of the elected President Mohammad Morse of Egypt through a brutal Military coup
d’état is the most recent classic example of de-democratization, the 1953 coup
against the elected Prime Minister Mohammad Musaddeq of Iran, and thwarting of
democracy in Bahrain. Musaddeq was a popular Iranian leader. He enjoyed the
approval of the Parliament for his nationalization program. As we know, the
US-UK comfortably toppled him. [9] The statement by the US Ambassador, in the
second epigraph, illustrates how Iran’s democracy was sacrificed to serve
national interests of the US-UK. In our view, this too is a classic example of
de-democratization we wanted to put on the record here. Another example is
Bahrain’s de-democratization from 1974 to 2005. [10]
does the ruthless pursuit
of ‘national interest’ and vocabulary of ‘geo-politics’ –supreme principles of
global political order –leave any room for a politics of ethics in planetary
terms? [11]
The Islamic
social systems always seek to form a tolerant and virtuous civil society and
thereby gain God’s approval and acceptance. It recognizes rights, duties and
responsibilities, not force, as the foundation of social life. Hostility is
unacceptable. Relationships must be based on belief, love, mutual respect,
assistance, and understanding instead of conflict and self centered realization
of personal greed or interest.
Our Social
awareness (consciousness) and education encourage the masses of the globe to
pursue lofty ideals and to strive for perfection, not just to run after our own
local desires. Calls for unity (tawhid), and virtue bring about mutual trust,
mutual support, solidarity, and belief system that secures brotherhood and
sisterhood encouraging the human soul to attain perfection that would bring true
happiness for all of our humanity through the concerted democratic efforts by
dedicated individuals, civil society institutions and best of democratic
governance by the governments locally and globally.
Historically, democracy has gone through so many different stages in the long
past, it will continue to evolve and improve further in the future. Along the
way, it will be shaped into a more humane and just governance system, one based
on righteousness and reality. If human beings are considered as a whole, without
disregarding the inner dimension of their existence and their spiritual needs,
without forgetting that human life is not limited to this mortal life and that
all people have a craving for eternity, and that democracy could reach its peak
of perfection bringing greater happiness for all. Islamic values and universal
principles of human free will, equality, accountability, justice, fairness,
openness, transparency
and mutual trust and tolerance can and will certainly help accomplish just that.
[12]
References:
[1]
Abulkalam Azad, ‘Al-Jihad, Al-Jihad: Al-Jihad fī sabīlil ḥurriyat’, Al-Hilāl
(December 18, 1912), p. 6.
[2] http://www.islamicwritings.org:
Islamic Writings; Islam and
Democracy-by Malek Bennabi, July 1, 2012.
[3] The
quotes on the first two pages are from John Keane’s book, The Life and Death of
Democracy. Simon and Schuster, London, 2009.
[4]
Love, Fear and the Destiny of Nations
(Paperback) -by
Richard Barrett June 29, 2012;
Published Fulfilling Books, Bath UK.
[5]
The Life and Death of
Democracy-by John Keane, W. W. Norton & Company (August 17, 2009).
[6] Keane,
The Life and Death of Democracy, p. 133.
[7] Ibid.
p. 140.
[8] Hadith
quoted by Fethullah Gülen in - A Comparative Approach to Islam and Democracy-by
Fethullah Gülen (January 7, 2013).
http://www.gulenmovement.us/a-comparative-approach-to-islam-and-democracy.html
[9] See
Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran
[10] Amy
Holmes, ‘The Political Economy of Protection: Democratization and the American
presence in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain’, paper at the conference US Democracy
Promotion in the Middle East, Melbourne University, October 2010.
[11]
Discussion on how ‘Islamophobia’ in Europe and elsewhere is a symptom of
‘homephilia/national identity’. I suggest ‘hotel/hostel’ as an alternative.
Irfan Ahmad, ‘In Defence of Hotel: Notes on Why Islamophobia Should Be Read as
Homephilia’, paper at the conference on Islamophobia: Fear of the Other (Monash
University, Melbourne, July 2009); also see my ‘is There an Ethics of Terrorism?
Islam, Globalization, Militancy’, South Asia 33(3) (2010): 487 — 498.
[12] A
Comparative Approach to Islam and Democracy-by Fethullah Gülen (January 7,
2013).
http://www.gulenmovement.us/a-comparative-approach-to-islam-and-democracy.html