/ 5 April 2007

Whose democracy is it anyway?

University of Cape Town historian Shamil Jeppie is impatient with the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>'s question: Is Islam compatible with democracy? "Would you bother to ask, 'Is Roman Catholicism compatible with democracy?'" he shoots back. "The NG Kerk provided a Christian rationale for one of the most undemocratic states of the 20th century."

University of Cape Town historian Shamil Jeppie is impatient with the Mail & Guardian‘s question: Is Islam compatible with democracy? “Would you bother to ask, ‘Is Roman Catholicism compatible with democracy?'” he shoots back.

“The NG Kerk provided a Christian rationale for one of the most undemocratic states of the 20th century. Does this mean that we must be suspicious of Christianity as a global threat to democracy?”

Jeppie goes further, arguing that these are unexamined assumptions in the often-highlighted contrast between Western states and an Islamic state like Iran. “How democratic were Western nations during their colonial expansionist era? Reasonably democratic at home, yes, but tyrannical in their colonial fiefdoms abroad.

“How democratic has Bush’s decision­-making been on the war in Iraq? And what genuine allegiance do Western democracies have to the democratic values they claim to espouse, when they support tin-pot dictatorships, as they routinely do when it serves their strategic or material interests?”

His point is: what gives the Western tradition the right to pose such a question, and what makes it believe it has the exclusive right to adjudicate on the answer?

He continues: “Democracy in the Western world evolved; it wasn’t born in a vacuum. It wasn’t until 1880 that atheists were allowed in Britain’s Parliament, only in the 1920s that women received the vote, and only in the last few decades that homosexuality has been decriminalised.

“Islam is itself not homogenous; it consists of many strands and traditions. There have been three women heads of state in Islamic countries. In fact, in public life at all levels in Islamic states — with the exception of Saudi Arabia — there are large numbers of women. Women’s rights in Muslim societies are not the one-dimensional matter they are typically taken to be.”

Islamic scholars argue that there are democratic traditions in Islam that Westerners do not recognise, and suggest that Islamic theocracy is different from the theocratic systems of European history.

They contend that it is not ruled by a religious class but by the Muslim community, including the rank and file — the entire population runs the state in accordance with scripture. The claim is that government of this kind is a “theo-democracy” or divine democracy, as it gives Muslims limited popular sovereignty “under the suzerainty of God”.

The executive is constituted by the general will of the Muslims, who have also the right to depose it. Every Muslim who is qualified to give a sound opinion on Islamic law is entitled to do so, when interpretation becomes necessary.

Western secular freethinkers would object to the concept of the “suzerainty of God”. But it is not such an alien notion: millions of Americans who regard themselves as exemplary democrats would accept it.

Jeppie insists that geopolitical forces have played a major role in shaping the states that have emerged in the Middle East. The West’s acceptance of the disenfranchisement of the Palestinians, and deal-making with despots, principally in the interests of oil supply, explain the reactions of many Muslims, he says.

There are older traditions. When modern Muslim states gained independence, a significant body of opinion favoured the state model in the West. Separation of state and religion became a popular idea, especially among Western-educated intellectuals. Fuelling such movements was the desire of Muslim elites to catch up economically with the West. Turkey’s Kemel Ataturk and Tunisia’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, believed Islam was an impediment to modernity.

The sultan of the Ottoman Empire introduced a Constitution and Parliament in the 1870s, while Turkey, its successor state, underwent secular transformation in the 1920s.

Iran had an extended struggle over constitutional government between 1905 and 1911 and again after World War II, when it passed through a period of secular democratic rule, and the Egyptians worked through the colonially created Parliament in the 1920s.

Tunisian leader and political exile Rashid Ghanoushi recently argued in the London Observer that Islamic doctrine and practice contains nothing inherently antagonistic to democracy, defined as government under popular control and where human rights are entrenched.

“If by democracy is meant … a system under which the people freely choose their representatives and leaders, in which there is an alternation of power, as well as all freedoms and human rights for the public, then Muslims will find nothing in their religion to oppose democracy, and it is not in their interests to do so,” Ghanoushi said.

Mark Tessler, a Middle East expert at the University of Michigan who has written extensively about Islam and democracy, cited Turkey as an example of how the participation of moderate Islamic parties in the political process enabled states to move away from slogans such as “Islam is the answer” — the watchword of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood — towards practical solutions and programmes.

But the popular perception that such states are irreligious and puppets of Western, and particularly the United States, imperialist interests has proved a major stumbling block to the modernising efforts of the secularists.

Central to reversing the tide was the Iranian Revolution of 1980, which overthrew the US-backed dictatorship of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Largely as a result of American interventions in the Middle East, including its war in Iraq, secular Islamic moderates are now everywhere under pressure.

What does the Qur’an say about statecraft? Like the holy books of Christianity and Judaism, it is a document from which conflicting views can be extracted.

As fundamentalist monotheisms, which admit to no limitation in the power and autonomy of God, all three religions are essentially anti-democratic.

It could be argued that liberal democracy has been achieved in the West only because religious fundamentalism has bowed to the suzerainty of human interests. And this is a continuing process, into which we are all locked.

Islamic democracy in Africa

More than 90% of the Senagalese population is Muslim, and yet the country’s first president after independence in 1960, Leopold Senghor, was a Roman Catholic. He stayed in office for 20 years. Successive presidents have been non-Muslims. The country has had its problems, but it has sustained a GDP growth rate of 5% per annum for more than 10 years, on the basis of a market-led economy.

Presidents are subject to election every five years. The country has never succumbed to military rule, and has a track record of peace-keeping in the region. It would be hard to say that it is any the less democratic than the United States. Its neighbour Mali, also a Muslim country, has been democratic since the early 1990s.