Islam & Democracy

Patrick S. O’Donnell (2023)

Akbar’s court

“[The Mughal Emperor] Akbar’s overarching thesis that the ‘pursuit of reason’ rather than
‘reliance on tradition’ is the way to address difficult problems of social harmony included a
robust celebration of reasoned dialogues. [….] [In keeping with his ‘sponsorship and support
for dialogues between adherents of different faiths,’] Akbar not only made unequivocal
pronouncements on the priority of tolerance, but also laid the foundations of a secular legal
structure and of religious neutrality of the state, which included the duty to ensure that ‘no man
should be interfered with on account of religion, and anyone is allowed to go over to a religion
that pleases him.’ [….] While the historical background of Indian secularism can be traced to the
trend of thinking that had begun to take root well before Akbar, the politics of secularism
received a tremendous boost from Akbar’s championing of pluralist ideals, along with his
insistence that the state should be completely impartial between different religions. Akbar’s
own political decisions also reflected his pluralist commitments, well exemplified even by his
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insistence on filling his court with non-Muslims intellectuals and artists (including the great
Hindu musician Tansen) in addition to Muslim ones, and, rather remarkably, by his trusting a
Hindu former king (Raja Man Singh) who had been defeated earlier by Akbar, to serve as the
general commander of his armed forces.” — Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on
Indian History, Culture and Identity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005): 16-19

* * *

First, a superb general introduction to our subject matter by Adam Przeworski:

“… [T]he idea that Weber saw in Protestantism the wellspring of modern democracy is
widespread among contemporary political scientists. In the most influential article on the
conditions for democratic stability, [Seymour M.] Lipset claimed that ‘It has been argued by
Max Weber among others that the factors making for democracy in this area [northwest Europe
and their English-speaking offsprings in America and Australasia] are a historically unique
concatenation of elements, part of the complex which also produced capitalism in this area,’
because ‘The emphasis within Protestantism on individual responsibility furthered the
emergence of democratic values.’ In turn, Catholicism, in Lipset’s view, was antithetical to
democracy in pre-Second World War Europe and Latin America.

In his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Lipset attributed the
origins of these views not to Weber but to Tocqueville, again without indicating a specific text.
Yet, Tocqueville, referring to Irish immigrants, not only observed that ‘Ces catholiques …
forment la classe la plus républicaine et la plus démocratique qui soit aux Etats Unis,’ but went
on to conclude that ‘on a tort de regarder la religion catholique comme un ennemi naturel de la
démocratie,’ pointing in particular to the egalitarian features of Catholicism.

Catholicism is not the worst enemy of democracy: Islam and Confucianism hold the palm (S.N.
Eisenstadt). [Samuel P.] Huntington reported that ‘No scholarly disagreement exists regarding
the proposition that traditional Confucianism was either undemocratic or antidemocratic.’
Similar views about Islam abound.

Yet Lee Teng Hui, former president of Taiwan, found in traditional Confucianism an emphasis
on limited government that is essential to democracy. And a systematic review of writings on
Confucianism and democracy, [Huyg Baeg] Im found a very mixed picture: on the one hand,
Confucianism has no concept of civil society and no concept of individual rights (but instead of
roles people should perform) or of the rule of law [compare the rule of li] but, on the other
hand, it has deep traditions of limited government, recognizes the right of rebellion against
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rulers who deviate from the prescribed ‘Way,’ is religiously tolerant, and is antimilitaristic.
Moreover, at least in Korea, a plurality of opinion, a public sphere, existed during the six
centuries of the Chosun dynasty.

The discussion within and about Islam is equally complex. According to Esposito and Voll, the
three basic tenets of Islam lend themselves and have been subject to more or less undemocratic
interpretations. Thus, the principle of the Unity of God (tawhid), while requiring consistency
with God’s laws, can leave interpretation of them to every capable and qualified Muslim and
need not be inconsistent with a system of government in which the executive ‘is constituted by
the general will of the Moslems who have also the right to depose it’ or with ‘an assembly
whose members are the real representatives of the people.’ Similarly, the principle of God’s
representative on earth (khilafah) need not be interpreted in individual terms but can be
extended to all men and women. Finally, the traditions of consultation, consensus, and
independent interpretive judgment can be used as arguments for or against democracy.
Eickelman and Piscatori show that such doctrinal interpretations have in the past served and
now serve to justify quite different political arrangements.

There are several reasons to doubt that cultures, or civilizations, as [Ali A.] Mazrui prefers to
think of Islam, furnish requisites for or constitute irremovable barriers to democracy. First, the
arguments relating civilizations to democracy appear terribly ex post: if many countries
dominated by Protestants are democratic, we look for features of Protestantism that promote
democracy; if no Muslim countries are democratic, obviously there must be something about
Islam that is antidemocratic. [….]

Second, one can find elements in every culture, Protestantism included, that appear compatible
and elements that seem incompatible with democracy. Protestant legitimation of economic
inequality, not to speak of the very ethic of self-interest, offers a poor moral basis for living
together and resolving conflicts in a peaceful way. Other cultures are authoritarian but
egalitarian, hierarchical but respectful of the right of rebellion, communal but tolerant of
diversity. So one can pick and choose.

Third, each of the religious traditions has been historically compatible with a broad range of
political arrangements. Tunisia is not Afghanistan, South Korea is not North Korea, Costa Rica
is not El Salvador, postwar Germany is not Hitler’s Germany. This range is not the same for
different religious traditions but is broad enough in each case to demonstrate that these
traditions are quite flexible with regard to the political arrangements which they can be made
compatible.
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Finally, and most important, tradition s are not given for once and all, they are continually
invented and reinvented …. In fact, the very analyses of the Confucian tradition just cited are
best seen as attempts to invent a democratic Confucianism [these attempts have markedly
increased since this was published]. Cultures are made of cloth, but the fabric of culture drapes
different in the hands of different tailors. [….]

Contrary to Lipset or Almond and Verba, Weber himself thought that the political role of
organized religions depends on their interests, not their content: ‘The widely varying empirical
strands which historical religions have taken in the fact of political action have been determined
by the entanglement of religious organizations in power interests and in struggles for power, …
by the usefulness and the use of religious organizations for the political taming of the masses
and, especially, by the need of the powers-that-be for the religious consecration of their
legitimacy.’ [….] Thus the claim that the antidemocratic proclivities of ‘civilizations’ are given
once and for all hurls itself against historical experience. To go back to [John Stuart] Mill,
‘People are more easily induced to do, and do more easily, what they are already used to; but
people also learn to do things new to them.’” — Adam Przeworksi in Maravall and Przeworski,
eds., Democracy and the Rule of Law (2003: 123-128)

* * *

Democracy, or “rule by the people” (typically, a majority thereof) is a term that has been used to
describe a number of different kinds of government: from ancient Greek city-states (e.g.,
Athens) to the contemporary (liberal, corporatist, and social democratic) welfare states of
Europe and North America, to the myriad post-World War II democracies (particularly since
the 1970s) around the globe, North and South, East and West. Today, democratic rule is usually
connected to Liberal ideas and ideals of governance and government by popularly elected
officials who legislate and enforce the laws in accordance with constitutionally ensconced
notions of individual liberties and civil rights, hence “the people” rule indirectly through those
elected to represent their considered preferences and interests as expressed in the voting booth
(of course the nature of ‘representation’ is a bit more complicated that). Historically, Islamic
juridical and political thought has legitimated various kinds of governance: from the despotic to
the benign. Indeed, the bountiful intellectual fruits of Islamic traditions—philosophical,
theological, jurisprudential, mystical—are capable of justifying (through the provision of what
philosophers, after Bernard Williams, term ‘internal’ reasons) a wide array of political models
and forms of political behavior and rule, including models and forms of democratic governance
and government (Hashemi, 2009 and March, 2009). We cannot here address a recent claim by
Wael Hallaq that is clearly germane to our discussion, namely, that “[t]he ‘Islamic state,’ judged
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by any standard definition of what the modern state represents, is both an impossibility and a
contradiction in terms.”

More than a few professors, pundits, policy makers (largely on the Right, but some on the Left
as well), and the public in their wake, together with self-described “jihadists,” Salafists and
some Islamists have assumed or argued that Islam and democracy are inherently incompatible
(or that ‘Islam’ has its own, unique version of democracy formulated in a Quranic idiom), or
that cultural and political beliefs and values found in Islamic traditions preclude the birth of
anything remotely resembling liberal “Islamic democracy” (the locution is somewhat misleading
and thus could better be described as a Muslim-majority Liberal democracy), or that Muslims
cannot reconcile their beliefs and values with citizenship in predominantly non-Muslim liberal
democratic societies (capitalist democracies). Nevertheless, empirical studies confirm the fact
that such cultural accounts and explanations (or rationalizations) “have little relevance for the
emergence and durability of democracies” (Przeworski, Cheibub, and Limongi in Dahl, et al.,
eds., 2003: 181). Asef Bayat succinctly makes our point yet another way: “Nothing intrinsic to
Islam—or for that matter, any other religion—makes it inherently democratic or undemocratic.”
Today a clarion call from Muslims around the world is heard on behalf of the virtues of
democratic values and principles (perhaps the most fundamental of which is a moral if not
metaphysical conception of the dignity of the individual human being), methods and processes.
These aspirations include but extend beyond electoral or procedural democracy, particularly
insofar as they express an ardent desire for liberties and rights of Liberal provenance, some of
which are recognized in international law as basic human (civil and political) rights. The largely
nonviolent political voices of the “Arab street” or the “streets of revolution” in the Middle East
and North Africa (Bayat, 2010), as well as the majority preferences of non-Arabic Muslims
around the world, provide persuasive evidence in favor of ballots (‘paper stones’) not bullets,
for a constitutional separation of powers, including an independent judiciary, formal equality
before the law, the right to due process, and counter-majority protection of minorities (so as to
avoid the ‘tyranny of the majority’).

We may in fact be witnessing the longue durée of a nonviolent socio-political (and possibly
economic) revolution in the Middle East that pivots around a democratic axis of beliefs and
values, a revolution with several possible beginnings, perhaps the foremost being the Kefaya
(‘Enough’) movement/Egyptian Movement for Change that crystallized in 2004 but emerged
earlier from pro-Palestinian protests during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, fashioned as committees of
solidarity under its umbrella organization, the Egyptian People’s Committee for the Support of
the Palestinian Intifada (EPCSPI). From there we can note Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution” (or
‘Independence Intifada’) of 2005-06, Iran’s “Green” Revolution and social movement
commencing with the summer of 2009, Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution that began in December of
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2010, soon followed by the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. The “revolutions” (in scare quotes
because their revolutionary character was not always evident and they were not, for the most
part, successful) that occurred in Tunisia and Egypt have come to be known as the tipping
point, as it were, for the “Arab Spring,” sparking largely (and at least in the first instance)
nonviolent demonstrations and protests, acts of resistance and revolt that eventually spread to
every country in the Middle East and much of North Africa. The short-term results of these
revolts and “revolutions” are rather bleak (with the exception of Tunisia), but a definitive
assessment of their long-term consequences awaits the passage of time, not unlike the manner
in which historians and political theorists have assessed the more significant democratic effects
of the French Revolution. Protests and revolts in the region suggest militant or jihadist Muslims
represent abhorrent exceptions to the norms of democratic yearning and nonviolent activism
among Muslims in the Middle East and elsewhere in the contemporary world. Alas, many
Muslims continue to contend with the oppressive terms and conditions of life within
authoritarian regimes marked by “a structural propensity for violence—deeply embedded at all
levels of the state apparatus,” but concentrated in the security services and Interior ministries
(Mallat, 2015). In any case, we have to some extent identified a cluster of social-psychological
and political variables that decisively contribute to the behavioral and ideological “de-
radicalization” of jihadists (armed Islamist movements). It remains to be seen if the relevant
parties will summon the requisite political will, courage, and timely exploitation of opportunity
and knowledge to properly take advantage of these variables.

In short, Islamic democracy—that is, democratic regimes in predominantly Muslim countries—

is not an oxymoron and thus one can be both a Muslim and a (Liberal) democrat, the warrant
for same found within the historical corpus of Islamic traditions, at least on some plausible or
reasonable interpretations and construals of their contents. One does not have to be a
“comprehensive” Liberal (or for that matter, a Lockean, Kantian, or Millian) in order to be in
favor of Liberal political freedoms, for the “defining feature of a liberal is a commitment to
specific policies or rights, which can be arrived at from various ethical and philosophical
[viewpoints and comprehensive doctrines]” (Rawls, 1993 and March, 2009), including—and
eschewing monolithic or essentialist formulations of—Islam. From within the Islamic “sciences”
and “first-order moral traditions,” such as Quranic exegesis, commentary on ahadith,
jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh), and legal-ethical ruling (furu al-fiqh or ahkam), one can discover the
requisite ethical and legal materials from which to construct an Islamic doctrine of (liberal)
democratic citizenship. The political ideal of Liberalism as a theory of social cooperation,
including the goals and values of fairness, shared political sovereignty, distributive justice, and
the social stability that is both cause and effect of an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls, 1993),
requires a “morally motivated commitment to a political community, the rights of fellow
citizens, and a political system” (March, 2009). Contemporary Muslims thus have—and many
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more may yet find—ample reason to identify and articulate the religiously derived moral and
legal resources that motivate liberal and democratic commitment.

Minimalist, proceduralist, or “thin” theories of democracy focus on the electoral components of

the democratic process, the desiderata being free and fair, multiparty elections by secret and
universal ballot. Such theories are often termed “elitist,” inspired by Joseph Schumpeter’s
model in which voters merely choose among policy packages developed by teams of elites
constituted principally as political parties. What matters here is that “everyone has equal power
over what eventually comes out of the political process, it does not matter how the process
produces the result” (Goodin, 2003), although such “output-oriented” democrats are
constrained by their ability to accurately anticipate or predict people’s preferences, be it during
agenda-setting or at election time (we cannot address here the nature of such preferences, which
may be malformed, adaptive, ‘laundered,’ myopic, and so forth). An electoral democracy is a
constitutional order in which the chief executive (for example, a president or prime minister)
and legislative offices are filled through regular and competitive elections. As Adam
Przeworski correctly appreciates, “the miracle of democracy is that conflicting political forces
obey the results of voting” (Przeworski in Dahl, et al., eds., 2003: 12). Egypt and Iran, for
example, count as (not Liberal) ‘democracies’ according to this elitist or proceduralist model,
despite otherwise conspicuous authoritarian features. Accordingly, democratic theorists (e.g.,
Goodin, 2003 and 2008) remind us that free and fair elections are necessary yet not sufficient
conditions for robust democratic rule (hence the significance of the theory and praxis of
‘participatory’ and ‘deliberative’ democracy, the latter in both ‘internal’-reflective and
‘external’-collective senses).

Different—contestable if not controversial—standards and criteria, in addition to those found in

the proceduralist model, have been used to assess whether or not a regime qualifies as a
“democracy,” the foremost being those found in the indices of the U.S.-based NGO, Freedom
House, and the Economist Intelligence Unit (an independent business of the British-based
multinational media company, The Economist Group). And so, by way of illustration,
Afghanistan, Algeria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (and other Arab states of the Persian Gulf, save
Kuwait), Syria, and Yemen are ranked as unambiguously authoritarian regimes. One might
reasonably argue about Iran being grouped among these states, given its periodic signs of
democratic promise and potential: its history of constitutionalism, the various classes and
motley social forces mobilized for its 1978-79 Revolution, the reform movement led Mohammad
Khatami (1997-2005), and recurring “Green movement” protests, as well as the recent protests
sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody. Countries with “partial” or “flawed”
democratic attributes include (again, by way of example), Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon,
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and Morocco. Finally, we might describe Indonesia, Malaysia, Senegal, and (for a time not long
ago at least) Turkey, as more or less, “democratic.”

However, historically recalcitrant problems persist for would-be democratic countries in the
Islamic world: executive offices are often uncontested; opposition parties face unreasonable if
not unwarranted government restrictions (not a few parties are routinely ‘banned’ for this or
that reason), with often limited access to a mass media that does not enjoy the rights of a “free
press” (and governments are learning how, with the help of transnational firms, to thwart new
‘social media’ technologies as well as conduct intrusive and privacy-violating forms of
electronic surveillance). In addition to voting fraud, authoritarian elites do not hesitate to resort
to insidious forms of (often otherwise ‘legal’) “electoral engineering” to achieve favorable
electoral outcomes. Perchance increased international election monitoring can continue to
discourage or prevent attempts at the more blatant forms of electoral manipulation. In sum, the
growth and consolidation of democracy in the Islamic world must confront egregious
difficulties and enormous obstacles: authoritarian political traditions and rural communalist
orientations (including entrenched ulema with medievalist-like responses to the conditions of
modernity); legacies of colonialist rule (including the effects of anti-colonial nationalist
struggles that lacked liberal democratic priorities) and ongoing imperialist interference; the
need to implement economic reforms by way of integration into the global economy while
steering clear of top-down neoliberal economic agendas and corresponding austerity measures;
and bureaucratically bloated and inefficient despotic states with excessive security and military
expenditures. Political economists and democratic theorists alike know all too keenly that
rentier states, such as the Persian Gulf monarchies, pose peculiar problems for democratic
development.

As part and parcel of formal institutional and electoral participation, some Salafi and reformist
Islamists have formed alliances and coalitions with “secularist” parties and movements, thereby
(formally or temporarily) renouncing the resort to violence. Denying Islamists participation in
electoral politics can have deleterious if not devastating effects, as in Algeria when the Islamic
Salvation Front (FIS) eventually turned to horrific forms of violence as its principal strategy of
opposition. Elsewhere, denial of formal political participation combined with government-
initiated repression has prompted Islamists to engage predominantly in the politics of civil
society, as with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the 1980s and ‘90s. And Islamist
parties demonstrating some level of commitment to democratic principles and procedures are
found, for example, in Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Jordan, Malaysia,
and Indonesia, as well in several of the republics of the former Soviet Union.
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It appears that the sustained participation of Islamists in new social movements, opposition
coalitions, and novel institutional sites in which they are intimately engaged with non-Islamist
political actors (say, secular Leftists or human rights advocates) has subtle but profound effects
on aspects of their individual lifeworlds and shared worldviews as they come to conform to
norms of rhetoric and conduct intrinsic to democratically constituted and animated civil society
fora. As Carry Rosefsky Wickham explains, such moral-psychological and socio-political
adaptation finds actors eventually compelled to explicitly confront the possible epistemic
justification of these adapted or adopted preferences, if only to avoid cognitive dissonance: “As
Islamist actors have assumed new roles and responsibilities, it can be theorized that they have
developed new competencies and skills and adapted their behavior to the norms and
expectations of the institutions of which they are a part.” We should make plain that the
corresponding modification of beliefs and values among these actors includes a novel
commitment to the moral value and political importance of democratic procedures and
mechanisms, including those internal-reflective and collective-deliberative processes that make
for substantive or meaningful aggregative democratic outcomes insofar as they now involve a
direct connection to the “inputs” of a significant number of citizens who heretofore have
thought and acted in relative isolation. We should thus encourage and enhance the
opportunities for Islamists to participate in intimately “intensive forms of dialogue, deliberation
and cooperation” with a diverse array of non-Islamist political actors, particularly those already
engaged in a “global discourse on democracy and human rights as well as local arguments in
favor of democratic reform.” Not surprisingly, one effect or by-product of such sustained and
intensive political participation outside insular Islamist networks has been “the increased
resonance of new and more progressive readings of Islam.” The enhanced availability of
“alternative interpretive frameworks … facilitates the ‘hybridization’ of democratic values or
their articulation in a local idiom.” The subtle and profound means of “democracy promotion”
outlined here strikes one as preferable to the initiatives and programs under this same rubric
sponsored by foreign government agencies, private corporations, and outside NGOs that
unabashedly bundle ostensible democracy promotion with neoliberal ideology and policy
prescriptions, as captured in the slogan, “free elections, free markets.”

Given the comparative economic conditions of many Muslim-majority countries outside the
Persian Gulf Arab states, it’s some comfort to learn that the level of economic development
provides little information by way of assessing the prospects for a transition to democracy,
although per capita income does correlate with the sustainability of democratic regimes.
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References and Further Reading

 Abou El Fadl, Khaled, Joshua Cohen, and Deborah Chasmen, eds., Islam and the
Challenge of Democracy: A Boston Review Book (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
2004).
 Bayat, Asef. Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
 Bayat, Asef. Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2010).
 Dahl, Robert A. Ian Shapiro and José Antonio Chiebub, eds., The Democracy Sourcebook
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003).
 Enayat, Hamid. Modern Islamic Political Thought (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
1982).
 Esposito, John L. and John O. Voll, eds., Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
 Feldman, Noah. After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
 Gaus, Gerald F. Contemporary Theories of Liberalism: Public Reason as a Post-Enlightenment
Project (London: Sage, 2003).
 Goodin, Robert E. Reflective Democracy (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003).
 Goodin, Robert E. Innovating Democracy: Democratic Theory and Practice After the
Deliberative Turn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
 Habib, Irfan, ed. Akbar and His India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997).
 Hashemi, Nader. Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Theory for
Muslim Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
 Holmes, Stephen. Passions and Constraint: On the Theory of Liberal Democracy (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
 Keane, John. The Life and Death of Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).
 Kurzman, Charles ed. Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press,
1998).
 Lynch, Marc ed., The Arab Uprisings Explained: New Contentious Politics in the Middle East
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
 Mallat, Chibli. Philosophy of Nonviolence: Revolution, Constitutionalism, and Justice beyond
the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
 Maravall, José María and Adam Przeworski, eds. Democracy and the Rule of Law
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
 March, Andrew F. Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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 Moosvi, Shireen. Episodes in the Life of Akbar: Contemporary Records and Reminiscences
(Delhi: Director, National Book Trust, India, 1994).
 Piscatori, James. “Islam, Islamists, and the Electoral Principle in the Middle East”
(Leiden, The Netherlands: International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern
World (ISIM).
 Rawls, John. Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
 Urbinati, Nadia. Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
 Urbinati, Nadia. Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2006).
 Wickham, Carrie Rosefsky. The Muslim Brotherhood: Evolution of an Islamist Movement
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

Relevant Bibliographies (freely available for viewing or download on my Academia page)

 The Modern Arab World
 Constitutionalism
 Criminal Law (municipal and international)
 Democratic Theory & Praxis
 Democracy, Elections, and Money
 Elections and Voting
 Human Rights
 Modern Iran
 Islamic Studies
 Islam & Jurisprudence
 The Political Philosophy of Liberalism
 Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East (with an emphasis on the Palestinian struggle)
 Sufism
 Theology and Philosophy in Islamic Traditions
 Violent Conflict and the Laws of War

For a basic introduction to Islam, please see my “study guide” for same:
https://www.academia.edu/5289597/Islam_study_guide