2 - ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY: Re-examining the Intricate Relationship

Summary

At the turn of the millennium, the relationship between Islam and democracy is hotly contested and debated both in and outside the Muslim world. As democracy has entered the public sphere of the Muslim world through globalization, the Muslim world seems to have come under sustained attack. Muslim world-view concepts and institutions that here invincibly been upheld for many centuries, such as the concept of the Islamic state or empire (khilafah, or caliphate) are now challenged. The abrupt expansion of democracy has not only resulted in schisms among Muslims, but also shaken the theological underpinnings of Muslim civilization. Practically speaking, Muslim political thought is at a crossroads. The diversity of the intellectual responses to this debate is unavoidable, not only because of Islam, but also because the socio-political constellations of the Muslim world are sophisticated and multifaceted.

The reasons for this are at least threefold: First, public debate about the relationship between Islam and democracy was stirred up by “cultural-essentialist” scholars such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel P. Huntington, and Francis Fukuyama, who suggested that Islam is by nature incompatible with democracy. This thesis invited much controversy and has been rejected by other scholars, particularly those representing the “structuralist-instrumentalist approach”. Second, the tragic events of September 11, 2001, being perpetrated by the international Muslim radicals of Al-Qaeda, were perceived by many as confirming the presence of a fault line between the Christian West and Islam. Third, in the dynamic internal debates among Muslims, a few major Islamist groups axiomatically rejected the notion of democracy, claiming that Islam is the best and only all-encompassing religion for dealing not only with matters in the world to come but also in the present world. Democracy, for these Islamists, is considered as alien to Islam because it comes from a culture of non-believers. For these groups, the adoption of democracy would constitute a revolt against God's most supreme law, that is, Islamic Shari‘ah.

This part seeks to reexamine the intricate relationship between Islam and democracy from a theoretical perspective, starting with a discussion of cultural essentialist approaches to democracy. Then the counter-arguments of the structural-instrumentalist school are elucidated, and finally an overview of the internal debate among Muslims themselves is presented.