5 - THEOLOGY OF RESISTANCE: On the Utopian Islamist Rejection of Democracy

Summary

THE ISLAMISTS’ CONCEPTION OF DEMOCRACY

The Islamists’ conception and understanding of democracy cannot be separated from the tightly knit, dialectical relationship between what they presume to be “pure Islam” and its supposedly external elements. Historical experience and the imagination of the past play a crucial part in the ceaseless forging of an Islamic identity. The sanctification of the pious deeds of their predecessors is recalled with a great deal of intensity in Islamists’ memories. Islamists would undoubtedly regard their pious predecessors (salaf al-salih) as normative models for their own beliefs and actions in the future. Nevertheless, this condition leads to the intermingling of normative texts with normative historical deeds, each of which occupies the Islamists’ minds as supreme references in generating discourses on democracy. In other words, Islamists are preoccupied with the idea of an imagined identity derived from the imagined combination of sacred texts and their historical past. This in turn feeds into the process of their identification of “self ” and “other”. In this context, it is not surprising that democracy tends to be defined by utopian Islamists within this Manichaean conceptual framework. As a result, democracy will never mean merely the “self ” without also implicitly mirroring the “other”. This bipolar frame of thinking is adopted by Islamist groups in order that the purity of the “self ” might be preserved from the ceaselessly corrupt, wicked, and evil “other”.

Thus, it is understandable that the Islamists feel themselves enmeshed in a never-ending battle to defend what they claim as the authentic self and to repudiate what they refer to as the inauthentic other. They are at times caught up in overwhelmingly xenophobic attitudes towards anything outwardly new. As a result, Islamists are tremendously selective, if not overly protective, in their cultural, political, and social encounters with anything perceived as “strange” or “alien”. This is because they are afraid that their sanctified identity will be torn apart. This is why Islamists are always quick to say “no” to democracy, particularly as this word is derived from the “un-Islamic” West and is not explicitly spelled out in their sacred texts. Nevertheless, this negative response is usually followed by a fairly prudential consideration of democracy. However, Islamists argue that the precise meaning of democracy cannot be grasped unless one refers to the Western tradition as its origin.