1 Boring Old Man

Islam and Democracy

The relationship between Islam and democracy is strongly debated among the people who identify with the Islamic resurgence in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Some of these Islamists believe that “democracy” is a foreign concept that has been imposed by Westernizers and secular reformers upon Muslim societies. They often argue that the concept of popular sovereignty denies the fundamental Islamic affirmation of the sovereignty of God and is, therefore, a form of idolatry.

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The Islamic tradition contains a number of key concepts that are presented by Muslims as the key to “Islamic democracy.” Most would agree that it is important for Muslims not simply to copy what non-Muslims have done in creating democratic systems, emphasizing that there are different forms that legitimate democracy can take. Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami, in a television interview in June before that country’s presidential elections, noted that “the existing democracies do not necessarily follow one formula or aspect. It is possible that a democracy may lead to a liberal system. It is possible that democracy may lead to a socialist system. Or it may be a democracy with the inclusion of religious norms in the government. We have accepted the third option.” Khatami presents a view common among the advocates of Islamic democracy that “today world democracies are suffering from a major vacuum, which is the vacuum of spirituality,” and that Islam can provide the framework for combining democracy with spirituality and religious government.

The synthesis of spirituality and government builds on a fundamental affirmation at the heart of Islam: the proclamation that “There is no divinity but The God” and the affirmation of the “oneness” of God. This concept, called tawhid, provides the foundation for the idea that one cannot separate different aspects of life into separate compartments. Ali Shariati, who made important contributions to the ideological development of the Islamic revolution in Iran, wrote in On the Sociology of Islam, that tawhid “in the sense of oneness of God is of course accepted by all monotheists. But tauhid as a world view … means regarding the whole universe as a unity, instead of dividing it into this world and the here-after … spirit and body.” In this worldview, the separation of religion from politics creates a spiritual vacuum in the public arena and opens the way for political systems that have no sense of moral values. From such a perspective, a secular state opens the way for the abuse of power. The experiences of Muslim societies with military regimes that are secularist in ideological origin, such as the Baath Arab Socialist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, reinforce this mistrust of separating religious values from politics.

Advocates of Islamic democracy argue that the Oneness of God requires some form of democratic system; conservatives contend that the idea of the sovereignty of the people contradicts the sovereignty of God; often the alternative then becomes some form of a monarchical system. The response to this is an affirmation of tawhid, as expressed by a Sudanese intellectual, Abdelwahab El-Affendi, in the October 2000 edition of Islam 21: “No Muslim questions the sovereignty of God or the rule of Shari’ah [the Islamic legal path]. However, most Muslims do (and did) have misgivings about any claims by one person that he is sovereign. The sovereignty of one man contradicts the sovereignty of God, for all men are equal in front of God…