| Islam poses no threat to democracy, say CDEM panelists BY MATT GETTY Given the struggles fledgling democracies have faced in Iraq and Afghanistan, some have begun to wonder whether or not democracy is incompatible with the Muslim world. At a recent Center for Democracy and Election Management (CDEM) conference, however, experts dispelled the myth that Islam and political freedom can’t coexist. During “Transitions to Democracy in the Middle East and North Africa: Lesson from Other Regions,” speakers argued that culture, development, and external factors—but not religion—pose the real roadblocks to democracy in the Middle East. “There is nothing in the Koran that represents a challenge to democracy,” said Laith Kubba, National Endowment for Democracy senior program officer for the Middle East and North Africa. In fact, he explained, the religious text encourages Muslims to “question authority” rather than accept tyrannical rule. Similarly, University of Richmond law professor Azizah Al-Hibri argued that Islam supports the basic democratic principle of equality. The Koran, she argued, clearly establishes “the equality of all human beings.” Though a few verses in the Koran have been interpreted to oppress women, she argued that those passages were misinterpreted because they contradict so many others. A basic principle of the Koran, she explained, “is that if you interpret any verse so that it contradicts another verse, you’ve misinterpreted it.” The challenge to democracy and civil liberty in the region, panelists agreed, is not Islam, but rather the way Islam has been adapted by cultures with long-standing histories of tyranny. “Today when we talk about religion, we are talking not about Islam, but about Islams,” said Kubba, explaining that the Koran has been interpreted differently in various areas of the world. In much of the Middle East, he argued, Islam has been warped to support tyranny because stretching back to the Ottoman empire of the sixteenth century, tyranny is all those countries have known. “Today,” he said, “we still see strong fingerprints of the Ottoman Empire’s political culture in the Middle East.” That’s likely to remain the case, Kubba said, as long as the region’s monarchies offer greater stability. Currently, he said, there’s little outcry for freedom because countries like Iraq and Afghanistan have yet to show that there’s any real benefit to democracy. “Unless there’s a clear link in their minds between democracy and development, they’re not going to go for it,” Kubba said. Additionally, the panel agreed, foreign policy in the West plays an important role. Rather than supporting democracy in the region as most believe, said Harvard professor Emad Shahin, the West is actually limiting it. While pro-Western regimes like the Saudi monarchy have U.S. support, he explained, grassroots democratic movements within Hezbollah and Hamas inspire fear because of the organizations’ terrorist links. “The Middle East is being ruled by pro-Western autocrats,” he said. “And the democratic resistance appears to be anti-Western . . . [The West] hasn’t made up its mind between concerns over national security and supporting democracy in the region.” Father Patrick Ryan, Fordham University vice president for mission and ministry, argued that Islam needs to play a role in any democracies in the region. Explaining the subtle difference between secularity and secularism, he argued that developing democracies should embrace secularity, which limits religion’s influence in the public sphere without expressing “hostility toward religion itself.” But secularism, as practiced in the former Soviet Union and nineteenth-
century Turkey, he said, is antagonistic toward religion and therefore would not work in the region. Despite the challenges they laid out, all of the panelists agreed that democracy in the Middle East is possible. Panel chair Robert Pastor, CDEM director and AU’s vice president of international affairs, pointed to history as proof that what appears impossible can become possible. Decades ago, he explained, many argued that religion in Latin America posed an insurmountable obstacle to democracy, but today that argument is laughable. “The general consensus was that Catholic countries could not be democratic,” said Pastor. The argument that Islamic countries can’t be democratic “will likely fall by the wayside as that one has.” The talk on religion’s role in democracy in the Middle East was one of five panel discussions at the daylong event. Cosponsored by the Council for a Community of Democracies, the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, and the International Centre for Democratic Transition, the conference also gathered ambassadors, United Nations consultants, and other experts to discuss challenges to democracy in the Middle East and North Africa. |
