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PRESENTATION BY
UNIVESITY OF MICHIGAN PROFESSOR
JUAN COLE
SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 2008
I think that the current focus on the pairing of “Islam and democracy” – despite it’s popularity in today’s media – is misses the mark. Democracy is a form of governance. And I don’t think that anyone completely understands the “why” and “how” people adopt particular forms of governance. Importantly, people’s choice of a form of governance also has a lot to do with things other than culture (e.g., the fact that they’re Muslim or Catholic). I can’t personally find an overlap between forms of governance and culture. Is there any form of government that has predominated in Roman Catholic countries more than in Protestant countries over a long period of time? If you go back to the medieval period, everybody in Europe had absolute monarchies: Protestants and Catholics. Muslims in the medieval Middle East had them too. But what does this penchant for monarchy tell you about culture? People in the medieval period even theorized about absolute monarchy in the same way: that their monarch was the “shadow of god on earth,” and that it was god’s way of showing their country divine preference.
Even in medieval times, there were some people – dissidents -- who disagreed with monarchy; however, they weren’t that important until fairly recently. Absolute monarchy has only gradually faded over the last 200 years. Not just in the West, but everywhere. And now it’s gone, for the most part.
There’s been a massive move toward forms of government other than absolute monarchy during the last 200 years. And it’s accelerating. If you think of democracy as a good thing, there’s good news for you: the number of countries that have a more or less democratic polity has increased enormously in the past 50 years. There are 187 countries in the world and about 120 of them are democratic. That wasn’t true in 1945. And it wasn’t true in 1900.
The other thing to be said about democracy is that we think of it as a Western thing. The standard account is that we here are peculiarly good people, who invented the wonder of democracy, and while other people in the world might struggle toward democracy, they’ll just never quite get there.
But actually, I don’t find democracy very prevalent in the West. Well, what do you mean by “the West” exactly? I mean, is Portugal not part of the West? If you looked on the map, it seems like it’s farthest west of anybody, but they weren’t anything like democratic until really, really recently. In fact, they were a very nasty, ugly kind of genocidal empire. Spain was too. Italy wasn’t democratic for most of its history, from the time that Garibaldi helped to found it until 1945. You know, people in Italy sent telegrams of congratulation to Mussolini when he abolished the Italian parliament. “Thank God, you got rid of that corrupt, nepotistic institution.” Democracy just wasn’t popular in Italy and Italy seems to be a fairly integral part of the West. Germany also seems to have had a lot of problems with modernity. It was a painful adjustment for them and for the rest of us. They didn’t buy into democracy. Germany only ended up with it because the U.S. military wrote their constitution and imposed it upon them.
When we talk about the West as peculiarly democratic or as “wedded to democracy,” I can’t find it! Where is it? The United States? Britain? But the British lack a constitution and some key individual rights. France? France couldn’t make up its mind for most of modern history. Are they a republic, or an empire, or a monarchy? A republic, an empire, a monarchy? They keep going back and forth.
So, what I’d like to suggest to you is that “democracy” hasn’t evolved smoothly from the essentials of Western civilization. It’s been a tough struggle in which North Atlantic powers have played a key role in imposing it on the rest of the West, not only in Europe, but also in Latin America. So it doesn’t seem to me that it wells up naturally, you know, in the breasts of people along the Rhine River, or in Spain or the West in generally.
So it’s not so surprising that we have Mubarak at the helm in Egypt. Does Mubarak have anything to do with Islam? Well he looks a lot like Franco to me. And, if you compare the social indicators of the Egyptian populace now with those of Spain in the 1940s, you’d see very similar levels of per capita income in real terms, literacy rates, capital in private hands, and the number of small firms. All of the things that might go into supporting a democratic polity were absent in Spain under Franco and still are absent in Egypt under Mubarak.
Does it matter that the Spanish were Catholic and the Egyptians are Muslim? I’m not saying it doesn’t matter at all, but I’d argue that it matters only at the margins. A kind of Roman Catholicism could be invoked by Franco to support his regime. A kind of Islam can be invoked by Mubarak to support his, not a kind that has a lot of purchase that has a lot of purchase among most Egyptians. The Egyptian government is a military dictatorship. Military dictatorships are very common in the world and aren’t at all limited to the Muslim world, and there’s nothing particular in Islam that commands a military dictatorship.
Reading Islam through this medieval lens, as though it’s incapable of changing or evolving, as though things are still true that you could assert in the 800s now, is a form of Orientalism, and it’s a big problem with the way the West approaches the Middle East. Relatively few Americans have lived in the Middle East, know Middle Eastern languages, interact with Middle Easterners, and, if they did, they wouldn’t say the silly things that they say about the Middle East.
I’d urge you not to take that kind of stereotyping of Islam very seriously. If we’re going to talk about Islam and democracy, we need to do so in concrete terms. Indonesia is the biggest Islamic country in the world, demographically. Since 1999, Indonesia has entered a marvelous, fascinating democratic experiment: multi-party democracy. They have a constitution that guarantees civil and human rights and freedom of the press. I sat at lunch with an Indonesian Sunni Muslim cleric and he had tears in his eyes. He said, “For the first time in my lifetime, we’re genuinely free.” This is not a man who has a difficult relationship with his tradition. He is steeped in the Sunni Muslim tradition. But he has embraced this development with open arms. He doesn’t see a contradiction.
Is there a contradiction between the way Indonesians are doing things now and some medieval text on Islamic law? Well, sure. But the same thing would be said of contemporary Italian governance. Well, that’s not a good example because they don’t have much in the way of governance in Italy, but the same thing would be true of many European governments and medieval Christian theology and so forth.
Things change. How do they change? Well, Islamic law is very capacious. In Shiite Islam, for instance, you have the conception of ijtihad, which is the jurists’ ability to reason the text through. So in Shiite jurisprudence, you don’t just take a fundamentalist approach to the Koran – the Koran says x, therefore you do x. The Koran has to be contextualized. The Koran says x, then let’s see what the prophet said, let’s see what the descendants of the prophet said, the imams, then let’s see what the great jurists have said through history, and then, let’s use our reason, let’s use syllogism, let’s use Greek reasoning. And Muslims apply all four of those ways of knowing what the text means to derive what the law is.
So, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq is the foremost Shiite jurist in the contemporary Islamic world. When the Bush Administration announced that it had a plan of writing a constitution for Iraq, rather like McArthur did for Japan, Grand Ayatollah Sistani issued a fatwa. He said, foreigners can’t write a constitution for Iraq. He said legitimate government derives from the will of the people. I looked for this principle of legitimate government deriving from the will of the people in the Koran and the sayings and doing of the Prophet and I couldn’t find it. I found it in an obscure Muslim thinker of the 18th Century, Sheik Jean-Jacques Rousseau . . . .
Sistani, as the Grand Ayatollah, has the authority to incorporate the Enlightenment into Shiite jurisprudence if he thinks it’s compatible and, indeed, useful for Muslims. And, he did. So, when Mr. Bush wanted to have caucus-based elections – what were “caucus-based elections” in Iraq. This meant that the Bush Administration planned to elect an Iraqi Parliament, the first one, by restricting the electorate to cronies of the Bush Administration in Iraq – members of the provincial and municipal councils, which had been massaged into being – certainly not freely elected in the first place – by a private firm based in North Carolina. And that was going to be the electorate. Grand Ayatollah Sistani gave another fatwa: not only couldn’t the constitution be written by the Americans, but it would have to be drafted by elected members of an Iraqi constituent council, but also, it was unacceptable that there be these caucus-based elections. Sistani demanded one person, one vote – open democratic elections. He said that’s the only was to guarantee that the sovereign will of the Iraqi people is expressed.
Now, I’m a fan of irony. And this is one of the great ironies of contemporary history, that Washington, D.C. was being lectured on this matter by the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf in Iraq! He took the Confessions of Rousseau and said, “Take that, Mr. Bush!”
And when Bush dragged his feet and said, oh, this couldn’t be done and he arranged for his cronies on the Iraqi interim governing council (that the Administration had massaged into being to advise Bremer) to oppose Sistani in January 2004, Sistani called masses into the streets. In Basra, the southern city, 40,000 people came out. They held placards: “We want democracy!” You promised us democracy!” Where is our democracy! We want open elections; no caucuses (whatever that might be).” 40,000 people. And they marched. They were calm. They were quiet. And the following Tuesday in January of 2004, 100,000 Iraqis came out, demanding democracy, open elections, free and fair. And this was the largest demonstration in Iraq since 1959. But this time, it was very different. A Shiite Ayatollah was instigating them to demand democracy.
In fact, it was fun. So they came to Sistani and said “that was great! Let’s do it again.” Sistani said, that’s enough. And he demanded that the U.N. come and investigate whether elections could be held and whether they could use U.N. ration cards as the voter registration mechanism. And the Bush Administration kept saying, “no, no, you can’t do any of that.” And after he brought all those crowds into the street, all of a sudden, the U.N. was sending an envoy, there were going to be elections, and Sistani got everything he wanted from the Bush Administration.
Americans didn’t go into Iraq with an agenda of open, democratic, unpredictable processes. They had a 7-point plan drawn from their occupation of Germany: they were going to write a constitution, they were going to have caucus-based elections. In fact, they translated this document from the Pentagon archives from German so quickly that at one point they said that it would be necessary to give support to the Iraqi reichsmark (the basic unit of German currency from 1923-1948).
Nobody can argue that Iraq is a paragon of democracy or that it will be anytime soon, but Sistani has made a breakthrough in Shiite Islamic jurisprudence that contradicts Khomeni. When Khomeni made his revolution in 1979, he rejected popular sovereignty. As you might expect from a theologian, Khomeni said, “OK, let’s say that the [then] 37 million Iranians vote for x. And let’s say that the Imam had said y. Who would be right? The Imam.” Sistani doesn’t say that. Sistani says that the Iraqi people would be right. Now, he would like to see some limit, so that the people don’t go wild. So I compare Sistani’s vision of democracy in Iraq to 1950s Ireland. In the 1950s, Ireland had an elected parliament, but if it looked like it might take up the issue of allowing divorce, the bishops would get together and issue a statement and hellfire would be promised, and, somehow, the Irish Parliament wouldn’t, in fact, enact a divorce law. They did, more recently, but in the 1950s, they were afraid of Hell.
Sistani’s vision is very much like the 1950s Irish situation. The Ayatollahs would intervene occasionally in the big issues of politics with a fatwa, but the fatwa is still a voluntary mechanism: Sistani is not demanding to be inside the government to actually give commands. He’s giving a fatwa. You can disobey a fatwa. It’s worth your eternal soul, but you can disobey it. And people do. So that was Sistani’s idea, that the clergy should stay in their seminaries in Najaf, they should give fatwas all they like, but they should stay out of government. Separation of religion and state. I have a dear friend, Mansour Mouhadel (SP?) who does opinion polling, and he’s done opinion polling in Iraq with a team. 55 percent of Iraqis are telling his team that they want separation of religion and state. 55 percent! Now, you see in the press, references to Muktada al’Sadr and the Madhi Army . . . and it doesn’t look like separation of religion and state to any of us, but apparently, they’re voting that way because they’re afraid. The people who stand for secular democracy in Iraq don’t have militias that can protect them. But if you ask them what they want, it’s separation of religion and state. My colleague Ron Englehardt did a poll throughout the Muslim world as part of his world values study: 89 percent of Muslims said democracy is the best form of government. 89 percent! Ask the Muslims what do they want, they say democracy. Of course, you can argue the don’t know what it is, but that’s what they say! If you ask Americans, 88 percent say democracy. [giggles] I’m worried about that 12 percent. I’m worried some of them might have been elected recently!
But this phenomenon that Professor Jowitt talked about in Bangladesh about rival political dynasties employing violence and corruption to rule, reminded me of something . . . I couldn’t think of what…
So you have Indonesia, as the most populous Muslim country in the world, entering a democratic experiment. Will it succeed? We don’t know. We also don’t know yet, I think, whether the Taiwanese experiment will succeed, which began around the same time. And there’s some evidence that whether these democratic initiatives succeed or not depends on things like per capita income. If people have $6,000 a year in real terms per capita income, they’re more likely to succeed when they start democratizing. Why should that be? Obviously, the stronger the society is, vis a vis the state, the less likely it is somebody can make a coup. And this is another thing that you see throughout the Muslim world, is that it is mostly poor. That’s an accident of history, but the per capita income throughout the Muslim world is relatively small nowadays. In the medieval period, it was a very wealthy and flourishing area, but those things that make for wealth in the modern world are often absent there. Islam spread along the arid zone through North Africa and into central Asia, and the arid zone tends not to have forests, amazingly enough, so when Egypt tried to industrialize in the early 19th Century, it couldn’t get enough fuel to run its steam engines to industrialize, and the experiment failed because of lack of fuel. It didn’t have coal either. But, I just don’t think that has much to do with Islamic jurisprudence. But I think it is that kind of thing that has stood in the way of certain economic and political developments in the Middle East that have not contributed to democratization.
Finally, I would like to suggest to you that the Cold War and various kinds of superpower interventions have been important in forestalling democracy in the Muslim world. We say “the Muslim world” now as if it’s a unit that can be conceptualized and that you can make essentialist statements about. But Indonesia was formed by the Dutch empire. We don’t usually nowadays think of the pothead, licentious Dutch as hard-line imperialists telling people what to do in Southeast Asia, but that’s what Indonesia was. It was formed by the Dutch and the Indonesians got rid of the Dutch only with a great struggle. Algeria had the French up their noses for over 100 years. The French came in 1830 and didn’t leave until 1962. And in the course of leaving in the 1950s and early 1960s, they killed 1 million out of 11 million Algerians – it was a kind of French colonial genocide in an attempt to keep their claws in the place. Well, what kind of a basis for democracy would that be? The French there as colonial, imperial rulers, telling people what to do from on high for all that time, and then killing all those people when they left, wouldn’t that leave behind a country with authoritarian, military traditions and instability and a lot of grievances? And that’s what you’ve got.
So, the colonial heritage in the Muslim world is very powerful and has not contributed to stability or democratization for the most part. And the United States and the Soviet Union didn’t play a positive role in this regard in the Cold War either. You know, we had democracy in Iran in 1951 and 1952. It was a parliamentary democracy. It was openly elected and had a multi-party cast, and it just wouldn’t make the right deal about petroleum with the British Anglo-Iranian oil company. And the British complained bitterly to the CIA and to Eisenhower, and so we overthrew that democracy and installed an absolute monarchy. And that was the Aermcians who did that. We wish we could get back 1951 now, but it’s too late. In 1957, there were parliamentary elections in Lebanon. I have a dear friend, Ray Close, a CIA operative who helped to engineer the 1957 election so as to make sure that the right guys got elected. That kicked off the Lebanon civil war of 1957-58, the denoument of which was that Eisenhower had to send troops to restore order in Lebanon. Well, who had disordered it in the first place? It was the CIA.
There’s a very interesting memo in 1963, when the Ba’ath coup occurs in Iraq and the Qassim government is overthrown by a national security aide to Jack Kennedy, which says: well we had very good information this coup was coming. We’re very happy about it. We anticipate wide-ranging economic and political contacts with the Ba’ath government.
Now this memo doesn’t prove that we installed the Ba’ath in 1963, but it does prove that we knew it was coming, we didn’t warn Qassim and we were really happy about it. So, Islam, shismam. The Americans, the Russians and other imperial powers have not played a positive role in fostering democracy, for the most part, in the Middle East, and in the Cold War we were often quite happy to have authoritarian governments that were firmly in the Western camp.
I think things will change. I think the general world movement is toward some kind of democratic policy and I agree that what happens in India, where the landlords tell the peasants who to vote for isn’t exactly democracy, but they have regular elections and people get thrown out of office. That’s, you know, the basics which doesn’t happen nowadays in Egypt. I think things will go in that direction over time. And, I have to say that while Islamic jurisprudence of the medieval period is an important heritage for the region, I don’t think anybody has democracy or doesn’t have a democracy because Ibn Taymiyyah wrote a fatwa in 1307.
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