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PRESENTATION BY
BERKELEY PROFESSOR
KEN JOWITT
SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 2008
I’m going to talk about “Islam and democracy,” and let me begin by saying, the wrong question to ask is whether Islam and democracy are compatible and if it’s the wrong question, it’s an easy question to answer and the answer is “No.”
That’s no different than the question “Is Roman Catholicism compatible with democracy?,” and speaking as a Roman Catholic, I can say “No.” It applies to Judaism too. It’s simply the wrong question. The right question is “What kind of democracy is Islam compatible with?,” and the answer is unstable ones. I don’t think you’re going to find any evolution in the near future that brings us Muslim societies with democracies that are viable, as opposed to unstable, and I’ll try to explain why. You’ll find Muslim societies that are compatible with the electoral spirit, but not the electoral letter and not the tolerant spirit we know in liberal, representative democracy.
Let me deal with three things. There are three proverbs about Islam and democracy that I’d like to discuss. A proverb is an obvious truth that does nothing whatsoever to advance understanding, and, if you read the Book of Proverbs, you’ll see that. You feel very good reading it, but it’s like Chinese food. It disappears.
The first proverb is that there are many kinds of democracy. This proverb is typically articulated by scholars who want to be nice to Islam. And my position as a scholar is to understand things, not to be nice or nasty to them. And the first proverb is: look, you can’t simply say “Is Islam compatible with democracy?” because there are multiple types of democracy. You have 40,000 Athenians directly deciding on every conceivable issue. That’s direct democracy. You have 70 percent of Russians voluntarily electing a monarch, Vladimir Putin. That’s plebiscitarian democracy: there are no intervening parties. Rulers just come up like Napoleon III and say “do you like me or not?” They say “Yes,” and he’s elected. And the same thing applies to the Hugo Chavezes of the world. And then you have the vote between Republicans and Democrats, and that’s representative democracy.
So, indeed, there are different democracies, but this is really a red herring. Basically, the question we’re asking here is whether Islam is compatible with representative democracy. Not with any kind of democracy. And the answer is “not very.”
And the second proverb, which again is designed to allow people to be nice to Islam and to say “Look, we can’t just rule them out.” We used to say that Catholics couldn’t be democrats and now there’s Spanish Catholic democracy and Portuguese democracy. And then we said that only white people can be democrats, and then South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan sort of messed that up. So now, obviously, everybody can be democratic.
And if you look at Islam the argument basically is that there is no one Islam. There are Shi’ites and there are Sunnis and nobody gets the Sunnis. There are lots of different Sunnis – hadafis, habalis, and malikis and so on. And there are variants of Shi’ites. So what you see here in this proverb is the point that there are multiple emphases, interpretations, and practices in Islam, some of which may be more, not less compatible with democracy. Consequently, with all the variety in Islam and all these different types of democracy, Islam might just allow for some kind of democracy. After all, there’s Swedish democracy. There’s Italian democracy. There’s American democracy. There are different variants of democracy, different variants of Islam, and there might be a fit of some elements within the democratic and Muslim tradition that allow for a variant of Islamic democracy. And when people look at Islam, they usually find references within it to consensus, consultation, the right to choose leaders, and to disobey unjust laws.
So let me try to get to this point clearly. Every ideology has multiple emphases. It doesn’t mean anything. The question is which emphases are dominant. Which circumscribe and embed the others. Take Roman Catholicism and Leninism or Communism. If you look at Leninism and Communism, the basis of the party is called democratic centralism. So there might be within Leninism, in totalitarianism, an ideological statement, a form of organization that would allow you to up the democracy and down the centralism. Certainly, when Lenin started out, he wrote a book called “State and Revolution” that said, “Look, the form of government we’re going to have here is direct democracy in the Soviets.” The only problem is that neither worked – ever. No matter if it was Chinese communism, Czech communism, East German communism, the centralism beat the democracy and the party beat the Soviets.
Or look at Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is hierarchical. It believes in God’s sovereignty, not popular sovereignty. It doesn’t like the nation state. It doesn’t like the individual. And it doesn’t like capitalism, which makes it hard for an American Catholic. But, what the hell, Bill Buckley wrote a whole book on it and sold magazines, loving that he was a Catholic, even thought his Church didn’t like him. But he was Irish, so it didn’t bother him.
What am I getting at? If you look at Islam, Catholicism, or Leninism, of course you can say that there are emphases in these religions that are more rather than less compatible with democracy. But this isn’t the right question. The right question is, under what circumstances can those institutions, ideologies, and beliefs be torn apart to allow the minor emphases to become major ones? And the answer is to violently destroy them. People don’t like to hear that. Particularly liberal, educated, affluent people. They want basically a nice world, where everybody can get a copy of The Federalist Papers and become a democrat. Everybody can read Adam Smith and become a capitalist and the whole world can all be happy together. It’s not the case. The West is a historical mutation. We’re the odd guy out. And when you have democracies it takes something very unpleasant to create it.
The third proverbial truth extends this second one about the range of ideological emphases and practices within Islam by correctly noting the variety of Muslim societies and their diverse experiences with democracy. We have Indonesia, which is different from Turkey, which is different from Bangladesh, which is different from Mali, which is different from Senegal. And so, once again, the emphasis on all of these things is to take away this essential antipathy that presumably exists between a monolithic Islam and a monolithic democracy by showing that there are multiple democracies and multiple Islams.
I would suggest to you that, while it is a friendly attitude, it is fundamentally mistaken. All of this emphasis on diversity and the implicit notion of adaptability, I think, runs a risk well stated by Goethe in Faust when he has Mephisto say the following:
Who would study and describe the living, starts by driving the spirit out of the parts. In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections. Lacks nothing except the spirits connections.
And what’s the point here? The point is, by being so kind and diverse about what Islam and democracy can mean, we don’t give Islam, or Roman Catholicism, or Leninism, or liberalism their due. They are disciplined phenomenon in which not all of the parts of equally important. They are all belief systems, institutions, and practices that favor anti-liberty, anti-tolerant, anti-democratic features. And the only way in which those minor allegedly democratic features are going to appear, is if you destroy their institutional, ideological coherence. Roman Catholicism was lucky. It was kicked out of politics, so it could stay dogmatic, hierarchical, and say nice things about ecumenicism which it doesn’t believe. It simply doesn’t believe. You talk to the Pope and say “Hey, we’ve got a Baptist over here. What do you think of him?” He has nothing good to say. Nothing good to say. He just has to say, “Well, we’re all Christians and they’re doomed.”
And the same thing is true about Islam and Leninism. Gorbachev did everything in God’s name wrong. But everything in Lenin’s name to adapt to democracy. He adapted himself out of existence. It was voluntary extinction.
So, the point simply is, there are some ideologies, institutions, and practices that have a wider range of adaptability than others. The more dogmatic, the less its range of adaptability. The more flexible, the more it is possible to accommodate, but not necessarily to have a spirit of affinity. You can get along. It’s de facto tolerance. De facto tolerance means I put up with my neighbors whom I don’t’ like. I just know it will be a mess if we argue every day. Principle tolerance means, I don’t think I have the only truth. That’s what principal tolerance is. And that’s why you have a Democrat and Republican who don’t like each other, but who argue that the American way is real coherent and each party has a partial truth, which they tend to think is the only one, but recognize that it isn’t. And because we recognize it isn’t, Daley stole the election for Kennedy and Nixon didn’t try a coup. Sandra Day O’Connor gave the election to George Bush. There was no coup. There was a lot of heavy drinking, but there was no coup.
Before becoming an apologist for President Bush’s utopian policy of regime change in Iraq, Bernard Lewis wrote a piece that you all read called “Islam and Democracy,” and his argument convinces me that, as a religion, Islam lacks the internal potential to provide a social, economic, or political base for a viable, stable, liberal democracy. Lewis identifies the following politically relevant features of Islam, all of them anti-democratic:
:: No principal of human rights;
:: No notion of popular sovereignty;
:: No principle or practice of representative government;
:: No effective defense of private property;
:: A personal versus impersonal procedure legal ethos;
:: And not even a word for “citizen.”
That’s a big one. Not even a word for citizen. Now, in the West, up until the 18th Century, there was no word for individual. Tocqueville points out in Democracy in America, the only word in French was “egoisa.” And if the French don’t have a word for something, it doesn’t exist. But when you don’t have a word for citizen, you’re really starting from a very low base if you want to create a public sphere, a civic ethos based on tolerance.
Christianity has an advantage, and I want to spell it out as clearly as I possibly can. Unlike any other religion, Christianity identifies the individual, rather than the chosen people or the party or the uumah, as the basis of salvation. The individual is called. Christ says, “I leave you with the Holy Spirit in each one of you.” He didn’t say, I leave it in the Jewish people, the communist party, or the ummah.
Now my point is not that Christ was a capitalist or a democrat. He didn’t care about either. The point is that, within Christianity, there is a potential for individual liberty that, given a series of events, successive, contingent, and violent, that potential of individual religious liberty could be extended into the political and economic world. Luther rescued the individual – the religious individual – from the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional, magical mass. And he brought it out and he said, “It’s you and God. One on one, the individual.” He made a statement, “Here I stand. I can do no other because of my conscience.” The Roman Catholic Church admitted the importance of conscience 80 years ago. 80 years ago! And then what happened is these Protestants, for various reasons in the 17th Century in Holland and in England, expanded religious individual liberty into economic and political liberty.
What I’m saying is that, if you look at what it takes to get free, those elements that have an affinity for democracy require prolonged, intensive, and comprehensive violence to come about. We don’t like to think about it. The 20-year English revolution. The 20-year French Revolution. The American Civil War: 650,000 out of a population of 35 million had to die to destroy slavery and create individual liberty. It took four years of war and occupation of Japan. Four years of war and occupation of Germany and both of those countries had semblances of a Reichstag, of law, of civil liberties before we went in and destroyed them and occupied them. Spain’s civil war. Greece’s civil war. The invasion of South Korea by the North that destroyed a lot of their traditional institutions. The invasion of Taiwan by Chiang Kai Shek. Democracy’s like salvation: many are called, but few are chosen. And it takes a very violent rupture with the past to create the possibility, not the guarantee, but the possibility that you can create democracy. The notion that we were going to go into Iraq, kill Hussein, get rid of the Republican Guard, the Ba’ath party, and then the “author of liberty,” George Bush’s favorite phrase, would touch the innate desire and ability of people all around the world to have democracy is a pure delusion. Pure delusion.
In Germany and Japan you had some precedents for democracty. You also had societies with enormous hierarchical social discipline. I mean, at 3 o’clock in the morning, no German crosses the street against a red light. None. None. If you do it, people wake up and start screaming!
Now, you take Arab society based on clans, on factions, on tribes, on families, you know, it’s like Sun Yat-sen said about China before the communists: you pick it up and it falls through your fingers. So this notion that we have, and we love it as Americans, we have this missionary impulse: we’re wonderful people, all of you can be wonderful people and be just like us. But we are the historical mutation. I think the most valuable in human history. But this arrogant, naïve notion that we can share what we have with the rest of the world . . . George Bush said, “The author of liberty has given everybody the desire and ability to practice democracy.” Jehovah had Moses kill his fellow Jews three times in 40 years. It was the first ethnic cleansing. Just read the Bible. Out there, killing them all. And told Arabs, you go out there and get your brother, your friend and your wife and if they’ve been consorting with non-Jews, kill them. Jesus said, I don’t care about Caesar. St. Paul got a guy who was a slave, ran away, came to Paul, Paul converted him to Christianity and told him to go back and be a slave. That’s not the author of liberty. And Islam means “submission.” That’s not a good base for citizenship. So when you look, the probability that any country, not just Islamic ones, will spawn a democracy is extraordinarily low – most societies are based on forms of organization, belief, and practice that are antithetical to what we have in the West.
Let me make a couple of final points. There is a type of democracy that I think Muslim societies are compatible with. And they’re based on, not a holy, but a wobbly trinity. They haven’t experienced a religion that grants the individual the right to argue with God. They haven’t experienced the violent transformation of pre- and anti-democratic institutions in their countries. The only one that came close was Turkey, and it was indecisive. It took enormous violence in Turkey in the 1920s and you got a half democracy. Then the United States, in a typical missionary move after World War II, said you have to be more democratic and created the mess that Turkey is today. Namely, a secular elite, a secular army, and an increasingly Islamic society that is now mobilized, literate, economically viable from a different region of the country. So it’s schizophrenic.
But there is a form of democracy and I’ve mentioned that it’s based on a wobbly trinity, so let me spell out what that it and I’ll conclude with that. This wobbly trinity consists of pragmatic electoral parties, radical Islamic groups and the army. And the pragmatic parties, precisely because they lack any ideological discipline, are, in fact, opportunistic parties, typically led by a person with a prestigious family name and connections. And that person and that party engage in massive corruption, often in conjunction with criminal gangs. That’s true in just about every Muslim society including the Muslims and Hindus in India, where 50 percent of the politicians running for office in Uttar Pradesh have been convicted of criminal crimes. It’s a very interesting form of democracy.
An integral part of this pragmatic party system is the unprincipled attempt to include and manipulate radical Islamic support and when this amalgam of corruption, extra-legal violence, and feuding threatens the integrity of the whole country, the army comes in and takes over. And when the army comes in and takes over, because it’s unusually inept at running a country, sooner rather than later, it fails to represent the social, political, and regional interests and it’s threatened with getting out of office and bringing around the corrupt politician with the nice family name who has a bunch of gangs and corrupt family members who benefit from it.
That’s what’s happening in Pakistan right now. And people are calling it democracy. It’s absurd! I mean look at what Bhutto and this other guy Sharif have done. I mean, if they’re democrats, Mayor Daley is God! There is no democracy whatsoever! It is simply two patron-led, corrupt parties that manipulate the economy as booty and engage in opportunistic behavior.
But the best example, I think, of what I’m referring to as a wobbly democracy, is Bangladesh. Just as divine intervention, I was reading this and, unlike Professors Nasr and Cole, I’m not an expert on Islam, I just am old enough and have tenure, so I can talk about anything I wish. But there was an article in the Wall Street Journal on July 4th and here’s basically what the author said, and I’m quoting:
Bangladesh had a democratic system that, however imperfect, allowed the opposition to oust incumbents in generally free and fair elections.
Now, that’s pretty good. That would seem to resolve the whole issue of can Islam and democracy be compatible. Just think about that: “had a democratic system . . . however imperfect . . . allowed the opposition to oust incumbents in generally free and fair elections.” That’s the introduction oust the article. He then adds the following and I’m quoting:
Bangladesh’s version of democracy has been hijacked by two powerful, political dynasties and families that resorted to violence and graft in their contest for power and that struck alliances with radical Islam.
Now we’re getting something a little less than “imperfect.” I’d offer one crucial correction to the author’s description. Bangladesh’s version of democracy wasn’t hijacked. It and other Muslim democracies are deliberately constructed on the basis of political, familial dynasties, alliances with radical Islamic groups that detest democracy and engage in nepotistic, corrupt practices.
But Muslim societies like Bangladesh, Turkey, and Indonesia are less than imperfect. They’re incredibly unstable. There is a high degree of violence. There is an enormous amount of corruption. And, as long as that familial, clan, traditional form of life attains, it’s not Islam that’s the problem, it’s tradition that’s the problem and Islam is part of it. I mean, if you look at the Middle East, the Middle East is not concerned with democracy. And while the Shia-Sunni thing is much more important, the real concern in Muslim societies is the father’s concern to have the son take over. Now you would think the Bush family would understand that! I mean, look at what goes on. Hatha al’Assad is in power. Guess who succeeds him? Nobody named Jim Johnson. It’s Barsha al’Assad. You look at Jordan, same thing. You look at Mubarak. Mubarak’s got all this façade – his National Democratic Party – it’s not national, it’s not democrartic, it’s not a party – but he has a son, Gamal, and Gamal’s going to take over. So what you have to look at isn’t so much Islam, you have to look at Muslim societies and their actual organization and practices, which are traditional. They’re based on personal ties. They’re based on personal definitions of justice. They’re not impersonal laws. They’re not based on the individual.
I’ll add just one thing: we’re obsessed with Islam and democracy and we’re engaged in misdirection. It’s not the most important thing in the world today at all. We live in an unusual period that lacks an ideology with an international orientation that’s politically centered and militarily powerful. For the first time in 200 years, the West finds no real challenge. I mean Shiites are not going to convert people in Illinois. It’s just not going to happen. Leninists could. Roman Catholicism has a much wider reach. It’s a matter of quantity, not quality, but we don’t have Leninism, we don’t have fascism, we don’t have Naziism. We live in an unreal world that Francis Fukuyama thinks is the norm. We took away Roman Catholic authoritarian regimes. We took away the fascists, the communists, and the Nazis. Fukuyama says we’re going to have trouble in the future, but basically there’s only one game in town. It’s liberal capitalist, representative democracy. And I think he’s completely mistaken. We, as a society, are based on individualism, a market capitalism that is procedural, a law that is procedural. The rest of the world is based on group identity. There was no individualism in the world until the 19th Century. And I love Americans because they typically, in Trotsky’s words, they assimilate the unfamiliar to the familiar. So, if you see some Toureg on a camel riding around they say “How individualistic.” It’s not. It’s a Toureg on a camel! Individualism is a cultural construct that makes no sense to the rest of the world. They can’t stand us, not just because we have women who are equal but because we have women who are individuals.
What I’m suggesting to you is that, in the next 15 years, you’re going to see something happen. You’re going to see the emergence of a new anti-Western ideology that doesn’t stress entrepreneurship, but heroism. Which stresses the group, not the individual. And you’re going to see it, if it lands in a country with resources, able to effectively challenge the United States. If Falun Gong takes power in China in the next 20 years, and that’s hypothetical, but not crazy – you’re going to see a China that’s not communist and corrupt – which is fine – which is not democratic, but which is nativist, anti-American, anti-Western, like Sendero Luminoso was in Peru, like the Kumer Rouge was in Kampuchea. And that’s going to relativize the importance of Islam and democracy.
We have become fixated on a one-dimensional, obsessive concern. Is it important? It is very important. And one of the greatest things that’s come out of this threat from Islam, which is a much exaggerated threat, is that more people now know about Islam. I think that’s wonderful. I, for one, never bothered to study it. And, as a result of this, I know more, and I think that makes you a really educated person, which is grand. But I do suggest to you that you look a little beyond at what’s going on in China, Japan, India and Korea, that’s every bit as important as what’s going on in Iraq. As for Iraq, we should have left yesterday. Yesterday. I realize that’s very provocative and I’d be willing to spell it out. One thing I can’t stand, it this notion that it would be irresponsible to pull out. You’ll get genocide in Iraq. You’ll get the spillover into the Middle East. You’ll get Iran invaded. None of which will happen. I’ve taken enough time, and I’d be happy to get into all of these neutral comments that I’ve just made at a later time.
Thank you.
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