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Islam,
Iraq, and Democracy
By
Daniel C. Peterson and William J. Hamblin
For the last ten years of his life (622-632 AD), the Prophet
Muhammad was both the spiritual leader of the Islamic community
and the political leader of a rising Islamic state centered
upon his residence in Medina. Accordingly, the revelations
he received during that final period (the so-called Medinan
suras, or chapters, of the Qur’an), summon his followers to
appeal not merely to God, but to “God and his Prophet,” for
the resolution of their disputes.
When
Muhammad died rather suddenly and unexpectedly, the senior Muslim
leadership scrambled to improvise an institution—the caliphate—that
would provide a ruler for the still-growing Islamic state, which,
by the Prophet’s death, covered virtually all of the Arabian
Peninsula and which would, within a century, extend from Spain
to the borders of India.
Very soon, however, the caliph lost much of his religious
authority (though not his political power) to intellectuals,
and particularly to legal theorists. On the basis of the Qur’an,
heavily supplemented by precedents gathered from the hadith
[ha-DEETH] (reports of what Muhammad and his immediate associates
said and did), these thinkers elaborated a very subtle and sophisticated
body of law that came to be known as the shari‘a (sha-REE-ah).
Then, roughly three centuries after Muhammad’s death, the “gate
of interpretation” of the shari’a was declared closed.
Islamic law was set, so it was announced, for all time.
This poses certain problems for the idea of democracy
in the Islamic world. The shari‘a is a very comprehensive
system, leaving little or no room for a separation of “church”
and state. (Nobody in the seventh to tenth centuries, anywhere,
envisioned such a separation.) There is, in Islamic theory,
only one (divine) legislator, and he has long since spoken.
Worsening the situation is the bad history that Muslims have
had since at least the nineteenth century with colonialist states
boasting of their own democratic principles, while suppressing
national liberty and personal freedom of Muslims under colonial
governments, a legacy that has often and understandably left
a bad taste in Islamic mouths. Moreover, Muslims themselves
have, at best, very limited direct experience of democracy,
and, today, threats and actual violence from Islamist extremists
understandably frightens off (and, not infrequently, actually
kills) would-be reformers.
Yet the prospects for democracy in the Islamic world
are not altogether grim. Since its founding in the early twentieth
century, the modern republic of Turkey has enjoyed constitutional
separation of religion from politics, and democratic theory
and practice has begun to take deep root there. Mali and Senegal,
although very poor, have established reasonably healthy democracies
in recent years. Qatar, Kuwait, and Tunisia are moving in distinctly
democratic directions, Malaysia and Indonesia have also made
great progress, and, now, both Iraq and Afghanistan are preparing
for elections.
There are, in fact, resources for the construction of
democracy in the Islamic world that are at least as promising
as the Magna Carta, extracted from King John by a council of
barons determined to secure the rights of the aristocracy in
medieval England. For example, the shura or consultative
council established by the dying caliph ‘Umar to choose his
successor in the mid-seventh century has been mentioned by several
Islamic reformers as a prototype legislature or electoral college.
Additionally, the lack of a living prophet, or of any
single clear religious leader, in the Islamic world today—the
same early twentieth century reforms that established modern
Turkey also abolished the Ottoman caliphate, which had already
been irrelevant for many centuries—creates, to some degree at
least, a weakness on the religious side against which governments
(including democratic governments) can assert their independence.
And that lack of a dominant single leader has also obliged far-flung
religious authorities to invoke the principle of ijma‘,
or consensus, in order to legitimate new understandings or applications
of the shari‘a—a principle that is not altogether unlike
the democratic notion of majority rule.
So there is reason to believe that, although it may
look different than it would in the West, democracy can indeed
flourish within an Islamic context. And there is, likewise,
reason for cautious optimism that some form of democratic government
can arise specifically in Iraq. First of all, Iraq is not a
“Beverly Hillbillies” society of Bedouin nomads. In fact, Mesopotamia,
the historical region now known politically as Iraq, has one
of the oldest traditions of settled, urban civilization in human
history; indeed, the earliest documented forms of democracy
anywhere in the world are found in third millennium BC city-state
councils in Iraq. And it has considerable temporal advantages.
Egypt, for example, possesses agriculture and vast tourist potential,
but virtually no oil. Saudi Arabia has oil, but its agricultural
potential is limited and, apart from the annual hajj
pilgrimage, it has virtually no tourism. But Iraq is potentially
wealthy because it has rich agricultural land, vast oil reserves,
and historical sites that could make it a major tourist destination
if its security climate can be improved. Historically, too,
it has had a large and relatively prosperous middle class.
The jury is still out on what Iraq will become, but
repeated polls have shown little taste among Iraqis—and, surprisingly,
least of all among its Shi‘ite majority—for an Islamic state
on the model of neighboring Iran. Moreover, the Grand Ayatollah
Ali Sistani, who is far and away the most potent religious figure
in Iraq, has clearly distanced himself from a role in the direct
governance of the nation.
The question of how Islam will develop politically is
vastly important, not merely for the roughly one billion living
Muslims but for all the peoples of the earth. It is very much in
everyone’s interest that states arise in Iraq and Afghanistan and
across the Islamic cultural region that reflect the will of free
peoples and respect the rule of law and human rights. The West
cannot enforce such changes, and attempts to do so would be horribly
counterproductive. But it can, should, and must do whatever it
can to encourage and support them. Americans have just celebrated,
yet again, the Fourth of July birthday of their free nation. When
Iraqis, Afghans, and Muslims generally can celebrate their own freedom
as Americans do now, the world will have taken an epoch-making step
forward.
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