For the Congress of Istanbul by Peter W. Rodman

The grounds for pessimism about democracy in the Islamic world are well known:

• Bernard Lewis has written extensively about the complexities of the Islamic tradition in this respect and the impediments to the development of liberal institutions. Representative government, the rights of individuals against the state, and other aspects of Western pluralism and legal tradition seem not to have roots of their own in the Muslim world. "Liberal democracy, however far it may have traveled...is in its origins a product of the West.... No such system has originated in any other cultural tradition; it remains to be seen whether such a system, transplanted and adapted in another culture, can long survive."¹
• In addition, Fouad Ajami, in his new book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, paints a damning picture of the Arab intellectual class -- their hopeless, maximalist visions of Arab resurgence, their abandonment of moderate political leaders struggling to come to terms with realities, their retreat into nostalgia and nihilism.² While the book deals mainly with Arab-Israeli peace, the same principle underlies the deeper weakness of Arab political life.

Decidedly a non-expert on the Muslim world, I pay great deference to these wiser men. At the same time, as a generalist I offer some observations on phenomena I see elsewhere in the world, including in other non-Western cultures, that may provide some context and comparison. For there is a trend in much of the world -- what Samuel Huntington calls a "third wave" of democratization ³ -- that is relevant to the question.

Professor Lewis is himself careful not to prejudge the answer. The Islamic tradition has its own moderating principles -- an historical notion of the sovereignty of the caliphate as "elective and contractual, in a sense even consensual and revocable;" a Koranic doctrine of the duty owed by a ruler to his subjects. The Islamic world has historically shown an extraordinary diversity, with many long periods of pluralism and harmony among different races, creeds, and cultures.⁴ And, of course, Turkey offers a positive example of what is possible.

Trends

But elsewhere as well, moderating principles may be found in surprising places. One of the leading experts on China, Arthur Waldron, has written that contemporary Chinese history is the history of a search for a new constitutional order to replace that of the emperors. Communism is dying, he says, and China is resuming the quest for a legitimate form of rule that it began at the beginning of the century:

Communism looks to have been a circuitous and ultimately wasteful detour; as it rediscovers the highroad, China is reviving and rebuilding its pre-1949 self.... Not revolution but rather the search for a constitutional order to replace the dynasties has been the most important theme in twentieth-century China's history, and it remains so today. The long personal rule of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping has only obscured this stubborn fact. But when Deng dies, the search for constitutional order is certain to resume....⁵

Indeed, much of the current revival of the democratic trend in the world is a function of the collapse of the Marxist-Leninist Left following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is no accident, comrades -- as the Marxists used to say.

The demise of the Marxist Left and of its brand of radicalism in much of the world has made possible what one could call normal politics -- politics that is not a matter of life and death. Normal politics is not possible when a major contender for power espouses an absolutist, totalitarian ideology that insists on the unity of everything and the impossibility of separating out politics from culture and all else. However such an ideological movement may come to power -- even through electoral means -- the real question is whether it will ever relinquish power afterwards. Such a movement usually seeks to make sweeping structural, institutional, and cultural changes in the society to insure its permanent hegemony. Real democracy, in the truest sense as we know it, means not just majoritarianism but constitutionalism -- that is to say, structural limits on government power, law as a guarantor of individual rights against the state, independent intermediate institutions, pluralism. Normal politics permits the alternation of parties; you can lose one political competition and know you'll still be around to compete the next time. It requires the reality of pluralism, a sense of the ground rules, and a basic consensus on limits to state power. This presupposes the absence of a radical challenge to the existing order.

And so, with the collapse of the totalitarian Left, we see more normal, democratic politics practiced in Latin America, in Africa, and in parts of Asia. It would seem to vindicate the universality of the ideals that the West has long espoused.

The tragedy of the Middle East is that, just at the moment when a forty-year struggle against the radical Left backed by the Soviet Union has been won -- the defeat of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his political heirs -- the vacuum is being filled in the Middle East by a totally different form of radicalism, that of revolutionary political Islam, or Islamism. This is not Islam as a religious faith; it is a political ideology, radical and anti-Western, that invokes Islamic themes. Many of the same problems apply in this case as in the case of the radical Left. Operating as it does from the basic tenet of the unity of mosque and state, the mass mobilization of society, and cultural hegemony, Islamist radicalism has obvious totalitarian implications.

For a long time after the Iranian Revolution, it was believed that radical Islamism was a Shi'ite, Persian phenomenon that would not spread to the Sunni Arab world. And for a decade or more, it did not in any significant way. What contributed to its upsurge in the Arab world earlier in the 1990s -- we have seen its signs, to one degree or another, in Algeria, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank, Turkey, and the Arabian peninsula -- is the collapse of the radical Left. Islamism filled the ideological void. It is in part the ironic byproduct of the Soviet collapse.

Sometimes, they are the same people. I have a Palestinian friend who has an acquaintance, a political activist on the West Bank. The activist used to be a Marxist agitator; now he wears the robes of an Islamist. For anyone who wishes to raise the banner of radical protest against the established order, Islamism is now the flag of convenience.

There are deeper causes, too, of course, which Fouad Ajami traces in his book. Secular Arab nationalism was discredited by a multitude of its own failures, political and intellectual. But other regions of the world have seen the vacuum filled by more congenial political ideas.

Lessons

There are lessons, particularly for Western policymakers. One is that, if we truly believe in our own principles of democracy, we will be skeptical of the legitimacy of Islamists' demands for a share of power. If a movement with totalitarian tendencies takes power, even by an election, it could be the last free election, given the movement's commitment to make irreversible changes in the society. Relinquishing power afterwards is never part of the radical agenda, whether because of the "iron law of history" or the "will of God," into which, of course, they claim an exclusive insight. It would be, in the common phrase, "one man, one vote, one time." It's not democratization, period.

The good news is that all revolutions have their life cycle. The radical Left waxed and waned. Even less than Marxism does Islamism have a sensible economic theory -- a cure for the social ills and economic hardships that provide fertile soil for such ideologies.

In the Arab world, in the early years of this decade, there were fears that Islamism was the wave of the future. Today, while it still poses dangers (including in Algeria, Egypt, and the West Bank and Gaza), the inevitability of its victory is less assumed. Similarly, the traditional monarchies turn out to be more resilient than many thought. At the time of the Gulf War in 1991, there was much nervousness about the vulnerability of all these traditional regimes. But the monarchies always had their own indigenous roots in their tribal societies; they were products of a social compact of a different kind. Many of them had good religious credentials, which stood them in good stead when this new Islamist force developed. Hassan of Morocco and Hussein of Jordan, it turns out, both enjoyed good relations with the Muslim Brotherhood because they had shielded the Brotherhood against the Nasserite tide during all the years when the secular Left was dominant. Bahrain has special problems because of its Shia population, but, by and large, at this moment, it would seem that the collapse of "Arab socialism" has created more of a problem of legitimacy for the secular, so-called revolutionary leaderships (like Algeria, Egypt, or the PLO) than for most of these monarchies.

In the meantime, one should not be eager to push any of the moderate, pro-Western Arab governments into political experiments that they consider too risky, so long as Islamism is still strong and is able to exploit these openings for its own -- anti-democratic -- ends.

The fount of contemporary Islamism -- the Islamic Republic of Iran -- is in its terminal political crisis. Its economy is a wreck: Effective unemployment is about 40 percent and inflation double the officially stated 18 percent, according to Business Week.⁶ The population is deeply disaffected -- demonstrated by the overwhelming vote for Mohammed Khatemi a year ago -- and some of the clerics in Iran are said to fear that the present regime is doing more than anything else could do to discredit Islam in the country.⁷ The regime is divided and demoralized. The discrediting of Islamism in Iran would have a serious demoralizing effect on its adherents elsewhere in the Muslim world, just as the Soviet debacle had on the international Left. We may not have to wait 74 years for this revolutionary ideology to run out of steam.

Civil society is evolving in the Muslim world. The West cannot directly affect the internal evolution of most of these societies, but we can certainly affect the external environment. A strong Western military presence, especially American, can help deter radical challenges, give confidence to moderates who choose to associate with the West, and who are taking risks for peace. If the West stands firm against Iran's hostile foreign policies -- and declares itself for true democracy inside the country -- we may accelerate the regime's decay. (In Iraq -- which is in ideological terms a Nasserite anachronism -- the overthrow of the regime by a democratic movement should be an explicit goal of policy.) If these means succeed, the conditions may come into being throughout the region in which political pluralism and normal politics can assert themselves.

When these changes come, they will not be a Western imposition or a Western import but a reflection of indigenous, popular forces. They may even have an anti-Western tinge (given the mood of many intellectuals). But the result may deserve the name of democracy.

Endnotes

1. Bernard Lewis, "Islam and Liberal Democracy," Atlantic Monthly, February 1993, p. 93

2. Fouad Ajami, The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation's Odyssey (New York: Pantheon, 1998).

3. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)

4. Lewis, loc. cit., pp. 97-98.

5. Arthur Waldron, "China's Coming Constitutional Challenges," Orbis, Winter 1995, pp. 25-26.

6. John Rossant, "Inside Iran," Business Week, December 8, 1997, p. 16.

7. Azar Nafisi, "The Khatami Phenomenon in Iran: The Beginning of the End for the Islamic Republic?," remarks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, April 1, 1998.