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.