Islam versus democracy

Political Islam and the Arab Uprising 

Islamist Politics in Changing Times

Fazzur Rahman Siddiqui

Sage 

364 pages; Rs 995

In The Clash of Civilizations Samuel P Huntington had for the first time in the 1980s and 1990s predicted “religious-civilisational disputes” between the Christian West and the Islamic Arab countries in the post-Cold War world. His diagnosis has proved substantially correct. Western powers are grappling with violent movements in the Arab world where the masses are being mobilised on the slogan that wars have to be waged in defence of “Islam,” which is under attack from its “traditional enemy”, ie the Christian West. 

The first major challenge to the West came from Muslim theologians, whose rejection of the West was manifest in the Islamic Revolution of Iran led by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. From Morocco to Egypt, the Arab world has not looked back since.

Fazzur Rahman Siddiqui, the author of this book, has focused attention on “political Islam”, which is juxtaposed to Western modernity, and he devotes his attention to the important idea of “divinity in the association of Islam and politics”. The post-Prophet era witnessed the emergence of the mullahs and ulema, scholars specialising in Islamic law and theology, who became “custodians” in interpreting Quranic law or Shariah. That tradition continues till today – so every Islamic revolutionary movement (beginning with Khomeini) has been led by some mullah or the other by virtue of his status as the official interpreter of “divine-political governance”. 

This is the religio-historical context of this five-chapter study. The first two chapters are a good summary of fundamental ideas that have shaped Islamic struggles and revolutions. Mr Siddiqui has linked the growth and development of political Islam and other Islamic movements to the 19th and 20th-century colonial history of the Arab countries. This precipitated a contest between Western Enlightenment ideas of state, sovereignty and secularism versus the Islamic concept of sovereignty resting with god as vested in the Holy Quran.

He makes the interesting point that “the trilogy of Caliphate, Shariah and jihad vanished completely from the centrality of the Islamic discourse” during the colonial period but revived when these countries became independent. What explains the revival of this anti-West, anti-Christian Islamism in the Arab countries? 

The collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 and the abolition of the Caliphate, which left the Muslim world without its global identity for the first time in 1,300-odd years, certainly contributed to these contestations. The author describes the forces that sought to fill this vacuum in the chapter titled “Islamic Response to Arab Politics During Colonial and Post-Colonial Phases” — focusing on Khomeini and Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s charismatic president in the 1960s and 1970s, and the proxy-Cold War battles between the Americans and the Soviets that sharpened political and social fault-lines in these newly emerging countries.  

  

Thus, the contemporary phase of political Islam, as manifested by the brief “Arab Spring” — a term linked to the tragic “Prague Spring”, the short-lived period of political freedom in Czechoslovakia against Soviet domination in 1968. The serial popular revolts against autocratic regimes in West Asia and North Africa in 2011 marked a watershed. As the author observes, “The Arab uprising unsettled many assumptions and notions about the Arab landscape. It debunked several culturalist assumptions on the sociology of the Arab region highlighting inherent incompatibility between Islam and democracy.” 

The Arab Spring, however, did not establish democracy in Egypt, though it succeeded in Tunisia. A deeper inquiry into this contrast could have opened many new areas of inquiry about the compatibility of Salafist Islam (as represented by the Muslim Brotherhood’s election to power, only to be overthrown by a military coup) with democracy compared with the liberal success in Tunisia via the Jasmine Revolution. The author provides the somewhat weak explanation that “the case of Tunisia is very different from the case of Egypt in political, cultural, ethnic and religious terms”. 

Why is it that Islamists of whatever nomenclature are not surrendering to the demands of popular uprisings for clean, efficient governance? How are Salafists succeeding in establishing religious fundamentalist regimes like ISIS? Though the author correctly points out that ISIS has shown a strong commitment to reviving the Caliphate, he has not linked this issue to the larger question of democracy and Islam. 

That said, the book is an important contribution to understanding the complexities and multi-dimensional aspects of Islam in politics. The pity is that the author does not frontally raise the issue of “religion versus democratic politics”. The short point is that Islamists only make false promises and they succeed in power through the medium of violent authoritarianism, whereas democracy is ultimately an untidy process that provides people with the opportunity to apply corrections through a participatory electoral system.  Secular politics is an integral part of the modern rule of law, and interference by religion and the priestly class in public affairs leads to the derailment of democracy based on the willing consent of the governed.