"Remember, when your Lord said to the angels: ‘I have to place a vicegerent on earth,’ they said: ‘Will you place one there who will create disorder and shed blood, while we intone Your litanies and sanctify Your name?’ And God said: ‘I know what you do not know’" (Qur'an 2:30)
Winds of Change.NET first informed its (very few) readers about UCLA's Khaled Abou El Fadl back in April 2002. Now, a despairing message from a moderate muslim in one of Dan's posts motivated me to post from El-Fadl's "Islam and the Challenge of Democracy" in a recent issue of Boston Review:
For Islam, democracy poses a formidable challenge. Muslim jurists argued that law made by a sovereign monarch is illegitimate because it substitutes human authority for God's sovereignty. But law made by sovereign citizens faces the same problem of legitimacy. In Islam, God is the only sovereign and ultimate source of legitimate law. How, then, can a democratic conception of the people's authority be reconciled with an Islamic understanding of God's authority?
The rest of his article goes on to wrestle with that very issue, but it begins with a core idea:
"Several considerations suggest that democracy - and especially a constitutional democracy that protects basic individual rights - is that form. My central argument (others will emerge later) is that democracy - by assigning equal rights of speech, association, and suffrage to all - offers the greatest potential for promoting justice and protecting human dignity, without making God responsible for human injustice or the degradation of human beings by one another. A fundamental Qur'anic idea is that God vested all of humanity with a kind of divinity by making all human beings the viceroys of God on this earth.... In particular, human beings are responsible, as God's vicegerents, for making the world more just. By assigning equal political rights to all adults, democracy expresses that special status of human beings in God's creation and enables them to discharge that responsibility."
Some echoes of the Sufi Wisdom stories attracted me to this bit, too:
'Ali himself had agreed to the arbitration on condition that the arbitrators be bound by the Qur'an and give full consideration to the supremacy of the Shari'ah. But the Khawarij - pious, puritanical, and fanatical - believed that God's law clearly supported 'Ali. So they rejected arbitration as inherently unlawful and, in effect, a challenge to God's sovereignty. According to the Khawarij, 'Ali’s behavior showed that he was willing to compromise God's supremacy by transferring decision making to human actors. They declared 'Ali a traitor to God, and after efforts to reach a peaceful resolution failed they assassinated him. After 'Ali’s death, Mu'awiya seized power and established himself as the first caliph of the Umayyad Dynasty.
Anecdotal reports about the debates between 'Ali and the Khawarij reflect an unmistakable tension about the meaning of legality and the implications of the rule of law. In one such report members of the Khawarij accused 'Ali of accepting the judgment and dominion (hakimiyya) of human beings instead of abiding by the dominion of God’s law.
Upon hearing of this accusation, 'Ali called upon the people to gather around him and brought a large copy of the Qur'an. 'Ali touched the Qur'an while instructing it to speak to the people and inform them about God's law. Surprised, the people gathered around 'Ali exclaimed, "What are you doing? The Qur'an cannot speak, for it is not a human being!" Upon hearing this, 'Ali exclaimed that this was exactly his point. The Qur'an, 'Ali explained, is but ink and paper, and it does not speak for itself. Instead, it is human beings who give effect to it according to their limited personal judgments and opinions."
As they say, read the whole thing.
Then, when you're done with that and want to get a better sense of the situation on the ground right now, read Muravchik's Among Arab Reformers for a gripping first-hand, on the scene look inside the reform movements in the Palestinian Authority and Egypt.
UPDATE: Winds of Change.NET's Cairo team member and Arab reformer Tarek Heggy talks about what it takes to bridge the gaps noted in Muravchik's article. Presenting: The Values of Progress.
[JK: deleted for lack of relevance to the topic of the post. Which one might expect from "insurgentmedia@yahoo.ca"]
This reminds me of the concept of Brahma, that through all mankind runs a spirit in common, and that that is the existence of God/Brahma. Making everyone's position and interests equal over the law. As in any system, the way it is administered, of course, usually is not always justified by the original concepts or beliefs.
The early Puritans in Massachusetts tried for awhile to establish written law in strict accordance with the biblical law, particularly the Deutoronomic code in the Old Testament.
This failed, as the leaders came to understand that an archaic code didn't take advantage of the principles of British common law, which had sensibly and brilliantly developed over hundreds of years.
One hopes that the Muslims in Iraq understand this. Actually the draft Constitution, while referring to holy law, by no means establishes it. My sense is that the best of the Iraqi jurists are quite sophisticated about this.
How, then, can a democratic conception of the people's authority be reconciled with an Islamic understanding of God's authority?
Christian reformers considered this question (and its many related questions) 500 years ago and came up with three different answers:
1. Theocracy (John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli). Total integration of church, state, and society.
2. Integration of Christians with society, but with total separation of church and state (Martin Luther). Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.
3. Separation of church and state, and separation of Christian and society (the so-called Anabaptists). Go thee and be thou separate.
The Ayatollahs and the Friday-morning clerics want number one, of course. But it never worked out for Calvin and Zwingli. Calvinist theocracy survived for a while in Zurich, Scotland, and Puritan New England, but could not sustain itself. Likewise the Catholic Church with its much greater numbers and influence could not enforce theocracy, even on Catholics like Charles V.
Number two was the historically successful model, followed today by both mainline Protestantism and Catholicism. We assume that "moderate" Muslims in the West follow this model. Democracy of some type is essential to this model, because believers cannot function normally in a society that outlaws their faith.
Number three almost went extinct, but survives today in the Amish, Mennonites, etc. Run out of most of Europe and Russia, they survived only in places that allowed a large degree of religious freedom, especially the United States. Only in democracies do these sects survive unmolested, so they should be all for democracy.
So Islam has three choices. One doesn't work, and the other two require democracy to work. So democracy it is, I hope that settles that.
There is no room for reforms in Islam. Everything is codified in the Qoran and the Hadith. None can deviate from them. At the best some have attempted revival of Islamic tendencies and some are still doing those.
All Islamic and Arab countries are peaceful democracies, it is just that they define peace and democracy radically differently from everybody else. Peace for them is for the population to be completely Moslem, and to kill or expel anyone who isn't. Democracy for the Arabs and the Moslems is one leader for life, who is elected time after time by elections in which he is the only candidate, that is if the leader even bothers to hold elections.
There's a concept of "ijtihad" in Islam where new issues are debated upon and new laws are generated. For example, can you use a computer?
The usage of computer is not mentioned in Qur'an, so Islamic scholars would have to debate the issue and come up with a law.
We should really educate ourselves about Islam before talking about it like we know everything about it.
Talking based on ignorance is exactly how hatred and misinformation spreads.