Alexis de Tocqueville thought that Islam and democracy were incompatible. The polemicist Ian Buruma declares in "Taming the Gods" that "Tocqueville's idea that Islam and democracy cannot survive together must be disproven."
It would be easier if there were any Islamic democracies, but Buruma, who revels in the gaudy but faintly ridiculous title of Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, tries.
First he examines whether democracy is compatible with any religion, finding that in America, for example, the two get along. He cites Tocqueville, approvingly this time, to the effect that "democracy in the United States could be established because Americans shared a Christian faith, specifically a Protestant faith, whose free agents observed clear boundaries between their churches and the democratic state."
Tocqueville was assured by various sectaries that they accepted toleration, and Buruma believes this, and Tocqueville may have believed it and even his informants may have believed they believed it. I grew up in Tennessee, and I don't believe it.
Tolerance survived in the America not because the various cults thought it good, but because there were 400 of them and they couldn't stand each other. Or as Samuel Eliot Morison put it: "The only way these sects of divers doctrine could be kept in a single political party, was by agreeing on toleration." At times and places where one sect dominated - as Connecticut in the 1800s, Indiana in the 1920s or Tennessee in the 1950s -- civil rights and free speech were hard to come by.
That early Americans thought political parties more important to preserve than even churchly dominance is a main theme of Morison's "Builders of the Bay Colony," which he attributes primarily to unplanned consequences of the way the New England charters were written. That America ended up with two political parties (and not 30) and that neither was captured by a religion is one of those things that we breathe in like air and don't think about, but it is unusual. (Buruma notes that Dutch politics, despite its origin in Europe's first religiously tolerant state, consists of a multitude of religious parties.) Nothing says America had to stay tolerant, and in 1930, when Morison wrote, the states of Indiana and Oklahoma had only recently purged their governments of violently intolerant Ku Klux Klan Christians.
I was shocked, as an adult trying to unlearn the lies about American history that I had heard in school, to learn that in the 1830s, the most vigorous defense of First Amendment rights to free speech and free press was mounted by Baptists, who felt themselves oppressed by Episcopalians and Congregationalists. I had grown up among Baptists, and I'd never met any who respected a free press. Nowadays, the sect that feels oppressed and puts out a magazine (Liberty) to defend free expression is the Seventh-day Adventists.
In my opinion, Tocqueville's statement will not have been proven correct until no sect feels the need to put out a magazine like Liberty. It is, obviously, not secularists who are making the Adventists feel put upon.
In the second section, Buruma presents the same dilemma to east Asia, and scouts the idea that religion has lived a separate existence from democracy there. Democracy has hardly had a long enough run there to make these conclusions impressive, even if correct.
However, nobody worries whether any significant number of devoted Buddhists or Christians are trying to overthrow democracy. (Hinduism may be an exception, but only in India, because it is not a universalizing cult, nor a monotheism. The universalizing, salvationist monotheisms are the dangers to liberty and democracy. Christians have already been tamed, except in Tonga.) Lots of people, however, wonder about Islam. The last third of the book is where the argument is intended to strike home.
Buruma aligns himself with the French accommodationist Olivier Roy and against the skeptics Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington in favor of the possibility of a democratic Islam. It would be easier to buy this if there were any majority Islamic states that were democratic, but there are not.
Turkey is not, although often claimed as the exception, and although a few (very few) Muslim places have had as many as two elections, it would be difficult to find an Islamic polity that could claim three in a row.
For people trying to establish the possibility of an Islamic democracy, Lebanon is the biggest obstacle. It was a democracy, more or less, with a population just under half Muslim. Given disparate growth rates, the Muslims could have dominated the government through the ballot box within a few years. They chose, instead, to destroy the country. The Syrian political scientist Bassam Tibi has said that Arabs are not interested in democracy. This may not be true of Christian Arabs, but it is too weak concerning Muslim Arabs, who are mostly hostile to democracy (assuming any have a clear idea what it might be, which our adventure in Iraq lays open to doubt).
It may be significant that when the USSR broke up, all the infidel republics turned democratic after a fashion, while all the Muslim "republics" became despotisms of medieval tenor. A better question than whether Islam is compatible with democracy is whether it is compatible with any sort of modern organization. (Lewis avers that monarchy has always been the accepted form of secular government in Muslim lands. Muslim monarchs were just jumped up bandit generals, and the leaders of most Muslim countries today still are, it is just no longer fashionable for them to style themselves m-l-k, malik, king.)
One quarter of the world's "nations" are predominantly Islamic in population, and of these about a tenth are failed states, with several more waiting in the wings to fail soon. The number of infidel failed states is close to zero (Zimbabwe, Congo, Haiti), although Cuba and North Korea and perhaps Mexico or Venezuela have a shot at it.
Buruma cites Roy to the effect that belief does not count, only following the rules matters. True, but there is more doubt than they will admit whether Muslims in general are prepared to follow the rule of law if it isn't Islamic law. (They have some serious problems even deciding on Islamic law among themselves.) Islam does not have a pope, as Buruma notes, but it does have a unified voice in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which has often declared not only that western ideas of civil rights are unacceptable in Islamic governments (which we already knew), but that they must be abrogated in favor of Muslim prejudices in every land.
Furthermore, if actions rather than ideas are what count in a successful democracy (an idea I accept only in the most trivial sense), then we have to consider Muslim actions. We cannot just blow them off by observing, as Buruma does, that the Old Order Amish in America do not subscribe to many democratic, secular values. True, but there are not a billion Old Order Amish, they do not control any precincts, let alone nations, and they do not blow themselves up to make political points.
It would be helpful if, even in undemocratic Muslim states, there were some indication of tolerance for infidels, but this is hard to find. Many do not even permit infidel churches, or, if they do, public opinion approves of torching them. This is so even in Muslim states that have had a healthy dose of exposure to western political values, like Egypt, and - especially notable in this context, since it claims to be a democracy and has elections off and on -- Nigeria.
But it is suicide bombing that presents the most obvious behavior that would lead one to think that Huntington ("Clash of Civilizations") is on to something; or, as some anonymous blogger once said, Muslims do not know how to be a minority.
That Buruma has no real answer to this is evident from his cursory treatment of this question, which under his own terms of reference ought to deserve a chapter in itself. Although he says he scorns cultural relativism, in this case he embraces it, asking why westerners admired soldiers in war who undertook death-defying missions.
But this misstates what was done and what was admired. Western soldiers sometimes killed themselves in order to kill enemy soldiers, but they did not do so in order to blow up pizza parlors full of teenagers, and if they had, no one would have admired them for it.
The question was made very clear recently by the Jordanian suicide bomber Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, who targeted CIA agents and left a message imploring other Muslims to do the same. This set Balawi apart from almost all suicide bombers, who kill at random, apparently for the joy of murder and/or for rewards in the afterlife.
And recall that, although they may fantasize about killing infidels, infidels tend to object to being blown up, so the Muslim suiciders overwhelmingly kill other Muslims. This is a behavior that writers like Buruma need to consider.
"Taming the Gods" is well worth reading, because Buruma asks some good questions, such as whether democratic states should cultivate "moderate" believers. He thinks not, although if the moderates are not cultivated, it is hard to see why they would consider the state "theirs too."
But if read, it needs to be read carefully. Many of his statements are simply wrong, such as that extremist Islamism is religious, not cultural. It is religious -- that is the probem -- but it is cultural. The yearning of bin Laden to reoccupy al-Andalus (Iberia) is a cultural, not a strictly religious, feeling.
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