Democracy and Islam

John Esposito, one of the leading scholars on Islam and editor of The Oxford History of Islam, addressed the question of Practice and Theory in the Boston Review Apr/May 2003. He was writing as part of a forum which was structured around the essay, Islam and the Challenge of Democracy by Khaled Abou El Fadl in the same issue.
Esposito writes:

So, are Islam and democracy compatible?

In addressing this question, we need to start with a general observation: religious traditions are a combination of text and context - revelation and human interpretation within a specific socio-historical context. All religious traditions demonstrate dynamism and diversity, which is why there are conservative as well as modernist or progressive elements in all religions. Judaism and Christianity, the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, have been used to legitimize monarchies and feudalism in the past, and democracy and capitalism, as well as socialism in the present. The Gospels and Christianity have been used to legitimize the accumulation of wealth and market capitalism as well as religio-social movements like those of Francis of Assisi and in the twentieth century Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement and Liberation Theology in Latin and Central America. Moreover, democracy itself has meant different things to different peoples at different times, from ancient Greece to modern Europe, from direct to indirect democracy, from majority rule to majority vote. Can Islam travel a similar path?

Generally speaking, the answer seems to be "yes." Islam throughout history has proven dynamic and diverse. It adapted to support the movement from the city-state of Medina to empires and sultanates, it was able to encompass diverse schools of theology, law, and philosophy as well as different Sunni and Shi‘i branches, and has been used to support both extremism and conservative orthodoxy. Islam continues today to lend itself to multiple interpretations of government; it is used to support limited democracy and dictatorship, republicanism and monarchy. Like other religions, Islam possesses intellectual and ideological resources that can provide the justification for a wide range of political models. (my emphasis)

Given our current foreign policy, and the secular and religious polemics against Islam in general that it has generated, it's probably appropriate to say that arguing that democracy and Islam are compatable is not the same as arguing that it's necessary or good for the United States to try to impose democracy on Islamic countries by bombs, bullets and torture.

But that argument does constitute one reason that it would be unrealistic and badly misleading for the United States to assume that Islam is some generally hostile ideology. A faith-based foreign policy gave us the Iraq War. The sooner we get back to a reality-based approach, the better off we'll all be. (Except maybe for Halliburton and Bechtel executives.)

Tags: islam, john esposito