symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 14, 2000 | by Geneive Abdo, | Daniel Pipes

Q: Are today's Islamic movements compatible with democracy?

Yes: Islamic nations are developing their own form of indirect democracy.

"Those intellectuals who say that the clergy should leave politics and go back to the mosque speak on behalf of Satan," Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini said in 1979. So began the modern world's first experiment in establishing a religious government armed with clerics who claimed to have divine right over all temporal authorities. Now, 20 years later, Iran is refining the once-stated aims of the Iranian revolution and taking significant steps toward realizing an Islamic republic -- a government that is Islamic but one in which the people have the ultimate say in matters of state.

"Democracy," considered a heretical concept in the early days of the revolution, now is embraced by the leader of the reformist movement, President Mohammad Khatami. A cleric and intellectual, Khatami believes that a religious government should serve the people's desires. "Government, although of religious character, is a human institution, and thus should be accountable to the people. In this respect, democracy may not be all that incompatible with religion," he said in a landmark newspaper interview in March.

Western skeptics and Iran's secular elite dismiss such notions, arguing that authoritarian practices are inherent in an Islamic state, making democratic rule impossible. But in recent years, overwhelming evidence suggests the contrary, not only in Iran but in many Islamic countries. Militant Islam, which saw the rise of violent groups such as the Gamaa al-Islamiyya in Egypt, the Islamic Group in Algeria and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, now has lost its luster and has been replaced by quietest movements aiming to address the social, religious and political needs of Islamic societies.

In Egypt, a generation of moderate Islamists transformed professional unions representing hundreds of thousands of doctors, lawyers and engineers into bastions of democracy in the 1990s. For the first time, free and fair elections were held in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak's government upholds its monopoly on power by banning nearly all opposition parties and most newspapers. Widespread fraud has existed in parliamentary and presidential elections for two decades, allowing Mubarak to claim 96 to 99 percent of the vote in presidential polls and to exclude powerful alternative voices from the parliament. When potential Islamist candidates have appeared to gain popularity ahead of elections, the state has imprisoned them to deprive them of victory at the ballot box.

In officially secular Turkey, Necmettin Erbakan became the first Islamist prime minister in the summer of 1996 -- only to be ousted in June 1997, when the army threatened a coup d'etat against his government and banned his Welfare Party. In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, the new president is a moderate Islamist.

Critics point to the most extreme examples of Islamic rule in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan to support the argument that democracy is incompatible with Islam. But there are fallacies in this assumption: In Saudi Arabia, it is a ruling feudal family, not Islamic principles, governing the country. And the Taliban's repressive and authoritarian tactics in Afghanistan hardly are considered a model by Islamic states. Iran has been at the forefront of denouncing the Taliban's distorted interpretation of the religious texts -- from where it claims to justify its actions -- as "un-Islamic."

Just as Iran introduced the world to the prospect of a theocracy 20 years ago, it now is at the vanguard of fusing Islam with democracy. The freest elections in the history of the Islamic republic were held in February. Thousands of candidates of many political stripes competed for 290 seats in the national parliament. The election was by no means a perfect democratic exercise. The Guardian Council, an election supervisory board comprised of six conservative clerics and six jurists, did its best before and after the poll to minimize the reformists' gains. The council disqualified some candidates deemed to fall short of the proper Islamic credentials before the election and cancelled some winners after the poll.

The council even went so far as to try to hand a seat to its favorite son, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who appeared to have lost in the first round of voting. But when the public outcry become too intense, Rafsanjani virtually admitted defeat and tacitly acknowledged he had been granted a seat through vote-rigging on his behalf. He resigned in disgrace. That left the new parliament, primarily in the hands of reformers, a bit less hindered in what are certain to be attempts to pass progressive legislation.

Such an admission, prompted by the public's demand for fair elections, would have seemed inconceivable even a few years ago. But now, the Guardian Council, a body some would argue is a major stumbling block toward Iran's modern political development, has been forced to surrender to the public will. The Guardians say they receive their mandate from the Iranian constitution drafted after the revolution.