Symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 1, 2003 | by Abdulwahab Alkebsi, | Robert Spencer

In the long history of the world, democracy is a relatively new phenomenon. It is still developing and is far from perfect. Islam, a 1,400-year-old religion, does not, of course, prescribe democracy as we know it today, but it lays the ground for the values of freedom, justice, and equality that are essential to democracy, more so than any other religion or dogma. Muslim and Arab countries have suffered for too long from oppression, authoritarianism and dictatorship. If the United States can help to bring democracy to the region, as tricky as this might be, it will become a tree friend and an ally of the Muslim and Arab world. This is good for the United States, good for the region and good for the world. A prominent Arab journalist recently told me: "We are at the cusp of democratic reforms. One can either ride the wave or be carried away by it."

Muslims and Arabs neither will accept nor embrace democracy if they believe that it is foreign or alien to Islam. To those who continue to insist that Islam and democracy are not compatible, let me offer this pragmatic approach: Muslims see Islam not just as their religion, but also as their identity and culture. Some people want to promote democracy in the Muslim world by telling them: "We have this wonderful product for you. It's called democracy. It will solve all your problems. It will take care of your political, economic and social problems. It will cure your governance ills and give you prosperity. There's just one problem: It is not compatible with your religion. You have to choose either democracy or Islam." Take a guess which one they will choose! However, the question that so profoundly looms before President Bush is: Can democracy be promoted through war?

Alkebsi is the executive director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, a Washington-based think tank dedicated to studying Islamic and democratic political thought and merging them into a modern Islamic democratic discourse.

NO: Insisting that the nations of the Middle East choose between Western-style democracy or the terror state will do more harm than good.

The president believes that democracy can succeed in Iraq, and in the Islamic world in general, because human nature is the same everywhere on earth. "It is presumptuous and insulting" he told the American Enterprise Institute, "to suggest that a whole region of the world--for the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim--is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life. Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on earth."

One of those good things, according to Bush, is democracy. "In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror."

Yet, are those really our only choices? Human history is full of regimes that were neither democratic nor terrorist. In the world today there are Muslim regimes that are not democracies or terror states, and their existence points to a third possibility. Many in Saddam's Iraq will want his secular regime to be succeeded by one that more or less conforms to the dictates of Islamic Shariah law. The president is correct that people want to be free from oppression and to seek a better life, but the particularities of what makes for that better life may differ markedly from place to place. As Bush himself notes, human cultures are different.