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Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy: Toward a Democratic Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy This page intentionally left blank Islam, Secularism, and Liberal Democracy Toward a Democratic Theory for Muslim Societies NADER HASHEMI 1 2009 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright # 2009 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hashemi, Nader, 1966– Islam, secularism, and liberal democracy / Nader Hashemi. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-532124-1 1. Islam and secularism. 2. Democracy—Religious aspects—Islam. 3. Secularism— Islamic countries. 4. Democracy—Islamic countries. 5. Islam and politics—Islamic countries. 6. Islamic countries—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. BP190.5.S35H38 2009 297.2072—dc22 2008026682 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To My Parents; for All Their Sacrifices This page intentionally left blank We should not ...conclude from this that politics and religion have a common object among us, but that in the beginning stages of nations the one serves as an instrument of the other. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. —Karl Marx And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family. It is the old, yet ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets. ...For I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element. All the religions, old and new, are there. —Walt Whitman Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst. Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation. To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a postnational constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk. —Ju¨rgen Habermas Throughout the nineteenth century, theorists of democracy found it quite natural to discuss whether one country or another was “fit for democracy.” This thinking changed only in the twentieth century, with the recognition that the question itself was wrong: A country does not have to be deemed fit for democracy; rather, it has to become fit through democracy. —Amartya Sen Secularists are wrong when they ask believers to leave their religion at the door before entering into the public square. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King—indeed, the majority of great reformers in American history—were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause. So to say that men and women should not inject their “personal morality” into public policy debates is a practical absurdity. Our law is by definition a codification of morality, much of it grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. —Barack Hussein Obama Preface This book was written during difficult times. While the basic para- meters and arguments were first conceived in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the critical questions that spawned my interest in this topic have been percolating in my mind for most of my adult life. They were given greater impetus in the lead up to and aftermath of the United States-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. The new American foreign policy thrust to promote, at least rhetorically, liberal democracy in the Muslim world also gave this project a pressing new relevance. Fundamentally, this is a study about the relationship between religion and democracy. The principal goal is to promote a rethink- ing of this relationship by challenging long-standing premises, para- digms, and conceptual models against the backdrop of what Fernand Braudel called the longue dure´e (the study of history as a long dura- tion). The focus, therefore, is not on the immediate social conditions that can generate reconciliation between the claims of religion and the demands of liberal democracy but on the connection and the coherence of a set of ideas—specifically, how we can study the connection between religion and democracy with fresh eyes, with a sense of history and free from the unexamined assumptions that have often clouded an understanding of this subject. In pursuit of the same objective, Fred Dallmayr has observed that one of the main goals of comparative political theory is to “rekindle the critical e´lan endemic to political philosophy since the x PREFACE time of Socrates and Plato but likely to be extinguished by canonization.” Challenging the received wisdom on any subject, Dallmayr suggests, can “help restore the sense of ‘wondering’ (thaumazein) that the ancients extolled as pivotal to philosophizing.”1 One of my key objectives, therefore, in writing this book is to challenge the received wisdom on the relationship between religion and democracy—especially in the context of Muslim societies—that dominates the scholarly and public debate on this topic in the West. A new paradigm is urgently needed today that is firmly rooted in the comparative study of history, religion, and political theory. While writing this book, I had several audiences in mind. First, this study has been significantly shaped by many conversations and (often heated) de- bates with close friends and colleagues who consider themselves part of the “political left.” From the moment I began to think seriously about the relation- ship between religion and politics, it struck me that much (but not all) of this commentary and analysis—while rightfully critical of religion and laudatory of secularism—was ahistorical, unnuanced, and elitist. This contrasted quite sharply with my own study of history. It also clashed with my personal observations on the sociological aspects of religion based on time spent living and teaching in the Middle East and several field trips to Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Indonesia, where I interviewed human rights activists, students, feminists, religious leaders, reformist thinkers, political dissidents, and—most important—ordinary people. The political analysis of my left-of-center friends was particularly unhelp- ful in understanding the complicated politics of Muslim societies where today religion is a key marker of identity, secularism has few supporters, and social movements whose participants self-identify with Islam are gaining in popular- ity and are important players in emerging social and political debates. As events over the past decade in Turkey have demonstrated, the binary division between secularists-equals-good guys and Islamists-equals-bad guys is simplis- tic and distorting. While it may be intellectually soothing and familiar to us to think in these terms, it fundamentally fails to contribute to a deeper under- standing of the complex role religion plays in emerging democracies within the Muslim world. Such labels and categories also fail to provide any illumina- tion on the important moral and political questions facing Muslims at the dawn of the twenty-first century. A more nuanced, historically rooted, and comparative perspective is needed to arrive at a more balanced comprehension of the multifaceted, complex, and interweaving relationship between religion and politics both within the Muslim world and beyond. Part of this analytical failure is due to an intellectual framework that has been demarcated on the one side by Karl Marx and his ideological successors in PREFACE xi terms of social theory and on the other side by the French Revolution as a paradigmatic political event that shapes an understanding of the role of reli- gion in society. As an alternative, as I argue in this book, if one wanted to look to Western political theory and history to shed light on the contemporary politics of Muslim societies, the seventeenth century is a better place to turn, where the political ideas of Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke are particularly relevant. As a seminal event, the English Revolution (1640– 1660) not the French Revolution provides a more useful reference point for comparative historical analysis than my friends and colleagues on the political left have generally appreciated. Second, this book is a partial response to a group of writers who believe in the “Islamic exceptionalism” thesis. Often identified as Orientalist scholars they subscribe to an essentialized conception of Muslim politics and history and have long argued that Muslims societies are uniquely resistant to secular- ism and liberal democracy due to an inner antimodern, religiocultural dynamic that has few parallels with other religious traditions or civilizations.
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