Is Islam Compatible with Democracy?

 

Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Ms.Sherry Rehman, has asserted and posited that Islam is compatible with democracy at a gathering termed’ Strategic Dialogue between American Muslims and the Muslim World. She also made an empirical observation about the presence of Muslims in North America, how they had adjusted to their host societies and extrapolated from this Islam’s compatibility with democracy.  . Ms. Rehman posited and drew attention to values like equality and Islam’s appeal to different cultures and then drew the inference of Islam’s compatibility with democracy. The confidence that she made these rather wild assertions reflects hope, defensiveness and aspiration than sobriety and fact. Why?

 

The reasons accrue from the nature of Islam and democracy. The former is a revealed faith or religion where absolute sovereignty rests in God and the latter is premised on the sovereignty of man and its concomitant: reason. These constitute the fundamental difference(s) between Islam and democracy. The reference to equality and fraternity do not constitute the grist and mill of democracy but are its components and constituents. Democracy is more than the sum of its parts and it cannot be reduced to mere equality. The inference about Islam’s compatibility with democracy drawn from the presence of the Muslim diaspora is also plain wrong. The Muslim diaspora in the west constitutes globalized Islam. That is, Islam shorn of cultural accretions and territorial associations operating or existing in a milieu defined by a liberal democratic cast.  Globalized Islam is about the gradual and perhaps inexorable adaptability of Muslims (not Islam) to liberal and democratic milieus. Drawing an inference from this about the compatibility of Islam with democracy is then akin to comparing apples with oranges. So is Ms.Rehman then entirely wrong and her assertions misplaced? Are Islam and democracy doomed fundamentally antithetical? Are they doomed to clash? Is there a redeeming factor? Can a modus vivendi be reached between Islam and democracy?

 

Ms. Rehman’s clear cut assertions are indeed wrong. However, modification of these statements and assertions may take us to the middle ground where Islam and democracy may be compatible. It is this middle ground that will perhaps (and hopefully) lead to the much needed modus vivendi between Islam and democracy. The question is what constitutes this middle ground and where and how can it be crystallized?

 

Faith in the absolute sovereignty of God and the centrality of the Propher(SAW) is a non negotiable  and pivotal aspect of a Muslims’ faith and belief. This cannot be touched and is sacrosanct. This stands in contradistinction to the premise of democracy. So what can be done to reconcile the irreconcilables? The answer may lie in imbibing and absorbing the procedural aspects and functions of democracy and integrating them into an Islamic framework. This does mean Islamization of democracy but a more accurate term for this synthesis may be Islamic democracy. Islamic democracy may not be a contradiction in terms and may in the final analysis be the most prudent and useful synthesis redounding more positively to the world of Islam. How could this synthesis be arrived at?

 

The sine qua non for Islamic democracy is reform within the Islamic world. The impetus for this reform should come from within. And the major component of this reform has to be the integration of reason with faith for it is reason that is the bedrock of democracy.  The Islamic world does not have to re invent the wheel, so to speak, for this. A healthy and salubrious tradition of the synthesis of faith and reason exists in the philosophical repertoire of Islam and Islamic history. It is this tradition that needs to be revived and made mainstream in the world of Islam. This means shedding the some of useless accretions that have latched onto Islam over the centuries and engaging with the premises of reason and its concomitant modernity in an idiom that redounds positively to Islam.

 

Sans this reform and impetus for reform, talking about the compatibility of Islam and democracy is chimeric. And without this reform and synthesis, the Islamic world will continue to wallow in a self created morass and political decay. It then becomes incumbent upon all and sundry in the Islamic world to stock take, review, introspect and then opt for a course of action that takes the Muslim world out of the torpor and decay it is afflicted with. It is perhaps only the synthesis between Islam , reason and democracy that can redeem the Islamic world. It is therefore about time that we, Muslims, do not swim against the tide but cull and take the best that modernity has to offer. We owe it to our faith and people.