MUNIR PERVAIZ SAAMI

Why has democracy not taken root in most Muslim countries?

FAMILY OF THE HEART SEMINAR, APRIL 02, 2006

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I am assuming that the question, as raised, is not rhetorical and that we are interested in pursuing it with integrity, and in light of empirical evidence. I will deal with the history of democracy in the west, present a definition of democracy, and discuss the state of democracy in Muslim countries.

“Of all the traditional names for the forms of government, “democracy” has the liveliest currency. Yet like all the others, it has a long history in the literature of political thought and career of shifting meanings.” 

One essential condition of democracy is the equality of all citizens without any gender, racial, and religious differences. I would revert to this and other essential conditions again later. 

If gender equality is an essential condition of democracy, then we see that a Muslim country, Turkey, established the right of vote for women in 1930 much ahead of France, Italy and Japan. And Pakistan, another Muslim country, established this right in 1947 at its inception much ahead of India, Greece, and Switzerland. It may be of interest to some, that Switzerland gave franchise to women in 1971!

Based on these historical facts can we deduce that Turkey and Pakistan have been better democracies than France, Italy, Japan, India, and Switzerland?  The answer is an emphatic no. 

Another essential condition of democracy is equal participation of the populace in constitutional decision making and formulation of laws for self governance. If such is the case, then let’s explore the percentage of women in the latest elected congresses, parliaments, and democratic institutions.

We find that the share of women in the lower houses of parliament in the US   was 14 percent, in the UK was 18 percent, and in Portugal was 19 percent.  The share in Pakistan was 22 percent. Can we again infer that Pakistan has been a better democracy, since it met two essential conditions of the institution of democracy? I am again confident that the answer will be negative.

You may also note that in Rwanda, 49 percent of women were elected to lower house and in Sweden this percentage was 46. This is a close to gender parity as one could expect. Can we then also establish that Rwanda is the best democracy in the world? I am again certain that the answer to this will also be strongly negative.

Let’s now try to have an overview of history of democracy and determine if it had kept pace with the evolution of human civilization. This may allow us to understand as to how deep the roots of democracy are in our time. 

In his research paper, Prospects for Democracy in Islamic Countries, Rein Taagepera, Professor Emeritus at University of California, writes that in the last 50 centuries of written history of humanity, democracy has hardly persisted for more than 2 of those centuries. 

Steven Howe of Ruskin College at Oxford informs us that, a great deal of the world’s history is the history of empires. And that all history of governance has been imperial, or colonial. 

In this backdrop we may go back to the Athens of 5th and 4th centuries BC, which gave us the word ‘democracy’ which is derived from ‘kratos’ by the ‘demos’ and literally means the rule by the common people. David Beetham, of the University of Leeds discusses in his book, A Beginners Guide to Democracy, that the rule by the people in Athens did not include either women or slaves, both of whom were believed to be naturally inferior to male citizens.

Despite this serious limitation, however, ancient Athens, and its democratic allies in cities across the Aegean, provided two key factors which have been an inspiration to democrats ever since. The first was an effective working example of a popular assembly, in which ordinary citizens debated and decided laws and policies for their society in person, including peace and war.

A second important feature of the Athenian democracy was that its supporters strongly professed and defended the principle that the poor citizens were as qualified and capable as the elite of the society to deliberate on issues of public policy and vote on it.

The Athenian, in one of the plays of Euripides, says that, “We give no special power to wealth, the poor man’s voice commands equal authority.  Pericles says in his famous funeral speech at the end of the first year of war with Sparta,  “No one, so long he has it in him to be of service to society, is kept in obscurity because of poverty.” 

These ideas of Athenian equality were not very popular among the Aristocrats and the elite. Plato considered democracy to be a ship that had been seized by an inexperienced crew, which had also consumed all supplies in a drunken orgy. 

In Plato’s view only philosophers with long education and experience and knowledge of what was good for a society were fit to be the rulers of a city. Plato even proclaimed that democracy was only one step removed from tyranny. 

These were the debates and arguments that led Aristotle to define in his classic work on Politics, Aristocracy as the rule by the Elite, Oligarchy as rule by a selected few and Polyarchy as rule by the many.

After the short- lived Athenian experience,  humanity endured a long and dark history of imperialism.  These included the Greek, Roman, Persian, Islamic Abbasid, Mogul, Ottoman, Persian Safavid, Chinese, British, Astro- Hungarian, Prussian, and other Empires. It was only between the beginning of First World War and the end of the Second World War that the period of formal Empires and Colonial rule came to a tentative end.

It was during the 18th and the 19th centuries that the divine right of rule by the princes was formally challenged and gave way to the establishment of democracies in Europe and the USA.  The democracy that began to prevail in the West requires certain essential conditions.

Robert Dahl, of Yale University defines these conditions, in his book, ‘On Democracy’ as follows:

Control of Military and Police by elected officials.

Democratic belief and political culture.

No strong foreign control hostile to democracy.

A modern market economy and society.

Weak sub- cultural pluralism.

Dahl emphasizes that, unless military and police forces are under full control of democratically elected officials, democratic political institutions are unlikely to develop or endure. In contrast to external threat of foreign intervention, perhaps the most dangerous internal threat to democracy comes from leaders who have access to the major means of physical coercion: the military and the police. 

David Beetham also defines certain critical principles that are essential for establishment of democracy, and these are:

Public offices open to all.

Selection for office by election.

Freedom of Expression and media.

Access to official information.

Free associational life.

Direct vote on constitutional change.

Rights enforced by independent judges.

It is not very difficult to observe that not all the conditions and principles described above are fully realized even in established democracies as we know them.

According to Dahl, only 65 of the 192 countries by the end of 1990 could be considered as democratic. This approximates to about 34 percent of the world countries that can be called democracies. Larry Diamond of Stanford also estimates the same percentage of democracies in the world by the end of the year 2000. These estimates may lead us to ask the question, as to why the democracy has not take root in the rest of the world.

A careful reflection upon the history of democracy and the empires will indicate that in the last two centuries various established European democracies that include UK, France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland, were also the main colonial powers that subjugated the entire populations of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. 

These colonial powers not only stripped the wealth of lands and usurped the resources of their colonies, but also stole the humanity of their subjects.

This dichotomy of the democratic countries and their colonial role may also help understand the non prevalence of democratic systems in the post colonial world. We may also note that at least 7 of the top 10 Western democracies are constitutional monarchies.

At the time that the powers of the European empire were receding, the star of USA the largest democracy of the time was rising. 

John Lucas, the author of recently published Democracy and Populism discusses this phenomenon in the section, 1917 and the Americanization of the World.

He writes that, both in the short run (meaning the outcome of the First World War) and in the long run (meaning the history of an entire century) neither Russia nor Communism, but the United States, with its power, its wealth, and its popular influences was decisive.

In 1917 the crucial event was neither the Soviet revolution nor the Soviet withdrawal from a European war but America’s entry into it. It was the reversal of a world movement of four hundred years. For four hundred years armies and people from Europe had moved westward across the Atlantic, to America. Now this was reversed. 

For the first time, two million American soldiers were shipped eastward to decide a European war. For two hundred years, Americans had lauded themselves that theirs was A New World, and that they should have little to do with The Old World and its inhabitants. Now young Americans were going over there, to teach the Old World a lesson.

It was on April 2, 1917, that president Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to seek a Declaration of War against Germany in order that the world “be made safe for democracy.”

John Lucas also writes that, the ideas of “ ‘National self determination’ and ’Making the world safe for democracy’ transformed the history of the twentieth century more than anything else.’

It is important to note that, “American foreign policy – indeed America’s view of the world – has remained Wilsonian ever since, adopted by and partaken and believed in by such different men as Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, and Gorge W. Bush.”

I mentioned earlier that, ‘democratic institutions are less likely to develop in a country subject to intervention by another country hostile to democratic government in that country. This condition is sometimes sufficient to explain why democratic institutions failed to develop or persist in a country where other conditions were considerably more favorable. 

It is in this light that we should look into the overthrow of democratically elected government of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Muslim Iran in 1953. He had a broad mandate and support from the Communist Todeh Party as well as from Ayatollah Kashani. After the declassification of US documents it is clear that both CIA and the British Intelligence directly intervened in Iran to topple a democracy.

It is such interventions in Latin America, Asia, and Africa that have thwarted and crippled any movements towards democratization in these continents including that of the Muslim countries.

I also mentioned earlier the requirement of subservience of militaries of a democracy to the civilian rulers. 

We know for a fact that military of Pakistan, a Muslim country, has usurped power from civilians for over three decades. Despite this fact, the US States Department’s recommends that Pakistan’s army which is the 8th largest army in the world should be kept strong.

Such are the policies of the established democracies that have deprived the rest of the world from the blessings that these democracies have benefited from. 

Tocqueville prophetically pointed out the evils of ‘Tyranny of Majority’ in a democracy while analyzing the US democratic system. And there is also prevalent literature that discusses the growing disillusionment of the citizens of the West with regards to the practice of democracy.

Any neutral observer will find that the Muslim countries have not fared so badly in the realm of democracy, when it has meant the governance by the citizens, and when the Muslim countries have met some though not all the principles and conditions described earlier. Several of these countries have gone beyond the fundamentalist interpretations of Islam that has remained the view of a small minority.

In two PEW surveys conducted in 2002 and 2003, the majority of respondents in at least 17 Muslim countries have opined that democracy can work in their countries.

Several Western scholars have also confirmed these attitudes and aspirations. Leading among these scholars are John Voll, professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, and John Esposito, professor of religion at Georgetown University. 

Various findings in the reports by the Council of Foreign Relations, also verify that there are no major issues of compatibility of democracy and Islam, that Muslims in many countries aspire for democracy, and that Islam is not a hindrance to democratic rule. 

A recent citation by the compiler of Wikipedia has provided a list of Muslim democracies that include Albania, Algeria, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Comoros, Guinea-Bissau, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra- Leone, Turkey, and Yemen. 

The list does not include Iran, Pakistan, and Gambia. I see no problem in adding Iran to the list. Iranians have regularly gone to polls and have changed governments through votes. The veto power in the hand of the clergy is reprehensive, but it is as reprehensive as the Veto at the United Nations in the hands of a chosen few! 

A count of this list indicates that 19 out of 48 Muslim countries are considered weak to moderate democracies. That is approximately 40 per cent of the Muslim countries. And this definitely compares well with the 34 per cent of the countries that can be considered democracies in the world.

Larry Diamond suggests in a Policy Review article that, “If democracy can emerge and persist (now so far for a decade) in an extremely poor, landlocked, overwhelmingly Muslim country like Mali — in which the majority of adults are illiterate and live in absolute poverty and the life expectancy is 44 years — then there is no reason in principle why democracy cannot develop in most other very poor countries.”

Professor John Donohue of the St. Joseph University in Beirut, and John Esposito in their latest book, Islam in Transition, have echoed the same views. They have referred to major conservative as well as moderate Muslim scholars, and have observed that, “this cross section of Muslim thought puts to rest the stereotype that Islam is contrary to democracy.”

I close this presentation with the suggestion that Muslim countries have kept pace with the democratic evolution like all other countries in the world. …but there still remain significant barriers to the introduction of democracy in several Muslim countries, often created by the West that continues supporting military regimes in order to further its own interests. 

The reasons for slower evolution are the same that have affected the establishment of the democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. And these reasons include the impact of colonialism, post colonial hegemony of certain established democracies, overt and covert foreign intervention, and propping up of military dictatorships by the US for its own benefit.

The Western nations took over 200 years to establish viable democracies. It is but normal that post colonial Muslim countries will take some more decades to reach that goal. 

Democracy, as the will of the majority requires absolute protections of the rights of all minorities. My hope is that during their evolution to democratic systems, Muslim countries would give critical attention to fundamental human rights that include freedom of religion, speech, thought, and right of minorities. 

Bibliography:

Dahl, Robert. On Democracy, Yale University Press, 1997

Beetham, David. Democracy: A Beginner’s Guide, One World, Oxford, 2005

Howe, Stephen. Empire: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002

Lucas, John. Democracy and Populism, Yale University Press, 2005

Donohue, John J. and John L. Esposito. Islam in Transition, Oxford University Press, 2007

Taagepera, Rein. Prospects for Democracy in Islamic Countries, Center for the Study of Democracy, 2003 (http://repositories.cdlib.org/csd/03-10/)

Voll, John O. and John L Esposito. Islam’s Democratic Essence, Middle East Quarterly, September 1994 (http://www.meforum.org/pf.php?id=151)

Middle East: Islam and Democracy, Council of Foreign Relations, September 19, 2003

(http://www.cfr.org/publication.html?id=7708#5)

Adler, Mortimer J. The Syntopicon, Democracy, Great Books of the Western World, Britannica, 1992

Diamond, Larry. Universal Democracy?, Policy Review Online (http://www.policyreview.org/jun03/diamond.html)


Originally published on the Family of the Heart site at http://familyofheart.com/Apr022006/Presentation_MS.htm and reprinted in TAM with permission of the author.