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why they can’t be

democratic

Bassam Tibi

Bassam Tibi , who was born and raised in Damascus, teaches inter-national relations at the University of Goettingen and is the visiting

A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. His latest book is

Political Islam, World Politics and Europe (2008).

Noting Islamism’s growing appeal and strength on the ground, many

Western scholars and officials have been grasping for some way to take

an inclusionary approach toward it. In keeping with this desire, it has

become fashionable contemptuously to dismiss the idea of insisting onclear and rigorous distinctions as “academic.” When it comes to Islam

and democracy, this deplorable fashion has been fraught with unfortu-

nate consequences.

Intelligent discussion of Islamism, democracy, and Islam requires

clear and accurate definitions. Without them, analysis will collapse into

confusion and policy making will suffer. My own view, formed after

thirty years of study and reflection regarding the matter, is that Islam and

democracy are indeed compatible, provided that certain necessary reli-

gious reforms are made. The propensity to deliver on such reforms is whatI see as lacking in political Islam. My own avowed interest—as an Arab-

Muslim prodemocracy theorist and practitioner—is to promote the estab-

lishment of secular democracy within the ambit of Islamic civilization.1

In order to help clear away the confusion that all too often surrounds

this topic, I will lay out several basic points to bear in mind. The first is

that, so far, Western practices vis-`a-vis political Islam have been faulty

because they have lacked the underpinning of a well-founded assess-

ment. Unless blind luck intervenes, no policy can be better than the as-

sessment upon which it is based. Proper assessment is the beginning of

all practical wisdom.

The second point is that Islam itself is basically a faith, a cultural sys-

tem, and an ethics—and hence not necessarily political by its nature. But

Islamism (or political Islam or Islamic fundamentalism—they all mean the

Journal of Democracy Volume 19, Number 3 July 2008

© 2008 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press

Islamist Parties



44 Journal of Democracy

same thing) is a political ideology, albeit one based on a religion. Islam and

Islamism are not just different words, but different things.

Third, when one addresses the issue of democracy and its prospects

within the world of Islam, it is slippery, inaccurate, and an unwarranted

favor to Islamists to blur the terms Islam and Islamism, as authors such

as John Voll and John Esposito do.2 We must not confuse the question

“Are Islam and democracy compatible?” with the question “How demo-

cratic is Islamism?” The answer to the first question is “yes,” conditional

upon religious reform (Salafist Islam is not compatible). The answer to

the second question is a qualified “not democratic at all,” with a possible

exception or qualification that I will specify later. The blurring of terms

against which I am warning is not a matter of mere semantics, but of sub-

stance. Nahdatul Ulema in Indonesia, for instance, is an Islamic—not an

Islamist—party, and it is fair to call it a democratic organization that rep-resents a civil Islam.3 In contrast, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and

its offspring such as Hamas are not democratic parties. On the contrary,

the Egyptian MB is totalitarian in its outlook, and I strongly disagree with

any tendency to speak of it under the rubric of “Islam without fear.” 4

Fourth, in addition to the distinction between Islam as a faith and

Islamism as a religionized ideology there is the distinction, within Is-

lamism itself, between peaceful and violent Islamists. The latter are

those who wage jihad—in the sense of qital or violence5 —in order to

advance their political agenda. Peaceful (or institutional) Islamists stickto participation in democratic institutions and forgo violence. This is a

difference of means, however, and not of ends. Both violent and insti-

tutional Islamists aim to establish nizam Islami —the “Islamic order”

based on shari‘a (Islamic law). Peaceful, institutional Islamists see elec-

tions instrumentally, as the easiest path to power and, with it, “creeping

Islamization.”6 Such a process is not an instance of democratization.

Fifth and finally, free and fair elections are a necessary but not a

sufficient condition for democracy, which is about much more than bal-

loting. Democracy is above all a political culture of pluralism and dis-

agreement, based on core values combined with the acceptance of diver-

sity. Free elections and a pluralistic political culture are parts of the same

system and cannot be separated, as institutional Islamists try to do. They

agree to ballots instead of bullets, but not to the pluralist political culture

of democracy or the type of free and open civil society that goes with it.

Political Islam and Pluralism

With all this in mind, we can now turn to the four issue areas that

form the focus of this symposium.

All Islamists seek to “shari‘a-tize” Islam. (It may be worth noting

here that the term shari‘a occurs only once in the Koran, in a sura that

deals with the meaning not of law, but of morality.) Their aim in doing



45 Bassam Tibi

so is to establish an “Islamic state” or “Islamic order.” Neither the term

dawla (state) nor the term nizam (system or order) occurs in the Koran.

Islamism is a modern political ideology (albeit a religionized one) whose

project is to remake the world in accord with an invented tradition.

There are two levels upon which this project seeks to proceed. The first

is the world of Islam itself; the second is the world at large. All Muslims

who subscribe to this agenda are Islamists. Faithful Muslims with a spiri-

tual understanding of Islam are not Islamists, because they do not sub-

scribe to this agenda. The new term “post-Islamist” can make sense only

if an Islamist movement has abandoned the desire to set up an “Islamic

order.” I do not know of a single Islamist movement that has actually let

go of its Islamist agenda. In some cases where the “Islamist” label is dis-

avowed (as with the Justice and Development Party [AKP] in Turkey), the

goal is concealment, not a sincere shift to a truly post-Islamist politics.Is there potential for Islamist parties to develop a “genuine commit-

ment to democracy” by embracing a liberal understanding of democratic

pluralism? The study of Islamist ideology suggests that the answer is

no. The nizam Islami is a totalitarian order. Could change come, ask the

editors of our symposium, “through shifts in the thinking and cultural

values of the Islamists themselves?” In my study of the practices of po-

litical Islam, I fail to see such shifts. There have been verbal and rhetori-

cal maneuvers, to be sure, as well a strategic adjustment to democracy

on the part of Islamists. But their reasons are always instrumental—toavoid banning and prosecution, for instance. Of course, there are indi-

viduals who honestly make such shifts, but in their cases what they are

doing is abandoning Islamism rather than reinventing it.

If my argument that Islamist ideology is unchangingly totalitarian

seems too general, let me be more specific. In the religionized ideology

of Islamism, difference appears as heresy and politics is placed within

the ambit of that which is sacred and hence nonnegotiable (consider the

charter of Hamas). Pluralism, diversity, and the culture of disagreement

and debate are condemned as “divisive.” Taking part in elections and

renouncing violence are not enough, if they remain unaccompanied by

decisive shifts in thinking and cultural values.

Some Islamist movements that embrace ballots, moreover, do not at

the same time give up bullets. Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Leba-

non, and the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, for

instance, all retain armed wings and want to have it both ways: They

field candidates and have seats in parliament, but at the same time they

keep their jihadist wings and commit acts of terror. All three have beenknown to engage in the intimidation of non-Islamist candidates; none of

the three can legitimately be called a democratic movement.

The purported distinction between jihadi-terrorist Islamism and insti-

tutional-democratic political Islam received a heavy blow from Hezbol-

lah during the domestic terror attacks which that organization launched




in Lebanon in May 2008. The episode began when Lebanon’s demo-

cratically elected government, acting in accord with its legal and duly

constituted authority, dismissed the security chief of the Beirut airport

on charges of collaboration with Syria and Iran and banned Hezbollah’s

illegal telecommunications network. In response, Hezbollah sent its pri-

vate army to occupy West Beirut by force, triggering combat during

which 65 people were killed. This is the same Hezbollah that has reaped

praise in some quarters for having supposedly gone from being a terror-

ist group to being a democratic party. Founded in 1982 in the Iranian

embassy in Damascus (and with training and arms supplied by Iran’s

Revolutionary Guard Corps), Hezbollah has taken part in Lebanese par-

liamentary elections since 1992. In 2005, a few of its members even

became cabinet ministers.

Yet the group never disbanded its heavily armed militia, using as apretext the claim that it was only there to fight Israel, as happened in

the war of July and August 2006. In May 2008, Hezbollah killed inno-

cent fellow citizens of Lebanon: Druze, Sunni Muslims, and Christians.

It successfully blackmailed the government, keeping the airport-security

chief in office, resuming its illegal broadcasting, and even forcibly closing

a rival media outlet (Future TV). Hezbollah, in short, imposed itself on

the people of Lebanon with bullets. In 2007, an allied Sunni movement,

Hamas, had engaged in a similar coup in Gaza after winning the Palestin-

ian Authority’s legislative elections the previous year. In light of all this,what is left of the distinction that claims to see a sharp contrast between

peaceful Islamists and Islamists vowed to jihad? How far can Islamists be

trusted even when they avow democracy and run in elections?

The acceptance of pluralism is the bottom line for an embrace of de-

mocracy. Citing shari‘a, Islamist movements reject power-sharing with

non-Islamists or non-Muslims. Islamists only admit what they believe

their totalitarian shari‘a allows. Shari‘a and constitutionalism are on all

counts at odds.7

I must, as a democrat, add the qualification that one cannot simply

bypass this movement. It is too big and too well organized to ignore,

and Islamists at present form the major opposition groups in most of

the world’s Muslim-majority countries. So what is to be done? There

are two broad approaches. One is inclusive, while the other is exclu-

sionary. Turkey represents the first; Algeria, which endured a bloody

internal war after the army shut the Islamists out of electoral politics in

the early 1990s, represents the exclusionary tack.8 I prefer the Turkish

model. And yet I know that the inclusion of the Islamists there has endedwith them in the midst of a full takeover of all state institutions from

their base in the parliament, wherein they predominate. The AKP is an

Islamist party, and not (as it pretends) an Islamic conservative party. It

is not comparable to Germany’s Christian Democratic Union.9 The AKP

is intolerant, not only toward secularists (whom it speaks of in anti-



47 Bassam Tibi

Semitic jargon as “hidden Jews”), but also toward ethnic and religious

minorities such as the Kurds and the Alevis. The AKP may have come

to power through democratic means, but it is not inclusive vis-`a-vis the

non-Islamist other.

Democracy is a cultural concept introduced as a novelty to the world

of Islam—where power often remains highly personalized10 —in an age

of global democratization. In that world, democracy lacks the strong

institutional and cultural underpinnings that it needs. Its claim to univer-

sal validity is questioned, not only by Western cultural relativists, but

also by non-Westerners seeking authenticity and suspicious of what the

well-known Islamist sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi derisively calls “import-

ed solutions.”11 Yet important Muslim thinkers such as al-Farabi (ca.

870–950 C.E.) have left us bodies of thought suggesting that universal

standards of good governance are knowable despite all the relativist andparticularist claims of those who would dwell on “authenticity” to the

exclusion of all else.12 The rhetoric of authenticity should not be used

as a weapon against promoters of genuine democratization such as Saad

Eddin Ibrahim and his Ibn Khaldun Center for Civil Society in Cairo,

who outline a future far more promising than anything on the agenda of

that other Cairo-founded organization, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Muslims today need civil societies that are stronger in relation to the

state. In order for democracy to function in the Islamic world, democra-

cy needs not only a civil Islam, such as the one that exists in Indonesia,but also a civil state and a civil society, with autonomous institutions to

match. In the world of Islam, civil society is weak, as are all the state in-

stitutions that are supposed to be participation-based. In too many Mus-

lim countries, the only institution that really works is the mukhabarat ,

the secret police. Islamists are often victims of police repression. Yet

if they won power, would they abolish the repressive apparatus, or just

redirect it? What has been happening in Gaza under the rule of Hamas

and in Turkey under the rule of the AKP is not reassuring.

Islamism is not compatible with democracy, for Islamism’s sine qua

non is the notion of din-wa-dawla (the organic unity of state and re-

ligion). If Islamists honestly—rather than tactically—were to accept

democracy wholeheartedly, they would cease by that very act to be Is-

lamists, and it would be wrong to call them such. Of Islamism’s two

tactical orientations—institutional and jihadist—the latter, with its vio-

lent vision of Islamic world revolution, is easier to write off as plainly

antithetical and destructive to democracy. The institutional Islamists

pose a subtler challenge. They will compete in elections for instrumentalreasons, but they refuse to accept the full measure of democracy, includ-

ing the political culture of democratic pluralism—something that must

never be forgotten. They may be partners, up to a point, in democratiza-

tion, but they cannot be trusted. This is the predicament of democracy in

the world of Islam today.




NOTES

1. In November 1982, I was among seventy Arab thinkers and opinion leaders whomet in Limassol, Cyprus, to discuss the “crisis of democracy” in Arab countries—none of which would let us convene on its own soil. No Islamists were present. The proceedingswere published under the title Azmat al-Democratiyya fi al-Watan al-Arabi (The Crisis

of democracy in the Arab world) (Beirut: Center for Arab Unity Studies, 1983). My owncontribution appears in Arabic on pp. 73–87. Among my extensive writings on the topic,I have contributed chapters on Islam and democracy to Alan Olson, ed., Educating for

Democracy (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 203–19; Michael Emerson,ed., Democratisation in the European Neighbourhood (Brussels: CEPS, 2005), 93–116;and Leonard Weinberg, ed., Democratic Responses to Terrorism (New York: Routledge,2008), 41–62.

2. John Voll and John Esposito, Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1996). As I detail in my review in the Journal of Religion 78 (1998): 667–69,Voll and Esposito overlook important original sources and not only confuse Islam andIslamism, but even end up watering down the very definition of democracy itself.

3. Robert Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2000).

4. This last expression comes from Raymond Baker, Islam Without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). On the MB, see RichardP. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press,1969). On the use of Hannah Arendt’s notion of totalitarianism to describe Islamism, seeBassam Tibi, “The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism,” Totalitarian Movements and

Political Religions 8 (March 2007): 35–54.

5. Present-day jihadism is clearly not the classical Islamic jihad, for in the latter vio-lence remains bound by rules and restricted to limited targets. Therefore, classical jihad

is a form of warfare (even if irregular) and not terrorism, as jihadism is. On irregular warfare, see Bassam Tibi, Political Islam, World Politics, and Europe (New York: Rout-ledge, 2008), ch. 1, n4. For a former insider’s account, see Ed Hussain, The Islamist: Why

I Joined Radical Islam (London: Penguin, 2007).

6. Zeyno Baran, “Turkey Divided,” Journal of Democracy 19 (January 2008): 69.

7. Bassam Tibi, “Islamic Shari‘a as Constitutional Law? The Freedom of Faith in the Lightof the Politicization of Islam: The Reinvention of the Shari’a and the Need for an Islamic LawReform,” in Church and State: Towards Protection of Freedom of Religion. Proceedings of the

International Conference on Comparative Constitutional Law, 2005 (Tokyo: Nihon Univer-sity Press, 2006), 126–70; and “Islamic Law, Shari‘a, and Human Rights: Universal Morality

and International Relations,” Human Rights Quarterly 16 (May 1994): 277–99.

8. On Islamism in Algeria, see Michael Willis, The Islamist Challenge in Algeria (NewYork: New York University Press, 1996). On Turkey, see Baran, “Turkey Divided.”

9. Bassam Tibi, “Islamischer Konservatismus der AKP als Tarnung für den politischenIslam?” in Gerhard Besier, ed., Politische Religion und Religionspolitik (Political religionand religious politics) (Goettingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 2005), 229–60.

10. Bassam Tibi, Der wahre Imam: Der Islam von Mohammed bis zur Gegenwart (Thetrue imam: Islam from Mohammad to the present) (Munich: Piper, 1996).

11. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, al-hulul al-Mustawradah (The imported solutions) (Beirut:al-Risalah, 1980).

12. Al-Farabi’s major work in this vein is known variously in English as The Per- fect State or The Virtuous City. For a translation along with the original Arabic text, seeRichard Walzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: Abu Nasr al-Farabi’s Mabadi‘ Ara Ahlal-Madina al-Fadila (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

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