Franz Magnis-Suseno SJ, Jakarta
Why would a Muslim institution of learning, in this case the Islamic
Religious State University of North Sumatra, invite a non-Muslim
philosopher
to answer the above question? Because they wanted an outsider's view on a
question often asked in the West?
Whatever the answer, this question seems to be lingering in the mind of
many
Westerners. They are asking: Can a country where Islam is the dominant
religion become a stable, sustained democracy?
But why would one ask this specific question? There are several reasons.
The first: There exist very few Muslim democracies in the world today.
There
are Indonesia and Senegal, and, with severe limitations, Malaysia,
Bangladesh and Lebanon. Whatever Pakistan is, it is not a stable
democracy.
In most other Muslim countries the government is more or less of a
dictatorial bent.
The second reason is that there are strong intellectual currents in Islam
which expressively denounce democracy. For instance Hizb ut-Tahrir. In
Indonesia, the writings of the Pakistani Maududi and of Hassan al-Banna
and
Sayyid Qutb of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which denounce any
political
system that is not 100 percent Islamic, are widely read by Muslim
intellectuals.
Is there a problem?
That many Muslim countries have or have had problems with democracy can
not
be disputed. And it is true: There are Islamic fundamentalisms that
denounce
democracy in strong voices. But, and this is the decisive question: How
relevant are these fundamentalist groups for the mainstream Muslim
populations in these countries? And what is the relevance of the fact that
many Muslim countries experience difficulties with democracy?
If we leave out for a moment the fundamentalists, then it seems that
people
in Islamic societies are not more and not less open to democracy than
people
of other Asian and African societies. All of these societies were a short
time ago traditional societies and, of course, not Western democracies.
In the West too, 100 years ago, only a very few countries were
democracies.
That these Muslim states have social and economic problems results from
the
repercussions that were the consequences of their forced transition into
modern political entities.
Thus difficulties with democracy should not be connected with a certain
religion, but with the general and complex challenges of societies
entering
modernity.
This seems to be particularly true for the Middle East. For centuries
these
tribally, culturally and even religiously (think of the Sunni-Shia split,
of
Druze, Alawites, Ismaelites and many others) extremely plural societies
enjoyed a measure of stability under the Ottoman caliphate. When it
finally
broke down, it came under British, French and Italian colonial rule and
then
ended in a number of national sovereign states, many of which had nothing
to
support national unity.
Thus all these countries experienced extreme political and social
upheavals
and still suffer from them. The coming into existence of the state of
Israel
did nothing to diminish these complexities.
In Muslim countries, like in other countries, the vast majority of the
people are not religious ideologists. There are good reasons for believing
that they are, as normal human beings, open to general human values. This
does not mean that for them democracy is the most pressing need. What they
directly need is economic safety, internal peace and an end to brutal
government repression.
But in all probability they would like to have a democratic government.
They
would most probably love what goes together with democracy: the rule of
law,
peace between people of different tribes and religious orientations (they
had this for a long time, before the arrival of modernity), respect for
human rights, generally peaceful and civilized behavior, especially the
unacceptability of killing and any other violence against people because
of
their political or religious views.
Thus if these countries are not democratic, it is not because of their
religion, but because their entrance into modernity failed miserably. The
same seems to be true of fundamentalism and religious extremism. If we
have
fundamentalism, extremism, political violence and terrorism in some Muslim
countries, is it because their religion is Islam, or because their
political, social, economic and cultural situation seems to be beyond hope
for their citizens?
Thus religious fundamentalism is not the source of the social, political
and
economic instability in many Muslim countries, but the instability in
these
countries produces extremism and religious, ideological fundamentalism.
Such
was the case in Algeria in the 90s, when FIS was becoming the strongest
political party, but then was suppressed by the military. But it was
similar
in Germany: Its first try for democracy, after World War I, failed and
ended
in the terrible ideological extremism of National Socialism.
It is not only Islam which is questioned in relation to its democratic
potential. After the shock of the French Revolution at the end of the 18th
century, the Catholic Church closed itself up for almost 100 years against
democracy and condemned human rights and freedom of religion. Only by
learning from experiences, especially in the 20th century, was the Church
able to change its attitude. Islam does not look any less compatible with
democracy than Catholicism did 200 years ago.
The writer, a Jesuit priest, teaches philosophy at the Driyarkara School
of
Philosophy in Jakarta.
Jakarta Post
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