Islamist Parties

why they cant be democratic

Bassam Tibi

Bassam Tibi, who was born and raised in Damascus, teaches international 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 Islamisms 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 on clear and rigorous distinctions as academic. When it comes to Islam and democracy, this deplorable fashion has been fraught with unfortunate 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 religious reforms are made. The propensity to deliver on such reforms is what I see as lacking in political Islam. My own avowed interestas an ArabMuslim prodemocracy theorist and practitioneris to promote the establishment 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 assessment. Unless blind luck intervenes, no policy can be better than the assessment 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 system, and an ethicsand hence not necessarily political by its nature. But Islamism (or political Islam or Islamic fundamentalismthey all mean the
Journal of Democracy Volume 19, Number 3 July 2008 2008 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press

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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 democratic 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 substance. Nahdatul Ulema in Indonesia, for instance, is an Islamicnot an Islamistparty, and it is fair to call it a democratic organization that represents a civil Islam.3 In contrast, Egypts 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 Islamism itself, between peaceful and violent Islamists. The latter are those who wage jihadin the sense of qital or violence5in order to advance their political agenda. Peaceful (or institutional) Islamists stick to participation in democratic institutions and forgo violence. This is a difference of means, however, and not of ends. Both violent and institutional Islamists aim to establish nizam Islamithe Islamic order based on sharia (Islamic law). Peaceful, institutional Islamists see elections 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 balloting. Democracy is above all a political culture of pluralism and disagreement, based on core values combined with the acceptance of diversity. 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 sharia-tize Islam. (It may be worth noting here that the term sharia occurs only once in the Koran, in a sura that deals with the meaning not of law, but of morality.) Their aim in doing

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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 spiritual understanding of Islam are not Islamists, because they do not subscribe 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 disavowed (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 commitment 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 political Islam, I fail to see such shifts. There have been verbal and rhetorical maneuvers, to be sure, as well a strategic adjustment to democracy on the part of Islamists. But their reasons are always instrumentalto avoid banning and prosecution, for instance. Of course, there are individuals 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 Lebanon, 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 been known 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 institutional-democratic political Islam received a heavy blow from Hezbollah during the domestic terror attacks which that organization launched

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in Lebanon in May 2008. The episode began when Lebanons democratically 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 Hezbollahs illegal telecommunications network. In response, Hezbollah sent its private 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 terrorist group to being a democratic party. Founded in 1982 in the Iranian embassy in Damascus (and with training and arms supplied by Irans Revolutionary Guard Corps), Hezbollah has taken part in Lebanese parliamentary 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 a pretext 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 innocent 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 Palestinian Authoritys 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 democracy. Citing sharia, Islamist movements reject power-sharing with non-Islamists or non-Muslims. Islamists only admit what they believe their totalitarian sharia allows. Sharia 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 worlds Muslim-majority countries. So what is to be done? There are two broad approaches. One is inclusive, while the other is exclusionary. 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 ended with 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 Germanys Christian Democratic Union.9 The AKP is intolerant, not only toward secularists (whom it speaks of in anti-

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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 Islamwhere power often remains highly personalized10in an age of global democratization. In that world, democracy lacks the strong institutional and cultural underpinnings that it needs. Its claim to universal 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 imported solutions.11 Yet important Muslim thinkers such as al-Farabi (ca. 870950 C.E.) have left us bodies of thought suggesting that universal standards of good governance are knowable despite all the relativist and particularist 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, democracy 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 institutions that are supposed to be participation-based. In too many Muslim 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 Islamisms sine qua non is the notion of din-wa-dawla (the organic unity of state and religion). If Islamists honestlyrather than tacticallywere to accept democracy wholeheartedly, they would cease by that very act to be Islamists, and it would be wrong to call them such. Of Islamisms two tactical orientationsinstitutional and jihadistthe latter, with its violent 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 instrumental reasons, but they refuse to accept the full measure of democracy, including the political culture of democratic pluralismsomething that must never be forgotten. They may be partners, up to a point, in democratization, but they cannot be trusted. This is the predicament of democracy in the world of Islam today.

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NOTES
1. In November 1982, I was among seventy Arab thinkers and opinion leaders who met in Limassol, Cyprus, to discuss the crisis of democracy in Arab countriesnone of which would let us convene on its own soil. No Islamists were present. The proceedings were 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 own contribution appears in Arabic on pp. 7387. 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), 20319; Michael Emerson, ed., Democratisation in the European Neighbourhood (Brussels: CEPS, 2005), 93116; and Leonard Weinberg, ed., Democratic Responses to Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2008), 4162. 2. John Voll and John Esposito, Islam and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). As I detail in my review in the Journal of Religion 78 (1998): 66769, Voll and Esposito overlook important original sources and not only confuse Islam and Islamism, 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 Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). On the use of Hannah Arendts notion of totalitarianism to describe Islamism, see Bassam Tibi, The Totalitarianism of Jihadist Islamism, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 8 (March 2007): 3554. 5. Present-day jihadism is clearly not the classical Islamic jihad, for in the latter violence 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: Routledge, 2008), ch. 1, n4. For a former insiders 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 Sharia as Constitutional Law? The Freedom of Faith in the Light of the Politicization of Islam: The Reinvention of the Sharia and the Need for an Islamic Law Reform, in Church and State: Towards Protection of Freedom of Religion. Proceedings of the International Conference on Comparative Constitutional Law, 2005 (Tokyo: Nihon University Press, 2006), 12670; and Islamic Law, Sharia, and Human Rights: Universal Morality and International Relations, Human Rights Quarterly 16 (May 1994): 27799. 8. On Islamism in Algeria, see Michael Willis, The Islamist Challenge in Algeria (New York: New York University Press, 1996). On Turkey, see Baran, Turkey Divided. 9. Bassam Tibi, Islamischer Konservatismus der AKP als Tarnung fr den politischen Islam? in Gerhard Besier, ed., Politische Religion und Religionspolitik (Political religion and religious politics) (Goettingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 2005), 22960. 10. Bassam Tibi, Der wahre Imam: Der Islam von Mohammed bis zur Gegenwart (The true 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-Farabis major work in this vein is known variously in English as The Perfect State or The Virtuous City. For a translation along with the original Arabic text, see Richard Walzer, Al-Farabi on the Perfect State: Abu Nasr al-Farabis Mabadi Ara Ahl al-Madina al-Fadila (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).