This is how the part of Bush’s recent Knesset speech that dealt with democracy has been reported:
"Bush rebutted what he said are the many arguments from 'skeptics about democracy in this part of the world,' without specifying who they are. He said democracy is not 'a Western value that America seeks to impose on unwilling citizens' and nor is it incompatible with the religion of Islam. He made clear how he defines democracy.
'Some say any state that holds an election is a democracy,' Bush said.
'True democracy,' he said, requires 'vigorous political parties allowed to engage in free and lively debate,' institutions that ensure legitimate elections and accountability for leaders, and an opposition that can campaign 'without fear and intimidation.'"
Bush, then, simply asserted -- he did not argue, he did not present the semblance of an argument or any evidence but simply asserted -- that Islam and democracy are compatible.
But assertion will not do.
Here is the argument that Bush should have addressed, and answered, if he had an answer.
The development of democracy in the advanced West has depended on political theory. It has depended on the notion that the state, and the state's monopoly of violence, can be justified by the need of individuals living in a state of nature (that is, without a state), to be protected from one another, so that they no longer live lives in which each is threatened by each, where life, as Hobbes famously says, is "nasty, brutish, and short."
This idea developed further. Locke said that it was important for property to be secure, and that property could only be secure where the state possessed the power -- handed over to it by individuals -- to protect that property. Rousseau's Social Contract continues in the same line of thought, and argues that the state's legitimacy depends on its fulfilling its task, and its task must be to adhere to the will expressed, the General Will, of the people. If the state does not reflect the will of the people, it is not legitimate.
But, it is suggested, in Islam the ruler can be a despot. He need only reflect the will expressed by Allah in the Qur'an, and as glossed by the Sunnah. As long as he remains a good Muslim, he can govern as he wishes. His model in all things is the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, Muhammad, who was himself no democrat but a despot. Now it might be argued that being "a good Muslim" means you must adhere to the Shari'a, and adhering to the Shari'a is, of course, what your Muslim subjects wish, for how could they wish otherwise? And so isn't this, someone might say, the same thing as advanced Western democracy?
But this argument rests on the idea that only Muslims count, and that furthermore, these Muslims need not vote, or express their views, for any good Muslim will naturally reflect what their views should be. The ruler "knows" what his subjects need.
And Bush did not ask, aloud, why it is that of all the Muslim nation-states, there is hardly one that can be called truly democratic in the Western sense, and only two seem to approach that. These are Lebanon and Turkey.
Lebanon does possess more political freedoms, more sense of the need for such freedoms, and that is because Lebanon has historically had a large, and dominating, and certainly civilizing, Christian population that, until recent decades, dominated the country. Lebanon is not a true democracy because it rests on a confessional arrangement, in which the most important positions in the government are guaranteed to belong to this or that sect, and other powers are assigned on the basis of a falsehood -- that is, the census of 1935, which has long been out-of-date but carefully (thank god) preserves the rights of the most advanced, i.e., Christian, Lebanese.
The second Muslim country that has something like democracy is Turkey. And Turkey has something like democracy because more than 80 years ago a remarkable man, Kemal Pasha, Ataturk, decided that in order to bring Turkey into the modern world, he would have to systematically and ruthlessly constrain Islam as a political and social force. And that is what he did, beginning as soon as he came to power in the early 1920s. As an undeniable war hero, he had the prestige to do what he needed. He did what he could to sever Turkey from Arabdom, and Arab Islam. He had the Qur'an, and a tafsir (commentary) translated into Turkish. He jettisoned the Ottoman (Arabic) script for Latin, i.e., Western letters. He passed the Hat Act, banning the fez and replacing it with Western caps (harder to bow in prayer with such caps rather than the red tarboush). He gave women the right to vote. He established a Ministry of Religious Affairs that had the power to write sermons and to carefully monitor all that went on in mosques. When he faced opposition from imams, he did not hesitate to arrest and jail them and to destroy their mosques. He was ruthless, and he had to be. He gave women the right to vote, and did give everything he could to give them legal equality with men. He created an army that would guard vigilantly the heritage of Kemalism. He prevented students who had attended madrasas from going to state-funded universities. He made sure that the officer corps was secular, and would vigilantly remove any soldiers thought to be "too religious."
Had he not been a despot, had he relied on "democracy" to effect these changes, they would never have been made.
But as a despot, Ataturk could do these things, and in doing them, he actually made democracy possible in Turkey. In other words, to achieve democracy, despotism -- the despotism of someone determined to constrain Islam -- was a necessary precondition.
George Bush gives no signs of understanding either the notion of political legitimacy in Islam, or of what distinguishes the handful of Muslim states, or largely Muslim states, that can be said to bear a likeness (even a distant likeness) to Western democracies.
And his would-be successor, McCain, has failed to properly analyze the failures of the Administration when it comes to Islam, and above all the continued, touching, and enraging faith in the Tarbaby-Iraq business, with its continued squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale, all for the sake of an outcome that, from the viewpoint of the American or Infidel interest, makes no sense. What makes sense is constant internecine warfare within the Camp of Islam and therefore the Camp of Jihad. What makes sense is an Iraq where the pre-existing fissures, sectarian and ethnic, widen rather than narrow, and ideally, use up men, money, and materiel from Shi'a Iran, and Sunni Saudi Arabia and its allies, and keeps them busy with each other for a long time to come. No one keeps demanding of McCain, as no one has demanded of Bush, that they begin to ask other questions, instead of relying on sentimental notions that, in the end, boil down to some version of bomfoggery, or People Are The Same The Whole World Over. They aren't.
And democracy, I think, as a political ideal, is indeed incompatible with the letter and spirit of the Shari'a. The odd caliph who consults with the odd vizier or assorted wise men is not, pace Bernard Lewis and his acolytes, equivalent to a political theory of democracy.
That's not all that was naive or ignorant or wrong with Bush's speech. But it's the main thing.
Thanks Dhimmi Watch
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