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God’s “Signs” and Democracy in Islam

We sent aforetime our messengers with Clear Signs

And sent down with them the Book

and the Balance (of Right and Wrong),

That men may stand forth in justice.

QUR’AN 57:25

MUSLIMS HEAR THE voice of God in cries for justice throughout human history. In several hundred verses, the Qur’an affirms that God has fixed justice as the lodestar to guide human affairs. The Qur’anic injunction to “build the world” carries the imperative to establish just communities that find their place in a diverse world.

Today, the intellectuals of midstream Islam argue that the surest path to a just social order passes through democracy. Across the globe, the values of justice, equality, and freedom are understood to provide the foundations for democracy. New Islamic intellectuals affirm these values. They explain that in Islam all three values find their place as God’s “signs” to guide the building of the world.¹ It is a reflection of God’s mercy that indicators appear in the natural and human world to guide human efforts to “build the world.” In the view of these centrist Islamic thinkers, the realization of justice in our time depends on the political and social freedoms that democratic governance fosters. They aim to clarify the Qur’anic position on the Islamic core values supportive of democracy, while countering distorted traditional and extremist views actively hostile to democratic aspirations.

The difficulty of the task is clear. In no other arena is the tarshid (guidance) of New Islamic scholars and thinkers more controversial and more imperative. Much work remains to be done to create social institutions that respond to God’s signs. Islamic traditionalists and extremists focus their attacks on democracy by arguments that Islam does not call for democracy on the idea of scant attention given to freedom in human affairs in the Qur’an. The New Islamic scholars focus their own efforts on elaborating and strengthening awareness of the link between justice, the preeminent Qur’anic value, and both equality and freedom.

The demanding character of this work should not come as a surprise. Such struggles are not Islam’s alone. Anyone reading the Talmud, the Bible, or the Qur’an and expecting to find in place fully elaborated foundations for a democratic polity will be sorely disappointed. None of the sacred texts of the three great monotheisms puts forward elaborations of the values that today define humanity’s highest moral and political ideals, notably including democracy. All three traditions are also suffused with patriarchal values, some of which by contemporary standards would be characterized as misogynist. None has much to say directly about human rights. What is required is interpretation of the sacred texts in ways that bring their messages into the modern world. Everywhere, the successes that have come from struggles for democracy and the freedom it brings have taken centuries and oceans of blood and tears to realize.

Unfinished Struggles for Justice, Equality, and Freedom

These struggles are unfinished. When speaking of the shortcomings of other traditions and historical experiences, it is important to remind ourselves that these struggles are still far from won even in politically advanced states, notably including the United States and Israel. The United States may choose to see itself as “the light unto nations” and “a city on a hill.” Israel may regularly pronounce itself “the sole democracy in the Middle East.” Neither claim carries much conviction beyond the sphere of state propaganda. The terrible erosion of public freedoms in the United States in the Bush/Obama years in the shadow of the “War on Terror” and the consolidation of the surveillance state make it clear that freedom’s gains in America are far from secure. At the same time, inequality in the distribution of wealth in the United States has reached grotesque dimensions. The excesses of American capitalism have generated powerful plutocratic forces that are actively undermining democracy.

Israel faces its own demons. Not all the warnings come from outside the borders of the self-proclaimed “Jewish state.” A growing number of Israeli scholars and public intellectuals warn that unless policies toward Palestinian citizens of Israel and toward Palestinians living for decades under onerous occupation are changed, Israel will forfeit forever the democratic possibility in favor of an exclusionary ethnic nationalism, wrapped in the external trappings of religion. Israel today is actively consolidating its character as just such an ethnocracy—that is, a state that is democratic for Jews and far less for all others.² Justice, equality, and freedom are unfinished business in both the United States and Israel.

What one does find in the sacred texts of the three Abrahamic faiths are the seeds of these core values on which democracy depends. They are God’s “signs” for humanity that point to the possibility of just societies. The seeds of just social orders can be found in all the great monotheisms. They are not evenly distributed among them, nor do they automatically come to fruition in any of them. The seeds must everywhere be protected and nurtured. The journey to a just society has a different starting point and distinctive trajectory in each tradition. The record of actual accomplishments is uneven in all three. Each tradition faces distinctive advantages and obstacles. Yet the revelations in each hold out the promise of freedom guaranteed by democracy.

Islam and the Question of Freedom

Islam provides particularly rich articulations of the values of equality and justice. The pathways to their realization are clearly marked. Both equality and justice in the Qur’an are given very concrete and varied metrics by which to assess their actualization in Islamic social forms. Freedom, in contrast, receives a far less robust elaboration. As a value, freedom is treated in only a handful of surahs. These surahs point to ways barriers to freedom can and should be lifted. The freeing of a slave, for example, is recognized in two surahs as a moral good that can make amends for even serious failings.³ Divorce that allows a woman to gain her freedom is judged as fully permissible in God’s eyes.⁴ These invocations of freedom pertain to social questions. In each instance, freedom is given a positive valuation but always indirectly by highlighting negative social practices that infringe on it.

The treatment of freedom in spiritual matters, in contrast, is direct and expansive in Islam. The Islamic injunction to worship God alone calls believers to free themselves from excessive devotion to the secular gods of material wealth, social prestige, or power. For Muslims, there is only one God to worship. No political figure, no matter how wealthy, prominent, or powerful, can rightfully usurp that place. In Islamic cultural contexts, resistance to tyranny always has a religious dimension, whether explicitly articulated or not. Ideas of fated outcomes do appear in the Qur’an. However, New Islamic intellectuals point out that the predominant message is the clear expectation that freedom of moral choice between good and evil is reserved to men and women, as they live their lives and build their communities. While differences between men and women that favor men are specified in certain matters of legal testimony, family affairs, and inheritance, the genders are recognized as equal spiritually in God’s eyes. Women have the same moral worth as men. Women are called to be partners with men in worshipping God and shouldering the burdens of “building the world.” They face the same final accountability for their actions in this world that will determine their just fate in the world beyond.

Muslims have made the question of freedom of religious belief most controversial. Many hadiths, including some judged reliable, decisively deny freedom of religion by specifying that apostates be killed. The hadith most frequently cited says simply that death is the penalty for changing religion. Throughout Islamic history, the death penalty for apostates has arguably been the consensus legal opinion. Islamic intellectuals of the midstream stand against such hadith-based conclusions to argue that the Qur’an calls Muslims to write a very different future.⁵ They point out forthrightly that there is absolutely no Qur’anic provision of a death sentence for those who leave Islam.⁶ Nor, they argue, is there any reliable record of the Prophet Muhammad himself having executed such a decision in the first community of Muslims. The Qur’an speaks in a pellucid prose to deliver this message: “Let there be no compulsion in religion.”⁷ Belief, another verse explains with perfect clarity, entails free choice: “The Truth is from your Lord; let him who will, believe, and let him who will, reject (it).”⁸

The choice of disbelief, the Qur’an does make clear, is a grievous error for which a severe price will be paid. However, the punishment will come from God and not man. It will be enacted in the hereafter rather than on Earth. God speaks directly to the Prophet Muhammad to bring his worldly role as political head of the ummah into conformity with this divine intention: “Therefore do thus give admonition, for thou art one to admonish.” The Prophet’s role is to teach and guide and not to direct and punish: “Thou art not one to manage (men’s) affairs.”⁹ New Islamic scholars insist that this crystalline message of the Qur’an takes precedence over the dismal historical record.

Because Islam has a political and a religious role, advocates of death for apostates often make their case by conflating apostasy with treason. The New Islamic trend insists on a sharp distinction between matters of religious belief and threats to the security of the community. The personal right to change one’s personal religious beliefs does not extend to a collective right of sedition. Treason, they judge, does rightfully carry the most severe of penalties, including capital punishment in cases where the threat to the community is most severe and clearly documented. A change in personal religious beliefs does not.

The sparse treatment of the idea of freedom in Islam is part of a larger and intentionally imposed challenge. In general, Islam does not specify particular political or economic forms to achieve a just social order. The task of creating political and economic systems in accord with the values of justice, equality, and freedom is left to each generation of Muslims by divine intent. The political and economic realms consistently have posed the most serious challenges for Muslims. Islamic civilization expressed its genius in the realms of law, culture, spirituality, human relations, and the arts. In contrast, the record of the political history of the ummah, in particular, is fraught with disappointment with the behavior of Muslims, though not with Islam itself.

The nurturing of freedom has been severely hampered throughout much of Islamic history. God’s “signs” have been neglected or ignored completely. A luxuriant overgrowth of tyranny in both theory and practice has overwhelmed freedom’s promise. In a memorable judgment the Egyptian New Islamic thinker Fahmi Huwaidi pronounced the political history of the Islamic world “a series of disasters in which only the names and places changed.”¹⁰ Islamic political history is marked by the dominance of tyrannical and unjust regimes. Numerous hadiths attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, many of dubious authenticity, provide a theological rationalization for this rampant authoritarianism. They explicitly warn against the dangers of freedom.¹¹ However, other sayings attributed to the Prophet counsel that the obligation to obey the ruler only applies to what is in keeping with God’s law and advances human well-being.

Yusuf al Qaradawi attributes the wretched political history of Muslims to “the early abandonment of shura (consultation).” The seeds of genuine Islamic rule planted by the Prophet Muhammad did give a voice to those governed, although originally that circle of inclusion was narrow. However, with the principle established, the expansion of the circle of consultation beyond the most important personages existed as a clear and attractive possibility. Instead, Qaradawi explained that the “the virus of dictatorship from the Roman and Persian Empires” infected Dar al Islam. Muslims, he argued, “copied the worst features of these imperial systems.”¹²

The dreary consequences that followed make a political port of entry to the Islamic world an inevitable disappointment. My own first intellectual encounters with Islam and the Islamic world took precisely this discouraging path. With Cairo-born political scientist Nadav Safran of Harvard as my guide to the Islamic world, I first glimpsed the Islamic world through the prism of the wreckage that defines Islamic political history. In those same years of graduate work, I studied the serious limitations of the Islamic heritage in political thought. No student of that historical and theoretical record can fail to notice the meager attention given to constitutional guarantees for such critical matters as freedom of speech, religious beliefs, and assembly. In his own work, Safran advanced the conclusion that these deficiencies flowed from Islam itself. In his view, the failure in Islam to separate the political from the religious sphere created an inherent propensity to theocratic rule. This tendency proved resistant to correction because the resources of political reason could not be brought to bear. In Islam, Safran saw an unbridgeable opposition between reason and revelation that precluded the elaboration of such reasoned protections.¹³ Like many in the Orientalist tradition, Safran concluded that the gate to ijtihad (interpretation) had been closed in medieval times.

These classic Orientalist views on Islam were not persuasive to me as a graduate student, nor are they now. Yet, ironically, my work with Safran prepared me as no other for my subsequent encounter with midstream New Islamic intellectuals. Born in Egypt to a secular Jewish family, Safran had close ties not only to Israel but, like other prominent scholars at Harvard during the 1960s, also to the CIA and the larger American imperial project that was just taking shape.¹⁴ Initially, I understood his inclination to paint things Islamic in dark tones as shaded by these affiliations. As a man who had developed Zionist commitments in his teens and had fought for Israel in 1948, it seemed perfectly clear as well why he might focus on the internal weaknesses of the Islamic world rather than external assaults Dar al Islam suffered as the cause for its weaknesses. Yet, in the end, it is the arguments and not biography that matter most. For all these shadows lingering over his work, I remained persuaded by the factual accuracy of the broad outlines of Safran’s delineation of the political legacy and contemporary political shortcomings of the Islamic world, despite my clear dissent from his assessment of their causes.

What was initially most striking in the work of the New Islamic intellectuals whom I began reading in the 1970s, while still a graduate student working under Safran, was their wholehearted acceptance of the broad outlines of his substantive characterization of the political failings of the Islamic world. At the same time, I was intrigued by their vehement rejection of the notion that Islam itself was at the root of the problem. In particular, the New Islamic intellectuals flatly reject the idea that the gate of ijtihad was and remained closed. They assert that such a notion of closure is itself an ijtihad. They forthrightly reject it. Reform and renewal of Islam are not only possible but imperative, they argue. Ijtihad is indispensable for that effort. At the same time, they explain that while the separation of church and state made sense in a Christian cultural context, it could hardly be imposed on Islam that had nothing comparable to an established church to provide infallible interpretations of the faith. They argue that revelation embraced reason in Islam, as indispensable for the process of interpretation. They affirmed the necessity for new interpretations for changing times and places.

The Islamic Renewal and the Opening to Democracy

Democrats in Islam look to the larger project of al Tagdid al Islami (Islamic Renewal) for hope of realizing a pathway to democracy in Islam. They note that, around the globe, Islam grows stronger in numbers from year to year. With some 1.6 billion adherents worldwide, Islam has emerged as the fastest growing of the major faiths. Yet midstream intellectuals argue that the spectacular growth of the Islamic body is far from sufficient. The New Islamic thinkers acknowledge the painful truth that the staggering increase in the size of the Islamic body has not automatically translated into a parallel development of mind and spirit. They recognize the deleterious effects of historic colonialism and the contemporary ravages of poverty, illiteracy, and tyranny across so much of the Islamic world.

Midstream Islamic intellectuals point to a disconcerting intellectual dimension to this backwardness of the ummah. Destructive distortions of Islam’s message flourish when the body grows and the mind fails to keep pace. Of all the misleading misreadings of the faith, none, in their view, is more damaging than the endlessly repeated mantra within the ummah itself that Islam calls for hakemeyya, understood to mean the rule of God and not men. This shibboleth serves those elements seeking to use Islam as a screen for their own drive to power. In the end, the rule of God will be their rule. This opportunistic banner, often raised by politicized Islam, is then cited by critics as proof of the impossibility of democracy in Islam. The controversies stirred by extremist views of hakemeyya are embedded in much broader issues of how Shari’ah and its role in the ummah are to be understood. On this plane, too, the New Islamic trend has confronted a plethora of distorted and destructive views in traditionalist and extremist circles.

The New Islamic intellectuals will have none of the simplistic and unfounded conception of hakemeyya as the literal rule of God. In their manifesto, written in the early 1980s and first published in 1991, Egypt’s New Islamic school directly challenges this slogan of politicized Islam. “It is unacceptable,” they write, “to deprive Muslims of their political rights and responsibilities with the assertion that in an Islamic society ‘rule is for God and not human beings.’” They explain that in the Qur’an the phrase actually means that “the values and principles of Islam are God-given.” They interpret this to signal that “God’s rule comes at the beginning and the end.”¹⁵ By this reading, hakemeyya means that the Qur’an defines the purposes for which power should be used “at the beginning” to inspire the effort to build a political system, and “at the end” to assess whether the efforts of a particular community have in fact achieved the just system for which Islam calls. By their lights, the whole process of building the political system, choosing leaders, and devising policies to meet people’s needs is all left to human actors. The democratic idea of popular sovereignty is perfectly compatible with such an interpretation.

According to the New Islamic school, the essential interpretive error of distortions resides in the conflation of two issues that in the Qur’an are kept separate. The source of legislation is the first, while the basis for obedience to the ruler is the second. In Islam, they explain, legislation originates in revelation. Shari’ah has a divine character in those provisions that come directly from the Qur’an. They do not treat the nuts and bolts of politics but rather the values and purposes that should guide political action. Both ruler and ruled are subject to these elements of Shari’ah. In contrast, the legitimacy of the ruler and of the political system itself in an Islamic society depend “on the consent of the people, meaning that Islamic government is a civil and not a religious government.”¹⁶ The rightful recognition of the divine character of Shari’ah as derived from the Qur’an should not be extended to the very different issues of the claims to rule by a particular political regime and leadership.

The ummah is rife with such flawed understandings of Shari’ah. The intellectuals of the New Islamic trend have little patience with those Islamic activists who reduce the responsibility to build just communities to simplistic calls for the implementation of Shari’ah. They dissent sharply from claims that Islam has such automatic solutions that can simply be applied mechanically, with force if required. They argue that “Islam is the solution,” but it is up to human beings to determine the precise forms and character that solution will take in their own particular environments. Fahmi Huwaidi makes the point that activists are wrong to consider that the Islamic solution is ready and at hand. Rather, he explains that “this solution is ‘possible,’ if we work hard at it. This solution is not ‘deficient’ as has been rumored by some, nor is it ‘impossible’ as others would like us to believe.”¹⁷

The New Islamic scholars embrace the view, shared by all Islamic currents, that without Shari’ah, there can be no Islamic community. However, they dissent in critical ways from the extremists on what constitutes Shari’ah and how it should be implemented. The New Islamic scholars wade into the ocean of competing interpretations over Shari’ah and put forward their own enlightened vision. They understand their battle with the extremists as one that juxtaposes two strikingly different substantive understandings of the nature of Islamic community and, more particularly, of the Shari’ah that regulates it. The community toward which the exegesis of the Wassatteyya strives is open, inclusive, and responsive to the world. The New Islamic conception of Shari’ah is consonant with such a community. In sharp contrast, the community of the extremists is closed, exclusive, and hostile to the world. The extremist understanding of Shari’ah mirrors those distortions and would inevitably produce theocracies.

With a very pragmatic intent, the New Islamic school argues that Shari’ah is already partially implemented wherever there is an Islamic community. The task for them is always the manageable one of using the mind to complete its elaboration and adaptation to specific circumstances. Kamal Abul Magd explains that the preferred course is to begin with these partial implementations of Shari’ah rather than dismantling them. “God gave us the mind,” he wrote, “to cope with this continuous change and to respond to developments. It is only the mind that can protect Shari’ah and achieve its purposes.”¹⁸ The New Islamic assessment of such political issues as hakemeyya and the implementation of Shari’ah takes for granted that Islam reserves all such issues to human discretion. Consequently, the human failings of Muslims rather than any inherent limitations of Islam explain the very long record of tyranny and the recent centuries of economic backwardness in so much of the Islamic world.

The Just Society on Islamic Ground

What does it take to build a just economic and political system on Islamic ground? The transnational Wassatteyya has put this question at the forefront of the concerns of all those who would contribute to al Tagdid al Islami. Conventional Western thinking already knows the answer: Such an Islamic project for economics and politics is futile. The most concise statement of the accepted wisdom comes from my mentor, Harvard’s Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington quotes the Sudanese Islamic scholar Hassan al Turabi to make the unexceptional point that all religions provide “people with a sense of identity and a direction in life.” Huntington then adds his own gloss that “whatever universalist goals they may have, religions give people identity by positing a basic distinction between believers and nonbelievers, between a superior in-group and different and inferior out-group.”¹⁹ In a later passage, he outlines where this chain of reasoning will take us in the case of Islam. Huntington predicts that in the end the global Islamic Resurgence “will have shown that ‘Islam is the solution’ to the problems of morality, identity, meaning, and faith, but not to the problems of social injustice, political repression, economic backwardness, and military weakness.”²⁰ These failures, he explains, will fuel envy and rage against the West.

Huntington helped shape conventional thinking by pointedly arguing that the problem for the West with the Islamic world is not Islamic extremism only. He argued that “the underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”²¹ In Huntington’s view, the prospects for building a political democracy or an advanced market economy on Islamic ground are dim indeed.

The idea that a rich culture and a strong identity have little to do with a strong economic and political order, implicit in Huntington’s analysis, can be entertained seriously only when talking about other people’s cultures, especially those of which we know little. For how long would we entertain such a notion for Western capitalism and liberal democracy? Exploration of precisely these linkages of culture and identity with the economy dominates Western economic history. It is quite impossible to explain the vitality of Western capitalism and the political dominance it enabled without attention to its “spirit,” grounded in Protestantism, as Max Weber famously argued.

The point must be that there are deficiencies in Islamic culture that preclude development. Certain traditionalist schools do erect barriers to development in modern conditions. They believe that the storehouse of traditional fiqh contains all that is needed to build a modern Islamic economy and polity. Islamic intellectuals of such schools speak quite legitimately about the importance of isolated elements of the heritage. They point to the rich and suggestive notions of waqf (Islamic endowment), riba (usury), and zakat (religious obligation to support those in need), in particular. However, they then quite misleadingly make the untenable argument that these inherited conceptions and structures contain within them all that a modern economy and polity built on Islamic ground requires.

In parallel fashion, extremist movements claim that they, rather than the traditionalists, are the holders of the keys to a flourishing social order. They reject the traditionalist reliance on inherited fiqh. Instead, they argue that the inspired and unquestioned ijtihad of their particular amir (leader of a politicized and often militant Islamic group) provides just the right combination of inherited elements and new insights to build a prosperous Islamic economy and social order, once they hold political power securely in their hands. Both traditionalists and extremists do entertain unfounded ideas that there is a ready-to-go Islamic model of governance and the economy that has only to be implemented. Such mistaken notions make the real work of building such systems much more difficult.

The New Islamic thinkers have no such illusions. Yet they do believe that Islam has direct relevance to politics and economics. Islam, they insist, is not alone in positing a relationship between the spiritual and the worldly realms of human experience. What does distinguish Islam is the direct and unambiguous character of the connection. In the West shaped by its Christian heritage, the spiritual is understood to play its role in indirect ways. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has left an indelible mark on Western economic and political theory. Charles Darwin borrowed the conception and reframed it as natural selection and the “survival of the fittest” to explain evolution. Darwin’s reframing opened the way for a loop back from biology to social life. Parallels were drawn not only to the economic competition of the market but also to the unregulated contests of power struggles. The invisible hand was thus seen to work its effects in biology, economics, and politics. In the economic realm, the amoral struggle of self-interested competitors is understood to realize a common good without reliance on altruistic intentions on the part of “economic man.” In the political realm, the indurate struggles of “political man” are seen to yield order and stability through the alchemy of the balance of power, making no demands at all of empathy or compassion. These formulations provide a purportedly secular foundation for an individualistic and ruthlessly competitive economics and politics. They are presumed to transcend their cultural moorings. They claim universal application as secular social science.

In fact, like so much else in Western culture, these apparently secular conceptualizations of how the biological, economic, and political spheres function rest on theological foundations. The magic of the invisible hand in economics and politics can be none other than the workings of divine providence, most evident in Darwinian natural selection. The invisible hand is the divine hand. It distills a collective good from amoral individual struggles for survival. Those struggles provide a model for the workings of markets driven by egotistical self-interest. It secures as well a system of order and stability out of the brutalities of unregulated power struggles. These wonders of biology, economics, and politics work their effects behind the backs of human actors and without any explicit recognition of the divine role. Ironically, when unacknowledged in this way, theology is all the more powerful.²²

A very different understanding of the relationship of the worldly and the spiritual characterizes Islam. Islamic thought rests on explicit recognition of the existence of a supernatural being. Muslims believe that God’s essence cannot be known. However, the divine influence can be experienced in the natural and social worlds. In Islamic thought, higher principles and values that advance the common good do not emerge from the actions of egotistical and competitive human actors that must somehow be squared with the common good. Instead, God calls men and women to their better selves. They are as emphatically enjoined to build just communities.

The Qur’anic notion of man as God’s khalifa or regent on Earth gives force to these imperatives. The mission itself is known as istikhlaf (the divine call to humanity to act as God’s regent on Earth). It takes the place of the invisible hand. Istikhlaf provides an explicit moral frame for the conduct of the economic and political affairs of the world. In Islamic thought, the theological conceptions that define the essence of man and underlie economics and politics are forthrightly stated. The moral framing of worldly affairs is, at once, unambiguously theological and eminently practical. Moral principles, notably justice but equality and freedom as well, are stated with absolute clarity in order to inspire humanity to creative thinking and real-world positive action to instantiate abstract principles in social forms. The moral framing underpins collective life and makes the community, rather than isolated individuals, the key actor in humankind’s worldly activities.

At the heart of these differences are contrasting conceptions of the nature of human beings. In Islam men and women are understood to be set off from all others of God’s creatures by their highly developed capacity for rational thought and moral reasoning. Men and women are to be creative builders of the world, mustakhlifun in the language of the Qur’an. The Qur’an says of humankind that “We have certainly honored the children of Adam … and conferred on them special favors, above a great part of Our Creation.”²³ Through impressive rational, imaginative, and moral faculties human beings have the potential to acquire the storehouse of spiritual insight and practical knowledge that istikhlaf requires. God calls humanity to use this knowledge to plan and initiate the works essential to build a world in “due balance.” The Qur’an summons men and women to work for social justice. They are expected to show kindness and compassion.²⁴ For a humanity so engaged in the high calling of istikhlaf, God lays out the riches of the Earth like a vast carpet, held in place by “the firm and immovable mountains.” Those copious resources are set forth to facilitate the responsibilities of a blessed humanity. Humans are called to worship God by performing good works of stewardship to benefit their communities, and to act with others across the globe for the general human welfare and protection of the Earth.²⁵

Muslims have not always risen to this high calling. “Could it be that not all of Adam’s offspring were so blessed?” Such was the bitter question put to Arab Muslims by one of the great Egyptian figures of al Tagdid al Islami. Perhaps those who were to benefit from this knowledge and capability were peoples other than our own, bitterly suggested Shaikh Muhammad al Ghazzali. If his fellow Muslim Arabs were forced to rely only on those things they themselves invented and produced, Ghazzali remarked, they would stand naked. He continued:

I look to the sea and see no ship that we manufactured. I look to the air and find no plane that we designed. The Arab is a consumer and not a producer. The pen is Italian, the cloth is English, and the shoe from yet a third country. The Arab does not think of exploring and extracting the wealth of the earth until the foreigner comes and does it for him. The Arab then takes his meager share of the profit and spends it on wasteful luxuries. That is not Islam!²⁶

While critical of the failings of fellow Muslims, New Islamic thinkers like Ghazzali resist the siren call of the West. They judge the Western conception of an egotistical and self-interested human nature to be not only wrong but repellent. They question whether the implicit sanctioning of humanity’s worst selfishness might not explain the terrible violence that the West’s imperial armies and continuing drive for global dominance have visited on the world.

The Qur’an makes it clear that although God has created men and women as mustakhlifun, they must struggle to rise to that calling. Islamic communities must actively and purposefully strive for balance and justice. The Sunnah (all the deeds and words of the Prophet) provides instructive illustrations of the ways the Prophet Muhammad sought to meet these challenges for the first Islamic community. Activists of politicized Islam mistake this exemplary work of the Prophet Muhammad for a model to be imitated and applied everywhere. It is not, the New Islamic intellectuals argue strenuously. Rather, the Prophet’s example serves a higher function: It is intended to inspire the spiritual insight, practical hard work, and imaginative thinking that the obligations of istikhlaf will require.

In all that pertains to the Message he received from God, the Prophet Muhammad is judged ma’asum (infallible).²⁷ On the other hand, in those matters that deal with his leadership of the community, Islam’s beloved Prophet is recognized as fully human. The Qur’an itself gives a striking example of the Prophet’s very human failings. Preoccupied with a conversation with pagan leaders of the Quraysh tribe, the Prophet showed a lack of sensitivity in “frowning and turning away” when a blind man asked his advice. The story comes complete with a humbling admonition given directly to the Prophet: “Of him wast thou unmindful. By no means (should it be so)! For it is indeed a message of instruction.”²⁸ In another incident recorded in the hadiths, the Prophet himself is quoted as recognizing without hesitation his limitations. On an important issue of fertilizing palm trees, the Prophet had offered his opinion. The practical results of following his advice were unfortunate. Faced with this outcome, the Prophet acknowledged that he simply did not have the knowledge required to provide sound advice on such agricultural matters. Without hesitation, the Prophet explained that “you know your life’s practical affairs better.”²⁹ The Prophet Muhammad’s record of community building represents a treasured exemplar. However, it does not provide a flawless blueprint to be followed mechanically down through the ages. The Wassatteyya judges that such an imitative project would stifle precisely the qualities of intelligence and imagination needed to build viable communities in new circumstances and different times.

In place of imitation, the intellectuals of the Wassatteyya have a complex and nuanced view of what economic and political development on Islamic ground requires. They give the very idea of Islamic ground a rich meaning. They explain that Islam has set deep cultural roots in the soil of Islamic lands. The West has historically viewed the lands of non-Western peoples as empty and inviting colonization, or cluttered with the debris of failed civilizations and requiring cleansing to make way for “progress.” The deep cultural roots of Islam have been more successful than most in resisting both colonization and cultural cleansing. At the heart of all Islamic communities, one always encounters an obdurate spirit of resistance to external domination.

In Islam, midstream Islamic intellectuals explain, there is no such thing as a blank slate for human efforts. Those who would defend and build on Islamic ground know that God is already there. To stand on Islamic ground means to accept God’s presence as an all-knowing and all-powerful being that must be obeyed and worshipped. Centrist Islamic scholars understand religion as something that comes from God to provide guidance as human beings interact with reality.³⁰ In Islam the essential elements of the creed are braided together with unchanging values and higher purposes that have practical relevance to the task of building Islamic communities. These values and purposes, articulated in the Qur’an, originate from God to guide an imperfect humanity to right beliefs and just actions in social life. Religious thought thus differs from philosophical thought in that its first premises originate from God rather than human reason. However, it is similar in that, like any system of thought, its elements are all related and all are developed from its first premises. Its practical significance can be traced empirically in the ways it has shaped human beings and their behavior in the world. Islam is understood to come to humanity from the general to give meaning to the particular, from the absolute to guide the relative, from the fixed to govern the changeable, and from the permanent to rule the temporary. Important worldly struggles in particular and variable circumstances, like those for a just political order, take fixed and unchanging Qur’anic values as their starting point.

Democracy and the New Islamic Trend

Centrist trends worldwide have put democracy on their agendas, although the horrific violence in recent years in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria has inevitably drawn attention away from their work. For midstream intellectuals, struggles for democracy loom large. Important gains on the democratic path have been consolidated in recent years in Turkey under the leadership of a party with Islamic roots. More recently, Tunisia has experienced a successful revolution and a promising transition that have captured the attention of the world. The Tunisian midstream Islamic trend, under the leadership of Rashid Ghannouchi, has been prominent in both successes.

Drawing on and enriching these practical experiences, New Islamic intellectuals, notably in Egypt but in other sites as well, have made significant contributions to contemporary Islamic thought on the question of democracy in Islam. The Wassatteyya addresses the issue of democracy with three distinctive questions: Does the ummah require democracy in order to flourish in the late modern world? What are the intellectual and practical resources on which Islamic movements of the center can draw to build a democratic political life? What are the prospects for success of Islamic centrists in their ongoing struggles for democracy in sites around the Islamic world, and how might those efforts be enhanced?

Egypt’s New Islamic thinkers have given the most theoretically sophisticated attention to these questions as a key component in their rethinking of Islam. Their theorizations rely only partly on the Egyptian experience of both advances and more recent reversals. They draw as well on knowledge of democratic struggles elsewhere in Dar al Islam, as that knowledge circulates through the Cairo node of the transnational centrist network. The theory and practice of the Tunisians, Turks, and Moroccans as well have had a large impact on the emerging body of centrist thought on Islam and democracy. The prospects of struggles on the ground for greater freedom and prosperity have the greatest immediate importance. However, the long-term efforts to develop Islamic thought on democracy also merit far more attention than they have received.

The popular uprisings across the Arab Islamic world in the spring of 2011 expressed democratic aspirations. They did so in a chorus of varied voices that everywhere included those that arose from the Islamic Renewal. Sorrows and profound disappointments came later to Egypt. Still, a new generation that includes Islamic activists and thinkers experienced that intoxicating breath of freedom. Freedom won by mass action now seems possible. Whatever else the recent upheavals may achieve, they have undoubtedly also generated new interest in the efforts of Islamic thinkers to theorize democracy on Islamic ground.

The approach of centrist Islamic scholars to democracy departs in significant ways from conventional treatments. The whole issue of the compatibility of Islam and democracy, which has dominated Western discussion and the work of secular thinkers in the Islamic world, is pushed into the background. Islam as understood by the midstream is fully compatible with a wide variety of political systems, including democratic ones. Islam clashes with democracy, they argue, only when the democratic concept is defined in ways that insist that a democratic political order is one that has removed religion from the public arena and replaced it with an atheistic humanism or nationalism. Such arrangements and the theoretical formulations that justify them are unacceptable to Islamic thinkers. Nor do they exhaust the available understandings of the democratic idea. In Islam, anything of value to human life must have a spiritual as well as a worldly character.

Islamic centrists are not the only thinkers convinced of these truths; the great American pragmatists, for example, held similar views. Democracy in both traditions cannot be solely of this world. Freedom for both has a spiritual dimension.

For Islamic thinkers, the issue for serious consideration, particularly in the decades since the 1970s, has been whether a democratic system or some other should be a priority for the Islamic world. Influential Islamic thinkers of the center have all argued unequivocally that democracy is imperative. The compatibility of Islam and democracy is assumed. They have held such views for decades. Democrats in Islam have contributed to this effort from all over the Islamic world. Islamic thinkers and activists from the Islamic strategic triangle of Egypt, Turkey, and Iran have all contributed to exploration of ideas of how to best advance political and economic freedom in Islamic communities.

Regrettably, Iranians who supported democratic values have been overwhelmed for now by the theocrats with their radical notion of theocratic rule, wilayet al faqih, and by the brutal repression of the dictatorial regime that followed from them. Still, it would be a serious mistake to underestimate the legacy of freedom struggles that are part of Iranian history and include the great mass revolution of 1979. Even today, the dominance of repressive ayatollahs should not blind us to recognition of the participatory dimensions of recent Iranian political experience. For all of the restrictions and distortions, the voice of the Iranian people can on occasion be heard in the outcomes of Iranian elections.

Important contributions to the theory and practice of democracy have also come from farther afield. They have greatly enriched the collective conversation. The Tunisian thinker and activist Rashid Ghannouchi, returned from exile to prominence by the Tunisian revolutionary uprising of 2011, has a long track record as an advocate of Islamic democracy. His works are cited and circulated by New Islamic intellectuals in Cairo and from Cairo to all of Dar al Islam. Ghannouchi, in turn, discusses the profound impact of Egyptian Islamic intellectuals and activists on his work, from the time of Muhammad Abduh to al Banna and the New Islamic trend.³¹ The practical experiences and reflections on their larger implications by articulate leaders of Islamic countries, like Alija Izetbegovic of Bosnia, Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, also provide an abundance of real-world experiences to deepen the discussions.

The intellectuals of Egypt’s New Islamic trend have provided the most compelling synthesis of these complex and free-ranging conversations on democracy. It is important to note that the Muslim Brotherhood did not provide the site for this intellectual development. In the long history of the Brothers, the only world-class intellectual produced was Sayyid Qutb, and even Qutb joined the Brothers later in life, already formed as a public intellectual. Moreover, as we have seen, the radicalism of Qutb’s thought, in the wake of the torment he endured in long years in prison, moved him out of the midstream. An important impetus of New Islamic rethinking of democratic theory has been quite explicitly aimed at countering Qutb’s elitist and extremist ideas. Several important figures of the New Islamic trend did themselves come out of the Brothers, notably Muhammad al Ghazzali and Yusuf al Qaradawi.³² While they maintained ties with the Brothers, they did their serious intellectual work outside its confines. Some of their most important writings defend the democratic idea against Qutbian elitist ideologies that continued to exert appeal in certain circles of the Brotherhood.³³

These figures left the Brothers precisely because the ideological and organizational structures of the society inhibited the kind of independent critical work that studies of the relationship of Islam and freedom required. The loose ties of the New Islamic school provided a collective environment much more conducive to the opening to the outside world and independent thinking and critical exchange that the elaboration of Islamic democracy required. Both Ghazzali and Qaradawi gave considerable attention to questions of critical reason and culture in their more theoretical writings. For the most part, this record has been ignored in the West.

Reason, Culture, and Islamic Roots for Democracy

New Islamic thinking takes as its premise the idea that Islam does provide abundant resources of reason and culture to radically rethink the legacy. Reason in the Qur’an looms large and is invoked in complex ways. Islam provides a distinctive cultural context that imbues the use of reason with a spiritual dimension. God challenges human beings to engage all of the faculties at their disposal to make an assessment of the universe they experience. God warns that the “signs” he has sent down should not be treated lightly or ignored; they demand attention and deep thought.³⁴ The word ayah is the word used for a Qur’anic verse. It is also the word used for a sign, an indicator. It refers to the markings God has made on his world. The New Islamic school argues strenuously that the Qur’an insistently and repeatedly calls humanity to think, contemplate, and reflect. Reflection in the Qur’an calls Muslims to admire the wonders of creation and to appreciate a universe created by one God. However, the demands of thinking go farther. The call to think opens the way to all the empirical sciences that explore God’s world. It invites the members of each generation both to explore the natural world around them and to assess the relevance of the knowledge of earlier generations to their own changed circumstances. The New Islamic scholars insist on the richness of the Qur’anic conception of reason. Culture for them is thus not a thing to be mummified as a relic of an earlier age. It is rather an active resource for dealing with the unique and daunting challenges of God’s ever-changing world. The New Islamic scholars affirm that wherever their reason takes them, human beings will find that God is already there.

Conceptualizing Reason

In the vast body of their scholarly work, the New Islamic intellectuals insist that Islam has more than adequate reserves of reason and culture on which democrats in Islam may draw. Reason in the thinking and action of the New Islamic thinkers assumes three related forms.³⁵ Instrumental reason that connects means and ends in practical life and cause and effect in science is very much a part of their thinking about the world and humanity’s place in it. In particular, they insist that Muslims quite self-consciously consider themselves the heirs of a civilization that absorbed the scientific achievements of the Greeks, the Indians, and the Chinese with whom they came in contact. God’s world, as the great medieval Arab travelers like Ibn Battuta taught, is a world of multiple civilizations with varied attainments. Islamic civilization did more than preserve and transmit the human treasure of speculative scientific inquiry of the Greeks. Medieval Islamic scholars contributed impressively to further scientific advances in medicine, mathematics, and astronomy and, most importantly of all, in understanding the methods and aims of experimental science.

New Islamic intellectuals have sought to activate rather than memorialize this impressive legacy of Islamic civilization. In the inaugural lecture in 1998 at a center named for the great New Islamic thinker Muhammad al Ghazzali, who had died two years earlier, Yusuf al Qaradawi chose as his theme the absolute centrality of practical and scientific reason to Islam. Qaradawi reminded his listeners that the very first revelation called on Muslims to use their minds:

Read!—In the name of thy Lord and Cherisher who created man … Read! And thy Lord is most bountiful—He who taught (the use of) the pen—Taught man that which he knew not.³⁶

Qaradawi interpreted this verse to mean that God wanted to begin the era of rationality in education and science and that he was calling Muslims to play a role as leaders in its realization. Qaradawi related how Ghazzali was deeply saddened that the Islamic community, the leading light for science and learning for a thousand years, had become backward and ignorant. What most angered Ghazzali was the blame placed on Islam for this backwardness. How could such an argument be sustained, he wondered, when Islam had proven itself to be the vehicle that brought science and enlightenment to the world?

While recognizing the centrality of the instrumental reason of social practice and scientific inquiry, the Wassatteyya also emphasized that Islamic civilization explored and deepened ways in which reason could not only relate cause to effects and means to ends, but also offer evaluative judgments about the hierarchy of such ends and the usefulness of such effects for the forms of collective life they sought to build. Evaluative reason, they argued, has played a part as important as instrumental reason in the Islamic world. Islamic thinkers have understood that not all ends are of equal value and not all means are compatible with the achievement of certain prized community goals, as Islam defines them. Means, they quite explicitly argue, must also be compatible with the ends used for their achievement. If they are not, the larger goals and purposes of collective life will be distorted and undermined. No one has conveyed that insight with more force than Qaradawi. He pronounces unequivocally that ends do not justify means, but rather means must always be compatible with the ends they serve.³⁷

Finally, moral reason in Islam holds out the possibility of generating ethical frameworks that encompass the instrumentality and evaluation that are inevitably entailed in all purposeful social activities. Fahmi Huwaidi brought reason in this sense into very public and controversial view when he launched an attack on the excessive religiosity of what he called the darawish. Moral reason in Islam is an intrinsic part of inquiry and social activity. In a candid and widely discussed column, Huwaidi noted that in the village of his origins, people repeatedly raised monies for the ‘umra (the recommended but not prescribed pilgrimage to Mecca at times other than the hajj) when the village was in dire need of developmental projects to improve the health and well-being of its inhabitants. Huwaidi did not question the probity of the ‘umra as a supererogatory but positive act of faith. What he did was place it in the larger framework of the Qur’anic injunction to “build the world.” He concluded bluntly that those resources would be better spent on social projects for collective betterment. The darawish, he explained, reduced their obligations as Muslims to narrow rituals and traditional religious practices in the hopes of securing God’s favor. “In doing so,” wrote Huwaidi, “they are striving for their own salvation as individuals and ignoring the society around them. This attitude of mind and heart causes a kind of unintended selfishness in their religiousness.”³⁸ Huwaidi decried this distortion of the priorities for practical activities that Islam establishes in the service of a larger moral whole. Reason in this third sense thus goes beyond instrumental and evaluative reason to organize the most valued goals and useful effects into a coherent unity. In Islam such thinking is marked by humility. The effort to see and understand the whole must be made, but with a sense that, in the phrasing of the Qur’an, only God can fully remove the “veil” to grasp the whole picture or complete “record” in all its complexity.³⁹

Understanding Culture in Islam

These three understandings of reason that characterize the thinking of the Wassatteyya emerge out of the cultural context shaped by Islam. The concept of culture embedded in the intellectual and social products of the Wassatteyya is multifaceted. It includes the notion of culture as those habits of mind and heart that are the common possession of the varied human communities of the Islamic world. Culture also has for them the additional sense of those outcomes of human effort that command attention and respect for the beauty with which they imbue the human environment, as opposed to the purely natural world. Thus, there is no inclination among the New Islamic intellectuals to denigrate the role of the arts and, indeed, of all forms of creativity, which are recognized as valued outcomes of the highest forms of human effort. With great courage, the New Islamic school has defended art and artists against what they regard as ignorant extremist distortions of Islam that banish music, dance, and artistic expression, at times resorting to violence to accomplish that goal.⁴⁰ They stand just as firmly for creative thinking that refuses rote memorization and the divorce of learning from living. Culture for the Wassatteyya is open and inclusive. It is a wellspring of intellectual inquiry and progressive social activity.

Centrist Islam, Pragmatism, and the Democratic Ideal

The open-ended character of midstream understandings of reason and culture has produced some unexpected twists. Midstream intellectuals do not see their Islamic culture as in any way sealed off from the world. They explore a variety of connections and interactions with other civilizations and celebrate the enrichment they provide. One such connection, noted earlier, represents the unexpected loop that intersects with the distinctive American tradition of philosophical pragmatism. The walk from an American philosophical and social reformist tradition to the contemporary thought of midstream Islam on democracy is less improbable than it might at first appear, although it is rarely commented on. The struggle for justice, equality, and freedom in community is a central preoccupation of both traditions. The pragmatists, especially John Dewey, conceptualized democracy as a call to a distinctive way of life. His lifework centered on educational reform, where he had his most enduring influence. The communal rather than individualistic emphasis in Dewey’s work has a particularly strong resonance for the Islamic world. Dewey wrote:

A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. The extension in space of the number of individuals who participate in an interest so that each has to refer his own action to that of others, and to consider the action of others to give point and direction to his own, is equivalent to the breaking down of those barriers of class, race, and national territory which kept men from perceiving the full import of their activity.⁴¹

Dewey offered a compelling vision of democracy as a way to live together free from arbitrary power in self-determined, participatory communities. Like the New Islamic theorists, he understood that social reform was at once an intellectual and a social project. Knowing in both traditions is always about doing. Truth resides in the practical outcomes of thought and action rather than a grasp of abstract essentials that in both traditions is thought to be beyond human capacity.

There is an irony to the introduction of an American philosophical school into a discussion of democracy in the Islamic world at a time when the United States has globally displayed such an intense hostility to democratic developments in those spheres of the world, like the Arab lands, where American power is dominant. The irony may be lost on Western readers, especially Americans, who take seriously American rhetorical commitments to democracy, no matter how obvious their violation in practice.⁴² Islamic intellectuals and activists wear no such blinders, in common with politically aware Arab citizens across the political spectrum who regularly witness American interventions to preclude, block, or undermine democratic developments. Yet, with a turn to pragmatism, even this irony is more apparent than real, for one of the most important and nuanced messages of the pragmatists was the forceful argument that American ideological crusades for freedom abroad and celebrations of freedoms at home more often than not functioned as mere screens for interested interventionism abroad and elite privilege at home. There are striking continuities in American foreign policy. The War on Terror provided an indispensable rationale for the support for odious but compliant dictators, like Hosni Mubarak. Today the same rhetoric is exploited by the counter-revolution to undermine the democratic opening in Egypt. At the same time the War on Terror facilitates the assault on longstanding American freedoms at home. In Dewey’s time the official battles against communism at home and abroad functioned in precisely the same way. The pragmatists would find nothing really new in the use of struggles abroad to circumscribe freedom at home.

Pragmatism invokes democracy not as a fixed and rigid political formula or mode. Rather, democracy is understood as a call to practices that enhance such value-laden prospects. Unfortunately, in both the West and the Islamic world the everyday usage of the adjective “pragmatic” has come to mean an approach to life that is purely opportunistic, guided simply by unprincipled exploitation of available opportunities without serious attention to values. Wusuli, the conventional Arabic translation of pragmatic, conveys precisely this distorted meaning. Dewey would be horrified by such a deformed understanding of pragmatism.

What is invoked in this chapter, and in such centrist works as Alija Izetbegovic’s Islam between East and West, is principled pragmatism as philosophy. Izetbegovic reasoned that its democratic commitments and spiritual roots made American pragmatism especially relevant to the work of Islamic centrists, who seek to honor God’s signs that humanity should act to advance justice, equality, and freedom. Pragmatism like centrist Islam insisted on the spiritual dimension of politics and the political dimension of faith. In the work of the major American pragmatists, one finds a consistent, intermingling of politics and faith rather than the polarization that characterizes much else in Western, and especially European, thought. Izetbegovic argues persuasively that Roger Bacon, centuries earlier and under the influence of the great Arab medieval scholars, had accepted this same premise of the commingling science and faith that has remained in creative tension in Anglo-Saxon although not in continental European philosophy.⁴³

Truth Standards of Pragmatism and Representationalism

A pragmatic rather than a representational standard of truth will be used to take the measure of the New Islamic explications of Islam in God’s world.⁴⁴ The approach here aims for the deliberate cultivation of empathy in the hope that such empathy will have practical consequences in possible joint projects that will require mutual understanding and shared values that rise from very different cultural contexts. Such an attitude of mind represents a break with the standard approaches to Islam and Islamic thinkers and activists by Western scholars. The dominant representational view identifies the world with true descriptions of it. This implicit identification supports a positivist sense that all true descriptions weave seamlessly into a single, authoritative narrative. A pragmatic stance, in contrast, views verbal descriptions as situated interventions in the world that aim to influence behavior. A description is true to the extent that those who adopt it can navigate the situation to which it pertains. Descriptions that cannot be taken for granted in action must be revised. The world is not contained in or mirrored by true, scientific theories. Rather, it is the world that makes true theories true, just as the ocean makes seaworthy ships seaworthy.

On the pragmatic account, the original sin of the representational midstream in Western thought is the idea that the final goal is some ultimate, final account of the subject matter, a description that reveals the core of things, duplicates their essence, and strips them to their bare bones. The problem with this understanding of truth is that words cannot literally duplicate anything except other words. In their work, those who entertain a representational understanding of truth set their sights on the one true account, the single description to be maintained to the exclusion of all others. The very belief that such an account is possible is an obstacle to meaningful conversation and possible joint action. It leads to an inclination to psychological and social disorders, notably a superiority complex regarding one’s own cultural or ethnic group. Islamic midstream intellectuals regard the certainty for which such accounts aim as God’s alone.

In contrast, a pragmatic account is necessarily available for feedback on the ground from partners in the joint inquiry and common project. The mark of accuracy comes wholly from the ease with which the account can be taken for granted in the contexts for which it is intended. The signature of the paradigm of representation is the phallic impetus to penetrate through the world we live in to the “reality” behind it. What does that penetration in fact yield other than words? What emerges is always some string of phrases like “essence,” “underlying factors,” “fundamental reality,” or “core meaning” that validates researchers and reassures the readers they seek to persuade. At the same time, these phrases actively undercut those described by pointing out that this true account lies beyond their grasp. A parallel contrast was very much in evidence in Chapter 6 between the work of the anthropologists Clifford Geertz and Michael Gilsenan. Geertz postulates a social reading of an underlying symbolic code of which those observed are unaware. Gilsenan, in contrast, makes it quite clear that the only real competence in navigating the mystical experience lies with those, including an anthropologist in the field, who actually experience it in their thinking and practices.

The Deweyan alternative aims for engagement with subjects whose grasp of what is required for conversation and cooperation is no more or less limited than our own. It involves its own generalizations and inevitable reductions, guided, however, by the pragmatic project of constructive interaction in the real world. It thus does the inevitable work of selection and reduction that thinking requires. However, it does so without the spectral baggage of the quest for pure and ghostly forms and priestly overlording of those who presume themselves to have escaped from the cave.⁴⁵

A Critique of Representationalism

The pragmatists want to move us from representational to pragmatic standards of truth in our accounts of Islam. Pragmatists have a future-oriented focus that looks ahead to the new forms of human interaction that inquiry enables. The dominant trend in Western Islamic studies is representational. Two important Western studies of Islam and Islamic movements illustrate this contrast and make more concrete the ways in which representationalism limits the enhanced interactive outcomes for which pragmatism aims.

Bruce B. Lawrence’s Shattering the Myth: Islam beyond Violence launches a powerful substantive critique of conventional Western studies that insist on a linkage between Islam and violence. Lawrence’s work must be appreciated for the effort to “shatter” that link. However, in methodology the work remains typical of Western studies that search for an ultimate cause or set of causes that explain the surface behavior of Islamic thinkers and activists. Such investigations usually end, as does Lawrence’s, with the explanatory focus on the accurate representations of the causal abstractions situated at a depth that is out of reach of Islamic subjects but available to the researcher.

In Shattering the Myth Lawrence provides an instructive example of how dismissive of the direct experience of others such an account can be, despite the best intentions of the researcher. Lawrence introduces his work with wise reminders that attention must be paid to local factors and to the creativity of human agents. After this promising opening, Lawrence proceeds to characterize rivalism, reform, and fundamentalism as paradigmatic Islamic responses to what he calls “the ascendant world order.” The three phases are shaped by their quasi-automatic reactions to global political economy forces originating in the West and best grasped in Western terms.⁴⁶ All that is left of the opening nod to Islamic agency resides in the small margin of gradation that shades particular instances of these fixed patterns of response. The patterns take on a life of their own. Self-understandings of the Islamic actors pale.

Lawrence explains his thinking by quoting Robert Segal on “the difference between starting with the actor’s point of view and ending with it.”⁴⁷ Lawrence is here guarding against relativism. Muslim subjects are quoted but their statements, in Lawrence’s work, are taken as a step removed from real determinants encapsulated in the pure forms that his paradigms represent. In the end, the inseparability of religion and politics simply means for Lawrence that causal political economy factors are veiled with Islamic symbols and rhetoric. Lawrence’s work projects the conclusion that it has pierced these veils to gain unmediated access to a reality the veils screen from view, presumably inaccessible to the actors themselves. Lawrence, in the end, succumbs to the illusion that reality is articulated fully in the authoritative discourse of Western political economy.

Pragmatism avoids this reductionist pitfall. It does so by identifying reality with the world we actually live in and experience, rather than with our descriptions of it. The pragmatist rejects the correspondence theory of truth—that is, the notion that true sentences and the world are in any sense isomorphic. On the pragmatic account, we face events forward, while speaking to each other sideways.⁴⁸ Such a future-oriented, pragmatic approach can acknowledge cultural variability, such as that represented by the variety of forms that modern-day Islam assumes. However, pragmatism abandons the conceit that these differences are objective discoveries. Rather, it puts the variation in us, as observers and actors in the world.

For Lawrence, the only choice is between an explanation cast in terms of pure but ghostly abstractions or a complicit relativism that takes far too seriously the self-understanding of Islamic actors. He opts for the accurate representation of the abstractions. Lawrence undoubtedly believes he has discovered the real underlying factors that shape the paradigmatic Islamic responses to the political economy forces that he gives causal force. In truth, the abstract patterns of response are not discovered by him in his subject matter at all. Rather, they are grouped and distinguished through his analysis, as a map adds borders and place names to terrain. No one “discovered” the borders of Egypt. The problem is that Lawrence’s account would reverse the relation of the factors to what is observed. The factors he identifies are discursive entities, abstracted from a plurality of particular events. Putting them “beneath” what has been observed is a way of encoding the idea that these factors have some sort of causal power. The test of causal power comes, however, from the attempt to use these factors in causal explanation, not from some elusive sense of “depth” that gets to essentials. Instead of “essential factors” a pragmatic approach would speak of descriptions sufficiently generic to cover the broad range of particulars about which some meaningful generalization is sought.

A second and different version of representational scholarship lodges truth in an authoritative narrative rather than deep causation. Stephen Humphrey’s Between Memory and Desire exemplifies this variant. Scholars working along these lines provide accounts of the words and behaviors of their subjects, apprehended as truth from a privileged external vantage point that makes them an objective representation of a reality only dimly grasped, if at all, by the subjects of study. The representational criterion of truth in such works manifests itself in a variety of strategies that all boil down to “letting the facts speak for themselves.” Those facts can be objectively reported and ordered in a definitive way. To do so, however, one must have the right access code, something apparently denied to the real-world subjects of the study.

The shared conceit of such essentialist accounts resides in the conviction that there is such a thing as a disinterested standpoint for description of a reality that is simply “out there.” Such a privileged standpoint would mean that there is some neutral, ultimate truth, some singular description the identification of which is the goal of inquiry. In contrast, in the pragmatic view descriptions inevitably involve selectivity. Essentialists deny the selectivity in their inquiries. In the end, such works are revealing for what the agenda that guides their selectivity tells us about Western thinking. Such works are routinely praised for precisely this quality. As Max Rodenbeck writes in his appreciative New York Times review, Humphreys’s book “ends up revealing as much about our own society as those it describes.”⁴⁹ I would put the same point in stronger terms: The book is of interest primarily for what it tells us about one style of American thinking about the Islamic world.

Such works as those of Lawrence and Humphreys are instructive and valuable for purposes of Western self-understanding. Humphreys, like Lawrence, does helpfully expose the most pernicious American myths and misrepresentations in his engaging book, such as the myth of the Middle East madman that is routinely evoked to explain the behavior of leaders in the Islamic world. In contrast, pragmatic accounts are of interest primarily for what they tell us about those others who have captured our attention. The subjects of such studies are beings who live rich and complex lives in their own culture with a decent awareness of the contextual influences they face. The aim is to create characterizations that would allow actors in the story to recognize themselves and to stimulate in the reader fellow-feeling sufficient to allow a grasp of the situation these actors face. When an effort is made to describe their environment from their own point of view, we at least have the possibility of experiencing imaginatively the challenges, the hopes, and the fears that actually animate their struggles. Such accounts can serve the aim of making possible cooperation for shared goals, like the attainment of democratic ends. The most influential of the “neo-pragmatists,” the late Richard Rorty, made precisely this point with his discussion of the value of detailed “sentimental stories” that can create sympathy with others sufficient to stimulate practical, ethical, and political action. Following Hume, he argues that such accounts have greater practical moral force than abstract rational arguments.

Stories of this kind invoke emotions that do encourage identification and sympathy. For Rorty, they contribute to his broader call for the education of sentiments, or as he puts it more provocatively “sentimental education.” Such education has the very serious and eminently practical aim of expanding “the reference of the terms ‘our kind of people’ and ‘people like us.’” The purpose, Rorty continues, is to “sufficiently acquaint people of different kinds with one another so that they are less tempted to think of those different from themselves as only quasi-human.”⁵⁰ Empathic knowledge in this way opens the door to constructive communication and possible joint action. It may, of course, also facilitate manipulation or other such less positive interactions. In any case, a complete mapping of the inner thoughts and feelings of potential partners is not needed. To talk and act in concert with someone for practical ends, whether positive or negative, we need not think and feel exactly as he or she does; all that is required is that we think and feel with him or her on behalf of some common, real-world project.

Grounded pragmatic accounts of the experiences of others cannot escape from the need for generalization and abstraction. For the purpose of communication and joint action with Islamic centrists about their democratic aspirations and strivings to realize them, for example, we clearly need at a minimum some generalized concept of democracy to recognize their stories as relevant instances of the broader class of worldwide democratic efforts.

Dewey recognized this need but was wary of reified, pure forms like “democracy.” He argued that the most useful generalizations would not be essentialized abstractions; rather, they would be cast in generic rather than essentialist terms. This distinction between the essential and the generic is critical to the pragmatic approach employed in this book. The essential characteristics of a phenomenon purport to identify those features that define its very essence—in other words, those whose absence would negate the phenomenon. Their specification requires piercing the veils of appearance to some pure form. Centrist Islamic thinkers, in common with pragmatists, doubt that such knowledge is possible. In midstream Islamic thought the notion of piercing realities to essences is knowledge reserved to God. Humanity has limitations that preclude the grasp of such absolute certainties. In Islam it is only God who knows such things. In contrast, generic features are simply those whose repeated occurrence is noted empirically in a variety of contexts. Unlike essential features, which require a God-like grasp of the unchanging essence of a given phenomenon, generic features simply refer to traits recognized as common to more than one example of the phenomenon. Islamic centrists are confident that knowledge of this kind is within reach of a limited humanity.

If two parties on different sides of an important cultural divide seek to talk to each other and even cooperate to achieve a common goal such as democracy or the realization of human rights held in common, each must find the resources in his or her respective cultural contexts to make that collaboration possible in practical ways. However, there is absolutely no necessity that they do so in the same or even parallel ways. We may, after all, arrive at a common destination coming from very different directions.⁵¹ We may do so by taking our cues from cultural landscapes that offer more in the way of striking contrasts than similarities. This insight represents some very good news: It removes a barrier that often seems daunting, notably the false assumption that achievement of a common goal requires traversing essentially the same pathways to its realization.

It is probably inevitable that the West, having achieved impressive, although still incomplete, advances in realizing a democratic politics, would assert a kind of cultural patent on democratic outcomes. The claim that the West’s pathway to democracy is the pathway permeates the literature on democratic transitions. It takes the form of assertions that those who lack certain elements of Western culture or historical experience are unlikely to make a successful transition to democracy. For example, it is frequently asserted that real progress is impossible without a culturally sanctioned separation of church and state or the related historical imperative of a “reformation” of the dominant religious tradition or the development of economic liberalization in tandem with an expansion of democratic freedoms. Clearly, all three features did play a key role in the Western path to democracy. However, those facts of Western history tell us little or nothing about the history of others and about the shape their journey to democracy might take.

The alleged democratic deficit in Dar al Islam invites the remaking of Islamic societies. The invidious claim of a Western patent on democracy manifests itself in the dangerous assertion that since democracy is one of humanity’s great attainments, the West as pioneer has a responsibility to remake the deficient cultures of others in order to bring the blessings of democracy to them from the outside. Now, critics of these views in the West have vigorously, although for the most part unsuccessfully, attacked the disastrous policies to which such views have led. The American official war for freedom and against terrorism in reality advances the imperial struggle for resources and strategic advantage abroad, even as it assaults democratic gains at home. The backlash of citizen resistance to the calls for endless war in the West did not come in time to avert the devastation of whole societies and the unleashing of deadly sectarian impulses that continue to wreak havoc throughout the area. While these policy critiques have increasingly taken hold, there has been far less attention to the underlying theoretical issue about which Western critics are usually silent. This silence may well explain at least part of the failure of the critics to put much of a dent in the dangerous and often violent policies that flow from this fundamental theoretical misunderstanding.

The pragmatists in general and Dewey in particular have addressed this fundamental issue of cultures and outcomes in constructive ways. To be sure, since the policies that originate from the flawed position of a Western cultural patent on democracy reflect not only flawed thinking but also deep-seated interests, they may well persist even after the intellectual basis for such thinking has been undermined. In truth, the West has shown little or no interest in actually supporting democracy in the Islamic world, despite the incessant rhetoric to that effect. But at least we can hope to clear away some of the fuzzy and unhelpful thinking that has helped to rationalize destructive policies and win support for them from often-reluctant publics.

A particular pattern of culture may be a sufficient condition for the shaping of human beings capable of a certain way of life, like democracy. However, it is groundless to extend that argument to the untenable claim that such a cultural pattern is the necessary condition for the way of life it produces. Those who know more than one culture in some depth repeatedly experience similar outcomes and experiences from very different cultural resources. I base this insight on the experience of a lifetime wandering through and staying for extended periods in cultures other than my own, not at all bothered by the title of khawaga (foreigner in long-term residence). I also rely on the work of the great political sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr., into whose seminar at Harvard I also wandered in much the same haphazard way. The seminar was over-enrolled and theoretically closed. However, I discovered that by just showing up and asking questions and offering comments that showed I had engaged the readings, Moore’s cool graciousness took over; he never asked me to leave. For all the casualness of my access, there was nothing haphazard in what I discovered. In his indispensable study The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, on which he was working at the time, Moore provides exactly the kind of generic rather than essentialized characteristics that Dewey invoked.

What matters for the advancement of democratic struggles around the world is emphatically not that other experiences duplicate those of the relatively more successful democratic experiments like the American one. The difficulty of criticism, especially in the face of particularly inept policies like those pursued in the wake of the terrible 9/11 attacks, has made it easier for illusions about what we have accomplished to persist. I have never been quite clear about why people are so reluctant to air dirty laundry in public; the sun and open air, after all, have sanitizing advantages, as my mother, my first instructor in the nuances of pragmatism, repeatedly assured her seven children. All of us learned a reverence for soap and water, a very Islamic trait, I was later to learn! Isn’t it wiser to concentrate on getting out the stains and the unpleasant smells rather than on what the neighbors think? My mother considered it important to acknowledge the messes you made and to figure out how they could possibly have happened. Simply moving forward, not looking back and not assessing the causes of mistakes, just was not something she tolerated. Nor should it be, whether in personal or public life. At a minimum, the notion that our path to democracy has not been without its share of stained sheets of our own doing would at least give us sufficient pause to allow others to find their own way to pursue, institute, and sustain a democratic way of life.

Barrington Moore, Jr., provides the practical insight necessary to recognize democratic experiences elsewhere and their possible contributions without turning the insight into an essentialized abstraction. According to Moore, “the development of democracy is a long and incomplete struggle to do three closely related things.” Moore employs verbs rather than nouns. He nestles the generic struggle for democracy in three project verbs: checking arbitrary rulers, securing just and rational rules, and providing for participation in making the rules.⁵² Democracy is something for which human communities strive in these generalized ways. It is not an object that America or Israel or any other state owns and with which it is entitled to bludgeon those “quasi-humans” who are judged less far along. When the issue of democracy is cast at this level of generality, it is possible to recognize that sustained efforts to pursue the democratic idea in Islam have taken place and to document them empirically.

Islamic Narratives and Theorizations of Democracy

Muslims have their own narrative of struggles for social justice. Its inspiration comes to them from the Qur’an. Lived experiences that curtail arbitrary power, generate just rules to govern the common life, and create broader opportunities for the people to take part in determining these rules, inspired by the Message, are an important part of the history of the ummah. These real-world experiences ground the narrative. Each of the core countries of the Islamic strategic triangle of Turkey, Iran, and Egypt has a proud history of battles for constitutional systems. They have all enjoyed mass support and have engaged trends across the political spectrum, always including Islamic trends.

Islamic democracy, the New Islamic school candidly acknowledges, is an unfinished project that challenges the ummah to bold thinking. They argue forthrightly that Islamic fiqh (legal reasoning, based on interpretation of the Qur’an and Sunnah) must appropriate the gains of Western political constitutional thought. Speaking with unembarrassed frankness, Muhammad al Ghazzali pronounced Islamic constitutional fiqh to be “severely underdeveloped.” He urged Islamic thinkers to borrow freely from Western democratic concepts and mechanisms. More precisely, the thinkers of the New Islamic school have singled out the following notions as proven instruments of democratic rule that should be imitated: separation of powers, multiple parties and competitive elections, constitutional guarantees of basic political freedoms such as speech and assembly protected by an independent judiciary, equal civil and political rights for minorities, and limited terms for the highest offices. The intellectuals of the New Islamic trend have accepted the challenge of integrating these elements from the experience of others into a coherent theory and practice of Islamic democracy.⁵³

The rich conception of democracy as a way of life goes farther still, demanding an attention to what Tareq al Bishri calls al mujta’a al ahaly (communal society). The concept for Bishri captures much of what is attractive about the Western civil society notion of a public space dominated neither by the market nor ruling power and committed to serving the common good. The distinguished Egyptian historian suggests this alternative term, however, because it avoids the secular bias against Islamic organizations that the civil society notion often carries, while preserving the positive features of a public arena where the general welfare can be defended.⁵⁴

The New Islamic vision of communal society is far more inclusive than realized. As an intellectual school, these scholars have, for example, produced bold and innovative studies of the role of women in public life, with the lead taken by the late Muhammad al Ghazzali in advocating for an expansion of women’s rights. New Islamic thinkers argue for the full inclusion as well of non-Muslims as citizens, a point of view boldly put forth in Fahmi Huwaidi’s early book Citizens, Not Zimmis. Yusuf al Qaradawi and Tareq al Bishri have also written extensively on an inclusive role for non-Muslims. Their efforts have yielded a collective body of work that is widely regarded as the most enlightened on this critical issue.⁵⁵ Their contributions provide a firm foundation for the equal participation of non-Muslims in the new political world that Islamic democracy would bring. However, these works by centrist Islamic groups are for the most part unread in the West, and the clear evidence of their value in combating extremism and preparing the ground for inclusive, democratic visions of Islamic community that draw on indigenous sources is completely ignored in mainstream Western commentary.

For decades New Islamic intellectuals have been engaged in collective efforts to theorize the Qur’anic narrative of justice and of the real-world struggles for democracy on Islamic ground that it informs. Their efforts to do so have repeatedly generated turbulence, as they raise controversial issues of great importance for the advancement of the ummah. They have registered critical gains in theory and practice on behalf of democratic objectives. On more than one occasion, democratic experiences judged antithetical to Western interests have been curtailed by repressive interventions and domestic tyrannies. In the face of these formidable obstacles, intellectuals of the New Islamic trend have developed ways of thinking and acting as part of the Islamic Renewal that can be validly and persuasively described as contributing to efforts to limit arbitrary ruling power, yield more just laws, and enhance participation in rule making. It matters little how their pathways to these positions compare to our own.⁵⁶ Their efforts merit serious attention. Such practical and theoretical work over several decades gives the lie to unfounded yet endlessly repeated Western assertions that Islamic culture cannot nurture the values of justice, equality, and freedom that democracy requires and all of the great monotheistic traditions advance.