In the last edition of his classic, The Arabs, published in 1992, the late Peter Mansfield described the Arab world in the 1990s as "confronted by a formidable problem which in reality affects all Muslims in the 21st century." The problem was that of "finding the means of combining Islam with democracy in our time." The perception of Islam as a problem for those wishing to promote the universal values of human rights and democracy is widespread, both in the west and among the elite of Muslim countries. But is it correct? If so, what is the nature of the problem? Before trying to answer, we must consider whether those values are indeed universal. Of the two, human rights makes a stronger claim to universality. Democracy has been recognised since ancient times as only one among many possible forms of government; even Winston Churchill found no better boast for it than that it was less bad than all the others. By contrast, the whole point about human rights is their universality. They are called "human" because they are held to be inherent in all human beings, irrespective of creed or culture. So it is not surprising that the Charter of the United Nations-endorsed by all the UN's 185 member states-expresses the determination of the world's peoples "to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person."
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its more detailed elaboration of rights and its explicit support for democracy, cannot claim the same degree of universal acceptance. It is true that, when it was adopted by the UN in 1948, no delegation voted against it and most of those who then abstained-South Africa and the states of the former Soviet bloc-have since accepted it. The present UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, has also stated (in a speech in Tehran in 1997) that the Declaration "was the product of debates between a uniquely representative group of scholars, a majority of whom came from the non-western world."
But we need to be careful about this. The scholars may have been representative in a geographical sense, but they were meeting at a time of maximum western power and influence, both political and cultural. It can be fairly questioned how representative they were of the cultures of the parts of the world they came from. For example, the Iranian scholar, Fereydoun Hoveida, was indeed a distinguished jurist, but he had studied with Ren?assin in France rather than with any of the leading Shi'ite authorities of the time. His brother was later the Shah's loyal prime minister.
So perhaps it is not surprising that the post-revolutionary Islamic regime in Iran has displayed an ambivalent attitude towards the Declaration. In 1984 its representative at the UN said that the Declaration "represented a secular understanding of the Judaeo-Christian tradition." His country, he added, rejected its values and "would not hesitate to violate its provisions." (States do not always live up to the pledges they make at international gatherings, but this one has certainly been honoured.)
One state which abstained in 1948 has never since changed its attitude: Saudi Arabia. The Saudi delegate condemned the text on the grounds that it reflected western culture and was "at variance with patterns of culture of eastern states." More specifically, he declared that the provision for religious liberty in the Declaration violated Islamic law. This drew a sharp rejoinder from the Pakistani representative, who said that Islam endorsed freedom of conscience.
The same issues continue to divide the Islamic world today. But there is no consensus on human rights in the west, either. While the catholic church now preaches human rights as intrinsic to its mission, other Christians have doubts about a concept which they regard as a legacy of the anticlerical Enlightenment. They prefer to dwell on "duties." There is also a mainly secular school of thought in the west which objects to articles in the Declaration that assert the right to social security, work, holidays with pay, and an adequate standard of living. Economic liberals fear that such rights can be used by the state to justify interference with private property.
We should therefore avoid confusing the notion of universal human rights with the particular rights defined in the Declaration. The same goes for the various international treaties which give legally binding force to specific human rights provisions. Some Muslim states have accepted these treaties only with large reservations. But these cannot be taken as evidence of any incompatibility between Islam and the rights in question. The US itself appended five "reservations," five "understandings," and three "declarations" to its own ratification of the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The US is also one of only two states (with Somalia) which has yet to ratify the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child. Should we conclude that these rights are "incompatible" with American religion or culture? Hardly.
What is hard to deny is that the particular form of the Declaration owes much to the domination of the west in the past two centuries. But this has not stopped the Declaration from having a powerful echo in all parts of the world. States may pay only lip-service to it, but almost everywhere, including most Muslim countries, it is found in the hands, or on the lips, of those resisting oppression. Its ideas are bound to have wide appeal because they are rooted in human nature. No one likes to be tortured or arbitrarily imprisoned, whatever their culture, religion or gender.
In Islam itself there is strong scriptural warrant for objecting to injustice and abuse of power. The Qur'an (God's word revealed to Muhammad) and the Hadith (which records Muhammad's own words and deeds) are full of denunciations of the corruption, cruelty and injustice of the pre-Islamic regime in Mecca, and of prescriptions for a new community of believers, equal in the sight of God, who must treat each other with solidarity and brotherly love. Most Muslims understand their religion as a message of tolerance, compassion and social justice. How many practise it as such may be questioned-but similar questions can be asked of the adherents of any faith.
There are, of course, specific texts and traditions which are used to justify oppressive practices, particularly against women and non-Muslim minorities, as well as punishments we now consider cruel and inhumane. In each case, some Muslims will argue that the prohibition or injunction is absolute and immutable, being founded in the Qur'an which is the literal word of God. And some will go on to explain why in their view such a practice is actually more just than currently received ideas in the west. In each case, however, other Muslims argue that the practice in question is either not Islamic at all, or not mandated in all circumstances; and that to revive it today would be against the spirit of Islam as they understand it.
Many long symposia have been devoted to these arguments-often at the instigation of western scholars who wish to encourage a dialogue between "Islam" and "the west." One virtue of such meetings is that the western participants learn to question the premise of the discussion, which postulates "Islam" and "the west" as discrete, internally coherent and mutually equivalent entities, capable of engaging in "dialogue" with each other. Actually, of course, both are abstractions. Some people may describe themselves as belonging to one or the other. But many belong to both. Neither is static. In the past, Islamic influences were important in forming the west. More recently, western influence on Islam has been enormous, in the sense that Muslims-including most "fundamentalists"-now think about their faith in ways which would probably not have occurred to them if the modern west had never impinged on their lives.
But the truth is that debate on political and religious issues is freer in most parts of the west than it is in most parts of the Muslim world. Many leading Muslim journals are now published in the west, and many leading Muslim thinkers reside there. Most Muslims who live and work in the west have a different perspective from those in Muslim countries. But they still have a contribution to make both to Islam and to western life. When the Mufti of Marseilles declares that "the allegorical language of religion allows for renewed interpretation as often as one feels the need of it" and "that is the secret of religion's longevity," it is a significant statement even though the orthodox in the Islamic world would not endorse it. It is important that Muslims in Europe-or some of them-now think in such terms: important for European society, and in the long term also for the Islamic world.
But we should not overstate the bleakness of the human rights picture within Muslim countries. The struggle for freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and women's rights is being carried out in many of them. In Iran, movements in civil society recently forced the conservative religious establishment to disown and even arrest some of its own thugs for carrying out assassinations of liberal intellectuals. In Malaysia, the movement backing Anwar Ibrahim has obliged Prime Minister Mahathir Muhammad to withdraw some of his more grotesque accusations and even to put his own police chief on trial for the beating of Anwar Ibrahim, which at first he had dismissed as self-inflicted. There are other examples.
at first sight, democracy looks less of a universal value than do human rights. It is a form of government developed, in its current form, mainly in the west. Article 21 of the Declaration says that "everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives"; and that the will of the people "shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage..." Democracy in that form was developed in the west between the 17th and 20th centuries.
Of course, notions of government by consent or of popular participation can be found in many other times and places. But the efforts of some modern Muslims to establish an Islamic pedigree for modern forms of democracy do not seem very convincing. The most we can find in the early Islamic state is a practice of consultation (shura) with the important people in the community (those with power "to bind and to loose"), and the ceremony of bay'a, in which a new Caliph was acclaimed or accepted by the people. A more interesting argument was developed by Namik Kemal, the leading thinker of the 19th century "Young Ottoman" movement. He suggested that constitutional government was implicit in the well-known Islamic principle of ijma', or consensus, embodied in the saying, attributed to Muhammad, that "my community will not agree upon an error."
Traditionally, this had been taken to mean that a consensus among the ulama -the "learned"-was the ultimate arbiter of any question about the interpretation of the Shari'a, or divine law. The ulama themselves, however, derive their authority not from the divine, but from the respect in which their learning is held by the community. Hence it can be argued that in the last resort it is the consensus of that wider community-the people-that is required.
An example often given, to show that ultimately the ulama's authority depends on popular endorsement, is the spread of coffee-drinking in the Islamic world in the 17th century. At that time, according to the historian HAR Gibb, the ulama "almost unanimously took the view that coffee-drinking was unlawful and punishable with the same penalties as wine-drinking, and a number of persons were actually executed for it." In spite of this, the prohibition was so generally ignored that in the end the ulama gave up the struggle. (Today coffee is freely consumed by even the most die-hard conservatives. Not even the Taliban in Afghanistan have banned it.)
The next step in the argument is that, if the interpretation of the law ultimately depends on popular consensus, then correct interpretation is best obtained by consulting the people in advance. The Ottoman Sultans, Kemal said, inherited the authority of the early Caliphs only by consent. To retain that consent, he argued, they should set up institutions for ascertaining the popular will. One problem with this argument is that it presupposes identity between the umma, or community of believers, and the citizen body of a modern state. In practice very few modern states are inhabited only by Muslims. It seems, therefore, that either we have to exclude non-Muslims from the citizen body, or we have to allow them an equal say with Muslims in determining the content of Islamic law.
This is one reason why most thorough-going Muslim democrats today would prefer to go beyond Kemal's reasoning, and emulate the west in separating politics from religion. They argue that Islam prescribes only general principles rather than a specific form of government. Others, however, maintain that such separation would go against the very essence of Islam, which is to regulate the whole of human life, public and private. But perhaps the question has been badly formulated. Secularism has got itself a bad name, not only with Muslims but also with many Christians, by appearing determined to exclude religion completely from public life. Muslims might have fewer problems with the separation of politics from religion if it were more related to its original purpose, which was to make the state an area where people of different religious convictions could meet on equal terms.
in the end it is hard to separate human rights and democracy. There is no way that free men and women can be governed other than with their consent and participation. And there is no sure way to ascertain what government people want except by holding free elections. Therefore, if human rights are guaranteed, we will end up having to organise the state along democratic lines. Do Muslims actually believe that their religion requires them to forgo rights which have been proclaimed as the common patrimony of the human race, simply because it was the west, in the last two centuries, which took the lead in defining those rights? The only way to settle this question is to enable Muslims to answer it freely-and that can only be done in conditions of democracy.
So far, many unpopular governments have resorted to "Islamisation" of a repressive kind, in an attempt-usually unsuccessful-to revive their popularity. Notable examples are the governments of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in Pakistan in the 1970s, and Ja'far al-Numairi in Sudan in the 1980s. But there are few examples of parties which advocate such policies winning power in a genuinely free election. Where they have done so or come close to it (as in Algeria in 1991-92), it has usually been because they also voiced popular grievances against a repressive regime.
This brings us to a secondary but important reason for giving priority to democracy, which might be called a "tactical" one. It is true that in many parts of the Muslim world the political running is now being made by "Islamists," who either explicitly repudiate democracy or seem to demand it in a purely instrumental spirit, as a means of winning power for themselves, rather than with any serious intention of practising it. In the words of the Moroccan Islamologist Mustapha Hogga: "How can we ensure that democracy is not used against itself; and that the Islamists, if they are allowed to take part in elections and win them, will respect the principle of alternance and its prerequisite, respect for minority rights?" His answer is that democracy must not be rushed; it must follow a timetable, the aim of which is an advance of freedoms in stability. This should probably be read as a criticism of the botched democratisation attempted by President Chadli Bendjedid in Algeria between 1988 and 1991, which culminated in the military coup of January 1992 to pre-empt the electoral victory of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS).
Indeed, many criticisms of that process would be in order. Particularly ill-advised was the choice of an electoral system which would have given the FIS an overall majority in parliament, even though it was far from having one in the electorate. Even so, it seems clear with hindsight that the coup of 1992, and the very muted response of the west-which was generally interpreted as support-were bad mistakes, leading to the bloodshed Algeria is now suffering.
The question is not whether the FIS leaders were genuine believers in democracy. At least one of them, Ali Ben Hadj, made it clear he was not. The question is whether the FIS in government could have been obliged to respect the rules of democracy, given that it had come to office through a democratic and constitutional process and would have had to share power with a president who enjoyed some popularity in his own right, and whom the army could have supported in his efforts to uphold the constitution.
We shall never know. But it is a great pity that the experiment was not tried. Ever since, the population has been subjected to the twin horrors of massive human rights violations by the regime, and terrorism by self-proclaimed Islamists. The regime has sought to legitimise itself through elections, but has never dared to allow a truly free vote. On the last occasion, in April this year, its candidate was elected "unopposed" after six others withdrew, alleging electoral fraud.
An even more important opportunity was missed in Turkey in 1996-97, when the secular military establishment overreacted to the coalition government led by the moderate Islamist Necmettin Erbakan. To an external observer, this seemed an almost heaven-sent chance for a "historic compromise," whereby Islamists and secularists could have worked out a modus vivendi under democratic rules. But the chance was not taken. Erbakan was repeatedly and publicly browbeaten by the military-dominated National Security Council, until his government collapsed through defections from his coalition. Thereafter his party was dissolved and he himself was banned from politics. Contrary to many expectations, in the ensuing election on 18th April this year, the electorate did not give an increased share of the vote to the successor Islamist party. Instead, riding the wave of nationalism inspired by the capture of the Kurdish guerrilla leader, Abdullah Ocalan, the far right National Action party made the most significant gains and became the country's second largest party. But it may well be questioned how far this was a genuinely free vote, given speculation that an Islamist victory would be met by a military coup. Shortly after the election, the country's senior judge astonished political observers with a public speech drawing attention to the limits on freedom of expression in Turkey. None of the main parties had made this an issue in the election campaign, or promised to do anything about it.
The point about the "tactical" abuse of democracy concerns not just the tactics of ?tes in the Muslim world, but those in the west who claim to believe in democratic values. How can we expect Islamists to take these values seriously, when western governments apply them selectively and appear to consider that violation of democratic choice is justified so long as the aim is to keep Islamists from gaining power? Also, western concern for human rights will not be taken seriously in the Muslim world unless it embraces the human rights of Palestinians when these are violated by Israel, or by the Palestinian authority responding to Israeli pressure. Israel should not be singled out for condemnation, but the tendency to overlook this aspect of the problem, especially in the US, is no less damaging than the tendency to view the internal practices of Muslim governments through the lens of their external compliance with western interests.
I am not seeking to assign an Islamic pedigree to either democracy or human rights. Both are universal concepts, but both owe most to the political and intellectual development of the western world in the last few centuries. It is no coincidence that this period also saw the west assume an unprecedented political and intellectual ascendancy over the rest of the world. Politically, of course, the west did not respect either human rights or democratic values in its treatment of the rest of the world. But people of other cultures latched on to those aspects of western culture, and used them to challenge the west's supremacy.
The west has now retreated-at least some distance-and people of other cultures have asserted the right to manage their own affairs. But no one's culture is immutable, and there is no question, pace Samuel Huntington, of organising a new world order in which separate cultural zones are preserved by the political hegemony of regional powers. We are all interacting with, and learning from, each other. In this context, it will be a great pity if ideas such as democracy and human rights come to be seen as peculiarly western or, still worse, as instruments of cynical western power politics. Whatever their precise origin and history, they are now the common heritage of humankind, and their implementation would safeguard people as much from abuse by western powers or their local surrogates as it would from the depredations of more "indigenous" regimes.
