What are the prospects for the emergence of liberal societies in Muslim countries? Note my choice of words: “liberal,” not “democratic.” Democracy, defined as competitive elections among rival slates of candidates, is much harder to find in the world than liberalism, defined as a decent respect for the freedom and autonomy of individuals. There are more Muslim nations—indeed, more nations of any stripe—that provide a reasonable level of freedom than ones that provide democracy in anything like the American or British versions.
Freedom—that is, liberalism—is more important than democracy because freedom produces human opportunity. In the long run, however, democracy is essential to freedom, because no political regime will long maintain the freedoms it has provided if it has an ironclad grip on power. Culture and constitutions can produce freedom; democracy safeguards and expands it.
I agree with the thrust of Wilson's opening statement, which is that democracy is not an end in and of itself, human liberty is. We choose democracy because it is, as far as we can tell, the best system for maintaining that liberty. I'm not wedded to the idea of democracy, and if someone came up with a system which I felt better served human liberty, I'd be all for trying it.
That said, the rest of Wilson's piece represents the same failure of imagination that I think typifies so much of the Western commentary on the Middle East. Modernization and liberalization are presented as concomitant with Westernization. Success is measured by how much they come to look like us, particularly in progress toward the separation of Church and State:
But in most Muslim countries today, the chief rival to autocratic secular rule has been not Western ideologies but Islam. On a purely institutional level, it is not hard to see why. Islam is organized into mosques, and many of these support charitable and educational organizations that provide services reaching deep into the society. Political activism gathers around religion the way salt crystallizes along a string dangling in sea water.
The Protestant Reformation helped set the stage for religious and even political freedom in the West. Can something like that occur in Muslim nations? That is highly doubtful. There is neither a papacy nor a priesthood against which to rebel; nor are mosques comparable to churches in the Catholic sense of dispensing sacraments. There will never be a Muslim Martin Luther or a hereditary Islamic ruler who, by embracing a rival faith, can thereby create an opportunity for lay rule.
Wilson is right that it is Islam is unlikely to produce a leader who could, at a stroke (or with the nailing of some theses to a mosque door), initiate a Msulim reformation. Islam isn't set up that way. But this is not necessarily a bad thing.
The delinking of Church and State authority was an essential step in the development of liberalism in Europe, but a look at the parallel growth of Islam and Christianity shows that grafting the European Reformation experience onto Middle Eastern Islam is very misleading. To put it (extremely) simply: The Catholic clergy stood firm against secular authority, and eventually broke. Secular authority now essentially reigns supreme in the West (except for certain parts of the U.S.). The Islamic clergy, the ulama, which never had as strict a hierarchy as its Catholic counterpart, bent and subtly adapted to increasingly secular rulers, and was thus able to maintain its traditional role as interpreter of religious law (the sharia).
In his book The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, Richard Bulliet argues that such an arrangement may not be entirely inimical to liberty in the Middle East. While there obviously may be problems with the supremacy of divinely inspired law over civil authority, it's important to note that the ulama enjoyed legitimacy as a result of being seen as fair and impartial, and that interpretations of the sharia have and will continue to subtly evolve to accomodate modern realities. Stories about fundamentalist interpretations of sharia, women being stoned for adultery, etc., while horrible, are not representative of the state of Islamic thought.
Historically, Muslim civil authorities derived their own legitimacy from their respect for and adherence to the sharia. The ulama , Bulliet argues, have historically acted as a check against tyranny, and when that check was removed in the name of "modernization," rather than increasing human liberty, Arab rulers increased their own power and wealth. Modern Islamic fundamentalism is some ways more a response to the tyranny of secular Arab rulers who spurned the authority of the ulama, much less to the "liberalizing" efforts of those rulers. Forget Bush's "They hate our freedom" nonsense. Islamic fundamentalists want freedom (in their own admittedly twisted way), but in the Arab experience the arrival of tyranny has been coincident with the arrival of Coca-Cola and plaid neckties, and so it's understandable that they would reject both and seek a solution in their understanding of "true" Islam.
Negotiating authority between the secular and divine took bloody centuries in the West. Hopefully it will not take as long in the Islamic world. But we in the West should not assume that success will only come when the Islamic world comes to more resemble us. Obviously, we want to see societies where all people and faiths are respected equally under the law (in his book, Bulliet points out historical incidences of Jews and Christians specifically requesting arbitration in Muslim religious courts because of those courts' reputation for fairness) but we should prepare ourselves for the ways in which those societies may not look like our own, and how they may safeguard and expand human liberty in ways that we haven't yet imagined.
P.S. Bulliet's book also serves as an excellent, and I think devastating, critique of Huntington's (by way of Bernard Lewis) ubiquitous "Clash of Civilizations" thesis.
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