Benjamin Barber on Islam, religion, and democracy

From a paper by Benjamin R. Barber, the Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos in New York City, presented at the Istanbul Seminars organized by Reset Dialogues on Civilizations in Istanbul last month:

There is a powerful rhetoric around today that claims Islam – not just fundamentalist or Wahhabist or Salafist Islam, but Islam itself is a religion hostile to democracy…

I want to offer six straightforward arguments, some historical, some sociological, and some philosophical – all reasonable and commonsensical in the broader sense of rational – that suggest why it is absurd to think that Islam cannot accommodate democracy or that democracy cannot accommodate Islam.

FIRST: It is not Islam per se, but religion tout court that stands in some tension with secularism and with democracy – a tension that is healthy rather than unhealthy in a free society. Augustine’s Two Cities and Pope Gelasius’s two swords speak to a world of the body and a world of the spirit, of the temporal and the eternal, the worldly and the ecclesiastic. These dualisms do not arise out of theology but inform theology with the deep logic of duality that defines our being. The opposition of morality and politics, and of divine or natural and positive law, is transferred to the opposition of church and state that produces troublesome but healthy tensions for societies everywhere.

SECOND: Sociologists from Tocqueville and Durkheim to that American sociologist of democracy Robert Bellah have insisted free societies have been constructed on a religious foundation that lends them stability and affords them the luxury of political disagreement. It is precisely religion that grounds democratic nations and bonds peoples who might otherwise be fatally divided by their economic and social differences and their political disagreements…

THIRD: Like Christianity and other religions, Islam is a religion practiced in many cultures and societies, sectarian, stratified, schismatic and pluralistic… Only around 15% of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims are Arabs but it’s hard to tell how many Westerners know that by far the largest proportion of Muslims reside in India and Indonesia. Even Bernard Lewis writes his history of Islam’s “decline” through the lens of the Middle East, primarily the Ottomans.

FOURTH: While we like to pretend that religion in the modern era is and should be private, parochial and conventionalist, it remains public, universal and moralistic. It is a creature of the Nomos (the universal law) rather than of the Ethnos. It wishes to occupy the public square (though not necessarily City Hall) and its claims necessarily rival the claims of positive law. Even early societies pitted their conventional “sumptuary laws” regulating public behavior against the positive laws of the state, and there is no religion that does not yield a version of Sharia. Are the Ten Commandments that inform the Mosaic Law meant to be private or less than universal? [...]

FIFTH: To the degree Islam is fundamentalist, so is religion in many places, because in our secular age religion is under siege and fundamentalism is above all a reaction to religion under siege. As religion was once the air we breathed and the ether in which we moved, today commerce, secularism and materialism are the air we breathe and the ether in which we move. Indeed, there are many who insist democracy is little more than the triumph of commerce and the victory of scientistic materialism – which may be why fundamentalists seeking to secure their religions take aim not only at modernity but at democracy as well.  American Protestant fundamentalists who school their children at home are little different than Muslim fundamentalists who oppose encroaching capitalist markets. Both see in Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the consumerist franchises that now encircle the world and dominate the media and the internet a two way sewer…

SIXTH AND LAST: We have seen that the conviction that Islam cannot accommodate democracy is rooted in a shallow and incomplete understanding of Islam. But it is also true that the conviction that democracy cannot accommodate Islam is rooted in a shallow and incomplete understanding of democracy – one that tends to assimilate democratization to Americanization or Westernization or marketization. It is tied to the false view that there is but one kind of democracy, one road to liberty, one formula for translating the theory of justice into just practices. But historically and philosophically, democracy is singular not plural. We would benefit enormously by simply talking about it in the plural rather than the singular: not “democracy” but “democracies.”

This excerpt only begins to capture the essence of the paper. It is a compelling piece that deserves wide discussion. I encourage you to read it.