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Benjamin Barber on Islam, religion, and democracy

July 8th, 2008
By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor


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.



This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 5:57 am and is filed under Democracy, Turkey, Islam, Evangelicals, Religion, Christianity, History. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 4 Comments

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    Disagree completely. Unfortunately, Islam (Mohammed) is inherently more violent than Christianity (Jesus). The lives of these two prophets are held up as the highest ideal - something to be emulated.
    No matter how secular and modern Islam may someday become, the violent, barbaric life of Islam's prophet will not change, it will lie in wait, to be used by the next unhappy generation of young people, like JRR Tolkein's 'One Ring'.
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    Among those who would disagree with you... Karen Armstrong. See, for example, her comments in this interview with Krista Tippett on Speaking of Faith.
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    Anyone who can say that Islam is like Christianity and other religions just does not understand Islam. The Islamic scholars themselves say that Islam is NOT a religion like others. They say that Islam is a complete way of life which governs ALL aspects of life. Not only is Islam totalitarian, it is also imperialistic. Christianity says to go forth and preach the Gospel to every living creature, but Islam, in the Koran, says to make war on non-Moslems until Islam reigns supreme. Other religions have little problem with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which enshrines freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, equality of religion or no religion, and gender equality. Only Islam has rejected the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- not a single Moslem-majority country has signed on to it. Instead, ALL 57 Moslem-majority countries subscribe to the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam which openly declares that Islam is superior to other religions and that the only source of human rights is the Shariah. Christianity and Judaism have the Golden Rule; Islam has no such thing. Islam divides the world between believers and unbelievers, between Moslems and non-Moslems, and the laws are different for the two groups. Christianity and Judaism say: "Thou shalt not murder/kill"; Islam says: "It is unlawful for a believer to kill another believer." There is no such concept in Islam as man being created in the image of God. Islam says that "Non-Moslems are the worst of animals" and "the vilest of beasts". Islam says that "non-Moslems are your inveterate enemy". There is just nothing like that in Christianity of Judaism or any other religion. One could go on and on with examples to show that Islam is fundamentally different from other religions, and inherently more violent and aggressive and hateful than any other. But, you would never know that from reading such careerists and apologists as Karen Armstrong or John Esposito. If you want to know the truth about Islam, you must read the Koran and the Hadith, and serious, respected Islamic religious authorities like Sayid Qutb, Abul Maududi and Ayatollah Khomeini. The Koran should be required reading for all non-Moslems.
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    I have to disagree also. You say the religion is the foundation for a free society, Name one Islamic country that has freedom. There is little freedom for women and non-Muslims in Islamic countries. Most Islamic countries are not stable. Please do not compare Islam to any other religion. They are not the same.

    Then you speak of Islam and democracy. Democracy means nothing to Muslims. It has been a failure, as they just vote in terrorist groups.

    Here is what Muslims have done with democracy.

    It's Only a Few.....That's What They Keep Telling us
    http://islaminaction08.blogspot.com/2008/05/its...

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