Democracy in Muslim world

Is Islam antithetical to democracy and vice versa is a question that seems to have generated a lot of debate inside and outside the Muslim world.

On this issue opinions are clearly divided between some of the western scholars and media gurus and their counterparts in the Muslim world. In fact, the entire debate has become so confusing that it has blurred reality.

American neo-conservatives such as Daniel Pipes, for instance, argue that Islam and democracy do not fit in together. Such a notion is based on the empirical evidence that most Muslim countries have monarchies or some kind of authoritarian rule. In fact a set of scholars — Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, Martin Indyk and Samuel Huntington — has been categorised as essentialists. These scholars argue that Islam offers a set of symbols and slogans, which is meant to muster support within the community, but then is also the cause of problems that the Muslim world is then accused of.

In other words, the lack of democracy or hostility towards the West is part of Islam’s value system. This argument is countered by what Michael Salla classifies in his Third World Quarterly article as the ‘contingencists’; such as John Espisito, who argue that it is not fair to bracket all Muslim countries in an ‘Islamic world’.

Obviously, numerous scholars from the Muslim world go into an overdrive arguing the opposite. Their argument is that majority of citizens of the Islamic world are actually as fond of democracy as anyone else in the Muslim world. Such a statement is at best reactive, which does not appreciate the evolution of the concept of governance in Islamic history.

The other day, I had a chance to watch a debate on one of the Pakistani channels organised by the Pakistan Institute for Legislative Development and Training (Pildat). The four speakers seemed to say different things but were making a similar point — democracy as a principle is acceptable in the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, the debate went on for an hour without really defining democracy which is not just about holding elections or a matter of one-man-one-vote, but it is about a political system where both the majority and minority have sufficient space to negotiate their interests. The electoral process, like accountability and the rule of law, is a component of the democratic philosophy or process. Elections, in fact, are one of the essential tools of such a system and nothing more.

One of the speakers in the programme tried his best to argue that Muslims all over the world were keen on democracy and that there was no difference between the West and the East in its peculiar conceptualising of the concept. Such an argument is indeed false. It is true that Muslims like their views to be reflected in policies. But what is also a fact is that the conceptualising of liberal democracy, which is based on the notion of constitutional government, majority rule, freedom of key institutions such as media and a free market economy, and a multiparty system, are part of a tradition that can at best be associated with the historical experience of the West.

Liberal democracy grew in the West as a result of certain historical experiences which allowed a set of countries to arrive on carving a social contract between the state and society that depended on the primacy of the individual in the socio-political system and de-linking of religion from politics.

Islamic political philosophy cannot claim such an historical experience. The social contract between the citizen and the state in the Muslim world is still undergoing an evolutionary process. A glance at the Islamic political philosophy shows that most political scientists have encouraged an acceptance of authoritarian rule to avoid societal crisis and conflict. It was not until the 20th century philosophers such as Syed Qutb and Ali Shariati began to talk about affirmative action against authoritarian regimes and systems that we hear anything about challenging the monarch. Of course, both scholars are distinct due to their philosophies.

Muslim philosophers such as Ghazali or those before him advocated an acceptance of authoritarian leadership for avoiding chaos in the state and society. This argument is understandable considering the chaos in the early years of Islamic history, especially the period of the four Caliphs. This is not to argue that Muslim political philosophy supports authoritarian rule, hence, Islam is antithetical to democratic principles. But what is a fact is that the evolution of the concept of governance has followed a different trajectory. In fact, the concept is still evolving. The fact of the matter is that people in the Muslim world want good governance which includes accountability and rule of law. In fact, the growing significance of militant force in different Muslim countries or the focus of political Islam in the eyes of the common Muslim is driven by his/her desire for justice, equitable distribution of resources and better opportunities for upward mobility.

Another important fact is that most of the Muslim world is still recovering from the historical experience of colonisation which is the main cause for authoritarian rule in these countries. Thus, what the common people protest against is not necessarily western civilisation but the nexus between the West and their authoritarian elite which is the source of the overall dictatorial environment. Since the existing elite is an agent of the old colonial system, people tend to support equally authoritarian militant structures which should not be construed as a fondness for dictatorial systems.

This is one dimension. The other is that a social contract carved on modern lines to fit the needs of the present times is missing mainly due to the scant debate on organising governance structures. The temptation of many to refer to the historical experience of 1400 years ago is driven by the desire for justice and fair play in state-society relations. So, while it is true that Muslims are no different from the rest of the world in their desire for good governance, improved political structures, which might resemble the democracy of the western world, are missing precisely because of the absence of a structured discourse on a new social contract.

The caliphate, which circulated around the leader of the Muslim ummah’s accountability towards the people via the tribal system, was workable in a city-state kind of a structure. However, it might not be possible today to have a small shura or a group of elders deliver governance. Hence, a new social contract is required for which a dialogue within the Islamic world, especially amongst the philosophers, is a dire need of the present times.

The writer is an independent strategic and political analyst.

Tension less, alienation more

A 47-YEAR-OLD woman, Amita Uddaiya, has disclosed that she was flown out from Mumbai to the US for questioning by ‘white men’.

Two days later, she was flown back and was asked to say that she had gone to Satara, a place not very far from Mumbai. Amita had seen six terrorists arriving in the fishermen colony on the seaside. They were part of a group of 10 who attacked Mumbai.

Surprisingly, no one from the media has followed up on the whisking away of Amita. Nor has the government come out with any explanations. Local police have rubbished her story. But she has stuck to it. Many questions remain unanswered — why did she go? Who forced her to undertake the journey? What did she tell her husband, who was in hospital, before she left? It is apparent that it was a hush-hush job which was in the knowledge of the powers that be. That America needed her was clear, probably to prepare the dossier on the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage. Was there something more than what meets the eye?

America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is known for such covert operations. Taking away Amita is not beyond them. But why was she flown all the way to America? Probably, the FBI has its most sophisticated equipment to interrogate, record and what not. This establishes one thing that the FBI enjoys a carte blanche in India. I would not be surprised if the agency has its network in the country; some with New Delhi’s consent but mostly without it. Not long ago, the agency sought permission to open its office in India. I do not know whether Amita’s is an isolated case but it is the only one that has come to light. There may have been more. The question is not that of numbers, but that of sovereignty. Has America extended similar facilities to India? This is not related to the extradition treaty. This is related to the extra-constitutional authority which America has come to wield throughout the world. I hope President Barack Obama, known for clean methods, puts an end to FBI’s mechanisations. In his inaugural speech, he said: “Our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please.”

In the past, whenever I read about Pakistan handing over its nationals to America — the number so far is nearly 500 — I explained to myself that a beleaguered country, financially and democratically weak, was unable to resist the pressure. How could India with its traditions of defiance and dissent act like a hapless state? Was the necessity of building diplomatic pressure on Pakistan so much that we had to surrender the independence of institutions? If this is the price we had to pay to get Washington on our side, it is much too much.

If we, claiming to lead the non-aligned movement, begin to behave like a supplicant nation, small and weak countries would have no reprieve from big powers. It looks as if we are being sucked into the American orbit of influence, without even realising it. The India-US nuclear treaty was responsible for it. The world even saw us voting against the age-old friend Iran at a crucial meeting concerning the International Atomic Energy Agency. We have lowered our tariffs to enable subsidised goods from the West to compete with our indigenous products. Thousands of small entrepreneurs have gone out of business and many shops have shutdown.

Permission given to foreign newspapers to print their facsimile edition from India, with 100 per cent equity may not disturb our press. But it indicates a change in policy. Former prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru did not allow The New York Times to have its facsimile edition from India in the fifties. Such things were considered a blemish on India’s independent identity and avoided.

While framing Indian foreign policy, Nehru wrote to Krishna Menon, then India’s high commissioner to the UK: “how naïve the Americans are in their policy. It is only their money and their power that carries them through, not their intelligence or any other quality.” When the new US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says that America wants to strengthen political and economic ties with India, she should realise that we are looking for friends, not masters.

Whether or not it was Washington’s pressure, Islamabad has changed its stance in the last few days. The dossier which was ‘mere information’ has become ‘useful and good.’ Pakistan could have done the same thing without bringing Richard Boucher into the picture. Now he looks like the whistle-blower. America has become a court of appeal for both India and Pakistan. Had Islamabad addressed New Delhi’s fears earlier, its loss of faith in Pakistan would not have been so much as it is today. No doubt, tension has lessened but the feeling of alienation has increased. In Mumbai the fallout has been irrational. Pakistani artists, staging their plays to packed houses, were forcibly ousted from the city. Fortunately, these artists also saw how the common man reacted. People came up to them to say that they were sorry for what the Shiv Senaiks had done. Happily, the story was different in New Delhi where another Pakistani troupe received deafening applause. Again, Mumbai witnessed some policemen visiting bookshops to tell owners to remove works of Pakistani authors from their shelves. No explanation was available from the government. Did it order such a search or did the policemen, contaminated as some of them are, do so on their own?

The cultural vandalism is, however, an indication of the mood of the people. There have been very few voices of condemnation. We say that music knows no borders or that terrorism has no religion. But when prejudice takes over, such observations mean little. The Mumbai attack has drastically cut the number of liberals in India and exposed peacemakers. Some human rights activists on both sides are trying to repair the relationship. I hope they succeed.

How to pick up the thread from the Mumbai carnage is the question. Now that Asif Ali Zardari’s government has assured India that it would bring perpetrators to book, the confidence will start building. But the probe should be authentic and transparent. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has said that India wants the whole thing to be out; from the beginning to the end. If done, this may falsify the impression in India that Pakistan always gets away with whatever it does.

If Islamabad is once again seen indulging in window dressing, the distrust will deepen. Even if there is no conflict, there will be no peace. Even if there is no hostility, there will be no harmony. Such a situation is neither conducive for India nor Pakistan.

The writer is a leading journalist based in Delhi.

A devilish threesome

NOW that the torch has been passed from the Decider to the Professor, get ready to grapple with some seriously complex logic emanating from the White House. Exhibit A: Obama’s Afghan policy.

Ground zero for President Obama’s war against a “far-reaching network of violence and hatred” — a sophisticated, and more accurate, way of describing Bush’s ‘war on terror’ — is Afghanistan. But he’s not thinking in terms of ‘victory’, just a “hard-earned peace”.

He means business, and is expected to back up his words with 30,000 more American soldiers in Afghanistan — to add to the 32,000 Americans and a similar number assembled by the international community already there.

But Afghanistan will not be peaceful while militants are traipsing around in Fata and crossing the border into Afghanistan. Ergo, militant sanctuaries must be eliminated in Fata and cross-border infiltration curbed.

Obama isn’t gun shy — notoriously, and steadfastly, he vowed throughout the campaign to go after “high-value terrorist targets” in Pakistan — but the Americans’ Fata strategy cannot be executed unilaterally without causing Pakistan’s cities and towns to erupt. It’s no good solving one problem by creating an even bigger one.

Which means using Pakistani personnel in Fata. But those personnel ultimately get their marching orders from the Pakistan Army, which isn’t sold on the idea of turning its back on yesterday’s enemy, India, to turn on yesterday’s allies, the jihadi networks.

So here’s what Obama’s got in mind: ease Pakistan’s, read the security establishment’s, read the Pakistan Army’s, worries about India and it will be more willing to focus on the militants. Obama’s message to Pakistan isn’t ‘India good, militants bad’ — it’s more ‘everyone can be a winner’. The clincher? Renewed American interest in Kashmir, which Obama’s nominee for UN ambassador, Susan Rice, lumped together with the Balkans, East Timor, Liberia, Cyprus and the Golan Heights as a threat to international peace and security.

Here’s where it gets really complicated: India is allergic to any mention of outside interference in Kashmir since, well, Simla. Kennedy got involved in the 60s but both sides dug in their heels and the multiple rounds of talks were dead long before the last meeting was held.

If American interference wasn’t welcome before, the Indians find Obama’s logic to do so now even more galling. One of the signature foreign policy successes of the Bush administration was to de-hyphenate its relations with India and Pakistan, i.e. deal with one country without being overly cautious about what the other would make of it. The Indo-US civilian nuclear deal epitomised de-hyphenation: the Bush administration made it clear that Pakistan should not expect anything similar, even though some have warned that the deal has sparked a nascent arms race with Pakistan turning to China as a counterweight.

Obama talking about Kashmir has alarmed India that the new president wants to re-hyphenate America’s relations with South Asia’s sullen neighbours. Privately, the Indians are more than alarmed — they are downright furious. It isn’t hard to figure out why: in India’s eyes, Pakistan’s jihad policy in Kashmir is paying off. Dangling Kashmir as a carrot rather than using it as a stick to beat Pakistan upsets Indians because they believe it rewards us for being bad and a general menace to our neighbours.

The collective blood pressure of India probably rose by ten points when Obama, in an interview with Time magazine, asked of India, “You guys are on the brink of being an economic superpower, why do you want to keep messing with this?” ‘This’ being Kashmir.

But it wasn’t politic for an aspiring global power to tick off the presumptive leader of the current global power, so India bit her lip. Nevertheless, murmurs of unfairness and betrayal floated around in the media — and Kashmir stayed on the lips of the Obama camp.

Eventually, however, the Indians found a proxy to savage and, in doing so, make clear their position on foreign involvement in Kashmir. Enter the hapless David Miliband, UK foreign secretary and now the first casualty of Obama’s Kashmir talk.

Last week, Miliband penned an opinion piece for the Guardian and one sentence particularly riled the Indians: “Although I understand the current difficulties, resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders.”

While prudence dictates American presidents are treated with deference in India, UK foreign secretaries aren’t so lucky. (In 1997, Robin Cook’s comments on third-party mediation on Kashmir were the catalyst for an infamous withering attack by the Indian PM, I.K. Gujral, who denounced Britain as “a third-rate power nursing illusions of grandeur of its colonial past”.)

Miliband’s trip to India was overshadowed by brutal condemnation in the media and by politicians, but, given what he said is very much in line with what Obama has said, he was just a whipping boy for the man the Indians dare not vent their spleen against publicly.

Yet, Obama isn’t naive; he acknowledged in the Time interview that Kashmir is a “potential tar pit diplomatically”. Fact is, the Americans have some leverage with India.

A report published by the Asia Society suggests the “US relationship with India will be among our most important in the future.” The report sets out ‘Vision 2012’ and advocates securing India’s leadership in multilateral institutions and expanding economic and security cooperation. In short, the US could offer India a seat at the highest table of them all — that of power exercised at the global level.

As for Obama’s much-vaunted regional Afghan policy, the Asia Society’s Task Force cautions India to not view it as re-hyphenation; “rather, it is the way to perceive the dense background against which our military and reconstruction efforts unfold.”

The Task Force, however, isn’t optimistic that India will relent on its Kashmir dogma. “The United States has been wise not to try to mediate” on a “point of extraordinary tension”, i.e. Kashmir. Instead, the Task Force suggests the Obama administration should encourage the resumption of the composite dialogue.

“Realism need be our guide. India and Pakistan are deeply divided. It will not be possible to overcome suspicion and long-standing habits of competition and confrontation. We can only aspire to mitigate their negative effects.”

All this in a report entitled ‘Delivering on the promise: Advancing US relations with India’.

Obama’s Afghan policy isn’t a pipe dream. But powerful forces, both in America and India, will want to bury the Kashmir piece of his elaborate jigsaw. It will take the very shrewdest of Pakistani and American minds to prevent that from happening.

cyril.a@gmail.com

Remaking of America?

IN his inaugural speech that was very good, but not the overhyped Lincolnian great, President Obama spoke both to his country and to the world. I believe that he succeeded rhetorically and can succeed practically with the first audience, despite all the current difficulties, but I’m less sure about the second. In fact, there’s a little-noted tension between the way he speaks to, for and about America, and the way he speaks to and about the world. The great theme of his whole life until now — including the literature we know he read most intensely, his own best book (Dreams from My Father) and his greatest speech so far (the Philadelphia speech on “race”) — is the blending of multiple identities in an America that will finally be at one with itself. He not only is but consciously presents himself as the apotheosis of the American dream.

He promises not merely to transcend, at long last, the United States’ founding contradiction between liberty and slavery, but also to prepare America for a new order of ethnic diversity. His immediate family of Michelle and the girls already personify the first: every other day will bring some photograph of the black family in the White House. His almost encyclopedically diverse extended family, in which the languages spoken reportedly include Indonesian, French, Cantonese, German, Hebrew, Swahili, Luo and Igbo, represents the latter.

As a wordsmith, he is adept at finding language to evoke this American blending of the many and the one. With time, I believe this sense of a more encompassing “we” can release significant new human energies among the less privileged members of American society. “Our patchwork heritage is a strength not a weakness,” he said, and he can make it so.

Although it was American financial follies, both private and public, that originally got us all into this mess, America is probably better placed than most European countries to get out of it. That may not seem fair, but whoever said life is fair? What’s more, he can seize the chance of this crisis to make transformative investments in energy, education and infrastructure.

So: the remaking of America? Yes, he can. Nothing in the future is certain, except death and taxes, but he has a better than sporting chance, especially if he is given a second term. But reshaping the world under renewed American leadership? Here I’m more sceptical.

Things will surely be better than over the last eight years. That’s hardly difficult. (Beside seeing the back of Bush, one of the frankly schadenfreudian delights of Tuesday’s handover was to see former vice-president Dick Cheney trundle off looking more than ever, in his wheelchair, like Dr Strangelove.)

Obama struck many notes that the world wants to hear from Washington, and struck them with characteristic grace. He spoke of the “tempering qualities of humility and restraint”. He indicated some priorities: combatting nuclear proliferation and climate change, contributing more to development in “poor nations”. He sent a special offer to “the Muslim world”: a new way forward “based on mutual interest and mutual respect”.

America may be ready to lead “once more” but what if the world is no longer ready to follow? What if it believes America has forfeited much of its moral right to lead over the last eight years, no longer has the power that it used to, and that anyway we are moving towards a global multipolar system, as Washington’s own National Intelligence Council predicts?

I am struck by how many little ifs and buts hedged even the customary welcoming words from world leaders. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel offered warm and Christian congratulations, but added that “no single country can solve the problems of the world”.

Nicolas Sarkozy said: “We are eager for him to get to work so that with him we can change the world.” (So, you see, France is ready to lead once more.) By the time we get to China, Russia, or an Arab world angered by Obama’s silence over Gaza, the caveats come not as delicate barbs but as heavy artillery shells.

You may say: but surely Obama, of all people, understands the full complexity of the world. I think that’s right, and our great hope. At the same time, the story that he wants to tell the American people demands a reburnishing of traditional notions of American exceptionalism, mission and leadership.

— The Guardian, London