Muslim Democracy

Politics, Religion and Society in Indonesia, Turkey and the Islamic World

Edward Schneier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138928121
• eBook ISBN: 9781317401957
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Muslim Democracy explores the relationship between politics and religion in forty-seven Muslim-majority countries, focusing especially on those with democratic experience, such as Indonesia and Turkey, and drawing comparisons with their regional, non-Islamic counterparts. Unlike most studies of political Islam, this is a politically-focused book, more concerned with governing realties than ideology. By changing the terms of the debate from theology to politics, and including the full complement of Islamic countries, Schneier shows that the boundaries between church and state in the Islamic world are more variable and diverse than is commonly assumed.

Through case studies and statistical comparisons between Muslim majority countries and their regional counterparts, Muslim Democracy shows that countries with different religions but similar histories are not markedly different in their levels of democratization. What many Islamists and western observers call "Islamic law," moreover, is more a political than a religious construct, with religion more the tool than the engine of politics. "Women who drive in Saudi Arabia," as the author says, "are not warned they will go to hell, but that they will go to jail." With the political salience of religion rising in many countries, this book is essential reading for students of comparative politics, religion, and democratization interested in exploring the shifting boundaries between faith and politics.

1 A brief history of the Islamic world

DOI: 10.4324/9781315682037-2

In 612 ad, two years after first hearing the voice of God, an Arab businessman, Muhammad ibn Abdallah, decided to devote his life to the articulation of an Arab monotheism based on the Abrahamic traditions of Judaism and Christianity. His worldwide following is now second only to that of Christianity. Expelled from Mecca in 616, Muhammad was welcomed as a prophet in nearby Medina, and was soon able to form a religious and political community that, for the first time in the Arab world, transcended tribal loyalties. In less than a decade, Muhammad and his followers had retaken Mecca and spread the faith throughout much of the Arab peninsula. The Prophet, however, left no instructions for his succession, resulting in multiple claimants and conflicting interpretations of his will that divide Islam to this day. In 632, Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s friend and father-in-law, was chosen by most of the Prophet’s close followers to be the head of the Muslim community. Bakr overcame the argument—advanced by the faction now known as Shi’ites—that Muhammad’s mantle should pass through a direct line of descent to his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. Although Abu Bakr ruled for only two years before being assassinated, his successors—later known as Sunnis—extended Muslim rule across the Arab world and into North Africa. They established the caliphate system which soon became the paradigmatic pattern of Muslim political rule.

The caliphate

The traditional caliph, from an Arabic word, variously translated as “successor” or “representative,” combined temporal and spiritual authority. Though never a prophet, because divine revelation ended with Muhammad, the caliph was expected to observe and defend the faith. Most of the early caliphs were generous in funding religious schools and building mosques, but their primary interests were more profane than sacred. Under their rule the Islamic world expanded rapidly and gave rise to a sophisticated civilization, culturally and scientifically the most advanced of its day. It superimposed on a society of nomads a growing network of cosmopolitan urban centers:

In the government offices, private salons, and marketplaces of such towns, as well as of the imperial capitals of Damascus and Baghdad, a new Islamic literary culture in Arabic began to crystallize—all the more remarkable because before the rise of Islam, Arabic had no tradition of written literature. Poetry, grammar, Quranic studies, history, biography, law, theology, philosophy, geography, the natural sciences—all were elaborated in Arabic and in a form that was distinctively Islamic.¹

The caliphs were not religious proselytizers and Islam has no missionary tradition. Their conquests were only inadvertently Islamic; their exploitation of the tribal wars and conflicts between the Persian and Byzantine Empires was “entirely pragmatic: they wanted the plunder and a common activity that would preserve” their emerging community.² Largely through the establishment of schools, the conversion of previously polytheist tribes, and the sense among the conquered that there were advantages in being on the winning side, the spread of the Islamic faith followed on the heels of both conquest and trade. And it was incredibly swift:

By the mid-650s the Believers ruling from Medina had loose control over a vast area stretching from Yemen to Armenia and from Egypt to eastern Iran. And from various staging centers in this vast area, the Believers were organizing raids into areas yet further afield: from Egypt into Libya, North Africa, and Sudan; from Syria and northern Mesopotamia into Anatolia; from Armenia into the Caucasus region; from lower Mesopotamia into many unconsolidated districts in Iran and eastward toward Afghanistan and the fringes of Central Asia.³

The most extensive and long-lived caliphate, the Abbasid Empire—in power from roughly 750 to 1250—developed an elaborate bureaucracy and a professional army, but remained relatively removed from religious activism. Followers of other monotheistic religions—Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish—were often taxed at higher rates, but tolerated. With the caliph and governing bureaucracy in Baghdad and the center of religious scholarship in Mecca, an implicit separation of powers was developed. So long as its members did not challenge state authority, each religious community was allowed to enforce its own civic code. Non-Islamic traditions of marriage, family and property law were generally applied within their communities as Islamic law applied to Muslims. Although the caliphs claimed the authority to make religious rulings, in practice:

the tendency to separate political and religious authority seemed unavoidable. As conquerors and emperors, the caliphs increasingly became political leaders with only a symbolic form of religious authority; the authority to promulgate or discover law, to make judgments on matters of belief, and to instruct ordinary Muslims devolved on the ulama and the holy men. By the time of the Abbasid Empire’s collapse, political and religious authority thus belonged in practice to different people, although this was not yet recognized in theory.⁴

The early caliphates ruled almost exclusively in lands dominated by Sunnis. In Sunni Islam, the caliph “functions as the political and military leader of the community, but not as their prophet. In Shia Islam, the Imam (leader)… is not only the political but also the religious leader of the community. Though not a prophet, he is considered the divinely inspired, sinless, infallible, authoritative interpreter of God’s will as formulated in Islamic law.”⁵ If the Sunni caliphs claimed no such role, and seldom interceded in the interpretation of sharia law, neither were they entirely neutral in their relations with the ulama. The leading ulama, from the Arabic word for scholarly wise men (sometimes written in English as ulema), though not an institutional clergy, as in Catholicism, nevertheless presided over substantial agglomerations of mosques, schools and other institutions. Their trained expertise in interpreting the Koran and applying its wisdom to contemporary problems gave them an especially important role, particularly in setting the standards of orthodoxy in schools, courts and mosques which were often coterminous. Financial support for these complexes generally came from private donors and communicants, but elaborate patronage systems also emerged, which favored Sunnis over Shias and particular sects, movements and individuals within Sunni groups.

As the caliphate expanded, both the bureaucracy and the professional army were stretched too thinly to govern a huge and diverse empire and at the same time protect its flanks from Christian crusaders from the north and Mongol invaders from the east. The growing complexity of the empire as well as its increasing reliance on paid mercenaries and slaves/soldiers simultaneously weakened it from within. The great Islamic scholar, Ibn Khaldun, acknowledged by many as the father of modern sociology, described North African and Middle Eastern society as an arena for ongoing conflict between the sophisticated urban centers of the caliphates on the one hand, and the more war-like, less sophisticated, tribes of the nomads on the other. As the former became larger, more complex and diverse, they lost their social cohesion and became increasingly vulnerable to the more compact, unified cultures of tribal nomads. Power founded in military might and royal authority would slowly lose out to the more intense loyalties of regional tribes. As the new leaders were assimilated in turn into the civilizations they had vanquished, they too would lose their solidarity and appetite for war. Other forces were at work, as Khaldun acknowledges, but the basic cyclical pattern of rise and fall which he described held at least until the advent of European colonialism, and in some cases even beyond that.⁵

Even as the caliphate succumbed to centrifugal forces, the cosmopolitanism of the region persisted, if only at times through the transmission of religious knowledge, and in the institutional structures of religious life. Although Islamic law pervaded the region with increasing uniformity and sophistication, held together in no small part by scholars like Khaldun, who was born in Spain, migrated to Tunisia, studied in Fez, moved to Algeria, and passed his last days in Egypt, the emergence of a distinctive Islamic religion took centuries to evolve. While the early caliphs facilitated the spread of Islam, they also became the targets of an emerging religious piety that both absorbed and transcended tribal divisions.⁶ Even as the decline and eventual disintegration of the Abbasid Empire decimated the number of Muslims living dar al Islam (in territories governed by Muslims), the Islamic world community continued to spread, particularly along the trade routes opening and expanding into Africa and Asia. Increasing contact with this wider world stretched and divided the empire and left it vulnerable to conquest.

Unlike Christianity, which is heavy on doctrine, Islam—like Judaism—lays emphasis on law. The idea “that to be a Muslim is to accept Islamic law” applies both to those living in Muslim-majority countries and to those outside of its formal jurisdiction.⁷ The Koran is the foundation of that law, but just as the Prophet was called upon to interpret and apply it to everyday problems, so there is a continuing need to interpret it. Thus, as the Islamic world grew and diversified and while the coherence provided by the caliphates declined, the gap between Shi’ites and Sunnis widened, minor sects proliferated and the importance of those defining and applying the details of Islamic law, the ulama, increased as well. There were both centrifugal and centripetal forces at work that tended to decentralize the faith as it accommodated new cultures, yet making it more uniform as the scholars interacted with one another. A system of connected schools, or madrasas, increasingly standardized training. Freed from the commercial and personal ambitions of state actors, the mosques turned in upon themselves providing a coherent set of doctrines and laws on the one hand, and insularity on the other: learned in the language of Koran, they were often unfamiliar with the native tongues of the citizenry or—to an increasing degree—with other cultures.

While there is no widely accepted theory as to why Islam lost its dynamism, there is a general consensus that the golden age, during which the Islamic world was at the center of science, learning and culture, began to turn in upon itself some three to five centuries after the death of the Prophet. What had been the foremost economic, military and scientific force in the world lost much of its edge. Medieval Europe, which had been “a pupil and in a sense a dependent of the Islamic world”⁸ became the engine of economic, military and intellectual change. In the Middle East, a new cadre of “traditionalist” ulama claiming that “Islam is the solution,” and suspicious of ideas not founded in the scriptures, came to the fore. Revelation displaced reason as the medium of inquiry.

Turning inward

There was, arguably, too much diversity in the Islamic world to label the period after the demise of the caliphates a dark age. As with a comparable period in Europe, scholars continue to disagree as to how much really changed (or failed to) from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries. On the one hand, Muslim scientists continued their research through much of what some scholars call “t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Front-Chapter
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of tables
• Introduction: Indonesia, Turkey and the Islamic world
• 1 A brief history of the Islamic world
• 2 Religion, development and democratization
• 3 The Middle East and North Africa: Strong states, weak democracies
• 4 The road to democracy in the Islamic world
• 5 Pathways to democratization: Turkey
• 6 Civil Islam: Indonesia
• 7 Islam and democracy
• Index