Islam and Democracy in the Maldives

Interrogating Reformist Islam’s Role in Politics

Azim Zahir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781032015538
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000505030
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines Islam's relationship to democratization in the Indian Ocean nation of the Maldives. It explores how and why an electoral democracy based in a constitution that has many liberal features but also Islam-based limitations, especially lack of religious freedom, emerged in the country by 2009. In doing so, the book interrogates a major approach to Muslim politics that assumes reformist interpretations of Islam are a positive, and even a necessary, force for liberalization and democratization in Muslim-majority contexts.

This book shows reformist Islam did play certain positive roles in democratization in the Maldives. However, the book suggests reformist Islam may not be an invariably uncontroversial force in the space of politics. It argues that modern nation building in the Maldives shaped by political actors with reformist Islamic orientations, since around the 1930s, has also completely transformed Islam as a modern institutional and discursive political religion. These transformations of Islam as a modern political religion have existed as path-dependent constraints on the depth of democratization, ensuring religion-based limitations and intensifying controversy over religion vis-à-vis the state and individual rights.

An original empirical contribution towards a better understanding of Islam and politics in the Maldives, this book will be of interest to academics and students working on democracy, and Islam in particular, and in the fields of political science and area studies, especially South Asian politics.

1 Interrogating the reformist Islam approach

DOI: 10.4324/9781003181453-1

What I have, in the Introduction, called the reformist Islam approach has emerged in part by critiquing the civilizational, culturalist, or essentialist approach that sees Islam as inherently inhospitable for democracy. While non-essentialist, however, the reformist Islam approach also assumes religious language, and religious actors are central in the space of politics in Muslim-majority states. Consequently, a major theoretical claim by the reformist Islam approach is that reinterpretation of Islam towards a more ‘modernist,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘civil,’ or ‘reformist’ Islam is crucial for a democracy that respects individual rights. Consider, for example, the claim by Nader Hashemi (2009) that given “the main political, cultural, and intellectual resources at the disposal of Muslim democrats today are theological,” while “[d]emocratization and liberalization do not necessarily require a rejection or privatization of religion … what they do require is a reinterpretation of religious ideas” (pp. 1–3).

In this chapter, I wish to detail these and other assumptions of the reformist Islam approach. I do not reject the formula that reformist Islamic discourses may be positively linked to democracy, but the empirical chapters show the limits of this approach and the Conclusion details the related general theoretical suggestions. In this chapter, building on institutionalist approaches (e.g., Cesari, 2014) that show the role of institutions in transforming religion’s relationship to politics, and taking into account any strengths of the reformist Islam approach, I detail a more capacious ‘discursive institutionalist’ (DI) approach (Carstensen & Schmidt, 2016; Schmidt, 2008, 2010, 2015; Schmidt & Monnet, 2008) to the study of Muslim politics in general and specifically for this study.

Overall, DI stresses both institutional factors (e.g., a state’s founding constitution) and discursive factors (e.g., reformist Islamic discourses, as well as non-religious discourses) for political changes (such as democratization) in specific contexts. DI does not have to assume the centrality of Islam in Muslim society, nor does it pin hopes of democratization on reformist Islam, as there may be other democracy-friendly discourses, including non-religious discourses, in Muslim societies, especially in a globalized context. Chapter 5 details how, for example, the global human rights discourse contributed to liberalization and democratization in the Maldives.

The reformist Islam approach: key assumptions

The civilizational or essentialist approach has been one of the dominant approaches in the academia and outside that has attempted to explain the role of religion in politics in the post-Cold War period. ¹ The civilizational approach generally takes religion as an independent variable and assumes religion is deterministic of sociopolitical outcomes. Specifically, with regard to Islam, claims such as Islam is diametrically opposed to Western values and institutions (Huntington, 1996, pp. 209–218), “Islam is the blueprint of social order” (Gellner, 1981, p. 1), Islam lacks categories such as ‘secularism’ supposedly required for democracy (e.g., Gellner, 1992, pp. 1–22; Huntington, 1996, p. 70; Kedourie, 1992, 1994; Lewis, 1996, pp. 61–62), or Islam is not favourable to nation-state ideology (Vatikiotis, 2016) fall under the civilizational approach.

The civilizational approach rightly draws our attention to the hitherto ignored role of religion in politics, perhaps under the influence of the secularization theory that assumes the inevitable decline or demise of religion with modernization (Casanova, 1994; Fox, 2015). However, it suffers from what Taylor (2009, p. xv) has called ‘block thinking,’ which assumes Islam is an essentialist tradition, culture, or civilization that constitutes fixed meanings for Muslims. It overemphasizes an inherent theology and overlooks other factors, such as the multiple interpretations of religion and the agency of actors (Fox, 2005; Grim & Finke, 2011; Hefner, 2000, 2001; Katzenstein, 2010; Kuru, 2009; Stepan, 2000; Stepan & Robertson, 2003; Taylor, 2009).

Even though there is a wide-ranging critique of the civilizational approach, the anthropologist Robert Hefner (2014) observes that:

if we take the pulse of broader commentaries in policy institutes, academia, and, above all, the mass media, it is clear that there has been surprisingly little progress toward a new consensus on democracy and Muslim politics.

(p. 85).

There may never be a new consensus on democracy and Muslim politics. Yet, by now an influential body of alternative literature, to which Hefner himself has contributed, has emerged. To be sure, this alternative body of literature that constitutes what I have called the reformist Islam approach is not a monolithic theoretical and disciplinary approach. Strictly speaking, it includes perspectives from a range of disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds (e.g., An-Na'im, 1990; An-Na'im, 2008; Bayat, 2007; Binder, 1988; Casanova, 2001; Eickelman & Piscatori, 1996; El Fadl, 2007b; Esposito & Voll, 1996; Filali-Ansary, 1996, 2012; Hashemi, 2009; Hefner, 2000, 2005, 2011; Kurzman, 1998, 2011; Moaddel, 2005; Piscatori, 1983, 1986; Stepan, 2000). It can also be both explanatory and normative. Nevertheless, these perspectives share certain key assumptions. Hence, we may consider them under the umbrella term, reformist Islam approach. These key assumptions include:

1. Islam is multivocal, and a reformist Islamic strand supportive of democracy has existed in Islam since at least the late nineteenth century.
2. Religion is crucial for Muslim politics (“Islam is the language of politics”) and reformist Islam is positively linked to democracy.
3. There is no necessary connection of democracy to mainstream secularism, and thus, a ‘third model’ democracy is possible.

Islam’s multivocality and the reformist strand

Reformist Islam approach’s core assumption is based on the fact that all religions are ‘multivocal’ (Stepan, 2000). This simply means there are different interpretations, multiple voices, and different practices within any religion, some of which have been supportive of democracy and liberal values. No religion, in this sense, is born with an inherent democratic tradition (Hashemi, 2009, p. 11). In pointing to the multivocality of Islam, the reformist Islam approach therefore stresses the existence of democracy-friendly strands of Islam, dubbed ‘modernist,’ ‘liberal,’ ‘civil pluralist,’ ‘progressive,’ ‘ethicalized,’ ‘enlightened,’ or ‘reformist’ Islam. What exactly is this ‘reformist Islam’?

Theologically speaking, ‘reform’ (islah) and ‘renewal’ (tajdid) of Islam are persistent themes in Islam (Ramadan, 2009; Voll, 1982, pp. 13–26). ² ‘Reform/renewal’ in this sense is about returning to the original sources of Islam and reforming the community in light of the ‘true’ Islam. The theological case for reform and renewal takes its justification from Qur’an and the Prophetic tradition. Those who are engaged in reform, for example, are seen as doing the work of God and are praised in Qur’an. Renewal is specifically attributed to a Prophetic tradition, which says, “God will send to this ummah (the Muslim community) at the head of each century those who will renew faith for it” (Ramadan, 2009, p. 13; Voll, 1982, p. 33).

Such a reading of reform/renewal assumes that the actual efforts of reform/renewal took place due to theological precepts. Sociologically speaking, however, as a ‘discursive tradition’ (Asad, 1986) that is historically and materially situated, Islam has had diverse interpretations and practices (Asad, 2003, p. 221; Ismail, 2006, pp. 16–17), whether or not they are consciously conceived through a continuing reform/renewal theological imperative. ³

However, beyond theological reform and diversity within Islam in the above senses, what the reformist Islam approach identified as the modern reformist Islamic discourses first emerged through Muslim religious engagements in the context of modern liberal discourses and associated political and institutional forms. Specifically, they are modern discourses with roots from around the mid-nineteenth century (Hunter, 2008, p. 5; Kurzman, 1998, p. 8; Moaddel & Talattof, 2002, p. 2) or at least the first quarter of the twentieth century (Filali-Ansary, 2003, p. 21). ⁴ The late nineteenth-century reformist Islam by Muslim figures such as Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817–1898), Jamal al-Din Afghani (1838–1897), and Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) was a reaction in a politically disintegrating Muslim context in the face of challenges from European military, economic, and political domination. In their reactions to modernity, therefore, their overall orientations were different from earlier ‘revival/renewal’ efforts, which were oriented towards ‘internal’ issues.

Yet reformist Islam is not monolithic, nor has it had uniform impacts throughout the Muslim world. It has diversified through different intellectual currents with varying effects during a period of more than 100 years. Let me briefly discuss some of the key strands relevant to the reformist Islam approach.

Islamic modernism

The reformist Islamic movement, known as ‘Islamic modernism’ in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, aimed to show that Islam, if approached anew through rational eyes, was compatible with many aspects of modernity, including science, rationalism, constitutionalism, and individual liberty (Ahmad, 1967; Filali-Ansary, 2003, pp. 21–22; Hourani, 1983; Kurzman, 1998, pp. 8–11; Masud, Salvatore, & Bruinessen, 2009; Moaddel & Talattof, 2002; Sharabi, 1970, pp. 24–40). While those who may be categorized as Islamic modernists do not always share the same positions, Islamic modernists generally share certain common views on key issues related to modernity. Moaddel and Talattof (2002, pp. 3–4) summarize the following as the key features of Islamic modernism:

• Reformulation of Islamic methodology to stress rationalism, in which ijtihad (independent reasoning) over taqlid is stressed
• Acceptance of the view that the West had a more advanced civilization
• Acceptance of differentiation in knowledge and respect for the modern sciences
• Support for constitutionalism and democracy
• Support for greater equality for women

Such views first emerged among the Ottoman intellectuals but spread to other corners of the Muslim world (Ahmad, 1967; Dudoignon, Hisao, & Yasushi, 2006; Federspiel & Aras, 2002; Hourani, 1983; Kurzman, 1998, 2011; Moaddel & Talattof, 2002). One of the first to talk about reforms on a reformist religious basis was an Ott...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• A note on transliteration and translation
• Introduction
• 1 Interrogating the reformist Islam approach
• 2 Seeding Islam as a modern institutional political religion (1932–1978)
• 3 Reformist Islam and modern nation building (1932–1978)
• 4 Islam’s emergence as a modern discursive political religion and institutional consolidation (1978–2003)
• 5 Reformist Islam, human rights, and democratization (2003–2009)
• 6 Explaining institutionalization of Islam and religion-based limitations
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Key constitutions analysed (1932–2008)
• Appendix 2: Legislation analysed for Chapter 2
• Appendix 3: Maldivian Democratic Party newsletters analysed
• Appendix 4: Constituent Assembly sessions analysed
• Index