الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

@ @

Islamic Republicanism and Liberal Democracy

resistance. There is an additional and more important explanation for what is commonly said to be the failure of democracy in the Middle East and that is that democracy in fact may not indeed be a universal concept. The democracy that is said to have failed in the Middle East is arguably in fact the Western democracy of liberal democracy. In other words, what is actually occurring is an instinctive sense of either the inappropriateness of liberal democracy or that an American power play may be afoot. In fact, democratization in the Middle East is proceeding on two simultaneous levels. First there is the level of American force and policy pressure which confusingly also results in the adoption of “democracy” by tyrannical regimes seeking “protective political coloration”. The second level of the spread of democracy is far more important and widespread. This consists of that sought by Islamic political oppositions and Islamic intellectuals. It is the argument of this paper that the democracy sought by Muslim groups might more accurately be termed Islamic republicanism. The latter more relevant expression of democracy, however, is unfamiliar to the West and thus tends to confuse and disorient American policy e.g. the Islamic republicanism of Iran.. The actual story of efforts at democratization in the Middle East has in fact a long and respected history. Now forgotten by those with a superficial knowledge of Middle Eastern political history is the fact that the recent eclipsed period of Arab nationalism in the 1970’s was preceded by that of liberal nationalism. During this earlier period, largely between the two world wars , the national leaderships of the Arab counties struggled courageously to establish liberal democratic regimes on the basis of the ideal principles of the European colonialism that exploited them. Today, there is a reenactment of this experience underway in which often equally courageous members of the intelligentsia are engaged in the effort to install a similar liberal nationalism. The difference is that in the earlier period there was a more pervasive secularism that permitted the attainment of often more politically meaningful political institutions(what Albert Hourani famously

-67-

Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter