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On a website, named Scholar of the House and dedicated to him and his works, Khaled Abou El Fadl is introduced as "the most important and influential Islamic thinker in the modern age;" as "an accomplished Islamic jurist and scholar;" as a "high-ranking shaykh;" as "a world renowned expert in Islamic law;" and as "a prolific author and prominent public intellectual on Islamic law and Islam." There is little more one may aspire to achieve. However, few Muslims will have heard of Abou El Fadl, let alone read him. Nevertheless, he seems to be a rising star in the United States where he has managed to persuade a good list of scholars, thinkers and policymakers to endorse his 'liberal' Islamic project.
In principle, his book on the compatibility of Islam and democracy could not come at a better, more urgent time. Democracy in the West, as well as all the attendant values of 'liberalism,' is in crisis: inalienable individual rights, a set of liberties, the rule of law and equality before the law have all been undermined with varying degrees across the liberal democratic world under a variety of pretexts. I see the pictures of Abu Ghraib and I weep - because I know they are not the exception but the rule of the new world order. Perhaps it's time to think what Islamic democracy might offer as an alternative.
Let me lay out my vision of where its prospects now stand. Muslims in particular have been primary victims because the "war on terrorism" has for all intents and purposes been nothing but a war on everything associated with the Islamic faith and Islamic culture. Since Sept. 11, 2001 thousands of Muslim men and women have been arrested and detained without charge in the USA, the UK and other European countries participating in the war on terrorism; laws have been enacted in all these places to restrict the freedoms of expression, movement and assembly; and Muslim school girls in France have been banned from entering schools with headscarves. In the lands of the East, on the other hand, irreparable damage has been inflicted upon the prospects of democratization. The Americans and their allies have given such a bad name to democracy that few Arabs or Muslims deem it appropriate to associate themselves with any talk about bringing democracy to the Muslim lands lest this is seen as collaborating with the foreign invading powers. Iraqis who loathed Saddam and prayed for an end to the nightmare they endured under him have regretted the end of his reign because America's promised democracy has turned out to be an even worse nightmare. 'Further the cause of democracy in the Middle East?' - America has reversed decades of progress in that direction.
In light of all of this it is indeed a bold move on the part of Princeton to undertake publishing the book. And they must know it. "Islam and the Challenge of Democracy" follows the format of Abou El Fadl's previous "The Place of Tolerance in Islam" - he writes a lead piece, and others respond. Princeton has amassed a hefty list of names. In the order of their responses to Abou El Fadl, they are: Nader A. Hashemi; Jeremy Waldron; Noah Feldman; M.A. Muqtedar Khan; A. Kevin Reinhart; Saba Mhamood; Bernard Haykel; Mohammad H. Fadel; David Novak; John L. Esposito; and William B. Quandt.
In his 46-page treatise "Islam and the Challenge of Democracy" Abou El Fadl seeks to find room for democracy in Islam: and he does, with skill and learning. But there are two major problems with his thesis. One: Abou El Fadl seems incapable of distinguishing between liberalism and democracy, he cannot split the terms 'liberal democracy' into their two separate constituent parts. Two, Abou El Fadl makes the suggestion that he, and he alone, has thought about Islam and its challenge to democracy, when a great many other scholars have been treading this path for decades. I am thinking of the Algerian Malik Bennabi, the Tunisian Rachid Ghannouchi and the Egyptian Tariq al-Bishri to name but a few.
Some of his interlocutors, however, do suggest he is part of a movement, mentioning in particular Ghannouchi (whom they mistakenly assume to be a resident of France), Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most authoritative contemporary sunni scholar and Fahmi Huwaidi, the most widely read and highly regarded Islamic journalist in the Arab world. However, in his own response Abou El Fadl seems to take offence at the suggestion that his position is shared with "other 'Islamicists' such as Rashid al-Ghannouchi, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, or Fahmi Huwaidi." He charges that "Huwaidi's and Qaradawi's proclamations on democracy are dogmatic at best; they do not exhibit any serious understanding of the doctrinal challenges a democracy poses for traditional understandings of Islam." It is his assessment that "both writers speak about Islam and democracy only in the most vague and general sense, without engaging the particulars of history or doctrine." Abou El Fadl has nothing to say about Ghannouchi; one is therefore tempted to think that he may have not read him. As for Malik Bennabi, he does not feature anywhere in the book despite the originality of his thinking and the enormity of his influence in contemporary Islamic political thought.
The real difference between Abou El Fadl's thinking and the thinking of the aforementioned 'mainstream' scholars and thinkers is that they emanate from within while he comes from without. Perhaps without realizing it, and he is gently alerted to this by some of his respondents, Abou El Fadl borders the 'end of history' discourse (as argued by Francis Fukuyama in his "The End of History and the Last Man") as he presents the case for democracy. Between the lines there is a message, clearly aimed at Muslims, that 'liberal democracy' has triumphed and that Muslims have no choice but to join in. This provides a sense of a final judgment, a last verdict that is more likely to provoke rejection than evoke sympathy. Why? Because Abou El Fadl does not make the effort to distinguish between liberalism and democracy. While Bennabi, Ghannouchi, Qaradawi and Huwaidi among others agree that there is much to be learned by Muslims from the liberal democratic tradition, they reject the stipulation 'take it all or leave it all' and insist on the right of the Muslims to carry of the package only that which they believe to be compatible with the values of their faith.
Democracy is seen by these Islamic thinkers as consisting of two components: a cultural aspect that is incompatible with Islam and a procedural aspect that Muslims can learn and benefit from. There is no way the liberal secularist component of democracy can be espoused by the Muslims because it contradicts the essence of their faith. It is simply a case of two directly opposed world views: in the Islamic view divine revelation is the source of reference whereas in the liberal tradition man is self-referential. It is therefore a futile effort to try and re-formulate Islam in order to espouse liberalism; this would simply be the end of Islam as a divine revelation. What Bennabi, Ghannouchi, Qaradawi and Huwaidi believe is that the chronic problem of despotism in the Muslim lands can be remedied in part by the adoption of some, or all, of the elements of the procedural aspect of democracy; for after all, it is these elements which are compatible with the Islamic values of vicegerency, Shura, justice and the rule of Sharia. It is these procedures that may help the Muslims institutionalize Shura and develop measures appropriate for their own needs and purposes in order to make governments electable by and accountable to the people and in order to check and limit the abuse of power.
Abou El Fadl's treatment of the question of compatibility between Islam and democracy suffers from a number of weaknesses, as rightly noted by some of his interlocutors - particularly Noah Feldman, Saba Mahmood and Mohammed H. Fadel. The first is his taking for granted and at face value what liberal democracy stands for. Having chosen to be economical about what liberal democracy stands for, he gives the impression that he whole-heartedly and unreservedly supports its values. There is no reference in either his prologue or his epilogue to the many broken promises of liberal democracy or to the undeniable historical link between the most liberal democratic nations and imperialism. The second is his shattering silence regarding the practical impediments to democratization in the Muslim world. These impediments do not come from within Islam and are not posed solely by the Muslim peoples. It is true that they were originally precipitated by centuries of decline and backwardness across the Muslim world. But that decline, in my view (and it is a view shared by many in the Muslim world), was the product of deviation from rather than adherence to the true path of Islam. However, that decline and growing inferiority to the West was later enforced by colonialism and is now sustained by a world order that claims to be liberal and democratic under the leadership of the US.
My own research, (see "Rachid Ghannouch:i A Democrat Within Islamism," OUP), argues that the world order, the modern territorial state and the policy of enforced secularization are the real culprits for democracy's absenteeism in the Muslim world. M.A. Muqtedar Khan in his response to Abou El Fadl, claims that "democracy must triumph in theory before it can be realized in practice." This is simply not true. Young Muslim men and women who lost all hope in a peaceful transition to democracy in the Muslim lands today ask: "What and who aborted the Algerian people's struggle for democracy in 1991? Who and what provides dictators across the Muslim world with financial and military support against the wishes of the peoples in their grip?" It is the USA, leader of the 'liberal democratic' world and its democratic allies in Europe: France and the United Kingdom. This is not an attempt to blame everything on the outside. There are, undeniably, local impediments. However, the struggle against those home-grown obstacles for the past five decades or so has invariably been thwarted by dictators with the help and under the protection of the powerful West. Saddam Hussein is a case in point: the least democratic of a motley crew of deeply undemocratic Arab autocrats. No democracy-loving Iraqi (and there were millions of them) ever had the chance of toppling him when, throughout the 1980s, he had the full support of the US against Khomeini's Iran. But beyond Iraq, there is Egypt's autocratic Mubarak, Jordan's King Abdullah, and a host of other un-elected leaders all of whom receive support from the West.
In the last few pages of his paper Abou El Fadl offers his remedy for the apparent tension between Islam and democracy. He comes up with a new interpretation of Sharia. Unlike contemporary Arab and Muslim modernists (or secularists to be more precise), Abou El Fadl is keen to show respect to the classical jurists who insist on the centrality of Sharia to Muslim life. However, Sharia for him is an unrealizable ideal. Whatever people claim to be Sharia is their own imperfect law-making that is nothing more than their understanding or interpretation of a divine perfection that is well beyond them. Abou El Fadl declares 'absolute' Sharia is impossible to implement because it can always be re-interpreted. He has a point, but I, and many millions of Muslims, would find it very hard to swallow. If, as I do, you believe in the Koran as divine revelation, and the Koran, in Surat al-Maidah (Chapter 5) which deals with the penalty for theft, tells us in the clearest possible terms "faqtau aydiyahuma" ("cut off their hands"), are we not being dishonest when we try to relativise this into (as Abou El Fadl would have it) "stop their hands from theft"? Are we not usurping divine revelation with the dictates of liberalism?
Abou El Fadl does not hide his disdain and contempt for the Wahhabis and what he calls the fundamentalists. Both terms have become tools in anti-Islamic propaganda to attack a broad spectrum of people including some of the most respectable personalities in the Muslim world. Who is a Wahhabi and who is a 'fundamentalist,' in the West's extreme understanding of the term? Mohammed ibn Abd Al-Wahhab was an 18th century reformer primarily concerned with cleansing Islamic practice from polytheistic impurities that crept into it with the passage of time. If two centuries after his death some of the people who claim him as their inspiration happen to be among the most corrupt rulers on the fact of earth, or happen to commit atrocities or espouse ideas alien to Islam itself, we cannot blame Ibn Abd Al-Wahhab directly. Journalists from the West conflating ideas they do not understand are responsible for the reductive thinking that makes practicing Muslims 'fundamentalists.' Abou El Fadl should know better.
The cause of democracy in the Muslim lands has not been served by this publication, which will only be seen by Muslims as another attempt to undermine their religion. It is as if Muslims have to buy the commodity of democracy at the cost of their own faith and culture or (as in Iraq and Afghanistan) at the cost of their own freedom and dignity. If democracy is indeed compatible with Islam, and this is what most Muslims today believe the case to be, then the last thing Muslims need to be told is that they need to abandon both their culture and their faith in order to be democratic. For it is a lie, and a lie which undermines the cause of democracy in the Muslim world.
Far from the assumption of this book Islam is not being challenged by democracy, it is liberal democracy that is today challenged by Islam. It is not Islam that needs to be reformed; it is democracy that needs urgent attendance so as to repair the severe damage caused to it by the liberal democratic states in America and Europe.
Azzam Tamimi, Visiting Professor, Kyoto University, Japan, Director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought, London | 
