Forbidding Democracy to Islamists

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

It is glaring, in the worlds of thought and politics alike, that the call for establishing democracy stays loud right up until the moment Islamists win — at which point it withers and fades away, little by little, until no echo of it remains. The leaders of the Western world raise their voices defending democracy, calling on every state in the world to adopt it as the successful, practical solution toward achieving human freedom, and intellectuals and thinkers from every corner of the world do the same. And from the sheer intensity of focus on this idea, a new global religion has begun taking shape, called democracy, built on the twin principles of individualism and liberation.

This new religion, which has no god, found no one to defend it when the Algerian elections were overturned by coup in 1992, found people rejecting it when the Hamas movement won the Palestinian elections of 2006, and stirred anxious fear among many parties when the Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt’s 2012 elections. It seems the religion is good when those we favor win their elections, and becomes corrupt when those we dislike win instead.

Good and Evil

Every political, social, or economic system has a vision according to which the definitions of good and evil are set. The democratic system is structurally tied to the capitalist system, which adopts a core value forming the first foundation from which its various other values spring: the value of maximizing the profits arising from economic activity. Here the democratic meaning of freedom becomes tied to the meaning of profit, in that whatever fails to align with this supreme value cannot align with the meaning of freedom either. Whatever aligns with the supreme value is good, and whatever does not align with it is evil — according to the system’s own architect, leader, and theorist.

So if the basic premise of the Islamic idea is the establishment of social justice, then individualism recedes considerably in favor of collectivism, which contradicts the value of profit — making Islam, in this framework, evil, and making the meaning of freedom in Islam contradictory to the meaning of freedom in democracy. It is therefore no surprise that crowds of politicians, thinkers, and intellectuals stand in opposition to democratic practice whenever its results threaten to override the profit principle that justifies capitalism’s very existence. Accepting electoral results whose intellectual outcomes, and subsequent practical implementation, might contradict the supreme goal of whoever formulated the notion that capitalism and democracy must go hand in hand amounts to accepting self-destruction, and a degradation of the supreme value that is supposed to govern human conduct.

Since the supreme value is profitability, the definitions of good and evil fluctuate along with the fluctuation of interest, and here principle disappears, or is bent to fit, while interest remains the master of human relations.

The Uproar over Political Islam

The uproar over political Islam is no longer hidden from anyone, and it focuses on a number of objections to Islamists and to Islam, including:

1. That Islam is a religion, and people hold various different faiths, and it is impermissible to subject them to a particular religion, even through democratic elections.

2. Islam’s contempt for women is evident through polygamy, inheritance, and testimony, and other matters, and this points to Muslims’ backwardness and their inability to keep pace with development.

3. Muslims do not chase the pleasures of the modern age, and fight against some of them to the point of undermining, for instance, spending on economic activities that bring their owners abundant profit, such as prostitution and debauchery.

4. Muslims reject pluralism and human freedom, and are expected to become despotic should they take power.

5. They are doctrinally hostile to Israel and do not accept its existence, reject dependency on global powers, and also seek to achieve unity or integration at the level of the Islamic world, or the Arab homeland.

Questions That Demand Answers

Facing the objections raised by those who reject rule by Islamic parties, I raise many questions, of which space here allows only a few:

a. Is modern democracy and liberating capitalism a religion, or not? How many times have American officials and capitalists repeated the claim that modern democracy and liberal capitalism are the two best systems in the world, that the world will never develop a political system better than democracy, nor an economic system better than capitalism? Did the American president not say that these two systems reflect the absolute truth, and that no other system reflects it?

b. Is communism, or Marxism, a religion without a god, or not? Are communism, socialism, and democracy not political projects, just as Islam is a political project?

c. Which shows greater contempt for women: the man who marries four, or the man who fornicates with twenty? Note that I do not endorse the traditional interpretation of the verse on marrying “in twos, threes, or fours.” And which shows greater respect for women: the man who protects a woman through marriage, or the man who uses her in a brothel?

d. Is raising children to chase after pleasures better than raising them to allocate their time in a balanced way among various activities, including leisure and play?

e. Where is the pluralism, if permitting it depends on mood and must align with interests? Can the slogan really be separated from the practice? Does the American Central Intelligence Agency not plant its agents within the ranks of other parties that do not align with the modern liberal capitalist system? Is it permissible for the people of the West to pursue those who do not align with their ideas, while it is impermissible for others to do the same thing?

f. Has the Islamic inheritance-distribution system ever been studied in full? And is it scientifically valid to take one part of a whole and judge that whole by it, without proper study?

g. Which is better: spending on educational institutions, or excessive spending on the world of entertainment and amusement? And which kind of spending is better: spending aimed at generating profit, or spending aimed at employing the greatest number of working hands?

Muslims Who Do Harm

As a Muslim who observes the conduct of some Muslims and Islamic parties, I would prefer to live under a democratic system than under their rule. There are hot-tempered Muslims who issue fatwas carelessly, according to their own personal moods and the demands of their upbringing. I agree that there are Muslims who focus on marginal matters largely unrelated to the Islamic religion. For instance, some occupy themselves and others with a woman’s clothing, shaking her hand, and the fields she is or is not permitted to work in, and so on, while, in most of what they say, they fail to adhere to Islamic teachings themselves. And there are those who poke their noses into the personal details of an individual’s life in a manner that contradicts Islam and repels people from it.

It is noticeable that some Muslims did not see in the Arab revolutions an opportunity to build a nation, but an opportunity to marry a fourth wife rather than “in twos, threes, or fours”; others found in them not an opportunity to develop scientific thinking and build advanced research institutes, but an opportunity to fight the internet and eliminate Facebook; others saw an opportunity to impose rituals on people by force, rather than to develop programs achieving social justice, and so on.

As a writer on Islamic thought, there are Muslims who pose a greater danger to the Islamic idea than those who reject the Islamic idea altogether. There are people in the world who reject religions outright, and there are those who see in Islam a religion hostile to human freedom, but there are Muslims who push people, forcefully, toward hostility against Islam and Muslims. This means that in the conduct of some Muslims lies something that justifies, for some who reject Islam, their own positions — on political, not intellectual, grounds.

But suppose people elected those we believe to be bad — what then is the proper stance? Note that the overwhelming majority of those who contest elections believe their own competitors to be bad.

The Right of Parties and the Right of Muslims

The most prominent question always raised is: why does every party in the world that wins an election have the right to form a government and implement its political program, while an Islamic party does not have the right to do the same? Is not the election itself the source of legitimacy in an electoral system? Why does it cease to be legitimate the moment an Islamic party wins? Why does France’s socialist president have the right to form his socialist government and implement his socialist program, while Egypt’s Morsi does not have the right to form a government from the Muslim Brotherhood and implement what he promised voters in his electoral program?

Many voices rose in Tunisia and Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood, or Islamic movements, monopolizing power, on the grounds that implementing the Islamic program would lead to strife, internal conflicts, and the elimination of pluralism. No voice ever clarified how this could be “monopolization” under an electoral system, nor how implementing the Islamic party’s program could lead to all these ills, while the programs of other parties do not lead to the same result. Some voices said that rule by Islamic parties would lead to reinforcing sectarianism, that matters would end in an Islamic-Coptic conflict, and that Egypt would descend into the depths of internal fighting. We do not hear this justification when a Christian Democratic party, or a socialist or nationalist party, wins in any other state.

No one has ever tried Islamist rule in an independent, stable state, and it is entirely unscientific to judge the performance of Islamic parties before ever seeing their activity, their work, and their practical policies. It is a basic principle of the democratic system that governance falls to whoever wins the election, and the principle of the peaceful transfer of power is enough to remove governments that fail in their task and lead their people into internal conflicts.

Elections as an Opportunity for Renewal

Elections are supposed to be a mechanism for renewing political life, and for entrenching the principle of the peaceful transfer of power. They are a sword hanging over the necks of rulers, threatening their rule should they betray the public trust or fail to fulfill it. When the winners do good, they are re-elected; they fail in the next election if they do harm.

This rule is expected to apply to the Muslim Brotherhood and to other parties that might win elections. The Brotherhood won, and now has an opportunity to prove its capabilities and the wisdom of its policies, and if it fails to do so, its fate is failure in the next election. And as long as we have accepted elections as the judge among people, and accepted the idea of majority or plurality rule, then refusing to accept the results stirs up strife and unrest, and creates a state of instability everyone pays the price for. We all have a lesson to draw from the Palestinian infighting that resulted from the refusal to accept the results of the 2006 elections, which favored the Hamas movement.

Islamists’ Respect for the Principle of Elections

From an Islamic standpoint, a Muslim must abide by the covenants he is party to. Entering an election is an explicit entry into a covenant with others that the election will proceed according to the rules of the democratic system, and the Muslim must, as a matter of religious obligation, abide by these rules. Whoever rejects the democratic system entirely ought not to enter the election in the first place, or else he enters into an open contradiction with what he believes. From this angle, observers, protesters, and objectors ought to wait until they see the actual practice of the Islamic movements.

In the end, my assessment is that this matter is tied to a bias against Islam and the Islamic movements, at the expense of the democratic principle itself. And I return to say that states, in the end, place interest above principle, and it is no surprise that states that defend democracy fiercely stand against democracy when principle conflicts with interest.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “تحريم الديمقراطية على الإسلاميين” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.