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Democratization
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Democracy, Islam and the

culture of modernism
a
George Joff
a
The deputy director, The Royal Institute of
International Affairs (Chatham House), London

Available online: 26 Sep 2007

To cite this article: George Joff (1997): Democracy, Islam and the culture of
modernism, Democratization, 4:3, 133-151

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 Democracy, Islam and the Culture
of Modernism
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GEORGE JOFF

The Islamic world seems to lack the ability to confront the challenge of modernism
and has chosen instead to turn inwards towards Islam as a political paradigm. As a
result, there appears to be a reluctance to adopt democratic principles of government.
This is due at the level of ideas to a failure to embrace secularism in the collective
sphere, as occurred in Europe. The cause for this failure lies in the marginalization of
the Hellenistic philosophical tradition in the twelfth century, despite the role of the
falsafah movement. Yet contemporary moderate Islamic and Islamist thinkers are
turning back to such paradigms in order to be able to incorporate the political
implications of modernism into the new Islamic project.

One of the most striking features of the contemporary Islamic world,

particularly the Arab world, is the way in which it seems to have lost its way
in the centuries immediately preceding the colonial period, and has not
apparently been able to recover its intellectual and cultural vigour since the
colonial period ended. This is in spite of the splendours of medieval Arab
and Islamic civilization. It is, of course, true that this period of apparent
decline - from about the fifteenth century onwards - actually saw the
development of three major Muslim empires - the Ottoman, Mughal and
Safavid empires - each of which, certainly during its period of growth,
made major contributions to Islamic culture and history. On the surface, at
least, this hardly appears to confirm a sense of secular decline.
Nevertheless, it is striking that, after the combined threats of, first, the
Crusader Kingdoms in the Levant and, second, the Mongol invasions of
Asia and the Middle East, there seems to have been a loss of inspiration and
vitality, from which the Islamic world still suffers. It is as if the modern
world has set challenges to which Islamic civilizations have yet to find, not
just an answer, but also the intellectual and cultural dynamism, spontaneity
and originality from which such answers would arise.
This is not to denigrate the truly remarkable economic and social
progress now found in large parts of Muslim Asia. After all, Malaysia is
counted amongst the 'tiger economies' of South-East Asia and Indonesia is

George Joff is the deputy director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham
House), London.
Democratization, Vol.4, No.3, Autumn 1997, pp.133151
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
 134 DEMOCRATIZATION

set to join the same class. Nor is it intended to disparage the efforts made by
the Arab states of the Gulf - and, indeed, Brunei - to accommodate to the
uncomfortable problems of oil wealth. Whatever their political problems,
these states have successfully created modern economies which have the
potential of surviving the oil era as viable entities in an ever more globalised
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world. Yet, the economic miracle in South-East Asia is not intrinsically

'Islamic'; it has little to do with the intellectual development of Islamic
economics, for example, although the region has taken a lead in this
direction. Indeed it seems to have much in common with other such
developments in non-Muslim states and nations. In the case of the Gulf, oil
rent has far more to do with development than Muslim culture or society.
Nor are the emerging political structures of the Islamic region specific in
this respect - at least, not beyond the level of political rhetoric. Indeed, in
cultural terms, at least, the Islamic world today seems to be increasingly on
the defensive, in the face of what it feels is an aggressive, threatening and
potentially hostile Western cultural offensive which it finds difficult to
incorporate or even resist. Even the refuge of an Islamic revivalism which
is itself a modernist experience, particularly in the political sphere, seems to
be couched in strangely defensive terms. It is as if its very self-
consciousness revealed its own inner insecurity, which could only be
covered by an aggressive and dismissive disdain for those it perceives to be
its opponents, whether domestic or foreign.
There is, in short, a sense that the Islamic world, in terms of its cultural
heritage and vitality, is losing out to the modernism inherent in
contemporary Western culture. Of course, it could be argued that Western
culture itself has been defeated by its own introspection in the blind alley of
post-modernism, although this is an issue which is not really relevant to the
issues posed above. Nor are these comments in any sense a statement about
the internal coherence and eternal significance of Islam as one of the three
great monotheistic religions in the modern world. The object is simply to
question why, within the temporal, collective arena of modern society and
politics, the Islamic cultural paradigm seems apparently unable to cope with
the implications of modernism, as manifested in what is today the dominant
culture of the secular West.
One of the most evident aspects of this stagnation occurs in the political
sphere in Islamic countries. It is generally extremely difficult for such states
to accept the implications of democratic political systems, largely at a
popular level at least - because they are perceived to be Western constructs
and therefore alien. Representative democracy is seen as alien to Islam;
consultation (shura) and consensus (ijmac) are sought instead.1 Although
Islamists claim this to be integral to their project for society and thus to be
derived from Islamic precept, this conviction has a far wider purview.
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 135

For most Muslims, the linkage between religious doctrine and social
order, epitomized in the adage, 'din wa dunya' - 'faith and society'(the
secular word) - carries an echo of 'dawla' - state as well. It stems from
the implicit contract at the base of Islamic constitutional theory2 which has
been absorbed into the general political culture of the Islamic world. It
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stimulates an instinctive preference for familiar archetypes in the resolution

of conflict and the imposition of socio-political order. Yet, at the same time,
the normative3 implications of democratic political systems, in terms of
personal freedom and socio-legal equality, attract considerable support,
albeit to the exclusion of some of the other concomitants they imply,
particularly where the moral arena is involved. However, the Islamic
ambivalence over democracy also has to do with the holistic nature of
normative Islamic society; its failure, to date, to have completed the
transition from - in Durkheimian terms - an organic to a mechanical society
and thus an inability to cope with the socio-political atomism implicit within
the democratic project. In short, the Islamic world has not yet fully accepted
the ideological implications of modernism.

The European Cultural Heritage

Modernism, as usually defined, refers to the European artistic and literary
movement of the latter years of the nineteenth century. There is, however,
another meaning which has developed, in European thought at least, in the
past three decades. Here 'modernism' refers to the social and intellectual
developments in Western culture that created the scientific and industrial
revolutions. In this respect it differs from 'modernity', although it is
contained by it.4 Modernism is usually perceived to start somewhere
between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries - from the late
Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. Its essential content has been
well caught in Ernest Gellner's phrase, when he described himself as an
humble adherent of 'Enlightenment Rationalist Fundamentalism'.5 By this
he meant that, although he did not accept that revealed absolute truth exists
in the real, external and temporal world, there are certain absolute and trans-
cultural philosophic and analytical principles, rooted in rationalism (the
rejection of conclusions based on anything but experience and inductive or
deductive reasoning) by means of which facts can be explored and
principles of analysis and explanation established. His comments were, in
fact, part of a critique of post-modernism which he saw as the relativization,
not only of principle but also of analytical method, and thus incapable, in
the last analysis, of even producing conclusions that can be discussed or
generally understood. But they were also part of an analysis of the role of
political Islam in the construction of modern society; a role which,
 136 DEMOCRATIZATION

incidentally, he did not see as inherently or even practically negative.

Gellner's comments provide a useful starting point for the discussion
that follows with, perhaps, the expansion of his definition to include the
suggestion that modernism, or rationalism, is also based on the ability of the
analyst to engage in speculative reasoning without restraint. This does not
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mean, however, that constraints do not exist, for clearly they do. Some are
inherent in the process of thought and logic, others result from linguistic
constraint and, whilst these are implicit constraints on speculation, there are
explicit constraints too. Personal conviction and morality, as well as
imagination, are perhaps the most obvious. But the crucial point is that none
of these are restraints which are the result of external edict; none of them
reflect the imposition of socially, doctrinally or legalistically defined limits
on speculation.
Now, of course this situation did not spring phoenix-like from the ashes
of medieval obscurantism - if, indeed, the European Middle Ages were as
irrational and obscurantist as they are usually portrayed. In fact, during the
Renaissance, one of the great dramas was the attempt by the Church to
hinder precisely the development of such speculative reasoning if it
threatened religious doctrine. Not only was Giordano Bruno martyred for
his scientific pantheism in 1600,6 but Galileo's proof of the accuracy of
Copernicus's description of the rotation of the earth about the sun suffered
Papal condemnation in 1633. Admittedly, change had occurred within the
Church. For, although Bruno was burnt at the stake, Galileo was eventually
merely confined to his home and, so legend has it, murmured, 'But still it
moves', after his condemnation.7 This evinced an irreducible commitment
to scientific, as opposed to religious, truth - except, of course, he believed
that there was no distinction between them. And, only four years later, in
1637, Descartes published his Discourse on Method, the book which, more
than any other, was eventually to define the Age of Enlightenment.
These events, however, occurred in a rapidly changing political and
intellectual context; so that, by the seventeenth century, the Roman Catholic
Church was already on the defensive against the onslaughts of the
Reformation. Indeed, the Reformation is the second key intellectual
influence which informed the era of modernism, alongside the Renaissance
which re-introduced the rationalism of the Greeks, mediated through the
innovative exegeses of Islamic science and philosophy, into the medieval
world of Europe. It was not the philosophical or doctrinal discoveries and
innovations of the Reformation which were so important, however. Indeed,
Luther rejected speculation as a means of understanding God and argued
that salvation came through faith alone. Calvin enunciated the terrifying
doctrine of predestination and was quite prepared to burn heretics at the
stake, as happened to Michel Servetus (who was accused, as Bruno had
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 137

been by the Inquisition, of pantheism).8 Instead, the growing individualism,

or rather, individuation of belief, as authorities based on doctrinal
justification multiplied through the process of the Reformation, was what
was important.
This meant, in effect, the loss of the idea that intellectual authority was
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divinely and thus uniquely sanctioned. It meant the growth of the sense that,
for practical purposes, power, authority and interpretation could be confined
and legitimised within the temporal, rather than the spiritual world. There
was, in effect, a secularization of the intellect. For now there could be
several truths, even over religious doctrine, rather than just one; and they
could be developed through personal interpretation, rather than through
divine sanction as mediated by the Church. They could not, of course, be
mutually acceptable, but, after the Thirty Years War, they could and did
coexist, for it was the Peace of Westphalia which brought the war to an end
which finally resolved this issue.
It is this which is the real meaning of the Augsburg Compromise of
1555. That established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, in effect
meaning that a prince could establish the form of religion practiced in his
territory.9 This principle, sanctified by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,
ushered in the European world of nation-states when, as Professor Tawney
pointed out, '... the secularization of political theory [was] the most
momentous of the intellectual changes which ushered in the modern world.'
He goes on to say, in a striking passage in his famous study, Religion and
the Rise of Capitalism, that
The theological mould which shaped political theory from the Middle
Ages to the seventeenth century is broken; politics becomes a science,
ultimately a group of sciences, and theology at best one science
amongst others. Reason takes the place of revelation, and the criterion
of political institutions is expediency, not religious authority.
Religion, ceasing to be the master-interest of mankind, dwindles into
a department of life with boundaries which it is extravagant to
overstep.10
The term 'intellectual analysis' could easily be substituted for 'political
theory' in this passage without outraging its meaning, so that the
secularization of the intellect has now been partnered by the secularization
of politics. In fact, by the Age of the Enlightenment, the scene had also been
set for the third of the great secularizations that defines the modernist world;
that of economic life. After all, in the Middle Ages, economic activity also
fell under divine sanction and the Church frowned on such activity
undertaken for its own sake. 'Christians should not be merchants', ran the
accepted dictum and the condemnation of usury was even stronger. Indeed,
 138 DEMOCRATIZATION

economic life was essentially based on agriculture and the moral hierarchies
of feudalism. It was not until the Enlightenment that the essential precursor
of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution - the market system, with its
tradable components of land, labour and capital - had fully developed,
although its origins lie in the thirteenth century and the subsequent collapse
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of the feudal system after the Black Death. In essence - and at the risk of
dangerous over-simplification - this transformation of economic life was
the transition from a moral economy to one based on the impersonal
operation of the market for the sake of profit; a secularization, in other
words, of yet another sphere of collective life and the precursor of modern
capitalism."
In so far as this tripartite process of secularization destroyed the
operation of an overriding divinely sanctioned moral authority, secularism
became the essential partner to intellectual speculation about the natural and
the temporal worlds. The only absolutes now were the rules and methods
which established how speculation should proceed, how its conclusions
could be reproducibly tested, but not the nature of the conclusions it could
reach. This comprises the essence of modernism and, in intellectual terms,
at least, the causative factor that has led to the scientific and technological
civilization embodied in the concept of 'The West'. It is crucial to realize
that this system has developed not because of some innate quality of
European culture to which other societies and civilizations have no access,
but because of a specific and particular historical nexus of factors that led
ineluctably to such a result. The historian, Paul Kennedy, for example, roots
this unique European experience primarily in geography which then led on
to socio-political differentiation.12 Because of Europe's differentiated
geography and natural resources, trade was stimulated and the political
system was decentralized - no state could gain sufficient advantage to
dominate the others for long, and all became engaged in technological
competition for military supremacy. With the development of both trade and
naval power, European aggressiveness was externalized and the
development of empire fed the growth of a market-based mercantilism and,
eventually capitalism. Had the right conditions existed elsewhere, then the
same 'miracle' could have theoretically developed elsewhere as well. The
question is, however, whether such developments would have been possible
without the concomitant intellectual evolution; indeed, whether that, too,
could have occurred elsewhere and - if not - why not?

The Islamic Experience

Contemporary Islam differs from Christianity in at least one crucial respect:
its values, principles and doctrines have an acute relevance to the formal
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 139

organization and legitimization of Muslim society. The process of the

secularization of social and political principles has not taken place as it did
in the Christian world before the nineteenth century. This does not mean, of
course, that systems of individual or personal morality may not have a
general social relevance. For such systems continue to operate in Western
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societies, too - most obviously in Middle America today. The issue is more
one of the legitimizing principles underlying the organization of society and
the sanctioning of the power and the legal system of the state - things which
in Western societies and states are purely secular in nature, but which in the
Islamic world refer back to Islamic archetypes. Nor does it matter that many
political systems in the Islamic world use such referents cynically; the
important fact is that no other system of legitimization seems to be valid. In
the Arab world, where, for decades the principles of Arab nationalism
served such a purpose, there are few states today that would depend only on
that as a system of legitimization. And even those which do, still seek to
demonstrate that they also operate in accordance with the principles of
Islam and the sharcia.
In part such a process is a statement about what appears to be culturally
appropriate within societies that have felt betrayed by the alternative
paradigms that they have been offered, particularly since independence. As
such, it is a reflection about the need to create confidence in a social and
political order that derives from innate cultural assumptions which inform
daily life as well as political and social institutions. However, it is also often
an explicit political manifestation of rhetoric and ideology that seeks its
legitimacy from an absolute, revealed truth. As such - and particularly since
such truth is not only absolute but also universal - this political, or, perhaps
more accurately, politicized, Islamic vision carries its own moral and
intellectual tinge. Sayyid Qutb, admittedly a personage excoriated by many
for his role within the Egyptian Ikhwan Muslimin but none the less a
recognised Islamic and Islamist intellectual, once remarked
[Islam] offers to mankind a perfectly comprehensive theory of the
universe, life and mankind ... a theory which satisfies man's
intellectual needs. It offers to men a clear, broad and deep faith which
satisfies the conscience. It offers to society legal and economic bases
which have been proved both practicable and systematic.13
The counterpart to such certainty can easily be a rejection of the freedom for
individual speculative reasoning which, as has been suggested above, has
played a major role in the evolution of Western culture. Indeed, in so far as
such convictions depend on belief in revealed absolute truth, this must be
the consequence, since, by definition, other truths are excluded. The
problem is neatly defined in a book entitled The Concept of Knowledge in
 140 DEMOCRATIZATION

Islam by the Malaysian writer, Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, where he writes:
"The unity of God who is Truth, the Light, logically implies the unity of
knowledge, that is, the unity of prophethood (nubawwa) [sic. nubuwwa].
The unity of knowledge ... means ... that there is no bifurcation between
what is called secular and religious sciences.'14 But, of course, it is precisely
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this bifurcation which was to prove essential to the dynamism of Western

technological, intellectual and literary culture after the end of the
Renaissance.
Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that all Muslims adhere to such
positions. Many, perhaps a majority, do not and have sought to come to
terms with the intellectual implications of Western culture ever since the
Islamic world has had to confront its more aggressive manifestations - after
the Battle of Palassi (1757) in India and as a consequence of the Napoleonic
invasion of Egypt (1798). What is striking, however, is the way in which
this has been done in the Islamic world. Unlike, for example, Meiji Japan in
the 1850s and 1860s - particularly after the Revolution of 1868 when the
old feudal regime and its 'traditional castes' (the term is Braudel's15) were
overthrown - the Islamic world, particularly in the Middle East, returned to
its own indigenous cultural sources to find the intellectual vigour with
which to undertake the process of reform.
The Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman empire led to the Young Ottoman
movement which itself was paralleled by al-Afghani's Salafiyya movement.
And the name of his movement alone seems to reveal an important truth, for
it referred back to the salaf- the ancestors, those who had had access to the
purity of early Islam and who thus held the key to an intellectual revival
which could confront and match the innovative qualities of Western culture.
This is, after all, a recurring theme in the Islamic response to Western
modernism which links together al-Afghani, through Muhammad cAbduh,
Rashid Rida and Chekib Arslan, to Hasan al-Banna, Mawlana Maududi and
the evolution of the modern Islamist movements of the Sunni Islamic world.
A similar pattern could be defined for Shi'a Islam, ranging from the
Constitutional Movement in Iran which led to the 1906 revolution and the
dominant political role of the Shi'a culama\ through to the Ayatollah
Khomeini who, in Ernest Gellner's view, moved politicised Shi'a Islam
'...very close to the puritan version of Sunni High Islam.'.16 And it is Sunni
High Islam or scriptualist Islam that Gellner believes is best suited to
dealing successfully with the modern world.
That conclusion is open to considerable question. In essence, divinely
revealed truth cannot deal effectively with Western modernism because it
denies itself the very quality which has made the modernist vision so
successful: the ability for unfettered rational speculation according to an
established epistemology, which lies at the basis of scientific analysis and
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 141

innovation. Furthermore, the dominant reaction in the Islamic world is to

seek solutions to temporal problems by referring back to the eternal verities
of Islamic doctrine. This is itself a cultural statement that bears analysis and
has a specific relevance to the issue at hand. Islamic revelation must also
reflect its own historic specificity, just as the development of Western
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modernism did. And in its origins there may lie clues as to how alternative
Islamic responses to the enforced co-habitation of the Islamic world with
the West may be formulated.

Origins and Consequences

The development of philosophical speculation in the Islamic world is,
interestingly enough, almost the exact reverse of the European experience.
That is to say that, after the initial evolution of Islamic doctrine, a period of
dispute and discord marked the early years of Islam. During this period the
Islamic world incorporated the Greek scientific and philosophical tradition.
Then consensus and conservatism developed, producing an apparently
immobile doctrinal and socio-political vision which was eventually
confronted by European colonialism. Because that vision was itself a
statement of absolute revealed truth, the only coherent response to this
threat could be to attempt to restate its basic elements, after an intense self-
examination designed to purify itself of aberration and distortion. As Amr
Sabet recently suggested (admittedly with reference to the Iranian
revolution, but his remarks have a wider relevance):

The Iranian Revolution reflects an Islamic response to the

manifestations of modernity's value and structural impositions. In
fact, it represents a culmination of a long evolving soul searching
process in most Islamic countries in reaction to the Western systems
of knowledge which were perceived to be detrimental to Islam and
Muslim's self-identification. Those systems' biased ethnocentricity
and their damaging impact in terms of traditional institutional decay
and value dependency have increasingly become the focus of Islamic
resentment and rejection.17
The suggestion here seems to be that there is a corpus of received wisdom
about the Islamic Weltanshauung which has been disrupted by the impact of
Western modernism and that in itself must be rejected, presumably by re-
emphasizing Islam and Islamic values - precisely the view inherent in the
salafiyya movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That
view, however, bears further examination. Is there such a corpus and, if
there is, how did it develop and how immutable is it in reality?
That there is such a corpus is undeniable. The orthodox statement of this
 142 DEMOCRATIZATION

position is that it consists of the literal word of God as revealed in the

Qur'an, buttressed by the sunna and the hadith - the practices and the
sayings of the Prophet Muhammad - and exemplified in the sharcia -
Islamic religious law. Its relevance to the temporal order which is
subordinate to it is defined by the principle of tawhid; unity, the unity of
God.18 Interpretation and amplification of the sharcia is possible through the
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institutions of ijmac consensus - qiyas argument by analogy or, in

theory, by ijtihad - innovative reasoning but in accordance with the
principles of sharcia and thus ultimately on the basis of revelation as the
underlying epistemological principle. The practice of ijtihad, however, has
been largely excluded within Sunni Islam for many centuries, although it is
still a vital part of the Shi'a tradition. This corpus, moreover, is not simply
a doctrinal statement about the personal relationship with the divine, but a
prescription for collective social and political order as well. It is,
furthermore, considered to be the reification of a religious tradition and a
tradition of religious analysis stretching back to the very origins of Islam
itself. In its modern form, therefore, it is the distillation of the doctrinal
essence of Islam in its original purity as demonstrated by historical
continuity and, as such, represents a set of revealed, unquestionable truths.
This seems to be open to several questions. First of all, despite the
tradition that the essence of Islamic belief was established in the seventh
century - during the lifetime of the Prophet and shortly thereafter; certainly
during the period of the Rashidun caliphate - the fact is that there was a
much longer period of confusion during which essential issues of dogma
and consensus had to be thrashed out. Quite apart from Western attempts to
identify the links between early Islam and Judaism, as exemplified in the
concept of Hagarism (put forward by Michael Cook and Patricia Crone),19
there are Muslim thinkers and historians who reject the received account as
well. Said Ashmawi in Egypt, for example, has argued strongly against the
idea that early Islam was a political and social dispensation as well as a
doctrinal statement about personal redemption. For him 'political Islam' is
a far later concept and a reaction to the collapse of the concept of the
caliphate in 1924, not part of an unchanging holistic tradition stretching
back to AD 632. The concept of social justice in Islam, on which its social
prescriptions are based, has been a largely secular creation, building on a
meagre Qur'anic legacy, for only 200 of the Qur'an's 6,000 verses actually
deal with matters of social legislation.20 His views may be extreme, but he
is not alone within the modern liberal Islamic tradition.
In fact, such a long period of gestation for mature Islamic doctrine
would not be surprising. In the case of Judaism, the evolution of the
mishnah took eight hundred years and, in Christianity, the same type of
doctrinal development took at least three hundred years, if not longer.
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 143

Furthermore, Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, also had to deal with the
Greek philosophical tradition which has always sat uneasily on the religious
stomach. There were two attempts to do this and, until they had been
resolved, it would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to speak of a
coherent, internally integrated Islamic tradition. The first was that of the
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Mutazilites who sought to associate the rationalism of Greek philosophy

with Islamic revelation and who reached the peak of their influence under
the Caliph al-Mamun in the ninth century.21 The moderate traditionalist
compromise interpretation of Islam by Ibn Hanbal and al-Ashari led,
however, to a general rejection of mutazili analysis, although the issue had
not been finally solved.
It was left to the falsafah movement to confront the issue again,
particularly to its two most famous exponents, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Neither doubted the essential principles
of Islam but each, in his own way, argued that an awareness of God was
possible through the power of the intellect; that rationalism could parallel
belief in achieving revelation. In this they were confronted by al-Ghazzali
who, although using Aristotelian techniques of analysis and thus
acknowledging an intellectual debt to the Greeks, rejected the neo-
Platonism of the falsafah philosophers, in favour of the primacy of the
mystical vision. He argued his case so effectively than falsafah doctrine was
effectively discredited within the general Islamic tradition, although it was
to linger on, re-emerging in the arguments of the Young Ottomans in the
nineteenth century. Ibn Rushd, who lived in Muslim Spain after al-
Ghazzali's death and passionately disagreed with him, also apparently
believed that rationalism could be applied, independently of Islamic
doctrine, to analyse the natural world. He believed that conclusions arrived
at in this way were 'true' in that they had internal consistency, coherence
and, presumably, reproducibility - a view that comes very close to the view
that was to develop in Europe as part of the Enlightenment. Nor was he
alone in this, for similar views seem to have been held by Ibn Sina.
Members of the falsafah movement would not have recognised any
distinction between this kind of truth and the absolute statements they
evolved over the divine world through their exploitation of the neo-Platonist
legacy. There was however, an essential distinction between it and the
absolute truth that rationalism could generate about that world, which was
paralleled by the revealed truth of the Qur'an. As Montgomery Watt says of
Ibn Sina:
He probably felt that the Greek scientific and philosophical learning
belonged to a different sphere from Islamic doctrine, and that there
was no fundamental opposition between them ... Nineteenth century
 144 DEMOCRATIZATION

European scholars thought that his mysticism was extraneous to his

philosophy, but fuller acquaintance with his writings makes it clear
that this is not so.22
Yet it is in this apparent division of the nature of truth that the falsafah
movement, particularly its most famous exponent, Ibn Rushd, is of
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importance to the theme here.23 Had it been able to continue, such a

distinction could have provided the opportunity for the development of
rational speculation about the real or natural world, unfettered by the
dictates of revelation. That would have paralleled the crucial separation of
religious dogma and intellectual rationalism in eighteenth-century Europe
which led to the development of modernism there.
In fact, this was not to be the case; for the Islamic world generally
preferred the approach of al-Ghazzali who developed the technique of using
the tools of Greek philosophical rationalism to justify truth achieved
through revelation and mystical awareness.24 There was thus an implicit -
indeed, an explicit - rejection of the falsafah approach25 and, slowly
thereafter, philosophical speculation about the natural world outside the
principles of revealed religion ceased to form part of the Islamic world's
intellectual horizon. Instead, there was a growing conservatism and rigidity
which emphasised the role of divine knowledge to the detriment and
eventual exclusion of its profane counterpart. As Braudel remarks, 'So
Muslim philosophy, despite what is sometimes said, did not die an
immediate death under the powerful, desperate blows of Al-Ghazzali. In the
end, however, it did die, together with Muslim science, before the end of the
twelfth century.'26
This development, however, poses the question as to why it happened
and what the consequences were to be. There appears to be no simple
explanation of what caused the sudden decline, although it is clear that
intellectual and political preferences played a part. The mysticism of
revelation has a powerful hold on the imagination, in ways to which
rationalism can offer no satisfactory alternative. For it offers an internalized
conviction about certainty that does not depend on argument and logic with
their implication of doubt, reductionism and explication. The occultation of
political power through divine sanction also exercises an irresistible
attraction on rulers, and the subordination of the culama' to temporal power,
which occurred at about this time, certainly eased the victory of revelation
over rationalism. This, however, cannot be the complete explanation and it
has been suggested that the sudden susceptibility of the Islamic world to
attack from outside - as Berbers, Seljuk Turks and Mongols threatened to
replace the established political order - marginalised intellectual
speculation in the face of the imperious need for survival through political
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 145

cohesion and commitment.

Whatever the reason, there is no denying the fact that conservatism and
intellectual rigidity came to characterise Muslim thought so that, by the
fifteenth century in the Sunni world, bab ijtihad or the "door" to ijtihad -
the only remaining avenue still available for relatively unfettered
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speculation - had been closed and was to remain shut until the present day.
Matters were far less restricted within Shi'a Islam, but there, too, the proper
objects of study increasingly came to be concerns related to doctrinal issues,
to the exclusion of the natural world. There seems to be little doubt that this
pre-eminence of doctrine over logic was also related to the close inter-
relation of revelation to collective, in addition to and as opposed to
individual, life within the Islamic world. The concept of truth in terms of
personal religious insight became the mirror of the social and political order.
Unlike the European experience, revelation could and usually did dictate the
mode of analysis of the natural world and the conclusions it produced. No
wonder, then, that Salafiyyism sought its philosophical insights, through
which it would deal with European technological superiority, in the
philosophical and doctrinal truths of early Islam.27

Modernist Holism
Nothing said so far, however, is intended to suggest that the Islamic world
today is excluded from operating within the intellectual environment which
has been created in the modern world as a result of the technological
civilization that developed from the European philosophical paradigm of
the Enlightenment. This is self-evidently not the case, as a simple survey of
the global scientific and intellectual community would demonstrate. Nor is
the intention to suggest that religious belief is an irrelevance in the modern
world. That could hardly be the case, given the evidence of the rapidly
growing interest in and commitment to the religious ideal in the lives of
millions of people in Europe and America. However, there has been a
growing separation of spheres of interest - which is, in the modernist vision,
absolute - between the concepts of truth in religion and in the temporal
sphere. This corresponds, not only to a distinction between personal
revelation and scientific analysis, but also to a rigid separation between the
personal and collective worlds. There is, in short, a potential conflict
between revealed, absolute truth and our understanding of the temporal
world in which we live and between absolute, revealed truth and the
way in which we organise that collective, temporal world. Although
Ibn Sina would have never accepted the distinction, the sceptical
rationalism of scientific modernism is implicitly based upon it - an
assumption which has crucial implications for the Islamic world today,
 146 DEMOCRATIZATION

particularly if the holism of much conventional orthodox Islamic

philosophy is maintained.
The fact is that analysis and synthesis in relation to the world in which
we live is based on rationalism and that the culture of modernism recognises
no other master. The organization of social, economic and political life is,
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in that sense, 'scientific' in that it is based on expediency and rational

analysis, not on moral imperatives or revelation. And those who wish to
operate within it or to master its projects can only do so by understanding
and exploiting its underlying rationale. The moral economy of Islamic
economics, for instance, will stand very little chance of imposing itself
within the world economic system unless it can demonstrate its superior
efficiency, not its superior moral purpose; expediency, not morality, is the
issue. The cultural implications of 'Islamic science', for example, do not
imply superior scientific outcomes, whatever the claims of its practitioners,
and thus offer little to persuade the dominant scientific community to
abandon its reliance on sceptical materialism. And the same could be argued
for the other branches of knowledge where, today, there is a growing desire
- not just amongst Muslim intellectuals, it should be said - to dispute the
trans-cultural nature of the principles on which Western modernism is
based.
Despite this divide, there is still clearly a moral and cultural component
to intellectual activity in general. Clearly, cultural preferences and
prejudices - Western as much as any others - determine intellectual choices
and can affect conclusions. But they cannot determine the process by which
analysis occurs. If conclusions are reproducible in other words, given the
same information, the same conclusion results from the application of
analytical principle - then they are scientifically true - whether we use
'fuzzy logic'28 or not. Indeed, if this were not the case, the modern material
world could not exist. Nor does the expediency of modern enquiry exclude
the operation of morality; the enthusiasm for eugenics, for example, did not
survive the bestialities of the Second World War. Certain disciplines,
indeed, have a moral, or at least an ethical component built into their basic
assumptions. The 'dismal philosophy' of economics, for example, is based
on the assumption that its objective is to maximize human material good.
Even the development of nuclear weapons was originally justified by many
of the scientists involved by reference to the morality of the 'just war'. And
some, like Professor Rotblat, actually abandoned their participation in the
Manhattan Project when they decided that those moral issues were being
sidelined. It is, in short, not helpful to condemn modernism simply because
of the apparently value-free nature of its analytical and synthetic principles.
Moral choice is still an essential component within its operations - but such
choice is an individual responsibility, not the consequence of externally
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 147

imposed restraints derived from universal revelation.

Perhaps the most acute arena in which this confrontation takes place
today is that of politics. The democratic political paradigm - which, after
all, in essence, merely suggests that communities are better administered
when their members participate in the process of decision-making than
when they do not - is contrasted to its disadvantage with the project of a
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divinely ordered community - one held to be innately superior because of

divine sanction. Leaving apart the issue that the democratic model also
contains the seeds of dictatorship (Lady Thatcher's favourite economist,
Friedrich Hayek, used to argue that its only advantage was that it provided
a mechanism for removal of government without violence),29 it is not clear
that there is any innate superiority in the alternative model that has been
proposed! Once again, it seems that the true test is not one of moral
comparability but of expediency; in short, which system provides an
innately fairer, more just solution to the problems of social and political
order where individual and collective interests inevitably clash. The Islamist
argument, which ultimately rests on the assumption that its political model
is by definition superior because of its origins, not because of its content,
simply begs the issue. And it is interesting to note that at least one leading
Islamist intellectual, Rachid Ghannouchi, has implicitly, if not explicitly,
accepted the role of expediency within the political sphere by accepting that
Islamists can lose, as well as win, elections and must then abide by
democratic choice!30
Indeed, there is another implication to be drawn from this, for his
position seems to be surprisingly close to that of Christian democracy and
Christian socialism in Germany, as formulated after the Second World War.
Nor, indeed, is he unique in this respect, for there is a whole school of
moderate Islamic and Islamist thinkers who accept this point of view,
including the Iranian scholar, Abdolkrim Soroush.31 In essence, by
accepting that those who do not favour the Islamist position may impose
their views upon those who do - through the process of electoral choice -
the Islamist liberal is also accepting that divine sanction is not the basis on
which choices about collective socio-political organization must be made,
even if it is his or her preferred option. Doctrinal truth is thereby trapped
within the private, rather than the public sphere, and the argument between
Islam and modernism fades away. The Islamic weltanshauung, in short,
comes to terms with the modern world and with the role of Western-inspired
modernism within it. It preserves its own doctrinal insights and revelation
intact but cedes the public space. It originally strayed into that space for
largely secular, rather than religious reasons, if commentators such as Judge
Ashmawi are to be believed. It integrates the trans-cultural analytical
principles of modernism without sacrificing its moral or spiritual values, in
 148 DEMOCRATIZATION

what was the real purpose of Salafiyyism.

There remains one final question, however. Can it really be said that the
modernist vision is the final word on social and political organization when
we consider the moral chaos and decay that seem to be present in Western
society? Is there no room for a moral order within collective life and does
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not the political order have some responsibility for imposing it on the
society over which it rules? There is here a real contradiction; between
voluntarism and restraint, individual morality and social responsibility,
freedom of expression and ethical constraint. Indeed, it is a contradiction
apparently entailed in the very principle on which modernism has been
based, that of unfettered speculation and its corollary, unlimited experience.
Yet there is nothing in the modernist credo that denies the key role of
morality; simply a requirement that this is a personal obligation that cannot
be effectively imposed by external edict. There is, however, the 'threat' of
post-modernism - the argument that absolutist principles of analysis do not
exist, that analysis itself is relativist and personal and that moral principle,
even at an individual level, is an unreasonable constraint on experience, for
those principles themselves are relativized and contingent. Only the text can
speak, not its creator, and all readings of it have their own intrinsic validity.
There, perhaps, lies the real danger, of which modernism is not yet fully
aware but which the Islamic paradigm instinctively fears!32

NOTES

1. Y. Choueiri, 'The Political Discourse of Contemporary Islamist Movements,' and C. Tripp,

'Islam and the secular logic of the state in the Middle East', in A.S. Sidahmed and A.
Ehteshami (eds.) Islamic Fundamentalism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), pp.24-5
and 62-3 respectively.
2. See N. Lambton, State and Government in Medieval Islam: an introduction to Islamic
political theory: the jurists (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981),
pp.87-103.
3. I leave aside here discussions of the inherent nature of democracy in the Middle Eastern and
Islamic contexts, particularly the criticisms made of it from a post-modernist and Marxist
point of view. See P. Gran, 'Studies of Anglo-American political economy: democracy,
orientalism and the Left', in H. Sharabi (ed.), Theory, Politics and the Arab World: Critical
Responses (London: Routledge 1990), pp.228-39.
4. Modernity may be best described as the age marked by constant change - but aware of being
so marked ... In other words, modernity is an era conscious of its historicity. Human
institutions are viewed as self-created and amenable to improvement ... The substitution of
new designs for old will be a progressive move, a new step up the ascending line of human
development. 'Modernity' in J. Krieger (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Politics of the World
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp.592-3.
5. E. Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and Religion (London: Routledge, 1992), p.80.
6. B. Dunham, The Heretics (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1963), pp.317-20.
7. G. de Santillana , The Crime of Galileo (London: Mercury Books,1961), p.329 - 'Eppur si
muove' is the traditional phrase.
8. Dunham, pp.293-4, 424.
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 149

9. G.R. Elton, Reformation Europe 1517-1559 (London: Fontana, 1963), p.266. In fact, this
Latin tag does not occur in the recess of the Diet of Augsburg which established religious
peace in Germany during its deliberations between February and September 1555.
10. R. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1922), pp.20-21.
11. I. Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983), pp.18-19.
12. P. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict
from 1500 to 2000 (London: Fontana, 1989), pp.20-38.
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13. Qutb (Kotb), Sayyid, Social Justice in Islam (Washington, DC: American Council of
Learned Societies, 1953), p.279.
14. Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud, The Concept of Knowledge in Islam (London and New York:
Mansell, 1989), p.12.
15. F. Braudel (trans. Mayne R. 1993), A History of Civilizations (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1993), p.292.
16. Gellner, p.17.
17. Sabet A., Iranian Journal of International Affairs, Vol.7, No.1 (1995), p.59.
18. J.L. Esposito (ed.), Voices of Resurgent Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1983), pp.3-4.
19. P. Crone P. and M. Cook, Hagarism: the Making of the Islamic World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1977).
20. N. Ayubi, Political Islam: Region and Politics in the Arab World (London: Routledge, 1991),
pp.203-4.
21. See M. Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy (London: Longman, 1983) for a detailed
description of the Mutazili movement.
22. W. Montgomery-Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology (Edinburgh: University of
Edinburgh Press, 1962), p.97.
23. As Fakhry points out (p. 276): 'For Ibn Rushd this postulate [the unity of philosophical and
religious truth] not only involved the methodological necessity of recourse to interpretation
(taw'il); in addition it implied the tacit recognition of the parity of philosophy and Scripture,
of reason and revelation, as the two primary and infallible sources of truth.' The important
point, however, is that there is a parity between the two and that, through philosophy,
religious truth is accessible. For the Quran (3:5) allows 'those confirmed in knowledge' to
interpret scripture where ambiguity (mutashabih) exists. Ibn Rushd's concept of the soul,
furthermore, emphasised his essential materialism which was similar to that of his mentor,
Aristotle, and led to his attempt, which had been anticipated by Ibn Sina, to give religion a
'scientific status'. (J. Schacht and C.E. Bosworth (eds.), The Legacy of Islam (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p.358.)
Ibn Sina, following Aristotle, argued that God was engaged in self-contemplation and
thus had no direct interest in the exterior worlds except in their creation. Reason was the
means by which access to understanding was possible, because it reflected universal images
which were themselves inherent in the universal science that was the only means of
apprehending God. Truth, in this context, was a quality of the 'intelligible form' of
knowledge: 'By truth is understood the state of the word and the intellect which refers to the
state of the external thing, when it coincides with it ... Truth is the identification of the speech
with things' - or, in the medieval reconstruction of Ibn Sina by St. Thomas Aquinas, 'Veritas
est adequaetio orationis at rerum' or 'Veritas est adequaetio rei et intellectus'. In other words,
it dealt with the real world, although it was linked to revealed truth (A.M. Giochon (trans.
M.S. Khan, 1969), The Philosophy of Avicenna and its Influence on Medieval Europe (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1942), pp.92-3.)
The result was that:
In fact it was religion which was to pay the price of this 'agreement'. It was philosophy
which was to discount the apodeictic truth; religion did no more than 'clothe' the images
to bring them to the level of the mass of people. This accounts for the attempt of some
Christian thinkers to interpret this attitude as the acceptance of a 'double truth' which
the Commentator [Averroes - Ibn Rushd] would have professed and which they would
have willingly accepted as their position. But in fact it meant destroying religion and
 150 DEMOCRATIZATION

theology, since it was estimated that on the essential points they would be in
contradiction with reason (Schacht and Bosworth, p.384).

24. Al-Ghazzali identified twenty errors in Ibn Sina, seventeen of which were bidac (innovation
- heresy) and the remaining three were kufr (unbelief). He went on to argue for the
predominance of religious revealed truth over philosophical truth:

... there is a whole area outside the scope of reason into which philosophy cannot
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venture. Al-Ghazzali was therefore right to argue that 'with respect to whatever lies
outside the scope of human cognitions, it is necessary to resort to Scripture [al-sharc]'
In certain cases, human reason is incapable of acquiring a form of knowledge
indispensable for man's felicity. In other cases, it is incapable because of accidental
impediments or simply the difficulties inherent in the subject matter itself. In all such
cases, revelation necessarily supplements rational knowledge (Fakhry, p.284).

Ibn Rushd rejected al-Ghazzali's arguments on the grounds that they negated causality, yet
the concept of 'efficient causation' (in Aristotle's formulation) was essential for there to be
action and, without action, God could not act upon the world. Furthermore, he argued that
'genuine knowledge is essentially the act of eliciting the causes underlying a given process
... whoever repudiates causality repudiates reason' (Fakhry p.286). This, in turn, denies the
concept of a wise Creator - who demonstrates wisdom by action - and is thus contrary to the
Qur'an.
25. It should also be borne in mind that, as Montgomery-Watt points out, both Ibn Sina and Ibn
Rushd were to be marginal influences on the Islamic world. This was partly because of the
Muslim preference for consensus as well as because of the intellectual dominance of al-
Ghazzali, even though they were major influences on medieval Europe. A devout Muslim
saw essential truth as revealed and not discoverable. Philosophy only had relevance if it
defended and explained this position, 'Consequently he looked on the Falasifa with
suspicion, for they were first and foremost believers in philosophy and science who then
but only in the second place tried to reconcile revealed truth with philosophy' (W.
Montgomery-Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh: University of
Edinburgh Press, 1973), p.205).
26. Braudel, p.84.
27. This is not to say, however, that the Salafyyists rejected European modernism. On the
contrary, they embraced it, simply looking for its justification within the Islamic corpus to
modify, rather than reject the culture that it embodied. Indeed, MuhammadcAbduh, a leading
figure of the movement alongside its founder, Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, turned back to the
neo-Platonist Mutazili school of philosophers for his justification of the rationalism of
Western political models. As he himself said:
I took it upon myself to plead the cause of two great issues. The first was the liberation
of thought from the shackles of blind imitation, and the comprehension of religion
according to the rules laid down, before the emergence of conflict, by the ancestors of
the community, and the return, in acquiring religious knowledge, to the original sources,
considering them in the light of human reason. The second issue was the reform of the
Arabic language ... The other issue that I espoused ... and is the pillar of social life was
the differentiation between the entitlement of government to obedience from the people,
and the people's right to justice from their government. (Abduh M. (1980), al-Acmal al-
Kamila (ed. cAmara M.) Al-Mucassasa al-cArabiyya Ii'1-Dirasat (Beirut), II, pp.318-19;
cited in Y. Choueiri., Islamic Fundamentalism (London: Pinter Press, 1991), p.38.
28. As opposed to Cartesian logic, 'fuzzy logic' attempts to allow for non-linearity of systems in
practice and reflects the concerns of chaos theory. It still, however, operates on the same
basic logical rules adapted to allow for non-linearity.
29. F. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics and the History of Ideas (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p.152.
30. In his lecture to the Royal Institute of International Affairs (London) on 9 May 1995, Dr
Ghannouchi stated:
 DEMOCRACY, ISLAM AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNISM 151

Islam is unique in that it alone recognises pluralism within and outside its own frontiers.
Within, no religious wars are known to have ever taken place. While on the one hand
Islam guarantees the right of its adherents to ijtihad in interpreting Quranic text, it does
not recognise a church or an institution or a person as a sole authority speaking in its
name or claiming to represent it. Decision-making, through the process of Sharia,
belongs to the community as a whole. Thus, the democratic values of political pluralism
and tolerance are perfectly compatible with Islam (p.58).
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He went on to say: 'Tunisian Islamists have never rejected modernization in the sense of
rationalising politics, administration and the economy. They recognise human dignity and
civil liberties, accept that the popular will is the source of political legitimacy and believe in
pluralism and in the alternation of power through free elections' (p.62). The speech is
reproduced in Maghreb Quarterly Report, 18 (1995), pp.56-66.
31. According to Soroush, the political application of Islam (what he calls 'Islamic ideology')
deforms religion and prevents true popular participation in the process of government. The
only form of religious government which does not do this is one that is democratic, for
democracy is a form of government which is compatible with a multitude of political cultures
including Islam. According to one commentator, he argues that, 'Any religious government
that rules without societal consent, or restricts this right, abrogates the public's conception of
justice and sacrifices its legitimacy.' In short:
Democracy is both a value system and a method of governance. As a value system, it
respects human rights, the public's right to elect its leaders and hold them accountable,
and the defense of the public's notion of justice. As a method of governance, democracy
includes the traditional notions of the separation of powers, free elections, free and
independent press, freedom of expression, freedom of political assembly, multiple
political parties and restrictions on executive power. Soroush argues that no government
official should stand above criticism, and that all must be accountable to the public.
Accountability reduces the potential for corruption and allows the public to remove, or
restrict the power of incompetent officials, Democracy is, in effect, a method for
'rationalizing' politics. V. Vakili, Debating Religion and Politics in Iran: the Political
Thought of Abdolkarim Soroush (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996),
pp.21-3).
32. I do not intend here to decry the very real power of post-modernist analysis, nor, indeed, to
reject the Rorty-esque vision of democracy within a post-modernist setting. It is merely that,
as much as post-modernism undermines the principles on which modernism is based, it must
also do the same to the Islamic paradigm. This indeed prompts a debate which has not yet
properly begun except, perhaps, in anthropology, in the context of dialogics. See
Abu-cLughod L. (1990), 'Anthropology's Orient: The Boundaries of Theory on the Arab
world', in H. Sharabi (ed.), Theory, Politics and the Arab World (London: Routledge, 1990),
pp.91-2.