Islam and Democracy discussion

On Thursday, I was honored to participate in a long round-table discussion on “Religion and Democracy” that was co-sponsored by Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, Iran and the center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington, DC. The session I was part of was held in a conference room at the Education Ministry in Teheran.

What follows here is a description of the substance of some of the most striking presentations made at the conference by Iranian participants. Please note that this account is a copy of what I wrote toward the end of this earlier JWN post. But I wanted to put this description up as a post on its own so that interested readers can join in a description on the Comments board that is limited purely to the substance of what I described there.

What follows also includes some of my own immediate reflections on what I heard.

If you want to read a bit about the fascinating back-story behind the holding of the conference, then go to that earlier post.

The participants in the Teheran session included CSID President Abdel-Aziz Sachedina, a distinguished professor of Islamic studies at the University of Virginia; Abdelkarim Soroush, a political philosopher who works in Germany now, but was previously at Princeton, Harvard, etc; Mohsen Kadivar, a tall, gentle-looking figure in mullah’s robes who teaches at Tarbiat Modares University in Teheran; Forough Jahanbakhsh, who teaches at Queen’s University in Toronto (and was the only other female participant); Ali Paya, a professor in Teheran who chaired the sessions and did much of the translating; and around a dozen others.

(Kadivar has his own website which certainly looks worth a lengthy visit. It has a good section in English, and one in Arabic, as well as all the Farsi material. In the Bio info in the English-language section, you can read that “Kadivar was arrested for the first time in May 1978 ? the last year of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi Shah’s reign in Iran… 20 years later, the unconstitutional Cleric Court of Iran found him guilty of campaigning against the Islamic Republic because of the statements he had made in an interview with the banned Khordad Daily … [and] he was sentenced to spend 18 months in Evin Prison, Tehran, and was released on July 17, 2000. He is still campaigning for the reform of the Islamic Republic of Iran.”)

The proceedings were all bilingual, with the presentations given in either
English or Farsi and then afterwards rendered orally into the other language.
Here, I’m relying mainly on the notes I took during the session, though
I’ll also refer to the abstracts of the presentations distributed by the
conference organizers… Longer versions of the presentations will later
be published as a book, though I believe some of them may be available before
that on the CSID’s website.

Now, read more about Thursday’s session…


Soroush started out by saying that though there are two main kinds
of theries of democracy– those that look only at its formal or procedural
aspects, and those that attempt to build a full-blown theory of liberal democracy–
he wanted to concentrate at first on theories of formal democracy, and the
compatibility of Islam with such a theory. He asserted forcefully that
the era of seeking to “derive” theories of democracy from foundational Islamic
texts (the Qur’an, the hadith) is no past, “because we’d be trying to conflate
two different worlds, the traditonal and the modern”. He argued that,
“whatever is not incompatible with Islamic teaching can be called Islamic.”

He said many parts of the theory of formal democracy could quite easily
be seen as compatible with Islam, while other parts required more intellectual
exploration. For example, regarding the separation of powers,
he said that Ayatollah Mishkini had written broadly soon after the Islamic
revolution in Iran on how this could be clearly derived from various suras
and hadith. On the independence of the judiciary, he said that
Muslims had had no problem with that, from the days of the Imam Ali on.

However, the two parts of a theory of formal democracy where he said considerably
more work needed to be done by theorists of Islamic democracy were those relating
to issues of political representation, and those relating to the bindingness
of the decisions of a constituent assembly. (These are, in a sense,
aspects of the same problem.)

He argued that in traditional Islamic theories of fiqh, there was
no theory of representation, but only a theory of agency (vekala)
which as he noted is something significantly different. This, in contrast
to European ideas of the vox populi, or of the “general will”, which
can serve as theories of representation. On bindingness, he noted the distinctive
differences between this and traditional Muslim theories of the purely advisory
role of a “consultative council”.

If Soroush was looking at the kind of intellectual work that theorists of
Islamic democracy (or, Islamic theorists of democracy) need to be doing, Kadivar
set out some of the intellectual/theological bases on which this work
could be done.

He said this work has gone through two main stages. In the first,
people looked at whether democracy was compatible with the kind of Islamic
practiced and presented in the days of the Prophet and the caliphs. “This
was not sophisticated,” he said, “but the answer was Yes. However, it
flew in the face of the evidence.”

Then, as a second stage, people got more sophisticated and started using
more detailed models. They started to understand that there are many
models of democracy and many models of Islam, so the question became to figure
out which of these could be identified as being compatible.

He then presented a theory of what he called “liberated democracy”, based
on six theses:

  1. All people are equal. (As opposed to the times of “historical
    Islam”, which saw differential status and power applied as between males
    and females, members of different religions, or slaves and freemen.)
  2. The freedom to choose and live the religion of your choice, with this
    being conceived of as a continuous right (i.e., people have the right to
    change their religions)
  3. Any intervention in the life of an individual requires his consent.
  4. All religious claims are open to critical evaluation and discussion;
    any statement contrary to reason cannot be called religious.. (In this
    regard, he said if a society using its collective reason comes to agreement
    on religious matters, then this would be close to the workings of a deliberative
    democracy.)
  5. The view that there are two types of statements: those that are eternally
    true and those that are subject to change. Statements in the first
    group are all just, all rational, and all “better than alternative models”.
    “If any religious statement lacks any of these attributes, one can
    conclude that it was a temporary one, and its time is over.”
  6. Those statements meant to be eternal address issues above the understanding
    of most people. The other kind can be discerned through collective
    reasoning. The number of “eternal” statements is small. Therefore
    this leaves much, including the form of government, to be determined through
    collective reasoning.

He concluded by saying that democracy can’t necessarily be derived from
the inherited Islamic tradition but must be reasoned toward; and Islam itself
essentially carries the possibility of ijtihad (“interpretation”, a
key concept in Shi’i Islam). He therefore advocated the use of deliberative
democracy.

… Well, we listened to four or five other papers almost all of which were
equally as interesting as these two, but these two are the only ones I have
time to write about here. One of the other presenters, Forough Jahanbakhsh
(all of whose paper was excellent) made the pertinent point that Iranians
are nowadays “showing the way” in developing theories of Islam and democracy,
and that “Religious intellectuals here have a better basis to do so than
others because we have 25 years of experience of Islamic government to
reflect on.”

… Now, I just want to quickly
put down a few of my own reactions to things that the people in the conference
were saying. One is that Mohsen Kadivar’s six points were all extremely
thought-provoking– and they all seemed to me to be totally compatible with
Quaker faith and practice. No, I’m not saying that maybe the guy’s
a closet Quaker and he never knew it. I’m saying that it was exciting
to hear him come out with so a set of propositions that are so congruent
with the principles the Quakers have arrived at, and tried to live by, over
the past 350 years. Especially (1), the fundamental principle of human equality,
(2 & 3) the importance of– as we understand it– freedom of conscience
and freedom of beief, (4 & 5) something akin to our principle of “continuing
revelation”, and (6), our own, Quaker-developed theories of internal and
external governance. (We would say that in reasoning together collectively,
our work is also guided by the Spirit. I imagine Kadivar might say
the same thing, too.)

I also note that, in regard to Forough Jahanbakhsh’s point, the Quakers also
went through a big experience of trying to run a wordly government: in our
case, that was William Penn’s “Holy Experiment” in Pennsylvania, which turned
out from many points of view to be a big disappointment. As I understand
what happened, the short version of the story is that the Quakers running
Pennsylvania were so liberal that– in addition to providing a haven for
members of other peace churches who were beng persecuted in Europe, like
the Amish– they also let a bunch of totally pacifistic, non-Quaker-like
settlers come there, too; and soon enough they lost control over the government
of the colony.

Well, I think that maybe the point here is that if members of faith communities
want to keep true to their beliefs and their practices, maybe they should not try
to run earthly governments, but rather try, firstly to live good, principled
lives themselves, and secondly to affect public policy without seeking
to take it over…

There’s a whole lot more I could say on this subject, and probably will (here,
or elsewhere; even better, perhaps in a continuing dialogue with Mohsen Kadivar?)
But I must say that my experience in Iran this time seemed to confirm
most of my general antipathy to the idea of a religious community trying
to take over the governance of a state: I suspect that it ends up being good
neither for the citizens of the state, nor for the state of actually religious
practice and thought within the faith community itself. (It was,
after all, a real setback for the actual practice of Christianity once the
Christians ceased being fed to the lions and took over the Empire instead…
Prime example of what went wrong there: it wasn’t till that point that the “Christians”
developed a concpet of a “just war” and abandoned the principled pacifism that had earlier
been embedded in the Christian message.)

Update:

Here is a comment that ‘SM’ posted onto the other Comments board soon after I posted the main text there:

    “He argued that in traditional Islamic theories of fiqh, there was no theory of representation, but only a theory of agency (vekala) which as he noted is something significantly different.”

    I would certainly like to hear a bit more about this.

    Taking all the political communities of the last 250 years into consideration, I have to say that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hasn’t done too badly. It was an early abolisher of slavery, after all, and a big incubator of anti-slavery thought and feeling.

24 thoughts on “Islam and Democracy discussion”

  1. I’m probably not mastering all the subtleties of English well enough : can someone tell what meands a theory of “agency” in this context ? I don’t understand the political concept behind it.. TIA

  2. Fascinating stuff. Some of what Kadivar is saying reminds me of Rashid al-Ghannoushi’s formulations of Islamic democracy, albeit with a less explicitly scriptural basis. I’ll have more to say later.
    I believe (although I could be wrong) that a “theory of agency” posits public officials as agents of the public welfare rather than representatives of their will – a Burkean theory of public service, if you will.

  3. As I understood it, when Soroush was talking about vekala as the Islamic theory of “agency”, it is a theory in which one party is the direct, authorized agent of another party– as when someone has a directly authorized power of attorney to act on behalf of another person.
    This is distinctly different from west-European theories of political “representation”, in which the elected representative is supposed to “represent” the voters in the deliberations and decisionmaking of, for example, the legislature, since the political representative does not have explicit, prior authorization from her/his constituents on how to vote on each piece of legislation… Rather, in west-European theory, the representative should be (1)open to be a full participant in the deliberations of the legislature, including to be swayed by the arguments voiced there by other representatives, and (2) open to acting in the broader interests of the entire (national or whatever) broader body politic, even where these interests might not be totally in line with the previously expressed wishes of her/his own constituents. (This is the Rousseauvian theory of the “general will”.)
    The representative is then liable to be held to account by the voters for the sum total of decisions thus taken in the legislature, and the voters may deem at that point that she/he has betrayed their interests, and vote against her. But not every single decision of the representative should be immediately thus liable to the voters’ censure…
    At another level it seems to me a west-European theory of representation includes the idea that the representative represents the interests of all the voters in the constituency (unless it’s a nationwide p.r. system)– and not simply those of the voters who voted for her…
    For example, back home in Virginia, I’m represented in the US Congress by three Republicans– two Repub Senators and one Repub Congressman. But the fact that I voted against all three of those people in their most recent (and any preceding) elections doesn’t mean that I have no right to expect that once in the legislature they represent my interests — along with those those of all other people in the relevant constituency, while they should also be open to their concept of the broader “general will”. Thus, I feel quite entitled to contact Senator John Warner and express my views on how I think he should vote on matters of vital interest, even though I didn’t vote for him…
    So it strikes me a robust theory of representation is a fine (and perhaps essential) thing in a working democracy. Certainly, it involves a degree of trust all round. Sometimes that trust is merited, sometimes not. At least, Sen. Warner does always respond to the letters I send him…

  4. Thanks for the correction, Helena. In Western terms, then, the theory of agency isn’t so much Burkean as corporatist, premised on authorized agents representing groups of people united in interest rather than all those residing in a defined territory. I could imagine a functional democratic system based on this principle, albeit not with geographic districts – e.g., voters could give agents proxies or powers of attorney to represent them in government, with the agents having weighted votes according to the number of proxies they carry. Did Souroush discuss any particular political forms or did he mostly concentrate on theory?

  5. Kadivar’s agenda is Liberal, not Islamic, but that is OK as long as he doesn’t claim it is Islamic.
    I should like to argue for different standards to be applied to the Protestant or post-Protestant world than the standards to be applied to regions of the world (including Catholic ones) where traditional society, belief, and mores, are still of significant power.
    For the former, the re-imposition of revelation-based law would be an impossibility without political violence. For the latter, the summary destruction of revelation-based law would be an impossibility without political violence.
    It is I think pointless to judge either type of society by the standards of the other. Change must come from within, not from the external manipulations of divide-and-rule neo-colonial liberal interventionists. Reaction against change, also, must come from within such societies, and that also is their own business. Western interventions appear on both sides – Wahhabism (and some would say Qutbism too) have been used by the CIA, MI6, etcetera against Marxist or bourgeois nationalist Arab regimes, and conversely, leftists and progressives have also been used against the so-called mullocracy. Not to mention feminists, poor gulls …
    The point is not that ‘progress’ is better or worse than ‘tradition’, but that both are being provoked, manipulated, and funded by western intelligence agencies.
    I use the word ‘tradition’ with a small ‘s’ here, since ‘Traditionalists’ with a capital ‘S’ hold that modern religions, especially the so-called semitic monotheisms, are themselves degenerations. See Guenon, or if you like see Sayyid Hossain Nasr (hahaha).

  7. Helena,
    Many thanks for your explanation of agency/vekala. If I understand you clearly, one could classify the leninist theory of the avantgarde under the hat of the agency theory : the avantgarde forming the party leaders knows what is good for the proletariat better than the proletariat itself, hence the dictature exerted in the name of the proletariat. I can imagine that the traditional religious leaders in Iran also think that they know better than the Iranians what is good for them or not, am I correct ?
    That said, I wonder whether it is right to oppose the theory of representation to the theory of agency ? What if they were complementary ? The theory of agency being applied to the executives and the theory of representation being applied to the legislative ? Each theory can lead to excesses and abuse. Some dictators are so charismatic that they can get plebiscited by the masses.

  8. The NYTimes magazine has an essay entitled :
    An Islamic Democracy for Iraq ? by Ian Buruma.
    Well, I don’t know what to think about it; he seems to make curious generalizations, for instance equating Panarabism to Pangermanism(?), or stating that in continental EU democratic christian parties are still mainstream (?)
    Nor does he really discuss the question of democracy and islamism.

  9. If I understand you clearly, one could classify the leninist theory of the avantgarde under the hat of the agency theory : the avantgarde forming the party leaders knows what is good for the proletariat better than the proletariat itself, hence the dictature exerted in the name of the proletariat.
    If I understand Helena correctly, the theory of agency would be directly antithetical to the dictatorship of the proletariat, because it is premised on the agents being directly and personally authorized by their constituents rather than appointing themselves for the good of constituents who “don’t know better.” The Iranian religious leaders might believe they know better, but I don’t think they’re practicing rule by agency as Helena described it.
    he seems to make curious generalizations, for instance… stating that in continental EU democratic christian parties are still mainstream
    Are you saying that mainstream Christian Democratic parties don’t exist in the EU? Your own country had one the last time I looked. Granted, they’re not directly comparable to Islamism as practiced in Iran, but I don’t see much difference between them and “Islamic values” parties like the AKP in Turkey or UMNO in Malaysia.

  10. The whole idea that the ‘Western alliance’, if I may start calling it that, has anything to do with ‘democracy’ is becoming increasingly absurd in any case : western anti-proliferation policy is being run by General Pervez Musharraf, and no one else has any veto power over his decisions, as the brainless Dubya puppet made clear yesterday:
    Washington Post
    and the other western allies in the mid-east are even less ‘democratic’ than he is:
    CounterPunch

  11. As all the speakers at this gathering were apparently Shia’ Iranians, the personage that looms the largest over them is in fact Imam Mahdi, the twelfth “hidden” Imam. From an esoteric point of view, agency actually works in the opposite direction, as deputies of the Imam work to fulfill his ends in society. The most senior mujtahids are often considered to be his representatives.
    According to Mohsen Kadaver, the number of eternal statements may be small, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t very important. Islamic democracy will have fundamental differences with secular systems precisely because of the crucial aspect of divine guidance. He is right in that there is plenty of room within this limitation on the “will of the people” for robust interaction and the use of reason. The Islamic government in Iran hasn’t necessarily been a failure because of the restrictions imposed by Islam, but more so by the corruption and incompetence at very high levels, including members of the clerical class who are supposed to modeling superior morals. I am hoping to hear more about this conference, as it shows the reform movement is at least full of intellectual life, if nothing else.

  12. Aha, thank heavens for someone who has some comprehension of the difference between the idea that the people should be consulted (‘shura’, in Arabic) and the anti-religious idea of ‘vox populi, vox dei’.
    Note that according to a traditional Sunni reading ‘shura’ does not extend to the imposition of a hereditary Imamate (or more accurately the imposition of the myth of a hereditary Imamate to justify a schism).
    Ansar

  13. To be explicit, the constitutional system in both Sunni and Shi’a Islam requires that the umma, which is to say the community of believers, be permitted to choose a leader for themselves, according to the principle of shura (consultation, and in this context representation) – but the role of this leader is not to articulate the ‘will of the people’ according to the ‘vox populi, vox dei’ principle, but to articulate the desires of the people in the court of the Islamic jurisprudents, who will make the final adjudications as to what is and what is not agreeable with Shari’a law.
    The only dispute between Sunni and Shi’a is in the subsidiary question of the interpretation and extrapolation of Shari’a law from the bases in the Qur’an and Hadith. In fact, the opposition between the traditions of the Shi’a jursiprudents and those of the four Madhhabs of the Sunnis is no more fundamental than that between the Madhhabs themselves, i.e. it is not a real mutual exclusion but merely a matter of regional emphases.
    I say this because it would be idiotic for the Sunnis and Shi’i of Iraq to get trapped in the divide-and-rule games of the oppressive invader and his unbelieving lickspittle pawns.
    Now I shall leave Helena’s bandwidth alone for a bit.

  14. I’m taken aback by the idea that “vox populi, vox dei” is an anti-religious idea.
    This seems to imply that modern democracy is based solely on the unrestrained will of the majority. In fact, the modern theory of democracy is based on the notion of “unalienable, natural” rights. There are plenty of things that the majority cannot do. This formulation has been supported by plenty of religious people.
    Now what exactly those natural and unalienable rights include is a matter for controversy. I don’t know a really good specific investigation of that notion, at least not a recent one that would reflect such hot-button current topics as gay rights. However, it should be out there somewhere.

  15. I think most of us here are familiar with the shura idea, but what Helena’s describing doesn’t sound much like shura, or rather it sounds like a very specific concept that can be implemented either as part of a shura system or otherwise. Shura is a very broad concept that can be interpreted to fit nearly any form of government as long as there is some way for the citizens’ voices to be heard; I’ve seen the Saudi monarchy described as a shura system by some of its supporters. Soroush’s agency theory, on the other hand, describes a specific system that, as far as I know, is without historical precedent.

  16. Rowan,
    I don’t think this is the appropriate forum to discuss shia’ sunni issues. The gist of my point is that everything has a context, and the democracy movement in Iran must be considered within its socio-religious milieu to be able to fully appreciate the concepts being discussed. Shia’ philosophical and political thought has developed in markedly different ways from the Sunni world, and understanding the historic role of the Imams is central to understanding how democratic forms might develop in a place such as Iran.
    “Vox populi, vox dei” is not necessarily anti-islamic, depending on how it is intrepeted. Imam Khomeini constantly invoked the people of Iran in his speeches. Of course, if you can get ten million people to show up for your funeral, you might have a basis for assuming popular support. If this phrase is being intrepeted as advancing the cause of secular humanism however, there would be definite problems with it.

  17. Thanks to Rowan, haydar, et al for this important discussion. I doubt there’s anything like it anywhere in the entire world.
    My question is for Rowan: there was a famous Arabic poet/scientist (a ‘Renaissance’ figure, if you’ll forgive me) whose name I can’t recall. My point is that if his contributions to engineering had reached Europe, say, then the West would have had a head start in terms of technology. Why didn’t the Arabs take advantage of this ‘local’ genius?

  18. It’s long since I have visited this site, but if I am not wrong the same point was being discussed: agency.
    Agency is one of those words which has double and somewhat conflicting meanings. The sense of “power of attorney” given above implies one who acts for another. But the major sense in philosophy is the quality of being able to act for one’s self. It means freedom, or independence, or autonomy.
    There is another similar contradiction, between “author”, and “authority”. An author is an originator, therefore in a sense a transgressor. But an authority is the defender of a fixed canon – the opposite.
    Similarly, the “subject” in philosophy is opposite to the “subject” of a king. One is free, the other not free.
    The argument you are having above is usually articulated as “representative” versus “delegate”.
    I don’t want to be pedantic, though. The fact that you have grabbed at the word “agent” is telling.

  19. Dominic, yes, you’re quite right that in western philosophical discourse that’s the commonly understood meaning of “agency”. When I used the term here though it was as directly translated by Soroush from the Iranian term “vekala” (cognate of the Arabic “wikala”) which he translated as both “agency” and “power of attorney”.
    As you note, the conceptual links embedded in the anglophonic understanding of these terms, as of author/ authority/ and indeed “authorize”, are really interesting…

  20. I don’t think it is only Western, I think it is universal. As soon as people start talking about democracy the question of agency or independent judgement is there.
    When it is a matter of religion, the same question is there (e.g. Bhagavad Gita, Catholic doctrine of “free will” [Christianity is Eastern, not Western]).

Comments are closed.