It has been frequently said that a central problem respecting the rise of democracy in the Arab world to date has been a certain incapacity of Islam to embrace democratic norms. This may have lessened over time, certainly scholars from Khaled Abou El Fadl to Noah Feldman have made the refutation of the thesis something of a core scholarly project, but Arab spring nothwithstanding, and successful democratic experience in the non-Arab Muslim world notwithstanding (Indonesia, with more Muslims than all of the Arab Muslims combined, stands out along with Malaysia for immediate mention), the myth remains.  It is in this context that I recite the following passage from the incomparable political philosopher of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr, in The Irony of American History

[D]emocracy in its most ideal formulation is not as immediately relevant to the ancient cultures of the East or to the primitive cultures of Africa as is generally supposed.  Some of both the spiritual and socioeconomic presuppositions for it are lacking.  Spiritually the Orient is informed by religions which are either mystic and pantheistic such as Buddhism and Hinduism; or humanistic and collectivist such as the Confucianism of China or the Shintoism of Japan.  Pantheistic religions can find no significance for the individual in the integral unity of his spiritual and physical life. . . .

Thus there is no spiritual basis in the Orient for what we know as the 'dignity of the individual.'  . . . The mystic religions of the Orient will hardly prove more capable of offering spiritual resistance to the demonic dynamism of the communist movement.

A democratic society requires some capacity of the individual both to defy social authority on occasion when the standards violate his conscience and to relate himself to larger and larger communities than the primary family group.  The highly developed individual self-consciousness in the Western Christian tradition is supported by a long spiritual history.

The point, to be clear, is not to mock and ridicule Niebuhr, for if we were to dismiss him as a pedant with, once the pedantry is stripped away, subnormal intelligence, his generation's version of Newt Gingrich, then there would be no cause to regard his ruminations as being anything other than those of a pedantic idiot, and they could safely be dismissed. But Niebuhr is a wise and modest man, with a penetrating intellect and an incisive mind, capable of understanding the dilemmas facing America during the Cold War in a way few others could.  Yet even the great Reinhold Niebuhr with all of his intellectual gifts is capable of broad overgeneralized misapprehensions, and from his remarks we can see that they arise most frequently when it comes to matters of faith. 

In Niebuhr's time the demon was not extreme and nihilistic manifestations of political Islam but rather communism. Even as Christendom was deemed the natural home for democracy now, so it was deemed then.  Yet because the Muslim nations were hardly a matter with which an anticommunist need be concerned (communism holding quite limited sway in most of them given its insistence on atheism), Niebuhr's antithesis to democratic thought is not found in Islam.  In fact even the basis upon which he finds the religions of Asia so lacking in democratic capacity would be absent as concerns Islam, which certainly involves the relation of individual to a larger group than that of the family (the umma) and which certainly recognizes individual capacity to defy social authority, as indeed the tales of the Prophets in the Qur'an frequently revolve around one speaking Moses' truth to the Pharoah's power.

Fast forwarding 60 years from the date of Niebuhr's work, and the enemy is no longer communism, which lies in ashes. India's democratic experiment, which has now lasted several decades and seems as vibrant as ever, makes any claim that Hinduism and democracy are not easily compatible seem rather silly.  The same might be said of Japan. In fact, I suspect that for any reader of this blog entry who has never read Reinhold Niebuhr before, I've done him a great disservice by quoting at length something which sounds not just offensively wrong, but so silly as not to be taken seriously.  his thoughts elsewhere are far more relevant even today than the passage above suggests. 

Yet now, the enemy to democracy is Al Qaeda and its lethal kin.  And it thrives in the land of Islam, yet America remains safely in Christendom.  So while Christendom again is the natural home of democracy, we will acknowledge that it might develop roots elsewhere, just not in the lands of Islam, where the more contemporary antidemocratic threat arises (from the margins I insist, and rapidly fading margins at that, but that is the subject of previous posts). Hence the resistance to democracy relates not to individuals and communities and the relationship of one to the other, but caliphates and divinely oriented rule systems that are purported to preclude the ability of a people to make its own laws (never mind that Judaism is at least as legalistic as we are). 

So fifty years from now, will those who talk of Islam's inherent incapacity to embrace democracy look at least as silly as Niebuhr does ascribing all of this to tenets of faiths millenia old, all of which have found ways to thrive in a variety of political systems?  I wonder.

HAH