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Daniel Brumberg

Islam Is Not the Solution

(orthe

Problem)

© 2005 by The Center for Strategic and International Studies and the MassachusettsInstitute of TechnologyThe Washington Quarterly • 29:1 pp. 97–116.

THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY s WINTER 2005-06 97

Daniel Brumberg is an associate professor of government at Georgetown University anda special adviser to the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C. Theauthor would like to thank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for

supporting the researching and writing of this article.

The quest to repair, reinterpret, reform, or otherwise fix Islam canbe seen in a range of official and nongovernmental initiatives, the likes of

which were hardly imaginable before Al Qaeda’s emergence. Colloquia on

ijtihad (the interpretation of Islam), conferences promoting liberal Islamic

networks, and the funding of liberal Muslim thinkers and their writings are

but a few examples of recent efforts to support Muslim voices that have

been drowned out by the din of Islamist populism. This development should

warm many hearts in the Arab world. After all, Islamists themselves have

long argued that democratic reform requires a transformation of Muslim

consciousness, asserting that the evolution of Islamic identity is the sourceof the problem and thus the core of the solution. 1

That an expanding circle of academics, journalists, and policymakers in

the United States has adopted some version of this argument is a trend that

holds both promise and concern. Because, with few exceptions, Islamists re-

main the best organized and most influential opposition forces in the Arab

world, any policy that does not engage mainstream Islamists, particularly ad-

vocates of a more pluralistic Islam, will fail to be credible or effective. Yet,

without understanding the intricacies of Islamist politics, U.S. efforts to en-

list Islamists and their ideas in the cause of democracy will do little good

and might do considerable harm. The problem is not merely that an uncriti-

cal engagement might strengthen illiberal Islamist forces.2 The more funda-

mental problem is the erroneous assumption that Islam itself provides the

foundation of political identity.



l Daniel Brumberg

THE WASHINGTON QUARTERLY s WINTER 2005-0698

Challenging this assumption and the misleading policies that have emerged

from it is tricky. Who today would assail a policy that, to its credit, has bro-

ken with the “soft bigotry of low expectations” 3 that long guided Washington’s

approach to the Middle East? As President George W. Bush has repeatedlystated, it is wrong to assume that “millions of men and women are con-

demned by history or culture to live in despotism.”4 Yet, even if bigoted no-

tions about an intrinsically “authoritarian” Islam are dangerous, so too is

the facile conviction that, with the proper

formula and a dose of wise clerical leader-

ship, Islam and democracy will join forces.

One should be wary of replacing an out-

dated ethnocentrism with an equally sim-

plistic universalism. To jump from one to the

other conflates a vaguely messianic impulse

to bridge the divide between the Islamic

world and the West with the more prosaic

task of grasping how the thorny question of

identity, and not merely Islam itself, fits into

the complex puzzle of democratic transformation.

On this score, the “Islam is the solution” approach—a policy that seeks to

promote democracy through supporting new Islamic thinking and new Islamicparties—suffers from three shortcomings. For one, it greatly underestimates the

political, social, and ideological obstacles to disseminating a liberal Islamic

ethos. These barriers are so formidable that, for the foreseeable future, any ef-

fective engagement with Islamists will require dealing with activists, many of

whom espouse ideas profoundly at odds with U.S. notions of democracy and

freedom.

Second, naming Islam as the solution exaggerates the extent to which Is-

lam shapes Muslims’ political identity. Not only do ethnicity and tribal af-

filiation often trump religion, but many Muslims, both practicing andnonpracticing, believe that their version of Islam should be separated or at

least distanced from politics. Indeed, little consensus exists in the Arab

world about the proper relationship between mosque and state. On the con-

trary, that world is rent by profound divisions over the very question of na-

tional identity—what it means to be Egyptian, Moroccan, Algerian, Bahraini,

or Iraqi.

Finally, the idea of Islamic democracy fails to recognize that there is no

Islamic solution to such identity conflicts. As the drama in Iraq demon-

strates, absent consensus over national identity, this solution requires

power-sharing arrangements that offer as many groups and voices as possible

a seat at the table of multiparty government. This kind of consensus-build-

U.S. policy should

focus less on ideas

and more onpromoting

institutional reforms.




Islam Is Not the Solution (or the Problem) l

99

ing approach cannot succeed unless all groups check their religions at the

door. Indeed, they must agree to constitutional and legal protections that

guarantee Muslims—Shi‘a and Sunni—as well as non-Muslims the right to

believe or not to believe as they please.How then to secure this institutional compromise, particularly when it

flies in the face of what it means to be an Islamist in today’s Arab world?

The idea that such an agreement must await an “Islamic Reformation” is un-

realistic. Although advocates of liberal Islam deserve U.S. support, it will

take decades for them to secure a politically significant foothold in the Arab

world. Democratic reform cannot be postponed, however, and the focus of

U.S. policy should therefore be less on ideas and far more on promoting the

institutional and procedural reforms that will prod mainstream Islamist poli-

ticians and parties to forge a democratic power-sharing accommodation

both with regimes and with non-Islamist political parties (all groups—secu-

lar, Muslim, and/or ethnic—that do not support an Islamist agenda, such as

the “Islamization” of education or, more ambitiously, the creation of an Is-

lamic state). In practical terms, this means helping non-Islamists build con-

stituencies and effective political parties, because it is only through the

carrots and sticks of real political competition that Islamists will see the

logic behind shelving their ideological priorities in favor of a system of com-

promise and multiparty coalition government. The examples of Turkey andIndonesia amply demonstrate just how critical such institutional incentives

and constraints are to promoting democracy. Although their democracies

are far from consolidated and the Islamic parties that participate or lead

their governments are not as united or as ideologically coherent as some

suggest, Turkey and Indonesia nevertheless illustrate that, for democracy to

have any hope in the Arab world, it is not Islam that must be fixed, but poli-

tics itself.

The Allure and Limits of Islamic Modernism

The fact that democracy promoters in the United States and their allies in

print and television media have embraced those Muslim intellectuals who

have boldly asserted that Islam demands democracy is a positive develop-

ment. It required courage to defy the myriad Arab nationalists and Islamists

who argued that any Arab who took up the Bush administration’s call for

democracy was a mere lackey of the United States or, worse yet, of Israel.

Although those accusations intimidated some, other Muslim liberals havewelcomed the warm hug of prominent foreign policy commentators, despite

their giddy naïveté or occasional ignorance about the origins and evolution

of what goes under the broad heading of “Islamic modernism.”5



l Daniel Brumberg


That phenomenon was hardly as novel as some of these commentators

imply. Egypt’s grand mufti, Muhammad Abduh, and his student, Ali Abdul

Raziq, pioneered an innovative way of thinking about the relationship be-

tween Islam and politics some 120 years ago. Since that time, the underlyingassumptions of what we now call Islamic modernism have remained the

same, even though successive generations of intellectuals have pushed this

approach in attempts to address its repeated failure to galvanize Arab imagi-

nations beyond a thin stratum of Western-oriented Muslims. The Islamic

modernists’ approach pivots around the basic idea that it is both possible

and vital to distinguish between the timeless, core values of Islam and the

way such norms are interpreted to address the evolving political, legal, so-

cial, and economic needs of each generation. Values such as tolerance, jus-

tice, equality, and moderation are identified from a comprehensive or

holistic reading of the Koran, rather than from any particular line or para-

graph. Islamic modernists argue that a literalist reading of any injunction in

the Koran can be deeply antagonistic to Islam because that interpretation

conflates the Koran’s ageless ideals with the time-specific tasks that

Muhammad faced. Without a grasp of how the evolution of human intellect

and reason effectively re-reveals “revealed truth,” thereby creating what

some modernists call a “living shari‘a,” or modern Islamic law, Islam cannot

realize its full potential.6

It is from this point of view that modernists argue for democracy because

it is said to be consonant with notions of participation and justice, mani-

fested, they argue, in the Prophet Muhammad’s call for shura (consultation).

They claim that democracy is the most efficient system for nurturing a mod-

ern and yet culturally authentic Islam. By linking the quest for democracy

and freedom with the need to protect society’s religious heritage, the mod-

ernist project has inspired many Muslim intellectuals to call not merely for

democracy, but also for a kind of Islamic Reformation. For example, Morocco’s

Abdou Filali-Ansary and Iran’s Abdul Karim Soroush, among others, havepushed the Islamic modernist project down a distinctly liberal path by argu-

ing that Islam’s spiritual influence would be enhanced by making the indi-

vidual, rather than governments or states, the focal point for interpreting or

experiencing faith.

Unfortunately, in the Arab world the very features that have drawn

such thinkers to Islamic liberalism have sometimes alienated a far larger

group of Muslim intellectuals and activists. The problem with the Islamic

modernists’ arguments is that their project hinges on a complex and often

opaque interpretive schema difficult for lay people to grasp. More cru-

cially, many find it difficult to avoid concluding that the core values that

modernists attribute to Islam come from Western political thought, and





101

the validity of this claim is far less politically relevant than the perception

that Islamic modernism is a Western project dressed in a thin Islamic garb.

Why sweat through a complicated series of interpretations to conclude

that Islam demands, for example, equal rights for women or equality of citizenship for Muslims and non-Muslims when it is far easier and perhaps

more honest to embrace Western ideas?

Islamic fundamentalists insist that a literalist reading of the Koran is the

only defense against a slippery slope that will eviscerate Islamic laws of

whatever distinct message God meant them

to have. The efforts of Islamic modernists to

advance an Islamic Reformation have been

especially susceptible to such fundamentalist

critiques. Because Sunni Islam does not pro-

vide for a clerical establishment but never-

theless calls for a linkage between religion and

politics, it is unclear how to justify a Protes-

tant-like movement to challenge a “church”

whose very existence Islam does not clearly

mandate. Islamic modernists’ audacious bid to liberate the interpretation of

Islam from the control of the quasi-official clerical establishments in Egypt,

Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia collides with this paradox by raising theawkward question of how any construction of Islam, including a liberal one,

will take root, absent an authoritative political body to legitimate and dis-

seminate it. The modernists’ response to this conundrum is that democratic

politics itself will eventually provide the vehicle for the triumph of a plural-

ist Islam. Yet, this retort not only places undue faith in the capacity of de-

mocracy to produce a rational or liberal thinking but also sidesteps the

concern of many orthodox Muslims that, once the state no longer controls

Islam, any amateur can step in, thus setting the stage for ideological, legal,

and social chaos, or fitna.This is why most mainstream Islamists, the majority of whom are lay ac-

tivists, do not so much question the right of the state’s clerics to interpret

Islam as assail those clerics for not defending the “correct” form of Islam.

This allegation is obviously self-serving. The bid to legitimate an Islamic Ref-

ormation has actually often strengthened fundamentalists, who plausibly ar-

gue that Islam is nothing without the state’s control. The inopportune

conditions in which Islamic modernism has struggled have magnified the al-

lure of this counterargument. Islamic modernism has often emerged in the

crucible of a great crisis, when the ostentatious corruption and economic in-

equality that accompany rapid development have nurtured fears of a new

cultural and economic Western invasion.

Only real political

competition willconvince Islamists to

shelve their ideology.



l Daniel Brumberg


Globalization has reinforced such paranoia by expanding the gap between

the haves and have-nots. Globalization’s losers fill the urban slums of Rabat,

Algiers, Cairo, and Amman, creating an enormous pool of potential recruits

for illiberal Islamism, whereas the winners are found among the Westernizedintelligentsia and small-business community. Is it any wonder then that,

when Islamic modernists raise their pens, they often provoke a counterat-

tack from illiberal Islamists? Not only does the latter group have the advan-

tage of numbers and organization, but it also

benefits from the belief that its adherents are

defending the identity of the Islamic umma

(community) and not their lily-livered mod-

ernist opponents. These perceptions have

proven disastrous for Islamic modernists.

Caught between illiberal Islamists and au-

tocratic regimes, some of which have actu-

ally tolerated or even assisted the former in

an effort to silence liberal thinkers, the mod-

ernists have faced two unfavorable options:

retreat or exile. Those who have chosen retreat include thinkers such as

Egypt’s Khaled Muhammad Khaled, who defected to a fundamentalist vision

after spending years advocating democracy. The rather long list of promi-nent Islamic liberals who have gone into exile includes Egypt’s Khaled Abou

El-Fadl, who now teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles,

and Nasr Abu Zeid, who currently resides in Amsterdam; Sudan’s Abdullahi

an-Naim, now a professor of law at Emory University; and Pakistan’s late

Fazlur Rahman, who taught at the University of Chicago. The fact that

many leading Muslim liberals have found a safer home in U.S. universities

speaks volumes about the enduring crisis of Islamic modernism.

Given the dilemmas facing Islamic liberals, might their cause be best

served by making Arab states the principal advocates of a pluralist Islam?The idea is popular in Washington, but applying it to the Middle East is a

tricky matter. Arab rulers are reluctant to offend clerical establishments that

have grown increasingly reactionary and influential. Responding to this

trend, the rulers of Egypt and Kuwait have at times indulged the religious

authorities by encouraging, or at least not opposing, the efforts of conserva-

tive judges to persecute liberals for “un-Islamic” views. However loathsome

such ideological concessions may appear, it is unrealistic and possibly coun-

terproductive to demand that Arab regimes purge advocates of illiberal Is-

lam from powerful institutions such as Egypt’s Al-Azhar University or that

they compel their religious institutions to rewrite religious textbooks to

meet the standards of Islamic modernism. The problem is not merely that

In the Arab world,

the fundamentalist

agenda has anorganized

constituency.





103

institutions such as Al-Azhar command a level of authority that is easier to

inflame than it is to undermine; the fundamental obstacle is rooted in the

Islamic liberal approach itself. Most clerics are hesitant to adopt interpreta-

tions of Islam that their traditional followers question or do not compre-hend, and many clerics fear that they would lose power by demanding the

separation of mosque and state. It is not clear how or why clerics should use

their authority to legitimate a reformationist logic that rejects that very au-

thority! Hard-line Sunni clerics regularly hurl this contradiction at reformist

clerics. These turncoats, the Sunnis assert, are undermining the very edifice

of Islam.

Paradoxically, more autocracy might be the most effective way to over-

come state-supported clerics’ resistance to advancing a modernist agenda.

For example, the government of Tunisia has disseminated a pluralistic vision

of Islam through the state’s public schools, a policy whose legitimacy is sus-

pect because it has been implemented by a police state that has repressed Is-

lamists. Morocco has taken a more pluralistic approach through consultative

councils whose mission is to create a consensus on controversial policies such

as reforming the personal status laws and, more recently, revising religious

textbooks. The very legitimacy of Morocco’s endeavor, however, rests on the

shoulders of the monarch, who as amir al-mumineen (commander of the

faithful) has the constitutional right to interpret what is Islamic. Many Is-lamists have decried this power as undemocratic, arbitrary, and thus un-Is-

lamic. Still, given the conservatism of the clerical establishment and secular

groups’ fears that any reformist agenda would be captured either by clerics

or Islamists, it is difficult to imagine a way forward other than making re-

form dependent on the supreme power of Morocco’s young king. Whether

this gambit succeeds or is undercut by a change of heart on the part of the

monarch, it is worth emphasizing that no other Arab state has a commander

of the faithful, which is a unique office in the Arab world whose very exist-

ence illustrates the challenges of promoting a state-based reform of Islamthat has both religious authority and democratic credentials.7

Is Islam the Foundation of Political Identity?

Washington’s fascination with modernist Islam is animated by a very old

idea, namely, that Islam defines the political identity of the Arab world.

This view is naturally the party line of Islamists, which is reason enough to

avoid accepting the proposal at face value. Even “objective” evidence, how-ever, such as election results, that is often cited to support this thesis must

also be viewed skeptically. Although Islamists have emerged as one of the

strongest, if not the strongest, opposition force wherever reasonably com-



l Daniel Brumberg


petitive elections have been held, these “facts” do not support the seductive

conclusion that, given a free choice among alternative ideologies, most

Muslims will always embrace an Islamist agenda. The real problem is that, in

the Arab world, the fundamentalist agenda has an organized constituencywhile the non-Islamist agenda is either controlled by a discredited authori-

tarian regime and/or has little organized basis in society itself. As a result,

the multiplicity of cultural, religious, ethnic, and linguistic cleavages that

are an everyday reality throughout the Arab

world do not find a direct or democratic ex-

pression in formal political life.

There are, of course, partial exceptions to

this rule. The first is Lebanon, whose “con-

fessional democracy” has been both praised

and damned for institutionalizing (some say

magnifying) divisions among Sunnis, Shi‘ites,

Druze, Orthodox Christians, and Roman

Catholics. The second exception is Iraq,

where Shi‘ites, Kurds, and Sunnis are pursu-

ing a bitter struggle to define a democratic power-sharing system. In fact,

however, the identity conflicts that have beguiled Iraq and Lebanon are

echoed from Rabat to Kuwait City. Some of these conflicts run along ethnic-national fault lines, as in Morocco and Algeria, where Berber minorities have

tended to reject collectivist notions of political identity based on Arabism or

Islamism. Elsewhere in the Arab world, the cleavage is religious or sectarian,

as in Bahrain, where a Sunni minority has dominated the Shi‘ite majority

through its control of the monarchy. By contrast, in Jordan a nationalist-

tradit ionalist cleavage between Palestinians and Bedouin tribal groups has

loomed large and has sometimes become violent, a pattern that has been re-

peated in Yemen, where the effort of the tribal-Islamist North to impose it-

self on the South, many of whose elites inherited the modernizing, secularinfluence of the former Soviet Union, has bedeviled the country’s “unifica-

tion” since 1991.

Yet, the sharpest divide, which is not so much religious or ethnic as it is

ideological and even existential, pits those Muslims who want to align poli-

tics with religion against those who wish to keep these spheres apart. The

latter are by no means only Western-oriented secularists; they include Sufi

Muslims, whose mystical practices most Islamists reject, and traditional or

even pious Muslims, who believe that faith is a personal matter. Thus, the

key divide of concern here is not between Islamists and secularists; it is be-

tween Islamists and non-Islamists. The most salient expression of this fissure

is found in North Africa, where Muslims who identify with French language

The key divide is not

between Islamists

and secularists, butbetween Islamists

and non-Islamists.





105

and culture have become separated from those who regard the Arab-Islamic

world as their wider home. Even though Arab rulers have tried to deflect

this trend by fostering a sense of nationalism, in recent years globalization

has widened the gulf between French and Arab Muslims by creating culturaland economic networks that bind the former to western Europe and the lat-

ter to the ideological and religious world of pan-Islamism. This polarizing

dynamic has also destabilized countries that do not suffer the kind of cul-

tural or linguistic bifurcation typical of the Maghreb. In Egypt, which is of-

ten touted as the most culturally unified Arab country, globalization has

taken the metropolis of Cairo by storm, vastly expanding the cultural and

socioeconomic gap between those who live in privileged neighborhoods

such as Ma‘adi and Heliopolis and those who suffer, sometimes just a few

blocks away, in the slums of Imbaba and Boulak al-Dakrour. Satell ite televi-

sion networks such as Al Jazeera have obscured this divide by fostering a

shared sense of grievance against the United States and Israel. This consen-

sus of resentment cannot create a common vision of politics, however,

much less a new formula for democratizing the region.

This absence of a consensus over national identity, rather than any par-

ticular brand of Islamism, be it moderate, radical, illiberal, or modernist, is

one of the primary roots of autocracy in the Arab world. Even if the most re-

strained of Islamists reject violence and promise to adhere to the rules of de-mocracy, this pledge alone cannot ease the fears of ethnic, secular, or even

some traditionalist Muslims that democracy will give Islamists a mandate to

impose their agenda. Consequently, despite growing dismay over the costs of

autocracy, thousands of would-be democrats in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt,

Jordan, Kuwait, and Yemen are still not ready to risk their lives to openly

challenge the status quo. Such worries are matched by the perception among

Islamists that the very purpose of the Arab world’s autocracies is to give eth-

nic, religious, or ideological minorities a vehicle for thwarting the majority.

The tragedy of the Middle East is that the fears of both sides are justified, andas a result, it has been difficult to negotiate an exit from the authoritarianism

that has haunted the region for decades.

It’s about Institutions, Not Islam

How then can democracy be made a winning proposition for all concerned?

Regime change, either from below or from above, will not achieve this goal.

On the contrary, as the experience in Iraq shows, even in the wake of top-pling a despotic regime, democratization is more likely to produce civil war

than to bring about stable and inclusive political change unless a political

process is established that reduces citizens’ fear that free elections will lead



l Daniel Brumberg


to their subjugation at the hands of the winners. That democratization

could become part of the problem rather than the solution is not a popular

statement to make these days. On the contrary, many a Middle East watcher

has been rendered light-headed by the recent “Arab Spring,” with its rousingimages of thousands of Iraqi citizens defying the insurgents to vote, of a mil-

lion Lebanese protesting Syria’s occupation, or of hundreds of Egyptians de-

fying President Husni Mubarak with their Kifaya movement, which is led by

a group of largely secular intellectuals and professionals who have had

“enough” (kifaya in Arabic) with the status quo. Yet, despite such good

news, Arab regimes and their opponents must still devise a democratic solu-

tion to the identity conflicts that have kept the pot of autocracy boiling.

POWER SHARING IS (P ART OF ) THE SOLUTION

Such a solution will be found less in the ethereal realm of ideas than in the

quintessentially political process of creating procedures, laws, and institu-

tions that ensure the inclusion of all significant groups in democratically

elected, multiparty, power-sharing governments. The purpose of such con-

sensual democracy is not to bridge the identity gap between Islamists and

non-Islamists or the gap between Berbers and Arabs. On the contrary, pre-

cisely because the very raison d’être of democratic power-sharing is to in-

clude all voices that accept the rules of the game and reject violence, the

price for a seat at the table of government must include accepting the

premise that the government will not impose any one group’s cultural or re-

ligious agenda on the rest of society. In short, some kind of explicit or im-

plicit distancing of mosque and state is vital. This is a prerequisite not

because people come to believe in it as a matter of first-order principles, but

rather because, as a pragmatic matter, only a constitutional order that de-

fends everyone’s right to practice or not practice his or her religion freely

can secure a polity that is democratic, inclusive, and reasonably peaceful.Unfortunately, the prospects for a move toward substantive, democratic

power-sharing remain modest. There are a host of reasons, including the

support that relatively friendly Arab autocracies, such as Egypt and Tunisia,

still receive from the United States. Yet, the more elementary domestic ob-

stacle lies in the surprisingly durable nature of Arab autocracies. Over the

last decade, many of these regimes have survived by enforcing a system of

autocratic power-sharing and state-managed pluralism that gave secular, Is-

lamist, and ethnic groups room to express their views in the press and even

in elected, state-controlled assemblies but that provided no basis for trans-lating these voices into a unified movement capable of threatening regimes.

Although opposition groups complained endlessly about such limitations,

their members were reluctant to defy this system of liberalized autocracy, in





107

part because, despite its flaws, it offered two advantages. First, it gave oppo-

sition groups space to criticize regimes and mobilize public support, some-

thing that Islamists were especially good at because, in contrast to their

secular rivals, they controlled mosques and other religious institutionsthrough which they could attract a mass following. Second, the power-shar-

ing arrangement enforced a measure of peaceful coexistence by providing

state-controlled legislatures under whose roofs competing groups could raise

their respective political and cultural agendas without fearing that they

would be dominated by the other. In short,

precisely because such legislatures and the

state-managed system that created them al-

lowed no group real power, many opposition

groups came to prefer, or at least tolerate, lib-

eralized autocracy. They feared that democra-

tization would create real winners and losers

and thus invite political conflict or even civil

war. Although manipulated by autocratic re-

gimes, such apprehensions were sustained by

the civil conflict that engulfed Algeria during

the 1990s, by the civil war that erupted in Yemen in 1993, and by the memory

of Lebanon’s civil war, the termination of which was marked by the 1989Taif Accords.

In the course of the last year, this tacit political consensus has frayed in

several Arab countries, including Yemen and Egypt, as secularists and Islam-

ists have concluded that the costs of liberalized autocracy are too high. Is-

lamists have sunk deeper ideological roots in Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, and

Kuwait, in part by expanding their direct or indirect control over profes-

sional associations, publishing houses, and even educational institutions,

such as Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, that are in theory controlled by the

state. Yet, increasing ideological influence rarely offers a chance for actualpolitical power—a point that has encouraged Islamists to explore cooperat-

ing with secular forces. For their part, some non-Islamists have concluded

that the only way to escape the snare of state-managed liberalization is to

roll the dice and demand real democratic reforms.

These intersecting calculations have produced new efforts at forging alli-

ances and cooperation, as reflected in the Doha Declaration signed by Is-

lamist, liberal, and Arab nationalist intellectuals and political activists in

June 2004.8 The key feature of this agreement is a call for national pacts

that would define the rules and procedures for a new era of democratic gov-

ernment. Such pacts can play two critical roles in helping regimes and oppo-

sitions define an exit from a legacy of autocratic government. First, pacts

within oppositions can enhance the political leverage of oppositions by de-

Globalization has

reinforced paranoiaby expanding the

gap between the

haves and have-nots.



l Daniel Brumberg


flecting the divide-and-rule strategies that autocrats have long used to sus-

tain their power. Second, by providing a set of mutual guarantees that pro-

tect the basic political interests of all groups, pacts can enhance the political

leverage of regime reformers, thus effectively creating a pro-democracy alli-ance between regime actors and opposition forces. Absent such an alliance,

it is difficult to imagine how Arab regimes can move beyond the state-man-

aged liberalizations that endure despite increasing dissatisfaction with the

status quo of liberalized autocracy.9

PROMOTING COMPETITION

The Doha Declaration represents a small but potentially important step for-

ward. Its significance lies in the fact that it demonstrates the capacity of oppo-sition groups with conflicting cultural and ideological agendas to find some

kind of common ground. The prospects for pacts will remain limited, however,

and even ephemeral as long as non-Islamist forces are so outnumbered and,

more importantly, so out-organized that they can have little hope of compet-

ing with Islamists. This problem is evident in Iraq and is bound to surface if

and when the venue for pact-making shifts from the artificial arena of a pan-

Arab conference of opposition forces in Qatar to the critical arena of national

politics in Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, or Kuwait. Each

of these countries has experienced regime-controlled attempts to promote na-

tional dialogues and even formal pacts. For the most part, however, such pacts

have helped to redefine the rules of liberalized autocracy rather that set out a

new agenda for genuine democratization. Yet, despite all the good news aris-

ing from the Arab Spring, support for negotiating such an agenda will remain

limited as long as regimes and their tacit allies in non-Islamist opposition

movements continue to fear that any genuine democratic pacts would be a

Trojan horse for Islamist domination.

Given this complex situation, the initial focus of democracy promoterswithin and outside the Arab world should not be on pact-making per se.

Rather, their efforts should be directed at promoting institutional and legal

reforms that boost the mobilizing capacity of non-Islamist forces. The latter

will never have any hope of competing with Islamists as long as the playing

field remains tilted in Islamists’ favor. Paradoxically, this tilting is a direct

consequence of the very controls that liberalized autocracies maintain over

the nature and scope of political participation. Because only Islamist parties,

by virtue of their access to mosques, religious charities, and other bodies,

have the means to challenge or partly circumvent such regime controls,non-Islamists have been left with the unenviable choice of supporting re-

gimes or allying with opposition forces whose ideological agendas they reject

but cannot deflect, given the overwhelming advantages enjoyed by Islamist





109

parties. For this reason, non-Islamists are unlikely to take the risk of forging

opposition alliances until a more competitive playing field emerges.

TURKEY AND INDONESIA : DIFFICULT LESSONS FOR THE A RAB WORLD

How then can a more competitive playing field be promoted? Some experts

have looked to the recent experiences of Turkey and Indonesia for answers

because, in both countries, Islamist parties have endorsed and enforced plu-

ralistic and democratic arrangements that respect the political and cultural

interests of non-Islamists. This development has prompted talk of a new, al-

ternative “Muslim democracy” that might

eventually take root in the Arab world, even

though neither of these cases is an Arabcountry.

The good news is that the experiences of

Turkey and Indonesia demonstrate that de-

mocratization and accommodation between

Islamists and non-Islamists does not require

a magical transformation of Islamic con-

sciousness. Modernist ideas have found a

more responsive chord in both countries

than they have in the Arab world. What has counted most, however, is the

fact that in Indonesia and Turkey secularists and traditional non-Islamic

Muslim parties have retained organized political support in society, a situa-

tion that has compelled Islamists to shelve religious agendas, such as the im-

position of Islamic law or, more ambitiously, the quest to establish an Islamic

state, in favor of the politics of accommodation. The stick of military estab-

lishments that serve as de jure or, in Indonesia’s case, de facto enforcers of

the state’s secular identity, coupled with the carrot that comes from the links

between the export-oriented business sector in each country and the inter-national business community, have also combined to create a web of incen-

tives and opportunities encouraging Islamist parties to respect the rules of

democratic, pluralistic politics.

The bad news is that the pragmatic calculus that has helped advance de-

mocracy in Indonesia and Turkey is not written in stone. Rather, it is the

product of a particular balance of domestic, regional, and global forces that

could shift dramatically, undermining the evolving balance of power that

has encouraged Islamist parties in those countries to subordinate their Is-

lamist policies to democratic governance. Moreover, even if the constraintsand incentives that have thus far helped to secure a pragmatic consensus in

favor of democratic secular politics endure in Indonesia and Turkey, the sys-

tems in place in these countries will be extremely difficult to replicate in the

The absence of aconsensus over

national identity is one

of the primary roots

of Arab autocracy.



l Daniel Brumberg


Arab world. With the possible exception of Morocco, most Arab states do

not boast a pro-democratic, export-oriented business class. Moreover, al-

though the militaries or security establishments in the Arab world are very

powerful, there is no legal or cultural tradition that would support their for-mal intervention in politics. The most cru-

cial point is that, with the possible exception

of Morocco, not one of the Arab world’s lib-

eralized autocracies boasts a political arena

in which non-Islamist parties can mobilize a

significant following. Consequently, talk of

importing the Turkish model or of bringing

“L’Islam des Tropiques” to the Arab world is, as

they say in Arabic, kilam fadi (empty words).10

LEVELING THE PLAYING FIELD: ORGANIZING NON-ISLAMISTS

Even though talk of importing this or that non-Arab model may be consid-

ered grandiose, naïve, or simply silly, it is useful to consider the kinds of re-

forms that might promote a level of competition sufficient to make pact-making

and democratization a more viable and winning proposition not only for Is-

lamists but also, and more importantly, for non-Islamists. It is non-Islamists

who need the most help, not their Islamist rivals. This point is not easily ad-

vanced in Washington, where the quest to find politically acceptable Islam-

ist interlocutors or, more ambitiously, to fix Islam itself has often obscured

the need to engage non-Islamists.

Some might argue that focusing on non-Islamist parties is a waste of time

because they tend to represent a miniscule part of the population while their

Islamist competitors speak for an overwhelming majority. Yet, this thinking is

misguided. Islamists are powerful not because they represent the majority, but

rather because they speak for an organized plurality that can usually deliver30–40 percent of a relatively free vote. This may not seem like a very large

number, but its political significance has been greatly magnified and distorted

by the striking capacity of Arab regimes to use the tools of financial and politi-

cal patronage, not to mention their control of the media, to mobilize their

own constituencies and/or to intimidate would-be voters who are not regime

loyalists into abstaining or to voting for regime candidates. These political

facts of life have left a fragmented array of secularists, business people, Muslim

traditionalists, and ethnic groups with the unenviable choice of staying home,

voting for corrupt regimes, or sending a protest vote by pulling the lever forIslamists, despite the former’s qualms about the latter.

To change this calculus of apathy, cynicism, or anger, democracy promot-

ers in the United States must encourage reforms that give non-Islamists an

Some kind of explicit

or implicit distancing

of mosque and state

is vital.





111

organizational alternative to the regimes as well as to their Islamist oppo-

nents. The “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” choices that non-Islam-

ist voters face when political systems are dominated by a lose-lose, two-way

contest between regimes and Islamist oppositions cannot be remediedthrough elections themselves. Rather, more dramatic, long-term reforms

must be enacted to eventually produce a political field that features at least

three, if not four or five, main contenders.

Adapting U.S. Policy to Focus on Institutions, Not Islam

The Bush administration is hardly oblivious to the need for a reform strategy

that helps galvanize underorganized, non-Islamist constituencies. Therefore,with the notable exceptions of Iraq and Afghanistan, it has focused this

strategy far less on elections and far more on medium- and long-term struc-

tural changes aimed at strengthening civil societies, promoting women’s po-

litical participation, and advancing market-oriented economic reforms. The

problem with this largely bottom-up, “demand-side” approach is that it does

not sufficiently address the supply side of the problem, which is nothing less

than overly centralized states that provide no truly effective outlets for po-

litical leaders other than regime cronies to freely mobilize and then formally

and effectively represent competing constituencies. Although there aresigns that the Bush administration’s Middle East Partnership Initiative

(MEPI) is adding more supply-side, state-focused programs to its agenda,

the emphasis remains on civil society.11 The fact of the matter is that inde-

pendent parties with the legal right and organizational capacity to mobilize

freely barely exist in the Arab world. Indeed, in Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait,

they are forbidden, and elsewhere they are emasculated by an array of laws

and complicated bureaucratic procedures. Because non-Islamists are the pri-

mary victims of these obstacles, the Bush administration must press Arab

leaders to drop these laws and procedures and to enact constitutional and

legal reforms, without which legislatures will remain little more than debat-

ing societies, a situation that only reinforces the resignation and apathy of

Arab youth.

Moreover, Washington must expand its grassroots, political party pro-

grams and target them at constituencies that have little or no effective rep-

resentation. Such constituencies are not limited to women, even though

U.S.-sponsored democracy assistance programs tend to make women a top

priority. Because many women are, in fact, often sympathetic to Islamistsand are even Islamists themselves, particularly women who live in urban ar-

eas and are literate, a policy designed to level the political playing field must

reach out to ethnic groups such as Berbers and Kurds, traditional Muslims in



l Daniel Brumberg


urban and especially rural areas, middle-class professionals, and indepen-

dent business people.

This last group could be an especially significant target. Many Arab

economies’ direct or indirect dependence on oil exports or other externalrents has limited the capacity of the business sector to act as an indepen-

dent political force, but there are ways to nudge this group from its tacit or

active support of autocracy and toward sup-

port for democratic reforms. The January 2004

Arab Business Council Declaration, which

states that “economic reform necessitates the

development of governance systems in the

Arab world,” is a tepid but potentially signifi-

cant step that suggests that some business

people might welcome more initiatives to link

economic and political reforms.12 Therefore,

U.S. nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)

that have focused on promoting private-sec-

tor initiatives, such as the Center for International Private Enterprise, must

now begin to design programs that will help the business sector forge organi-

zational and financial ties with political parties. Absent such initiatives, it is

difficult to see how the Arab world’s silent pluralities will secure the eco-nomic resources to stand on their own.

Such fundamental political restructuring of the institutions of political

representation does not mean abandoning Washington’s traditional focus

on grassroots civil society programs. To be effective, however, the United

States must not shy away from promoting civil society organizations that

have an explicitly political role, namely, to enhance the credibility and orga-

nizational effectiveness of political parties, elections, and legislative bodies.

The promotion of local, provincial, and national election-monitoring asso-

ciations or of citizens’ groups that work to improve local and national legis-latures would make political participation a credible and attractive option

for the thousands of young people who do not currently participate. Toward

this end, rather than becoming directly involved in such initiatives, an ap-

proach that would rob them of credibility and thus undermine their effec-

tiveness, official and nonofficial U.S. organizations such as the National

Endowment for Democracy, MEPI, and the U.S. Agency for International

Development should promote partnerships between indigenous Arab NGOs

and their Western counterparts, with the former take a leading role in project

design and implementation wherever possible.

In concert with the above, it is vital that the U.S. government support

the efforts of Arab political activists to create forums through which Islam-

Non-Islamists need

an organizational

alternative to the

regimes and their

Islamist opponents.





113

ists and non-Islamists can pursue dialogues about the purposes of political

reform. Such bridge-building activities could occur via citizens’ groups or

professional associations, but to be most effective, the effort should be based

in secondary schools and public universities. Some Arab regimes will resistthis idea, fearing that any independent political activities would benefit only

Islamists. Even though that concern is understandable, until universities

make room for extracurricular programs, for example, open student elec-

tions, party formation, and organized discussions of politics, either Islamists

or regime cronies will control whatever politics that exist in the lecture halls

and classrooms. As always, the losers will be the silent plurality of young

people who scorn participating in formal political life.

Over time, structural political reforms that enhance competition and par-

ticipation, combined with new initiatives to promote dialogues between Is-

lamists and non-Islamists, will help level the playing field in ways that could

facilitate the negotiation of new national pacts. In Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait,

Bahrain, and Yemen, regimes have implicitly acknowledged the transforming

and thus threatening potential of such pacts by sponsoring national dia-

logues or covenants designed to preempt reforms that transcend the limits

of liberalized autocracy. Yet, these orchestrated initiatives have run out of

steam. Washington should encourage the efforts of ruling elites and their

mainstream opponents to pursue dialogue about the fundamentals of consti-tutional and legal reform.

Iraq and Beyond

It is in the context of such dialogues that the United States needs to con-

tinue its engagement with Islamists. The word “continue” is emphasized, be-

cause democracy promoters in the United States such as the National

Democratic Institute and the National Republican Institute have for several

years regularly included Islamist parties and leaders in their programming.

Yet, the nature and focus of U.S. engagement must shift. In addition to the

technical assistance provided in areas such as campaign management and

legislative procedures, the emphasis must now turn to helping Islamists ap-

preciate that an implicitly secular logic of democratic accommodation with

non-Islamists can bring concrete benefits, not least of which is the possibil-

ity of actually representing elected constituencies in multiparty govern-

ments that wield real political authority and power.

This sensitive subject has occasionally been tackled in internationalmeetings that bring activists from postconflict regions such as the Balkans

together with Arab activists who have experienced civil conflicts in Yemen,

Lebanon, and Algeria. Outside of Iraq, however, this type of dialogue is not



l Daniel Brumberg


a central feature of U.S. aid programs. It needs to be, not because Islamists

should be versed in de Tocqueville, Madison, or Dahl, but rather because it

is important for them to grasp the practical returns that come from achiev-

ing a democratic peace with their rivals. At the same time, Washingtonmust not shy away from publicly or privately calling to task Islamic parties or

organizations, such as Jordan’s Islamic Action Party, that profess support for

democracy while tolerating and occasionally

promoting intolerant ideas and programs.

On this score, NGOs such as Human Rights

Watch or Amnesty International could play

an especially helpful role by monitoring the

programs and rhetoric of Islamist parties that

have become politically active fairly recently,

such as Morocco’s Justice and Development

Party, or that are now aspiring to gain legal

certification and join the political fray, such as

Egypt’s Wasat Party. This new generation de-

serves a chance, but they must also know that the international community

will play a vital role in monitoring the efforts of the Arab world’s diverse

communities to share power peacefully and democratically.

That said, no one should minimize the challenges and even dangers thatattend any effort to promote genuine accommodation. Indeed, democratic

power-sharing arrangements have downsides. Rather than diminish, they can

solidify and even intensify identity divisions between Islamists and non-Is-

lamists or between Shi‘a and Sunni Muslims. Moreover, to endure, power-

sharing rules and procedures often require enforcement by a legitimate and

most of all powerful third party. Precisely because societies that suffer from

deep religious, ethnic, or ideological cleavages often lack such a third party,

however, they often must depend on external forces, such as the various

NATO stabilization forces in the Balkans, the United States in Iraq, or evenSyria in Lebanon, to provide the military and policy backbone that weak

states lack.

Unfortunately, there may be no way around this weak-state problem or

any of the other liabilities that arise from democratic power-sharing if only

because the Arab world does not have better democratic alternatives. It is in

this context that both the promises and dangers of the Bush administration’s

gambit in Iraq become clear. Although the escalating challenges that the

United States faces in Iraq can be partly attributed to misguided policies,

Iraq was always one of the least likely candidates to succeed at building a

power-sharing government. A country that endured decades of a neo-totali-

tarian, minority regime that persecuted and terrorized a narrow majority

There are ways to

nudge the Arab

business sector

toward support for democratic reforms.





115

faced, from the start, an uphill battle in fostering the trust and institutional

guarantees essential to pact-making.

This thought is sobering because, for many years to come, the United

States will have to remain the military guarantor of a tenuous power govern-ment in Baghdad (a role many Iraqis reject) and also because Iraq has be-

come the Arab world’s litmus test for democratic power-sharing. Although

it is too early to predict failure or to dismiss the possibility of success, one

thing is clear: if the democratization of identity conflict in Iraq produces

civil war, Arab autocrats might very well point to Iraq’s fate to enforce a

new “Winter of Autocracy,” one that will make the brief Arab Spring seem

like a passing dream. That is why it is imperative for the United States to

look beyond Iraq and to prod Arab leaders and their oppositions to initiate

substantive democratic reforms and power-sharing initiatives. This will cer-

tainly not be easy, but we can take encouragement from the fact that efforts

to produce some level of political and ideological accommodation has al-

ready taken place in Morocco, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Jordan, albeit

under the increasingly shaky roofs of liberalized autocracies. The challenge

now will be to rebuild and transform this mixed legacy so that democratic

power-sharing becomes a viable option.

None of these initiatives can substitute for the struggles of Muslim think-

ers to renew Islam in a more pluralistic light. Those who have done so haverisked the wrath of autocratic regimes and illiberal Islamists, thus earning

the respect and support of the United States as well as its European friends.

It is important, though, to be realistic about the practical impact that these

efforts to promote Islamic liberalism will have in the short and even medium

term. Democratization in the Arab world is a pressing need. Therefore, the

United States, in concert with the European community, must foster the in-

centives and constraints that make accommodation a logical priority. Ab-

sent these efforts, Islamists and their rivals will never reconcile, a prospect

that can only encourage Arab autocrats everywhere.

Notes

1. See Raymond William Baker, Islam Without Fear: Egypt and the New Islamists (Cam-

bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003). See also Muslim Democrat 7, no. 1(April 2005), http://www.islam-democracy.org/.

2. See Gregory Gause, “Can Democracy Stop Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs 84, no. 5

(September/October 2005): 62–76.

3. Fouad Ajami, “Bush Country,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2005, p. A16.4. The White House, “Remarks by the President at the 20th Anniversary of the Na-

tional Endowment for Democracy,” November 6, 2003, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2003/11/20031106-3.html.



l Daniel Brumberg


5. See Thomas Friedman, “Brave, Young and Muslim,” New York Times, March 3,2005, p. A31.

6. For a useful introduction to Islamic liberals, see Charles Kurzman, Liberal Islam: A

Sourcebook (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). See also Larry

Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg, eds., Islam and Democracy in theMiddle East (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). For a

classic example of the conceptually challenging nature of Islamic Modernism, seeFazlur Rahman, Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

7. See Abdeslam Maghraoui, “Depoliticization in Morocco,” Journal of Democracy 13,

no. 4 (October 2002): 24–32.

8. See Mona Yacoubian, “Promoting Middle East Democracy II, Arab Initiatives,”

Special Report 136, United States Institute of Peace, May 2005.

9. For this classic work on regime-opposition pacts, see Guillermo O’Donnell andPhilippe C. Schmitter, eds., Transitions From Authoritarian Rule, Tentative Conclu-

sions About Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univer-sity Press, 1986).

10. For a related but slightly different perspective, see Vali Nasr, “The Rise of ‘Muslim’Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 16, no. 2 (April 2005): 11–27.

11. For an overview of official U.S. efforts to promote democracy in the Arab world, seethe Middle East Partnership Initiative’s Web site, which can be found at http://

mepi.state.gov/mepi/.

12. See Arab Business Council of the World Economic Forum, “Economic Reform Pri-orities in the Arab World: A Private Sector Perspective,” January 20, 2004, http://

www.weforum.org/pdf/ABC/ABC_R1.pdf.

islam not solution or problem

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