Islam and Democracy: Intellectual Origins and Macro-Context

Many leading scholars of democracy and Muslim society speculate that Islam is inimical to democracy. This claim is mostly based on the observation of Islamic history, from the early period of about 1500 years ago to the present. In the long history of Islam, relative to other religions, democracy has been absent. Islam is a crucial cause of this problem, it is argued, as Islam has a unique political philosophy inimical to democracy. Political secularization, the separation between religious and political domains, or between religion and state, which is an essential part of modern democracy, is not characteristic of Muslim societies. Islam is therefore not likely to contribute to political secularization and democracy.

This chapter addresses this question through a brief consideration of contemporary Islamic political thought and action among Muslim intellectuals. It focuses on contemporary Indonesian Muslim elites, parties, and movements. It lays a foundation of intellectual origins and a macro context of individual attitudes and behavior. If observation of Muslim societies is restricted to contemporary Muslim political thoughts, parties, and movements, it can be shown that the negative evaluations of Islam and democracy are accurate only regarding one variant of Islam. However, as mentioned above, critical analysis is mainly based on their observation of the past, not the present. It is true that the past shapes contemporary Muslim societies and polities, but it is not the whole story.

As discussed in the introduction, the way the past shapes today’s Muslims' views about politics may be influenced by the way cultural agents or interpreters interpret the past, the tradition. Their view of the past may be different from that of their predecessors without becoming less Islamic. They may even feel that their "new Islam" is more Islamic than "old Islam" placed in a new society. This does not mean that "old Islam in a new society" has disappeared. It still exists, and is probably dominant in Muslim societies as Samuel Huntington and other pessimists believe. But it is not alone. It is competing with "new Islam in a new society." Today’s Muslims are struggling to define the meaning of Islam in a new world.

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Islam in Civic Culture Perspective (Part 2)

The claim that Islam is responsible for the lack of democracy or for unstable democracy in predominantly Muslim states must be evaluated as a problem of political culture in which political behavior, institutions, and performance are shaped by culture. The political culture approach is necessary to assess the core arguments and the logic underlying the analysis of Huntington and other critics of Islamic democracy.

At the same time, Huntington and the others are not systematic in the way in which they construct their argument, nor do they provide satsifactory evidence to support their claim. This study is designed to approach the issue more systematically by deploying the civic culture perspective laid out initially by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963). In its focus on attitudes, beliefs, and orientations, this perspective is the closest to Huntington, while being scientifically more persuasive.

Almond and Verba’s Civic Culture is the first work which addresses systematically the problem of democracy from the political culture perspective. They define political culture as psychological orientation toward social objects, or as attitudes toward the political system and toward the self as a political actor (Almond and Verba 1963). This orientation includes individual knowledge or belief, feelings or affection, and evaluation or judgment of the political system in general, political inputs and outputs, and one’s own role within the political system. Variation in these orientations and attitudes are believed to shape political participation and to effect democratic stability.

Almond and Verba believe that variation in political orientations produces three types of political culture: parochial, subject, and participant. In parochial political culture structural differentiation, for example between the religious and the political, is absent. People are unable to orient themselves towards structurally differentiated political systems. Individuals who adhere to this political culture tend to be apathetic or alienated from the political system.

Unlike parochial culture, subject political culture tends to make people active towards structurally differentiated political systems in general and towards the output side of the system, but passive towards the political input side. As with the parochial, the subject is characterized by an absence of orientation towards the self as a participant in the input side of the political process.

Finally, the participant is characterized by the presence of orientations not only toward the structurally differentiated political system in general and the output side of the system but also toward the input side and the self as an active participant. The participant, however, does not eliminate either the parochial or the subject. The participant orientation is an addition. Therefore, participants do not necessarily leave their primordial orientation. For example, a devoutly religious individual can be an active participant, supporting specific government policies and articulating his or her views as to what the government should do.

This mixed political culture is believed to have a positive impact on democratic stability. Almond and Verba’s civic culture is in fact not merely participant political culture, but participant political culture plus something else, i.e. activism plus passivism,when viewed as a whole. The result is moderate, rather than radical, political behavior. The orientation is not toward revolutionary but rather toward gradual change in the society and polity.

The civic culture syndrome has been strongly criticized (Barry 1970, Pateman 1971, Muller and Seligson 1994, Tarrow 1996) but remains resilient, at least in the scholarship of democracy in the developed nations.1 The increase in the number of democracies in the world has raised the question of the extent to which the new democracies can become stable or consolidated. In attempting to answer this question, a significant number of studies have turned back substantively to the civic culture syndrome. Inglehart even proclaimed "the renaissance of political culture" in which political culture is believed to be a crucial factor to explain democratic stability (1988). Or, as a counter to Skocpol’s idea of "bringing the state back in," he suggested the idea of "bringing the people back in" to explain political phenomena, especially democratic stability (1997). Regardless of their conclusions, Norris' Critical Citizens (1999) or her Democratic Phoenix (2002), for example, are studies about global support for democracy and political participation among people which are theoretically guided by the civic culture syndrome. Putnam's Making Democracy Work (1993) is probably the most cited recent work which revives the idea of civic culture to explain democratic performance. It has brought back not only Almond and Verba's Civic Culture but also Tocqueville'sDemocracy in America which emphasized the importance of political culture, and specifically civic association, for American democracy. All of these works argue that political culture cannot be ignored in democratic studies.

Accordingly, I will discuss the issue of the relationship between Islam and democracy in this introduction according to the logic of the civic culture research tradition. Democratic culture and behavior are understood as composed of several components: secular civic engagement, interpersonal trust, tolerance, political engagement, support for democratic system, and political participation. The claim that Islam is inimical to democracy can therefore be evaluated by exploring the extent to which Islam has a negative relationship with support for secular civic engagement, interpersonal trust, tolerance, political engagement, and political participation in addition to support for the democratic system. Before discussing these issues, I will offer a brief overview of how religion and democratic culture have generally been addressed in social science.

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Islam in Civic Culture Perspective (Part 1)

A global tendency in the post-cold war period is the increase in the number of democratic or democratizing regimes. However, this tendency does not occur in most predominantly Muslim states (Freedom House 2002, Lipset 1994, Huntington 1997, 1991). On the basis of Freedom House’s Index of Political Rights and Civil Liberty in the last three decades, Muslim states have generally failed to establish democratic politics. In that period, only one Muslim country has established a full democracy for more than five years, i.e. Mali in Africa. There are twelve semi-democratic countries, defined as partly free. The rest (35 states) are authoritarian (fully not free). Moreover, eight of the fifteen most repressive regimes in the world in the last decade are found in Muslim states.

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Contextualizing Muslims’ Political Language (Part 2)

The term daulat was introduced into Malay political tradition to give new meaning to the concept of andeka of the earlier Buddhist kings—”aword that meant the ghostly forces that lived around sovereign and smote with evil any reckless person who blasphemed their majesty” (Wilkinson 1932b: 80). Thus, daulat enunciates the religious aspect of politics which function to magnify the position of the rulers, that they have religious sanction to exercise their power. Daulat therefore cannot be sufficiently interpreted by such words as “sovereign” or “power”. It is the divine quality which is inherent in the rulers of the Malay world (Errington 1975: 118). As to a divine quality, the concept of daulat regards the rulers as having a sort of “divinely-endowed power or gift” which enabled them to exercise political power over the subjects (Khalid-Thaib 1981: 309).

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Contextualizing Muslims’ Political Language (Part 1)

Here, let me begin with the Sejarah Melayu. Although classified as belonging to a historical literature genre (Winstedt 1969: 158-62), this text is of great significance to the Islamic discourses of the precolonial archipelago. Considering both the period of its composition—at the time when Islam was already established as a social and political phenomenon (Braginsky 1993: 7-10) —and the nature of its contents which reveal a strong familiarity with Islamic terms, the Sejarah Melayu presents a clear account of the translation of Islam into the Malay society and culture. This text was deeply-seated in and significantly meaningful for the increasingly Islamized Malay circumstance (Errington 1975: 53; Day 1983: 141). Here, the Sejarah Melayu is therefore taken as the first Malay classical text to discuss.

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The Formation of Kingdoms (Part 2)

In the Eastern part of Java, Giri-Gresik emerged as a leading Islamic state as well as an important port in the international trade network. Tome Pires described Giri-Gresik as “the jewel of Java in trading ports” (1944: II, 193), indicating its crucial importance as a trade centre and at the same time a major centre of Islam. Giri had been the site of Sunan Giri, a leading ‘ālim and one of the nine walis of Java, who then became the ruler of Gresik. Thus, Giri-Gresik developed as a kingdom with the ‘ulama as the rulers (priester-vorstendom). This kingdom reached its high point under the reign of Sunan Prapen (+1548-1605) (de Graaf and Pigeaud 1974: 187-8). During this period, Giri-Gresik became the centre of Islamization in the eastern part of the archipelago. Lombok in Nusa Tenggara, Makassar in South Sulawesi, and Hitu in Maluku were some of areas under the Islamic influence of Giri-Gresik (de Graaf and Pigeaud 1974: 190-2).

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The Formation of Kingdoms (Part 1)

The historical sources available on the early history of Islam in the archipelago have led historians to conclude that Samudra Pasai was the first Islamic state to emerge in the areas in the late thirteenth century.1 This conclusion is based on evidence supplied by the gravestone of Malik al-Saleh, the first Muslim ruler of Samudra Pasai, which is dated 1297.2 This opinion corresponds to the story provided in the Hikayat Raja-Raja Pasai, in which Malik al-Saleh is described as the first ruler of the state to convert to Islam. 

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