IN A REMARKABLE SPEECH at the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, President Bush acknowledged 60 years of American error and announced a policy of encouraging democracy, not dictatorship, in the Muslim world. Whether this long overdue message is followed by an actual policy change or simply results from the short-term need to explain the Iraq war in the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) remains to be seen. But in any event, Bush neglected to mention a crucial fact that looms over every discussion of democratization in the Muslim world: if freed to make their own democratic choices, many Muslim peoples will choose Islam, not secularism.
The fact that Muslims in many countries have a strong preference for Islamic parties is evidenced by the results of elections, free and quasi-free, in which Islamic-oriented parties have consistently scored significant victories. The paradigm case took place in Algeria in 1989 and 1990. There, the first free elections in decades yielded substantial majorities for Islamic parties before the military government thought better of its democratic experiment, rescinded the election results, and by banning the Islamic parties thrust Algeria into a decade-long civil war. More recently, the Turkish Justice and Development Party came to power with a decisive plurality in the autumn 2002 elections, and the Moroccan moderate Islamic party of the same name won a disproportionately large share of the seats in an election -- held around the same time -- in which they were limited to running in only two-thirds of the contested districts. In Pakistan, the more radical Mutahhida Majlis-i Amal (MMA) achieved the best results ever by an Islamist party in the country's history, emerging as the third-largest party in a parliament whose power is in any case limited by the extraordinary authority of President Pervez Musharraf. Islamic parties also performed well in recent elections in Jordan and in the cautiously liberalizing Gulf emirates.
The reasons for the success of Islamic politics are not difficult to discern: disillusionment with existing regimes, especially characteristic of the Arab states, pervades the Muslim world more broadly. With secular nationalism and socialism discredited, political Islam has grown in appeal wherever it has not been tried. Islamists enjoy organizational advantages in countries where normal democratic politics are outlawed or highly restricted. Islamic parties speak the language of justice, the paramount political value to most Muslims -- that is why so many Islamic parties have the word in their names -- and are perceived as relatively free of corruption, especially where they have not yet had the opportunity to govern. Except in Iran, where corruption and the abject failure of clerical rule have discredited religion, Islamic politicians can convincingly present themselves as pure and untainted by scandal.
But perhaps most important, Islam itself remains a rich and vital force, informing the lives of 1.2 billion persons in the realm of faith, a realm not automatically segregated from politics either for Muslims or others. It should surprise no one that such a resilient resource of values affects political life in countries where it is the predominant or overwhelming faith. In places like Turkey, Indonesia, and Malaysia, secular forces in the society counterbalance rising Islamic politics; but in Arab dictatorships, where secularist politics are associated with autocracy, increased political freedom will most likely lead, at least in the short run, to new victories for political Islam.
The intriguing fact about political Islam in the last decade is that it has moved away from the rhetoric of revolutionary violence that characterized its approach during the 1980s, and has increasingly embraced the language, and to a degree the ideology, of constitutional democracy. Seeking the votes of the public in competitive elections, Islamic politicians are saying that democracy and Islam are compatible, indeed supplementary. As In Iraq, where Ayatollah Ali Sistani has emerged as the leading spokesman for an Iraq that would be both democratic and expressive of Islamic values, theorists elsewhere in the Muslim world -- whose theories underwrite moderate Islamic politics -- today argue for what they call Islamic democracy. If political freedom in the Muslim world is likely to empower Islamic parties and politicians, then the viability of the project to democratize Muslim countries may well turn on the question of whether Islam and democracy can be reconciled or are simply a contradiction in terms.
In its ambitions, attractions, and dangers, the Afghan draft constitution of November 2003, which enshrines Islamic values even as it guarantees basic liberties, can be understood as a metaphor for the prospects of Islamic democracy more generally. If the United States is to promote democracy in Muslim lands, we need to ask the crucial question implicit in the Afghan draft: Can Islam and democracy be fused without compromising on human rights and equality? If not, then democratization in places like Iraq and Afghanistan will be a pyrrhic victory for freedom. But if a synthesis of Islam and democracy can satisfy believing Muslims, while protecting liberty and the rights of women and non-Muslims, then Islamic democracy may be the best hope for improvement in countries where Islamic politics prevails. Indeed, perhaps only Islamic democracy can give democratic values and institutions staying power in political cultures to which they are essentially newcomers.
Make no mistake: drafted by Afghans who consider Islam the glue that holds together their country's ethnic diversity, the Afghan constitution is pervasively Islamic. Its first three articles declare Afghanistan an Islamic Republic, make Islam the official religion, and provide that "no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam and the values of this constitution." The Supreme Court, which has the power to interpret the constitution, is to be composed of judges trained either in law or in Islamic jurisprudence. The flag features a prayer niche and pulpit, and is emblazoned, for good measure, with not one but two Islamic credos: There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet," and "Allah Akbar" -- "God is Great." The government is charged with developing a unified curriculum "based on the provisions of the sacred religion of Islam, national culture, and in accordance with academic principles," and the provision requiring the state to ensure the physical and psychological well-being of the family calls, in the same breath, for "elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of the sacred religion of Islam."
Yet the draft constitution is also thoroughly democratic, promising government "based on the people's will and democracy," as the preamble says, and guaranteeing its citizens fundamental rights. one essential provision guarantees that the state shall abide by the UN Charter, international treaties, international conventions that Afghanistan has signed, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because Afghanistan has, as of March 2003, acceded to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (a treaty which the U.S. Senate, by contrast, has never ratified), the draft constitution guarantees women far-ranging rights against discrimination. The drafters' strategy here is certainly to avoid a pitched ratification battle with extremists, incorporating progressive rights by reference instead of by direct decree. In Afghanistan, and anywhere else where radical Islamists continue to oppose democratic constitutionalism, this prudent approach may be unavoidable; but of course it would also be possible and probably preferable to make basic rights, including women's rights, more explicit.
The draft also requires the president to appoint women to half of the seats in the upper legislative house that are under his control, ensuring women at least 16.5 percent of the total membership. Today, 83 years after women got the vote in the United States, a record 14 of 100 U.S. Senators are women, and it would be hard to imagine constitutional quotas for women legislators. Yet Morocco and Pakistan have adopted similar set-asides for women in their parliaments, following a model pioneered in Western Europe. And, so far it has not attracted major opposition in those countries.
Observers of the Afghan constitutional process worried that religious liberty might not be adequately protected, and the United States reportedly brought pressure on the Afghan drafters to ensure that this would not be the case. Perhaps as a result, the same provision that makes Islam the official religion simultaneously recognizes the right of non-Muslims "to perform their religious ceremonies within the limits of the provisions of law." This carefully chosen language might arguably leave room to restrict proselytization, as, for example, does the law in India and Israel; but the constitution also guarantees ｅxpression as an inviolable right, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, embraced by the draft, guarantees the right to change one's religion as well as the freedom of conscience.
There can be little doubt that, if the draft is ratified by the Loya Jirga and actually implemented despite Afghanistan's shaky political situation, tensions in the constitutional structure would have to be resolved later by the Supreme Court. According to the draft, for instance, political parties must not be organized around a program contrary to Islam or the constitution. That would exclude an anti-democratic Taliban party; but would it also exclude a party of secularists who wanted to remove Islam from the constitution? What if the legislature enacts laws that make it a crime to blaspheme Islam or the Prophet? Such laws would appear to violate the freedom of speech -- but would the Supreme Court be prepared to say so? What about laws requiring women to dress modestly: unconstitutional as a violation of women's rights, or constitutional as in accord with the teachings of Islam? The Afghan draft constitution gives guidance on all these questions, but a Supreme Court dominated by illiberal religious scholars might interpret the text one way, while the cases might come out differently if a majority of the Court were trained in a secular legal tradition. The constitutional strategy of deferring such contentious problems until institutions are in place to resolve them has its risks, of course. But in practical terms, it may be far preferable to trying to resolve tensions at the ratification stage, when the nascent republic is at its most fragile.
Some will say that we should avoid democracy promotion in the Middle East lest we open the door to elections that might be, in the memorable words of former Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian, one man, one vote, one time." These same skeptics will point to the Afghan constitution and emphasize its potential to marginalize democracy and render Afghanistan purely Islamic. But this conservative approach, which calls for preserving the undemocratic status quo at the expense of Muslim freedom, neglects to acknowledge that the alternative to trying Islamic democracy may be much worse. In Afghanistan, the alternative to the vision of the new constitution is not idealized secular democracy: it is a return to the Taliban. In other Muslim countries, the alternative to trying democracy is autocracy, whether secular dictatorship or religious monarchy.
In Iraq, for example, now that Saddam is gone, the only alternative to democracy is anarchy and civil war. Some ex-Baathists among the Sunni Arabs might prefer these options, in the mistaken hope that they could reestablish something like the old autocratic regime. That certainly seems to be what is motivating the present insurgency. But Iraq's Kurds and Shi'a Arabs, who together make up nearly 80 percent of the population, want to produce a functioning constitutional order; and if the Kurds' idee fixe is federalism and greater autonomy, the Shi'is seem as of the present writing committed to giving Islam a key role in the federal constitution. The Shi'i majority can be expected to demand provisions not entirely unlike those in the Afghan draft as the price of constitutional democracy. Those who call for the United States to impose secularization in places like Afghanistan and Iraq are therefore simply unrealistic. For a constitution to work in practice, it must garner the support of the citizens whose will it represents. Nothing could make a constitution illegitimate more quickly than imposing secularist red lines in a well-meaning show of neo-imperialism.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, however, all these questions may become academic if the United States and the West do not help create the material and political conditions for the success of Islamic democracy. After driving out the Taliban, the U.S.-led coalition has done little to bring Afghanistan under the control of a centralized government. Nor has the UN presence in Kabul made much difference to the de facto control of the country by the regional warlords who made up the former Northern Alliance. Unless the West takes further steps to help give an elected Afghan government actual sovereignty, the Afghan constitution will matter more as a symbol than as an actual charter of governance. Similarly, if the United States and its coalitional partners don't do more to establish security and a working economy in Iraq, then real democracy will have little chance there.
Of course Iraq and Afghanistan are distinctive in that the United States removed existing regimes and continues to play the role of military occupier, directly in Iraq, and mediated through the United Nations in Afghanistan. The leverage of exercising de facto sovereignty cannot, and probably should not, be replicated elsewhere. Inevitably, then, American influence over democratization and its constitutional ｅxpression in other Muslim states will be significantly less direct. Circumstances differ greatly among Muslim countries, both with respect to internal political economy and the government's relations with the United States. A free vote in today's Saudi Arabia would replace the royal family -- which, whatever its considerable demerits, has been a reliable American ally -- with Islamists whose radicalism might preclude real democracy, and who might use oil profits to sponsor terrorism officially, not just accidentally; Saudi Arabia therefore needs liberalization before elections.
By contrast, a country like Egypt needs to be encouraged to make elections more meaningful and to allow a wider array of political actors to participate. Economic assistance provides leverage against Egypt, while only America's security alliance can influence the Saudis. Syria is susceptible to American pressure to the extent it shares a long border with Iraq, where presence of American troops constitutes an implicit threat to it. Conditions in the majority Muslim republics of Central Asia are different still, inflected both by local al-Qaeda offshoots and by America's different security posture in Afghanistan.
One-size-fits-all approaches to democracy in the Muslim world are bound to fail. Statecraft calls for nuance, not just generalities, and it would be foolish to assume that instant democratization would serve U.S. interests -- or those of Muslims themselves -- in the same way everywhere. But our overarching, unifying goal must be to support the belief of the majority of the world's Muslims that Islam and democracy are perfectly compatible. To lose the debate over the compatibility of Islam and democracy would be to lose the opportunity to win over Muslim states to the side of democratic liberty, equality, and justice. If we insist that only secular government can be truly democratic, we are bound inevitably to alienate many of those we are most eager to convince. This will be especially true in Iraq, where the constitutional process must publicly convince both Iraqis and the rest of the world that the Coalition intends to let Iraqis govern themselves. Worse yet, denying the possibility of Islamic democracy may bolster the case of Islamist radicals who, for their own reasons, claim that Islam cannot accommodate democracy.
The draft Afghan constitution suggests one possible picture of how Islam and democracy can coexist in the same political vision, not without risk of tension, but with the possibility of success. There are no guarantees in constitution writing, in nation-building, or indeed in history itself, and it is too soon to predict that the idea of Islamic democracy will in fact succeed in taking hold in practice, either in Afghanistan or elsewhere in the Muslim world. In light of the alternatives, however, we should stick to the course on which the United States, at least rhetorically, has already embarked. We should press hard for democracy in the Muslim world with our eyes open: not because we naively expect a victory for secularism, but because, in the end, freedom only makes sense as a value extended equally to all, to make of it what they will.