After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy

NOAH FELDMAN

After Jihad

NOAH FELDMAN, born in 1970, teaches law at New York University. Feldman received an A.B. summa cum laude in Near Eastern languages and civilizations from Harvard University, a J.D. from Yale, and a doctorate in Islamic thought from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. A former Supreme Court clerk, he was senior adviser for constitutional law for the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in the months after the U.S. war in Iraq. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He lives in New York and Washington, D.C.

AFTER JIHAD

AFTER JIHAD

AMERICA AND THE STRUGGLE

FOR ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY

NOAH FELDMAN

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

19 Union Square West, New York 10003

Copyright © 2003 by Noah Feldman

Preface copyright © 2004 by Noah Feldman

All rights reserved

Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America

Published in 2003 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 2004

 The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Feldman, Noah, 1970–

After Jihad: America and the struggle for Islamic democracy / Noah Feldman.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-374-17769-4 (hc : alk. paper)

1. Democracy—Religious aspects—Islam. 2. Islam and world politics. 3. Religion and politics—Islamic countries. 4. United States—Relations—Islamic countries. 5. Islamic countries—Relations—United States. 6. Islamic countries—Politics and government. I. Title.

BP190.5.D45F45 2003

321.8’0917’671—dc21

2002192524

Paperback ISBN 0-374-52933-7

ISBN 978-0-374-52933-8

Designed by Amy Trombat

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3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4   2

FOR JEANNIE

The Prophet, upon whom be prayer

and peace, was returning from one

of their battles, when he said, prayer

and peace be upon him, "You have

made the finest of returns; you have

returned from the lesser jihad to the

greater jihad."

They said, "And what is the greater

jihad?"

He answered, "Man’s struggle against

his desires."

"We have returned from the lesser

jihad to the greater jihad."

They said, "And what is the greater

jihad?"

He said, The jihad of the heart.

CONTENTS

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

THE REVOLUTION THAT WASN’T

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY IN CONTACT

PART ONE

The Idea of Islamic Democracy

ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY, NOT ISLAMIST DEMOCRACY

ISLAM, THE WEST, AND THE QUESTION OF OPPOSITION

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY AS MOBILE IDEAS

THE RESILIENCE OF ISLAM

GOD’S RULE AND THE PEOPLE’S RULE

ISLAMIC EQUALITY

ISLAMIC LIBERTY

THE UNIVERSALITY OF MOBILE IDEAS

PART TWO

Varieties of Islamic Democracy

DEMOCRATIZATION AND MUSLIM REALITY: AN OVERVIEW

IRAN: ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY IN THE BALANCE

TURKEY: THE OUTLIER

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA:

MOBILITY AND POSSIBILITY

PAKISTAN: THE ISLAMIC STATE AND THE

STRUGGLE FOR STABILITY

THE DIVERSITY OF THE ARABS

MONARCHIES WITH OIL: THE RENTIER STATE IN ACTION

KINGS WITHOUT OIL

THE DICTATORS AND THE ISLAMISTS:

THE PUZZLE OF EGYPT

REGIME CHANGE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES:

DICTATORS WITH OIL

THE BIG PICTURE: ISLAM, DEMOCRACY, AND THE

CONTACT OF MOBILE IDEAS

PART THREE

The Necessity of Islamic Democracy

WHY DEMOCRACY? THE PRAGMATIC ARGUMENT

NEUTRALIZING ANTI-AMERICANISM BY REFUTING IT

DOING THE RIGHT THING

HOW TO DO IT

DEMOCRACY’S MUSLIM ALLIES

IMAGINING AN ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY

AFTER JIHAD

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

When After Jihad went to press in the spring of 2003, with the United States poised to remove Saddam Hussein from power by force, the question of whether democracy could succeed in countries with active Islamic politics was an urgent one—but America had not yet committed itself to an answer. Our government’s track record of supporting Muslim autocrats in the name of regional stability was still unbroken. The absence of any real Arab democracy figured prominently among the arguments against intervention in Iraq: If the dictator fell, why expect anything better afterward? Free elections in Iraq seemed almost unimaginable, and even if they happened, anti-democratic Islamists might be elected.

In that environment, to call on the United States to take seriously the idea of Islamic democracy—a form of government both legitimately democratic and respectful of what its citizens consider Islamic values—was to struggle against historical precedent and received wisdom. After all, Islam’s rich system of ideas, values, and religious faith revolves around a deep commitment to God’s unity and ultimate sovereignty, and a timeless, divine message expressed in a book of revealed scripture, the Qur’an. Democracy, on the other hand, as practiced in liberal constitutional regimes today, assumes that laws are made by the elected representatives of majorities, and that basic rights are recorded in founding documents of human origin. Could the apparently competing ideas associated with Islam and democracy combine to create a form of government that would work in practice?

For a decade at least, new voices in the Muslim world had been calling for exactly such a synthesis between democratic and Islamic values, and insisting that the best interpretation of Islam actually required the rule of law, the consent of the governed, and the liberty and equality of all citizens. But these voices could be dismissed by skeptics as either marginal or as hypocritically masking a plan to take over by elections and then establish a dictatorship of the faithful. The few Muslim-majority countries that arguably qualified as democratic—such as Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Malaysia—were either technically secular, only shakily democratic, or both.

A year later, with the removal of Saddam an accomplished fact and the postwar Iraqi political process proceeding along the uncertain road toward a democratic constitution, the fate of Islamic democracy still hangs in the balance. Security problems remain in Iraq, and will continue to jeopardize both the constitutional process and any government that comes out of it. Iraq’s delicate balance of Shi‘is, Sunnis, and non-Arab Kurds may yet fail to coalesce into a unified state capable of withstanding the pressures that inevitably face a new democracy. One crucial fact has changed, however: America—and through the United Nations, the rest of the world—has now taken a stand firmly in favor of the possibility of Islamic democracy.

In response, Iraq’s Islamic democrats, even those who spent years in political exile in Iran, have rejected the Iranian model of government by mullahs, a model whose failures are as clear to them as to the rest of the democratic world. As if to underscore the extraordinary shift in Islamic political thought that has occurred in the last decade, Sayyid Hossein Khomeini—the grandson of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, inventor of Islamic clerical rule—emigrated from Iran to Iraq, set up shop in Baghdad, and began trumpeting the virtues of democratic government and religious liberty to anyone who would listen. The grandson lacks the late Ayatollah’s charisma, and he is still far from achieving a popular following; but there he is, black robe, turban, and all, an undeniable human fact to those who would deny the existence of Islamic democrats.

The book in your hands is therefore much more practically applicable—and its theoretical conclusions more concretely testable—than was its hardcover predecessor. This will be true most obviously for Iraq, where the constitutional deliberations that have already begun directly engage the questions that the first part of the book asks: How can the Islamic idea of God’s sovereignty be reconciled with the democratic ideal of popular government? What are Islamic constitutional values when it comes to basic liberties like free speech and freedom of religion? Does democracy’s commitment to equal rights for men and women and for people of all religious faiths pose an insurmountable problem for a government that may wish to implement certain provisions of Islamic law? My argument that Islam and democracy can be compatible, since both are flexible, mobile ideas that function in different ways all over the world, is a working hypothesis for evaluating events on the ground in Iraq. If what emerges from the constitutional process there is a form of government recognizably democratic yet still incorporating Islamic ideals as interpreted by Iraqi Muslims, then Islamic democracy will have been shown to be possible in practice, not just in theory.

Of course Iraq remains unique in the way in which the possibility of democracy was introduced there. Trying to spread democracy through conquest is a costly, high-risk proposition, unlikely to be repeated elsewhere. Although Iraq is the most obvious and pressing test case for Islamic democracy, and the one in which I have been personally involved as a constitutional consultant, the prospects for varieties of Islamic democracy in the rest of the Muslim world—the focus of Part Two of the book—are as important now as they were a year ago, probably more so. In the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for example, the princes of the ruling family still make the decisions; the country remains troubled by its faltering economy and has been plagued by continuing al-Qaeda-style attacks. At the same time, influenced by the remarkable liberalization and constitutional reforms in neighboring Bahrain, and concerned about internal dissension, the Saudi monarchy has begun a formal national dialogue in which previously unspeakable truths about the need for change are being spoken publicly. The kingdom has even begun to experiment cautiously with elections for local councils—the first open elections ever held in Saudi Arabia. The United States has begun to reward Gulf states that liberalize, relocating its air force base from Saudi Arabia to Qatar and deepening bilateral relations with Bahrain. It is increasingly likely that the future of U.S.-Saudi relations, strained since the attacks of September 11, will turn on the degree of change that the kingdom is prepared to risk.

Meanwhile in Iran, the democratic reform movement is stalled. President Mohammad Khatami, despite receiving overwhelming popular support in two elections, has not been willing or able to resist the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah ‘Ali Khamene’i, whose hard-line Islamist supporters suppress free speech and political opinion, and so retain the reins of power. Iran’s progress toward developing a usable nuclear weapon offers a potential excuse to Americans who would like to intervene and topple the unpopular hard-liners; yet there is also reason for the U.S. to tread lightly. For the moment, Iranians are somewhat sympathetic to the U.S., which opposes the government they abhor. Any interference in Iranian affairs might alienate the Iranian public, reminding them of America’s unattractive history of meddling in their political affairs. Iran is not yet ready for revolution, but unless the democracy movement revives, the country is headed for implosion.

In Turkey, by contrast, true democracy has made great strides in the last year. Although the army has historically acted as the guardian of secularism by removing elected leaders who start to seem too Islamic, nonetheless the elected Islamic democrats of the Justice and Development Party have so far overcome the threat of military intervention and managed to govern in accordance with democratic principles. Turkey now stands as a remarkable example of democracy in action in a Muslim country, where government responds to the electorate, makes political compromises when circumstances require it, and respects basic rights. Party leader Recep Tayyep Erdogan was rehabilitated after being banned from politics for his Islamic beliefs, and he is now Turkey’s prime minister. He and his party leadership supported a failed parliamentary initiative to allow American troops to use Turkish bases to invade Iraq; and under Erdogan, Turkey agreed to send troops to help keep the peace in postwar Iraq. The Justice and Development Party has shown that a party of Islamic democrats can pursue pro-American policies when it is in their national interest. Oppression of Turkish Kurds still continues to mar Turkey’s human rights record, but by most accounts it is gradually lessening. The radical Islamic anti-Americanism warned of by the skeptics has failed to materialize, even as the Turkish majority continues to oppose American intervention in their backyard.

Indeed, throughout the Muslim world, opinions of the United States have fallen even lower today than the already low ebb they had reached a year ago. The reasons for this decline, though complex, have much to do with Muslim perceptions that the U.S. has not corrected its past course of failing to support democracy in Muslim lands. Most Muslims, when surveyed, profess a deep skepticism about America’s motives in Iraq—a skepticism shared, it must be noted, in Brussels as well as in Baghdad, in Cambridge almost as much as in Cairo. The widespread Muslim belief that the United States intends to act as a neo-imperial oppressor in Iraq profoundly underscores the argument that I make in Part Three of this book, namely that the only way that America can win friends in the Muslim world is by proving it is committed to helping Muslims achieve the same liberty, prosperity, and self-government that Americans want and enjoy. It was naïve to expect Iraqis to be grateful for a liberation that came a decade after the U.S. stood by and allowed Saddam to massacre hundreds of thousands of Shi‘is and Kurds in 1991, and which itself followed a decade in which the U.S. supported Saddam in his war against Iran. Iraqis and other Muslims will begin to change their views of America only when we start to deliver on the promises of freedom that we have now made in blood.

Our moral duty toward the Muslim world, strong though it was in the light of a history in which the United States had tolerated and supported Muslim autocrats, is also incomparably greater in the wake of America’s intervention in Iraq. Americans, whether they supported the war in order to promote democracy and bring change to the region—as I argued before the war, the only plausible, lasting justification for intervention—or whether they opposed it on the altogether reasonable grounds that international support and legitimation were lacking, should all agree that the disorder created by invasion imposed an obligation to leave Iraqis better off than America found them. It will be extraordinarily tempting to Americans to withdraw troops and financial support to protect our own soldiers and pocketbooks, regardless of the consequences for Iraqis. But withdrawal must occur only when Iraqis say they are ready for it and when sovereignty can be transferred to a legitimate, democratically chosen government. Even then, we will owe it to Iraqis to remain involved in reconstruction as long as they want us to continue. Our duties to other Muslims are more attenuated but no less important in the long run. To live up to our ideal of ourselves as Americans, we must encourage, not impede, the process of democratization in the Muslim world—the necessity of Islamic democracy.

Critics of After Jihad, and of efforts to include Islamic democrats in the constitutional process in Iraq, have occasionally argued in the last year that Islam cannot offer a firm enough protection of individual or minority rights to count as properly democratic; some have made the cruder, more deterministic argument that believing Muslims just cannot accommodate democratic institutions. In a decade or two, the latter argument will come to seem just as anachronistic as the now-defunct, once-popular arguments that Catholicism and Confucianism, each in turn, were incompatible with democracy. The former argument, with its concern for the protection of women and non-Muslim minorities, remains important, and only time will tell whether the guarantees of religious liberty and equality of the sexes that will be enshrined in the constitutions of Islamic democracies will be enforced in practice. The world is littered with well-crafted bills of rights that have meant little or nothing as applied, and it would be unreasonable to assume that Islamic democracy is immune from the dangers that plague any nascent constitutional order.

Yet it would be equally unreasonable to insist that Islamic democracies must be suppressed lest they go awry and violate basic rights. What else is on offer in the Muslim world? Those who announce to the world that the United States or the West must insist that the constitution of a country like Iraq give no recognition to Islam need to explain how, exactly, we are to justify to the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims that America is entitled to tell them how to take account of their own religion in their own constitutions. More to the point, they need to clarify how, in taking such a position, the U.S. could avoid sending the disastrous, self-defeating message that democracy is incompatible with Islam. To encourage the spread of democratic values of liberty and equality requires arguing, to the contrary, that Islam not only accommodates but actually mandates freedom and self-government.

Terrorism has not ended since America took on its new regional role in Iraq, nor should we expect it to end of its own accord anytime in the near future. America’s presence as the occupier of a Muslim country may even generate new hostility against us, since the paradigm case of jihad to which many Muslims will always be sympathetic is a defensive war against a foreign invader. But we still must focus our efforts on creating a world in which violent jihad is behind us and in which we encourage, in ourselves and others, the inward struggle for justice that can ultimately displace outward-directed violence. Violent jihad will not end just because we want it to, but neither can it end unless we will it.

New York and Washington, D.C.

October 2003

AFTER JIHAD

THE REVOLUTION THAT WASN’T

Can democracy be made to flourish in the lands where Islam prevails? Today this might be the single most pressing question for American foreign policy, and this book sets out to answer it. But more than a decade ago, before jihad became a household word, before the most senior voices in the U.S. government began to speculate about a democratic Iraq, democracy had a trial run in an Arab state outside the international spotlight. What happened there set the course for the U.S. policies that are now being reforged in the crucible of the war on terror. It is there that the story of the encounter between America and Islamic democracy begins.

In 1989, that year of revolutions, unglamorous Algeria was an unlikely candidate for democratic change. Perched on the rim of North Africa, far from the upheavals of Eastern Europe, Algeria had been home to a romantic liberation movement that had evicted the French after a hard-fought guerrilla war. Yet the liberation movement had morphed, by way of a 1965 coup, into an autocratic, quasi-military, socialist regime. The sole political party, the Front de Libération National, had not permitted real elections since shortly after independence.

Starting in late 1988, young Algerians began a series of protests that led to a new constitution promising fundamental rights and political parties other than the FLN. The spirit of 1989 was abroad. In June 1990, in the first local elections under the new constitution, a newly formed Islamic party, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), came more or less from nowhere to win 62 percent of the votes cast. The FLN, which could boast that it had liberated Algeria from the French, came in at 28 percent.

One could almost hear the whispered soul-searching starting in Western foreign ministries. If elections were going to replace dictators in the Arab and Muslim worlds, as they seemed to be doing in the Eastern bloc and beyond, would Islamic parties do this well everywhere? Would democratically elected Islamic governments be good or bad for Western interests? Although democracy seemed like the desirable result of victory in the Cold War, the Algerian election suggested otherwise: Could democracy be an unalloyed good if Muslim states chose fundamentalist leaders?

Of course these were still just local elections. Perhaps the Islamists of the FIS had succeeded because no one else had had time to organize effective political parties in the short period between the ratification of the new constitution and the local elections. Unlike political parties, Islam itself had never been illegal, so Islamist politicians could use mosques as centers for organization, recruitment, and advertising—a built-in infrastructure that other parties lacked. Or perhaps Algerians who were not deeply sympathetic to fundamentalist Islam had voted against the old-guard FLN as a protest against dictatorship. In the national elections, with more at stake, people might vote more moderately.

The leadership of the FIS was almost as surprised as everyone else at the party’s success in the local elections. The FIS was suddenly a major political force, and needed to explain to the newly minted electorate what its policies would actually be. No one had ever run a democratic Islamic government before, and the FIS leaders were not of one mind about the relationship between Islam and democracy. In the event, the ruling FLN effectively decided election strategy for them. In the run-up to the December 1991 national elections, it put the two most prominent FIS leaders in jail. This deterrent failed, and the FIS went on to win more seats than any other party: 188 out of a total of 429. The FLN got just 15 seats. The constitution called for a second round of elections; if the votes remained steady, the FIS was headed for a national victory.

Now the success of the Islamists became the stuff of high-level policy-making. In Washington, the experts were divided on how to react. Some sincerely worried that if the Islamists took office, they might abolish elections. Others focused on the strategic interests of the United States. As the example of Iran showed, states run by Islamist parties could be terribly anti-American, and might export terror. Still others, either optimistic or pragmatic, pointed out that the United States could form a friendship with an Islamic state. After all, America’s close ally Saudi Arabia was a traditional monarchy in which Islamic law prevailed.

Then a remarkable thing happened. At the insistence of the Algerian generals, the FLN canceled the second round of elections. It retroactively called off the first round, and in effect the municipal elections, too. It banned the FIS and jailed the rest of its leaders. Its party banned, its leaders jailed, and many of its activists arrested, the FIS split in two and turned to armed resistance.

The French, worried about the influence that Islamic fundamentalism might have on the millions of Algerians who lived in France, acquiesced in what was essentially a preemptive coup d’état against the almost-elected FIS. The United States decided to go along with French policy. In a speech that has cast long shadows over subsequent American policy, then–Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian explained that while the United States favored democracy, it opposed elections that would provide for one person, one vote, one time. By implication, elections won by Islamists were elections that would lead not to more democracy but to less.

Algeria was plunged into a bloody civil war that has since killed at least 100,000 people. The experiment with Islamic democracy was over before it could get started. American policy was now firmly on the side of the autocrats against the Islamic democrats.

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY IN CONTACT

The compressed drama of Algeria’s flirtation with democracy foreshadowed a new, democratic direction for Islam, a harsh response from most Muslim monarchs and dictators, and acquiescence in repression on the part of the U.S. and Europe. In the decade since the collapse of the Algerian experiment, a handful of Islamist extremists have grabbed headlines by perpetrating violent terror, most spectacularly the September 11 attacks. The United States has been inexorably drawn into political and military engagement with the Muslim world. But during the same decade, outside the headlines, many more committed Muslims have sought to participate in the electoral politics of the countries where they live. Moving beyond the fantasy of violent revolution and Islamic utopia that some Islamist extremists entertain, they have turned toward persuasion and pragmatism.

So, contrary to what is sometimes believed in the U.S., Islam is not inherently committed to the overthrow of Western ideals. To the contrary, many, though by no means all, Muslims find the combination of Islamic ideals and democratic values appealing. Today Muslims around the world embrace the elegance, logic, and depth of Islam perhaps more warmly than at any time in a century. In Islam’s language of justice, morality, hope, and commitment, they find not only religion, but a vital force in the realms of politics, society, and the spirit. At the same time, as their reliance on Islam grows, Muslims are also embracing the ideals of self-government and freedom associated with democracy. To an increasing number of Muslims, these democratic values resonate with Islam and can develop in tandem with it. Wherever advocates have been free to speak out or run for office in the name of Islamic democracy, they have found an eager audience.

That freedom has certainly not been enjoyed everywhere. The quality of elections varies dramatically across the Muslim world. There are emerging democracies like Turkey and Indonesia, faltering quasi-democracies like Pakistan, and de facto presidential dictatorships like Egypt; there are constitutional monarchies like Jordan and Morocco; and in the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, where the king’s word is law, there are no elections at all. Iran combines an elected president and legislature with an unelected Supreme Leader. Several of the Central Asian republics are run like the Soviet provincial satellites they once were.

Muslim countries, most of which are American allies in one sense or another, differ greatly in political system, degree of freedom, wealth, language, and culture. In nearly every Muslim country, however, there are voices today calling for greater democracy. Remarkably, the loudest voices are often those of Islamists, activists who believe that Islam is the solution to all problems in politics and private life alike.

The Islamists’ call for democratic change in the Muslim world marks a fundamental shift in their strategy. For more than a decade after the Iranian Revolution of 1979, many Islamists sought to emulate the Iranian model by Islamizing their own countries through the revolutionary transformation of violent jihad. This violence was never embraced by every Islamist, but it was very much in the air, and few Islamists were prepared to condemn it. It brought about the assassination of President Sadat; it was also connected, more positively, to the Islamist resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The violence between the secular Algerian autocratic government and the Islamists after the cancellation of the Algerian elections certainly became jihad from the perspective of the Islamists themselves. A proliferation of so-called jihadi organizations throughout the Muslim world occurred during the 1980s, and the one that emerged as most prominent, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, culminated its jihad with the horrifically successful attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But September 11, and the sporadic attacks which have followed, are the last, desperate gasp of a tendency to violence that has lost most of its popular support. Al-Qaeda was itself a radical offshoot of the mainstream Islamist movement, politically irrelevant outside of its meddling in Taliban Afghanistan and Central Asia. Frustrated by Islamists’ failure to effect actual change in the governments of the Muslim world, it concentrated on blowing up American targets because it had run out of other options. Al-Qaeda members may have believed that Muslims would rally to their cause and fight both the U.S. and their own governments, but that never happened. The notion that an Islamic state should be created through holy war is an idea whose time has passed among most in the Muslim world. The remaining jihadis may have a toehold in the predominantly Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union, and there are those inspired by bin Laden who will surely attempt further terrorist attacks against people whom they perceive as the enemies of Islam. For that matter, Pakistani-supported jihadis continue to operate in Kashmir, a phenomenon that has brought Pakistan and India to the brink of war. A worrisome number of Palestinians, some supported by Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran, are for the first time prepared to describe their battle against Israel in terms