After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy

Parameters,  Summer, 2004  by Robert B. Killebrew

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy. By Noah Feldman. Basking Ridge, N.J.: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. 272 pages. $24.00. Reviewed by Colonel Robert B. Killebrew, USA Ret., who served in Special Forces, mechanized, air assault, and airborne infantry units, and held a variety of planning and operational assignments, during his 30-year Army career.

Occasionally an important book comes along that does more than just inform; it challenges the reader to reevaluate fundamental perceptions. After Jihad is such a book, and whether the reader agrees or not, one's perceptions of the Islamic world will be changed after reading Noah Feldman's perceptive comments on Islam, democracy, and the Muslim world.

Feldman's argument is that Islam and democracy are fundamentally compatible, and that in fact radical Islam is already losing ground to moderate Muslims who feel both the dictates of their religion and the pull of democracy. Islam, Feldman writes, actually has a democratic tradition that extends as far back as the first Caliphs after Muhammad, who ruled in place of the Prophet and, since their authority did not come from God as his did, were legitimized instead by the consent of those they governed. Both Islam and democracy, he writes, are "mobile ideas," simple concepts of universal appeal and sufficient flexibility to accommodate themselves to a variety of circumstances. When mobile ideas meet, they can enter a dialectic that produces something new, but with traces of the old. Thus Islam, a fundamentally simple religion--one God, one prophet--has spread rapidly around the world, as has the simple idea of democracy--one person, one vote.

The fusion of the two ideas in the Muslim world, he writes, has already developed momentum sufficient to ensure the eventual irrelevance of radical Islam and the eventual triumph of Islamic democracy in many forms, though not always in forms that reflect Western-style norms. In a section entitled "Varieties of Islamic Democracy," the reader gets a detailed and erudite country-by-country analysis of the status of Islamic democracy today, from Turkey through South and Southeast Asia, through the Middle East and across the Mediterranean littoral. Feldman's insights into the political culture of each country, and particularly the influence of Islam, are rewarding and insightful.

In the case of Iran, where the author claims that democracy hangs in the balance, Feldman sees a process of gradual democratization being driven by an almost inevitable public reaction against religious oppression--"The whole country is a bit like a Catholic school or yeshiva in which nuns or rabbis walk around checking hemlines or necklines"--corruption, and economic stagnation, with an aversion to another bloody 1979 revolution. Democracy is gaining a foothold in Iran, where elections, however conducted, have gradually begun to legitimize public approval or disapproval of candidates.

In his analysis of oil-rich Arab states, Feldman points out that rich states have little incentive to democratize, because abundant oil money frees the government and the citizenry from the give-and-take over public financing (taxes) that make governments and people mutually dependent. His believes that the oil monarchies will change very slowly, if at all, since as long as the oil keeps flowing, they can continue to buy off their internal enemies and cozy up to Western protectors against regional threats.

The author's most hopeful analysis is saved for two nations of "kings without oil"--the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco. There, without extensive oil revenue, the governments have embarked on the risky business of investing in people--in education, economic development, and state services--which in turn will lead to populations that expect more and more say in how they are governed. Neither monarch nor country has had an easy time of it. Feldman follows the political development of Jordan, in particular, as first the late King Hussein and the present King Abdullah have tacked and jibed toward gradual liberalization. He portrays Abdullah as a powerful force for eventual Islamic democratization, and one who is liable to be successful, provided that the West supports him with private investment, trade liberalization, and other concrete steps which reinforce the risks that both Abdullah of Jordan and Hassan of Morocco are taking.

The United States, Feldman writes, has powerful reasons to encourage the development of Islamic democracy around the world. Enhanced security, economic advantage, and the goodwill of emerging, stable states fall on the plus side of the ledger; increased terrorism, instability, and hatred fall on the other. His prescription: the United States should be true to its own democratic traditions and find ways to extend those benefits to Muslims who, though they may be initially clumsy at self-government, nevertheless desire the same freedoms that every American knows.