Islam, democracy, and constitutional liberalism

Political Science Quarterly

Volumn 119, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 1-20

  Zakaria, Fareed ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 3142733515     PISSN: 00323195     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20202302     Document Type: Review

References (14)

1. Elie Kedourie, Democracy and Arab Political Culture (Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Studies, 1992), 5.
2. Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 97.
3. The hadith are often more important than the Koran because they tell Muslims how to implement the sometimes general Koranic injunctions. For example, the Koran commands Muslims to pray, but it does not tell them how to pray; this is found in the hadith. (There are, of course, many hadith, many of dubious authenticity, and sometimes they contradict each other.)
4. Sahih Muslim, book 20, hadith 4533.
5. "Islamist" refers to people, like bin Laden, who want to use Islam as a political ideology, setting up an Islamic state that follows Islamic law strictly. I use this term interchangeably with the more commonly used "Islamic fundamentalist," although many scholars prefer the former.
6. I often lump Iran together with Arab countries. It is technically not one of them; Iranians speak Farsi, not Arabic. But Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1979 gave an enormous fillip to the broader fundamentalist movement and, for now, has dulled the age-old divide between the two largest sects of Islam, Sunni (mostly Arabs) and Shia (mostly Iranians).
7. Bahgat Korany, "Arab Democratization: A Poor Cousin?" PS: Political Science and Politics 27, no. 3 (September 1994), 511.
8. Halim Barakat, The Arab World: Society, Culture, and State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 23.
9. John Waterbury has demonstrated that, far from being undertaxed, the Middle East is the "most heavily taxed of the developing regions." Using World Bank data from 1975 to 1985, Waterbury showed that "tax revenues as a proportion of GNP averaged 25 percent for Middle Eastern states while Latin America averaged 12 percent. This reflects not merely the effect of the preponderant weight of captive petroleum corporations in several Middle Eastern countries, which can be easily and heavily taxed. On average, 19 percent of overall tax revenues in the Middle East came from corporate profits tax, while the corresponding figure for Africa was 20 percent, for Asia 19 percent, and for Latin America 10 percent." But Waterbury errs by neglecting to disaggregate Arab states by type and amount of unearned income. If he had done so, he would have found that the oil-producing states - such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait - levy few or no taxes, whereas the larger non-oil-producing states such as Egypt and Syria do levy substantial direct and indirect taxes. Although the unearned income that non-oil-producing states receive is significant, it is not enough to live on. Most of the unearned income in such states goes straight to the military. So the absence of demands for democracy in the Middle East can be chalked up to two separate factors: mass bribery in the really rich states and mass repression in the poorer ones. But both are courtesy of income that flows into the governments' coffers and requires very little real economic activity.
10. In many ways, the original fundamentalist was Qutb's contemporary, the Pakistani scholar Abul Ala Maududi. Qutb was an admirer of Maududi and translated his writings into Arabic. But it is Qutb who is read throughout the Islamic world today.
11. Maududi argued that the colonial powers could be viewed in the same manner as the pagan tribes at the dawn of Islam. Just as the pagans were fought and resisted by the Prophet, so too should a jihad be waged by Muslims against their colonial oppressors. Qutb adopted Maududi's reasoning and extended it to propose jihad against irreligious Muslim governments. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (India-napolis: American Trust Publications, 1990). The best introduction to Qutb is Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
12. Maududi argued that the colonial powers could be viewed in the same manner as the pagan tribes at the dawn of Islam. Just as the pagans were fought and resisted by the Prophet, so too should a jihad be waged by Muslims against their colonial oppressors. Qutb adopted Maududi's reasoning and extended it to propose jihad against irreligious Muslim governments. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (India-napolis: American Trust Publications, 1990). The best introduction to Qutb is Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
13. On the power of the medieval ulama, see Richard W. Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
14. There are some exceptions to this rule in Gulf states such as Dubai, Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia.