Review of "Islam and the Challenge of Democracy" Philadelphia Inquirer 3.6.05

What Islam says of democracy: Scholar shows terrorists' perversion.

By Carlin Romano

Inquirer Book Critic

Islam and the Challenge of Democracy By Khaled Abou El Fadl Edited by Joshua Cohen and Deborah Chasman Princeton. 139 pp. $12.95

In a just world, Khaled Abou El Fadl would get as much publicity as Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

Bin Laden and Zarqawi blow up buildings and slaughter fellow Muslims. Abou El Fadl blows up everything those two terrorists supposedly believe in.

A UCLA law professor trained in Islam's jurisprudential traditions, Abou El Fadl specializes in exploring Islam's humane and democratic elements. A few years ago, in the brisk The Place of Tolerance in Islam, he explained why Islamic and tolerant aren't contradictory, despite terrorists who suggest that Islam stands for nothing but hatred and violence.

Now, with demands for democracy resonating in the Mideast - among Iraqi voters, Lebanese demonstrators, even the right and left lobes of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak - observers might turn to Abou El Fadl's Islam and the Challenge of Democracy for a crash course on the basics.

The book's key message? Democracy isn't a great challenge for Islam - at least doctrinally.

According to Abou El Fadl, "classical Muslim scholars embraced core elements of modern democratic practice." Although "the Qur'an itself does not specify a particular form of government," it does, he argues, pinpoint values central to any Muslim state: "pursuing justice through social cooperation and mutual assistance (49:13, 11:119); establishing a nonautocratic, consultative method of government; and institutionalizing mercy and compassion in social interactions (6:12, 6:54, 21:107, 27:77, 29:51, 45:20)."

"Institutionalizing mercy and compassion"? No, such values don't seem to be within a light-year of exploding car bombs that wipe out hundreds of fellow Muslims.

Reading Abou El Fadl should anger every Muslim and non-Muslim. Why? Because he demonstrates not just the brutality but the idiocy of so-called Islamic fascism - "so-called" because it's really 99 percent fascist, and Islamic only in its rhetorical propaganda. As the author sets out Islam's authentic theses, the gap between them and their perversions grows ever clearer.

He writes, for instance: "A fundamental Qur'anic idea is that God vested all of humanity with a kind of divinity by making every person the viceroy of God on this earth."

Al-Qaeda agitprop insists that because many Iraqis killed by car bombs supported or sought jobs with the government, it's OK to target them. There's just one problem - Islam doesn't accept that callous thinking. Those would-be cops are also Allah's vice-regents on Earth.

And what of the quality of "mercy" - certainly not a notion widely associated with Islam these days? Listen at length to an Islamic scholar who, unlike Osama, did not spend his youth in Western nightclubs, or making big money in construction.

In the Qur'an, Abou El Fadl writes, "God describes God's self as inherently just, and the Qur'an asserts that God has decreed mercy upon God's self (6:12, 54). Furthermore, the very purpose of entrusting the divine message to the Prophet Muhammad was a gift of mercy to human beings.

"In the Qur'anic discourse, mercy is not simply forgiveness; nor is it the willingness to ignore the faults and sins of people. Rather, it is a state in which the individual is able to be just with him or herself and others by giving each individual person his or her due. Fundamentally, mercy is tied to a state of genuine perception of others - which is why in the Qur'an mercy is coupled with the need for human beings to be patient with and tolerant of each other. Most significantly, diversity and differences among human beings are claimed in the Qur'anic discourse to be merciful divine gifts to humankind (11:119)."

On almost every point, al-Qaeda "policy" blasphemes against Islam. Where Islam calls for mercy, al-Qaeda shows none, beheading truck drivers, anti-American journalists, anyone who falls into its clutches.

Where Islam demands attention to an individual's deserts, al-Qaeda celebrates random murder, often having no idea who will die at its hands. Where Islam welcomes diversity of peoples, al-Qaeda acts as if diversity alone in the Mideast justifies mayhem.

Much of Islam and the Challenge of Democracy focuses on concrete issues that remain problematic for "Islamic democracy." How, for instance, "can the higher law of Shari'ah, founded on God's sovereignty, be reconciled with the democratic idea that the people, as the sovereign, can be free to flout Shari'ah law?" (It's possible, says Abou El Fadl.) Who are "the people that have the power to choose and remove the leader" in an Islamic state?

Such issues receive further illumination from the 11 worthy scholars who offer short responses to Abou El Fadl's main essay, among them Jeremy Waldron, Saba Mahmood, John Esposito and Noah Feldman.

One younger contributor, political scientist Nader Hashemi of the University of Toronto, sums up the core finding of this book: "Islam is neither more nor less compatible with modern democracy than Christianity or Judaism."

We hope he keeps clear of Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, chief conservative ideologue at Tehran University. Hashemi quotes a sagacious maxim from one of the learned cleric's sermons: "If someone tells you he has a new interpretation of Islam, sock him in the mouth."

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