Islam and Democracy.

• Author: Butterworth, Charles E.
• Position: Review

John L. Esposito and John O. Voll. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 232 pages, index, Hardcover $45.00, paper $17.95.

Reviewed by Charles E. Butterworth

The question these days is why democratization does not exist in Muslim nations to the same extent as within Western ones, and the answer usually probes for ways in which Islam differs from either Judaism or Christianity. Yet momentary reflection should give pause. Judaism and Islam have many features in common, from the prominence of the divine law to the refusal to accord the prophet divine status. Esposito and Voll avoid such pitfalls as well as that of attributing the difference to Western peoples' non-adherence to the given faith, to a secularist mentality. Rather than trace the peculiar revolution in thinking that occurred in the West, and only in the West, from the end of the fifteenth century until the late eighteenth century and thus point to the way ideas influence action, they emphasize the vestiges of democracy to be found in nations adhering to Islam.

Carefully attentive to the facts, to what occurs in polities that either proclaim themselves Islamic or must be so considered because the majority of their citizens are Muslim, the authors emphasize the presence of democratization or vestiges of nascent democratization. Unlike Olivier Roy, they find political Islam anything but a failure; and their visit includes Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. They also find political Islam somewhat democratic. Where democracy does have difficulty taking root, they explain the phenomenon by factors having more to do with history, economics, and politics than Islam. (For a similar point of view, see the articles of Ghassan Salame, Aziz al-Azmeh, John Waterbury, Jean-Francois Bayart, and Abdelbaki Hermassi in Ghassan Salame. Ed., Democracy without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World [London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1994]).

Starting from the observation that "even in medieval Islamic civilization, in the era of the great Muslim empires of the Umayyads and the Abbasids, nonstate structures with important functions in the life of religious faith and action developed" (p. 4), Esposito and Voll seek to explain why Islam is not antithetical to democracy. Casting the reformers of the 19th and early 20th centuries as modernists, they argue that these activists were looking for structures that would not jeopardize Islam and thus were...