This afternoon, the Center for American Progress hosted an event with Tariq Ramadan, Matt Duss, Hussein Ibish, and Brian Katulis focusing on the future of democratic movements in the Middle East. Ramadan, the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, was banned from the United States by the Bush administration for spurious reasons. Because of his biography, Ramadan is viewed with great suspicion by conservatives who think he is trying to put a moderate gloss on a radical Islamist agenda.
Political Islam in the Middle East is a reality. There's no way to excise Islam from the fledgling democratic movements in the region any more than there would be to remove religious influences from politics in the United States. The problem, the panelists explained, was that European-style secularism -- which is not the same as American-style state neutrality -- is viewed as being associated with Western-backed dictators and oppression. So something vital that gets lost in translation is that when Americans talk about secular democracy, we're not actually talking about banishing faith from politics.
Ramadan argues that "just as there is a diversity of Muslims within Islam, there is a diversity of Islamists within Islamism." This is plain to see -- even if one does not believe there's much of a difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda (there is), the rise of a liberal-democratic Islamism in Turkey shows that Islam does not by definition have to be an illiberal force in politics.
The panel agreed that the main challenge that the Middle East's democratic movements are facing is not elections. What we should be concerned about, Katulis argued, was the rise of "illiberal democracies," elections without constitutionalism, where the tyranny of a dictator is replaced by mob rule. What's vital for the success of democratic movements, Ibish observed, is the adoption of Madisonian democracy, elections that never fundamentally alter or change the rights of minorities.
I think that's basically right. As Duss has written, because we're never going to get Islam out of politics in the Middle East, the U.S. has to help (or not get in the way of) these countries "develop[ing] pluralistic systems that can accommodate religiously oriented political actors while securing all peoples' basic rights." The challenge is to construct a system where the ambitions of illiberal forces can be constrained by the rule of law -- attempting to eliminate them by force will simply foment radicalism. It's also, as Ibish noted, not democracy.
This is why the outcome in Egypt is so important, and so worrisome. The recent referendum adopting constitutional reforms put the country on a steep path to elections that will empower the established factions, the Muslim Brotherhood and former Egyptian Dictator Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party. Whatever the outcome in Egypt, it will likely serve as a model for the rest of the region, for good or for ill.
