First let me say it is a pleasure to be here. The purpose of this series-to explore alternative prospects for democracy in the Muslim world and the Middle East-is obviously a very important issue. We are here primarily, I gather, to talk about Saudi Arabia, but I was given a somewhat different task, which was to introduce the discussion by talking about Islam and Democracy. This is obviously an extremely broad subject, obviously too broad for the time and our immediate purposes which are to focus in on Saudi Arabia. It is necessary, nonetheless, to say something about the question of Islam and Democracy, insofar as the questions and problems are common to the Muslim world. Now, this is only partially true, but it is true enough for me to be able to say some things about the subject, Islam and Democracy, which might be helpful for the discussion we will have later. This is especially so because of our primary subject, Saudi Arabia. What I mean by that is this: Saudi Arabia, or rather its religious and intellectual establishment, representing what has come to be called as Wahhabism, has endeavored to make their mode, that is to say the Wahhabi mode, of framing the discussion of Islam and Democracy, basically universal within the Muslim world. Hence it is necessary for that reason alone to try to say a little bit about what that overall discussion is.

One might say, beginning from that point, beginning from the way in which it has been cast by Wahhabi thought, that it is a framework that is essentially hostile to democracy under any of its common meanings or in any of its common practices. And this makes Saudi Arabia a particularly difficult case for democratic reform or for the discussion that I think has been the theme of this series. This is especially so because the legitimacy of the Saudi regime, the legitimacy of the ruling family, has come and continues to come from Wahhabism. It obviously creates a situation in which democratic reform is particularly difficult; if, on one hand, the family derives its legitimacy from Wahhabism and Wahhabism says essentially that democracy is not legitimate. I am going to come back to this a little later. I do want to say that the position that is essentially taken by Wahhabi thought concerning the democratic issue will be or is critical for other efforts with respect to democracy, precisely because of the attempt on the part of the Wahhabi establishment to make their understanding pretty much the standard or universal understanding throughout the Muslim world.

As our time is short I am going to try to give what is admittedly a bare-bones of the argument that is made with respect to democracy from the Wahabi perspective and then say a little bit about what the alternatives are in the contemporary Muslim discussion, and where that might lead with respect to the Saudi case.

The simplest form of the argument goes as follows: Democracy stipulates that sovereignty belongs to the people, or as a rule their designated representatives, operating through lawful institutions. That is what we ordinarily mean by democracy, and the Wahhabi critique is essentially correct in describing it that way. But according to this critique, in Islam sovereignty belongs to God, and God’s authority is not only higher than the authority of the people, it is also completely comprehensive. There really is not any room for any other source of authority and sovereignty. Of course it is not the case that God rules directly in the ordinary sense of the term. His rule becomes operational through his law as proclaimed in the Koran, and also developed through the Sunnah and so forth, and also through its designated administrators, namely the fuqaha, and in the case of Saudi Arabia, obviously the special police which enforce religious law.

I want to say for the purposes of our discussion, that this is not simply an unanswerable argument. That is to say the argument that there is no room for democracy in Islam because of God’s sovereignty and the contradiction between that and the notion of the sovereignty of the people can be responded to. We have some insight into the possibility that that is the case from the fact that there are other people who also insist that God has sovereignty, namely Christians and Jews. According to Christian and Jewish teaching, God is also sovereign. Moreover, for a long time, to speak simply of the Christian world, which has a longer and somewhat richer political tradition, there were of course people that made such arguments, arguments along the lines of the Wahhabi argument, namely that democracy could not possibly be a legitimate form of rule for a Christian polity because it would contradict the sovereignty of God. In the Christian case, for a considerable period of time, this notion was disputed and an argument was developed according to which the fact of God’s sovereignty and the sovereignty of the people could be and was reconciled.

Which leads me to say that this could of course happen with Islam, and I want to say further that there are people trying to tread this path. I can say that I know this to be the case because I know them; I know people who are trying to develop this argument, and moreover think it is not just merely an argument to be cooked up, but an argument that bears respect on the merits, bears respect on the merits of what Islam’s fundamental teaching is. Unfortunately, I know most of them, most of the people who are developing this argument, which means to say they are as yet very few. Like Nir and Meyrav, if I may put in a little pitch for myself, I am also conducting a project on Islam and Democracy and the idea basically is to find and provide an atmosphere in which people who think along these lines are in a position to develop their ideas and also get some hearing in American public space and perhaps Muslim space generally. But still all that means to say is that there is not yet what one could probably call a fully fledged Islamic-Democratic theory.

Now lacking that option for the time being, and I do hope that actually it can develop, and in fact I am reasonably confident at the moment that it can develop, there is another option. There is what we might call the democratic practice within Muslim countries. We have some examples of this: Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, unfortunately none in the Arab-Muslim world. The situation becomes even more clear-cut in the Middle East. Most of the non-Islamic regimes in the Middle East, many of them may be secular, but they are certainly not democratic, but rather autocracies. So they don’t provide living experience, rather, or the practice of democracies in the absence of the theory of democracy.

The problem it seems to me is particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where I will conclude, where the form of government is essentially the rule of family, the Saudi family. This rule was achieved by conquest, and as a result it had from the beginning and in some respect still has questionable legitimacy, including the question of whether it is legitimate for this family and its government to rule the two holiest cities in the Muslim world, Mecca and Medina. Because of that and throughout the history of this family and the Saudi Kingdom, legitimacy has been provided by the crusading mission of Wahhabism. That is to say the justification for Saudi rule, the rule of a particular family, was the service it provided to Wahhabism, to Wahhabi teaching and so forth. This means that quite obviously that it presents a very grave problem for the Saudi regime to undertake democratic reform because the main pillar of its legitimacy and the main pillar of its support frankly rejects that.

Now I just want to say a couple of words about what options there might be. According to classic democratic theory and practice, there is one source of democratic rule and democratic support which we call the middle class. There is a middle class in Saudi Arabia created in large part by virtue of its wealth. Some part of that middle class is restive with the non-democratic character of the county, and it might serve as an alternative support for the Saudi family under some new political arrangement. It might serve as some support for reform. We saw that very recently in the aftermath of the bombings in Riyadh when a number of Saudi papers, in particular Watan, opened up a discussion concerning the character of the regime, and in particular the impact of Wahhabism and the clerical establishment on life in Saudi Arabia. It seems to me that the family or the government could have let that go on and see where that might have led. That is to say they could have seen whether these "loudmouths" in Watan actually had a constituency, had other people who felt the same way they did, and could have seen whether there was some kind of alternate powerbase for them in Saudi society to which they could appeal if they had to come into conflict with the clerical establishment. For reasons which I guess we will get into, they decided to fire the editor of Watan and not see where that was going to go. So at the moment it seems that option has been foreclosed.