1. Islam’s Forgotten Heritage

Hillel Fradkin: Khaled Abou El Fadl teaches at the UCLA School of Law. A native of Egypt but long-time resident of the United States, he received his law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and his Ph.D. from Princeton. Dr. Abou El Fadl is a world-recognized authority on Islamic law and political thought. Two of his most recent books are Speaking in God’s Name: Islamic Law, Authority and Women, published by Oneworld Press, and The Place of Tolerance in Islam, published by Beacon Press. He is widely known as a thoughtful interpreter of Islamic tradition and how it relates to the contemporary condition of the Muslim world. [Update: In August 2003 he was appointed by President Bush to the Commission on International Religious Freedom.]

Dr. Abou El Fadl’s efforts to give a thoughtful interpretation of the current crisis, rather than present a merely moderate face, have earned him the criticism of some fellow Muslims. (For a very good account of that, see Franklin Foer’s article "Moral Hazard" in the November 18 [2002] issue of The New Republic.) In speaking of the American Muslim community’s response to 9/11, he has complained that "Muslim leadership has failed, and it has blamed everyone but itself for this failure." And there is more: Dr. Abou El Fadl has traced this failure to a failure of the Muslim community worldwide. Like many other Muslims, he himself grew up with an unhealthy dose of highly opportunistic and belligerent rhetoric, not only in the official media but also at popular cultural venues such as local mosques. "Despotic and exploitative regimes have taken power in nearly every Muslim country," he has written. A dogmatic, puritanical, and ethically oblivious form of Islam has predominated since the 1970s, he says, an Islamic theology "dismissive of the classical juristic tradition and . . . of any notion of universal and innate moral virtues." It is a theology that is alienated not only from the institutions of power in the modern world but also from its own heritage and tradition. And it is this that Dr. Abou El Fadl has been most eloquent in decrying.

Many of the discourses on Islam in the contemporary age are highly essentialized-in fact, they are caricatures-so that what emerges does not come close to reflecting the full depth and complexity of the tradition The Islamic tradition, like any other, is determined by human agents and constructed in a variety of ways to mean a variety of things in a variety of contexts in various periods of history.

The risk in attempting to characterize a tradition is that you end up projecting upon it your own highly specific individual context-biases you happen to hold, aspirations you happen to hold. Perhaps that is unavoidable in human interpretation, but it does call for caution. And it calls for the very healthy practice of trying to look for the nuances and the complexities.

The Islamic historical experience is bewilderingly complex. But today there is an obliviousness toward the pluralism of the Islamic tradition. This obliviousness is one of the most serious obstacles that modern Muslims con-front in developing what I call a "democratic commitment." Democracy is not just a theory. It is possible to acquire all the trappings of a democracy but lack the democratic ethic-the intangible element that distinguishes a democracy that works from a democracy that exists only on paper. A democratic "commitment" is evidenced by the type of social and political mores that permit a democracy to exist, to actually work to produce results.

Are there fundamental, irreconcilable differences between Islam and democratic systems? Institutionally and doctrinally, Islam has generated concepts that are quite similar to the types of institutions and doctrines we see in a functioning democracy. For instance, in pre-modern discourses, long before Rousseau and Locke, Muslim jurists debated questions akin to those at issue in the Western debates on the original condition of man. They debated whether human beings by their nature need government; whether government is required by virtue of text-i.e., God says have government, therefore you should have government-or by virtue of our rational faculties; whether human beings in their original condition are by nature fractious or tend towards cooperation.

In addition, some medieval Muslim jurists divided systems of government into three categories. The first was nearly a state of anarchy with no formal law, which they described as primitive and barbaric. The second was dynastic, where the law depended on the will of a king, which the jurists called a despotic and illegitimate government. And the third depended on the divine law, which they considered superior to the other two forms because both the ruler and the ruled are bound by laws that emerge from outside of them.

Fairly early, Muslim jurists agreed on the notion that government exists by contract (what they called aqd al-khilafa) between the ruler and the ruled. They all agreed that there is a contract-some arguing that it should be an actual written, signed document, others saying it was a contract to be presumed in law-but they disagreed about the legal position of this contract. There were some fascinating debates about whether the contract of khilafa, the contract of the caliphate, was akin to a marriage con-tract, a sales contract, or an agency contract.

Similarly, we find in medieval writings the concept of a bayah, a pledge of allegiance-or in the language of some modernists, a vote-being necessary to justify government. Jurists disagreed whether it was necessary that every person in society give that vote of allegiance, or if it was sufficient that a single person give the pledge. They also debated whether it could be obtained by coercion; some jurists in a very sanguine and calm fashion said you give it or die, while others saw things differently. Also, the Koran talks on at least two occasions about the elusive but tantalizing notion of shura, government by consultation. In early Islamic rebellions, sometimes the rebels’ complaint was that the leaders had destroyed the shura. What was meant by that? What was it that they thought they had lost, a loss that justified the rebellion?

In the old days, I taught a class in Islamic political concepts where I had graduate students pore over these texts, trying to analyze and understand them. But is that necessary? Or is it sufficient simply to set forth these concepts and say they show that Islam is consistent with democracy and order?

Many Muslim apologists do exactly that. As they see it, the task starts with showing that these concepts existed in one form or another, without regard to predominant historical practices, intellectual orientations, or doctrinal biases. They say, "There it is. Problem solved. Islam is consistent with democracy." The other camp tends to see these as basically irrelevant technicalities. What really matters is that only God is sovereign; the people are not. Therefore Islam is fundamentally inconsistent with democracy.

I’m going to focus on the first camp, but first I want to comment on the second camp and the idea of sovereignty. The matter of where sovereignty belongs-with God, with the people, with the jurists, with the ruler, with the rich, with the poor-was contested in the Islamic tradition. Some of the early debates about sovereignty would, by modern standards, be quite radical-bordering on the blasphemous, in fact. For instance, it is not unusual to find jurists from the tenth or twelfth century saying that God’s sovereignty in the hereafter means nothing on this earth. They divided rights into the rights of the people and the rights of God, and they said that God can take care of God’s rights on the final day; here on earth, we are concerned about the rights of the people.

There are problems with this methodology of setting out medieval concepts-such as government by consultation, the vote or the pledge, the contract, the original condition of man-and attempting to solve the challenge of Islam and democracy on those terms. First is that in the modern age only a select few have access to the medieval texts and debates. Quite simply, most Muslims do not know about this doctrinal tension that exists in the Islamic tradition. Of course, a text can always inspire something. But at this stage, the medieval concepts are not analyzed and applied to the production of modern political systems. Rather, they are presented with the sole purpose of proving the worthiness of Islam vis-à-vis the other. So the typical thing among apologists is to say, "Well, look at all these concepts. We invented them before the West, so that means Islam is wonderful, period." There is no critical energy that then engages the various concepts and draws out their potential.

A second problem with this use of medieval concepts is that modern democratic systems constitute a fairly sophisticated field of inquiry. We are no longer talking about the city-state of the Prophet, or the city-state type of Greek democracy. What often happens is that those who can and do read the texts and know of this debate do not have either the competence or the desire to know the democratic theoretical part and how it is applied in modern times. They learn the medieval and stop there, and so in large part their knowledge remains anachronistic.

Third, and perhaps most important, is this notion of the democratic commitment. At a minimum there have to exist some basic foundational elements, like tolerance of differences. And here is where I find the biggest problem with American Muslim organizations. They remain activist groups with activist energies but without intellectual grounding in any particular tradition other than the reactive tradition. Let me explain. Many of us grew up basically either responding to the West-England and the United States primarily-or responding to the Soviet Union. It is easy for Islamist intellectuals to maintain the mode of action they learned growing up in Muslim countries, that you define yourself basically in reaction to the other. So if you don’t like the West, you are everything that’s different from the West. If you don’t like the Communists, then you’re everything that is different from the Communists. But among American Muslim organizations, the intellectual and moral grounding-not just in the Islamic texts but in the pluralities of the Islamic tradition-is woefully, woefully absent. There has not been a serious movement among these organizations to create educational institutions that would attempt a critical understanding of the tradition they claim to represent. There are practically no such institutions, or even attempts to preserve the knowledge of Islamic law. These organizations remain activist, with a lot of energy but without direction.

Perhaps it is no surprise to find that even the grounding in the democratic tradition itself is remarkably poor. I wonder how many leaders of the predominant Muslim organizations have read a single book about democratic theory. They flaunt terms like "pluralism" to prove that they know what’s happening. But scratch beneath that surface and you find little or nothing. I also wonder how many of those leaders have read a single book about American history and the debates of the early American democracy. It is true that lately Muslim organizations have gained knowledge of political candidates, and they have even produced what they call the "shame list" and the "honor list" of candidates, people they like and people they don’t like. Ten years ago, they were not even aware of candidates.

Before American Muslims can be said to be engaging in a pluralistic democratic tradition in the Western world, they must become convinced of the moral worthiness of the pluralistic ethic within Islam itself. In my view, it is nonsensical to maintain a despotic and authoritarian position regarding the Islamic tradition while claiming to be a full participant in a democracy. But that is in fact a prevailing paradigm I have noticed among Muslims in the United States, England, Denmark, and the Netherlands. It is as if the engagement with Western democracy amounts to the use of that democracy to achieve political objectives that they find desirable, rather than acceptance of the ethic of democracy as a moral virtue in itself. Observe the way these organizations react to their own tradition: the tolerant pluralistic ethic, the tolerance of the other, is woefully absent.

Here is where the real lost opportunity is. Muslims in the West have a rare opportunity to counter the distressing circumstances of many Muslim countries-despotism, economic need, social turmoil. But instead, the prevailing paradigm remains that democracy is a continuation of the logic of the market. You take from it whatever suits your interests.

I do not believe that the Islamic tradition is fundamentally anti-democratic or even substantially anti-democratic. Nor do I believe that it is pro-democratic. Democracy was simply not in the moral universe of the medieval jurists who constructed what we call Islam today. I don’t mean by this that there is no Islam other than what they constructed. I am not among the followers of deconstructionism, and I don’t admire Foucault or Derrida. But we must recognize the crucial role played by interpretive communities of the past. Notions of democracy and representation were not a part of their conceptual world. There were other issues that consumed them, other debates they took extremely seriously. Those debates had clear implications for us as Muslims-or at least for me as a Muslim-in the modern age. The key is to recognize that, but not to think we must handle the tradition with kid gloves. That tradition ought to be engaged critically and analytically, and not merely treated as some type of decorative device useful to impress others or defend against their presumed anger.

American Muslims are far from doing that.

DISCUSSION

Hillel Fradkin: Thank you, Dr. Abou El Fadl. It is indeed very disappointing that Muslims in the West, who have the most intimate experience of democratic life, have not done more to create the grounds for participation in non-Muslim democratic societies and to create the prospects for carrying back democracy to despotic Muslim countries. What is the biggest obstacle preventing a return to the resources you’ve described in the Muslim tradition?

Khaled Abou El Fadl: This is a very good argument for a liberal arts education. There is a notion that we take from the West their science but not their social or political ideas; if you accept social and political ideas, then you will be labeled "secular." Rarely do we find someone who identifies himself as an Islamist and at the same time talks about importation of ideas.

There continues to be a strong trend toward the physical sciences. There aren’t many political scientists or anthropologists or sociologists or even lawyers among leaders of the American Muslim organizations. Most of them are in medicine or engineering. And if they were educated in the United States, they were likely to take the absolute minimum of liberal arts courses.

I would be quite remiss if I didn’t add a couple of other factors. We cannot deny the extremely powerful impact of the puritan orientation in the contemporary politics of the Islamic world. That puritanism, particularly the Wahhabi or Salafi strains, insists that Islam is simple and straightforward and that complexity in social thinking is the door to the devil-thus encouraging the unwillingness to gain a civic education. The minute you start getting a little bit complicated, you are told, "Okay, that’s heretical," simply because not every idiot can understand. The minute you reach the point of more than basic literacy you become heretical.

Also, there is the fact that most Muslim organizations have had the luxury and the curse of relying on easy cash, i.e., oil money. They’re like a spoiled child who never gets the benefit of a good beating in life and a real social education. Someone who is spoiled can exist in a world he has constructed for himself oblivious to what lies beyond its narrow confines. Often when I deal with the leaders of Muslim organizations, that is exactly the feeling I have. Easy money produces easy worlds in which Muslim leaders live comfortably without worrying about things such as their persuasiveness to grassroots Muslims, or indeed whether they actually have any support at all among their constituency.

Nir Boms: Our efforts to bridge the gaps between Islam and democracy by encouraging pluralism, generating debates, fostering scholarship, and so on-is all this really futile?

Khaled Abou El Fadl: If I considered it completely futile, I would not continue lecturing and writing articles and training students in these matters. But I think that part of being morally responsible is to refrain from being optimistic (or pessimistic) when circumstances don’t warrant it. I’ll tell you what exactly I’m reacting to. When I was growing up in the Middle East, a statement I would hear constantly was, "God has promised to take care of Islam. So regardless of what’s going on, don’t worry, brother, Islam will be taken care of." This was a prescription for what I experience as much cowardly, morally evasive behavior.

I was in Canada debating the head of a major Muslim organization, and he just got fed up with me. He said, "You count five pieces of good news right now or I’m not going to accept anything you say." I told him that I’m not a cheerleader, that my job as a scholar is to analyze and critique. I must err on the side of the necessity of action rather than on the opposite side. The minute I tell people, "It looks good, don’t worry," I’ve failed. That’s not my task.

In the seventies, early in the Wahhabi movement, I would hear continually from my family and from my teachers in Egypt, "You know, Egypt is the mother of the world. We are not going to be affected." I continued to observe this sort of unjustified confidence as things kept getting worse, as the whole world was crumbling around us. Professors who taught philosophy were fired, professors who taught Kalam were fired, the position in Shiite law at al-Azhar University in Cairo was terminated- and yet people kept saying, "Focus on optimism."

According to Nasser, Egypt was not defeated in 1967. According to Sadat and Mubarak, 1973 was a clear-cut and unequivocal victory. And so there emerges a pattern not of optimism but of delusion.

Jeanne Heffernan: Which of the concepts that you alluded to within Islam fit best with the democratic ethic?

Khaled Abou El Fadl: The best way to think of them is as untapped, undeveloped intellectual potentials within the tradition. So, for instance, it is a fact that when the Prophet was going to leave Mecca to go to Medina, he took a pledge of allegiance-later called bayah, which some modernists have argued is a vote-from key individuals. When he entered Medina he went around doing what we today would call soliciting votes. He wanted to know that people wanted him. Muslim jurists transformed this historical experience, which could be interpreted in different ways, into the notion that if a ruler comes to power, ideally that ruler should receive the support of the people who have power in society, or whose consent represents the consent of society.

Or, for another example, take shura, government by consultation. It’s mentioned twice in the Koran. In the classical tradition there used to be a debate about the meaning of shura ghayr mulzima--"You’re the ruler, you took consultation": Did the consultation merely produce a recommendation, leaving the ruler free to follow it or not, as he saw fit? Or was he bound by the results? But other than among bookish people, these have not been translated into concepts of empowerment. Can it happen? Well, I surely hope that my graduate students will play a role in making it happen. Do I believe it will happen in my lifetime? No. In their lifetime? Maybe. It depends on the quality of their students. If they are not good teachers, then it’s a spent force; the intellectual energy will have to be invented all over again. But if they are good teachers, there will be incremental progress.

2. Islam and Constitutionalism

Hillel Fradkin: Sohail Hashmi, a graduate of Harvard and Princeton universities, is a professor of international relations at Mount Holyoke College. He has written a great number and variety of articles on Islamic political thought and ethics, especially in the area of international affairs, and is currently shepherding two books to publication. In a number of his writings Professor Hashmi has drawn attention to one source of contemporary problems in Islamic history: Not only does Islamic political and intellectual culture lack a tradition of democratic political thought, but political thought altogether, once a vibrant field of Islamic intellectual endeavor, has fallen on hard times in the past centuries. Islamic political thought is ill prepared, given its present resources, to guide Islamic political life at all, let alone towards a democratic future.

Islamic constitutionalism and the prospects for democracy are topics occupying a lot of time at the moment. In a volume entitled Islam and Constitutionalism, my co-editor Professor Houchang Chehabi and I, along with more than thirty other collaborators, attempt to describe the evolution of constitutional ideals in Islamic societies. Starting with the classical period of Islamic thought back in the time of the prophet Muhammad and the earliest community itself, then working our way up to modern times, we survey, in a very systematic way, the experience of constitutionalism among Muslim peoples.

A Muslim engagement with formal constitutions and the ideology of constitutionalism dates back more than a century and a half. Today virtually all of the fifty-seven or so Muslim-majority states have promulgated written constitutions. Indeed, the writing of a constitution is one of the first tasks upon which they embarked soon after independence.

But as we all know, it is one thing to promulgate a constitution and quite another to develop a constitutional order able to support liberal democracy. Thus far in their political history, modern Muslim states have generally failed to realize either constitutionalism or liberal democracy. The record of those states that have sought to apply Islamic principles in their political structures-for example, by proclaiming that the Koran is the state’s constitution, as in Saudi Arabia; or by declaring that sovereignty belongs to God, as in Pakistan and Iran-is particularly disheartening for those who look to Islamic constitutionalism to provide a basis for liberal democracy.

The experiences of these three countries and many others, such as Sudan and Afghanistan, prompt the question, Is there something inherently authoritarian in the vision of an Islamic state? This is a very complicated and controversial question, a proper answer to which would take much more time than we have today. So I will, with your indulgence, examine this question with reference to the understanding and application of sharia, or divine law, as it is understood by many Muslims, and the tension that such an understanding creates with constitutionalism.

First, it might be useful to step back a bit and examine the relationship between constitutionalism and religion more generally. Constitutionalism is the idea that the political order is subject to a higher authority beyond arbitrary human changes, either those of an autocrat or those of a democratic mob. Western constitutional theory may be traced back to roots in the natural-law tradition of the ancient Greeks and Romans, particularly the Stoics. In medieval Christendom, natural law was upheld by Catholic scholastics as being congruent with divine law; it was seen as an aspect of the eternal reason, God, that nevertheless was discernible by all human beings exercising right reason.

Later theorists would diminish the divine element in natural law. Instead of emphasizing the obligations inherent in natural law, they emphasized the rights of the individual in the face of society or the state. Still, constitutionalism remained wedded to natural law in the sense of holding human beings accountable to a relatively stable set of prescriptions for what government may or may not do to its own people and what citizens may or may not do to one another.

Modern constitutionalism is often linked to liberal democratic regimes that operate according to the will of the majority while guaranteeing the equal rights of their citizens. Yet theoretically this linkage is not essential. In the broadest sense, any regime that provides for (1) limited and accountable government, (2) adherence to the rule of law, and (3) the protection of fundamental rights, may be said to embrace constitutionalism.

Today, formal written constitutions are so often an expression of democratic principles that we tend to forget the early democratic opposition to them. Remember that at the time of the Federalist Papers, the anti-Federalist "Brutus" defended popular sovereignty against the Federalist "Publius," who championed a constitution establishing a strong central government. The anti-Federalist lobbied for the insertion of the Bill of Rights, which strengthened the American constitution as a genuine expression of constitutionalism. In general, then, we could say this about the relationship: constitutionalism doesn’t require liberal democracy, but liberal democracy does require constitutionalism.

Now the way that constitutions, constitutionalism, and democracy relate to one another has been widely explored in the scholarly literature. But the way that constitutionalism, democracy, and religion relate to one another has received scant scholarly attention. We don’t need to look far back in the history of Western political thought to understand why. Constitutionalism arose as part of a package of Enlightenment ideals in which secularism occupied a very prominent place. Modern constitutionalism has generally been seen as a means of formalizing the secular quality of the political arena. The framers of the seminal documents of modern constitutionalism—that is, the American constitution and the French revolutionary constitutions—took great pains either to separate religion and politics or to subordinate the church to the state. And political theory largely upheld the increasing secularization of politics as a defining characteristic of modernity.

Yet constitutionalism has never been entirely devoid of religious influences and significance. The debates in American constitutional law centering on the interpretation of the First Amendment clauses respecting religion testify amply to this fact. Even the apparent linkage between secularism and constitutionalism is extremely problematic in terms of both the process of constitution-making and the written constitutional documents themselves. This is because religiously motivated individuals and groups have frequently engaged in the process of constitutionalism in both supportive and oppositional ways. And religion is frequently a part of written constitutional documents, again in both negative and positive expressions. This is true of some Western countries, but it is especially true of non-Western countries where constitutionalism spread-along with other ideologies- in the tracks of imperialism. In short, religion and constitutionalism have played extremely important interrelated roles in the political history of the past two centuries all over the world.

From the three characteristics of constitutionalism that I gave earlier, it’s not at all apparent that religion and constitutionalism would necessarily conflict. The conflict arises when constitutionalism proposes a higher law based upon rational deduction that challenges the higher law based on divine command. To the extent that divine law cannot be reconciled or accommodated with conceptions of natural law, conflict is inevitable.

The legitimating appeal to religion reintroduces a source of tension that is perhaps the oldest in human nature: that between natural or manmade law and divine transcendent law-that is, between the conception of law and ethics as a sphere of rational interpretation and a more literal application of scripture. This tension is, of course, not at all unique to Islam. Controversies in Israel over the place of secular versus Jewish law have so far prevented the adoption of a constitution in that country. In the case of Islam, controversies over manmade law versus divine law date back to the formative period of Islamic thought, perhaps to the time of the prophet Muhammad himself. The Koran was seen in part as an expression of divine law; as the Koran commands, "O believers, obey God, and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you." Naturally the problem that confronted the Muslim community immediately after the death of the Prophet was how to apply the Koran and the Sunna (the traditions of the Prophet) when they are silent, ambiguous, or seemingly contradictory. The legal controversies that inevitably arose on this point fueled a broader theological controversy over the question, What makes God’s laws good or right?

Although the debate was conducted by a range of writers over some two centuries, it centered by and large on the ethical objectivism favored by the school of Mutazilites, and the ethical voluntarism argued by their rivals, the Asharites. Let me say a little bit about this. The earliest schools of Islamic jurisprudence were established by men who advocated ijtihad al-ra’i--that is, legal judgment based on human reason. The advocates of right reason found support in the ethical objectivism of the Mutazilites. Revelation could be supplemented by reason, the Mutazilites argued, because truth and false-hood, right and wrong, are objective categories independent of God’s will. Revelation supplements reason in confirming the value of certain actions, particularly those involving human obligations toward God, such as prayer and fasting. Nevertheless, reason unaided by revelation is adequate in confirming the specific dictates of revelation. And therefore, theoretically, even a conscientious non-Muslim could arrive at the right moral conclusions. It is clear that the Mutazilites were trying to reconcile Greco-Roman natural-law arguments with Islamic conceptions of divine law.

This approach was challenged by later schools that espoused another form of ijtihad: ijtihad al-qiyas, legal interpretation based on analogy. Instead of being guided by the public welfare, or principles of equity, the jurist according to this view was to deduce law through strict analogy with cases that were already to be found in the Koran and in the Sunna. This shift away from an emphasis on human reason and legal interpretation was mirrored by the rise of the Asharite school in theology, which fiercely denounced the ethical objectivism of the Mutazilites. The Asharites held that God’s power could not be subject to any objective ethical values; rather, ethical value was derived entirely from God’s command. Human beings discovered right action through God’s grace to his creation, through the scriptures, and through the actions of divinely inspired prophets. These sources of divine law are the only arbiters of the moral content of specific actions. "He who does not validly know the law," Abu-l-Qasim al-Ansari wrote in the twelfth century, "does not validly know that a bad action is bad."

By the end of the twelfth century-owing in part to political reasons that had nothing to do with the intellectual merits of either of these contending viewpoints -the Asharite position had emerged as orthodoxy in Sunni intellectual circles. The triumph of the Asharites had profound consequences for the evolution of Islamic conceptions of ethics, philosophy, and law. Emphasis on revelation over reason places those most familiar with revelation-the ulama, the religious scholars-in an obviously privileged position, while increasing political in-stability, coupled with pressures from various Abbasid caliphs of the time, forced these ulama toward greater and greater conservatism in their legal interpretations. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, further development of the law was seriously curtailed with a fabled closing of the gates of ijtihad. This event is more mythical than real, because of course legal interpretation did continue; but the ethos that gripped Islamic scholarship was deeply resistant to change or critical inquiry.

As the sharia became more and more closed to fresh interpretation, while Muslim societies continued to change and encounter new problems, extra-sharia legislation developed. This siyasa-sharia, or qanun as it was labeled, was treated by the jurists as the realm of manmade laws, tolerated by them for pragmatic or utilitarian purposes. But their qualified acceptance of such manmade laws is clearly reflected in a statement by one of the greatest thinkers of his time, Ibn Khaldun, who wrote in the fourteenth century:

That state, therefore, whose law is based on violence and coercion, and gives full play to the irascible nature, is tyranny and injustice and, in the eyes of the law, blameworthy, a judgment in which political wisdom also concurs. Furthermore, that state whose law is based upon rational statecraft and its principles, but lacks the supervision of the revealed law, is likewise blameworthy, since it is the product of speculation without the light of God. For the Lawgiver (God) knows best the interest of men in all that relates to the other world, which is concealed from them. The principles of rational government aim solely at apparent or worldly interests, whereas the object of the Lawgiver is man’s salvation in the hereafter. It is imperative, therefore, by the very nature of revealed laws, to bring the whole people to conform themselves to their ordinances in all matters of this world and the next. And this rule is the rule of the lawgivers (the prophets) and of their successors, the caliphs. And this is the true meaning of the caliphate.

In the early nineteenth century, constitutional ideas began to creep into Muslim states as more and more Muslims traveled and studied in Europe. But what impressed early Muslim visitors about Western constitutionalism was not so much its secular foundations as the orderly procedures of government that it provided. For example, Mirza Abu Talib Khan-I believe he is the third Indian known to have visited Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century-records in his famous travelogue, the Masir-i-Talibi, how impressed he is with the rules for succession to the English throne. The wars of succession that had repeatedly wracked the Mogul Empire no doubt influenced his views. He wasn’t favorably impressed with Parliament, however, whose debates reminded him of a flock of parrots incessantly squawking at one another. Rather incredulously, he noted that the British parliament legislated according to its own wits, without the assistance or the constraints of divine law.

As the nineteenth century wore on, the need to reopen the sharia to interpretation and reform was one of the driving forces underlying the advocacy of constitutionalism among various Muslim reformers. For these men, constitutionalism was the supreme manifestation of the new ijtihad; it was a legitimate vehicle for the reconceptualization of Islamic polity and for the creation of new and more effective political institutions that reflected the true purposes of the Islamic ethical sources. But from the beginning, the reformers faced concerted opposition from the ulama and other conservatives who viewed constitutionalism as human tampering with the sacred law. According to this view, the sharia is the immutable Islamic constitution, so human beings are limited to law-finding rather than law-making. Significant differences also arose over the credentials of those who may engage in this process of law-finding and the extent to which this effort may go. These serious differences in understanding of the constitutional process and the meaning of the constitution in national life have obviously had profound consequences for Muslim societies. They have often stymied the development of genuine constitutionalism or have led to the demise of the constitutional enterprise altogether. Let me provide some examples.

The first comes from Tunisia, which in 1861 became the first Muslim state to promulgate a constitution. The constitution itself was preceded by a document known as the aqd al-aman, the Pact of Security, which enumerated the rights of Tunisian subjects-particularly those who were non-Muslims. The committee set up to write this document initially consisted of nonreligious scholars as well as a number of the leading Tunisian ulama. In the middle of the drafting process, the ulama bolted from the committee en masse. The reasons for their abrupt departure are still unclear, but one explanation widely given is that these ulama felt uncomfortable participating in an enterprise they considered alien to their role as defenders of the sharia. Some ulama did participate later in the judicial system that the constitution created, but the leading ulama made no attempt at ijtihad, no attempt to interpret Islamic laws according to their current conditions. Instead, they persistently appealed to legal rulings rendered by the classical jurists in earlier centuries. They thus undermined the spirit in which the constitution had been drafted, and they contributed significantly- through their acts both of omission and of commission-to the abrogation of the constitution in 1864, just three years after its adoption.

For the second example we turn to Iran. The constitutional movement of 1905 to 1911 resulted in bitter disputes among the Shiite ulama over their role in drafting the constitution and over the role of the constitution itself in the life of the faithful. Two tracts give us a glimpse into the rival positions. The first is by the pro-constitution alim Shaykh Muhammad Na’ini: "The soundness and completeness of the constitution arises from its dealing with all affairs necessary to the well being of society, with the proviso that none of the constitution’s provisions should be in contradiction of the holy law of Islam." For Na’ini, legislation under the constitution must be restricted to the limits established by the sharia. But he doesn’t specify what those limits are. What’s really noteworthy about Na’ini’s tract is that he doesn’t limit the legislative function to any particular group. He writes only very generally, "There must be reliance on the elements of perfect stewardship or guardianship, calculation and responsibility and the entrusting of a group of people gathered in a consultative assembly which is composed of those who are the enlightened ones of the country and the good intentioned. Thus the whole intellectual power of the country is put into the service of the people within the official setting of the national consultative assembly."

In marked contrast to Na’ini’s views are the opinions of Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri, who was a leader of the anti-constitution camp among the ulama. What particularly aroused Nuri’s ire were the legislative provisions of the constitution. Nuri characterizes them as "an innovation and down-right aberration," because in Islam no one is allowed to legislate or to establish a provision. Islam does not have any shortcoming that requires completion. When new incidents emerge, they should be referred to ulama, who will deduce the relevant provision from the Koran and the Sunna. But the ulama cannot make law.

Similar controversies erupted in 1979 when the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran was being drafted. This constitution was framed entirely in light of Ayatollah Khomeini’s notion of the vilayat-i faqih, the direct role of the Shiite jurisprudent. And so the Iranian constitution today incorporates into its framework an explicit guardianship role not just for the Shiite ulama as a whole but for one of them in particular: the "supreme" guide, as he is referred to in the constitution. In the task of insuring that no law passed by the parliament, the Majlis, contravenes the principles of Islam, the supreme guide is assisted by a twelve-member Council of Guardians. The Council of Guardians proved such an impediment to the legislative functions of the Majlis that Khomeini himself established what has come to be known as the Expediency Council to arbitrate disputes between these two institutions. Upon Khomeini’s death in 1989, this Expediency Council was formally instituted by an amending of the constitution, but its existence has not broken the log-jam between the elected reformers in the Majlis and the appointed conservatives on the Council of Guardians.

Another prime example comes from Pakistan. Pakistani constitutionalism has grappled with the complexities of framing an Islamic constitution ever since a 1949 resolution of the first Constituent Assembly proclaimed that the state would be built on Islamic principles. Very quickly, the reform of sharia emerged as one of the most contentious issues in the new Islamic republic. In 1955, by act of the Pakistani National Assembly-which was still meeting without a constitution because the Pakistani constitution was not promulgated until 1956-a commission on marriage and family laws was formed consisting of six lay members and one representative of the ulama. Its purpose was exploratory and advisory. It was to consider the applicability and the possible revision of Islamic family law in light of the modern conditions of the Pakistani people.

The commission’s investigations and recommendations were released the following year, but in two separate reports. The majority report reflected the consensus of the committee’s lay members, and it begins with the traditional acknowledgment of the "comprehensive and all embracing nature" of Islamic law, the sharia. But then it very quickly proceeds to argue that since no code of law can comprehend the infinite variety of human relations for all occasions and for all ethics, the commission was justified in proposing the reform of laws pertaining to such fundamental issues as marriage, divorce, and in-heritance. The Islamic rationale presented for this revision was, once again, the principle of ijtihad, which the majority report enshrines not only as the dynamic force underlying the sharia, but indeed as a basic right of each Muslim generation. The discussion of ijtihad concludes with a ringing expression of the modernist position:

No Muslim can believe that Islam is an outworn creed incapable of meeting the challenge of evolutionary forces. Its basic principles of justice and equity, its urge for universal knowledge, its acceptance of life and all its aspects, its worldview, its view of human relations and human destiny, and its demand for an all-around and harmonious development, stand firmly like a rock in the tempestuous sea of life.

Very eloquent, but it didn’t sway the sole religious representative on the committee. The lone dissenting opinion from the majority’s claimed right of legal revision came from the committee’s religious scholar. Maulana Ihtisham ul Haq writes that the institution of a committee composed of persons ignorant of Islamic jurisprudence negates the very possibility that its detailed inquiry into technical points of sharia could be valid. A far more vigorous attack on the majority position focuses upon the lay members’ claim to be conducting ijtihad. Ihtisham ul Haq writes,

To consider personal and individual whims to be a legitimate form of sharia interpretation is not ijtihad, it’s only a distortion of the religion of God and the worst type of heresy. . . . Certain recommendations, which reflect subservience to the West of some of the members and their displeasure with Islam, constitute an odious attempt to distort the holy Koran and Sunna with a view to giving them a Western slant and a Western bias.

The majority report was eventually pushed through the Pakistani National Assembly, but not through any kind of democratic process. Rather, it happened under the dictatorship of General Ayub Khan.

Under the Zia ul-Haq government (1977-88), Muslim personal law was explicitly singled out as the one area of legislation beyond the purview of the federal sharia court. But the ulama and other conservative elements have lobbied incessantly to have this exception to the court’s jurisdiction lifted and true sharia applied. Many of the leading ulama in Pakistan with whom I’ve spoken are confident that it is only a matter of time before they get this exception lifted.

So how can we think about resolving this tension? What possible ways are there to accommodate liberal constitutionalism with Islam when so many Muslims view sharia as divine law, in opposition to manmade law, which of course is inherent in the notion of constitutionalism?

One obvious path is to embrace secularism outright. The experience of Turkey under the newly elected AKP and the politics of moderate Islamic parties in Malaysia and Indonesia will be quite important in the years to come, if these experiments are allowed to continue that long. It will be important to see if religious parties that claim to be applying Islamic principles to their national life can, in fact, accommodate to secular politics. A number of prominent Muslim activists and theorists argue precisely that. But I think that the secular path, the path that attempts to divorce Islam completely from political life, will be difficult if not impossible for other countries to follow. In other countries, the experience of the past fifty years has shown that if Islam is not incorporated into the constitutional order, it is likely to become a source of agitation and challenges to that order. So in my opinion, the task for Muslim constitutionalists is not to discard Islam but to find the resources within Islamic thought that permit the development and sustaining of constitutionalism.

How can we do that? One of the first steps is to assert the possibility of natural law and especially natural rights within an Islamic framework. This will require, to some extent, a resurrection and a dissemination of the early Mutazilite emphasis on ethical objectivism-that all human beings possess the God-given rational faculty to discern right from wrong and to form moral conclusions on how to order their lives. Professor Abdulaziz Sachedina has recently suggested, in a book called Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism, that a conception of natural law is evident in the Koranic concept of fitra, which basically means that all human beings are united in sharing a basic moral awareness, a moral consciousness.

The second task is to develop a societal consensus that ijtihad, legal interpretation, is indeed the birthright of all Muslims, and that each Muslim generation has not only the right but also the duty to understand the Koran and the Sunna in light of its own needs and its own circumstances. Some Muslim scholars (such as the late Professor Fazlur Rahman) have argued that this view was in fact the understanding of sharia for the earliest Muslim generations. It was certainly, as I’ve tried to show, the methodology embraced by the earliest legal scholars, the ones closest to the prophetic community. These scholars gave as much importance to istislah, the notion of public welfare, and istihsan, equity or fairness in law, as they did to custom or dogma.

The third possibility is to reopen an old, old idea and give it new content. This is the idea of divine sovereignty as a check against human tyranny. I mentioned earlier that many of the classical ulama of the Abbasid period resisted tampering with the sharia because of the theological argument that to do so would be to tamper with divine law. Well, that was certainly one motivation, the ideological, theological motivation. But there was another very practical political reason involved as well. By upholding the immutability of the sharia, the jurists were not seeking to enforce any specific legal points that were part of the sharia; they were instead trying to uphold the rule of law. They were trying to prevent the transformation of the sharia into an instrument of tyranny at the hands of what were already widely considered to be corrupt rulers.

Modern Muslims can embrace the same conception of sharia and apply it to their own political realities, which are, objectively speaking, not so far removed from those of the early centuries. They must start by approaching the Koran as a book of practical morality, not a compendium of legal minutiae. The sum total of the Koran’s morality can be conceived of as the sharia. So the sharia must be disentangled from the notion that it is divine law, because divine law in this case is, as many Muslim modernists have pointed out, not God’s revelation but fiqh, the human interpretation provided by the early jurists that came over the centuries to be enshrined as God’s will. If the sharia is understood not as a law book or code of law, not as a set of detailed legal requirements, but as the moral foundation for constructing a political order, if it is understood as fundamentally enjoining the principles of justice, equality, and the submission of human beings to a transcendent authority, then in fact it can serve as a check upon arbitrary human rule, upon authoritarian regimes that dictate laws to their people. Sharia in this conception can play the role that constitutions play in a constitutional order.

DISCUSSION

Hillel Fradkin: Thank you, Professor Hashmi. You mentioned my teacher, Fazlur Rahman, who in the 1960s was appointed under Ayub Khan to mediate the tension between the sharia and the constitution by being head of Pakistan’s Central Institute of Islamic Research. That effort failed in a dramatic way: Rahman was driven into exile. Does that failure tell us something about how modernization might come about in the Islamic world?

Sohail Hashmi: I think the most profound and revolutionary changes are happening gradually on the so-called Islamic periphery. By that I mean Malaysia and Indonesia, where I really have high hopes that some kind of model will be developed over time. I would include in the periphery Muslims in Europe and the United States, where it is a brave new world for Islam. And here I think there are a number of Muslims who are very much Americans but who also feel strongly committed to and grounded in their native societies. Certainly there are a number of potential candidates to aid the process of this intellectual revival, persons who live in the United States and were educated here but who could easily be influential back in their own countries. So as Fazlur Rahman said, the key is education; he devoted the last part of his life to discussing the problems of Islamic education. We know from our own experience here in the United States that constitutionalism itself is a very gradual process. It doesn’t spring into existence fully formed. It’s learned, sometimes through very bad mistakes.

Abdulwahab Alkebsi: There are other examples of Islamic constitutionalism, including the constitution of the Prophet himself in Medina. That was a secular constitution, one that enabled Muslims, Jews, and atheists to live together as one nation under a secular regime. More recently, the 1948 "constitutional" revolution in Yemen introduced a constitution that held the leader, the imam, accountable.

Sohail Hashmi: The constitution of Medina is a very good example of a fusion of secular and religious ideas. It was not a single written document. More than likely, it was a series of contracts that the Prophet forged, first with the Muslims who had migrated from Mecca to Medina in 622, and later with the Jews and also some pagans who had not converted to Islam in Medina. So it’s a series of contracts that are compiled in what Muslim historians refer to as the Sahifa, the document, that is, the foundational document of the community of the Prophet. It doesn’t re-ally provide for details of political structure, but it does fuse the Muslims into a transcendent sort of identity-the identity of a Muslim umma, or nation, an umma that is superior to but does not necessarily displace the tribal identities of the Muslims. The tribal identities were of course paramount before the rise of Islam. So the document creates an ethical basis for Muslim action. The ethos of pre-Islamic Arabian tribes was, "My tribe, right or wrong." The Islamic ethos is now: the umma when it is right, but go with your own conscience if the umma is wrong. The constitution of Medina is an assertion of a higher authority, divine law, above any kind of manmade assertions of what is right and wrong.

What is really quite intriguing is that the Jewish tribes were incorporated into this document. As the document itself says, the Muslims are an umma and the Jewish tribes are an umma. Muslim scholars have debated back and forth: Were the Jews integrated into the Muslim umma, or did the Prophet conceive of them as a separate community, enjoying autonomy alongside the Muslim umma? I tend towards the latter conclusion, because the document says that the Muslims had their religion and their laws, and the Jews had their religion and their laws, but they are all part of one overarching confederacy.

David Abramson: These sorts of transformations are also influenced by Western concepts. Would it be possible to discuss such matters in some way other than in terms of a West/anti-West dichotomy?

Sohail Hashmi: Certainly Muslims should feel free to borrow from what is best in other traditions. And in the case of democracy, I think the strongest case Muslims can make for democracy is not that the Koran is a democratic document, as we often hear. It strikes me as a bit of a stretch to find in one verse of the Koran the notion of shura, or consultation, and therefore claim that the Koran is a democratic document. I think the right way to argue for the compatibility of democracy and Islam is on the basis of what human experience has shown to be in the best interest of human beings. What allows them to flourish? What allows them to become good, moral people? I think democracy has shown itself, with all its faults, to be the political system that best allows that to happen.

So one can argue for that on utilitarian grounds as well as from natural law. The resources are there. One of the exciting parts of our project on Islamic constitutionalism that I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks is that we have asked our contributors to try to identify how classical Islamic thought might have contributed to the development of constitutionalism among Muslims. It’s obvious that the West influenced constitutionalism in Islam, but there are also indigenous sources that contributed to its rise.

3. Islamic Democracy: Liberal and Progressive Voices

Hillel Fradkin: Qamar-ul Huda is a professor of theology at Boston College. He received a B.A. in international relations and comparative religion from Colgate University, and a Ph.D. in Islamic history from UCLA. He is an advisor to the Archdiocese of Boston and a member of the Islamic Council of the New England Christian-Muslim Dialogue. Dr. Huda is a great student of Sufism- Islamic mystical thought-and in particular of one of the very greatest Islamic thinkers, Suhrawardi. He brings to our conversation the resources of what has been called the "Greater Jihad"-the jihad that does not involve warfare but instead focuses on the need for personal struggle and personal improvement.

Discussions about Islamic democracy tend to focus on the concepts of shura, which is consultation, and ijma, which is consensus, and on issues of minority rights. A lot of people begin and end their thinking about Islamic democracy there. Here I would like to move away from those points and develop ideas that are more pertinent to my own work. I’d like to show that discourses on contemporary issues within the Islamic community are democratic, in a sense, for they are pluralistic, embodying numerous perspectives and views. As examples of some democratic trends and patterns I will focus on two vocal groups of Muslims, the liberals and the progressives.

Even since the ninth or tenth century or even earlier, Christians and Muslims have tended to see and think of each other through defined and polemical formulas. Some Christians, like Saint John of the Cross, said that Muhammad had delusions, false revelations, and multiple marriages, and was violent-how could he be a true prophet? Muslims described Catholics as being too subordinate to the papacy and to the priestly class and accused them of inventing the Trinity. This polemical approach continues today both in popular discourse and in academic circles. The Reverend Jerry Falwell called Muhammad a terrorist; other Christian fundamentalists have said that Islam is an evil religion. Meanwhile Islamic fundamentalists label Christianity a false religion and call Christians infidels. How can such charges contribute to a better understanding of each other?

Let me begin our discussion by highlighting voices in the Muslim community that reject polemical arguments and instead try to bring about responsible social and political changes. Two major groups that come up in scholarly discussions about Islamic democracy identify themselves, for lack of better terms, as "progressive" Muslims and "liberal" Muslims. These two groups not only represent trends within the Muslim community of thinking about democracy but also are themselves expressions of some democratic sentiment within that community.

The term "progressive Muslim" was coined back in 1982 by Iranian scholar Suroosh Irfani, who wrote a book (Revolutionary Islam in Iran) about how progressive Islam has to be anti-authoritarian and opposed to the conservative clerical class. You could be pro-clerical, so long as the clerics you favored were progressive, liberal, or moderate. So the notion of "progressive" Islam was started by an Iranian scholar under the ayatollahs of Iran. The term was formalized into an official group, the "Progressive Muslim Network," whose members felt that something needed to be done about institutional injustices. Progressive Muslims are concerned about the competitiveness of individualistic modernity, and about the dislocating results of modern globalization and modern institutions.

In part, the "liberal Muslim" movement got its start in 1996 when Samuel Huntington published his "clash of civilizations" thesis, which upset a lot of American Muslims. They were paying taxes and being decent Americans. They believed in capitalism and the free-market system, in secular values, in the separation of state and religion. So what did it mean to say that their civilization was "clashing" with the West? They argued that the Islamic world as a whole is not stagnant; there are only pockets of extremism and fundamentalism. Liberal Muslims were most adamantly against Huntington’s seeming belief that Muslims around the world will act thoughtlessly and in uniformity.

Then came the September 11 attacks. Liberal Muslims said that 9/11 shook their faith to the core, and that Islamic fundamentalism is clearly the most important global issue of our time. In editorials and letters to editors they made desperate attempts to distance Islam from Wahhabism and terrorism, and to assert that those things are not really in the Muslim tradition. To many liberal Muslim thinkers, "Wahhabism" is the source of all of Islam’s problems. But this response offers no real political or contextual analysis of the source of fundamental-ism, no real way of historically defining the emergence of fundamentalist movements and analyzing their success in Muslim politics. Liberal Muslims do not really understand the larger, complex socioeconomic issues involved in radical Islamic movements.

Let me return to the progressives and read a definition from the website of the Progressive Muslim Network: progressive Islam is described as

that understanding of Islam and its sources which comes from and is shaped within a commitment to transform society from an unjust one where people are mere objects of exploitation by governments, socioeconomic institutions and unequal relation-ships to a just one where they are the subjects of history, the shapers of their own destiny in the full awareness that all of humankind is in a state of returning to God and that the universe was created as a sign of God’s presence.

Progressive Muslims think their focus has to be on recreating a just society. They ponder the power relationships between dominant classes and subjugated classes, and they think about how people have been exploited by governments and other institutions. They are concerned, they say, about the relentless promotion of corporate culture and consumerism that results in the exploitation of our natural environment, deforestation, the destruction of local communities, and senseless cruelty to animals. They are against "racism, sexism, homophobia, and all other forms of socioeconomic injustices both within and outside of Muslim societies and communities." These injustices, they declare, "detract from the sacredness of all humankind imbued when Allah blew of his own spirit into the first created person," a reference to the Koran.

This could have been written by Alexander Cockburn or Eric Alterman in The Nation. Progressive Muslims are really concerned about institutions and their impact on individuals, about power and powerlessness. They feel they must think about institutional change, about political reform, about the way corporate culture affects individuals and societies.

Here, then, are two different Muslim voices, two examples of how Muslims are searching for democracy or thinking about innovative means to build democratic institutions within a society that reflects Islamic principles. These two groups are trying to rethink the place of Islam in today’s world. They have different approaches to Islamic democracy. The liberal Muslims are thinking more about how to assimilate, how to be a part of an established Western democratic society, how to be a political participant in democracy, while progressive Muslims take a far more critical stance toward that society.

How does this play out in Muslim countries? You cannot simply talk about importing Western democracy with its attention to freedom, individual rights, rights of assembly, political participation, fairness to children, and so forth. In Muslim countries, the heart of the economy is child labor. In Muslim countries, if you speak out, you may disappear; if you write something critical of the government in the newspaper, you may lose your bank ac-counts. Grassroots groups that oppose child labor have testified to groups like Amnesty International and Catholic Charities, asking them to use their influence to change the conditions for Muslim children.

The question is, how do we move away from this serious repression to achieve internal reform? This is where progressive Muslims and liberal Muslims meet eye to eye. It’s useless to think about doing away with Muslim clerics; you are not going to marginalize them and say they have no place in a democratic Islamic state. But both progressives and liberals are thinking about a new society that reserves a prominent place for religion. Religion can be an important force to create and maintain an ethical society. That doesn’t mean there will be religious law. Instead, understanding religion "progressively" can aid in building just institutions, bringing about greater gender equality, yet not neglecting the past. Thus these two Islamic voices with different approaches are linked by a new and dynamic way of thinking about religion and its role in a democratic Islamic state.

DISCUSSION

Hillel Fradkin: Dr. Huda, the "progressive" Islam you described sounds very much like garden-variety leftism, rather tenuously wedded to Islamic notions. I think it is unlikely to have very much Islamic vitality, because it hasn’t grown up out of those religious roots. Nor is it likely to have much democratic vitality, because that kind of leftism has been shown to lack analytic power and political appeal.

Qamar-ul Huda: But to progressive Muslims, the divine is an important part of life, and we need to appreciate the divine in all creation-which is why they emphasize ecology and environmentalism. They make heavy use of the Koran and the Hadith, so they aren’t really able to communicate well in a larger discourse outside Islam. But within the Islamic world they have pockets of followers who hold meetings. They’re particularly strong in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey.

Hillel Fradkin: How do the liberal and progressive Muslims differ on the subject of democratic reform?

Qamar-ul Huda: Neither group has come out with a clearly defined idea of what a democratic Islamic state would look like. They agree on the basic freedoms, on participation, on some type of parliamentary system. But they don’t agree on the role of religion in a democratic Islamic state. Progressive Muslims have a type of blue-print, but I don’t think the liberal Muslims do, because they are more concerned with becoming accepted in American society and in distinguishing themselves from the fundamentalists.

Steve Rempe: You used the term "fundamentalist" with reference to both Christianity and Islam. Do you mean to make some type of connection between fundamentalism in Islam and fundamentalism in Christianity?

Qamar-ul Huda: In American Christianity, fundamentalism is clearly a particular way of reading the Bible and understanding the faith in evangelical terms. In Islam, fundamentalism has various shades and colors. It’s not one monolithic group of people. There are fundamentalists very much involved with the state, as in Turkey and Pakistan, and then there are fundamentalists who are anti-authoritarian anarchists and who believe they have to destroy the secular state in order to establish a true Islamic society. So within Islam, "fundamentalism" is a political term as well as a religious one. People often mistake Muslim activism or revivalism for fundamentalism, but there are clear lines of division.

Brian Cathcart: You described liberal Islam as having an assimilationalist outlook while progressive Islam focuses on (correctly) perceived injustices toward Muslims. I’m wondering whether there is a movement toward a third way, what might be called a "constructionist" paradigm, where Muslims affirm their differences and call attention to injustices while at the same time showing how members of their faith can participate in mainstream society.

Qamar-ul Huda: Within the progressive Muslim movement, there are alternative views of politics and religion. The progressive Muslims, as part of a grassroots movement tied to scholarly initiatives in these matters, are doing some far more innovative things than the liberal Muslims that I know.

Liberal Muslims are doing an equally important job, but not from the grassroots. Their view is from the top down: "We need to set up an office in Washington, D.C., we need to be a part of the political process, we need to support the right politicians for our purposes, we need to influence the top people in business." Their goal is to touch the top of the pyramid because their agenda is to be aligned with those in power. The progressive Muslims would say that, before we can even get to that point, we need to think about what’s happening on the ground in Muslim countries-gender issues, spousal abuse, child labor, globalization effects, and so on.

Hillel Fradkin: Are the issues that concern progressive Muslims, the ones that are also most dear to the political left, likely to find a constituency in the American Muslim community, not to mention the worldwide Muslim community? Are they issues that lie just under the surface, waiting for someone bring them to the fore, or are they really the preoccupations of a small number of people?

Qamar-ul Huda: The vast majority of Muslims are working class and blue collar, but often they are represented by very well-educated people who are trying to project an image of a very white-collar Islamic community. When I travel and talk to cab drivers, it’s clear that they feel really disenchanted about what they’re hearing in the mosques- the obtuseness of the sermons, which lack any connection to what’s really happening in these people’s lives, their struggles to support their families, to pay their bills, to deal with issues of immigration. I think working-class issues for American Muslims are identical to the issues of the political left. There is a younger generation of American Muslims who vote for the left and volunteer their time for liberal and political-left parties.

Sarah Wolfowitz: What role might the media in the Middle East play in the move from repression to reform?

Qamar-ul Huda: The lack of press freedom in various countries is tied to larger institutional issues. The press is restricted and controlled by the heavy hand of the state, for reasons connected with the post-colonial experience. There have been gradual steps for reform. The greater press freedom represented by institutions like Al Jazeera in Qatar and Al Arabiya in Dubai didn’t develop overnight. There was instead a gradual acceptance that the state controlled the media, everyone in the press was on a state salary, and alternative views were missing or non-existent. Even now, although Al Jazeera is a very nice alternative to the state-controlled press of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it still has a long way to go. Just listen to some of the debates. They don’t roll up their sleeves and ask, for instance, why Egypt rounds up thousands of people without any recourse. They may show the news-reel, but they do not honestly address the hard-hitting socioeconomic issues.

Steve Lenzner: To what extent do you have to subordinate Islam to make it compatible with liberal democracy? Must Islam be viewed as a source to be mined for particular statements rather than as a comprehensive guide?

Qamar-ul Huda: Liberal Muslims argue that there are democratic institutions already in Islam. They take a very narrow reading of Islamic texts and history and argue that we already had democracy, that even though those democratic institutions didn’t survive, they are all part of our history and we just need to recover them. But progressive Muslims say that it didn’t work then and isn’t going to work now, and that what we need is a real separation of religion. We don’t need a theocracy. We don’t need clerics in the place of the executive branch. We instead need clerics to be an "ethical branch," to think about cutting-edge issues like stem-cell research and genetic engineering. We want the clerics; we just don’t want them to be our politicians or our economists or our military leaders.

David Abramson: You said that your remarks today reflect a work in progress; what questions remain unanswered that you will pursue?

Qamar-ul Huda: I belong to the Islamic tradition, and I see myself trying to use the particular language of that tradition for reforming and rethinking, trying to help create a healthier society in various parts of the world. My subject today is just a little section of something larger I’m calling Islamic "liberation theology." The Catholic concept of liberation theology was very influential in my life, and I continue to find it valuable. I’m not trying to develop a carbon copy of that concept for Islam, but there are many things-in classical theological texts, in Sufi readings of the Koran and Sufi perspectives on the world-that can help us think about being more inclusive and pluralistic and tolerant, both in theological and in non-theological terms.

This process of searching is liberating. Faith should not be stagnant and oppressive and repressive. It should be uplifting and innovative, a force to bring economic, political, gender, and social justice to everyone.

Hillel Fradkin: Zainab Al-Suwaij was born in Basra, into a distinguished intellectual Shiite family. She was a witness to the first Gulf War and participated in the failed 1991 uprising against Saddam. After that painful experience, she fled to the United States to complete her studies. Since then she has worked with other refugees and has been a teaching fellow in Arabic at Yale University. She is now the executive director of the American Islamic Congress, an organization she founded after 9/11 in the belief that American Muslims should play a leading role in rejecting Islamist radicalism and in promoting a democratic future for the Muslim world. Her writings on Iraq, Muslim women, and Islam have appeared in The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

Before I immigrated to the United States from Iraq eleven years ago, I would never have imagined myself speaking to a group like this. Under Saddam Hussein, it was unthinkable to gather and openly discuss issues that you and I care so deeply about. Democracy, freedom, civil society-such topics were off-limits in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq; you could not talk about them.

Many of the Muslims who live in the United States today were not born here, or their parents were not born here. The experience of growing up in the Muslim world under dictators and in oppressive societies has molded our community. Living without freedom-without free speech, without a free press, without free education- and with some leaders who preach hate has shaped us in ways we cannot control. I am still emerging from the deep pain of growing up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq even though I left Iraq over a decade ago.

I grew up religious in a secular society in the city of Basra. My grandfather is a leading Shiite cleric there, and as his granddaughter I was the only girl in my third grade class who started wearing the hijab, the traditional headscarf. From the age of nine, I got used to standing out, and I became comfortable with who I was and what I believed. It was not easy, but I managed.

I was in the fourth grade during the Iran-Iraq war. One girl in my class mentioned that Ayatollah Khomeini and Iran were not that bad. She must have heard it from her parents. The next day she and her whole family disappeared from the neighborhood. So at an early age you learned not to say things, not to challenge the government in any way.

Many families of Iranian origin were expelled from Iraq, like the Iraqi Jews before them. Their houses were taken over by government officials. Good friends of my family were kicked out of their house, which was then occupied by the family of one of my classmates; her father worked for the secret police. At school, teachers would force us to participate in political demonstrations. They basically shut the school and had us go to the street and demonstrate for Saddam, or against Iran or Israel or America. They would hand out signs and lead our class out to participate. The police beat students who resisted, or who tried to run away from the demonstrations.

In 1990, after I finished high school, I went to visit my relatives in Kuwait. But I guess Saddam could not bear to live in Iraq without me, so he invaded Kuwait. There I witnessed the killing and destruction caused by Saddam Hussein and his forces. I saw soldiers beating men and women. I saw animals from the zoo running in the street. And I saw how that country was ripped apart. I then returned to Iraq, where I experienced the allied bombing.

When the war ended, a popular uprising took place. Saddam was withdrawing from Kuwait, and President Bush went on Voice of America encouraging the Iraqi people to rise up. America would support them, he said. The Iraqi people listened to him, and within one week we liberated fifteen of the eighteen provinces of Iraq. I helped treat wounded people in the hospital. When we opened the doors of one of the prisons we liberated, we saw thousands of prisoners-not only Iraqis but Kuwaitis and people from many other Arab countries, and also some Europeans. One of the prisoners said to me, "I want

to show you what they used to do to us." He took me to a torture chamber inside the prison, a huge room with an awful smell, blood spots everywhere. We stood in front of a huge machine. It was a human meat grinder, the prisoner said: "They lined us up, prisoners and the people who refused to confess what they did against the government. They brought in a live person and put him in the machine." He also showed me chemical baths that they dissolved people in. Ovens. Rooms for sexual torture.

And many other kinds of tools-hooks to hang people on, electrical wires to use for electrical shock. As you can imagine, that experience changed my image of the world. Everyone talks about the war on Iraq, but for three decades there has been war within Iraq-war waged by the government against its own people.

But after we liberated all those provinces, the American army never came. Saddam regrouped and crushed us. The uprising failed. I cannot stress enough that the United States should be very careful about what it promises. Its failure to support the people of Iraq sent a negative message throughout the Arab world, creating bitterness and mistrust of America and its values. These scars still haven’t healed, but I believe that the United States can heal the wounds by demonstrating a genuine commitment to freedom in the Muslim world.

After the uprising I went into hiding for two months. Eventually I escaped Iraq, and I ended up in the United States. For the first time in my life I was exposed to diversity in a free society, and I loved it. A good example is a group of my son’s friends’ parents-parents who are Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists-who get together and talk about many topics, not just religious or racial differences. We look beyond our religions and enjoy the values we share as human beings.

If you were born in America, you probably find it hard to appreciate how valuable your freedom is. But as an immigrant, let me remind you: freedom is the most beautiful thing in the world, and the most important. September 11 was a terrible nightmare. As I watched the towers burn on TV, I realized that the terror I thought I had left behind in Iraq had followed me here. Now it was threatening my friends, my son and daughter. I so much wanted to see my children grow up in freedom, safety, and peace. But now the forces of hatred were gathering and threatening us even here in America.

A recent poll of people in the Muslim world revealed overwhelming disapproval of the United States. Many Muslims said they doubted Arabs were behind the attacks of 9/11. But this is just one expression of contradiction within the Muslim world. People say that the World Trade Center bombing was caused by the Mossad or the Jews-but Osama bin Laden is a hero for attacking the Great Satan. People say that America hates Muslims and America is a terrible country-but at the same time they ask, can you get us a visa to come to the United States? So this kind of contradiction unfortunately is al-most everywhere in the Middle East and the Muslim countries. You see, when you are not free, accepting contradiction is a simple survival mechanism; when you do not know what you are supposed to say or believe, contradictions become the only way to keep your options open. The mood of the government can change at any time, and people who are not willing to be flexible in their beliefs are likely to disappear. You learn quickly.

This reality makes the job of fostering civil society in the Muslim world very difficult. You may have read a New York Times story a few months ago about a Muslim women’s rights activist in Holland. Ayaan Ali, originally from Somalia, became a translator for Dutch social services. She started assisting Muslim women immigrants and listening to their stories. She began to speak out. And she began to receive death threats. Some Muslims are afraid that she is trying to impose Western values on Muslim society. This, too, is a contradiction, because Muslims strongly believe in the worth and dignity of every person, especially women. Yet it is very difficult for Muslim women to speak about problems they face within our community.

In November 2001 I gathered a group of Muslims together to form the American Islamic Congress, a non-profit organization dedicated to building tolerance and interfaith understanding. We lead tolerance programs, educate for freedom in the Muslim world, and encourage American Muslims to speak out and take action. I try to bring a traditional Muslim perspective to a moderately progressive agenda. As you can imagine, this is not easy.

The American Muslim community is now beginning to overcome the barriers that come with not growing up in a free society. American Muslims not only should stand up for freedom and dignity here in the United States but should do more to defend these rights abroad. By standing up for human rights, for tolerance, and for civil society, American Muslims can send a powerful message throughout the Muslim world.

Unfortunately, in some Muslim communities even here in the United States, persons are not encouraged to express opinions that differ from those of their leaders, and they may feel too intimidated to do so. They cannot speak openly about serious problems inside their communities. I believe it is extremely important for American Muslims to encourage freedom of speech within our own community. If we can talk openly, we can begin to help build civil society in the Muslim world. We need free labor unions, fair courts, and schools that teach tolerance. I am happy to say that I will soon be going back to Iraq to help rebuild the educational system. I feel strongly about helping Iraqi children by improving an educational system that has been degraded by thirty years of dictatorship.

The Muslim community in America is young. We are still learning how to find our voice in a civil society and how to help bring civil society to the Muslim world. We need your help in establishing our voice.

Hillel Fradkin: Thank you, Ms. Al-Suwaij. I think there is a growing awareness among Americans that what we failed to do in Iraq in 1991 was a dreadful mistake- dreadful both in its own right and because its undermining of trust very much complicates the aspirations of the current war and its aftermath. Is it possible to rebuild that trust?

Zainab Al-Suwaij: I think liberating Iraq and helping the Iraqis establish a democratic government will have a big impact on the whole region. People are eager to have free societies.

Roya Boroumand: How influential among the Shiite community in Iraq is the Iraqi Islamic Revolutionary Council, which is supported by the Iranian government?

Zainab Al-Suwaij: Let me clarify something. Shiites in Iraq, who make up about 65 percent of the population, are mainly secular. Even though they believe strongly in their religion, most of them are not very religious in practice. Iran’s experience is different from Iraq’s, I think.

Arthur Kennedy: At Boston University recently I met with some leaders from several Arab countries, and their major concern was trying to rescue educational systems from the fundamentalists. Is that a problem in Iraq?

Zainab Al-Suwaij: No. The problem in Iraq is Saddam Hussein’s government. I recently received some textbooks from Iraq. Every other page has a picture of Sad-dam, his name, a picture of tanks. And this is for children who are ten and eleven years old. In Iraq we don’t have very strong Muslim extremism. What we have to do is to de-Baathicize the books and the curriculum and just provide children with a normal, peaceful education.

Radwan Masmoudi: I was especially moved by your description of the torture chambers in Iraq. Being from an Arab country myself, I know that such torture chambers exist in other Arab countries also, not just Iraq. And like you, I founded an organization a few years ago to promote democracy in the Arab world. I think it is very critical for Iraq to succeed in becoming a model for democracy in the region. What can we do to help, as Americans in general but in particular as Muslim Americans?

Zainab Al-Suwaij: You can help the Iraqis establish a free press by helping them with technology. You can send people there to teach; if you are an academic, you can open a branch of your university in Iraq. You can help labor unions support the rights of workers, which have been missing for so long. You can help people talk and write and publish books about their experience and about the transition from dictatorship. The arts have a big influence on the people; you can help establish music or arts groups. You can do all these things-as Americans, as Muslims, and, most importantly, as human beings.

David Bernstein: One of the unavoidable but very unfortunate aspects of liberating Iraq is the death of many Iraqi soldiers. I have heard some astounding figures of how many Iraqi soldiers have already been killed. I’m wondering how that is going to affect the Sunni population, which, after all, while a minority, is still the key to the future of Iraq. How are those deaths going to play into the potential for an Iraqi democracy?

Zainab Al-Suwaij: The Sunni population in Iraq also suffered a lot under Saddam Hussein’s regime. I cannot differentiate between Sunnis and Shiites, Muslims and Christians, Kurds and Arabs, in Iraq. We, as Iraqis, didn’t have this sense of differences. We always lived in the same neighborhoods and went to the same schools. In the future, I think having one Iraq with all groups respecting one another is the ideal. And I think that is what is going to happen.

Todd Deatherage: Obviously everyone in Iraq has suffered tremendously at the hands of the regime. Does the Shiite majority blame the Sunni minority, since the regime was affiliated with the Sunnis? If so, what can be done to make sure there is no effort to exact revenge on Sunnis once the regime is no longer in place?

Zainab Al-Suwaij: Saddam Hussein’s regime did not have only Sunnis in it-it was a mix of Sunnis, Shiites, Arabs, Kurds, Christians, Muslims-so I don’t think Shiites are going to seek revenge on the Sunnis. In Iraq what matters is whether people are loyal to Saddam and the Baath party or are not. It doesn’t matter what their ethnicity or religion is. In 1991, when we liberated all of those provinces of Iraq, we didn’t have this kind of backlash. When the uprising happened, I was in Karbala, which is 99 percent Shiite, and people were very angry with their fellow Shiites who were with Saddam or were working with the secret police there.

Walter Berns: Before coming here this morning I spent an hour and half talking with someone from the prime minister of Israel’s office and concluded once again how blessed the United States is in not having religious parties. Is there any possibility of achieving a democratic constitution of some sort for Iraq where the basis of representation is not religion? For example, would it be possible to have an assembly where representation was based on geography?

Zainab Al-Suwaij: I cannot predict what will happen. Some people are very conservative and would like to be identified as members of their religion, and in my opinion, there is nothing wrong with being religious. The thing that is really challenging is when some people go to extremes in practicing their religion and end up harming other people. If this does not happen, I don’t see a problem with having a religious party.

In Iraq, religious leaders emphasize the separation of religion and the state. My grandfather always tells me that, as a religious man, he wants nothing to do with politics. He wants to practice his religion and teach his followers. Many of the Shiite leaders, and even some of the Sunni, focus on religion and not on politics. The Iraqi opposition in Iran started out as solely religious. But now its leaders are combining political action with religious practice, because they feel they are the voice of the Shiites who are being killed or tortured.

Sukkar Aslam: How long should the coalition stay in Iraq after the war, helping with rebuilding?

Zainab Al-Suwaij: I think they should stay until the government is formed, and safety and stability are established. If the Iraqi government were to be formed tomorrow, then I wouldn’t see any necessity for the coalition to stay there after tomorrow. The Iraqis want to be able to rule themselves by themselves, and I think that is what is going to happen.

• Khaled Abou El Fadl, UCLA School of Law
• Zainab Al-Suwaij, American Islamic Congress
• Sohail Hashmi, Mount Holyoke College
• Qamar-ul Huda, Boston College

• Hillel Fradkin, Ethics and Public Policy Center

• David Abramson, Office of International Religious Freedom, U.S. Department of State
• Abdulwahab Alkebsi, National Endowment for Democracy
• Sukkar Aslam
• Walter Berns, American Enterprise Institute
• David Bernstein, American Jewish Committee
• Nir Boms, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
• Roya Boroumand, Foundation for Promotion of Human Rights and Democracy in Iran
• Brian Cathcart, Initiatives of Change
• Todd Deatherage, Office of International Religious Freedom, U.S. Department of State
• Jeanne Heffernan, Ethics and Public Policy Center
• Arthur Kennedy, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
• Radwan Masmoudi, Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy
• Steve Lenzner, New Citizenship Project
• Steve Rempe, Institute on Religion and Democracy
• Sarah Wolfowitz, InterNews Network