"The truth, always the truth--at all costs"
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| 847 07/18/2003 Why Religion Must Play A Role in Iran Reza Aslan |
The student movement that has consumed Iran this summer has been interpreted by many senior American officials as a signal for the Bush administration to begin its next phase in democratizing the Middle East. But while the waves of protests and arrests — the latest came last week outside a Tehran university — may indicate the inevitable collapse of the Islamic Republic, what student leaders are calling for in Iran does not correspond with the administration's designs for the region. The president has interpreted the current situation in Iran as a conflict between Islamic theocracy and the kind of Western secular democracy his administration envisions for Iraq. But that is not at all how most Iranians see it. Over the past two decades, academics, reformist theologians and liberal clerics in Iran have been struggling to redefine traditional Islamic political philosophy in order to bring it in line with modern concepts of representative government, popular sovereignty, universal suffrage and religious pluralism. What these Iranians have been working toward is "Islamic democracy": that is, a liberal, democratic society founded on an Islamic moral framework. This is not theocracy; it is religious democracy. And while that may seem like an oxymoron to most Americans, it is in no way a new paradigm: the Jewish version of this ideal currently exists in Israel. Indeed, it could be argued that the United States itself began as a religious democracy founded on a Protestant moral framework that still plays an influential role in our laws and politics. Nevertheless, the concept of religious democracy has not been allowed to reach fruition in the Islamic world, partly because of foreign interference, partly because of religious fanaticism, but mostly because of the West's overwhelming fear of Islamic government. It is this fear that has sustained an outdated foreign policy in the Persian Gulf, one that is still founded on containing Iran at all costs — regardless of the profound changes taking place in its government and society through the work of reformist politicians who are fighting for wider powers for the elected Parliament and greater freedom for the populace. It is this same fear that has led to American military and economic support of antidemocratic regimes in Pakistan, Egypt and Jordan. More recently, this fear of Islamic government has forced the United States to forgo elections in Iraq in favor of appointing a Governing Council, lest the Shiite majority exercise its democratic right to self-determination. But if there is any lesson to be learned from Iraq, it is that the American model of democracy is not necessarily applicable to the peoples of the Middle East, nor should it be. The fact is that "democracy" is a contested term with no universally accepted definition; the notion that it must be based on secularism is not only a new concept, but a distinctly Western one. The conviction among many in the United States that a secular, democratic Iraq (if that itself is a possibility) can somehow become the model of democracy in the Middle East is both unreasonable and unfounded. Recall that when the British and French colonized the Middle East, they did so in the guise of a civilizing mission. The idea was to transplant Western principles of government and society — ideals that took hundreds of years to develop in Europe — to uncivilized lands. However, no attempt was made to incorporate the cultural and religious identities of these regions. As a result, rather than embracing these ideals, the colonized peoples lashed out violently against them and reverted to a fundamentalist doctrine that rejected the West and everything it stood for. What the United States must learn from the colonialist experience is that the only way to promote lasting democratic reform in the Middle East is to encourage it to develop according to its own indigenous culture and its own religious identity. That is precisely what reformists are trying to do in Iran, and rather than being feared or isolated, they should be supported. If it can successfully fuse its democratic aspirations with its Islamic identity, then Iran, rather than Iraq, may be able to provide the template of democracy in the Middle East. At the very least, it can become the middle ground between the Islamic dictatorships of Egypt and Jordan, and the fundamentalist regimes of Saudi Arabia and the Taliban. Reza Aslan, a visiting professor of Islamic studies at the University of Iowa, is author of the forthcoming ``No God but God: A New Interpretation of Islam.'' c ny times 2003 |
