There is a rather heated discussion going on between Dean Esmay and Michelle Malkin on whether or not Islam is compatible with Democracy. Dean would like to make clear that our fight is not with Muslims or with Islam (despite the efforts of the Islamists) but with a particular dangerous strain of totalitarian Islam. I doubt that Michelle disagrees but she makes the salient point that Dean's post seems more polemical than reasoned and thus is a distraction.
I have written about the problem of Moderate Muslims sharing characteristics with Moderate Germans; while they might not necessarily be proactive anti-Semitic Islamo-Nazis, their tribal affiliations lead too many Muslims to passively support their leaders and self-styled spokesmen, many of whom are Fascists of one sort or another. Whether or not a large enough co-hort of Moderate Muslims exists or will emerge, will ultimately determine whether this "Long War" against Islamic fascism ends up more closely resembling the cold war or WWII.
The Anchoress has weighed in with some trenchant thoughts on the issue:
There is a lot of chatter these days, but it seems to me the best way to ease the confusion is for the Muslims themselves to define themselves once and for all - to sort of “take back the faith,” from the extremist, radical Islamists who have come to - in the eyes of much of the world - define Islam.
Donald Sensing also has some sensible thoughts on the matter. He liberally quotes Prof. Bernard Lewis and concludes:
Bottom line: Islam as practiced and preached in much of the Muslim world today is incompatible with democracy of any recognizable kind. And Islamism (Islamic fascism) is no more compatible than Nazism. But the US, Britain and the West should not try to nurture democracy in Iraq or elsewhere that cleaves to a mainly Jeffersonian model. That is to guarantee failure.
My impression has always been that religions are flexible enough to be used in many different ways and it is the interaction of religious strictures and culture that determine how religious beliefs are expressed. At the moment, Arab culture seems to be incompatible with democracy and this is where the most significant problems arise.
Democracy requires that the vast majority of a society's members agree to play by certain ground rules. Most especially, there is agreement that the use of force to settle disputes is the sole province of the government and, at least in our system, subject to checks and balances by multiple power centers. In general, people who are willing to use force to get their way are considered criminals. In a society where a small percentage do not play by the rules, these people are defined as Sociopaths, or psychopaths. (While there is more to the definition, for practical purposes, anyone who uses a gun or threats of violence to bend others to his will is behaving in an anti-social, or sociopathic, manner.) If there are enough who refuse to play by the rules and decide to group together, they become gangs. Thus far, in the West, the level of sociopathy tends to stabilize at the gang level, though sometimes such gangs can become quite large and powerful. However, even when gangs mutate or evolve into groups large enough to be called "organized crime" they tacitly agree not to challenge the authority of the government. They will often subvert individual members of the government, which is then called corruption, but they do not directly challenge. If they become powerful enough to directly challenge the government, and/or corruption becomes so endemic that the government no longer functions as the sole wielder of force, democracy fails.
In the Arab world, and much of the Muslim world, the tribal organization of society means that the government is rarely, if ever, the sole arbiter of the use of force. Further, when people have split allegiance, to the tribe as well as the country, or primarily see themselves as members of a tribe, corruption easily becomes entrenched.
Arab culture, in conjunction with an interpretation of Islam that supports such societal organization, tends to reward what we in the West would think of as Sociopathic behavior. Select individuals are empowered by the state, and the religion, to use force against those they wish to control. It is no surprise that in Saudi Arabia, for example, slavery effectively still exists. Furthermore, cultures that hold women in near slave status are unlikely to be open to democratization.
Rather than ask whether or not Islam is compatible with democracy, I think the better question would be in two parts: Can a culture that supports sociopathic behavior become or remain a democrcy? And, how many sociopaths does it take to prevent a society from democratizing?
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