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a primer on Islam, democratic development and philosophy |
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August 22, 2006 | gary e. davis | ||
Preface This discussion is a beginning. I would develop the topic in light of influence by others and in light of my own learning curve. I’m parsing the topic into four areas, based on three sources indicated below:
The following may exemplify the policy-interested approach to Theory/theory and practice that I sketched earlier (as an accessible matter of entering into Habermasian studies practically, not yet as a matter of doingor, in my case, returning todifficult conceptual work). I’m relying on only two kinds of sourcesthe April 2005 Conference Report of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy; and two reports by the U.S. Institute for Peace on Islam and Democracy, 2004
I want a quick but reliable basis for relativizing my own initial thoughts to the issue of Islam and democracy, pending stronger interest caused by others’ interest or response. The four areas above are rubrics organizing key themes from the CSID conference and 2 USIP studies. My conjecture is that the salient themes of the Conference and the USIP studies indicate the range of what "the" issue of Islam and democracy is for the Islamic world, early in the 21st century. This conjecture is tacitly the question: If not this, then what? At this beginning point, the discussion is mostly an organized quoting from my sources’ synoptic statements, for the sake of organizing the topic (and my own thoughts on the matter initially), not yet working from the entirety of the Conference set of papers or the entirety of the USIP reports. My contribution is organizational, with some theoretical commentary that prospects further inquiry and discussion. Compatibility of Islam and democracy
This type of theme was variously reiterated by the CSID Conference. I suppose that Western innocence is exploited by vocal Islamic fundamentalism for the sake of political economic division masked as incompatibility of secular and religious life.
To what degree can the Christian democratic experience be of service to democratization of Islamic society (without mapping Western notions into Islamic contexts)? Can Habermas’ "Religion in the Public Sphere" provide exemplary guidance?
A hermeneutical challenge, then, is to substantively dramatize the common ground of generative tradition that already binds apparent adversaries (i.e., secular democracy and religious life). Theory of the lifeworld as "The Background" (in the Dreyfusian mode of Habermas’ TCA-2) frames a doorway into the historicity of shared ground (from shared planet of cultural geographies to anthropology of shared humanities). A great challenge for Islam is the hermeneutical challenge shared with all religious life:
This might result in appreciation for the potential of democracy in Islam itself:
Another great hermeneutical challenge for Islam is to show how the democratic spirit is implied by revelation.
Also, the notion of ijma or freedom shows the democratic spirit of Islam (csid.10).
Thus, Islam must welcome scholarship that shows how "there is no element in Islam that does not resemble democracy" (csid.11), but "in order for sound democratic institutions to flourish, there needs to be a culture in place to foster democracy....[D]emocracy took roots in America because it was initiated by the prevailing culture" which was and is "liberal" in the classical, nonpartisan sense (csid.11). Note "prevailing." It is the burden of democracy that there be a prevalence of one ethos over othersa claim to the superiority of the liberal ethos. That superiority can be justified, I would argue, in terms of humanistic reasoning rooted in our common anthropology (e.g., an intrinsic love of openness born from the intelligent child’s love of learning). But a detailed democratic understanding appropriate to the 21st century doesn’t follow straightaway from Islam, just as it doesn’t follow from Christianity. Hermeneutics as ijtihad might show how shura belongs to conceptualization of democracy, as well as to communicative practices within local society. That is, competing notions of democracy belong to democratic life, such that the question What is "democracy"? remains an open question belonging to democracy as such, thus belonging to the spirit of learning and openness that originated religious life. By now, humanity has over two centuries of experience learning what democracy in modern times must be in order to be valid for the sake of the humanity it advances. It is an empirically pertinent issue how real democracies understand themselves. The democratic spirit of Islam might, in order to be true to itself, find its humanity reflected in the experience of real democracies, and thereby further itself in terms of real democracies, in complement to understanding democracy in terms of Islam. Maybe Islam essentially implies fundamental kinds of value that democracy can offer its people, but the nature of democratic value belongs to the discourse of democracy, rather than to revelation. A marriage of ijtihad and shura requires, I conjecture, finding the place of revelation in a rigorously reasonable modernity, bringing Islam into discursive inquiry about the appropriate place of religious life in modern public spheres, where revelation and reason belong together in the same humanity.
I haven’t yet looked at the transcript of Gershman’s presentation, but from the above account in the Conference report, it seems clear that Gershman is talking about the basic rationality of good government: accountability and truly normative authority. It may be a duty of the marriage of ijtihad and shura to show the commensurability of Islam with rational transparency and truly normative authority (as normativity is founded in the genuineness of consensual validation of proffered regulatives).
The "virtue" here appears to be the integration of political economic systems with development policies oriented by an enabling state. This kind of conceptualization provides an opportunity to integrate development economics with progressive welfare policy.
This is the fully communicative life idealized by the bourgeois public sphere which has evolved into constructivist (post-indoctrinal) approaches to educational life; and notions of organizational learning and the learning society.
In fact, all of the other kinds of value indicated by Gershman imply intrinsic values, e.g., the value of learning, freedom, and human rights. Indeed, the realm of intrinsic value is primordial, I would (and will later) argueprimordial both for religious life and for democracy, which belong together in the same intrinsic humanity. In such a basis, communicative life may enable enabling government to have truly legitimate power. Out of intrinsically grounded enabling (or empowerment), the spirit of humanity democratically expresses itself and thereby evolves across generationsa Creating forever unfinished. Muslims and existing democracy Most Muslims are already living in formally-democratic societies, but most Arabs are not.
Does this mean that a syndrome of Arab exceptionalism inhibits the potential of non-Arab Islamic civil societies for influencing Arab social evolution?
But that insight may be less help in the Arab world than elsewhere. If "Muslim NGOs [in Indonesia] are responsible for dictating what Muslim civil society looks like, since they are at the heart of Indonesia's thriving civil society," there might be a potential for NGOs in Arab regions that is especially suppressed by Arab authorities, and the challenge for Arab cultural maturation might best be located in creation of opportunity for NGOs to advance Arab civil society.
Apparently, the embodiment of democratic ideals in American democracy may be especially relevant.
All the more important, then, that U.S. development policy be exemplary. Inhibiting factors affecting democratic development "Islam" for some powerful Islamists is counterdevelopmental.
Given that "the lack of educational focus and political freedoms [are] barriers to human and economic development,...the prevailing interpretation of Islam in the Arab world may also be one of the problems" inhibiting a governmental "focus on education, economic development, and innovation" (csid.3). Like a conflicted mind working out its emancipatory interest, the Arab Muslim world is working through conflicting "readings" of its "deserted" legacy (against a seafaring modernity that left Arabia behind).
Welfare statism I call this the bolshevik factor in welfarist states that fosters helplessness. It’s the story of Saudi Arabia.
Inhibitions created by globalist interventions and frames of mind The political economic marginalization of some Islamic societies during the 20th century caused these societies to be ill-placed for healthy developments (or genuinely modernizing effects) of recent economic globalization (unlike Asian societies), thus being left to "benefit" from the compensatory impositions of top-down "development" programs.
Domestic roots of terrorism We’re made only too aware of the domestic backgrounds of terrorism which then inhibit development in those societies that spawn terrorists.
Beyond its murderousness, a tragedy of terrorism is that it fosters the inhibitive social conditions that spawns more terrorism.
It seems to me that U.S. policy has long supported the development of civil society in Muslim regions, but lacking colonialist engagements (unlike Europe), the U.S. has found itself having to support given governments for the sake of regional stability, and those governments have been repressive. It has been the U.S. interest in global economic stability (the general condition for regional development), not repression, that has guided U.S. policy. So, I disagree that:
The U.S. more or less created UN development programs, the World Bank, and the IMF, which have been generally constructive institutions, despite critical mistakes. This is certainly a fertile theme for further attention, as anti-Americanism has become in inhibitive force unto itself. Progressive development programming development and freedom Obviously, "the lack of political freedom and transparency is the reason for the deficit in human development. (csid.4) Yet,
May the mother-child relationship save the world. Anyone who’s familiar with Chicago philosopher of law Martha Nussbaum would have to be deeply impressed by her street level engagement with programs for the development of women in India and her earlier work for development policy through the U.N.my heroine. (Frankly, she may seem to antiquate the public intellectual as model for bridging theory and practice.) inspiration of recent elections around the world Democratic elections held in Iraq and Palestine, along with the democratic changes that have swept through Latin America, Eastern Europe, Asia, have had an impact across the Arab world. (csid.6)
In this regard, Aljazeera and Al Arabiya may do as much for instituting a democratic ethos as do specific leaders leading up to local electoral events. The planetary eyewitnessing never sleeps, and cannot die. Facilitating creative bridgework for progressive realism: The Council for the Study of Islam and Democracy may be paradigmatic of what it means for academics to construct realistic bridges to progressive practice: "bringing together scholars and activists from the West and the Islamic heartlands" to shape a "commonality of perspective and aspirations" (csid.12) for engineering the complex relationship between democracy and development through a "proper framework" (csid.12) that bridges Theory/theory with experienced practices. Their 2005 Conference provided
Here, the philosopher and the religionist have common cause in shaping understanding of the spirit of humanity.
activist priorities
In other words, a holism of thinking is required. There is need for conceptualization that is comprehensive of the human interest in knowledge across such a scale. In the competition of worldviews, extremism is defeatable epistemically.
We armchair progressives are great at appreciating need for conflict resolution, playing referee and arbiter so comfortably. But the real progressive work is done in actually promoting literacy (not just theorizing it), designing and implementing employment development programs, and instituting financial sector institutions. So, the place of theory here should be relative to the realities of actually doing that. In other words, the real work to be done is very technical within a realistically broad-based understanding of the practical epistemic continuum from higher education to "the street." It’s an "engineering" complex of problems (in, of course, an enlightened enrichment of the notion of engineering), nested (ideally) within a postmetaphysicalist holism that enjoys the place of religion in the public sphere. Abstractly, this includes networking across modes of activity, development of capability, and institutional coordination of durable (intergenerational) reforms. networking
Can the Internet be network heaven? Of course, extremists think so. So, theory <-> policy <-> activism interfaces have to be smarter: networking institutional resourcefulness globally, out-constructing the destructionists with better organization, better resourcefulnessbetter "wealth"in order to rob extremists of their basis. development priorities But only Muslims in their own heartland can adequately address one CSID presenter’s list of obvious "essential movements":
Westerners have to excellently communicate what may be replicable from their own modernization journey, while being exemplars of collaborative, coordinative change in the theory <-> policy <-> activism interface. Realistically theorizing collaborative, coordinative change through this interface may be what a Habermasian is most well-situated to do. institutional coordination But engineering social evolution requires that Critical Theorists outgrow alienation from strategical thinking, strong leadership, and technological competence. The undoing of "brilliant" change programs is lack of administrative competence. Management theory has probably done more to alleviate poverty over the past couple of decades than social theory over the past century (let alone Critical Theory) due to the former’s openness to social learning (managerial ambition) and the latter’s ambivalence toward organizational capability (the ivory tower of "Enlightenment"). I suppose it’s a mark of my life-based animus that the above polemic is caused by the following tame passage from the CSID Conference summary:
American Muslims need organization and lobbying competence
U.S. Arabs might do well to take lessons from the Israeli lobby. Philosopher in a crowd My longstanding experience with so-called Critical Theory causes me to believe that it promotes rejectionist positions that marginalize capability from the enabling and organizational processes that have real promise of actualizing the ideals that Critical Theory applauds. In short, it’s "ivory tower" work. Critical Theory should need to outgrow its abstraction from real bridgework between theory and practice. My brief presentation here dramatizes the above point in terms of the issue of Islam and democracy, by just more-or-less framing a small context of scholar/activist involvement in terms that can be extended into realistic philosophical theory. I most certainly haven’t begun to exhibit a detailed entrance into that issue of Islam and democracy. But, after all, I’m not a Muslim living in Arabia. But I am appreciative, I hope, of what can be a progressive role for philosophy in facilitating the theory <-> policy <-> activism interface. Extending this particular context, I would show, for example, how the old Gadamer-Habermas debate may serve the interface of Western and Islamic hermeneutics to critically facilitate postmetaphysicalist enlightenment through educational and emancipatory processes. Or I would show how the above, considered altogether, sets a proper stage for understanding what Habermas means my "transcendence within this world." But the above presentation is an overtly ad hoc example of facilitating the interface that I could apply to literally tens of other topics. But, ironically, I feel compelled to perform the complement, e.g., showing how the self-formativity of postmetaphysicalist thinking originates in natural evolutionary dynamics. So, what next? Who knows, as I’m just going with the flow. I’d have great fun discovering how my naïveté about Islam and democracy is exposed here through deeper reading (and/or the guidance of those who are too busy to have responded to my query on the issue). For example, Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, by Khaled Abou El Fadl, Princeton UP, 2004; or Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, edited by Larry Diamond et al., Johns Hopkins UP, 2003, both of which are on one of my bookshelves. So much worth understanding, so little time. Be fair. © 2017, g. e. davis |
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