Islam, Democracy and Nationalism after the Second World War

Abstract

This chapter studies the common assumption that in Muslim societies, religion plays a negative part in the development of democracy. Indeed, some observers uphold the idea of ‘Islamic exceptionalism’ — in effect the view that Muslims are uniquely resistant to liberal democracy and secularism. Democratic institutions left by departing Western regimes, so the argument runs, have failed to survive everywhere except in Turkey; they have been superseded by autocracy and one-party states. Islamists in particular are thought to endorse democracy, before subsequently suppressing democratic opposition as subversive and irreligious. Another obvious limitation of the negative view is that it focuses on a few Muslim countries around the Mediterranean, and ignores those in the Far East, such as Indonesia, not to mention those that do not have a Muslim majority, such as India. Neither of those countries is consistent with the conventional assumptions. Moreover, the negative view tends to overlook the fact that Oriental societies have good grounds for regarding the Western model of parliamentary democracy as suspect — not least because the United States and Britain have a record of collaborating with Muslim autocracies and undermining and overthrowing democracies when they choose left-wing or anti-Western governments. This is notoriously the case in countries such as Iran after 1945.