Muslim Democracy: Politics, Religion and Society in Indonesia, Turkey and the Islamic World By Edward Schneier

Abstract

In the best tradition of Max Weber’s theses on the Protestant ethic and its role in the evolution of modern capitalism Edward Schneier’s book is a daring and inspiring attempt to assess another form of religion’s impact on society. The focus here is on Islam, or, more precisely on the broad range of Islamic political thought and ideals and their impact on democracy in not less than the Islamic world as a whole. Concerned by the heated debates on Islam, violence, and authoritarianism triggered by the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, the troubled history of the Middle East since the invasion in Iraq in 2003, and the Arab Spring in 2011, Schneier starts with the question what the resources of ‘Islamic ideals’ are that might provide a solid foundation for and sustain democracies. His implicit assumption thereby is that Islamic political thought—as far as such a coherent body has ever existed—has historically been embedded and thus translated into various cultural and political contexts. An endeavour to better understand the interdependencies between Islam on the one hand and governance, democratization, and secularization on the other, is therefore by definition a comparative undertaking that seeks to contrast the different experiences of Muslim-majority societies so far. The approach Schneier suggests to realize this is not to ask whether Islam as such is compatible with democracy, but to analyse ‘what features of democratic institutions and processes work’ (p. 7) in specific Islam-dominated countries. Schneier’s lens through which he discusses these complex developments is thus not theology, but these societies’ political, and to a certain extent also social and economic, history.