Asian-Arab philosophical dialogues on globalization, democracy ...

Public Debate, Shûra, (overlapping) Consensus,
Ijma’: Toward a Global Concept of Democracy
Soumaya Mestiri, Tunisia
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Asia-<strong>Arab</strong> Philosophical Dialogues on Globalization, Democracy and Human Rights
The fact that Muslim fundamentalists and Western political thinkers join in the idea of an “Islamic
exception” is very interesting to notice. The former promote a truly unique dogma, which embraces all
aspects of the human life. They put forward that Islam is endowed with a concept of democracy and
that it is therefore not in need of an exogenous experience to provide it with what it already possesses.
Because they are often good at exegesis of texts, Muslims fundamentalists are able to base their
demonstration on verses of the Quran where the notions of shûra and ijma’ are clearly present. They
intend to show that the bedrocks of democracy are typically Muslim and that all discourses which try
to improve the Islamic tradition actually consolidate West’s repeated attempts to reduce the value of
Islam. But one can say that ideas and notions we are full of can never be considered as a threat, but on
the contrary, as an extraordinary richness. This is borne out by the fact that thinkers and philosophers
living on the land of Islam, from Kindi to Ibn Kkaldun, appropriated and assimilated a genuinely Western
legacy – the same one that is judged nowadays to be dangerous by some people.
To the contrary, the latter; i.e. Western thinkers, criticize the propensity of Islam to produce exclusively
authoritarian regimes and, armed with the observation of the political reality of the <strong>Arab</strong>-Islamic world,
assert strongly the essential anti-democratic feature of the Muslim tradition. To this Eurocentrist point
of view, democracy prides itself with a unique origin, that is Greece. The idea that democracy is born
in Athens is one among those ideas which acquired, with time, an incommensurable sacredness.
Nevertheless the Roman origins of democracy are at least as important as the Greek ones, to the extent
that Western modernity had drawn from them its raison d’être, if not its institutions. It is thus easy for the
Western tradition to claim to go back to the spirit of Greek sources while it obviously owes its birth to a
Roman experience which is, by nature, nearer to the provisos and bases on which it was gradually built.
Indeed, the notion of popular sovereignty is more Roman than Greek: one will easily concede that it is
not the Athenian restriction of citizenship to native and free men that would refute this truth.
This seminal idea is employed for two purposes, which are closely related to one another. Indeed,
showing the Western uniqueness of the democratic experience comes down to demonstrate the
political authoritarianism in force in Muslim countries. This kind of theoretical provincialism takes a
particular form nowadays, inherent in the tendency to assert, more or less, the hegemony of the liberal
model of democracy in terms of both value and validity. Indeed, those who insist on the uniqueness of
the sources of democracy are the same who affirm the uniqueness of its forms, methods and practices.
Reference is made here to Fukayama, who claims that the triumphal advent of liberal democracy has
rung the end of history.
Yet, the affirmation of such liberal hegemony, has lost ground since the publishing of Amartya Sen’s works
on the subject. According to him, the democratic phenomenon doesn’t concern only one civilisation or
tradition more than another and is not, moreover, about a unique experience with forms and practices
precisely drawn. In his appropriately titled book, The Democracy of Others, Sen demonstrates that India
and the <strong>Arab</strong>-Muslim world have both experienced democracy in more than one way, highlighting the
fact that tolerance and respect were not empty words.
My aim in this paper is to dismiss these two apprehensions of the Islamic exception, without being in
favour of either. I will show that they are both based on a theoretical provincialism and an obvious denial
of history. I will try to define to what extent it is possible to shed light on genuinely Islamic concepts
which possess a highly democratic potential, that’s to say the concepts of shûra and ijma’, using some
Western theoretical experiences whose nature and relevance in such a task will be examined.
I would say here that I’m not trying to replace a particular Eurocentrism by another. All I want to do is to
underline, as you’ll see it, an audacious and productive analogy made by the great learner Ibn Khaldun
(1332-1406) between the Roman republic and the Muslim shûra. By doing so, I wish to highlight a
meeting and certainly not a fate, that is to say the meeting of a particular Western legacy and the <strong>Arab</strong>-
Muslim tradition, a meeting which could have been full of great consequences for the whole world.