Islam, Authoritarianism and Intolerance

Why Nations Fail/

thedailybeast.com

Yesterday’s news might be seen as a confirmation of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations idea, pitting Islam against the West.

First was the headline news that Islamist militants, angered by a trailer posted on YouTube depicting Prophet Muhammed as a sexual predator, homosexual and child molester, attacked the US Consulate in Benghazi, set the Consulate ablaze, and killed ambassador Christopher J. Stevens and three members of his staff. There were violent protests elsewhere, including in Egypt.

Second was the perhaps equally disturbing news from Pakistan of an 11-year-old illiterate Christian girl (described as “slow” by the news reports) now freed from jail but still running from the mob, threatening to kill and burn her and her family, because of “blasphemy” (she’s accused of burning pages from an Islamic textbook).

Add to this the general poverty and authoritarianism of the Middle East and North Africa and other Islamic countries (especially if you leave out oil wealth), the case seems open and shut.

There are many versions of why Islam is at the root of authoritarianism, backwardness and poverty in these countries. Perhaps the most famous one argues that Islam, by failing to recognize the separation of religion and state, naturally leads to authoritarianism. In a now famous book, What Went Wrong, historian Bernard Lewis popularized a version of this idea. He wrote, for example:

The idea that any group of persons, any kind of activities, any part of human life is in any sense outside the scope of religious law and jurisdiction is alien to the Muslim thought (page 100).

He went on to compare Islam to Christianity in this regard:

From the beginning, Christians were taught, both by precept and practice, to distinguish between God and Caesar and between the different duties owed to each of the two. Muslims received no such instruction. (Page 103).

Though popular, this view doesn’t seem entirely well grounded in history or scripture.

First, as we argued in Why Nations Fail, there is another obvious explanation for extractive economic and political institutions in the Middle East and North Africa: the legacy of Ottoman rule and institutions.

Second, the close relationship between politics and religion is not confined to Islam. Rulers have used religion to cement their power or support their attempts to conquer new lands throughout the ages. For example, though colonialism was not a religious endeavor, religious rhetoric and the project of converting heathens to Christianity did play a role in motivating the Spanish and the English alike and provided a pretty good “cover story”.

Third, it is true that secularism, in any of its forms, has been all but absent in Muslim lands, but this is at least as much because politics has co-opted religion rather than the other way around.

Fourth, there is really nothing in the Koran or even the Hadith about constitutions or how the government should be organized and operated.

But the question remains: it’s unlikely to be a coincidence, nor easily explained by the Ottoman legacy, that most Muslim countries are not democratic and almost totally lack civil society, and most branches of political Islam are intolerant and often violent.  More >>