This is the third post in a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. The first post in the series can be found here. Yesterday, I briefly discussed the alleged substantive contradiction between Shari’ah (God’s law) and democracy. Today, I will address the first historical attempt at reconciliation between Islam and democracy, which was grounded (in part) in the Islamic concept of “shura”. The next entry in this series, dealing with the historical election of the caliphate, will be posted on Friday.

I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

The Young Ottomans, a group of Istanbul writers in the 1860’s, were perhaps the first group of Muslims to claim that Shari’ah was compatible with modern democracy. In fact, the Young Ottomans went further, claiming that Islamic law, correctly understood, required some form of constitutional government. They argued for a return to the spirit of classical Islam, which recognized the sovereignty of the people and the principle of government by consultation.

The Young Ottomans advanced two arguments. First, they grounded their arguments for democracy in the concept of shura (consultation), which they derived from the Prophet’s command to “take counsel with them [the Prophet’s followers] in the matter” (Qur’an 3:158). Broadly speaking, shura requires rulers to consult with their subjects on matters of the law, and the Young Ottomans believed that this concept was therefore consonant with the democratic impulse to ground legal legitimacy in the consent of the people. Some contemporary Muslims have continued in that vein, arguing that shura coincides with “an integral component of the Western conception of democracy” (Muhammad Asad) because it “demands open debate among both the ‘ulema [the jurists or clerics] and the community at large on issues that concern the public” (Ali Abootalebi). Coupled with the viceregency of all mankind, which will be discussed in a future entry in this series, shura has therefore been interpreted as strengthening one of the values necessary for democracy: the belief that all people are fundamentally equal in their rights and responsibilities. This has led some Arab intellectuals, such as Sadek Sulaiman, to argue that shura and democracy are “synonymous in conception and principle, although they may differ in details of application to conform to local custom”.

Within the context of Islamic law, such arguments are probably not sufficient to establish that democracy is authentically Islamic. Originally, shura did not merely signify consultation; it implied resistance to oppression and to government by force. After the third/ninth century, however, the jurists began to speak of shura as requiring consultation with ahl al-shura (the people of consultation) which was believed to be the same group who constituted ahl al-‘aqd (the people who choose the ruler - more on this on Friday). However, some scholars, such as Fazlur Rahman, have suggested that this later conception of shura was in error, as the Qur’anic conception of shura “does not mean that one person asks others for advice but, rather, [it means] mutual advice through mutual discussions on an equal footing”. In any event, the majority of classical Sunni jurists concluded that the determinations of ahl al-shura were advisory, not compulsory, and that instead (and it’s not entirely clear what this means) the ruler should make his decision in accordance with the Qur’an, the Sunna, and the consensus of the jurists, taken together.

Further, contemporary Islamic arguments in favor of democracy sometimes claim that both shura and democratic theory flow from the belief that collective, majority judgments are more likely to produce a fair and just result than the decision of one individual. However, classical Islamic thinkers tended to distrust the laity, concerned that they might “be more content with choosing [to the caliphate] the wrongdoers instead of the righteous”, as Professor El Fadl put it. In response to contemporary arguments, then, it has been argued that the concept of ijma (the infallible consensus of the jurists) implies that the views of the jurists rather than those of the people receive primacy, and that ijma thus stands in tension with shura in that it does not “imply democracy in any modern application of the term”, as Malise Ruthven argued.

Finally, the overlap between the principle of shura and the Western concepts of consent and popular sovereignty is not total. Consent, in premodern Islam, meant something closer to acquiescence. Some scholars, such as David Westbrook, have therefore argued that “the liberalism that informs… Western notions of democracy relies on consent in ways different from Islam” and that attempts to conflate the two fail to “confront the question of authority at the heart of the fundamentalist argument”. As John Esposito put it, “A major issue in democratization in Muslim societies is whether or not scholars and leaders have successfully made the transition from listing ‘democratic doctrines of Islam’ to creating coherent theories and structures of Islamic democracy that are not simply reformulations of Western perceptions in some Muslim idioms.”

So while the concept of shura might provide some support for democracy within the context of Islamic theology, by itself this argument is too simple. On Friday, then, we will turn to the second argument that the Young Ottoman’s advanced: that the historical election of the caliphate permits the conception of an authentically Islamic democracy.

UPDATE: This entry continues here, where I continue my examination of the arguments advanced by the Young Ottomans.