This is the fourth post in a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. The first post in the series can be found here. On Tuesday, I discussed the Islamic concept of “shura”, or consultation, and concluded that shura could not by itself support the idea of an authentically Islamic democracy. Today, I will turn to the second argument advanced by the Young Ottomans, which was grounded in the historical election of the caliphate. The fifth entry in this series, reexamining the fundamentalist argument that Shari’ah (God’s law) must be sovereign, will be posted on Monday.

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

The Young Ottomans’ next argument noted that Abu Bakr, cousin of the Prophet and the first Rightly Guided Caliph, was chosen by the acclamation of the Muslim community assembled together after the death of the Prophet. Since that time, the classical Sunni theory of the caliphate had always maintained the fiction that the caliph was elected by the leading men of the community, although the manner of election and the number of electors were exteremely ambiguous. Within the umma (community of believers), they pointed out, all are on equal footing. Though the ruler performs a different function, it is the umma as a whole that choose the ruler. Thus, the Young Ottomans argued that, taken together, the principle of shura and the election of the caliphate demonstrated that Islam was, and always had been, fundamentally democratic, and that “all the intervening centuries of autocratic rule had been a tragic diversion from the true path”.

Turning to Islamic legal history, Abu Bakr himself is reputed to have said that “God has left people to manage their own affairs so that they will choose a leader who will serve their interests”. Even Abu Bakr, however, circumvented this method of choosing a successor by nominating Umar (the second Rightly Guided Caliph) without consultation. Further, the Islamic conception of political leadership changed over time. When the caliphs eventually lost their effective power, for example, jurists such as Al-Mawardi reconciled the king-making activities of the Buyids with the principle of election by declaring (with al-Ash’ari before him) that an election was valid even if only one elector was present. Obviously, this is not the most democratic of beliefs. Similarly, when the caliphate finally ceased to exist independently, the jurists transferred the concept of the caliphate to the sultanate, requiring only that the sultan acknowledged the universality of Shari’ah (in principle if not always in practice).

While the Mu’tazili scholar Abu Bakr al-Asam claimed that the community as a whole retained the right to elect the caliph, with each person individually giving his consent, almost all the other classical jurists argued that the right to choose the caliph resided with those who had the power (shawka) to ensure the obedience of the public at large. Thus, it is not at all clear that the historical practice of electing the caliph reflects a recognition that contemporary democratic theory can be authentically Islamic.

Though the arguments of the Young Ottomans, when examined carefully through the lens of classical Islamic law, seem to be unpersuasive, this does not mean that Islam and democracy cannot be reconciled. On Monday, then, we will return to the fundamentalist argument that Shari’ah must possess both symbolic and substantive sovereignty in any Islamic form of government.