Islam and Elections

2004 Report (Continued)


Introduction

Dialogue between Islam and the West, or between Islam and the United States, may be furthered by dialogue within the Islamic world designed to appraise the range of views that Muslims hold on a particular subject. Such an internal debate, prompted by the rapidly changing political situation in the Muslim world, was the objective of the “Workshop on Islam and Elections” held in Amman, Jordan, from March 6 to 8, 2004.

For the past thirty years, questions about the proper role of Islam in modern political life have gained ever wider audiences both within and outside the Muslim world. The Iranian Revolution of 1979 demonstrated the political potential of Islamic politics; it encouraged avowedly Muslim political activists elsewhere, while at the same time inspiring more secular regimes to limit or suppress burgeoning Islamic movements. No other revolution occurred, but suppression had the unanticipated consequence of driving some activists to resort to assassinations, hostage-taking, and other violent acts.

The most glaring expression of this violent strand of Islamic politics occurred on September 11, 2001, with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in the United States. The U.S. government swiftly responded by militarily removing Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. This phase of the “War on Terror” was followed by a war in Iraq beginning in March 2003. Though it is now clear that Iraq was not directly linked to 9/11, the Bush administration claimed that attacking Saddam Hussein’s regime would overthrow tyranny and introduce “democracy” to the Muslim world. Some American officials optimistically described a process of democratization that would begin in Afghanistan and Iraq and spread throughout the region as other Muslim populations watched democracy take hold in the Muslim world.

Events did not proceed according to this vision and around the world, above all in Muslim countries, American intentions and their potential outcomes were the subject of heated debate. This, in turn, brought systems of governance in the Muslim world to the fore of international political concerns.

Political trends in the Muslim world today can be broadly classified according to the following five types:

  1. Autocratic regimes or movements that do not espouse any form of participatory governance;
  2. Parties and movements that support the idea of elections but do not currently envision a peaceful transition to representative government;
  3. Regimes that maintain a constitutional commitment to elections but do not conduct them in a free and fair fashion;
  4. Groups that support participatory governance in ways that reflect the concerns of Muslim populations living as minorities in predominantly non-Muslim lands;
  5. Parties and movements advocating a peaceful and rapid transition to participatory governance, either within an existing constitutional framework or through constitutional change.

Participants in the Dialogues: Islamic World-U.S.-The West workshop were drawn from all parts of the Muslim world with the clear objective of fostering as meaningful an exchange as possible among individuals who, in one way or another, support the principle of electoral governance. Participants from Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Malaysia, Nigeria, and Tunisia offered the perspective of citizens of Muslim-majority states. Participants from India represented a nation in which Muslims have historically been, and currently are, a minority group—albeit a very important one in demographic terms. And Muslim participants from the United States and Europe spoke as part of a comparatively new Muslim population in the West.

His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan, who served as the local host of the workshop, actively contributed to several sessions, insisting on keeping the welfare of the citizenry in the forefront of the deliberations and offering his analysis of the events transpiring in Iraq.

The workshop coincided with the approval of an interim constitution for occupied Iraq; this timeliness lent the dialogue a sense of urgency and, at the same time, filled some participants with feelings of frustration since democratization efforts in Iraq seemed to be paying so little heed to Islamic principles and traditions.

The issue of participatory governance in the Muslim world will undoubtedly remain a major concern for Muslim citizens as they grapple with the need to adapt their beliefs, traditions, and historical memory to the requirements of modernity. The conclusions of the Amman workshop seem to indicate significant areas of agreement on how to advance this struggle. Participants also expressed a deep awareness of the urgency of the task. It is the hope of the Dialogues program that the “Workshop on Islam and Elections” has made a contribution to what some might describe as the debate of the century.

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