The best place to begin is with Sayyid Qutb’s most infl uential book, Ma’alim fi al- tariq (Signposts along the road). Here Qutb diagnoses why the “sick West” is falling apart along with its democracy. The West is to be replaced by an imagined Islamic power that will take over the world in a
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“return of history” that is synonymous with a return of Muslim glory. Such thinking is manifest in most Islamist writings. Qutb writes: “Humanity is at the brink . . . most clearly in the West itself . . . after the bankruptcy of democ-racy, which is fi nished . . . the rule of the Western man is about to break down. . . . It is only Islam that possesses the needed values and method. . . . It is now the turn of Islam and its umma community in the most tense time to take over.” 10 This is the hall Islami, the Islamic solution, that Qaradawi preaches as well.
Second to Qutb among the founding fathers of Islamism, but of much the same caliber, is the Indian Muslim Abu al- A’la al- Mawdudi, who articulates his rejection of democracy in much stronger words: “I tell you Muslim brothers in all frankness that democracy . . . stands in contrast to what you embrace as religion and its dogma. The Islam that you believe in and according to which you identify yourself as Muslims differs in its sub-stance from this hateful system [of democracy]. . . . Where this system of de-mocracy prevails Islam is in absence, and where Islam prevails there is no place [la makan] for this system of democracy.11
Qutb was executed in public in 1966, and Mawdudi died a de cade later.
The foremost Islamist alive today, in terms of impact, is Yusuf al- Qaradawi, widely considered the heir of Qutb. Al- Jazeera tele vi sion so extends his reach that he has been nicknamed “the global Mufti.” Qaradawi fi rst became known after the devastating Arab defeat in the Six- Day War of 1967; his writings contributed to the deligitimation of secular regimes. His book al- Hall al- Islami wa al- hulul al- mustawradah (The Islamic solutions and the imported solutions) is the fi rst volume of a trilogy advocating the rejection of Western values for “Islamic” ones. Qaradawi issues all kinds of fatwas, which make a great impact. (A fatwa is simply a legal judgment that includes teachings and instructions for right behavior. It is not, as has been widely believed in the West since the Salman Rushdie affair, a death sen-tence.) Qaradawi dismisses and even ridicules all cultural borrowings, in-cluding democracy, as “imported solutions.” In one of his fatwas, Qaradawi writes that “the term liberal democracy refl ects its Eu ro pe an origin. . . . Liberal demo cratic thought entered into the life of Muslims through colonization. . . . What looms behind this thought is the wicked colonial notion that religion is to be separated from politics and from the state.”
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hind this wickedness are the familiar villains: “The colonial crusaders and world Jewry are the instigators of this fi tna within Islam.” 12 There is a double meaning involved in the notion of fi tna: literally, the word means sexual danger, but it is also used by Muslims to connote violent fi ghting among Muslims (fi tna wars), with the implication that the fi ghting has been insti-gated by a non- Muslim.
In Qaradawi’s view, Islam presents “shari’a as the alternative to the imported solutions.” The Islamist shari’a state must replace “liberal democ-racy [which] failed in the world of Islam” because the latter is imported and
“alien to Islam.” Like all other Islamists, Qaradawi does not speak like this when he visits Eu rope and talks to Westerners. There he voices approval of democracy. This Islamist double- speak is a great obstacle to the West’s un-derstanding of Islamism.
If we take these statements by the three foremost authorities of po liti cal Islam at face value, we may conclude without further discussion that Islamism, by its own declaration, is not compatible with democracy. Why, then, am I writing this chapter?
Despite the evidence, the job is not that easy. Many Western scholars quote and take at face value different Islamist pronouncements about democracy— those specifi cally designed for Western ears— and on these grounds reach different conclusions.13 The major source of their confusion is the missing distinction between Islam and Islamism. Islam itself, as a faith and system of religious ethics, could be made compatible with democracy if combined with the will to religious reform. The Koranic term “shura” means in Arabic “consultation,” not democracy. However, one can refer today to shura in the course of helping to resolve the Islamic predicament with cul-tural modernity14 and introducing democracy to Islam, and thus view shura in a new interpretation as a demo cratic ethics.
A second source of Western confusion is the postmodern objection to the universalization of modernity. From this comes the view that Islamism is a kind of “other modernity” whose relation to democracy will necessarily be different from what Westerners expect. In practice, this amounts to an apology for po liti cal Islam’s use of the ballot box solely to seize power and its renunciation of demo cratic principles once that goal is achieved. Such an
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instrumental use of demo cratic forms— with none of their substance— grows increasingly likely as the Islamist movement gains appeal and its ideology becomes elevated to a public choice. Today, no Middle Eastern democracy can afford to exclude Islamism without sliding into authoritarian rule. But since Islamism is not compatible with democracy, its participation in demo cratic institutions raises a dilemma.15
The fi nal source of confusion comprises American policymakers who today are attempting to demo cratize the Middle East with Islamists as al-lies. They have apparently never learned from the past. American support of the Afghan- Islamist mujahidin against the Soviet invasion in the 1980s was a grave error that gave rise to the Taliban.16 After 9/11, the Bush ad-ministration’s disastrous “war on terror,” conducted against these same Is-lamists, succeeded in alienating all Muslims suspected of supporting jihadist terror but failed to deter jihadism. Then followed a bit of pure madness sold to the public as “the politics of demo cratization,” which brought Islamists to power in Iraq and Palestine and may soon do so in Egypt. Those efforts at “regime change” have utterly failed to bring democracy. Why? The igno-rance of Western policymakers about Islam and its civilization has certainly been a major factor. While the Obama administration has pursued a mark-edly different and more conciliatory approach, it, too, has demonstrated no clear understanding of democracy and demo cratization in the Arab world, and no proper assessment of Islamism. Islamist parties are presented by Is-lamists and their Western apologists as comparable to the Christian Demo-cratic parties of Western Eu rope, but this is utterly wrong. Unlike those parties, the Islamist parties are not secular— they have, in fact, an agenda of desecularization— and their commitment to demo cratization ends with the ballot box. In this upside- down world, speaking the truth about Islamism is a Sisyphean task.