Rethinking Islam, military power, and democracy: A year-end correction

Many of you might think I got something so wrong in National Interest pieces written this year. I might disagree! But some deserve a mea culpa. I'd deal with the most recent this week

Where does a columnist acknowledge that he has a disagreement with himself? Or rethink a stated view failing the test of time. This being the last National Interest of 2025 is a good occasion to do so. Will I do so every year-end? I hope not. I hope I won’t have arguments to rethink, recalibrate, or simply resile from that often. 

An opinion column is exactly what it is meant to be: One writer’s opinion. It can’t and shouldn’t win everybody’s approval. It is better if it is provocative. The readers’ disagreement with some columns will be more intense than with others. The readers then have the recourse to write back, in a letter to the editor. Where does the writer go, except to you — the reader? 

I know so many of you might think I got something so wrong in one or another of the nearly 50 National Interest pieces written this year. I might disagree with that! But I can list at least five over some 25 years that deserve a mea culpa. I’d deal with the most recent of these this week. This was published on September 28, 2024. It asserted that Islam doesn’t kill democracy. The Army-Islam combo does. How come Pakistan and Bangladesh rarely have a peaceful transition while Islamic Indonesia and Malaysia do? 

Similarly, I argued that Myanmar had a military-ruled hybrid system (they’re polling this Sunday) despite being almost entirely Buddhist, especially after they brutally expelled most of their tiny Muslim minority, the Rohingya. And if Buddhism was the challenge to its democracy, how come Sri Lanka had no such issues? As I look back, I see many flaws with this formulation. The first is that so many Islamic countries have no democracy, despite their army not interfering. My distant vision was clouded by what I see in the neighbourhood. Iran has no military rule, and while it has regular elections, the unelected clergy rules. This is the classical hybrid arrangement and stable, unlike Pakistan’s where power equations occasionally shift. 

The Gulf monarchies fear not their armies, but democracy. They rule with the benefit of natural resources and in the name of Islam. It is most pronounced in the case of Saudi Arabia. Türkiye has regular elections, but Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has used religion to mutilate the constitution and destroy much of the Opposition. 

In that 2024 piece, I also overlooked the lessons of the Arab Spring (2011), again because of nearsightedness. The Western world, liberal foundations, and the Obama administration hailed this as a “wonderful democratic upsurge” in Muslim autocracies. Good riddance, people had now arrived to claim their place under the sun. 

There was some liberal excitement in India as well. After all, had been roused by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s line — “singhasan khaali karo ki ab janata aati hai (vacate the throne, people have arrived to claim it) — quoted by Jayaparakash Narayan (JP) in the fight against the Emergency. Or those Faiz Ahmed Faiz lines so popular with our left-liberal community: “Sab taaj uchhale jayenge,sab takht giraye jayenge/aur raj karegi khalk-e-khuda, jo main bhi hun aur tum bhi ho.”  (When crowns are tossed, thrones toppled, and power vests in God’s people, that’s you and I). 

That unravelled fast. In some cases people welcomed the return of the past dictatorship, as in Egypt. And in some the dictator survived but the country became a failed state (Syria) with many rebel armies rising not in the name of democracy or even nationalism but versions of Islam. 

Tunisia and Algeria carried out “corrections” to remain intact; Yemen is still broken and at war; and Libya, we don’t have the space to talk about its horrible plight. Cruel though it may sound, you need to ask if the country wasn’t better off under Colonel Gaddafi? At least he was an Arab nationalist. Now we have the country divided between two warlords buying black market arms with stolen oil money. 

The main reason the Arab Spring failed was that the only institutionally organised group in all of these countries was Muslim Brotherhood. While democracy was its vehicle to power, its agenda was ideological, pan-national religious conservatism. 

I was particularly wrong with this argument because in many of the Islamic nations the army has actually been a force of stability and safety, even for minorities. We are watching the army play that invaluable role next door, at least as yet, in Bangladesh with its history of instability and martial law. In Egypt, General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi got rid of Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi and found popular acceptance and a sigh of relief. 

Similarly, in Tunisia and Algeria the army has balanced out the Islamist forces and prevented the slide into a failed state. The idea that the army-Islam combo was needed to destroy democracy, therefore, was too sweeping a generalisation. 

Whether there is a contradiction between Islam and democracy is a complex debate. Let’s nuance it with two questions. One, is there a contradiction between a Muslim state and democracy? And second, what’s the difference between Islamic and Islamist? The answer to the first, unfortunately, is mostly yes, despite exceptions like the Maldives, Indonesia (the largest Muslim country) and Malaysia. A doctrinaire adherence to faith brings a pre-ordained, unitary system of governance — just like communism. That’s why the global lib-left-Islamic alliance is just so much blah. Both sides are cynical in partnering against a common enemy: The “evil” West and its “favourite child” Israel. The Islamic intelligentsia needs the left for global respectability and the left needs alienated Muslims as gun fodder. Why not fight American imperialism and neo-liberalism to the last angry Muslim? Can a communist state be democratic? Don’t confuse it with socialism. And can an Islamic nation have democracy? 

This brings us to the distinction between Islamic and Islamist. The former is simply adherence to a faith. It’s a choice, just like being Hindu, Christian, Jewish or atheist. It doesn’t seek to force others to alter their ways to conform to yours. Contrarily, Islamist is a political philosophy that wants to enforce rules of the faith on non-believers and if they don’t, punish them. 

That’s ISIS, the ideology that fuelled the Bondi Beach massacre of Jews in Australia, Easter bombings targeting Christians in Sri Lanka, and the depredations in Syria and its neighbourhood, and across the world. Forget democracy, the Islamists wouldn’t even countenance nationalism. They want a caliphate transcending all Muslim nations. That’s why the force every Muslim nation fears the most is ISIS, the Islamists. The unfortunate truth is that fair elections brought them into power (in the name of Muslim Brotherhood) in so many states. 

We can safely say, therefore, that there is a contradiction between Islamists (as distinct from Islam) and democracy. Pakistan is an Islamic republic with a strong nationalism. It isn’t Islamist. It will never fight for another Islamic nation, unless of course it’s paid for it. Even Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed use Islam to fuel their hatred of India. 

Even the Taliban, who run the world’s most shariat-compliant state fear ISIS because it threatens their nationalism. Will they risk a free election? Nor would any of the Gulf states. Iraq stands out as an exception but its Shia-majority demographics and the Iranian influence qualify its democracy. 

In my September 2024 column, I overlooked these nuances. My vision was focused too tightly on the neighbourhood. The regrettable fact is that as you draw a line from the Red Sea to the Bay of Bengal the only countries where Muslim citizens have had uninterrupted free vote that determine who rules for a finite time are at the two extremities: Israel and India. I, accordingly, stand corrected. 

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