BROADCASTS.com

b'

[This is an entry to the\\xa0Adversarial Collaboration Contest\\xa0by John Buridan and Christian Flanery.]

Matter: To what extent does liberalism and democracy obtain in Islamic countries. Whether Islam consistently poses political opposition to liberalism and democracy.

Two simple narratives have split the western world\\u2019s perspective on Islam.

These two narratives do not exhaust the\\xa0spectrum of opinion, but they do\\xa0function well enough\\xa0to establish the basic controversy around Islamic countries and Liberal Democracy.

The first narrative opines that Islam is an ideology\\xa0inimical to \\u201cwestern values,\\u201d\\xa0such as classical liberalism and liberal egalitarianism, and a\\xa0rival to the Judeo-Christian\\xa0social mores. It constitutes an ideological rival, inherently aggressive, both unable and unwilling to sustain non-partisan legal systems, democratic norms, fair treatment for opposition parties, protection of dissidents, or the basic rights and freedoms which Western European and Anglophone countries enjoy. And that Islam sustains this undesirable state of affairs.

The second is that Islam is not qualitatively different from any other religion. Islam has contributed to civilization in a significant way, and ordinary Muslims\\xa0share our own values\\xa0of family, peace, and justice. In contrast to the first narrative which stresses Islam as an ideology, the second narrative emphasizes that Muslims are\\xa0normal people.There is\\xa0no problem with Islam eo ipso;\\xa0the perceived \\u201cproblems\\u201d of Islam are actually some combination of the fairly normal problems of traditional societies, poor socio-economic conditions, and\\xa0legacy problems from colonialism.

In order to avoid a point-scoring debate between these two narratives, our approach is to provide a descriptive examination of the performance of liberal democracy within Islamic environments. We take as granted for this paper that one cannot look at a religion on paper and predict what it will look like in a polity. Religious practice and theological doctrine inform every aspect of the pious person\\u2019s outlook and life, but the way in which it informs that outlook is not deterministic and cannot be gleaned merely by looking at the source texts, nor by the impossible task of a quantitative comparison of which religion has produced more violence across regions and millenia. Although we believe original texts are not deterministic, that does not mean Islam is totally amorphous. Religious culture is a powerful force within society. It unifies people, allows them to feel part of something bigger and better, it provides solace in their troubles, and can mobilize political action. How that mobilization of power occurs remains largely up to the needs of the moment, but it\\u2019s that mobilization of power which we are interested in.