{"id":213,"date":"2000-11-21T15:45:58","date_gmt":"2000-11-21T23:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/doctorsoroush.com\/english\/?p=213"},"modified":"2012-09-26T15:47:22","modified_gmt":"2012-09-26T22:47:22","slug":"islamic-democracy-and-islamic-governance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/islamic-democracy-and-islamic-governance\/","title":{"rendered":"Islamic Democracy and Islamic Governance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span>A summary of remarks by Abdolkarim Soroush and Charles Butterworth at The Middle East Institute, November 21, 2000<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

On November 21, MEI gathered two scholars, the Iranian thinker Abdolkarim Soroush, visiting professor at Harvard University, and Charles Butterworth, Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, for a discussion on \u201cIslamic Democracy and Islamic Governance.\u201d The two focused their comments on the arguments in Soroush\u2019s recently published collection of essays in English, Reason, Freedom, and Democracy in Islam<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Charles Butterworth opened the debate by saying that Soroush was speaking from within Islam and stood as a reformer, whereas there was also a need to speak from outside Islam.\u00a0 For him, the basic problem that religious thinkers have been facing is how to reconcile things that don\u2019t change with the contingency of the world.\u00a0 The difficulty is clearly how to reinterpret religion so as to adapt it to the needs of a political system.\u00a0 Within this frame, Butterworth asserted that the task of political philosophy was not only to think about the best possible regime, but also to think about the goal of this regime.\u00a0 He argued that, today, it goes without saying that human beings should aspire to freedom and that the best way to attain freedom is democracy.\u00a0 Freedom should help us to live in a political community peacefully, while other goals, such as pleasure, satisfaction, wealth or honor, do not ensure a peaceful political community.\u00a0 When studying the origin of a law, either divinely inspired or democratically approved, we have to understand the goal of the legislature in designing the law.\u00a0 For the American professor, the endeavor to think of freedom as a means, rather than an end, is at the heart of reforms in Iran.<\/p>\n

Abdolkarim Soroush said he has been working for a while on the theme of freedom, and that one cannot understand freedom in Islamic societies without going back to medieval philosophers such as Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, or Ibn Khaldun.\u00a0 The concept of freedom was not as important at that time as it is today, he said.\u00a0 As Soroush mentioned, the origin of the world \u201cpolitics\u201d gives us good insight into this difference.\u00a0 In Arabic the word siassa<\/em> means \u201cto care, to control.\u201d\u00a0 On the other hand, for Anglo-Saxons, the word \u201cpolitics\u201d finds it origin in the Greek word polis<\/em> (city), and means \u201cto run a city.\u201d\u00a0 Thus, for Al-Farabi and the other medieval Islamic philosophers, politics referred to the need to control people.\u00a0 People needed to be controlled because they were by nature violent, like animals.\u00a0 Soroush noted, however, that the vision of man in modern philosophy is quite different.\u00a0 Man is now viewed as essentially good and, as a matter of fact, as entitled to many things.\u00a0 The need for controls on man\u2019s behavior is seen as an exceptional case.\u00a0 Moreover, added Soroush, the way men considered themselves has changed.\u00a0 In the past, men considered themselves as duty-bound, whereas today men think they have more rights than duties.<\/p>\n

Referring to the old definition of man, Ibn Rushd considered prophets as physicians.\u00a0 People were naturally unhealthy, ill, and they needed to be cured, to be shown the right way.<\/p>\n

Soroush went on to discuss the link between religion and freedom in Iran.\u00a0 In Iran, oppressor regimes based their political power on religion, and as the place of religion in politics grew, the regimes put more pressure on freedom.\u00a0 As a result, he said people in Iran today view religion as inherently authoritarian.\u00a0 This is what drives his own work, Soroush said.\u00a0 The role of the philosophers, in Soroush\u2019s view, is to try to reconcile religion and freedom, to give an understandable new definition of religion and to link democracy and religion.\u00a0 Soroush wants to convince his fellow citizens that it is possible to be Muslim and to enjoy liberty.\u00a0 His main task has been to give theoretical foundation to link the immutable aspects of religion to the mutable, changeable aspects of peoples\u2019 everyday lives.<\/p>\n

Following Soroush\u2019s opening remarks, Charles Butterworth responded by citing the work of Al-Farabi, who examined the link between people in a society.\u00a0 Al-Farabi argued that, to live together, people needed to share opinions broad enough so that they can tolerate others within definite limits.\u00a0 For Al-Farabi, religion consisted of opinions and actions.\u00a0 To live together, we need a general set of views of how the universe works, a definition about what is to be good, or to be bad.\u00a0 This was what religion contributed to politics.\u00a0 On the eve of the 21st<\/sup> Century, Butterworth argued, we are the stepchildren of Rousseau rather than the stepchildren of Hobbes or Aristotle.\u00a0 In other words, we believe that human beings are by nature good.\u00a0 We don\u2019t want to go back to the Hobbesian vision of government\u2019s origin, according to which humans are driven by concupiscence and unbridled desire and that politics is necessary to preserve order.\u00a0 Butterworth challenged Soroush to elaborate his view of what kinds of bonds tie humans together in community, and what the goal of a political community is.<\/p>\n

Soroush replied that, for him, governments have been divided between democratic and non-democratic governments, and philosophers have always been concerned with the fair distribution of power and wealth.\u00a0 This is his concern as well.\u00a0 Soroush examined the discussion between divine legislation and the modern definition of law.\u00a0 Divine Law, he said, does not reflect the general consent of the people.\u00a0 As Soroush put it, divine legislation in Islam is said to have been discovered by a few and those discoverers think that they have privileged access to the interpretation of this law.\u00a0 The certainty of the few leads to their governance of the whole society.\u00a0 Soroush argued instead that there should be general consent of the governed behind even Sharia Law.\u00a0 Soroush asserted that every Divine Law has a purpose.\u00a0 Once one uncovers these purposes, he contented, one has a clearer view of the law itself and can reinterpret it to fit changing modern requirements.<\/p>\n

Soroush stressed that there were two views of religion, a maximalist and a minimalist one.\u00a0 In the maximalist view, he said, everything has to be derived from religion, and most of the current problems in Islam come from this view.\u00a0 Soroush maintained that this view had to be replaced by a minimalist view of religion.\u00a0 This view implies that some values cannot be derived from religion, like respect for human rights.\u00a0 Even freedom has to be dealt from without religion for Soroush.\u00a0 Islamic philosophers, he suggested, have to change their definition of man and to concentrate on the idea of justice.\u00a0 Traditional Islamic philosophers have been looking to necessities, not to contingencies, and have been thinking that nature cannot be changed.\u00a0 The Iranian thinker argued that the role of reformers was different.\u00a0 For reformers, contingencies are part of life, politics, and society, and justice requires a change in the relationship between God and law.\u00a0 In his closing remarks, Soroush said that ideas could be borrowed from outside Islam in this effort, but that they must be adapted to serve the right purposes.\u00a0 It\u2019s not enough to copy; one also needs to translate these ideas to meet the current needs of Islamic societies.<\/p>\n

This policy brief was prepared by Romain Fremont.\u00a0\u00a0 (<\/em><\/span>The Middle East Institute)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0A summary of remarks by Abdolkarim Soroush and Charles Butterworth at The Middle East Institute, November 21, 2000 On November 21, MEI gathered two scholars, the Iranian thinker Abdolkarim Soroush, visiting professor at Harvard University, and Charles Butterworth, Professor of Political Science at the University of Maryland, for a discussion on \u201cIslamic Democracy and Islamic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/drsoroush.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}