Using the Arab Uprising, recent revolts in Turkey and the Syrian civil war as examples, three N.C. State faculty members delved into the world of religion and politics in order to better understand the compatibility of Islam and Democracy.
Tuesday night, the Office of International Affairs invited Bob Moog, an associate professor of public and international affairs, Anna Bigelow, an associate professor of philosophy and religious studies and Akram Khater, a professor of history and director of the Department of Middle East Studies to address an audience of more than a hundred students about Islam and how successfully or unsuccessfully Islamic political systems incorporated democracy.
In succession, Moog, Bigelow and Khater demonstrated respectively how, historically, Islam and Democracy haven’t been compatible. They subsequently addressed what philosophical differences caused this split and how a peaceful union of Islam and Democracy was stopped in its tracks by oppressive governments.
Many causes of today’s political description of Islamic societies put into question how free information is in a country like the United States as all the professors, especially Khater, showed how oppression from countries such as Egypt was met with the violence seen in the media.
Khater, who’s also an internationally recognized speaker about the subject, painted the picture of middle-eastern struggles as he demonstrated how puppet states quietly shut down any form of Islamic democratic movements.
The most effective repression, that of Algeria, is when a military intervention cut the Islamic affiliated political group short.
“In the second round of [presidential] elections, the military steps in and calls off the elections,” Moog said.
Algeria was not the only country to reject Islamic tendencies in politics, yet it may have been the most peaceful. Egypt, Syria and Turkey all have a bloody background of repressing political parties affiliated with Islam.
“The Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930’s and 40’s believed that they should participate in the democratic process,” Khater said.
According to Khater, the Muslim Brotherhood then tried to be voted into power, only to have the presidential elections be rigged twice.
“By the 1950’s and 60’s in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood had gone underground, [and] its leadership had been jailed, exiled or killed,” Khater said.
The conclusion for the Brotherhood is that democracy would never work for them. As a result, the Muslim Brotherhood turned to violent resistance, according to Khater.
The speakers described the strictest theocracies, such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, that put Fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, into their civil law codes. Other countries, such as Pakistan, had a constitution that forbade any jurisdiction that contradicted Shari’a law. They also discussed countries that had strictly secular civil laws, yet recognized Islam as a national religion, such as Tunesia.
Although politically affiliated groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, appear united in how to apply Islam to civil law, the Arab world isn’t unified in how religious their law codes are.
“For those who have lived under a different political system—an oppressive one—the answer for what is right is not obvious.”
