(Authors: Paul Eidelberg, William E. Morrisey, Vol. 64, #1, Pesach 2009)
Last year marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the debates between the then-great American senator Stephen Douglas and an obscure Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. A single election campaign for one seat in the United States Senate, generations back: it all seems too parochial, so distant, so entirely irrelevant to today. And yet the basic principles enunciated in that debate illuminate perhaps the most agonizing conflict of our own time, the confrontation between the liberal democracies of the West and the Islamic monarchies, tyrannies, oligarchies in the Middle East – with Israel at risk.
Lincoln and Douglas met two years before the American republic sundered in its bloodiest war, a civil war that cost more American lives than the First and Second World Wars combined. The issue that threatened the Union was simple: slavery. But the question of slavery cuts to the heart of how we define ‘democracy.’
After all, ‘democracy’ simply means ‘rule of the people’ or popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty requires majority rule. But where does that leave an enslaved minority? In a community of three, if Eidelberg and Morrisey want to enslave Schwarz, what is poor Schwarz to do? The principle of pure democracy gives him no alternative but to submit to the rule of the majority.
In the 1850s, the champions of popular sovereignty in America intended to escape the increasingly sharp division between Americans (usually in the Northern states) who sought to abolish slavery – condemning it as a crime against humanity – and Americans (usually in the Southern states, where slaves picked the cotton and tended the tobacco plantations) who upheld slavery as ‘a positive good,’ as the phrase went. In reply to both sides, Douglas proposed a seductive solution: Let the people decide. If the settlers of an American territory want to join the American Union, let them vote slavery up or down. End of problem.
Douglas told Illinois voters that popular sovereignty was “the great principle that every people ought to possess the right to form and regulate their own domestic institutions in their own way.” Self- government means that “every community [may] judge for itself, whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil for them to adopt it.”
Self-government is “the birthright of freemen.”
The framers of the United States Constitution endorsed popular sovereignty, Douglas claimed, in order to honor diversity. “The laws and domestic institutions which would suit the granite hills of New Hampshire would be totally unfit for the plantations of South Carolina.” Separate and distinct conditions require separate and distinct laws, even separate and distinct definitions of right and wrong. “Uniformity is the parent of despotism the world over, not only in politics, but in religion.” The diversity popular sovereignty ensures therefore amounts to “the greatest safeguard of all our liberties.”
Then, as now, this was an attractive argument. After all, only a tyrant would contend that the laws adequate to, for example, a largely nomadic desert people in the Seventh Century CE could sensibly apply to the citizens of Paris or Buenos Aires. But the argument doesn’t quite work. The key to its unsoundness rests in the little word ‘totally’. No one could deny that regions as diverse in climate and terrain as New England and the deep South could thrive under the same laws. Uniformity in that sense would indeed spawn despotism, or at least misery, in one or both places. But does that mean that all or even most of the laws of New Hampshire and South Carolina must diverge from one another?
Enter Lincoln. The purpose of popular sovereignty, he said, is not simply to honour diversity and to avoid the tyranny of a deadening conformism. For what reason, by what criterion, do we judge diversity good and despotism bad? On this point, the American founders had spoken with one voice, in their Declaration of Independence from the British monarch and parliament: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Governments exist in order to secure those rights, and the moral legitimacy of the democratic form of government – along with all other forms – stands or falls on its ability to do just that.
When the American founders go on to say that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, they mean two things. First, every adult who is to be governed must be asked – a point that the founders (who of course included slaveholders among them) knew must include the slaves, who were more ‘governed’ than anyone. More subtly, ‘consent’ must mean not mere assent – a child can give that – but reasoned assent, assent given after due deliberation, debate, and expressed in a free and fair vote by the people or by their (freely and fairly) elected representatives. Consent, in other words, must stay within the framework of the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, within (as the Declaration also says) the laws of nature and of nature’s God.
When Lincoln lost his senatorial election to Douglas in 1858, he did not call upon his followers to take up their guns and march on Washington in order to reverse the result. Having consented to participate in the political process – debating, deliberating, deciding – he also consented to accept the result of that process. In doing so, he followed the practice of politics as defined by perhaps the greatest of political philosophers, Aristotle. It is in considering Aristotle’s definition of politics that we can begin to see the problem of Islamic rule.
Aristotle begins his study of politics with the family. In every family, he sees three distinct forms of human rule. There is the rule of the parents over the children; this entails a one-way, ‘commanding’ type of rule, exercised by the rulers for the sake of the ruled. ‘I’m doing this for your own good,’ is the perennial theme of parenting. The families Aristotle saw also exhibited the rule of masters over slaves; this also entailed one-way or commanding rule, but now exercised by the rulers for the benefit of themselves. Not for Aristotle the sentimental talk of the slaveholder as wise parent/guardian of the ‘childlike’ slave – the stuff of the Southern planters’ rhetoric, and of tyrants everywhere. In both of these forms of rule, the unspoken command underlying all the other commands is: “No talking back!”
But not so for the relationship between husband and wife. In the ancient world, of course, the husband might have the final word in any argument, but arguing, persuading, and even consent always underlay the marriage. Aristotle calls this government-by-reasoning, this talkative way of rule, this ruling-and-being-ruled, this give-and-take, the only genuinely political rule. It is the only kind of rule fit for adult human beings, who are, uniquely, creatures capable of reason, creatures whose God-given natures cannot flourish without the opportunity to think things through.
Now consider Islam. It comes in many varieties, of course, but at its core, according to its scriptures themselves, is command – the commands of Allah, through Mohammad. What is more, Mohammad represented Allah’s commands to establish a regime of military conquest – a regime of armed force. Whereas the God of the Bible is no less commanding, note this: the prophets talk back. One of them, famously, even wrestles back! Consider also God in Christianity, calling upon Christians to conquer, to be sure, but to conquer by persuasion and witness, not by fire and sword. It is no slander on Islam to take it at its word. Islam command jihad – wars of forced conversion, the alternative to which is either death or Dhimmitude – that is to say, strict subordination to the Muslim conqueror.
Dhimmitude might or might not mean literal slavery, but the point remains: this is not politics; this is not government by the consent of the governed.
We select the example of the founder of the Islamic ‘Republic’ of Iran, which of course is in fact a religious oligarchy. The founder of the Iranian regime, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, propounded his theory of ruling in his book, Islam and Revolution. Khomeini understands Islam as a regime, a way of rule. It is Allah’s regime, a comprehensive system of laws, “a complete social system” through which “all the needs of man have been met”. No more legislation is needed; Allah has provided mankind with the final and authoritative way of life under Allah’s laws. It is left only to rulers to execute those laws and to judge disputants under the laws’ guidance. “If Muslims had acted in accordance with this command and, after forming a government, made the necessary extensive preparations to be in a state of full readiness for war, a handful of Jews would never have dared to occupy our lands”.
Khomeini conceals nothing concerning the character of this regime. It is, he writes, constitutional – a genuine rule of law – but “not constitutional in the current sense of the word, i.e., based on the approval of laws in accordance with the opinion of the majority. It is constitutional in the sense that the rulers are subject to a certain set of conditions in governing and administering the countries, conditions that are set forth in the Noble Qur’an and the Sunna of the Most Noble Messenger…. Islamic government may therefore be defined as the rule of divine law over men.” Consent comes in only at the beginning when the infidel accepts the rule of Allah and of Allah’s laws and the authority of Allah’s prophet, Mohammad.
But how can such a set of laws, first laid down in a small community that knew nothing of modern states, modern technology, modern economies, really rule today? Khomeini does not flinch. The sinews of the modern state in its day-to-day exercise are the lines of command seen in bureaucracies. But “superfluous bureaucracies and the system of filekeeping and paper-shuffling that is enforced in them” are “totally alien to Islam.” “When the juridical methods of Islam were applied, the shari’a judge in each town, assisted only by two bailiffs and with only a pen and an inkpot at his disposal, would swiftly resolve disputes among people and send them about their business.” There is no ‘state’ in Islam – only the community of believers, the ummah, and the local rulers. Insofar as Muslims might ‘need’ to adopt statehood in order to defend themselves from similarly-organized infidels, they do so only with a view toward eliminating the state altogether, in future.
But what of modern technology? The judges and executors of Islamic law defer to those most expert on that law, the clerics, the fuqaha. The Islamic political community is not a monarchy or a democracy but a ‘fuqaharchy.’ And above all the fuqaha stands the supreme religious ruler on earth, the Imam. This, then, is a system of rule, a regime, based not on politics but on command, and Khomeini again not only understood this but insisted upon it: “With respect to duty and position, there is indeed no difference between the guardian of a nation and the guardian of a minor.” The clerics are the fathers of the people, the Imam or supreme cleric – “the universal divine vicegerent” – the father of fathers. This is “a vicegerency pertaining to the whole of creation, by virtue of which all the atoms in the universe humble themselves before the holder of authority.” Muhammad and the Imams “existed before the creation of the world in the form of lights situated beneath the divine throne; they were superior to other men even in the sperm from which they grew and in their physical composition” – “limited only by the divine will.” Thus the power of the Imams, rulers superior in nature to men and indeed to all of creation, far surpasses the power of mere human invention.
For Khomeini, and indeed for many Muslims, Shi’a or Sunni, all men most emphatically are not created equal. Unlike Moses or the Apostle Paul, Mohammad is more than human, and so are all of the Imams who followed Mohammad. This gives them the right to rule parentally, not politically.
Islam has won the adherence of millions around the world. In its several forms it animates vast majorities in the Middle East. Khomeini calls his regime an Islamic republic, but insists that it is no republic in the Western sense. What does it mean if a majority associates rule not with politics in the strict sense – with reciprocal ruling-and-being-ruled – but with command?
This can really mean only one thing: the majority, guided by the clerical elite, will execute the divine law and judge one another, and all minority groups not as fellow-citizens but as commanders. Such a majority will happily vote for the likes of Hamas, a paramilitary organization that seeks the violent destruction of Israel and indeed the annihilation of anything or anyone standing in their way, which (they tell themselves) is God’s way. Meanwhile, insofar as it attempts to undertake ‘even-handed’ diplomacy towards Israel and its enemies, the West essentially adopts the position of Stephen Douglas: “Let the people decide” their own local ruling institutions and practices, the West says, imagining itself to be fair and dispassionate. Let Muslims rule themselves; let Jews rule Jews. Can’t they all just get along, if only they would respect one another’s majorities?
No, they can’t – or, more accurately, they won’t. Muslims in principle despise such easy-going moral relativism. In Khomeini’s estimation, the ‘imperialists’ of the West are “even more Satanic” than the Jews. No milk-and-toast moralist of amorality, the Ayatollah! Any compromises with Satan’s great or small amount to tactical manoeuvers at best. The only true peace is in submission, the meaning of ‘Islam.’
Professor Paul Eidelberg is President of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy Jerusalem. William E. Morrisey is Professor in the Department of Political Science, Hillsdale College, Michigan.
