Islamic Democracy

The crux of An-Na'im's Islam and the Secular State is that Muslims should be allowed to practice their faith as they see fit and should comply with sharia, but voluntarily. The call from Islamists to impose sharia with the full power of the state will only lead to totalitarianism, he argues. To bolster his claim, he notes that the Koran never mentions the idea of a state and does not prescribe a particular form of government.

"The premise of my proposal," writes An-Na'im, "is that Muslims everywhere, whether minorities or majorities, are bound to observe Shari'a as a matter of religious obligation, and that this can best be achieved when the state is neutral regarding all religious doctrines and does not claim to enforce Shari'a principles as state policy or legislation."

Without sharia as the supreme law, there can be no truly Islamic state, at least as Islamists see it. An-Na'im's proposal for a significant degree of separation between religion and state not only flies in the face of the Islamist vision but verges on heresy to many Muslims. To An-Na'im, "Islam is the religion of human beings who believe in it, while the state signifies the continuity of institutions like the judiciary and administrative agencies." And "this view is fundamentally Islamic," he asserts, because Islam holds that "religious compliance must be completely voluntary" and because "coercive enforcement promotes hypocrisy . . . which is categorically and repeatedly condemned by" the Koran.

Feldman's argument in The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State is more mainstream than An-Na'im's in the context of contemporary Islamic thought, though many Western readers may view it as contrarian.

Feldman condemns the autocracies in many Muslim countries but argues that sharia is not to blame. On the contrary, he says, in the "traditional Sunni constitutional order," sharia was interpreted by an independent class of scholars who served as a check on tyranny, preventing rulers from exploiting religion to justify their political positions.

Feldman advocates for sharia as a potential way to help democratize Muslim societies, but he stops short of explaining exactly how this might be possible. As he notes, today's Islamists urge a return to the Islamic state but are not always keen on having truly independent religious scholars. He also has to reckon with the examples of several countries in which the restoration of powerful religious scholars has been problematic, to say the least. In Saudi Arabia, he notes, the scholars who interpret sharia "are more than scholars; they are active, quasi-tribal allies of the Sa'ud family" and "actually part of the ruling class." And in Afghanistan under the Taliban and Iran after the 1979 revolution, religious authorities assumed so much power that, once again, there was no effective check on tyranny.

Feldman's cautiously optimistic conclusion is that sharia "has the capacity to function as a tool for the fair administration of justice. But like any other legal system, it cannot do so if it is not embedded in a constitutional order."

Ultimately, these books are more than contrasting legal arguments; they represent the perpetual contest between practice and theory. An-Na'im's experience in his native Sudan and in the United States has bred the practical assumption that an Islamic state will lead only to tyranny, and that Muslims need a secular state in which to live their faith by their own free choice; for him, this is "the only valid and legitimate way of being a Muslim." Feldman is an ardent constitutionalist trying to show how, in theory at least, his democratic vision could be compatible with another country's traditions and institutions.

Geneive Abdo, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is the author of several books on contemporary Islam, most recently "Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America after 9/11."