Religion is an idea. Democracy is an expression

The idea that you can brand members of a religion as “a problem”, because of the fact of their religious faith, is a monstrous negation of humanity.

Yet that is what increasing numbers of non-Muslims are doing to the great religion of Islam.

It feeds the growing western view that Islam is somehow incompatible with democracy. It helps breed irrational fear that every Muslim, however inoffensive, and however much “like you” on the surface, is really a jihadist hell-bent on killing unbelievers for Allah.

For this reason we need to measure very carefully what rational critics who advance the view that it is Islam that is the problem are really saying. They are feeding off the western presumption - and it really is presumptuous - that democracy can only find its true expression in western forms of government.

One such advocate is the political writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose friend the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered over an anti-Islam film for which she wrote the script.

She - like others - overlooks the fact that democracy has many forms, including the inclusive form of collective decision-making, long lost in the west, under which leaders are informed by community views and base their decisions directly upon them.

The west likes to see Islamic societies - particularly Arab societies - as fundamentally undemocratic when in fact, if traditional social norms are being observed and have not been suborned by a history of western “liberal” intervention, it may well be more democratic than the giant and overweening bureaucracies that now encumber western advance.

Where the west sees a “strongman” - and hence some ill-defined threat - what actually exists can be simply a leader who is responding culturally and socially, within a historical context, to the modes of civic and political authority traditionally expressed in his society. (That does not make him - or her - automatically right, of course.)

It is true that Islam sticks rigidly to the substance as well as the form of its rites. It is the Christian “west” that has wandered from that particular path. Some of the results of this can be seen in the activist Protestant protestations over homosexuals achieving consecration in high church office; and, in the Catholic Church, the refusal - at high level - to accept that individuals have responsibility for their own fertility and thus may choose to use birth control.

We are invited - by among others, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of the book Infidel and who was recently a guest in Australia of the Centre for Independent Studies to discuss the Enlightenment - to conclude that Islam has not “modernised”, and to be afraid of this.

It may be that the ideas of Mohammed are incompatible with the ideas of liberal secular democracy, as Hirsi Ali said in a recent interview on ABC radio. But why is this a problem?

Would the world automatically be a better place if everywhere had a parliament on the European model? Surely it would be much better to encourage development of better serviced and more informed societies among those whose traditions do not include the unintended future dynamics of the Magna Carta and Black Death-induced feudal collapse from among the rich traditions they themselves possess?

The 63-year-old experiment with modernism going on in Indonesia is a case in point. According to Hirsi Ali, it is indeed a case in point, but dangerously, partly from the opposite side of the argument. She concludes that Indonesia’s national story - having started post-1945 independence life as a secular and democratic country - is now under threat from a radicalised Islamic movement which is gaining support for the introduction of Sharia law.

Hirsi Ali, an apostate from Islam, did emphasise in her ABC interview that it was not Muslims as individuals who presented a problem: “[T]hey’re varied, they’re very diverse. Some Muslims are a problem, some Muslims are not, some Muslims are apathetic, but Islam as a system of ideas is incompatible with liberal democracy as a system of ideas,” she said.

In the context of Indonesia, the natural interface with the Muslim world for Australia, she added:

“We see Indonesians who are evolving in their understanding and practice of democracy, but we also see Indonesians who are affected by the Middle East and especially by the Islamic Radical Movement and who are choosing to introduce Sharia, or parts of Sharia, into Indonesia ...”

What is profoundly unclear here is precisely what liberal democracy would find offensive about communities that largely live an Islamic life - and democratic decals aside, that’s what the bulk of Indonesians do - choosing to apply the rites of their religion to how they choose to live.

Are there aspects of Sharia law that offend liberal democrats? There are, of course. But there are aspects of liberal democracy - as it is applied in western societies - that are frankly offensive to Muslims.

Is the fact that the Koran - to use Hirsi Ali’s words from her ABC interview - is a “read-only” document really a threat to world peace, in as much as this fact is said to invite liberal democrats to conclude that a jihad is heading their way? Does it really matter if Muslims believe Mohammed is infallible, based on their core religious belief that the Prophet (Blessings be upon Him) gave only the immutable word of God in his teachings?

Hirsi Ali draws inspiration from the Enlightenment, that peculiarly European experience which far more than Stevenson’s Rocket or Brunel’s bridges laid the basis for the forced - and it should be said, hugely beneficial - conversion of the world to the “western standard”.

The Enlightenment was anathema to the fundamentalists who ran Christianity at that time. One suspects it still is, to much of the leadership of the Catholic Church today and perhaps to the Anglican Communion in Africa. The Enlightenment laid the foundations of the post-Christian era that exists today in liberal democracies.

Nor would it be wise to forget that liberal democracy, dumbed down as it has been, has ultimately brought us full exposure to the vacuities of Paris Hilton and the galaxy of other celebrities that cloud the cosmos and fill the gossip spots on the web and in the press.

None of that is to say that Enlightenment is a mistake or that liberal democracy is wrong. But it is not the only path to civilisation and betterment. To assert that it is, is to lay down the grounds for conflict.

In a secular country such as Indonesia - no less than in Australia - the real job of those who seek to argue for advance in one direction or another is to do so from an inclusive perspective. It helps if the arguments advanced by other protagonists - those opposed to your own preferred view - are at least understood, if not incorporated after moderation through rational argument, where they can be.

Indonesia, Australia’s big neighbour, is treading a tightrope. Its constitution mandates secular government; its majority population is Muslim; but there are substantial indigenous Christian communities; and there is the distinct - and distinctly different - Hindu culture of Bali.

Managing this mix is highly complex and demands broadness of vision that is, to say the least, unusual in the adversarial politics that defines western democracy.