Quetta, Pakistan, June 2009

The streets are no longer a war zone in Iran. The Republican Guards and the Basij militia have managed to clean up whatever remains of the violent protests that broke out in Iran following the elections which brought back an unpopular Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president. What started as a protest over presumed electoral fraud broadened into a movement for greater civil liberties and a more tangible democracy and it even threatened a regime-change. But in spite of its intensity, the expectations it raised, and its persistence, in cyberspace and in clandestine circles, the movement failed to achieve its immediate objective — forcing a re-election that could bring into office the liberal-reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi. It has led to more repression as the State tries to hunt down the dissenters, who are being portrayed as enemies of the Islamic Revolution.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was what gave Iran its present system of governance — elected members of the majlis answerable not to the people but to clerics who owed their allegiance to the ‘Supreme Leader’. The structure has made it impossible for progressive reforms to sneak in. Yet all the anger and disaffection in Iran are directed not against this flawed order, but against the president, who was equipped by the system to use power the way he did. Even while openly defying Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, Mousavi never tried to undermine the gains of the Revolution or to question the political structure. Commitment to the Revolution and its grand Islamist ideals circumscribed Iran’s popular movement from the very beginning.

Recent mass agitations in Pakistan, another Muslim country which saw a similar assembly on its streets — predominantly of young men and women in T-shirts and jeans, as also in salwar kameez and chador and the ubiquitous sunglasses — have been more successful. The mass movements of 2007-08 brought a change of government in February 2008. A more recent one in March 2009 marked a high point in Pakistan’s struggle for democracy. It forced the government to reinstate the former chief justice of Pakistan and recall the Punjab government it had unfairly dismissed.

But even during this peak in March, there was no movement against another development that undermined Pakistan’s democracy. The Awami National Party government in the North-West Frontier Province, less than a month ago, had unilaterally decided to enter into a deal with the pro-Taliban Islamists in Swat for the enforcement of the Sharia, in spite of the fact that the deal went against the mandate the party had received in the 2008 elections against the ultra-conservative dispensation of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Ammal.

There were, of course, doubts about the efficacy of the deal in meeting the Taliban threat. But there was a broad consensus that the deal was in consonance with Pakistan’s constitution, which is committed to the enforcement of the Sharia. Contradictory images emanated from Pakistan — of women in Lahore and Islamabad leading pro-democracy struggles on the street on the one hand, and women being thrashed in Swat for disobeying Taliban dictates on the other. In spite of that, democracy was assumed to be thriving in Pakistan.

One could jump to the conclusion that Muslim countries — whether Islamic republics or Muslim-majority nations — can have no real democracy because, as the case of both Iran and Pakistan prove, religion comes in the way. But what is ‘real democracy’? If the holding of elections is a criterion, then even if the Arab countries do not qualify, most other Muslim countries would. Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bangladesh and Indonesia do hold periodic elections. But what about the other criteria of democracy, such as accountability and rule of law? Does religion hamper these?

The question, asked innumerable times since 9/11, has greatly agitated the community and a standardized defence has been worked out. Islam is not antithetical to democracy, but admittedly the Muslim world does have a problem with ‘democratization’. This, the argument runs, has nothing to do with religion. It has more to do with each country’s history of political and economic development and Western imperial domination.

As Ayesha Siddiqa writes in a recent article in Dawn, “Most of the Muslim world is still recovering from the historical experience of colonization which is the main cause for authoritarian rule in these countries. Thus, what the common people protest against is not necessarily Western civilization but the nexus between the West and their authoritarian elite which is the source of the overall dictatorial environment.”

In her introduction to an Observer Research Foundation volume investigating contemporary Muslim societies and the workings of democracy there, the historian, Zoya Hasan, writes of the indivisibility of State and religion in the Muslim world as “fiction” created by leaders in order to legitimize their authoritarian rule. But as Hasan may have noticed, this fiction has long turned into fact with Islam being continually used by various pressure groups either to capture political power or retain hold over it.

Take Iran, where the West no longer dominates, except over the imagination of its jeans-clad youth. Religion here is being used to thwart democratic aspirations to maintain the clergy’s stranglehold on political power. Since it was the clergy which gave the people their first taste of political freedom by upholding the constitutional revolution of 1906 (that curbed the monarch’s power) and then engineered the Islamic Revolution which finally overthrew the Pehlavi dynasty, spiritual leaders have become inseparable from political authority. Any movement that attempts a dissociation of the two is decried as a betrayal of the Revolution, and thereby, of Islam.

Two student movements in 1999 and 2003 failed because they challenged the idea of the supreme leader. The story is no different in Pakistan, where religion was used by the State to keep together a disparate nation of multiple classes, multiple ethnicities and multiple loyalties. Now the conservative Islamists, formed either into political parties or student militias, will not allow the State to forget the religious commitment it made.

Islam may not be antithetical to democracy, but in the hands of the politically ambitious among its followers, it tends to becomes so. In Iran, when Ahmadinejad found his control over the people slipping because of his economic foolhardiness, it was assumed that Islam would give him the sanction to employ the moral police to rein in dissenters (usually the restive, educated middle class in cities) and thus show off his religious credentials. The show may have won him the loyalty of a religious population — perhaps even 11 million of them.

The problem is not with Islamic countries alone. Any democracy runs the risk of falling into the same trap if it allows religion — and not justice, equitable distribution of resources and the guarantee of basic freedoms — to become the benchmark of good governance. India, in that case, would be as vulnerable to authoritarianism as Iran. But religion still does not weigh oppressively in India. So it is still possible to send pink chaddis to Pramod Muthalik and his Ram Sena after their effort to morally police the cities of Karnataka. No such misfortune can befall either Ahmadinejad or his supreme leader.