[Islam, Religion]
Religious and Political Pluralism.
Yesterday's post inspired a fair amount of interesting commentary on the subject of politics and religion, and the extent to which the latter influences the former. We fall necessarily into the morass of confused causality in this kind of formulation. To use Christianity as an example, the influences on the US were wildly contradictory--from the strength, wealth, and institutional autocracy of the Catholic Church (and the Holy Roman Empire), to the individualistic, mercantile Protestantism that seems to have guided much of the founders' thought. Does Christ's message encourage individual "agency" (call it the liberty argument) or the opposite--a refutation of temporal power and submission only to God?
The morass is obvious: the influences create a feedback loop and trying to identify causality is a fool's errand. Just so with taking Islam and pretending to understand how it might influence politics.
But one thing occurred to me as I read through the comments: countries with homogenous populations--linguistically, culturally, religiously--don't have to address pluralism's messy implications. Let's pull it out of the Muslim context. At independence, India and Pakistan split in half. Pakistan did better at religious homogeneity--97% of the population is now Muslim (it was lower at independence, but still high). India was far more heterogeneous: India had substantial minorities of Muslim and Sikh citizens (and important, though statistically small minorities of Jains, Christians, and Parsis). As a result, India's democracy has been far more vibrant and stable. The push-pull of those perspectives created one of the more sophisticated judiciaries of new democracies, and it has served India well. Pakistan, despite broad national agreement, has been a zoo.
This isn't a perfect metric. Japan managed to successfully democratize despite homogeneity, while Iraq's diversity looks to be one of it's principle destablizers. There are a lot of factors. But how a country deals with minorities is an important metric about how successfully a country has democratized. In countries where diversity is an accepted reality--never mind religious imperatives--this seems to be a big advantage.
3 comments:
It may be difficult to trace the precise origins of this or that aspect of our culture of liberty but it isn’t necessarily a “fools errand.” It seems more likely that some people would rather not acknowledge those roots and thus tend to posit, as James Lileks recently put it, “some overarching, free-floating Enlightenment unmoored from the cultures that produced it.”
You don’t go that far, but you offer a bad argument to support the notion of the futility of political genealogy:
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Does Christ's message encourage individual "agency" (call it the liberty argument) or the opposite--a refutation of temporal power and submission only to God?
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You fail to see that these two notions are complementary, not antagonistic. The individual’s dignity is based on his relationship to God, not to a temporal ruler.
I point this out in defense of the arguments I made yesterday but I hasten to add that I also argued, in effect, that the influence of local religion can be overwhelmed by ideas with universal appeal. I would also add that such ideas have arisen in religions other than Christianity.
Speaking of complementary, hope you don’t mind my plugging my latest post on the cartoon business as touching on themes highly relevant to this discussion.
Idler, I'll take issue with the idea that 1) there's a fixed interpretation of religion; 2) that interpretations will affect government in a predictable fashion. You and I could argue the religious merits of whether Christ's message was at odds or congruent with democracy, but our answer doesn't have the slightest influence on a culture with Pat Robertson and Matthew Fox. There ain't no truth, just interpretation.
You wrote:
"There ain't no truth, just interpretation."
Hmmm. Maybe you're more post-modernist than I thought...
To address your point, there are indeed fixed interpretations of religion, along with intederminate, shifting interpretations. The fixed ones are the creeds/credos and other explicit statements of dogma.
I agree that it's hard to predict where things can go, especially when a culture has arrived at a pass where freedom has allowed the opportunity for any view to flourish. That said, for all the multiplicity of views that might exist, there are trends in the thinking about the individual in society that trump the importance of excentric variants within the larger picture.
I still think it's absurd to think that the prevalent religious culture of more than a millenium-and-a-half has not influenced notions of individual rights, particularly when it has preached the spiritual equality of people throughout its entire history.
One might consider the role religion played in recent times in the British and American abolitionist movements and the 20th century American civil rights movement.
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