Does 'Islamic Democracy' Exist?

For 1,300 years Muslims have been engaged in a search for a form of government that is right for them. There are parliaments and sometimes even political opposition groups in many Muslim countries, but as a general rule political decisions are based on agreements reached between tribal groups and families.

If democracy has ever had friends in the Arab-speaking countries it has been among the monarchs of Kuwait. In 1752, when the age of enlightened absolutism was just dawning in Europe, a man by the name of Sabah bin Jaber became the emir of a Bedouin population known as the al-Utoob.

It was not murder, revolution, or warfare that brought him to power. He got elected. His descendants, the Al Sabah, continue to rule Kuwait to this day and have preserved a noteworthy weakness for letting their people vote.

The country elected its first legislative assembly in 1938. After independence in 1961 it elected a constitutional council. Following their liberation from Iraqi occupation in 1991 the Kuwaitis elected a new national assembly. Two years ago women were for the first time granted the right to vote. The members of the national assembly are sometimes not in office for very long. Not for reasons of incompetence mind you. More often than not it is because the executive government sees them as being too competent: The national assembly in Kuwait has sole responsibility for passing legislation. It determines how much the emir is paid. And it has the right to question and dismiss ministers, a privilege it makes extensive use of.

Kuwait is the most democratic country in the Arab world.

On May 17 this year, the emir called an election, made necessary by the fact that he dissolved the national assembly in March, following a political blockade that had gone on for months. A lively election campaign ensued. Voting districts were redrawn to make it more difficult for closely interrelated tribal leaders to influence voting behavior or engage in electoral fraud. There was detailed television and newspaper coverage of the candidates who ran for office, including 27 women, something still inconceivable in neighboring Saudi Arabia, from whose desert regions the Bedouin forbears of today's Kuwaitis once came. In the judgement of international observers the election was free and fair and went off without any hitches.

But who won? As in most of the elections that have been held in recent years between Cairo and Riyadh, the Palestinian terroritories and Bahrain, it was Islamists who carried the day -- in this case Salafists, particularly radical advocates of political Islam in the Gulf region. They include men such as Hassan Jowhar, a representative of the national assembly who noted with satisfaction at the opening session that nine members of his group walked out one door because two woman ministers walked in another door without wearing headscarves. "Some of us have our reservations," he said. "The government must accept this."

Kuwaiti women cast their votes for the parliamentary elections in May.

Kuwaiti women cast their votes for the parliamentary elections in May.
Nathan Brown, a political scientist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, predicts that the new national assembly is "likely to be more confrontational than the outgoing one. The result will be a deepening political deadlock between the government and the parliament in the Gulf's most democratic political order. ... Kuwait's long-simmering and nonviolent political crisis has long been overshadowed by more dramatic and bloody conflicts. But the threat to one of the region's most dramatic experiments is real."

For decades Kuwait was the most attractive of the Gulf states, a destination for bankers and engineers as well as guest workers from Egypt, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Kuwait has lost ground politically and economically and there are not a few who take the view that democracy has been a major factor in this.

Businessman Yassin al-Shammari, 57, is one of those who sees it this way. He drives past the national assembly in Kuwait City with a look of contempt on his face, his reaction to one of the most beautiful parliamentary buildings in the world, built in the 1970s by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, who also designed the Sydney Opera House. "A place for jibber jabber," al-Shammari growls. Like many of his countrymen, he looks with envy to Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi, where sheikhs rule who don't have to worry about parliaments or a political opposition.

Note: Visit Der Spiegel for 7 part series on Islam and Democracy in the Middle East: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,573604,00.html