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Can You Force People to Be Free?
In part 3 of my letter exchange with Mustafa Akyol, I argue that to privilege liberalism in the Arab world is to consign Arabs to their tragic fate.
This is part 3 in a 6-part correspondence series between myself and the Turkish author and thinker Mustafa Akyol. I will be writing letters 1, 3, and 5, and Mustafa will be writing letters 2, 4, and 6 on his Substack.
Links will be added as the letters get published: letter 1, letter 2, letter 3, letter 4, letter 5, and letter 6. We’d love to hear from you, so let us know what you think in the comments.
Dear Mustafa,
Hope you’re well. It appears that our debate has caught fire, for better or worse. I think this is an important experiment, because it shows that good friends can (and probably should) disagree—profoundly—on foundational questions of what is right and good. It can get tense. In the past few days, our increasingly heated Twitter exchanges have even gotten a bit awkward. But hopefully writing in longer-form can move us in a more productive direction.
With that, let’s get to it. First, thanks for your thoughtful reply to my opening letter. I’ll start by addressing your question of definitions. What is liberalism? As I argue in my book, liberalism is only neutral to those who are already liberals. Like other ideological orientations, it speaks to foundational questions about the good life and the purposes of government—the ends of politics, rather than the means.
Liberalism is best understood as a value system as well as set of premises about the primacy of the individual over the collective and of reason over revelation. If the primary unit of reference is the individual, it follows that particular importance would be paid to freedom of conscience, belief, and expression. The right to pursue happiness (or fulfillment) as one sees fit is sacrosanct, with the only real delimiting principle being one of harm to other individuals, since this would infringe on their own pursuit of happiness and fulfillment.
Liberalism is not synonymous with secularism, of course. But even the more permissive and broad-minded forms of liberalism imply a restricted role for religion in public life. The preeminent liberal theorist John Rawls deserves special mention, since he went out of his way to make room for religion within the liberal imagination. For Rawls, believers did not have to give up their “comprehensive doctrines.” This was the broad-minded part. But there was a catch. Believers would need to justify their policy preferences with resort to rationales that could be accepted by citizens who didn’t share the beliefs in question. This is what Rawls called “public reason.” Public reason, to put a finer point on it, was to be the realm of secular.
The relative emphasis placed on reason over revelation and on personal autonomy over traditional norms and collective obligations is either a bug or a feature of liberalism, depending on your perspective. The collective has no legal, enforceable “rights”—or at least none that can supersede an individual’s, when the two are in tension. And this is where the tension between liberalism and democracy becomes palpable.
In this sense, liberalism can’t but clash with Islam—a religion that, in its various mainstream iterations, has jealously guarded its jurisdiction over such ultimate questions. This is not Islam as it “should” be, but Islam as it has been—nearly uninterrupted for the better part of fourteen centuries. I imagine, Mustafa, that you could simply respond that you disagree with my characterization of Islam. And many Muslims might share similar objections. So I want to put the empirical question of what Islam has been (and the normative question of what Islam should be) to the side for a moment and focus instead on what I worry are the practical implications of prioritizing liberalism over democracy, regardless of one’s opinions about Islam itself.
When people question whether Arabs are really ready for democracy, they are falling back on a liberal premise without necessarily realizing it. Underlying the liberal idea in its original European forms was the notion that there should be a particular sequencing to the development of societies—that before mass politics or anything approaching universal suffrage, there must first be education and enlightenment. Enlightenment proponents wanted to protect hard-won liberties from the ordinary unwashed. As the political theorist Faheem Hussain notes (emphasis mine): “Enlightenment philosophes were prepared to make a spoken or unspoken agreement with authoritarian interests, promising obedience and loyalty as long as core liberal values such as freedom of expression over private beliefs were maintained, at least those opinions that wouldn’t trouble the security of the state.”
These, then, are the deeper philosophical assumptions driving what might be called temporary repression in the name of tolerance. And now to the practical implications. Crucially, Hussain connects the assumptions of liberal sequentialism to the tragedy of the modern Middle East:
As the [Enlightenment] philosophes did before them, Egyptian liberals find themselves within societies that have religious majorities who view liberal ideas as at best religiously problematic, or at worst foreign or infidel.
Which goes a long way towards explaining why Egyptian liberals saw democracy—and, really, mass politics of any kind—as an existential threat. Not only did they view it as such, they quite consciously and deliberately acted upon that view by supporting the July 2013 military coup that ended Egypt’s democratic experiment, however flawed it might have been. Among those of us who worked on Egypt, we’d “joke” that you could count on one hand the number of prominent Egyptian liberals who opposed the coup. This wasn’t hyperbole—the most we could usually come up with was 3 or 4 individuals (in a country of 100 million).
In practice, if not necessarily in theory, this is what liberal premises can lead to—authoritarian justifications for the indefinite postponement of democracy. Maybe liberal premises shouldn’t lead to this. But they do, and they have. And that is what we have to contend with. This isn’t just an academic debate.
That’s probably a good place to end, for now. Mustafa, very much looking forward to hearing your thoughts and continuing the conversation!
Sincerely,
Shadi
Can You Force People to Be Free?
Excellent articles, I was like Mustaga Akyol not long ago, but today I am convinced that a pure and hard liberalism is an acid for the traditional morality resulting from Islam (and monotheistic religions). Your Debate reminds me of the "liberalism vs communatarianism" debate and in my opinion here that Muslim political thinkers should work. The religion and Islam in particular is communatarianism, but that does not imply authoritarianism, a happy medium between liberalism and communatarianism can be found. With in particular, a multi-denominational state where liberal secular morality would not have to be imposed on religious. This multi-confessionalism would have its limit, with a freedom to change denominational community, for example going from an Islamic community to a liberal community. This point of view requires a State with a local democracy where each city and region could leave the choice to its population to apply liberal or religious standards. What do you think ?
Firstly thank you for having this debate / discussion so openly (both not in private, and being open changing your mind/s).
I agree that in a democracy we need to be open to ideas that we don’t like, and that one’s ideas (or the representative of those ideas) losing as much as winning. This is essential for democracy to function.
However, my query is how do you define democracy? I note in your previous post you define it as “a set of procedural mechanisms for managing political competition, selecting leaders, and alternating power between parties and individuals.”
Keep in mind then, that there are many different types of procedural mechanisms, currently in play in what we would call ‘democracies’ around the world, and that choice of mechanism can lead to very different outcomes (take a simple example of ranked-choice voting versus first-past-the-post voting). Some of these are better than others and I suspect you might agree we should be improving them? If so, to what end? (I don’t think the end can be divorced from the means).
Equally electoral representation has only really been synonymous with democracy since Tocqueville in the 1830s. And even then it was a very different version than what we would call democracy today. Which goes to suggest that democracy is no better an anchor for good government than liberalism? And perhaps worse?
Or to put the question more openly, what is the essence of democracy that you hold as the core here?