Irawaty Wardany, Jakarta – A US political scientist on Tuesday dismissed the idea that democracy cannot develop in countries with large Muslim populations, citing Indonesia as an example of a smooth democratization.
"Our current qualitative assessment found that six non-Arab Muslim majority countries – Turkey, Senegal, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Mali and Nigeria – were more electorally competitive than Arab Muslim majority countries," Alfred C. Stepan, director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Tolerance and Religion at Columbia University in New York, told a discussion.
The assessment, he said, was based on two criteria: government springing from reasonably fair elections, and a government capable of filling the most important political offices.
Therefore, he said, Arab countries could not be a benchmark to evaluate the implementation of democracy in the Muslim world since they have a very different pattern of actual democracy. "So if you focus on Arab countries you'll get a total misconception," he said.
In fact, about half of all the world's Muslims, or more than 600 million people, live in democratic, near-democratic or intermittent democratic states.
Unfortunately, he added, many Americans tend to conflate Arab and Islam, even though Arabs make up only 22 percent of the entire global Muslim population. He said this had led to the false impression that there were no Muslims living under democratic systems.
"Democratization is not a problem in the Muslim world but it is a problem in the Arab world because most of them are governed by monarchs or dictators," he said.
"In your country it is very impressive to see that the two largest Muslim organizations in the world, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, have very explicitly come out for basically a policy that I would consider twin tolerations," Stepan said.
He said what he meant by "twin tolerations" was that the government must be free from the influence of religious institutions to generate policies, while the religious institutions should not have a constitutional privilege that allows them to mandate the elected government regarding public policies.
"What democrats require or what is needed from a religion is simply that religious authorities not be considered so powerful that they can constrain and block democratic politics from passing laws."
He said religious institutions in Indonesia received a high level of support from the government and that they increasingly felt comfortable with the government.
"In Indonesia, Muslim identities are often moderate, syncretic and pluralist," he said, adding that in this context there was space to foster a transition to democracy.