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# Posted 9:01 PM by Patrick Belton

THE WEEKLY STANDARD'S AMIR TAHERI has a solid piece on democracy in the Arab world. After briefly surveying the principal canonical stages in Arab political development (monarchies, supplanted after 1948 by republics, which then evolved into authoritarian states relying to differing degrees on Islam to counteract the Khomeini-influenced oppositions who opposed their authoritarianism and corruption...), he offers this cogent analysis of prospects for democracy in Islamic political literature:

The failed model is the power state, known in Islamic literature as "saltana," whose legitimacy rests on the possession and use of the means of collective violence. In saltana, there are no citizens, only subjects, while the ruler is unaccountable except to God.

The only alternative to this failed model is what might be called the political state, whose legitimacy rests on the free expression of the citizens' will. Such a model could be based on what the 14th-century historian Ibn Khaldoun called "al-assabiyah," a secular bond among citizens. The key feature of this model is pluralism, known in modern Islamic political literature as "ta'adudiyah" and "kisrat-garai."

Both the Islamists and the secular authoritarians of the Arab world have persistently opposed the idea of bonding through citizenship. Nevertheless, Islamic political and philosophical literature offers a wealth of analyses that could be deployed in any battle of ideas against both the Islamist and secular enemies of pluralism. Both Farabi (d.950) and Avicenna (d. 1037), partly inspired by the work of the Mutazilite school, showed that there need be no contradiction between revelation and reason in developing a political system that responds to the earthly needs of citizens. On the contrary, because Islam places strict limits on the powers of the ruler, it theoretically cannot be used as the basis for tyranny.

One hopes our Arab brothers and sisters come to Taheri's conclusion, not that of Khomeini and his heirs.

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