Is Islam exceptional?

At last Thursday’s Brookings event celebrating the launch of his new book on Islamic Exceptionalism, Shadi Hamid laid out the historical and religious reasons for Islam’s resistance to liberal secularization. He argued that the differing contexts of Christianity and Islam’s founding moments shaped the histories of interactions between the state and religion in European and Islamic civilizations.

Jesus and Mohammed, Hamid argues, had different historical roles. Jesus was a radical dissident in the Roman Empire. He avoided politics. The New Testament has little to say about governance, making it easy to divorce Christianity from political life. Mohammed was the author of a constitution and for part of his life a head of state. The Qur’an guided governance in the Middle East and North Africa for well over a thousand years, with the reign of the Prophet serving as an example to live and rule by. Liberal ideas like the inevitability of progress and secularism have no analogues in traditional Islam.

The end of the Ottoman Caliphate left the Middle East struggling to create a new, legitimate form of government. Mainstream Islamism is the latest successor to generations of Muslim thinkers attempting to parse the legacy of Islamic governance beyond its eighth century origin. The current Islamist project of reconciling pre-modern Islamic law with the modern nation-state has never been attempted before. Islamism is inherently modern in a way few conservative religious movements can claim to be.

Brooking’s Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy, Leon Wieseltier, joined Hamid in discussing one of the most controversial arguments in Islamic Exceptionalism. Islam does not fit with Western concepts like secularism. This exceptionalism challenges the liberal tendency to explain away difference and argue that all peoples and civilizations are fundamentally the same—or are at least similar in fundamental ways. Hamid contended that the differences between the Islamic world and ‘our’ largely Christian world tangibly affect what forms of government and policies are feasible or practical.

Wieseltier and Hamid then dove into the questions of Islam’s compatibility with liberal democracy and the values essential to it, namely equality. Hamid argued that Islam is compatible with democracy, but it runs into some problems with liberal democracy. Islamic concepts such as Shura can be adapted into democratic structures, but equality doesn’t fit neatly into Islamic law or many Islamic societies. Wieseltier challenged this point; he claimed that certain concepts like equality are as universal as algebra, and therefore can be compatible with a ‘modernist’ vision of Islam.

In Hamid‘s view, the ‘metaphysical’ nature of this discussion reflected the political debate happening all over the Middle East. Rather than contesting budget reports, Islamists and their opponents are dealing with big questions about the role of religion in public life. The conversation about that will not be over soon.

Here is the video of the event: