INTRODUCTION. An argument can be presented that if indeed we witnessed a politically significant "Third Wave" of world wide democratization in the decade of the 90’s in the aftermath of the "Triumph" of the U.S. in the Cold War, this wave has now been dissipated after its dialectical encounter upon the beaches of the Communism of the Eastern bloc and the caudilloism of Latin America. Instead, there now exists a new nationalist synthesis of both elements in their respective regions. The remnant of the democratic pools remaining on these beaches as the tide recedes cause one to reflect further on one more, "Why not the Middle East?" question, this time that of the absence of democracy in that region.

The primary answer presented here is to question the assumed universals of democratic theory and to argue the inappropriateness of this theory to the cultural region of the Islamic Middle East. It is not that the region cannot be democratized, but rather that a culturally appropriate theory of Islamic democracy is called for. A further possible answer is that the Middle East is the one region of the world that has felt the brunt of post-Cold War American military power as the U.S. has guaranteed Israeli security and protected the energy resources of the world. Political experiments with democracy have not been possible however, because while much military muscle has been exerted, American influence has also been somewhat paradoxically kept politically at arm length, unlike Latin America and Eastern Europe. The American policy stakes in the Middle East are so high, that democracy as a policy objective is potentially politically destabilizing and therefore an unaffordable luxury.

The preceding problematic is analyzed below under the rubrics of the culturally parochial nature of democratic theory of the European Enlightenment; the romanticizing of the American democratic experience in American political science theory; democratic theory in American political science as a form of once discredited "neo-modernization theory"; the cultural inappropriateness of an Enlightenment derived democratic theory which emphasizes secularization; the uses of democratization as an instrument of American imperialism and the potential of an Islamic theory of democracy to challenge the secularism and the materialism of the West by a transcendentalism. expressing a human need.

Prepared for the panel, "Religion, Islam and Democracy in the Contemporary Middle East"(Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy), Middle East Studies Association, November 17, 2000, Orlando, FL.

The European Enlightenment has three key theoretical assumptions that limit the appropriateness of its teachings to Europe and its colonized and settled outlying regions, e.g. North America, Australia etc. The first of these is the belief in an idealized utopian future of freedom. This contrasts with the glorification of the past as the guide to a possible progressive future in the traditional societies of Germany, Asia and the Islamic Middle East with the latter’s glorification, for example, of the Rashidun. The second is stress upon the individual and individualism. This contrasts with the subordination of the individual to the group such as family and the umma in Islam. The third is the assumption

that the ends of the society consist of maximizing individual freedom and material well being. In Islam, on the other hand, the objective of society is to promote that which is good and to prevent that which is evil and to further moral well being . On the basis of the foregoing, it is clear that Enlightenment derived democratic theory that emphasizes the individual, secularism and an imagined future is a poor fit for the Middle East.

AMERICANIZED POLITICAL SCIENCE. The theory employed by American political scientists studying democratization abroad differs from both the critical historical research done on the American founding and the behavioral theory developed on the basis of research on the American political experience with democracy. The theory employed abroad is a combination of the idealization of Enlightenment theory and of the American democratic experience. On the ideological side of liberalism, this means that the criteria of democracy consist of political equality, due process, liberty, secularism and one man , one vote. On the structural side of pluralism, this means that power is horizontally dispersed into competing individuals and groups on a level playing field.

The conventional interpretation of the American founding understands that the system of division of powers and of checks and balance in the Constitution were intended to constrain and limit the state. There is an alternative or possibly simultaneous interpretation that what motivated the Federalists James Madison and Alexander Hamilton especially was the fear of the "tyranny of the majority". Therefore these provisions along with, for example , the electoral college were intended to create a complex system of governance in order to frustrate a direct American democracy and to insure the behind the scenes governance of a political elite or political class.

The intellectual history of the political science discipline prior to the outburst of theories of democracy and civil society in the 1990’s is one in which the idealistic version of American democracy beginning with such figures as Lester Ward, Woodrow Wilson , Charles Beard, Arthur Bentley etc attempted to reform American society in order to bring it into conformity with the idealized version of democracy. This reform effort, however, began to erode in light of the obstinacy of the apathy of the American voter and the persistency of elite rule in America. Harold Lasswell, David Truman and especially V. O. Key, the latter as something of an inspiring intellectual titan of behavioral political science, all came to the conclusion that democratic elitist rule was not only inevitable in America but in fact given the apathy and ignorance of the voting public, this was preferable.

What the preceding suggests is that the top down and elitist nature of Middle Eastern politics and the reality of American political practice have something in common.

It had been once been thought that the intellectual criticism generated by the turmoil of the 1960’s had laid modernization theory to rest. Among the criticisms leveled against it was that it contained pluralistic equilibrium assumptions as a theory of change that endorsed the political status quo and thus also served as an ideological accompaniment of the West in the Cold War. In addition, it also was ethnocentric in that it was based on the Western experience with social and economic development along with similar assumptions of equality and secularism. Further, it was said to embrace a principle of unilinear development that was borrowed directly from the Western idea of the idea of progress. To put it succinctly, its assumptions were derived from an idealization of the Western experience based on cultural assumptions of the European Enlightenment and even the parochialism of the American experience whose social science was its intellectual inspiration. This criticism ushered in a brief intellectual moment of what was termed "post-behavioralism" in the discipline of political science with modernization theory representing the expression of behavioralism in the subfield of comparative politics.

The period of post-behavioralism may have lasted about a decade or so from the 1970’s until some time in the 1980’s when the American ethnocentric assumptions of political science that had led to the earlier intellectual criticism began to reemerge in the guise of rational choice theory. This theory with its assumptions of individual rationalism, secularism and pluralism has been able to ideologically bridge from rallying the West in the last years of the Cold War to be an intellectual "explanation" of the post-Cold War triumphialism of the U.S. and the West after 1990. In the post –World War II world of political science, at least modernization theory originated from within the sub-field of comparative politics and represented one of its distinctive intellectual features. Rational choice theory on the other hand has now impacted on virtually all sub-fields of the discipline and in the process even comparative politics has become significantly "Americanized".

DEMOCRATIC THEORY AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY. Just as modernization theory had its genesis and funding for academic research in the policy atmosphere of the Cold War, so too has the new "modernization theory" had a similar experience. Social science perhaps inevitably like trade follows the flag in all cultures e.g. the role of French anthropology in the colonization of North Africa. In society everyone works for someone and it perhaps follows that a social science with establishment assumptions is predestined to work for the state. As earlier in its history especially in the period of the Spanish-American War leading to WWI, comparative politics by means of democratic theory may appear to have reacquired a distinctive approach relevant to its mission to study foreign politics. Once again, however, it is serving to both help the state to celebrate it triumph in the Cold War as a democratic victory and to rationalize U.S. foreign policy.

This foreign policy has the two cardinal features of globalization on the one hand and democratization on the other. From the point of view of real politik, the former represents the effort to seek new markets and to increase market share for U.S. business and the latter to create institutions and classes responsive to American imperialist designs. From the point of view of the messianic idealism that always must cloak U.S. foreign policy ambitions, the former represents an ideological capitalism that will develop poor nations and the latter an inapplicable ideological political formula of representation and government accountability. This political formula thus becomes a political false consciousness meant to mislead and misdirect the impoverished masses of the world. Democratic theory as development theory thus represents the contribution of academic political science to the effort of world domination by the United States. The American academic joins the American policy maker in advocating a romanticized version of theory and American practice that resembles the practice of the Dutch who export Heinekens beer but do not market it or consume it at home.

The political science that is so complicit in this is an intellectually naïve and unitentionally critical social science. It is naïve in that it is uncritical of itself but it is implicitly intellectually critical in application to the Middle East in that the application of this liberal pluralist paradigm informs one as to what is undemocratic in the Middle East by its own standards. It does not, nor arguably can it, explain Middle East politics. The operation of the process of sociology of knowledge predestines all social science to adopt a value point of view reflecting the dominant intellectual values of the time.

While this is generally true, why should this point of view be restricted to the establishment values of liberal pluralism? The critical intellectual exercise of the application of the Marxist radical paradigm as a second research paradigm can also be used to expose the collaboration of political science in the capitalist exploitation of the impoverished masses of the world. It too is incongruent with the subject it is studying. A "statist" or conservative corporatist paradigm is a third paradigm that reflects the political reality of the social and political organization of much of the world can on the other hand contribute to a more accurate understanding of that world. This paradigm consists of a philosophical conservatism that utilizes the state, a political class and licensed corporatist groups as a formula to both inform as to a more realistic way of understanding the world and to suggest an alternative plan for reorganizing and developing that world, along the lines of the German or Asian models.

THE DIALECTIC OF THE STATE AND ISLAM. Unlike Christianity and even Western political philosophy, there is no abstract theory of the state in Islam. Instead, writings about the state seem always to be based on inductive reasoning based on historical reality. This is illustrated in the case of one of the most renowned theoriticians , al-Mawardi whose greatest work is said to be based on the political experiences of the Abbasids in the 11t^h century. (This anchoring of normative ideas in historical reality strikingly resembles Hegel’s concept of "particularity".)

Al-Mawardi’s formulation of an executive with powers of taxation and military coercion offset by the ulama and the fuqaha with powers of legislation and the judiciary may be said to very broadly constitute the "tradition" in the 18^th century that was to be dialectically contradicted by the defensive modernization and the colonial impact of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It was to be this secularized modern-colonial synthesis that was to be in turn contradicted by the liberal nationalism of the pre-1950’s. This liberal nationalist synthesis was in turn contradicted by the Arabism of the decades of the 1950’s and 60’s. This long period of a century and a half of course did not see an eclipse of Islam but while at times being the basis for political resistance(e.g. al-Afghani)and making efforts at reform(e.g. Abduh), it did recede from political prominence while remaining part of the historical synthesis in liberal nationalism and Arabism. . In the aftermath of the defeat of 1967, a religious revival took place that began to contradict Arabism. This Islamism which combined the universalism of both ideologies is now in the process of being contradicted by what can be termed Islamic nationalism and this is now emerging as a new synthesis. The issue of Islam and democracy is now an important part of the effort to define this latest phase.

DEFINING ISLAMIC NATIONALISM: ISLAMIC DEMOCRACY. Islamic nationalism is a concept that suggests "Islamism in one country". It does not represent the abandonment of the universal truth of Islam as a religion, but it does acknowledge the persistent political reality of the state as an entity among Muslims. From the point of view of Muslim intellectuals, it might be said that they recognize either the political success of Islam(e.g. in Iran, the Gulf, Jordan, Morocco etc ) or its ascendancy in Egypt and even in Lebanon. Time would also be seem to be on its side in Palestine, Syria, Tunisia and Algeria as well. These intellectuals are therefore engaged in the definition of Islamic nationalism at the moment of its triumph. An important dimension of this definition and one that logically precedes the question of democracy, is that of the definition of the state.

Two important theoreticians that have addressed this question are Abdelwahab Elmessiri and Parvez Manzoor. They both set out to develop the concept of "immanentism" as a criticism of the secular state. Their point is that the secular states in fact takes on the features of a religious state in that it also immanents in god-like fashion values which however are not located in an identifiable sovereignty. The result is that the values which the state projects are those of popular sovereignty which in their individualistic diversity are diffuse, incoherent and provide little moral guidance to society . Instead, these values reflect those of its constituent individualism, freedom, secularism and materialism. The immanent state is thus an amoral state which reflects in a somewhat circular fashion the values in effect of the European Enlightenment. According to Manzoor, "The state as the embodiment of the "spirit " of a nation or people is therefore an emotive, mystical and intractable an idea as "God" in the traditional discourse of theocracy." Such a nation is not the source of any morality and has no categorical imperative beyond "…the preservation of the political self".

But if there is an immanentism of the Enlightenment, there is also the potential immanentism of radical Islam which seeks to reinstate the fiqhi regime and in the process substitute raison islamique for raison d’etat. Instead, one can note as above, that precisely because Islam has no abstract theory of the state, Islam has always functioned in intimate contact with the reality of practical politics. This suggests that the political practice of Islam has habitually been in practical term’s secular while that secularity has been guided by the state providing moral guidance on the principle of "Command that which is good and prohibit that which is evil."

The new Islamic thought of the contemporary era of Islamic nationalism is critical of what it judges the amorality of the Enlightenment and convinced of the strength of Islam in being able to resist this and remain true to itself. It is also acutely aware, however, of the contemporary tyranny of Middle East governments. It is also aware that as it seeks a democratic solution, that solution will evolve from within Islamic tradition and not from uncritical borrowing from the West. Just as it is possible to now to argue that modernity is now a universal concept separate from "Westernization", so might be the case of "democracy".

One can begin with an overview of the structure of the Middle Eastern state as the arena within which democracy would operate. This state is in value terms, conservative in the sense developed above of valuing the past, the group as opposed to the individual and desiring societal objectives of moral and ethical values. This conservatism finds it expression in Islam.This state is also structurally corporatist in that it is organically organized from the top with a strong executive ruling on the basis of patrimonialism (rais/malik), a durable ruling class(ayyan/khassa) and functional groups reflecting the societal division of labor(e.g. trade union federation, bar association etc) that are in a vertical relationship to the state and are formally related to it by a law of organizations and informally by a compact(mithaq) and a tradition of clientage.The compact is an understanding of mutual responsibilities in which the group agrees to perform its responsibilities to the state and will do so with out public opposition to the state. In exchange, the group will have a monopoly of its activities and will also be autonomous to a degree from the state(Gellner’s segmentary state).

It is this state which is to be democratized. One can begin with the identification of the basic actor in a prospective Islamic theory of democracy. This actor is the group and not the individual. The inviolability of the individual must be assured, but in fact the individual has no social identity except in a relationship of responsibility to the family and to the umma. One becomes a member of the ruling class as the result of group identity, whether it is family or an organization or both. One lives in a group in a neighborhood and one forms political views and when permitted to do so, one votes

as a group.

It is within groups, that one is socialized into the social value of consensus(ijmaa). This value begins with an instinctive aversion to dissent as primarily a religious term(fitna). Consensus is achieved by a combination of authority from above but also by consultation(shura). It is consensus and consultation which are the values underlying Islamic democracy, not the dissidence(hizbiyya) of individualism and competition.

From the point of view of democratic theory, this combination of the nature of the state and underlying social values is suggestive for the problems of democratic participation and constraints and influence upon the state. The group both in terms of articulating political positions on the basis of consensus and in terms of electoral behavior would structure Democratic participation. The constraint of the state is envisioned as occurring as a result of the ulama returning to the historical role of relative independence from the state. What is not envisioned is having Islam as defining the state.

CONCLUSION. There are several conclusions that can be made in light of the foregoing:

1. The Enlightenment inspired liberal democratic theory being applied in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world is inappropriate to the conservative culture of the region.
2. Liberal democratic theory has a further limitation in that a political science that sees such theory as validated by its success in America has failed to acknowledge that democratic practice in America is in fact elitist and thus tends to hold democratic practice in the Middle East up to an idealized standard.
3. Democratic theory is also to be criticised as resurrecting an earlier discarded "modernization" theory.
4. The research of many American scholars applying democratic theory in the world are unknowingly supporting the aims of U.S. foreign policy.
5. Due to the fact that there is no pure theory of an Islamic state, Islamic principles are grounded in empirical reality and this lends clarity to conceptualizing political change in Islam dialectically.