[In the following review of Islam and Democracy, Brumberg commends Mernissi's analysis of Islamic culture and political power, but objects to her assertion that the West must enforce democratization in the Arab world.]

Fatima Mernissi is a Moroccan sociologist who has written widely on the role of women in the Arab Islamic world. She is also an Islamic liberal who believes that the values of liberal democracy can be reconciled with those of Islam. In Islam and Democracy, she has brought her interests together in one of the most thought-provoking books to be written on Islam in many years.

In the first half of her book Mernissi tries to account for the antagonism of Arab youth to democracy by tracing the historical development of Islam. During the first decades of Islamic history, she argues, the notion of ta'a (obedience to God) was balanced by the ideals of rational free will ('aql) and personal opinion (ra'y). The early caliphs based their rule on a contract which held that the people could remove the leader if he abused his powers or acted outside the law. But eventually the Abbasids caliphs replaced this contract with the notion of blind obedience to the ruler, a concept that then became the norm.

Although this analysis seems to echo the idealist apologetics that have often marked Islamic reformism, it is based on a structural approach that roots the emergence of an authoritarian ethos in the growth of patriarchal states (although she doesn't use this term). The men who rule these states, she claims, have quashed the idea of a more individualistic Islam. Thus, today, the Gulf sheikdoms use “oil money” and the “cloak of the sacred to cultivate ta'a.”

Because this analysis explains how state structures and cultural worldviews reinforce one another, it also shows how an ethos can become rooted in the soil of a civilization. Repeatedly, Mernissi's approach leads to such insightful, yet discouraging, generalizations as her remark that in the Arab world, “people experience modernity without understanding its foundations, its basic concepts.”

While much of her work is informed by this pessimism. Mernissi's remedy for the malaise she analyzes is very optimistic. For example, she writes that because “concepts of political power … have been tightly controlled since the Abbasids,” Arabs must do nothing less than “minutely” remodel the political terminology that informs their language. Yet she then proclaims that the Arab world—led by a vanguard of middle-class professional women—is “about to take off” on a journey “towards uncertainties, toward plural modernities.”

Mernissi attempts to bridge this gap between her explanatory pessimism and her prescriptive optimism by arguing that patrimonialist regimes survive owing to their support in the West, demonstrated, she claims, by the war that the United States waged to liberate Kuwait. This argument leads Mernissi to the conclusion that the West must use “its power to install democracy in the Arab world.” Moreover, she asserts that by forcing the rulers of the Arab Gulf states to democratize, the West will ensure that their wealth is more equally distributed to the poor Arab populations.

This prescription is dubious. Rapid democratization in the absence of a transformation of Arab civil societies might in fact empower the very forces which Mernissi opposes, as almost happened in Algeria. It might also make it easier for Arab businessmen to invest outside the Middle East. Finally, spreading the oil wealth absent a coherent plan of economic reform would not resolve the crises produced by decades of state-managed underdevelopment.

The solutions to the profound crises so well explained in Mernissi's book lie within the Arab world. The West can bolster the chances for democracy in the Arab states by backing civil society groups. But everything in this fascinating book suggests that the edifice of authoritarianism in the Arab world can only be chipped away at slowly lest it come crashing down on the heads of those who struggle against it.