Swiss voters have approved a referendum banning minarets.  So much for the theory that democracy and high levels of income generate tolerance.

none

It’s time to put an end to the myth that Islam is incompatible with democracy.  It seems like every week there are talks in Washington on this issue. Democracy and Islam are compatible.  Let’s move on to other things.

First, lets look at the data.  The countries with the five largest Muslim populations in descending order are Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria.  These countries account for about 50% of the total global Muslim population.  Notice any interesting patterns?  Well here are a few:

First, the countries with the largest and third largest number of Muslims, Indonesia and India, are democracies.  About 20% of all Muslims live in these two countries.  Moreover, most theories of democracy would predict that these two countries would not be democratic: they are poor, ethnically diverse, and, Indonesia possesses large quantities of extractive resources.  In addition, while Muslims are the vast majority of the population in Indonesia, they are a minority in India.  Thus, the share of Muslims in the population apparently does not matter for whether it can be a democracy, either.

Second, the other three countries in the top five, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, which account for 27% of all Muslims, are partial democracies and these countries provide very little support for the claim that democracy and Islam are incompatible. In Bangladesh and Nigeria, the problem with securing democratic rule is poor governance and corruption, not Islam.  Moreover, a big part of Pakistan’s problems with Islam are a result of the government’s deliberate efforts to promote it and it’s support of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  It took both of these decisions in order to gain leverage against India.  It is not much of a stretch to say that Pakistan’s problems with radical Islam are a result of the government’s intentional efforts to promote radical Islam.

The astute reader will notice that I have not mentioned anything about the Arab world.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Arab countries and democracy are incompatible, rather than Islam and democracy, and some have made this claim.  I do not think this is useful or accurate, either.

First, Arabs only account for about 15% of all Muslims.  Thus, even the claim that Arab countries are not compatible with democracy is far from saying that Islam is not compatible with democracy since Arabs comprise such a small fraction of the total number of Muslims in the world.

Second, the number of Muslims living in Arab countries is slightly larger than the number of Muslims living in Indonesia.  To say that being an Arab Muslim makes you pre-disposed to authoritarian rule thus makes as much sense as saying being an Indonesian Muslim makes you pre-disposed to democratic rule.  While I hear the former often, I have never heard the latter.

Third, most cultural theories about democracy have short shelf lives.  For example, before the 1960s, it was common to claim that Catholic countries could not be democracies because the hierarchy of Catholicism was incompatible with democracy.  Today, the vast majority of Catholics live in democracies and all wealthy countries with sizable Catholic populations are democracies.

Fourth, there is a serious problem with spurious correlation.  It’s hard to see what Arab countries have in common only with each other than language (think Lebanon, Qatar, and Yemen, for example).  Why language should map onto a distinct regime type is not immediately clear.  For example, with the exceptions of Cuba and Equatorial Guinea, every Spanish-speaking country in the world is a democracy or, in the case of poor ones, a partial democracy.  In addition, there are 60 million more people living in Spanish-speaking democracies and partial-democracies than live in the Arab world.  I can see no reason why speaking Spanish would faciliate democracy.  In fact, up until about 30 years ago, none of these countries were democracies.  Like Arabic today, one could have made the argument in 1970 that speaking Spanish hinders democracy.  Such a claim looks foolish today.  Why Arabic ought to be different is unclear.

So why aren’t Arab countries democracies?  I don’t think it’s much of a puzzle, except for a few cases.  To see this, it helps to examine the issue country by country.  First, many Arab countries have lots of oil (Algeria, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE), and an abundance of extractable natural resources, like oil, predicts non-democracy even outside the Arab world (e.g., Angola, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo).  Second, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon possess significant ethnic problems that make democracy difficult.  Third, much of the rest of the Arab world is poor (Comoros, Djibouti, Mauritania, Somalia, Yemen) and thus unlikely to be democratic because of economic factors.  In addition, Sudan has ethnic problems and is poor.  After accounting for these factors, only four Arab countries are left: Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Tunisia.  I accept that these four are outliers, but this is a long, long, long way from the argument that Islam is incompatible with democracy.

Islam is compatible with democracy.  End of conversation.

none