The second is an attempt to restore to Muslims those historical precedents
and religious practices that sustain participatory and democratic governance.
Soroush’s explicit purpose is to insist, on the one hand, that a secular
government in a religious society is undemocratic and, on the other, that
religious knowledge must be subject to criticism by way of collective debate.
Drawing upon philosophers ancient and modern, European and Muslim, his
argument serves, moreover, as a reminder that democracy as both concept
and practice is far richer and more contested even within the West than
simple Schumpterian deWnitions of it in terms of ‘‘competitive elections’’
suggest (Schumpeter 1942 , 269 ).
In times of crisis and threat, from the height of European colonialism in
the nineteenth century to a post- 9 / 11 world, it is perhaps unsurprising that
investments on all sides deepen and congeal. Yet alongside the cacophony of
voices intent on arrogating the authority to demarcate what is authentically
Islamic and un-Islamic once and for all, just these brief examples demonstrate
that there have long been and continue to be lively debates about, for
example, Islam, democracy, and gender, informed by the dialectical relation-
ship between rich texts that yield multiple interpretations and the lived
experiences of actual Muslims past and present who live in a stunning variety
of cultural contexts and regions. Attending to such historical conditionality
and textual indeterminacy is not the same as moral relativism; these partici-
pants often bring deeply held political and moral convictions to such debates,
although they may have no more substantively in common with one another
than a commitment to the very conditions that make such engagement
possible—commitment, in other words, to what might be characterized as
a democratic ethos, a ‘‘politics of democratic disturbance through which any
particular pattern of previous settlements might be tossed up for grabs again’’
(Connolly 1993 , 264 – 5 ). Yet their practices at once presuppose and demon-
strate that ‘‘what Islam is’’ is not singular andWxed but multiple and con-
tested; that Islamic religious practices and ideas are, like any rich theoretical
and cultural tradition, shaped by historically speciWc conditions and circum-
stances, and vice versa; and that,Wnally, Islam is a living tradition that both
withstands and encourages constant interpretive re-engagement in changing
historical contexts.
310 roxanne l. euben