160. Karen Armstrongwhat passed as nationalism took a purely negative stance and
became identified with the desire to get rid of the West. Some
of the new nations had been so constructed that there was
bound to be tension among their citizens. The southern part of
the Sudan, for example, was largely Christian, while the north
was Muslim. For a people who were accustomed to defining
their identity in religious terms, it would be hard to establish a
common "Sudanese" nationalism. The problem was even
more acute in Lebanon, where the population was equally di-
vided among at least three religious communities - Sunni,
Shii and Maronite Christian-which had always been au-
tonomous before. Power sharing proved to be an impossibility.
The demographic time bomb led to the civil war (1975-90),
which tragically tore the country apart. In other countries,
such as Syria, Egypt or Iraq, nationalism would be adopted by
an elite, but not by the more conservative masses. In Iran, the
nationalism of the Pahlavis was directly hostile to Islam, since
it tried to sever the country's connection with Shiism and
based itself on the ancient Persian culture of the pre-Islamic
period.
Democracy also posed problems. The reformers who
wanted to graft modernity on to an Islamic substructure
pointed out that in itself the ideal of democracy was not in-
imical to Islam. Islamic law promoted the principles of shurah
(consultation) and ijmah, where a law had to be endorsed by
the "consensus" of a representative portion of the ummah. The
rashidun had been elected by a majority vote. All this was
quite compatible with the democratic ideal. Part of the diffi-
culty lay in the way that the West formulated democracy as
"government of the people, by the people, and for the peo-
ple." In Islam, it is God and not the people who gives a gov-
ernment legitimacy. This elevation of humanity could seem
like idolatry (shirk), since it was a usurpation of God's
sovereignty. But it was not impossible for the Muslim coun-