Slouching Toward Medina 261Middle East, they mean specifically an American secular democracy,
not an indigenous Islamic one. And dictatorial régimes in the Middle
East never seem to tire of preaching to the world that their brutally
antidemocratic policies are justified because “fundamentalists” allow
them but two possible options: despotism or theocracy. The problem
with democracy from their point of view is that if people are allowed a
choice, they may choose against their governments. So, in Algeria,
free democratic elections have been suspended whenever it seemed
imminent that they would be won by an Islamist party, while in Egypt,
a permanent application of the country’s emergency laws has made
free elections inconceivable, lest groups like the Muslim Brothers be
given a voice in the government.
Ignoring for a moment the role these and so many other auto-
cratic régimes in the Middle East have played in creating Muslim
extremism in the first place through their antidemocratic policies,
there exists a far more philosophical dispute in the Western world
with regard to the concept of Islamic democracy: that is, that there
can be no a priori moral framework in a modern democracy; that the
foundation of a genuinely democratic society must be secularism. The
problem with this argument, however, is that it not only fails to recog-
nize the inherently moral foundation upon which a large number of
modern democracies are built, it more importantly fails to appreciate
the difference between secularism and secularization.
As the Protestant theologian Harvey Cox notes, secularization is
the process by which “certain responsibilities pass from ecclesiastical
to political authorities,” whereas secularism is an ideology based on
the eradication of religion from public life. Secularization implies a
historical evolution in which society gradually frees itself from “reli-
gious control and closed metaphysical world-views.” Secularism is
itself a closed metaphysical world-view which, according to Cox,
“functions very much like a new religion.”
Turkey is a secular country in which outward signs of religiosity
such as the hijab are forcibly suppressed. With regard to ideological
resolve, one could argue that there is little that separates a secular
country like Turkey from a religious country like Iran; both ideolo-
gize society. The United States, however, is a secularizing country,
unapologetically founded on a Judeo-Christian—and more precisely