Can there be a true democracy in an Islamic culture?
Many people point to culture, and specifically Islamic culture, as an obstacle to the flourishing of democracy in Iraq. I am not persuaded. Many cultural traditions, from those in Catholicism to Confucianism, have been accused of being inhospitable to democracy at different times. But these cultural endowments have not prevented countries in Latin America or Asia from going democratic. In fact, there are majority Muslim countries that are electoral democracies (Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia) and millions of Muslims, both pious and not, live in democracies in India, Europe, and the U.S. without any injury to their religious identity. So I m not persuaded that Islam is a barrier to democratization in Iraq or elsewhere. What role can outsiders, like the U.S., play in building a democracy in Iraq? I agree with my colleague Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Foundation, who argues that outsiders can at best play a marginal role in fostering democracy in any given country. The primary thing that
