Religion, democracy and the challenge of the Arab Spring

What is it about?

In this piece I use the ideas of Rancière and Mikhail Bakhtin in order to critique the parameters of debates concerning the challenges to democracy posed by the Arab Spring.

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Why is it important?

The ‘Arab Spring’, while generally celebrated as an awakening of the Arab people, has also been greeted with anxiety and reservation. For many observers the revolutions in the Middle East and the potential for democratization are seen as fraught with danger, either because the democratic face of the revolutions may serve to hide its ‘true’ Islamist nature or because the masses, unable or unwilling to recognize the distinction between religious and political spheres, will hijack the fledgling democracies by electing Islamist governments. Trepidation in the face of this ostensible threat is particularly evident in the general absence of a politico-ethical engagement with the election (or potential election) of Islamist governments. In this piece, I first engage in a critique of each of these responses to the Arab Spring, arguing that most have involved either an invocation of the alibi of elections as democracy or an abdication of democracy in the face of what is deemed an exception. While the former concerns itself with judging the democratic nature of the revolution on the basis of the fairness of the elections, the later argues that the potential rise of Islamist government requires a temporary abandonment of democracy in order to protect the democratic revolutions. Second, I argue that the notion of ‘the scandal of democracy’, allows us to better contend with the singularity of the events that have come to be constitute the Arab Spring and their relationship to democracy.