Islam, Democracy, and the Bridge Between Worlds

Introduction In September 2023, Abbas Araghchi was appointed Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran — one of the most consequential and scrutinised diplomatic posts in the world. To many in the West, Iran’s foreign minister is little more than a symbol of confrontation: a representative of a government that has stood in open opposition to the United States and its allies for over four decades. But Araghchi is a more complex figure than this caricature allows. Before he became a senior diplomat, before he served as a key negotiator of the 2015 nuclear deal, before he navigated the labyrinthine politics of the Islamic Republic, he was a doctoral student at the University of Kent in Canterbury, writing — under the supervision of the eminent Marxist scholar David McLellan — a thesis that asked one of the most urgent questions of our age: can Islam and Western democracy coexist? The year was 1996. The Cold War had just ended. Samuel Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis had recently appeared, stoking fears in the West that Islam would be the next great ideological adversary. It was in this charged atmosphere that Araghchi submitted his dissertation, titled ‘The Evolution of the Concept of Political Participation in Twentieth-Century Islamic Political Thought.’ The thesis, now openly available through the Kent Academic Repository, is a remarkable document — not because it provides easy answers, but because it refuses the premise of the question as it was then being asked. Rather than treating Islam and democracy as inherently opposed, Araghchi spent nearly three hundred pages demonstrating that Islamic political thought had been wrestling, seriously and productively, with questions of participation, representation, and popular sovereignty throughout the entire twentieth century. What follows is an account of the five central themes of that thesis, and why, thirty years later, they remain not merely academically interesting but politically vital. I. Islam Is a Living Tradition, not a Frozen One The first and perhaps most fundamental argument of the thesis is that Islamic political thought is not static. This may seem obvious, yet it runs directly against the assumption embedded in most ‘clash of civilisations’ thinking: that Islam is a medieval system, essentially unchanged since the seventh century, incapable of adapting to modernity. Araghchi’s historical survey demolishes this view with evidence. He traces a century of Islamic intellectual ferment, from the modernist pioneers Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through Rashid Rida’s effort to construct an Islamic nation-state, through the ideological frameworks of Mawdudi and the Muslim Brotherhood, to Khomeini’s doctrine of the governance of the jurist in Shia Islam. These thinkers disagree profoundly with one another. Some embrace representative institutions enthusiastically; others do so cautiously; a few reject them. But all of them are engaged. All of them are thinking hard about what Islam requires of political life in a modern world — and all of them are revising, debating, and reinterpreting inherited doctrine in light of contemporary circumstances. The thesis argues that this process of reinterpretation is not a betrayal of Islam but an expression of its vitality. Islamic ideals and instructions, Araghchi shows, have been continuously reexamined in the light of modern requirements, in order to answer the questions of the modern Muslim and to provide new solutions to the problems of stagnation and decline. This is, in other words, precisely the kind of intellectual development that Western political thought underwent during its own transitions from medieval to modern. The Reformation, the Enlightenment, the emergence of liberal constitutionalism — these too were processes of reinterpreting inherited doctrine under pressure from new circumstances. There is no reason, the thesis implies, why Islam cannot do what Christianity and secular Western thought already have. II. Divine Sovereignty and Popular Sovereignty Are Not Opposites The most technically challenging argument in the thesis concerns the concept of sovereignty — and it is also the most politically explosive. The standard Western liberal objection to Islamic governance is this: if sovereignty belongs to God alone, then the people cannot govern themselves, and democracy is impossible by definition. Araghchi takes this objection seriously and traces how twentieth-century Muslim thinkers have responded to it. His finding is striking. The majority of significant Muslim scholars across the century concluded, in one form or another, that although ultimate sovereignty belongs to God, His agents on earth are the people — not caliphs, not saints, not clerics acting as God’s proxies. Divine sovereignty, in this reading, is not diminished by popular participation but extended through it. The people are not rivals to God’s authority but its earthly instruments. And if the people are God’s representatives, then their collective voice in governance is not merely permissible — it is theologically required. This is a sophisticated theological move, and Araghchi is careful not to overstate it. Not all Islamic thinkers accepted it, and even those who did often remained uncomfortable with its full implications. But the trajectory is clear: over the course of the twentieth century, representative government became increasingly accepted as an Islamically legitimate — indeed, for some scholars, an Islamically obligatory — form of governance. Far from being structurally incompatible, the concepts of divine sovereignty and popular political participation had, in the hands of the most influential Islamic thinkers, been drawn into a productive synthesis. Become a Medium member III. Democracy’s Roots in Islamic Soil: Shura and Ijma’ A third major theme addresses the question of cultural authenticity. One persistent critique in the Muslim world of democratic institutions is that they are a Western import — alien to Islamic civilisation and carrying within them the seeds of Western cultural domination. Araghchi does not dismiss this concern. He acknowledges that the specific forms of Western liberal democracy — political parties, contested elections, parliamentary procedure — were not developed within the Islamic tradition. But he argues that the principles underlying these forms are not alien at all. The thesis draws sustained attention to two concepts deeply rooted in the Quran and the Prophetic tradition: shura (consultation) and ijma’ (consensus). Shura refers to the obligation of rulers to consult with those they govern before making decisions. Ijma’ refers to the principle that the consensus of the community carries a form of divine sanction — ‘my community will never agree on an error,’ as the Prophet is reported to have said. These are not peripheral or obscure concepts; they are foundational to Islamic jurisprudence and political thought. What the thesis shows is that twentieth-century Muslim thinkers rediscovered these native principles precisely as they were engaging with Western democratic ideas. Rather than simply importing Western institutions wholesale, they found within their own tradition resources that could serve analogous functions: shura as a form of representative consultation, ijma’ as a legitimating equivalent to majority rule. The encounter with Western democracy, in other words, drove Muslims back to their own sources — and what they found there was not incompatibility but resonance. Democracy did not need to be imported into Islam; it needed to be excavated from within it. IV. The Islamic Vision of the Human Person Demands Political Agency The fourth theme operates at the deepest philosophical level. Before one can ask whether Islamic societies can accommodate democratic participation, one must ask what Islam believes about the nature of the human being. If Islam teaches that humans are essentially passive, subordinate, and without genuine agency, then political participation would seem to be at odds with the faith’s fundamental anthropology. Araghchi’s analysis of the Quranic conception of humanity shows that the opposite is true. He demonstrates that the Quran presents the human being as a glorious and exalted creature: appointed by God as His vicegerent on earth, endowed with the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, and given genuine freedom of will. The story of Adam in the Quran is not, as some have read it, primarily a story of sin and obedience. It is a story of agency: Adam and Eve make choices. They are presented with moral alternatives and held responsible for their decisions. This is a theological anthropology that places freedom and responsibility at the very centre of human existence. Crucially, this connects directly to political life. If humans are God’s vicegerents on earth — literally, his khalifas, his representatives — then their collective deliberation about how to organise their common life is not a usurpation of divine authority. It is the exercise of precisely the capacity God gave them. Political participation, in this framework, is not a concession to secular modernity; it is the fulfilment of a religious vocation. The dignity and agency that Western liberalism grounds in the concept of natural rights, Islam grounds in the concept of the human being as God’s representative. The foundations differ; the conclusions converge. V. Selective Engagement, Not Wholesale Rejection or Wholesale Adoption The fifth and perhaps most nuanced theme is what we might call Araghchi’s theory of selective engagement. The thesis resists both of the positions that dominated public debate in the mid-1990s: the Western triumphalist view that liberal democracy is the universal endpoint of history and that Islamic societies must adopt it wholesale, and the Islamist rejectionist view that everything Western is corrupt and must be refused entirely. Araghchi documents a third path, actually practised by the majority of significant Islamic thinkers throughout the century: a discriminating, critical engagement with Western democratic ideas that accepts their practical benefits while retaining an Islamic philosophical foundation. The thesis concludes that while liberalism — the philosophical basis of Western democracy, with its insistence on individual autonomy as the ultimate political value — is broadly rejected in Islamic thought, the practical institutions of democracy: representative assemblies, competitive elections, the rule of law, and the protection of minorities, are widely approved and sought after. This is not intellectual incoherence or tactical opportunism. It is a principled position that has analogies in many non-Western encounters with modernity. Japan adopted Western technology and institutional forms while insisting on its cultural particularity. Catholic social teaching engaged with democratic theory while maintaining its theological framework. Islamic political thought, Araghchi argues, is doing something similar: borrowing the machinery while rebuilding it on different philosophical foundations. The result is not a pale copy of Western democracy but something new — an Islamic democratic model that is still in the process of being constructed. Conclusion: Why This Thesis Matters Now Abbas Araghchi wrote his doctoral thesis at a moment when the world was deciding what story it would tell about the post-Cold War order. Huntington’s clash of civilisations narrative offered one story: Islam and the West as permanent adversaries, their conflict rooted in irreconcilable values. Araghchi’s thesis, written at the same moment, offered another: a hundred years of Muslim thinkers working, struggling, debating, and innovating in response to modernity — not rejecting the West’s political achievements but engaging with them, arguing about them, and seeking to incorporate their essential insights within an Islamic framework. The man who wrote that thesis went on to spend his career at the intersection of those two worlds — negotiating nuclear agreements, navigating sanctions, managing the tensions between a revolutionary state and an international order it distrusts. Whether or not one agrees with the positions he has taken as a diplomat, it is worth knowing that he began his public intellectual life by arguing, with scholarly rigour, that the civilisational confrontation his career has so often been caught within is not, in fact, inevitable — and that the intellectual traditions of Islam contain within themselves the resources to resist it. That argument has not aged. If anything, in a world still convulsed by the question of whether Islam and liberal democracy can coexist, the careful, historically grounded, intellectually generous answer that Araghchi’s 1996 thesis provides deserves more attention than it has ever received. The thesis does not resolve the tensions between Islamic and Western political thought — no thesis could. But it demonstrates, with considerable force, that those tensions are not the same as incompatibility, and that the people who have lived within them have not, for the most part, experienced them as a clash of civilisations but as the difficult, necessary, ongoing work of synthesis. Based on: Seyed Abbas Araghchi, ‘The Evolution of the Concept of Political Participation in Twentieth-Century Islamic Political Thought,’ PhD thesis, University of Kent, 1996.

America’s Iran War: Objectives & Consequences

 

Introduction

The America’s Iran War, often referred to as the Twelve-Day War, erupted in June 2025 amid escalating tensions over Iran’s nuclear program and regional proxy activities. On June 13, 2025, Israel launched major airstrikes targeting Iranian nuclear facilities, missile sites, military infrastructure, senior IRGC commanders, and nuclear scientists. Iran responded with waves of drones and ballistic missiles against Israel.

After days of exchanges, the United States directly intervened on June 22 with precision strikes using B-2 bombers and Massive Ordnance Penetrators on three key nuclear sites: Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at the U.S. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar (with advance warning and no reported casualties). A ceasefire was announced on June 24, 2025, brokered with U.S. involvement under President Trump.

Officially, the stated objectives focused on preventing Iran from achieving a nuclear weapons capability, degrading its ballistic missile program, dismantling support for regional proxies (such as Hezbollah, Houthis, and Hamas), and restoring freedom of navigation in critical waterways. U.S. and Israeli statements emphasized defensive necessity, counterterrorism, and regional stability.

However, beneath these immediate security rationales lies a broader strategic vision: advancing the “American Century” project, conceived in the early 1990s in the wake of the Cold War’s end. This project seeks sustained U.S. global hegemony across economic, military, technological, and geopolitical domains by preventing the rise of peer competitors. The Iran campaign advances seven core objectives in service of this agenda:

(1) preserving dollar dominance

(2) expanding American arms exports

(3) establishing U.S. monopoly over energy sources and routes

(4) containing Chinese development and influence

(5) advancing Greater Israel,

(6) further weakening and Balkanising Russia.

(7) Grand Fragmentationist Strategy

Let me explain the above objectives in a bit of detail

1. Preserving Dollar Dominance

The U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s primary reserve currency underpins American power by enabling deficit financing at low interest rates and extraterritorial sanctions. This system evolved from the Bretton Woods gold-linked framework (1944–1971) to the petrodollar era after 1971, in which OPEC oil was priced and settled predominantly in USD, compelling importers to accumulate dollar reserves.

The Iran War accelerates the transition to a hybrid petro/LNG-dollar system. The traditional model depended heavily on Saudi crude; the emerging one centers on abundant U.S. crude and Gulf Coast liquefied natural gas (LNG), with no comparable alternative supplier at scale. LNG infrastructure creates deeper, longer-term lock-in: buyers commit to multi-decade contracts and build specialized regasification terminals, making pivots costly and slow. Europe and key Pacific allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) find themselves structurally dependent on U.S. supply chains.

Market signals during and after the conflict reinforced this shift. The DXY strengthened notably, gold prices retreated significantly from early 2026 peaks, and Brent crude climbed above $100 per barrel amid disruptions. Institutions in Europe and Asia liquidated holdings in precious metals and cryptocurrencies to secure dollars for energy purchases — the only large-scale option remaining. This dynamic weaponizes energy dependency: the world effectively exchanges gold for American energy priced in American currency. The structural repricing of global finance toward dollar dominance persists irrespective of the war’s exact tactical resolution.

2. Expanding American Arms Exports

The conflict has generated a substantial surge in U.S. arms sales. Israel and Gulf states placed urgent, large-scale orders for advanced systems including F-35 aircraft, air and missile defence batteries (Patriot, THAAD), precision munitions, drones, and related technologies. American defence contractors reported expanded backlogs, supporting domestic high-tech manufacturing jobs and R&D investment.

Beyond immediate revenue, the war provides real-world combat validation of U.S. weaponry against Iranian systems and proxies. Performance data enhances marketing credibility for future sales to other nations hesitant about Chinese or Russian alternatives. This recycles energy-related petrodollars back into the U.S. economy, creating a virtuous cycle that sustains the military-industrial base and reinforces technological superiority.

3. American Monopoly on Energy Sources and Routes

The deepest operational layer involves consolidating U.S. control over global oil and natural gas flows. When examined as part of a multi-year sequence, the pattern becomes clearer:

· The Ukraine conflict enabled sanctions and infrastructure sabotage (including Nord Stream) that drastically reduced Russian pipeline gas to Europe, elevating the U.S. share of European LNG imports from about 28% in 2021 to over 50% by 2025, with record U.S. exports.

· The fall of the Assad regime in Syria (late 2024) disrupted planned overland connectivity nodes linked to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

· U.S. actions in Venezuela in January 2025 effectively brought the world’s largest heavy crude reserves under greater Western influence, benefiting Gulf Coast refineries optimized for such blends and strengthening U.S. dominance in refined product exports.

· The Iran phase intensified the energy shock. Israeli strikes hit Iran’s South Pars gas field (the world’s largest shared gas reservoir), and Iranian retaliation damaged Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex — one of the planet’s premier export hubs. The Strait of Hormuz faced severe disruptions, spiking European gas prices and doubling Asian spot LNG prices in waves. A post-conflict compliant government in Tehran could bring roughly 40–45 million barrels per day of global production (out of ~103 million bpd total) under U.S.-aligned influence, marginalizing OPEC’s pricing power while extending control into the LNG sphere. The result positions the United States as the indispensable marginal supplier of both oil and gas.

4. Containing Chinese Development and Global Influence

Modern artificial intelligence and advanced computing are energy- and resource-intensive industries. Data centers demand reliable baseload power (often natural gas), while semiconductor fabrication requires helium, rare earths, and stable supply chains. By disrupting Middle Eastern LNG and helium production and tightening control over maritime chokepoints (Strait of Hormuz, Malacca Strait), the campaign raises China’s input costs and risks.

The United States, bolstered by domestic production plus Venezuelan reserves, maintains energy self-sufficiency. China, a major net importer, sees its energy imports increasingly subject to U.S. naval influence. Iran had served as a key overland Belt and Road energy corridor, offering a partial bypass to vulnerable sea routes. Its neutralization isolates this pathway. Consequently, Chinese data centers and chip production face heightened competition for constrained global LNG supplies, while American facilities operate with domestic advantages. This directly slows China’s compute scaling and AI advancement timeline, preserving U.S. technological primacy in the race toward artificial superintelligence.

5. Advancing Greater Israel

The war significantly weakens Iran’s military capacity, nuclear potential, and ability to fund and arm proxies. This grants Israel expanded strategic depth and security margins. With reduced immediate threats from Hezbollah, Hamas, and other groups, Israel can pursue long-term arrangements — including buffer zones, further normalization with Arab states via frameworks like the Abraham Accords, and influence over regional reconstruction. From the U.S. perspective, a strong, capable Israel serves as a forward partner that helps stabilize the region and align energy nodes with Western interests, reducing the need for large-scale permanent American ground deployments.

6. Balkanising and Weakening Russia

Russia faces compounded pressures in the aftermath. A rehabilitated Iran under U.S. influence could re-enter markets with competitively priced heavy crude, undercutting Russian exports to key buyers in China and India. Russia’s higher production costs erode its remaining advantages. Concurrently, intensified Ukrainian strikes on Russian energy infrastructure during the Iran distraction accelerate economic strain. The overarching message encourages Moscow to accept terms on Ukraine. With Iran neutralized, Russia isolated, and China’s energy bypasses curtailed, the United States enters subsequent great-power diplomacy holding dominant leverage over energy, finance, and technology.

7. Fragmentationist Grand Strategy

A term coined by Nel B., the great geopolitical analyst, this is the overarching strategy for maintaining U.S. hegemony in an era of relative decline. Countering the narrative that the U.S. is finished due to military setbacks and de-dollarization: the American empire remains infrastructural, military, cultural, and technological — still dominating critical choke points such as SWIFT, dollar clearing houses, energy logistics, and undersea data cables.
Most of the Global South is not Russia, China, or Iran; these nations lack the scale to openly defy the U.S. without risking financial ruin, coups, or energy blackmail. They are focused on survival while attempting incremental independence.
The U.S. power elite recognizes it can no longer win conventional wars or sustain true hegemony through consent, so it has deliberately shifted to fragmentation. A broken, burning, divided world is far easier to manage and control than a cohesive, consolidated multipolar order.
Transatlantic ruling elites cannot retreat without collapsing their rentier profits in finance, energy, and defense sectors; therefore, they lash out aggressively as their primary remaining tool of dominance.
The Middle East war demonstrates this willingness: the U.S. is prepared to risk global depression, energy crises, and even widespread starvation to preserve structural control. We are currently in the midst of imperial decline — the hardest phase is not behind us, but unfolding now.

Consequences

The war has produced multifaceted outcomes. Economically, global energy markets have undergone lasting repricing favouring U.S. LNG and refined product exporters; Qatar’s extended recovery timeline alone sustains elevated demand for American supply through the decade. Europe confronts renewed energy price volatility and dependency, while Asian economies absorb higher costs that constrain growth and industrial output. Financial markets reflected forced dollar demand through shifts in currency indices, gold, and crypto.

Humanitarian and regional costs include civilian casualties, infrastructure destruction in Iran and Qatar, displacement, and long-term reconstruction challenges. Geopolitically, the campaign has fragmented Iran’s “Axis of Resistance,” weakened BRICS momentum against dollar hegemony, and reinforced transatlantic and Indo-Pacific alliances. However, risks persist: prolonged instability could fuel insurgencies or new proxy dynamics; domestic U.S. political support may erode if costs mount; and perceptions of orchestration risk accelerating de-dollarization experiments in parts of the Global South.

In the broader arc, the Iran War represents a crucial campaign in the American Century strategy. By intertwining monetary control, energy supremacy, and compute dominance, it aims to determine which power first masters transformative technologies like artificial superintelligence. Success would entrench U.S. primacy for decades; incomplete outcomes or backlash could instead hasten the multipolar shifts the strategy seeks to avert. The full consequences — economic, strategic, and civilizational — will unfold over years, reshaping the international order well into the 21st century.