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.