The Search for Arab Democracy

Book excerpt: How to be a democrat and a Muslim at the same time is the subject of ongoing controversy. This book maps out the variety of voices contesting Islam and democracy in the Arab world, insisting that neither category can be taken as unitary or fixed. In the Arab Middle East, the contestover which democracy, whose democracy, and how much democracy takes place within an existing contest over the degree of preeminence that which slam, whose Islam, and how much Islam should be given in the political and cultural sphere. There is a Democracy and there are democracies. There is an Islam and there are Islams. Larbi Sadiki deploys the conceptual tools of contemporary Western political philosophy and theory to articulate and defend some provocative theses.