I woke up yesterday morning to a conference being broadcasted on C-SPAN called “The Future of the Middle East,” and since I was still sick, I sat up and watched through the whole thing in between shots of Tylenol. There were a couple of people on the panel fielding questions, but the most interesting comments tended to come from the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Faruk Logoglu, with regards to Islam and building democracy in the region. Here are three of the remarks he made that I think are worth remembering:

1) We should not be asking whether democracy and secularism can live alongside Islam, or any other religion for that matter. Furthermore, we should not try to achieve pluralistic societies in the Middle East by attempting to mix Islam with democracy. Instead, he believes that democracy and Islam should be separated, with religion being relegated to the private sphere completely, much like what we do here in the West. That is how they codified it in Turkey’s constitution, and certainly that country has become known as one of the most secular and pluralistic Muslim countries in the world.

The problem at the heart of this issue has always mainly been the fact that Islam puts a special emphasis on religious and politics being intertwined, inevitably leading to the tendencies toward totalitarianism. So perhaps we should be looking at the Turkish model as a way of approaching the problem of creating democratic societies in Muslim countries. From that point, we would only need to figure out how people from other countries would accept such a model.

2) He pointed out that elections alone do not make a democracy. This is something that I have stated several times but many seem to forget it. Democracy requires a diverse economy and civil society, a free media, fair courts, and all of the institutions that help secure people’s rights that don’t just magically appear with elections. For a read about what you generally need for a full democracy, read Robert Dahl’s On Democracy.

3) Education was one of the more important things that he emphasized with regards to building and safeguarding democracy. He also talked about the need for a good, secular education. This is particularly a concern for Muslim countries where many children are educated in religious madrassahs, but instead of being educated, are indoctrinated with extremist ideologies. For democracy to succeed in the Middle East, the next generation needs to be literate and ready to embrace the new millenium.

It reminds me very much of the vast tranformation that undertook Germany after World War II. One of the first things the Allied power did was to restructure the country’s education system by ravamping the curriculum, adding civics courses, and firing teachers that were associated with the Nazi regime. The problem is a bit different in Muslim countries, however. For example, in Pakistan, madrassahs hold great power over local populations because of the services they offer because the government does not provide them. Governments therefore cannot act with such haste to remedy this like the Allies did, but they can act to subvert their power through good governance.