Abstract
This article tries to develop a moderate reading of political liberalism applicable to post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies. Contrary to the strong reading, which considers political liberalism as limited in its scope to those societies that already have a strong liberal tradition, I argue that Rawls’ project does have something to offer to reasonable post-Islamist, Muslim individuals. In part I of the article the idea of a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority society is conceptualized and explained. Part II focuses on the Rawlsian ideas of justification, demonstrating that the conceptions of justification available in political liberalism, i.e. political constructivism, wide reflective equilibrium and a wide view of public reasoning with its ideas of declaration and conjecture, can justify the political conception of justice for reasonable individuals living in any society, including post-Islamist ones. Focusing on Rawls’ notions of stability in part III, I argue that the idea of overlapping consensus should not be considered as the only account of stability offered by political liberalism. Put another way, notwithstanding the strong reading of political liberalism in real western and post-Islamist democracies, liberal stability is always a mixture of overlapping consensus and modus vivendi.
Keywords
In the last two decades, a substantial body of scholarly literature has emerged on the relationship between Islam and democracy, produced by African, Middle Eastern, Asian, European and North American scholars. However, most of these works are indifferent to Rawls’ idea of Political Liberalism (1993) as one of the most recent accounts of liberal political theory, and the small, though significant, body of literature which addresses Islam and the political liberalism issue limits the scope of its question to the case of Muslims living in western liberal democracies, neglecting the case of Muslim-majority societies of the Middle East and elsewhere. 1
Furthermore, in the mainstream interpretation of political liberalism, which I call the strong reading of political liberalism, Rawls’ project to defend liberal democracy is specially considered to be limited in its scope to non-Muslim societies, not providing any type of justification for liberal institutions beyond the modern West. Thus, political liberalism on a strong reading seems to offer nothing for aspiring democracies in the Middle East and elsewhere. That is because apparently since A Theory of Justice (1999b[1971]) the range of social systems that Rawls takes his liberal conception of justice to be applicable to has dramatically shrunk (Pogge, 1989: 213, n.).
2
Especially Rawls’ distinction between decent and liberal peoples in his theory of international relations as offered in The Law of Peoples (1999a) is considered as a proposal for decent religious states for Muslim-majority societies (Hadji Haidar, 2008: 104). A liberal Muslim’s reaction to these shifts in Rawls’ theory might be articulated similarly to the following words: In renouncing any universalistic ambitions Rawls may now seem to have gone too far in the other direction and to have produced a version of liberalism that is so historically specific and so dependent on a prior context of liberal institutions as to be of little relevance in those situations where the justification of liberalism matters most: that is, where liberalism is confronted by, and must engage with, societies whose practices are not liberal. (Scheffler, 1994: 21)
I What is a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority society?
In his account of the sociological and historical roots of political liberalism, Rawls mainly mentions three factors: (1) the religious Reformation and its aftermath the Wars of Religion; (2) the rise of the modern state and constitutionalism; and finally (3) the development of modern natural sciences. The Reformation and the Wars of Religion fragmented the unity of Christianity in the Middle Ages according to Rawls, and paved the way for religious pluralisms, and by the end of the 18th century pluralism became a fact in European culture. The rise of the modern state and its central administration limited the absolute power of rulers to the principles of constitutionalism. And the development of modern science by Copernicus, Newton and others led to the division of power between the Church and the secular world (Rawls, 1996: xxii–xxvi). There are interesting similarities between these sociological milestones for political liberalism, and what some scholars call the post-Islamist situation of some of the Muslim-majority societies. But before going to that, I need to make clear why a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority society is different from Rawls’ idealized Islamic people named Kazanistan.
As mentioned earlier, Rawls’ model of decent hierarchical people, exemplified by the case of imaginary Kazanistan in The Law of Peoples, may falsely inspire the assumption that Rawls’ only normative proposal for contemporary Muslim-majority societies is to be decent. 3 Indeed, there are visible references to Islam in Rawls’ example of Kazanistan, where Kazanistan’s system of law ‘does not institute the separation of church and state. Islam is the favored religion, and only Muslims can hold the upper positions of political authority and influence the government’s main decisions and policies, including foreign affairs’ (Rawls, 1999a: 75–6). Insofar as other religions are tolerated and may be practised without fear or loss of most civic rights except the right to hold the higher political or judicial offices, Kazanistan is considered as a decent society by Rawls. However, he admits that there are fundamental differences between Kazanistan and a liberal democratic society. 4
Indeed, according to Will Kymlicka the idea of decent hierarchical people is adopted upon the millet system of the Ottoman Empire with a non-liberal understanding of the idea of toleration (Kymlicka, 1995: 156–8). The Ottoman Empire’s pre-modern, multinational system is not compatible with the models of post-colonial, Muslim-majority nation-states which, following the 19th-century European models of the nation-state, are almost based on a unitary and homogeneous political culture. 5 None of the past multicultural empires of the Islamic world resisted after the world wars of the 20th century. Thus, Rawls’ picture of the Muslim people of Kazanistan is oversimplified and does not fit with the real experience of most of the Muslim-majority nation-states. This is the case particularly if we consider the post-Islamist experience of Muslim-majority countries like Iran in the last decades. By Islamism I refer to ‘those ideologies and movements that strive to establish some kind of an “Islamic order” – a religious state, shari‘a law, and moral codes in Muslim societies and communities’ (Bayat, 2013: 4). Association with the state is a key feature of Islamist politics. On the opposite side, what is called post-Islamism is predominantly marked by a call to limit the political role of religion. A post-Islamist society is not anti-religion, but rather reflects a tendency to resecularize religion among a vast number of populations. The idea of an Islamic religious state is no longer dominant among the public political culture of a post-Islamist society.
As originally used by Bayat for the first time in his 1996 article, post-Islamism had an Iranian genealogy pertaining only to the realities of the Islamic Republic of Iran. According to Mahdavi, the experience of post-revolutionary Iran both conceptualizes and contextualizes the conception of post-Islamism (Mahdavi, 2011). However, recent studies demonstrate that in the last two decades Islamism has been transformed in many other Muslim-majority societies as well. For example, one might consider Turkey. Dagi’s study shows that in their transformation from Islamism to post-Islamism, post-Islamist Muslim intellectuals in Turkey appear to have abandoned their ideas for the construction of an alternative Islamic political order to replace modernity (Dagi, 2004). 6
Post-Islamism represents both a condition and a project which might be exemplified in a multi-dimensional movement. As a condition it refers to a political and social situation where ‘following a phase of experimentation, the appeal, energy, symbols and sources of legitimacy of Islamism get exhausted, even among its once-ardent supporters’. This is a condition where Islamists become aware of their system’s anomalies and inadequacies as they attempt to normalize and institutionalize their rule and become compelled ‘both by their internal contradictions and by social pressure to reinvent themselves’ (Bayat, 2005: 5; cf. Bayat, 1996: 45–6).
Post-Islamism as a project is ‘a conscious attempt to conceptualize and strategize the rationale and modalities transcending Islamism in social, political, and intellectual domain’ (Bayat, 2005: 5). Post-Islamism as a project aims to marry Islam with individual choice and freedom, with democracy and with modernity. It is a research program to achieve what some have named as alternative modernity. It ‘implies an understanding that not only is Islam compatible with modernity, but its very survival as a religion depends upon achieving this compatibility’ (Bayat, 1996: 45–6). Thus, in a post-Islamist turn the militant Islamism is replaced by trends towards universal human rights and the very idea of democracy. A post-Islamist society experiences a ‘post-ideological’ situation as well, where the age of ideological convictions in which all people were supposed and suggested to believe in a particular comprehensive doctrine, either Islamism, Marxism, or any other religious or secular conviction, is considered to be over (Dabashi, 2010: 53–68).
As far as a post-Islamist Muslim’s view on the idea of a secular state is concerned, these lines by Sudanese Muslim intellectual Abdullahi An-Na‘im are very enlightening: In order to be a Muslim by conviction and free choice, which is the only way one can be a Muslim, I need a secular state. By a secular state I mean one that is neutral regarding religious doctrine, one that does not claim or pretend to enforce Sharia – the religious law of Islam – simply because compliance with Sharia cannot be coerced by fear of state institutions or faked to appease their officials. (An-Na‘im, 2008: 1)
At the beginning of this section I mentioned three factors as the sociological and historical roots of political liberalism in Europe according to Rawls, i.e. religious reform, establishment of the modern state and constitution, and the development of modern sciences. Here I want to argue that among these historical and cultural preconditions of political liberalism all are more or less predominant in a post-Islamic society. As mentioned above, at the heart of post-Islamism lies a serious movement for religious reform and a rejection of the idea of a religious state. As far as the second and third requirements are concerned, the post-Islamist countries like Iran are modern states with modern constitutions – although not liberal ones – and since the beginning of the 20th century they have established their own modern schools and universities which were absent before. As a result, many concepts of modern natural sciences are now well entrenched in the public culture of a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority society.
So far I have explained the meaning of the term ‘post-Islamism’. Here the question is whether Rawls’ theory of political liberalism has the potential to enrich post-Islamism’s intellectual side or not. Considering this fundamental question of Rawls’ in his latest article on public reason, I think political liberalism has the capacity to contribute well in the intellectual project of post-Islamism. As Rawls puts it, political liberalism asks: How is it possible for those holding religious doctrines, some based on religious authority, for example, the Church or the Bible, to hold at the same time a reasonable political conception that supports a reasonable constitutional democratic regime? Can these doctrines still be compatible for the right reasons with a liberal political conception?…How is it possible for citizens of faith to be wholehearted members of a democratic society who endorse society’s intrinsic political ideals and values and do not simply acquiesce in the balance of political and social forces? (Rawls, 1997: 780–1)
Extending Rawls’ political liberalism to post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies
In all of Rawls’ political philosophy works, starting from A Theory of Justice, through Political Liberalism and ending in The Law of Peoples, the principles of justice are presented in two main stages. First, the most reasonable principles of justice – either for domestic or international cases – are selected from among a list of rival principles, without taking into account their possible stability. In the second stage, we check whether the society regulated by the principles selected in the first stage is stable. These two stages of the argument for justice are complementary to each other in the sense that, unless we are able to show that the political conceptions selected in the first stage are sufficiently stable at the second stage, the argument for justice is incomplete.
Following this logic our moderate interpretation of political liberalism is presented in two sections. In the first part (section II of the article) I will argue that the methods of justification available in political liberalism are more universal in their character in contrast to the claims of strong reading. Extending the conceptions of justification in political liberalism into a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority context, I show that political liberalism has enough justificatory tools to give reasonable individuals living in those societies reasons in defense of liberal democratic institutions. My focus here will be on Rawls’ accounts of political constructivism, wide reflective equilibrium and public reasoning, where the latter one is accompanied by two complementary non-public discourses named declaration and conjecture. As will be shown, the idea of the reasonable, like a rope, links these different Rawlsian justificatory tools and the idea of post-Islamism together.
Focusing on Rawls’ accounts of stability, in the second part of this section (section III of the article) I consider whether the political conception of justice can be stable in a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority context. I will argue that a full overlapping consensus is not available even in modern western societies, and in any democratic society including post-Islamist ones liberal stability needs to be considered as a mixture of modus vivendi (where citizens endorse principles of justice simply out of rational reasons) and an overlapping consensus (where the endorsement of justice is rooted in reasonableness of the citizens).
II Rawlsian conceptions of justification and universal inclusion of the reasonable
1 Political constructivism
Political constructivism is a view about the content and structure of justice as fairness as the most reasonable conception of justice. This procedure of construction is modeled by the original position in which rational agents, as representatives of real individuals subject to the constraints of the veil of ignorance, select two principles of justice to regulate the basic structure of their society. In political liberalism, the original position provides a useful device to elaborate a political conception of justice for the basic structure from the ideas of society as a fair system of cooperation and of persons regarded as free and equal (Rawls, 1996: 26). Thus, the idea of the original position presumes particular conceptions of society and persons, and the conditions imposed on the parties along with the description of their deliberations model the rationality and reasonableness of individuals. Since Rawls regards free and equal persons as both rational – having a conception of the good – and reasonable – owning a sense of justice – the original position ascribes to the parties in it two corresponding higher-order interests in order to be able to develop and exercise their moral powers of rationality and reasonableness. Someone who has not developed and cannot exercise the two moral powers of reasonableness and rationality to the minimum requisite degree cannot be a normal and fully cooperating member of society over a complete life, and thus is not modeled in the original position (ibid.: 74).
Conceptions of society and the person have a significant place in political constructivism as the particular Rawlsian method of justification. According to Rawls, the original position as the procedure of construction demonstrates ‘how the principles of justice follow from the principles of practical reason in union with conceptions of society and person, themselves ideas of practical reason’ (Rawls, 1996: 90). Justice as fairness does not proceed from practical reason alone, but is developed from the union of practical reason with particular conceptions of society and person. The conceptions of person and society exemplify agents who reason and characterize ‘the context for the problems…to which practical reason applies’ (ibid.: 107). This account of practical reasoning which is tied to political constructivism has strong universal elements, being able to be extended to a post-Islamist context.
As Roberts puts it, ‘perhaps different conceptions of society and person will be appropriate in different contexts and for different subjects’ (Roberts, 2007: 64). Indeed, contrast between Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples shows that different conceptions of society and person lead to liberal or decent conceptions of justice in the two different models of constructivism developed in these works (ibid.: 67–8). Regarding liberal democracy, Rawls’ constructivism uses conceptions of society as a fair system of cooperation and of the person as a free and equal citizen. However, regarding a decent society, which is Rawls’ concern in the second part of ‘Ideal Theory’ in The Law of Peoples, persons are described differently.
For Rawls, decency is ‘a normative idea of the same kind as reasonableness, though weaker…it covers less than reasonableness does’ (Rawls, 1999a: 67). His minimalist idea of human rights is connected to his perception of the decent in that decency is the most universalist normative conception in his political philosophy: ‘Definite [minimum] conceptions of society and person are essential elements of any conception of justice’ (Rawls, 1996: 109–10). As mentioned earlier in the case of Kazanistan, lacking the democratic idea of citizenship according to which one person has one vote, the decent conception of society is ‘associationist’, viewing society as a hierarchical community, with persons being members of that community rather than free and equal citizens (Rawls, 1999a: 64, 73).
In Political Liberalism Rawls famously claims that the content of the political conception of justice …is expressed in terms of certain fundamental ideas seen as implicit in the public political culture of a democratic society…This public political culture compromises the political institutions of a constitutional regime and the public traditions of their interpretation (including those of the judiciary), as well as historic texts and documents that are common knowledge. (Rawls, 1996: 13–14)
Here is the point. Opposite to the moderate reading of political liberalism which is adopted in this article, the strong reading interprets the above phrase as meaning that Rawls’ political liberalism addresses only individuals living in countries with a long liberal democratic tradition, making it irrelevant in those contexts in which democracy is going to be established for the first time. However, the moderate reading of political liberalism appropriate for post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies, interprets the above famous lines as implying that only those individuals who hold reasonable comprehensive doctrines, no matter in which society they live, are addressed by political liberalism. To make this clearer, we need to look at the idea of reasonable in more detail.
For Rawls, reasonableness (together with rationality) is one of the fundamental powers of free and equal citizens in a well-ordered society. The first basic aspect of reasonableness is ‘the willingness to propose fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them provided others do’. The second basic aspect, according to Rawls, is ‘the willingness to recognize the burdens of judgment’ (Rawls, 1996: 43). Kelly and McPherson term these ‘political reasonableness’ and ‘philosophical reasonableness’ respectively (Kelly and McPherson, 2001). A reasonable person desires a social world in which all free and equal citizens can cooperate with one another on terms all can endorse. Thus, the liberal conceptions of both society and person, as explained earlier, are tied to Rawls’ idea of the reasonable. 8
According to political liberalism’s thesis for post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies, instead of considering the reasonable as being rooted in the shared culture of western liberal societies, it is more appropriate to say that reasonableness is the shared political culture of reasonable individuals all over the world. One may justify this position by appealing to philosophers like Scanlon, who define reasonableness as the disposition in which ‘when we address our minds to a question of right and wrong, what we are trying to decide is, first and foremost, whether certain principles are ones that no one, if suitably motivated, could reasonably reject’ (Scanlon, 1998: 190). It is very important to note that the attitude which Scanlon attributes to the reasonable is universal, part of the idea of practical reasoning.
Connected with the idea of reasonable is the concept of a reasonable comprehensive doctrine; that is, a comprehensive doctrine affirmed by reasonable individuals in any society (Rawls, 1996: 59). Likewise one might argue decent or unreasonable individuals affirm decent or unreasonable comprehensive views respectively. Rawls defines a comprehensive doctrine as having three main features. First, it is an exercise of theoretical reasoning, including conceptions of what is of value in human life, and ideals of personal virtue (ibid.: 175; cf. ibid.: 59). Second, it determines which values count as having more weight when values conflict. Third, it normally belongs to, or is an extension of, a tradition of thought with a specific history and intellectual movement. Rawls seems to count all familiar traditional religious doctrines, such as Islam, as reasonable (or at least decent) (ibid.: 59–60). Since the rational and the reasonable are embedded into, or modeled by, the original position, a reasonable interpretation of Islam is embedded into, or modeled by, political constructivism as well.
Conversely, unreasonable views of Islam are not modeled in political constructivism. As far as decent Islamic and non-Islamic doctrines are concerned, although they are not initially enrolled in the second original position described in The Law of Peoples, the results of that second original position, leading to the international law of peoples, are also acceptable to them. 9
If political constructivism had modeled only individuals living in long-standing liberal societies, it would have no justificatory force in a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority context. However, since reasonable individuals living in post-Islamist societies are modeled by political constructivism or embedded into it, they may find political constructivism persuasive. For the same reason, unreasonable doctrines belonging to unreasonable individuals living in post-Islamist societies (both religious and secular) are excluded from political constructivism. Thus, within a Muslim-majority society, depending on the comprehensive views of the individual in question, he or she may regard justice as fairness as persuasive or as unattractive. The justification of liberal institutions can be extended into a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority context depending on the comprehensive doctrine of the person in question. As an example of unreasonable religious doctrines which will not find political liberalism as persuasive one might mention guardianship of the jurist doctrine [velayat-e faqih], as the most influential manifest of Shia Islamism in the contemporary era.
2 Wide reflective equilibrium in post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies
It can be claimed that whereas politician constructivism is the specific Rawlsian methodology to justify the two principles of justice as fairness in a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority context, wide reflective equilibrium is the general Rawlsian methodology to justify any political conception of justice in those societies and elsewhere. Indeed, Rawls’ concept of wide reflective equilibrium implies his universalist understanding of justification in political philosophy. According to Rawls, reflective equilibrium is a process of moral deliberation in which we move back and forth between a judgement about what is the right action in a particular case and the reasons that are offered for it. In this process, we may revise what we regard as correct if our initial intuitions do not fit with the principles we are later inclined to accept.
A reflective equilibrium can be narrow or wide. It is narrow when only a very limited number of conceptions of justice is taken into account. Wide reflective equilibrium, on the other hand, is reached when we carefully consider alternative conceptions of justice in philosophical tradition and the force of various arguments for them. At the end of a wide reflective equilibrium, the involved person has considered the leading conceptions of political justice found in the western or eastern philosophical tradition, including views critical of the concept of justice itself, and has weighed the force of the different philosophical and other reasons for them (Rawls, 2001: 31; cf. Rawls, 1996: 384 n.).
Therefore, the difference between a narrow and a wide reflective equilibrium is that in the former the person is presented only with conceptions of political justice which more or less match her existing judgements except for minor differences, whereas in the latter the deliberating person considers all possible conceptions of justice favoured by other individuals in modern eastern or western societies, together with all relevant philosophical arguments for them (Rawls, 1996: 384 n.; cf. Rawls, 1999b[1971]: 49). In reaching a wide reflective equilibrium, if we are not able to test our beliefs against all advanced moral theories of various types, at least we do so in the case of some leading alternatives (Daniels, 2003).
Indeed, wide reflective equilibrium is what many political philosophers, including those who belong to the Muslim tradition, aim at when engaging in political philosophy. According to Norman, wide reflective equilibrium is ‘Rawls’s most enduring legacy’ in political philosophy, although nobody uses it as a literal method for political philosophizing (Norman, 1998). That is, it is not how a post-Islamist political philosopher argues on the written page because, by the time a theorist writes, he has already settled on the considered judgements he will use to support his own refined theory or to refute someone else’s.
Therefore, wide reflective equilibrium is a universalist method of justification that is not limited to any particular society. A reasonable person who reflectively reads Rawls or other texts on political philosophy in a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority society or elsewhere is able to move back and forth between a particular theoretical framework, such as the original position, and her firmer intuitions of justice, to reach a balance. That is, involvement in the process of reaching a reflective equilibrium does not require living in a long-standing western democracy. Similarly to the case of political constructivism, a reasonable Muslim individual in post-Islamist society may benefit from this method to support his society’s democratic institutions, or to justify establishing new ones in cases where they do not already exist. On the other hand, unreasonable individuals such as fundamentalist Islamists will find these Rawlsian methods of justification neither persuasive nor attractive. Opposite to post-Islamist persons, they will not regard wide reflective equilibrium as a persuasive method of justification for justice.
3 Public reasoning, declaration and conjecture
Public reason is the third Rawlsian method of justification offered in political liberalism. It is the reason of free and equal citizens participating in public debates in their society. Here again the idea of the reasonable has a central role in Rawls’ understanding of justification. For Rawls, given the reasonable pluralism in a democratic culture, the aim of political liberalism is to uncover the conditions of the possibility of a reasonable public basis to justify fundamental political principles. In so doing, political liberalism distinguishes the public point of view from the many non-public (though not private) points of view (Rawls, 1996: xix). Public reason demonstrates the moral ideal of citizenship in a democratic society.
Following from the idea of public reason, in a reasonable constitutional democracy, the coercive power of the state, which citizens may impose over each other as members of the public political forum or while voting, is legitimate only when they are able to explain to each other the policies and principles they advocate and vote for in a language which is compatible with the political values of public reason. Thus, public reason is tied to the liberal principle of legitimacy, according to which ‘our exercise of political power is proper and fully justifiable only when it is exercised in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to them as reasonable and rational’ (Rawls, 1996: 217).
Two accounts of public reasoning may be discerned in the works of Rawls. In the earlier account, he adopted a more restrictive view of public reason, arguing that in a well-ordered society citizens should avoid appealing to their comprehensive and non-public reasons in public political debates, particularly when it comes to constitutional essentials and matters of fundamental justice. However, he accepted that in a society where religion has a significant role in public identity and is not fully well-ordered in a technical sense, a reasonable religious discourse is permitted to enter into public discourse on condition that this eventually leads to a situation where the limits of public reason are fully honoured (Rawls, 1996: 249 f.). To quote Rawls, ‘for a well-ordered society to come about in which public discussion consists in the appeal to political values, prior historical conditions may require that comprehensive reasons be invoked to strengthen those values’ (ibid.: 251 n.). This situation is more likely to happen when there are just a few strongly held comprehensive doctrines believed by the majority of citizens, similar to the situation of Muslim-majority societies. Thus, in a post-Islamist Muslim society where a majority believes in Islam, reasonable Islamic arguments can have an important role in strengthening the values of public reason in the political culture. Indeed, when, in a particular moment of history, liberal institutions are going to be established for the first time in a post-Islamist society, there is no way to escape from developing comprehensive philosophical, moral, or religious justifications, in addition to purely political arguments, in favour of liberalism. Viewed this way, Rawls’ initial idea of public reason can be extended into a post-Islamist context.
This universalist characteristic of Rawls’ account of public reasoning becomes even more obvious when we consider his latest account of public reason. In ‘The Idea of Public Reason Revisited’ (1997) Rawls adopted a more inclusive view of public reason, called by him ‘the wide view of public political culture’, arguing that both religious and non-religious comprehensive arguments are morally permissible in public discussions at any time insofar as they satisfy a proviso. This proviso states that …reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious or nonreligious, may be introduced in public political discussion at any time, provided that in due course proper political reasons – and not reasons given solely by comprehensive doctrines – are presented that are sufficient to support whatever the comprehensive doctrines introduced are said to support. (Rawls, 1997: 784; emphasis added)
Generally speaking, declaration seems to be more powerful than conjecture because declaration is uttered by a believer from the same community, whereas conjecture is developed by persons who are looking to that faith community from the outside (although sympathetic with that faith). 12 Consider the comprehensive doctrine of Islam. While in declaration the agent is a reasonable faithful Muslim declaring that her comprehensive view endorses the political conception, in conjecture the subject will be a non-Muslim (i.e. an atheist or a Christian) who is nevertheless highly respectful and sympathetic towards Islam. An-Na‘im’s post-Islamist theory of shariah, as noted briefly earlier, is a good example of a reasonable comprehensive doctrine which supports the political values of public reason and constitutionalism (Rawls, 1997: 782–3 n.; cf. An-Na‘im, 1990, 2008). 13 An-Na‘im clearly explains the logic of declaration from a post-Islamist point of view: ‘it is important to strive to justify my proposal from an Islamic perspective for Muslims, without denying the right of others to support the same position from their respective religious or philosophical positions’ (An-Na‘im, 2008: 6). 14
Although both declaration and conjecture are non-public types of reasoning, their role in strengthening the idea of public reason becomes particularly clear when there is a conflict between the pro tanto justification of public reason and various citizens’ non-political values (Schwartzman, 2012). A pro tanto justification is a type of justification that takes into account only political values while neglecting non-political ones (Rawls, 1996: 386). Therefore, in his latest account of public reason Rawls accepts that political philosophers may advance non-political conceptions of justice where, and to the extent that, this is necessary to refute those unreasonable comprehensive religious, moral, or metaphysical conceptions that conflict with the political conception proposed by political liberalism. 15 It needs to be noted that declaration and conjecture are not limited to religious discourse. A secular, non-public philosophical argument in favor of the political conception can be an example of declaration or conjecture. 16
Similar to political constructivism and wide reflective equilibrium, reasonableness has a central role in Rawls’ account of public reasoning. Furthermore, political liberalism seems to be unachievable unless a society, historically speaking, already has a strong tradition of engagement in comprehensive liberalism, in which reasonable philosophical, moral and religious arguments are proposed for the political conception of justice. One can doubt that without prevalent reasonable religious arguments in favor of political conception, political liberalism is able to justify establishment of the liberal institutions in the first place in a post-Islamist Muslim society. In other words, post-Islamist societies need to get engaged in comprehensive types of justification, i.e. declaration and conjecture, in order to develop their own democratic public political culture which would support the idea of public reasoning. This means that post-Islamist political theorists need to engage with all types of comprehensive reasoning, in addition to political types of justification, in order to enrich the public political tradition of their Muslim-majority society.
III Stability of political liberalism in post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies
Modus vivendi and overlapping consensus
The second part of Rawls’ argument for the political conception of justice is to check its stability. Thus, in this part of our article we consider how the political conception of justice can be stable in post-Islamist, Muslim-majority societies. In the scenario Rawls proposes in Political Liberalism, stability is developed in two stages. First, it is achieved simply as a modus vivendi, meaning an agreement in which two parties adopt the principle of toleration, in our case democratic constitutionalism, simply for rational and prudential reasons. For Rawls, a significant example of toleration grounded on modus vivendi is the situation of Roman Catholics and Protestants in Europe immediately after the Wars of Religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. At the beginning of this article we mentioned how according to Rawls the Reformation and its aftermath historically paved the way for political liberalism. As Rawls puts it, ‘religious toleration has historically first appeared as a modus vivendi between hostile [Roman Catholic and Protestant] faiths, later becoming a moral principle shared by civilized peoples and recognized by their leading religions’ (Rawls, 1999a: 113).
From this one might conclude that if the principle of religious toleration be adopted as a modus vivendi in a post-Islamist society like Iran at the first place, by generations it may turn into a moral endorsement of toleration via an overlapping consensus. Modus vivendi usually comes with constitutional consensus. Constitutional consensus is a consensus reached for prudential reasons on issues such as the procedure for making and interpreting law, processes for selecting persons whose decisions are accepted as authoritative and other formal procedures. Rawls imagines that under the reasonable and normal conditions, the constitutional consensus gradually evolves into an overlapping consensus.
Overlapping consensus is the most reasonable account of stability for Rawls (Rawls, 1996: 158–68). In contrast to modus vivendi or constitutional consensus, it has a moral dimension. It occurs when the political conception of justice is embedded, mapped, or inserted as a module into different doctrines affirmed by citizens. In an overlapping consensus, while we want a political conception to have a justification by reference to Islam or other comprehensive doctrines, ‘it is neither presented as, nor as derived from, such a doctrine applied to the basic structure of society’ (ibid.: 12).
In the case of a post-Islamist, Muslim-majority society we come up with the idea of overlapping consensus as the account of stability when we take pluralism seriously, and try to answer this question: ‘How is it possible that there exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical and moral doctrines?’ (Rawls, 1996: 4). However, in the strong reading of political liberalism, overlapping consensus is addressed to ‘societies of a certain type at a particular historical moment’ (Scheffler, 1994: 18). As advanced democracies, such societies have a strong tradition of democratic thought.
In the moderate reading adopted in this article, overlapping consensus is not too demanding. Rather, it is conceived as an action-guiding formula of reasonable stability, part of the ‘realistic utopia’ of a just constitutional democracy. This interpretation of an overlapping consensus is presented in The Law of Peoples when Rawls says: ‘[P]olitical philosophy is realistically utopian when it extends what are ordinarily thought to be the limits of practicable political possibility, and in doing so reconciles us to our political and social condition’ (Rawls, 1999a: 11). Thus, we are able to consider overlapping consensus as an ideal theory which exemplifies a well-ordered, post-Islamist, Muslim-majority society. 17 In this interpretation, overlapping consensus shows our aim at post-Islamist social reform by defining a vision of what is the best we can hope for as far as the stability of our post-Islamist democracy is concerned.
Although Rawls is optimistic that there are sufficient sociological and psychological forces to make an overlapping consensus possible in a constitutional democracy (Rawls, 1996: 158), many political theorists are extremely doubtful about the plausibility of a 100 per cent overlapping consensus. For example, Baier claims that it is not clear whether an overlapping consensus really produces greater stability and social unity than a constitutional consensus (Baier, 1989: 790). Indeed the results of numerous social science studies reveal the pervasive intolerance of citizens in western liberal democracies. For example, empirical studies in the United States show that significant majorities of Americans, like the citizens of other liberal societies, do not uphold basic liberties in the strong sense, 18 suggesting that ‘a strong conception of rights does not appear to lie at the heart of liberal culture’ (Klosko, 1993: 356, 352–3). According to the same research, at least one third of the American and British citizens are against the free speech rights for communists, atheists and other disliked groups. These facts contradict the strong reading of political liberalism, according to which the founding intuitions of political constructivism are well entrenched in the public political culture of western societies, whereas they are absent from the public political culture of post-Islamist ones. Considering this failure of strong reading on empirical grounds, it would be appropriate to say that the reasonable conceptions of persons and society are not predominant in the political culture of long-standing democracies, the same as they might be not predominant in a post-Islamist, Muslim society. Still, we may claim that a constitutional consensus is plausible in both cases.
As a result, the stability of political liberalism in both western and post-Islamist democracies has to be regarded as a mixture of modus vivendi and constitutional consensus. As far as the public acceptance of liberal democratic values is concerned, the difference between the public political culture of modern post-Islamist, Muslim-majority countries and western societies should not be exaggerated. Even in western democracies, some citizens adopt the principles of constitutionalism simply as a modus vivendi. Sherman Jackson, an Afro-American Muslim theologian and intellectual, proposes that US Muslims need to adopt the US constitution simply as a modus vivendi. He argues that US constitutionalism is a product of American custom (urf in Islamic jurisprudence terms) that can be worked into the Muslim American conception of the shariah in the way that certain customs of the pre-Islamic Arabic Jahiliyya, such as tribalism and agrarianism, were worked into Islamic jurisprudence (Jackson [2005: 145–50] quoted in Cornell, 2010).
As noted earlier, we would do better to consider overlapping consensus as a realistic utopia of a post-Islamic society into which the constitutional consensus will be hopefully developed at some point. If Rawls’ scenario is correct, over time across generations, the endorsement of liberal democratic values by Muslim and non-Muslim citizens simply out of rational (prudential) reasons will develop into a reasonable overlapping consensus, where those values are respected on their own.
To conclude, a moderate reading of political liberalism, applicable to modern post-Islamist societies, is plausible. Opposite to the claims of a strong reading of political liberalism, political liberalism as Rawls’ innovative account of political modernity does offer important theoretical tools which can be used for the enrichment of the post-Islamist project, and to contribute in the transition to democracy of post-Islamist societies. Put another way, a deep review in the Rawlsian accounts of justification and stability proves that, against the claims of strong reading, political liberalism has ‘relevance in those [post-Islamist] situations where the justification of liberalism matters most’, 19 that is, where liberalism is confronted by non-liberal trends, and reasonable individuals look for the moral support of political philosophy. 20
Footnotes
Funding
The author, a Research Fellow at the Center for Modern Turkish Studies at Istanbul Şehir University, has developed this article from his PhD dissertation at LUISS University in Rome, and it has been finalized with the financial assistance of TÜBİTAK (the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) [code: 2216].
The author particularly thanks Will Kymlicka, Sebastiano Maffettone, Mohammad Fadel, Devrim Kabasakal Badamchi, Alessandro Ferrara, David Rasmussen, Daniele Santoro, Ingrid Salvatore, Aakash Singh and Domenico Melidoro for their support at different levels of his PhD work. An earlier version of this article was presented in the conference ‘Pluralism and Conflict: Distributive Justice beyond Rawls and Consensus’ at Fatih University in Istanbul (June 2013) and an online seminar on the philosophy of John Rawls in Farsi (October 2013). The author thanks the participants at these events for their comments.