UPDATE: Rusty responds. Scroll down for my responses.
UPDATE 2: Demosophist responds to a few things, in that Italian font.
UPDATE 3: Rusty back at ya!

I started out tapping out a comment to Rusty's post on this topic, but it grew to the point that I decided to publish it as a separate essayette. Rusty graciously establishes the empirical parameters of this thesis, but I don't think they necessarily address the issue:

If one were really interested in seeing whether or not there is a relationship between Islam and liberalism, I would suggest the following. In fact, I dare any one to run the following analysis.

Hypothesis: there is a strong correlation between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Null Hypothesis: there is no relationship between the percent of a nation's population that is Muslim and the extent to which that country's population is free in the liberal sense of the word.

Plot a simple OLS regression model with the two variables. The first variable would simply be % Muslim. The second variable would be the Freedom House numbers. Since the Freedom House Numbers are coded negatively the following results should be found.....

If we are agreed that the above is a moderately fair way of empircally testing the relationship between Islam and tyranny, then the gauntlet has been thrown. I personally do not have the time to run the numbers, but perhaps some enterprising blogger with moderate experience using SPSS would like to give it a go?

The problem with this method is that, while it's a reasonable way of testing the relationship between Islam and political freedom, that's not the research question that's being considered. Dean's question is whether Islam is compatible with democracy, so unless Rusty is willing to propose and support the notion that all of these democratic nations are free only because of their non-Muslim population he isn't actually posing an alternative hypothesis. It's a useful analysis, but not one that's necessarily in opposition to Dean's.
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Rusty Says: True, but Dean's post is actually one in a long series of posts. But the question of whether of not Islam is compatible with democracy is really not fair either. Why? Because stated that way then a single example is evidence since if just one Muslim country can be shown to be domocratic then Islam must be compatible with democracy. So, stated that way, it tells us nothing about Islam's impact on democracy.
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Demosophist Says: That seems like a more useful thing to suss out, yes. Not that I know how to do it. Islam still seems like a six-fingered hand to me.
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That is, even if the correlation or slope turns out to be negative with respect to the % muslim that only suggests that there's muslim resistance to democracy, not that such resistance will ultimately dominate.
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Rusty says: Good point, but it's not fair to say that it 'only' suggests, since these same data could be interpreted otherwise.
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In fact, such a finding of resistance would be trivial... since we can almost predict it will exist without doing the analysis. To illustrate what I'm saying, a similar empirical analysis would have supported the notion that Democracy in America was impossible in the late 1700s, since there were no other extant examples on earth where even a Schumpeterian democracy (competition between elites for public opinion supporting their "right to rule") had a foothold. The universe at the time was completely selected against democracy. The incidence was 0. However, one might have looked at some of the precursors, such as the rule of law, parliamentary forms of government, written constitutions with specifically described "negative individual rights," etc., and having seen a positive trend have decided that a breakthrough was more or less inevitable. But there were no correlates of democracy at the time, because there were no democracies. Conceptually it was Everest. Seen in this light the Founders' vision is nothing less than miraculous. That's right, miraculous.
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Rusty says: no argument here.
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Plus, as a rule data suffering from selection bias tends to underestimate the effect of treatment variables, rather than overestimate those coefficients. That's because the baseline is higher so it's more difficult to get a large positive relationship for the treatment. This isn't always the case, but it's more often true than not. (For those interested in issues of arcane method see Designing Social Inquiry King, Keohane and Verba, 1994.) In this case, though, the treatment variable would not be the percentage of Muslims, but various kinds of interventions or adjustments that neutralize muslim resistance, or even turn it to an advantage. What I'm saying is that precisely because the selected sample is biased with respect to the dependent variable the effect of those independent and instrumental variables will probably be underestimated, if we limit analysis to "less than or equal to 4" on the FH scale.
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Rusty says: No, it wouldn't. Because what you are proposing is an alternative to what I am proposing to test. You wish to operationaize "resistance" by coming up with proxies for it. I don't. In fact, the theoretical underpinnings of what I wish to test are simply about Islam, not about OTHER factors that lead to "resistance". If we can come up with an N=135 (whatever the # of nation states are nowadays) and we have two relatively cardinal number sets, than I don't see a problem (at least, no problems greater than the average study)
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Demosophist Says: The only way to determine the independent impact of Islam (whether it's labelled resistance or something else) is to use some kind of counterfactual method, such as multivariate regression or case studies that "hold all else equal." In other words a regression that includes only the %muslim parameter wouldn't isolate the impact of Islam, but the opposite. It would conflate that influence with just about everthing else in the set of instrumental variables. If you omit other important variables, in other words, their influence will show up as an influence of Islam, whether it is or not. Think of it this way, if the only variable you use to analyze student test scorse is race then the influence of race will look huge because the black student population scores way below everyone else. If, however, you use a socio-economic variable then the actual contribution of race to student achievement turns out to be nil.
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Rusty 2: Okay, now I see what you are getting at! Okay, so we enter a third variable, say, poverty. Feel free to enter more the usual variables (since I'm not a comparative guy I'm not 100% sure what all the 'usual suspects' are).
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Having said that, I don't have a clear idea how you'd operationalize such a question. One way to start would be to use a case study method, comparing countries that were similar in every respect except the proportion of Muslims. Then also look at countries with identical proportions of Muslims, but very divergent outcomes. You might not be able to prove the impact of Islam, but you'd at least get an idea of how to specify a regression that stood some chance of proving it.
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Rusty 2: Come on, this seems straightforward enough! If the data were available, like it is in the U.S., we could use some kind of devotional index. Like, mosque attendance or something like that. But, alas, you work with what you have.
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And finally, Ernest Gellner's analysis in Conditions of Liberty (which, after all, is what we're talking about) basically argues that there's a threshold effect that depends on the process of reformation within the Ummah, or actually on the proximate end of that process and the exponential growth of rationalization (in the Weberian sense). I'd say that what Rusty has identified as "Marxist tendancies" in Islam are actually what Weber would have called (with good reason) "traditionalist." They resist rationalization, but there's no reason to presume that such resistance will ultimately succeed any more than we could have concluded that predominantly Catholic countries in Europe would remain immune to democratic reform indefinitely. In fact, if there's a positive trend toward economic rationalization one can almost predict an eventual democratic outcome, unless everything blows up...
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Rusty says: no, in fact I don't believe I have identified Marxist tendencies at all nor Weberian traditionalism. The Marx references were only analogies. That is, we were able to take on Marx head first without worrying about offending the Left, yet we won't take on Muhammed or Islam because somehow religious ideologies are 'off limits'.

In fact, I believe that my theory is fairly straightforward and has NOTHING to do with economic theories. I think what you are trying to argue is covered in Timur Kuran's Islam and Mammon : The Economic Predicaments of Islamism, if I am reading between the lines. Kuran, like you, seem to be making the argument that what Islam really needs is to first reconcile itself to the basic realities of the marketplace in order to modernize. It's classic Fukuyama End of History nonsense in my mind. Islam adopts modern property rights and allows for interest and voila--Muslim countries modernize and liberalize.

I just don't buy it. There is more going on in Muslim countries than a simple lack of the basic social tools needed for economic modernization. Perhaps my proposed test is simplistic, but so what? Let's start with the simple test of whether or not there is a positive correlation between Islam and authoritarianism and then move on from there.

I may be wrong. I hope I'm wrong. But I fear I'm not. Let me make myself clear: even though I do not think the probability for turning Iraq or Afghanistan into a liberal democracy with true freedom of religion, this does not mean that we should not be there. Why? Because freedom is a relative term. It is in our national interest that we help the Islamic world become more free, even if it may never be completely free.
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Demosophist Says: If you aren't saying that Islam is similar to Marxism in a substantive way then I probably misunderstood you. Having said that, I think your proposed test is entirely inadequate to the task you set for it. Moreover, I just don't understand Islam well enough to suggest anything yet. You claim it's an ideology, while Pace claims that terrorists aren't religious in any conventional sense. The way I see it Qutbism is largely ideological, but it's mostly borrowed from the western counter-enlightenment traditions. (Which, ironically, makes it more "end of history" kind of crap.) How much of it is pure Islam I just can't tell, because I don't know very much about it.

I take your point about religious ideologies being "off limits" and suggest that the only way we get to the bottom of that is to learn a thing or two about Islam. But if Sufism is Islam, then I don't see much of a problem. It'd be no more problematic than Zen Buddhism would it? And probably no more help, either.
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Rusty 2: Me either, if Sufism was Islam, but it's not. It is a branch of Islam. It would be much easier if Muslims stopped calling themselves "Muslim" and adopted sectarianism.
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And finally, I still think Gellner is correct that Islam is in dynamic flux... therefore most Muslims may not even know what it is with any degree of certainty. There's this whole business about "low" vs. "high" Islam, for instance... with "low Islam" being mainly a set of village rituals and superstitions that have little to do with the Koran. Apparently the whole business about iconoclasm (making images of Muhammed) doesn't come from the Koran at all, but from later writings.
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Rusty 2: what the average Muslim, though, thinks about Islam is no more important to understanding Islam as an ideology as what the average Marxist thought about Communism. Most Communists I know continue to think of Communism as simply a big welfare state--a way to help the poor. They fail to grasp the essential and radical nature of it. It seems to me the same is true with Islam. Most Muslims just want to follow the good parts in Islam and ignore the bad. Unfortunately, though, the bad comes with the good and the tendency in all ideologies is that once power is siezed that the more radical elements sieze power since they are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve their goals.
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As a practical matter though, it'd be a lot more difficult to eliminate Islam than it was to marginalize Marxism. At least Marxism had some degree of an empirical claim, so once that was proved to be bunk most of the believers abandoned it. I can't see that happening with Islam, frankly. But we might force a retreat into something that looks more like Sufism, or at least a lot less like Salafism.
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Rusty 2 (electric bugaloo): Agreed. It is much more easy to falsify an empirical claim than it is to falsify a religious one. However, look at Judaism for a moment. Excuse the blasphemy, but a whole lot of the Old Testament stuff seems just as barbaric as anything I read in the Koran. So, such reform is possible, but it could take a long, long time. It also took the destruction of Jerusalem on at least two occasions, a two meilennia long diaspora, and being a minority population virtually everywhere unable to exercise power for centuries. Personally, I dread the thought that Muslims would have to go through any of that to reach the conclusion that all that stuff in the Koran about Muslims dominating the world was just figurative, and the stuff where it says to kill the blasphemer, well, that doesn't apply any longer.
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(Cross-posted to Demosophia)

Posted by: Demosophist at 03:02 PM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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