Appropriating Democracy: A Comparison Between Argumentative Strategies for Confucian and Islamic Democracy

Surveying English, Chinese and Arabic texts, I find that advocates for Islamic or Confucian democracy often use three argumentative strategies. First, they tend to interpret democracy as a procedure to select a government instead of as an ideology or worldview. They, therefore, seem to have adopted a reform policy first suggested in nineteenth-century China: that of keeping the local ‘essence’ (ti) – often interpreted as values – and adopt the foreign ‘practical use’ (yong) – technology. However Islamic activists in particular are also able to draw on a founding myth of local democracy in the form of the early Islamic state under the Prophet, which provides an, albeit vague, native democratic practices and mechanisms. A third strategy is the search for democratic values in tradition. Both sides find native equivalents for the ‘sovereignty of the people’, interpret exhortations to rule for the people as proof for democratic values, and stress a right to revolt. Both sides share an unease with Western liberal democracy’s secularism or moral neutrality, preferring a ‘communitarian’ alternative – a more harmonious, less competitive form of democracy in which the individual’s freedom is restrained by their ties to a moral society.