In Search of Non-secularist Democracy
Mark Silk Tuesday, 1 March 2005
Just before the Iraqi elections, a young doctor in Basra working for one of the Shiite religious parties told George Packer of The New Yorker, "The Jean-Jacques Rousseau idea, the French Revolution ideas—we think that these ideas are typical ideas for the European society. But how far it is from Iraq to the European societies is the distance from Islam to the French Revolution."
Exactly what the doctor meant by "the Jean-Jacques Rousseau idea" is not clear, but it doubtless had something to do with the place of religion in the social order. The great eighteenth century philosopher famously took up that subject at the end of his Social Contract—and the ideas he put forth there are not a bad place for Westerners to begin when pondering the religious ordering of the emerging Iraqi nation.
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