: New Constitution For Iraq Causes Controversy

As the players in the Iraq drama try to turn the rhetoric of Iraqi democracy into reality, several competing visions are starting to emerge. Everybody has a different idea about the new Iraq – the Kurds want their piece, the Shi’as want theirs, Iraqi Christians are afraid of being caught in between, and the Americans want democracy on their terms. Nothing will settle into place, however, until a new Iraqi constitution is drafted to answer the questions on everyone’s mind: What form of government will Iraq have? Will Iraq share the same freedoms that the developed world has? And what role will Islam play? It’s this last question that causes the most anxiety, both for the provisional authority and Iraq’s wary citizens. Support for an Islamic role in the new Iraq is coming from an unlikely source: a young law professor who is writing a proposed new constitution and believes that an Islamic democracy is the answer – even if it isn’t secular. “It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world, or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim,” says Professor Noah Feldman of NYU, who grew up an Orthodox Jew but is also has a Ph.D. from Oxford in Islamic thought, “is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life.” His premise – as illustrated in his recent book “After Jihad” – is that even Islamists who resort to political violence do so because they are not given an honest chance at the ballot box, and that Muslims have an innate respect for democratic ideals that can be easily mapped to Islamic concepts of consultative governance. Some neocons consider Feldman hopelessly naive, and some in the Arab world feel that native scholars could do a better job than an outsider, but Feldman continues to optimistically walk the tightrope between the two. “A lot of appointments to very sensitive jobs leave you amused or intrigued or indifferent,” said Akbar Ahmed, a leading Islamic scholar from American University in Washington. “But here we had, for once, the right man for the job.”

Zahed Amanullah is associate editor of altmuslim.com.  He is based in London, England.