chance, Muslim Democratic parties (which are responsive to public opinion and thrive in an open political contest) can prevail over harder-line and more violent varieties of political Islam.
Among the parties Mr Nasr identifies as Muslim Democratic are the faction of the Pakistani Muslim League that held sway until the military takeover in 1999; the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (in power till last year's coup); Malaysia's ruling UMNO party; and a cluster of mildly Islamic parties that share power in Indonesia (see article). Exhibit A for Muslim Democracy is Turkey's Justice and Development (AK) party, which won its democratic spurs after several decades of sparring between generals and pious politicians.
As with several other Muslim Democratic parties, the AK's rise reflected economic growth and the advent of a devout but non-fanatical middle class which resents the older elites of bureaucrats and generals.
But what if any is the intellectual ground for Muslim Democracy? Roman Catholic thinking had to tread a long path before it reconciled its belief in human sinfulness with popular sovereignty; Christian
Democracy, an important force in post-1945 Europe, was the result.
Abdal-Hakim Murad, a British Muslim scholar, argues that Muslim Democrats have an easier road to travel because Islam's view of human nature is a less pessimistic one. But several factors have helped to make the Muslim debate about democracy difficult and inconclusive. Most of the schools of Muslim thought that have emerged over the past century have been intensely interested in political theory, and also intensely concerned with precedents set at the dawn of the Muslim era. But the precedents are not clear: some caliphs took power by inheritance, others through consensus, others by force.
Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Egyptian-born law professor, has pointed to a passage from the Koran which seems to endow human beings with a special mandate to look after their own affairs.
When your Lord said to the angels: “I have to place a vice-regent on earth,” they said: “Will you place one there who will create disorder and shed blood, while we intone Your litanies and sanctify Your name?” And God said: “I know what you do not know.”
That verse, Mr Fadl has argued, seems to imply that far from sitting back and letting God do everything, human beings must organise their own society.
Another relevant text is the story of Ali, the fourth Muslim caliph, whose leadership was challenged by a rival. To the fury of his zealous supporters, Ali agreed that conflicting claims should be submitted to arbitration. Posterity found Ali right and his critics wrong: human institutions do have a place in settling issues of state.
for the compatibility of democracy and Islam from the University of California at Los Angeles, probably a more secure setting than his native Cairo.
Meanwhile Firas Ahmad, a columnist who co-edits a glossy Muslim monthly from his home in Boston, maintains that a lot of Islamic history—as well as the dilemmas of modern times—should be reconsidered in the light of the robust separation between religion and state which (on his reading, at least), Muslims have quite frequently, and cheerfully, maintained. In modern America, Muslims can make a big
contribution to debates about greed and social justice, while fully respecting the country's secular constitution. And his favourite passages in history are the bits where believers (often courageous Sufi mystics) spoke truth to power, not the instances when pliant greybeards did favours to the sultan.
There are, in short, many interesting things to say about Islam and democracy. The pity is that they are mostly being said in the West, not in Islam's heartland.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Avoidable deaths
Where do all the dollars go?
Jan 10th 2008 | NEW YORK From The Economist print edition
America lags behind its peers in preventing avoidable deaths COMPARING the health systems of different countries is a tricky business. Even if you look at countries in the same income bracket, there are plenty of factors, from demography to culture, that confuse the picture. But a new study of data from 19
prosperous nations draws one firm conclusion: despite being the top spender per head on health, the United States lags painfully, and increasingly, behind other wealthy countries in the overall performance of its medical system.
That harsh judgment is made by Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee, researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. They looked at deaths that should have been
preventable by proper health care in people under the age of 75.
These include deaths resulting from bacterial infections, treatable cancers, diabetes and surgical complications; over a fifth of male deaths and nearly a third of female deaths result from such causes.
They found that the group as a whole did well in tackling this problem: the decline in what they call
“amenable mortality” averaged 16% across these countries from 1997 to 2003: the decline was 17% for men and 14% for women. But the news was not so good in the United States; it had the worst record of the countries studied. America cut “amenable” deaths by only 4% during that period; it fell to bottom of the table.
The study makes two sharp observations. First, countries that started off with low levels of avoidable deaths (like France) and those with higher levels (like Britain) saw big improvements, even as America lagged. Second, merely by lifting its performance to the level of the average rich country, America could avoid perhaps 75,000 “excess deaths” per year; if it matched the top three, it could save 100,000 lives a year. There are things to be said in the American system's defence; for example, it has an impressive history of medical innovation. But for Americans wondering what their country's big spending on health care really buys, the conclusions are sobering.
Copyright © 2008 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
The music industry
From major to minor
Jan 10th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Last year was terrible for the recorded-music majors. The next few years are likely to be even worse
Get article background
IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its
headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.
In public, of course, music executives continued to talk a good game: recovery was just around the corner, they argued, and digital downloads would rescue the music business. But the results from 2007 confirm what EMI's focus group showed: that the record industry's main product, the CD, which in 2006 accounted for over 80% of total global sales, is rapidly fading away. In America, according to Nielsen SoundScan, the volume of physical albums sold dropped by 19% in 2007 from the year before—faster than anyone had expected. For the first half of 2007, sales of music on CD and other physical formats fell by 6% in Britain, by 9% in Japan, France and Spain, by 12% in Italy, 14% in Australia and 21% in
Canada. (Sales were flat in Germany.) Paid digital downloads grew rapidly, but did not begin to make up for the loss of revenue from CDs. More worryingly for the industry, the growth of digital downloads appears to be slowing.
“In 2007 it became clear that the recorded-music industry is contracting and that it will be a very
different beast from what it was in the 20th century,” says Mark Mulligan, an analyst at JupiterResearch.
Last year several big-name artists bypassed the record labels altogether. Madonna left Warner Music to strike a deal with Live Nation, a concert promoter, and the Eagles distributed a bestselling album in America without any help from a record label. Radiohead, a British band, deserted EMI to release an album over the internet. These were isolated, unusual deals, by artists whose careers had already brought years of profits to the big music companies. But they made the labels look irrelevant and will no doubt prompt other artists to think about leaving them too.
The smallest major labels, EMI and Warner Music, are struggling most visibly. Warner Music's share price has fallen to $4.75, 72% lower than its IPO price in 2005, and it is weighed down by debt. EMI's new
Illustration by Claudio Munoz
private-equity owner, Terra Firma, paid a high price for the business in August 2007. Now, having got rid of most of EMI's senior managers and revealed embarrassing details of their spending habits (£200,000 a year went on sundries euphemistically referred to in the music business as “fruit and flowers”), Terra Firma is due to produce a new strategy later this month. But many observers reckon the private-equity men are out of their depth.
The two biggest majors—Universal, which is owned by Vivendi, a French conglomerate, and Sony BMG, a joint venture between Sony and Bertelsmann, a German media firm—derive some protection from their parent companies. Universal is the strongest and is gaining market share. But people speculate that Bertelsmann may want to sell out to Sony next year.
Three vicious circles have now set in for the recorded-music firms. First, because sales of CDs are tumbling, big retailers such as Wal-Mart are cutting the amount of shelf-space they give to music, which in turn accelerates the decline. Richard Greenfield of Pali Research, an independent research firm, reckons that retail floor-space devoted to CDs in America will be cut by 30% or more in 2008. The pattern is likely to repeat itself elsewhere as sales fall.