While the globalised world of the twenty-first century is a very different place, Western anxiety about Islam continues to be driven by a fear of the unknown and by dark imaginings. Islam is said to be a problem because it cannot fit into our modern world; because, by its very nature, it is anti-modern. Islam, so it is claimed, cannot be modern because it cannot be democratic, and specifically lacks the capacity to appreciate and embrace secularism. Consequently, Islam is framed as an enemy not just of the West but of Western values in general, and specifically of all that is associated with the modern secular democratic state. On this basis, the outraged expression of alarm about Islam’s presence in the West is justified by the need to defend Western values – not least, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others would tell us, arguing from the particular to the general, women’s rights. A search of popular online bookstores for recent titles on Islam confirms the West’s phobia: a disturbingly high proportion of recent titles speak to a moral panic, particularly in the United States, about Islam. Further evidence of moral panic about Islam can be seen in the current storm-in-a-tea-party about the ‘Ground Zero mosque’.

Some of the more serious writing of this kind comes from scholars such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington and Daniel Pipes. Their carefully reaso-ned assertions that Islam is inherently political and is inseparable from a theocratic view that is essentially opposed to secular democracy in particular, and modernity in general, find plentiful support from an array of strident voices in the Muslim world. Together they claim that the radical Islamist understanding of Islam is the primary and authentic understanding, and that whenever Muslims become serious about their faith, this understanding comes to the fore.  One of the strongest advocates of this view was the popular Indian writer Abul Ala Maududi (1903–79). Maududi developed a distinctly South Asian approach to Islamism, and successfully used the language and ideas of the West to capture the imagination of generations of Muslims not only in South Asia but also in the Arab world. Although much more of a populist than a serious theologian, the journalist turned polemicist made an enormous contribution to the development of Islamist ideas. Islamism – an ideology in which Islam is seen to provide the essential elements and inspiration for a distinctly non-Western form of politics that aspires to the establishment of an Islamic state and the implementation of sharia, or Islamic, law – did not exist before mid-twentieth-century writers such as Maududi began to hammer out a radical alternative to secular democracy. Apart from his dozens of popular books and millions of readers, Maududi’s lasting legacy has been the political movement Jamaat-e-Islami in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Irfan Ahmad’s Islamism and Democracy in India is an engaging exploration of the heartland of Jamaat-e-Islami in India. Ahmad began living with ‘the Jamaat’ just a few weeks after the events of 9/11 had dramatically accelerated tensions between both Islam and the West, and between Muslims and non-Muslims in India. For two years, as an eager young anthropologist, he lived among the Jamaat on university campuses and in schools associated with the movement, engaging in hundreds of hours of conversation with students, activists, ideologues and national leaders. As a Muslim who had grown up in a small town in the impoverished northern state of Bihar, and who had been formally educated in Urdu, Persian and Arabic at a traditional Islamic madrasah before undertaking college studies at the Muslim Jamia Millia University in Delhi, Ahmad was well placed to capture an insider’s view of Jamaat-e-Islami. But returning as a doctoral student from the University of Amsterdam, even he had to struggle for acceptance. His lucidly written account takes us with him on his ad-ventures in the field and brings us into an otherwise inaccessible world.

Ahmad, who now teaches at Monash University, documents an important turning point in the Jamaat’s evolution. Maududi began the movement by articulating a radical case for theocracy, but Ahmad documents the sea change in thinking that overtook Jamaat-e-Islami following Maududi’s death, which has seen its leaders become ardent advocates for secular democracy. Ahmad paints a picture in which the radical ideas of Maududi are recognised to be so deeply unpopular as to be unsustainable.

India, a nation of more than 1.1 billion people, is overwhelmingly Hindu, but around fourteen per cent of Indians are Muslims, meaning that India, alongside Pakistan, has the largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia. But today, among India’s more than 140 million Muslims, the puritanical Jamaat-e-Islami can count on a dedicated core numbering no more than 7000 members and on a community of sympathisers that is but a small fraction of one per cent of all Indian Muslims.    In fact, Maududi’s ideas were never truly popular amongst the Muslims of South Asia, and in contemporary India, Pakistan and Bangladesh the Jamaat has struggled to draw more than a tiny minority of Muslims to its cause. As a political party of long standing in Pakistan, Jamaat-e-Islami has been relegated to the position of a minor special interest party that has completely failed to win seats in all but the exceptional 2002 election, despite the fact that the vast majority of Pakistani voters are practising Muslims. The experience of the Jamaat-e-Islami in South Asia, where democracy has, more or less, been given a chance to prove itself, is that Muslims overwhelmingly are not attracted to Islamist politics and do not believe that Islamism represents a true understanding of Islam.

Ahmad describes how, as early as 1961, a Jamaat poll of all ulama in India revealed that ninety-eight per cent supported secular democracy. In 1985, in the Jamaat itself, the shura, or religious advisory board, finally voted to support secular democracy. Ahmad’s fieldwork in the months after 9/11 revealed that the Jamaat leadership had decisively embraced it.

The West’s fear of Islam is shaped by the mistaken conflation of Islam with the Middle East, in both popular and serious reporting, and by the belief that Islam is best represented by its Arab heartland, such that everything different represents a peripheral aberration of no great consequence. For reasons that have much more to do with politics than with religion, secular democracy is not thriving in the Middle East, and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood remains a powerful channel of dissent.

The reality in the greater Muslim world, however, is very different, as emerging young writers such as Ahmad are beginning to show us. Around eighty per cent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims live outside the Arab Middle East. The majority of Muslims live in Asia, with the largest population found in South Asia. On the geographic periphery of the Muslim-majority world, it is countries such as Indonesia to the east and Turkey to the west that have most convincingly demonstrated that Islam and secular democracy can be deeply compatible.

Whatever the claims made about Islam and the arguments put forward in support of Western anxiety, the overwhelming evidence of recent decades is that wherever there is a modicum of good governance and secular democracy, the vast majority of Muslims reject Islamism in favour of secular democracy. With wry humour and an insider’s perspective, Ahmad’s nuanced but lucid account tells us why.