What Paul Bremer Could Learn from the Pilgrims

Sarah Whalen, a teacher at Loyola University School of Law, writing in Arab News (Jan. 22, 2004):

Is democracy delayed, democracy denied?

In delaying truly democratic elections in Iraq, the US reveals how far removed it has become from its own democratic origins, which commenced not with the colonial revolution or its 1776 Declaration of Independence, but much earlier — 1620, to be precise, when a small group of conservative religious fanatics, hated and reviled in their own European countries, crossed the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and arrived at Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the 99 survivors “stayed.”

Their original destination had supposedly been the northern part of the then-British territory of Virginia, roughly where New York City lies today, but the fanatics sailed even further north, beyond the Virginia limits.

The reasons for this are in historical dispute. The fanatics themselves officially claimed to have gotten lost or misled by their captain, but scholars now think that they intentionally sought to avoid not only the grasp of the British government and its established religion, but to do something so simple and yet so extraordinary for their time — “to live as they wished,” writes historian Eugene Aubrey Stratton in Plymouth Colony; Its History & People, “and take orders from no one.” Their notion for independence was borne not of any inherent unity, but from this tiny group’s inherent divisions and fractiousness. Thus, “it was thought good,” wrote one fanatic, “that we should combine together in one body, and to submit to such government and governors, as we should by common consent agree to make and choose.”

What these fanatics, whom we now call the Pilgrims, desired and achieved was nothing less than a highly conservative, rigid religious state.

What is worth looking at more closely as democracy is pushed further away from fruition in Iraq is that from the Pilgrims’ desire to live wholly under God’s command was born the Mayflower Compact, which stated essentially that all individuals agreed to submit themselves to majority political rule. Like the modern Iraqis, the Pilgrims’ were an unstable society in a harsh environment. Three months after landing in America, half the Pilgrim settlers died, and many others became wretchedly ill. Facing critically low food supplies, daily deaths, and untold dangers, these profoundly religious people did not hesitate or delay their democracy until better, more stable times, but plunged ahead with their brave new experiment of one man, one vote — to take place in an entirely religious context — “for the Glory of God,” declares the Compact, “and advancement of the Christian Faith.”

The Pilgrims created their own council, an executive and judicial body, and formed a citizen’s militia. “From the very beginning,” Stanton observes, “all important positions were elective,” including the militia.

While some may scoff at comparisons between the smattering of Pilgrims and multitudinous Iraqis, their commonalities, although removed in time, are nonetheless striking. To paraphrase Stratton, just as the Iraqis are “much poorer than we (in the West) are in material things,” they, like the Pilgrims, are nevertheless “modern people, much closer to us in mind than to those who lived before them in medieval or ancient times.”

Iraqis are extraordinarily well educated and well informed, despite Saddam’s generational tyranny. And their greatest asset may be the thing we most fear — the undeniable power of their religion, Islam, to motivate community formation.

For Islam to develop democracy in Iraq, the West in general and the US in particular needs to look at the regenerative, redeeming powers that can be harnessed from religion, and become more attuned to our own fundamentalist American history.