ABSTRACT
Liberty Liberty is one of the important bases for democracy. The work of John Stuart Mill in this regard is emphasized here because he set out the basic tenets of modern liberalism, building on the work of his father, James Mill, and the philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, to explore the building of a modern liberal democratic state. This is something to which parts of Iraq aspire and others clearly do not. Mill is famous in the Arab world and highly regarded by intellectuals and learned individuals in Iraq. Although his ideas were expressed in the early nineteenth century, they are still as relevant in the early twenty-first century for the purpose of this book. Indeed, they supply something of a benchmark against which Iraq may be measured. Mill defines liberty as the protection against the tyranny of political rulers, where he puts the rulers in ‘a necessarily antagonistic position to the people they ruled’.1 He expressed liberty in terms of the limitation of the power of the rulers. ‘The aim of the patriots was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community and this limitation is what they called liberty’.2 Limiting the ruler’s power is done in two ways. First via ‘a recognition of certain immunities called political liberties or rights’. If the ruler infringed on these rights, specific resistance or general rebellion was held to be justifiable. Second, through ‘the establishment of constitutional checks’ by consent of the community or those who represent its interests.3 The implication here runs against a dominant view that the interests of the rulers are ‘habitually opposed to those of the people’. But under democracy, the dynamic has changed. The rulers should now be ‘identified with the people and their interests and will should be the interests and will of the people’.4 This is so because rulers are now elected by the people to represent the popular will rather than imposed through coercion. Mill defines ‘the will of the people’ as meaning ‘the will of the most numerous of the most active part of the people; the majority or those who succeeded in making themselves accepted as the majority’. This majority may desire to ‘oppress a part of their number’ which necessitates precautions against this trend to prevent the abuse of majoritarian power.5 This is what Mill calls ‘the tyranny
of the majority’; something he regarded as an ‘evil’ which society needs to guard against.6 One of the least understood tenets of democracy in Iraq is the nature of rights in a democratic system. The dominant understanding, promoted by the political class, emphasizes group rights rather than individual rights. In this context, groups are understood as primordial and fixed identities into whose membership all Iraqis have to belong in order to be represented and ‘enjoy’ their rights as part of the group. Women, for example, are treated as a group, not individuals. Muslims are also treated as a group with no variations among them. Politicians always talk about Muslim or Shia majority, dismissing individuality altogether. The Islamic Fadheela Party (IFP), sought in 2014 to legislate for a Shia personal status law whereby nineyear-old girls would be eligible to marry.7 The bill was passed by the council of ministers and it could become law if parliament approved it, something that didn’t happen. On 24 October 2016, parliament passed a law to ban alcohol in the whole of Iraq on the basis of the ‘Muslims majority’.8 Mahmoud Al-Hassan, the head of the parliamentary legal committee, announced after the adoption of the law that ‘anyone who objects to this law is indirectly objecting to God’s law and he will be prosecuted’.9 Islamist rule is basically the tyranny of the majority.
