As the new Iraq begins the long and gruelling process of constructing a viable democracy, the question on everyone’s mind seems to be whether the Shia parties that now dominate the provisional government will seek to establish Islam as the official state religion. Indeed, dire predictions are already being made that the Shia are planning to turn the country into a totalitarian theocracy modelled on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

But while the new Iraq will in all likelihood be an “Islamic” state (in a country in which 96 per cent of the population is Muslim, it would be ridiculous to expect otherwise), there is little reason to fear that Iraq will become a new Iran. If there is one issue on which most Iraqis (and Muslims) agree, it is that the theo-political experiment in Iran—in which the Shari’a (Islamic law) is the primary source of law and the clerical oligarchy its sole interpreters—has been a devastating failure: the Islamic Republic is isolated, its economy is in shambles, and its citizens are on the verge of insurrection. Not even the menacingly titled Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq has voiced any enthusiasm for replicating Iran’s botched example of “Islamic democracy.” Rather, in its quest to fashion a state that is at once democratic and patently Islamic, Iraq must look not to the east and Iran, but to the west and Israel.

Despite the apartheid state that has resulted from over half a century of bloody territorial conflicts with its neighbouring Palestinian territories, few would deny that the state of Israel is a democracy. At the same time, Israel is a country founded upon an exclusivist Jewish moral framework, which offers all the world’s Jews—regardless of their nationality—immediate citizenship, providing them with a host of benefits and privileges over its non-Jewish citizens. It is a country in which the Orthodox rabbinical courts have jurisdiction over all matters relating to Judaism (including who is a Jew); where religious schools (yeshivas) are subsidised by the state, and marriages are religious, rather than civil affairs (meaning no official will marry a Jew to a non-Jew); and the government is dominated by religious parties such as the ultra-Orthodox Shas, the Yahadut Hatorah, and of course, the ruling Likud. In short, Israel is, in every sense of the term, a “Jewish democracy.”

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