Early historians of Islam traced its rise in Muhammed’s time to the increasing dissatisfaction of the people under an increasingly mercantile economy.

More contemporary historians dispute this, suggesting that the solution to the puzzle of Islam’s rise cannot start by assuming it was a response to a burgeoning sense of capitalism, but rather that it must start at the fact that Muhammed lived in a tribal society, and that Allah must have had something to offer that was of more value than the society’s already-existing pagan gods. This is from Patricia Crone’s, “Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam“:

What he had to offer was a programme of Arab state formation and conquest: the creation of an umma, the initiation of jihad. Muhammad was a prophet with a political mission, not, as is so often asserted, a prophet who merely happened to become involved with politics….Why did the Arabs in Muhammad’s time find the vision of state structures and unification so attractive?…There is no shred of evidence that commercial interests contributed to the decision, on the part of the ruling elite, to adopt a policy of conquest; on the contrary, the sources present conquest as an alternative to trade, the reward of conquest being an effortless life as rulers of the earth as opposed to one as plodding merchants….Holy war was not a cover for material interests; on the contrary, it was an open proclamation of them…God could scarcely have been more explicit. He told the Arabs that they had a right to despoil others of their women, children, and land, or indeed that they had a duty to do so: holy war consisted in obeying. Muhammad’s God thus elevated tribal militance and rapaciousness into supreme religious virtues: the material interests were those inherent in tribal society, and we need not compound the problem by conjecturing that others were at work. It is precisely because the material interests of Allah and the tribesmen coincided that the latter obeyed him with such enthusiasm.

All of which is to say that Muslim serves the interest of the tribe, and not the interest of the individual. In such a mileiu, is it any wonder that a mercantile, bourgeois class failed to crystallize?

This is not to disagree with your proposition that democracy spread through the West on the heels of trade (though Protestantism definitely had something to do with it: see this review of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism), but it is to make clear that tribal interests inherent in Islam affected the non-rise of the mercantile class before the non-rise of the merchants affected Islam.

I know you didn’t say this. But I thought it was a possible implication from your italicized use of “really,” and I just wanted to make something that possibly implicit into something definitely explicit.

What to do now? We have to stay until there is either a civil war or a semi-democracy.

In this worldview, an individual is free when the government does not control what she might or might not use her labor-power to buy. In, say, Iran, consumer choice is violently impaired by theocratic tyranny. Thus, in Iraq, by removing the Bad Man Saddam, we clear the way for market forces to do their thing, maximizing the wealth of Iraqis as a people. They are definitively freer for it.

Considering this, alongside one of your premises…

The Protestant revolution in Christianity led directly to the democratization of European governments because it reinforced the notion that every individual should be an active partner in his or her relationship with the heavenly Creator — and that every individual should be from the mediation of that relationship by the religious authorities; it is only a matter of a few steps to the notion that every individual is an active partner in his or her relationship with the State.

…one might also posit that it was the rise of the mercantile, bourgeois class that really facilitated the democratic paradigm shift of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. That is, the moral system of free-trade was instantiated as a manifestation of individual freedom to be an “active partner” in a government that is responsive to what the governed individuals are willing to pay for.

Now, whether or not this is the best definition of freedom is another issue. I tend to disagree with the idea that unregulated markets are the best form of freedom to strive for, and in that light I agree with your analysis. But the ideal of freedom that, I think, you and I share is that prescribed by a liberal democracy, not necessarily by all conceptions of a democratic republic.

Interestingly, I think that this conflation of multiple notions of freedom has done a lot to help the Republican success in the last fifty-years or so, and let them count on the support of certain groups (namely, libertarians) that seem generally opposed to the sort of foreign policy the GOP has been pushing. It will be interesting to see if this might be turned into a “wedge” concept in coming elections.

In response to your last question, I still don’t think the situation in Iraq is doing much to further freedom, market or otherwise, either. But I’m not sure this failure is due to the same forces you’ve cited above. I think Muslim culture, largely, lacks the concept of a bourgeois middle-class, which is fundamental to neoclassical economics.

Although, I’m no Saddam-lover, and I remember nine-eleven (I’ll never forget!). So, support the troops, and the war they are fighting to protect our freedom. God Bless America.