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Reader comment on item: Debate: Islam and Democracy

Submitted by Karl Ericson (United States), Jul 17, 2003 at 11:43

Archbishop Giuseppe Bernardini reported that during a synod that the Vatican held on October 1999 to discuss the rapports between Christians and Moslems, an eminent Islam scholar addressed the stunned audience declaring with placid effrontery: "By means of your democracy we shall invade you, by means of our religion we shall dominate you". (The Rage and The Pride, Oriana Fallaci p98)

Reza F. Safa, a Shiite Muslim who converted to Christianity after fleeing Iran and author of "Inside Islam: Exposing and Reaching the World of Islam." explained that:

The goal of Islam is to produce a theocracy with Allah as the ruler of society, a society with no separation between religion and the state. This society would have no democracy, no free will and no freedom of expression...

Islam to a Muslim is more than a religion, more than daily rituals. Islam is a way of living, thinking and reasoning.

Al-Nidaa, a website affiliated with Al-Qa'ida, recently published a series of articles about the war in Iraq. The eleventh(1) part of the series stated:(MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 498 5/2/03)

one of the greatest threats to the hegemony of Islam and the dominance of Shari'a [Islamic law] is the American secularism that will be imposed forcefully on the region... The Islamic world will change from dictatorship to democracy, which means sub-human degradation in all walks of life." The meaning, stated the article, of the term 'democracy,' is that people rule, instead of Allah.

Jamie Glazov in an article titled Why Islam Hates Democracy wrote:

In the eyes of Islam, the very notion of democracy is demonized. In Islam, after all, Allah is sovereign, which means that humans constructing their own laws is sinful. The Koran and Sharia Law give Muslims all the laws they need...

In Islam, democracy, as well as the very notion of the freedom of human conscience, represents a dangerous deviation from the Koran and the Sharia. Elections are seen as a form of blasphemy. They are Satan's vehicle to destroy the Koran

Abul A'la Mawdudi, founder of the Jamaat-i Islami in India, has argued that if democracy is conceived as a limited form of popular sovereignty, restricted and directed by God's law, there is no incompatibility with Islam, but Mawdudi concluded that Islam is the very antithesis of secular Western democracy based solely on the sovereignty of the people. (Quoted in Esposito and Piscatori, Democratization and Islam, p. 436. See also Abul A'la Mawdudi, A Political Theory of Islam, in, Donohue and John Esposito, eds. Islam in Transition: Muslim Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 253-54.) On the other hand, Sayyid Qutb, a leading traditionalist theoretician of the Muslim Brotherhood, executed by the Egyptian government in 1966, objected to the idea of popular sovereignty altogether: Qutb believed that "the Islamic state must be based on the Quranic principle of consultation or shurah [on the interpretation of Shari'a], and that the Islamic law or Shari'a is so complete a legal and moral system that no further legislation is possible or necessary." (Quoted in Hudson, "After the Gulf War," p. 436. For more on Qutb's views on Islam, see John L. Esposito, ed., Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983))

Benjamin Netanyahu, in a speech to the House Government Reform Committee on September 20, 2001, argued that Islamic hatred of democracy fuels hatred of the West. He explained:

The soldiers of militant Islam do not hate the West because of Israel, they hate Israel because of the West. They see it as an island of Western democratic values in a Muslim Arab sea.


These quotes were taken from Islam and Jihad http://www.primechoice.com/philosophy

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