Islam Democracy in the Early

Islam Democracy

In the early nineties, a major historical event was announcing the new order of the world, together with the beginning of a distinctive era: the Cold War had finally ended, proclaiming the incontestable victory of democracy. Its opponents of any kind had been defeated.

Ever since, democracy and capitalism have become synonyms with progress, benefits and wealth and their derived principles have been widely adopted. Nowadays, one cannot imagine living otherwise than in a democratic manner, on the solid ground of equality, universal human rights and autonomy. Political leaders talk about democracy as the main goal to be achieved by a state and, most of the times, it becomes the most important indicator for measuring the level of development in a certain country or area of the globe. Given this attitude towards democracy, one will find desirable the fact that it should be adopted in every corner of the world, in order to bring global prosperity. Yet, there are certain areas that appear as being incompatible with the democratic system, the most relevant example being the Islamic world.

Is Islam incompatible with democracy? It is interesting to see how democracy appears as incompatible with Islam from the Western point-of-view, but gets complete different perspective in the Muslims' world. On one hand, there is the general Western assumption that labels the Islamic belief as being rigid and conservative. On the other hand, the Muslims' approach claims the existence of a distinctive model of democracy, based on the Islamic identity and cultural personality. The equality of all before the law, the respect for human rights and for minorities, the closure to friendly states, the separation between judiciary and executive, the system of social security and the acceptance of opposition (as long as it does not turn into rebellion) are obvious principles of democracy, even in the Western assumption. All these "are illustrative of the unique Muslim tradition of governance and constitute significant pointers towards the development of a distinctly Islamic model of democratic governance. These can be the source of inspiration and guidance for developing Islamic democratic models in the contemporary world." (Ahmad, 2000, p. 1).

With the main advantage of being democracy's "place of birth," the Western position is extremely firm. John L. Esposito, John O. Voll (1996) state that: "In the current global context, most who advocate democratization still do not recognize it […]as a result, they view people with different interpretations of democracy as "perverse and lunatic," and thus are open to the perils of underestimating the strength of the alternatives. This is especially true of advocates of the styles of democracy found in Western Europe and the United States, who believe themselves to be the true heirs to the only legitimate democratic tradition and thus view any other efforts to create democracies as false and undemocratic." (p. 14)

The answer to the question "Is Islam incompatible with democracy?" is hard to find. The personal opinion is that the major criteria by which one defines his/her position is the affiliation to one of these two distinctive worlds. What one must take for granted is the fact that democratization, along with all its principles, must be culturally legitimated by the history of an area and must not be imposed by external factors.