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¶ … speech entitled, "Why Democracy, Why Now," by Abdulaziz Sachedina, the Muslim authors enters into a public conversation with his fellow Muslim intellectuals about their responsibility to the wider Islamic community. Sachedina argues that intellectuals must work to encourage Muslims to eschew fundamentalist, anti-democratic ideals, especially after the events of 9/11. The Muslims of today must speak out against fundamentalist intolerance, even though there may be a temptation to band together against the cultural backlash against Islam in America. Muslims reared in democratic nations must make it clear to their co-religionists living all over the world that Muslims have a right to demand democracy from their religious leaders as well as their civil leaders.
Islamic intellectuals must cast aside class differences and learn to speak a more popular language of the ordinary people. The reason fundamentalists have found such an audience is not that their words speak the truth about Islam -- far from it. Rather, the fundamentalists know how to respond to speak the language of the common people unlike, the academic author says to his colleagues, those who have the comfort of the cloister of the Ivory Tower and do not always need to address practical concerns in their writings, concerns that are vital to the worldview of ordinary Muslims living in poverty. The fundamentalists have played upon the "pathological distrust" of intellectuals that has been fostered in the hearts and minds many Muslims (309). Islamic intellectuals have done little to diffuse this distrust, but they must diffuse it, if Islam is to survive in a healthy fashion.
Intellectuals must show that democratic ideals are Islamic ideals, and this must be expressed in a way that is persuasive to everyday Muslims. Muslim dissident scholarship is growing, particularly in Egypt and Iran, in the language of the common populace, and this must be encouraged. If rational and pro-democratic voices of intellectuals do not quickly learn to speak in a more accessible fashion about economic privation and the political concerns that occupy the minds of ordinary Muslims living in Islamic nations, these intellectuals will lose any chance of gaining a platform in the community.
Works Cited
Sachedina, Abdulaziz. "Why Democracy, Why Now?" From Islam and Contemporary Issues. pp. 307-310.
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