[Abu_Hind]

This characteristic of Islam made society immune to absolute tyranny and dictatorship. There have been Muslim rulers who were despotic, but they were so only in that they were not chosen by the true representatives of the Muslim people, or that they were not strict in abiding by some of the Islamic teachings; but none of those who called themselves Muslim rulers dared, or perhaps even wanted, to abolish the Islamic law.

This emphasis on the law stood in the way of absolute tyranny in another way. It gave the ulama so much legislative power that it was their word, and not that of the ruler that was final on many matters. An interesting section of one of al Bukhari's chapters reads: If the ruler makes a decision that is contrary to that of people of knowledge, his decision is to be rejected.

Walter Lippman considers it a weakness of democracy that it laid more emphasis on the origin of government rather than on what it should do. He says (Rossiter, 1982, p. 21):


The democratic fallacy has been its preoccupation with the origin of government rather than the processes and results. The democrat has always assumed that if political power could be derived in the right way, it would be beneficent. His whole attention has been on the source of power, since he is hypnotized by the belief that the great thing is to express the will of the people, first because expression is the highest interest of man, and second because the will is instinctively good. But no amount of regulation at the source of a river will completely control its behavior, and while democrats have been absorbed in trying to find a good mechanism of originating social power, that is to say, a good mechanism of voting and representation, they neglected almost every other interest of men.


Similarities

So much for the basic differences, we now come to the similarities, and some of the less basic or minor differences.

Islam and liberalism share certain values, basically those which the concepts of democracy and shoora entail.

In liberal democracy there are rights which individuals have as individuals, even if they are in a minority. These rights are said to be inalienable and cannot, therefore, theoretically speaking, be violated, even by the overwhelming majority of the population. Such violation, even if embodied in a consti*tution, makes the government undemocratic, even tyran*nical. One might think that the idea of inalienable rights is not compatible with the basic concept of democracy as rule of the people, because if the people choose, by ma*jority vote, to deny some section of the population some of what the liberals call their human rights, then that is the rule of the people, and it would thus be undemocratic to not to let it pass. But on close inspection one can see that this is not so. It is not so because the concept of democracy entails that of equality. It is be*cause the people are equal in having the right to express their opinion as to how they should be ruled that democ*racy is the rule of the people. But surely individuals have rights that are more basic than participating in decision making whether directly or indirectly. To participate they must be alive, they must be able to express themselves, and so on. There is thus no contradiction between the concept of democracy or shoora and the idea of inalien*able rights that sets limits on majority rule, because the former is more basic to democracy than the latter.

If I am right in saying that these values are entailed by democracy and shoora, it follows that absolute democracy, democracy that is not constrained by those values, is a contradiction in terms.

Islamic shoora agrees with liberal democracy that among the important issues to be decided by the people is that of choosing their rulers. This was understood from the fact that the Prophet chose not to appoint his successor, but left it to the Muslims to do so, and this was what they did in a general meeting in his town al-Madina. When it was reported to Umar, the second Caliph, that someone said that if Umar died he would give allegiance to so and so as Caliph, he got very angry and said that he would warn the Muslims "against those who want to forcibly deny them (their right)". He later made a public speech in which he said,

If a person give allegiance to a man, as ruler, without a consultative approval of the Muslims, ala ghayri mashoorati-n min al muslimeen, then neither he nor the man to whom he gave allegiance should be followed (Bukhari, al Muharibeen)

As far as my knowledge goes the manner in which this public right is to be exercised, is not specified in any authoritative statements or practice. The first four, The exemplary Caliphs were chosen in different ways.



Is the Islamic state democratic?

Can a country that abides by the principle of shoora constrained by Islamic values be described as democratic? Yes, if democracy is broadly defined in terms of decision-making by the people. No, if it is arbitrarily defined in a way that identifies it with the contemporary Western brands of it. Such definitions commit what Holden (1988, p. 4) calls the definitional fallacy.

In essence it is the fallacy of believing that the meaning of 'democracy' is to be found simply by examining the systems usually called democracies. A common example of this is the idea that if you want to know what democracy is, you simply have a look at the political systems of Britain and America. There are some deep-rooted misconceptions involved here. Apart from anything else, though, such an idea involves the absurdity of being unable to ask whether Britain and America are democracies: if 'democracy' means , say, 'like the British political system' we cannot ask if Britain is a democracy.

An example of a definition which commits this fallacy is that of Fukuyama (1992, p. 43):


In judging which countries are democratic, we will use a strictly formal definition of democracy. A country is democratic if it grants its people the right to choose their own government through periodic secret-ballot, multi-party elections on the basis of universal and equal adult suffrage.

There was no universal suffrage in Athens where women, slaves, and aliens were excluded; no universal suffrage in America until 1920, in Britain until 1918 or 1928, and in Switzerland until 1971. Fukuyama's definition would exclude all these, and would apply only to contemporary Western democracies or ones that are copies of them.

I called such a definition arbitrary because it selected, without any rational criterion, only those features which are common to the Western democracies, but not those on which they differ, and made them necessary conditions for a country being democratic. Otherwise instead of government, it could have said 'their own president', but that would have excluded Britain and some other European democracies. It could also have been specific on the periods of time between elections , but that would again have excluded some Western democracies.

Why should the right to form political parties be a condition for democracy? Suppose that a country gave its people, as individuals, and not as party members, the right to freely choose their government, why should that exclude it from being a democracy?

Why should government elections be periodic? Can't a country be democratic and set no limit to the term of its ruler so long as he was doing his job in a satisfactory manner, but gave the elected body that chose him the power to remove him if and whenever they thought that he was no longer fit for the job?

Having said all this, I must add that I do not set any great store on the epithet 'democratic'. What is important to me is the extent to which a country is Islamic, the extent to which it abides by Islamic principles, of which decision making by the people is only one component and, though important, is not the most important.