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Originally Posted by 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.

If that were the case, it wasn't a very effective immunity if those despotic Muslim rulers weren't blocked. Though the author describes it as though other forms of democracy don't have an analagous higher law that limits dictatorship.

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.

That sounds like some big exaggerations.

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.

I don't know if it's intentional or not, but it's like he's tying a wordy linguistic knot to emphasize a paradox that doesn't really exist.

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?

Some democracies don't have term limits.