Global Intifada
“It’ll be -- It’ll be the -- the ballot or it’ll be the bullet. It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death. And if you’re not ready to pay that price don’t use the word freedom in your vocabulary.”
- Malcolm X -
I. Introduction
The Muslim world seems to be locked in battle between various factions competing for dominance in their respective societies. Presently, the two leading forces seem to be the proponents of Islamism against those who are proponents of secular liberal democratic capitalism. While not all of the various groups can be properly categorized neatly into these two categories, generally speaking, Islamists are those who seek the destruction of the nation-state system by replacing it with a Universal Caliphate that seeks to implement the Shari’ah. Within the Islamist school there are two groups: traditionalists and fundamentalists. The Traditionalist paradigm for political revival is Gramscian in the sense that it recognizes that the state is not the ultimate objective of revolution, but rather, merely a means to a complete and total social transformation. For Traditionalist Islamists, the focus if or an intellectual elite, the ‘Ulema, to woo other segments of society so that the formal acquisition of power by the state does not create a conflict between those who lack the intellectual foundations to appreciate the Islamization of society. Fundamentalists seem to take a more Stalinist approach where the state is the be-all-end-all of Islamic civilization. For them, intellectual elites are not intrinsically necessary for a Islamic Revolution and ultimately detracts from the expediency of acquisition of power. Secular liberal democratic capitalism is rather self-explanatory. These two groups and their sub-groups are confronting one another in various segments of Muslim societies from families, to public forums, to the political arena. The focus is of this paper is on one particular area of conflict between these two groups: the mode of governance. The democrats have often argued that the only valid form of government is democracy since it takes its consent directly from the people. They argue that Shari’ah is an abomination in the modern world and if Islamists seek to implement the Shari’ah, then they should subject themselves to democratic processes and win elections. There are two categorizations of problems this argument. The first can be categorized as theoretical and the second can be categorized as empirical/historical.
Theoretical problems with this argument: (A) subjecting the rule of God to human judgment is kufr, contradicting the basic tenets of Islamic aqeedah, (B) it would be contradictory for Islamists to do so because some of them (extreme Salafists, Hizb e Tehrir, Tanzeem e Islam, al-Muhajiroun) don’t deem democracy to be a valid political or legal system, (C) it would also be contradictory for democrats to do so because if Islamists were to win in the elections, it would be contradictory for Islamists to win in elections and than abrogate the secularized nature of the state and certain rights, (D) defining the relevant electorate, (E) defining the relevant electoral districts.
Empirical problems with this argument: (A) Islamic governance has been the historical norm and democratization seems more to be a by-product of the imbalance of power between Muslim states and the West, (B) polls reveal that Muslims do want Islamic governance, (C) in those states with elections, Islamists have won and were kicked out or their power minimalized by local or foreign interference (Algeria, Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, Palestine, Iran, Lebanon), (D) in those states that have no Islamist parties, but have attempted to uphold Islamic law, their have been foreign influence as well (Afghanistan and the Apostasy debacle), (E) in those states that have popular Islamist movements, they have been subjected to foreign influence as well (Afghanistan under the Taliban, Somalia, now Sudan), (F) in those states that Islamists have won, they have achieved remarkable progress, especially financially (Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia).