[Dean's World] Mary Madigan: Is Islam compatible with Democracy?

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Mary Madigan:
Is Islam compatible with Democracy?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1141928713.shtml


   Of course it is. There is no reason why Muslims, or the religion
   Islam, can't live within a democracy. There's no reason why their
   personal and cultural beliefs can't coexist with democracy.

   However, when the state is ruled by Islamic Sharia laws, as Iran is,
   that state becomes incompatible with democracy because Sharia laws are
   apartheid laws. Under these laws, non-Muslims have fewer rights than
   Muslims. Women have fewer rights than men. The purpose of establishing
   a legal system based on Sharia is to create an apartheid state. That's
   why the use of Sharia laws as a foundation for Islamic states is Osama
   bin Laden's goal.

   [1]Ann Althouse attended a lecture given by her colleague, Asifa
   Quraishi, a law professor specializing in Islamic law. It was titled
   "A Reconsideration of Presumptions: Is Islam Compatible with
   Democracy?"

   Apparently she believes that Islam is compatable with Democracy, but
   her version would have a greater resemblance to this [2]'democracy'
   than to Western Democracy:

     What I was tackling in my presentation was the roadblock in this
     issue that I think is presented by the western tendency to think
     that the sovereign state should be the location of all law for all
     of society. Once we are able to re-think the location of legal
     authority in a society, that some can exist as valid and
     authoritative, yet outside the realm of public lawmaking
     mechanisms, then I think that we will have gotten much further to
     coming up with a system of government and lawmaking and
     adjudication for Muslim societies that can be (but doesn't have to
     be, frankly I don't care what it looks like, that's up to them)
     "democratic" but in a very different model than western
     nation-state democracies.

   Compared to, say, Ahmadinejad, Asifa Quraishi can appear to be fairly
   liberal. She has addressed women's issues in the past, but has she
   discussed the persecution of non-Muslims under Sharia? Has she
   discussed the sharia-based slavery in Africa, or the sharia-based
   genocide in the Sudan? Has she discussed the sharia-based persecution
   of Kurds in Saddam's Iraq, and his Anfal Campaign? ("Anfal" is a
   principle from the Koran and it allows the looting of a non-Muslim
   population when Muslims conquer them.)?

   Slavery and genocide are just not compatible with democracy.

   There are some religion-based groups whose religion-based laws can
   coexist with a Democracy, like the Amish in America, but membership
   within these groups is purely voluntary. In Islamic states ruled by
   Sharia, the penalty for conversion, or apostasy, is death.

   Apartheid, fundamentalist Sharia law is comparable to the 'laws' that
   govern the [3]one currently existing "Christian" group. Like the
   fundamentalists who claim to base their laws on the Koran, the Lord's
   Resistance Army claims to base their laws on the Bible. They've used
   the Bible to justify their campaign of slaughter, rape and slavery in
   the local area, just as the fundamentalists and Arabists have used
   Islamic law to justify their campaign of ethnic cleansing in Africa
   and the Middle East.

   If the Lord's Resistance Army was sitting on many billions of dollars
   worth of oil, we'd probably be debating whether a legal system that
   murders, enslaves and padlocks people's mouths shut through holes cut
   in their lips in the name of the Bible was compatible with democracy.

   As Amir Taheri said in his remarks in a debate about [4]Islam and
   Democracy:

     Muslims should not be duped into believing that they can have their
     cake and eat it. Muslims can build democratic society provided they
     treat Islam as a matter of personal, private belief and not as a
     political ideology that seeks to monopolise the public space and
     regulate every aspect of individual and community life.

   Simply put, your own personal Islam YES - political Sharia NO.

References

   1. http://althouse.blogspot.com/2006/03/is-islam-compatible-with-democracy.html
   2. http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/irancl.htm
   3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord's_Resistance_Army_(1986-1994)
   4. http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/4462