Islam and Democracy

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY

Democracy is defined by Oxford Dictionary as a ‘Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them. It denotes a social state in which all have equal rights, without hereditary or arbitrary differences of rank or stature. A state or community in which government is vested in the people as a whole.’’

This system has been adopted by many countries; lately however there has been a long running debate as to whether Islam endorses such a system. The views about the compatibility of Islam and democracy can be segregated into three distinct categories:

The first view is that of the Non-Muslims who see the fact that there are few democratic states in the Islamic world and that Egypt had been ruled by Hosni Mubarak for 30 years until he was swept from power as proof that Islam is not compatible with democracy. (1)

This view was first presented by Samuel Huntington who set off an intellectual firestorm when he published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he claimed that while Turkey and Pakistan might have some small claim to “democratic legitimacy” all other “… Muslim countries were overwhelmingly non-democratic: monarchies, one-party systems, military regimes, personal dictatorships or some combination of these, usually resting on a limited family, clan, or tribal base”. He thought that while the idea of Western democratization is being resisted in other parts of the world, the confrontation is most notable in those regions where Islam is the dominant faith. ( [ 2 ])

On the contrary, the second view is that of many Muslims who also believe that Islam and democracy are not compatible, because democracy is the product of thousands of years of western history, which has nothing to do with Islam. They do not believe that democracy is...