Islamic democracy
Mohammad Habash [left] is a member of the Syrian Parliament and director of the Islamic Studies Center in Damascus. In this opinion piece for Project Syndicate, he recounts some of the main ideas in a lecture he gave at the Faisal Center for Islamic Research and Studies in Saudi Arabia.As your students learn about Iran, Islam, and velayat-e faqih (the guardianship of the jurists), this article might be a good counterpoint to the authoritarianism exhibited by the Iranian regime.
Habash's refers to soft power in the second quoted paragraph below.
Breaking the Democratic Taboo
"It was obvious that the conference organizers’ goal was to revive religious and political speech in order to find a middle ground between Islamic faith and democracy. I argued that, as many Islamic scholars have recognized, Islamic jurisprudence is compatible with democratic values. Every country that has chosen democracy has come closer to achieving Islam’s goals of equality and social justice.
"Democracy suffers in the Islamic world due to skepticism about everything that comes from the West, especially the US. Thus, some leaders view democratization efforts as a new form of colonialism or imperialism in disguise.
"But the region’s hesitancy to embrace democracy goes beyond mere fear of Western hegemony. There is a deep philosophical dispute about the nature of democracy. Some Islamic thinkers point to an inevitable contradiction between Islamic and democratic values. They argue that Islam requires submission to the will of God, while democracy implies submission to the will of people. This notion was clear in the writings of Said Kotb, who saw parliaments as preventing people from submitting to the rule of God...
"Reconciling the true understanding of Islam and democracy will, I believe, lead to a full realization of the richness of the Islamic experiment. It could also add great vitality to the democratic experiment by bringing it closer to the Muslim street. But the Islamic mainstream must first realize the importance of democratic reform, which is possible only by clearly understanding the Prophet’s message, which promises genuine solutions for every time and place..."
Labels: concepts, democratization, globalization, pedagogy, political culture, theory
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:09 AM
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