Is Democracy Compatible With Islam?

Abstract

For more than a century a question discussion has been whether democracy is compatible with Islam or not? The issue came into focus again after the recent phenomena of war on terrorism. The hypothesis is that in the wake of the terrorist act is a result of authoritarian and undemocratic regimes or politics. Similarly the issue has implications for the social sciences students also: does Islam in particular or religion in general, have an effective impact on the political establishment of a state? This question turns out to be more striking when one takes into account the reality that the greater part of the Muslim-majority countries are either unstable democracies or non-democratic regimes. The question whether democracy is compatible with Islam has a direct impact on almost one fourth of the world’s populace. In terms of modernization which is the component of the democracy the Islamic world has a poor record. Though it cannot be said that the cause of this situation is due to the religion i.e. Islam but there are other factors which should be given due consideration such as colonialism, international trading and economic systems and above all the role of the military. Identifying these themes permits us to find a way of considering the potential remedies to bring change in Muslim populated countries. The much propagated and widely spread misconception, that Islam values dictatorship has its origin in the history of Muslim rulers. But we cannot and should not make this assumption on the basis of the Mughal rulers of India, the rulers of Baghdad, Abbasid period, Spanish and Turkish rulers etc., as these rulers were not the rulers according to the teachings and the injunction laid down in the Quran. They were only the dynastic regimes. And in this same period of time, the West also had similar dynastic autocratic rulers. The notion of democracy in Islam can be best defined as functioning at two levels: at the individual, and at the collective levels. Individually, the person has the freedom to adopt the way of worship that he or she likes, but when it comes to the collective level, it becomes a group matter, and the voice of the people in Islam, is given preference. From the social perspective, it is the communal Islam, which is prescribed to be practiced at all levels and thus democracy in Islam is a social concept more so than in any other theoretical tradition of democracy (e.g., Liberalism), and further, it is democracy understood as an expression of the group’s voice which is more Islamic than any other theory of ruling. This study reveals the relationship of Islam and democracy in practice and thus offers a new perspective to boost our understandings of both democracy and Islam. A main proposition of this study is that instead of repeating the cliché that Islam is compatible with democracy, the focus should be on ‘how’ is democracy compatible with Islam and thus how can we democratize Muslim societies?