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ISLAM IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY
“Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Bible, Matthew 22:21)
One doesn't have to look too hard to notice that most Islamic countries are not that democratic, and that the more hardline the ruling Islamic regime is, the less democratic their governing system. But is this a product of Islam itself, or merely incidental?
The truth is that sharia law, implemented in full, is about as far from democratic as you can get. It is an authoritarian, theocratic system with Allah alone at its head, and there is little room for freedom or the democratic process.
Islamic law is based on the Qur'an and Sunna (hadith traditions, etc) and these are fixed and unchangeable. The world is to be run according to Allah's law, never under the laws of man, who is not infallible like Allah. According to the 20th century Muslim Brotherhood scholar Sayyid Qutb, “It is Allah and not man who rules. Allah is the source of all authority, including legitimate political authority. Virtue, not freedom, is the highest value. Therefore, Allah's law, not man's, should govern the society.” Islamic law provides a complete system for living one's life, directing the faithful in all areas of everyday existence, even down to which hand to hold one's penis in while urinating. The political and the religious are inseparably interwoven in Islam.
All of which means that Islam is much more than just a religion: it is in fact a political ideology, also – one which assumes that it must rule over all others. More evidence for this comes from the Muslim calendar. Westerners familiar with the way the Roman calendar begins at Jesus' birth may be forgiven for thinking that the first year of the Muslim calendar would have some religious significance. Was it the year Muhammad was born? The year he died? The year he became a Prophet? In actual fact, it is none of these. The first year of the Islamic calendar marks the Hijra – Muhammad's flight from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD. This event marks the moment that Muhammad became a political and military leader, and Islam became a state. This is a clear indication of Islam's political nature, and it has only been demonstrated further in the centuries following the Hijra.
The notion of a separation between church and state has always been heretical in Islam. While the West has developed a system whereby religious and secular authorities act mostly independent of each other, Islam's political nature has always inhibited this. The distinction between the religious and the political has been made, in a rudimentary form, in Christian teaching, but was never transferred to Islam.
Indeed, some Muslim scholars have been highly critical of the Western democratic system and its Judeo-Christian roots, critiquing them as inferior to the Islamic model. Sayyid Qutb wrote that Christianity “is an individualist, isolationist, negative faith. It has no power to make life grow under its influence in any permanent or positive way.” By contrast, “Islam is a perfectly practicable social system in itself...It offers to mankind a perfectly comprehensive theory of the universe, life and mankind.”
Qutb is not alone in this belief. The influential Pakistani scholar Sayyid Abul A'la Maududi declared that “the purpose of Islam is to set up a state on the basis of its own ideology and programme.” The charter of Hamas, the Palestinian terror group that seeks to destroy Israel, affirms the idea that Islam and secularism are incompatible: “Secular thought is diametrically opposed to religious thought...For the Islamic nature of Palestine is part of our religion, and anyone who neglects his religion is bound to lose.”
Western colonialism in the last couple of centuries has led to the amalgamation of Muslim and Western modes of society in the Middle East, such that many modern Muslim countries have now partially imbibed Western democratic values (which is a major reason why most Islamic countries do not embrace full Islamic law at its most extreme today). And yet some Muslims still do not accept these values – not even the concept of human rights.
In 1970, the Iranian Sufi leader Sheik Sultanhussein Tabandeh wrote A Muslim Commentary on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In it, he argues that if a Muslim is killed, capital punishment must be enacted, but if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim the punishment should only be a fine, “[s]ince Islam regards Muslims as on a lower level of belief and conviction”. Indeed, by and large, the Islamic world has never embraced the idea of human rights and the dignity and equality of rights of Muslims and non-Muslims, formulating its own human rights documents based on Islamic principles, which specifically reject the idea of religious freedom. For instance, the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam states that “Everyone shall have the right to advocate what is right, and propagate what is good, and warn against what is wrong and evil according to the norms of Islamic Shari'ah.”
“According to the norms of Islamic Shari'ah”? Given that we have already seen that sharia commands the death penalty for leaving Islam, among other things, this guarantees that in fact no one has the right to advocate or propagate anything at all, unless it coincides with sharia.
And this is one of the main reasons why Islam is incompatible with democracy: because it rejects the idea that everyone is created equal, Islamic law denies equality of rights to religious minorities. And this influence has bled through into Islamic countries that are supposedly moderate and democratic. There is not a single Muslim country in the world today where non-Muslims enjoy full equality of rights with Muslims. In every Islamic country, Jews, Christians, and people of other religions face institutionalised discrimination which is either tolerated or actively encouraged by the leadership.
The following are some representative examples of the discrimination against religious minorities in Muslim countries:
EGYPT: In 2003, 22 Christians – many of whom were Muslim apostates – were arrested and tortured. The same year, the Brethren Church of Assiout was demolished so that the Christians could build a new one, but before they could begin, their building license was inexplicably revoked – bringing to mind the dhimmi prohibition against building new churches or repairing old ones.
PAKISTAN: Blasphemy is still heavily clamped down on in the “moderate” Pakistan. In late 2003, Anwar Masih, a Christian, was arrested for blasphemy, provoking local residents to pelt his house with stones. The police did nothing about the attacks on his home. The following month a Christian church was attacked and ransacked by a Muslim mob, but the police refused to file any report and the doctors at the local hospital ignored the injured Christians at the direction of an influential Muslim cleric. The following year, another Christian charged with blasphemy, Samuel Masih, was beaten to death with a hammer by a Muslim policeman as he lay in hospital suffering from tuberculosis.
KUWAIT: Hussein Qambar Ali was convicted of apostasy after he converted to Christianity, even though the Kuwaiti constitution guarantees absolute freedom of religion. At his trial, a prosecutor said: “With grief I have to say that our criminal law does not include a penalty for apostasy. The fact is that the legislature, in our humble opinion, cannot enforce a penalty for apostasy any more or less than what our Allah and his messenger have decreed. The ones who will make the decision about his apostasy are: our Book, the Sunna, the agreement of the prophets and their legislation given by Allah.”
INDONESIA: When three Muslims beheaded three Christian girls in 2005, they received sentences of up to 20 years in prison. But the following year three Christians were executed for allegedly inciting violence against Muslims during riots, even though it was never definitively proven that they had done any such thing; and even though the violence was not one-sided, no Muslims were prosecuted. Also, Muslims have burned down well over a thousand churches since the 1960s and virtually none of the perpetrators have ever been punished.
MALAYSIA: In recent years, several large Hindu temples have been classified as “illegal structures” without explanation and demolished. In early 2007 the government ordered that a civil rights group dedicated to religious freedom be disbanded. Also, the Islamic Religious Department seized the fifteen-month old child of a woman who had converted to Hinduism, and the woman herself was made to attend a “rehabilitation centre”. In 2005, Bibles in the Malaysian language were banned.
TURKEY: Often hailed as a moderate, secular state, Turkey has nevertheless seen a great challenge to its status from hardline Muslims who want to bring back Islamic law. But even so, it already discriminates against Christians. To this day it still refuses to give legal status to the Catholic Church. Also, while Turkey does not enforce the death penalty for apostasy, two Islamic converts to Christianity were put on trial for “insulting Turkishness” in 2006. Also, several Protestant churches have been stoned and firebombed with no interference by the police.
Islamic countries may be democratic in terms of voting and elections, but in terms of equality of rights for people of all faiths and freedom of conscience, they are anything but democratic.
The fact is that Islam is the only religion in the world which comes with a built-in series of legal directives which it seeks to impose on the land. The religion is the law, and vice versa. This is the system the jihadists are fighting to implement here in the West, in the Middle East, and all around the globe. It is totalitarian, barbaric, and totally in opposition to Western notions of freedom and human rights.
Does this mean that no government can ever be simultaneously Islamic and democratic? Not necessarily, but the creation of an Islamic state that also grants full equality of rights to all can only be achieved if prominent Muslims reject the discrimination enshrined in the sharia and embrace the values of freedom we so cherish, as imperfect as they may be. But so far, they have not done this in any significant numbers, and so the discrimination and inequality goes on.
