الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

@ @

Islamic Republicanism and Liberal Democracy

and the law and jurisprudence of this variety of republicanism is the sharia and fiqh . In terms of a dramatic instance of the implementation of Islamic republicanism, there is the republicanism of vilayat i faqih (the authority of the jurist) and Ayatollah Khomeini that succeeded in the revolutionary over throw of the shah. In March 1979, the Iranian people by referendum agreed that the name of the new state would be the Islamic Republic of Iran, guided by the motto, “ nah gharbi, nar sharqi, jumhuri-yi Islam “ or “Neither Western nor Eastern, Islamic Republican”. This is the ideological justification for Iranian political populism. Iranian republicanism is now so firmly established that even the heroic political opposition leader Akbar Ganji who has suffered years of imprisonment struggling against the conservative republicanism of the regime, has done so in the name of reformist republicanism. Moreover, he has done so with a strong distrust of the “tyranny of the majority”, an additional criteria of republicanism.. He sees his role as instructing the masses in the theory and practices of democracy. Islamic republicanism is said to stand for the justice of Islam and the republican electoral process of the masses, but republicanism in Islam and in Western theory presupposes an authoritative state and the guardianship of the few over the many. The republican state is guided by virtu or maslaha i.e. the public interest. Islamic republicanism in contrast to liberal democracy is congruent with the values and institutions of Islamic society. It is the community that takes precedence over the individual, it is the past and tradition that guides the future and the ruler is guided by “Enjoining that which is good and prohibiting that which is evil.” These are politically conservative criteria that ideologically distinguishes Islamic republicanism from liberal democracy. In summary, it can be noted that the Americans advocate what they regard as the universal nature of liberal democracy. As already noted, this advocacy is intellectually naïve because they fail to recognize that the epistemological preconditions of individualism , secularism and pluralism

-69-

Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter