الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

do not exist in the Islamic world. They are supported in this, however, almost uniformly and uncritically by the Western academic and intelligentsia establishment which concludes that the near total absence of liberal democracy in the Middle East is a reflection of cultural defects rather than the inappropriateness of the concept . The near polemic of this criticism also prevents attention to the fact that this liberal democracy is also being advanced very much as it was by Napoleon Bonaparte at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century at the point of bayonets in his version of democratic imperialism. As a consequence, the Middle East and Muslims are confusedly excoriated for the absence of in liberal democracy in what might be a republican Middle East and Muslim world. As already noted, there are in nearly all Muslim countries a small minority of the secular intelligentsia who valiantly struggle to implement this same liberal democracy. There are also Muslim intellectuals who are also similarly engaged formulating a an Islamic liberal democracy. The reasons for the difficulty in achieving this is by now apparent in the argument made above i.e. arguably the inappropriateness of the concept. There is, however, a further and more fundamental difficulty. Those who stand for liberal democracy are very clear in their minds about what the agenda is and what the general prescriptions are. The argument here is that these “clear” categories and assumptions of liberal democracy are in fact inappropriate to Muslim society. This does not mean, as polemical Western critics claim, Islam is intrinsically opposed to democracy. In fact, this suggests by way of conclusion a larger and more provocative question. From a Muslim point of view, what is the question? The essential answer of liberal democracy is that of the freedom and autonomy of the individual. Muslim theorists also employ the label of democracy but the question they raise is not that of the answer of individual freedom but rather the question of liberty and justice. That is why the label of Islamic republicanism resonates so familiarly and comfortably. Islam as a religion politically stands for justice ( ’adl ) and in that connection, “ The enjoining of that which is good and the prohibition of that which is evil.”. But in so do doing, it is accompanied by the linking of the moral concept of khalifa (vicegerency of God ) to the political concepts

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