Western Centres for Islam and Democracy

I am most puzzled to find one Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy included in a list of organisations that stand for Democratic Capitalism.

"Islamic democracy" is of course an oxymoron but this is not understood in the West, and Western individuals, organisations and govrnments unfortunately do not merely tolerate but actually promote and even finance such organisations!

Islam cannot accommodate democracy, since it has always been and will always be a theocracy modelled by the Prophet Mohammad and controlled by the Ulema (religious scholars). No real Muslim will accept the principles of democracy since that would allow a Kaffir (unbeliever) to hold political power - an anathema to Islam.

A "liberal muslim" is by definition not a "real muslim" since s/he rejects the model provided by the Prophet Mohammad as well as the essential teaching that Islam makes no distinction between the State and the "Church" of Islam.

The objective of Islam is always to take control of politics in order to re-arrange society in accordance with Islamic precepts including the lower level assigned to women and the even lower level assigned to unbelievers (e.g. not being able to serve in the defence forces or in high civil, business or political office) as well as having to pay a special tax.

As I am from the second-largest Muslim country in the world (India), I am well acquainted with "very good Muslims" who are caught between their desire to be "very good Muslims" and seeing the way their minority is treated in a more truly secular democracy (India) versus the way that Islamic societies conduct themselves as a whole as well as the way that minorities are treated in Islamic societies.

I am not saying that India treats Muslims and other minorities perfectly, merely that inspite of its inadequacies India makes a better job of treating its minorities according to its ideals and that, if India did treat minorities fully in accordance with democratic capitalist ideals, no one would have anything to complain about; whereas the more that Muslim societies treat minorities according to Islamic principles, the more genuine democratic capitalists will be offended and shout for the removal of those principles.

However, I should say that the same criticism applies, though perhaps nowadays not quite as strongly, to the Roman Catholic Church, since that is in principle also theocratic, because Roman Catholicism was at least as deeply shaped by Islam ss it was by the some of the teachings of Jesus: the Pope is like the Caliph, and the equivalent of the Ulema is the College of Bishops - though the political sway of Roman Catholicism extends only to the Vatican while the political sway of Islam reaches to many countries (that is compensated of course by the religious influence of Romanism which reaches many more people, even though Roman Catholics may not realise that Romanism has never repudiated its right to have an army, for instance). In Romanism, as in Islam, there is plenty of contradiction between the ideals that are professed for public consumption versus the principles on which the religion is really run - and therefore the realities of the religion.

Nazism was, in its structure, quite like the Roman and Islamic religions - and many modern Hindu and Buddhist organisations are, regretfully, developing towards similar structures.

The alternative remains truly democratic and secular societies - which are threatened by the sort of debased capitalism that we have seen in the last 30 years. Sphere: Related Content