DEMOCRACY AND ISLAM

Webster's New World Dictionary

 1. government in which people hold the power either directly or
 through elected representatives; rule by the ruled 2. a country,
 state, etc. with such government 3. majority rule 4. the principle
 of the equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment, or the
 practice of this principle 5. the common people, esp. as the
 wielders of power

George Kennan, Policy Planning Study 23

 ... we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its
 population ... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a
 pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this
 position of disparity ... To do so, we will have to dispense with
 all sentimentality ... We should cease to talk about vague and ...
 unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living
 standards, and democratization. (Written in 1948, for the U.S.
 Dept. of State, Mr. Kennan was awarded The Peace Prize of the
 German Book Trade.)

Howard Zinn, A People's History of The United States

 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
 equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
 unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
 pursuit of Happiness. . . Some Americans were clearly omitted from
 this circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of
 Independence: Indians, black slaves, women. . . . . . the reality
 behind the Declaration of Independence was that a rising class of
 important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans
 to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of
 wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial
 history. . .

 At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton suggested a President
 and Senate chosen for life. The Convention did not take his
 suggestion. But neither did it provide for popular elections,
 except in the case of the House of Representatives, where the
 qualifications were set by the state legislatures (which required
 property-holding for voting in almost all the states), and
 excluded women, Indians, slaves.

Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy

 A society can have the formal trappings of a democracy and not be
 democratic at all. The Soviet Union, for example had elections.

 The US obviously has a formal democracy with primaries, elections,
 referenda, recalls, and so on. But what is the content of this
 democracy in terms of popular participation?

 Over long periods, the involvement of the public in planning or
 implementation of public policy has been quite marginal. This is a
 business run society.

Karen Armstrong, A History of God

 Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class
 citizens in the new civilizations of the Oikumene. Their position
 was particularly poor in Greece, for example - a fact which
 Western people should remember when they decry the patriarchical
 attiudes of the Orient. The democratic ideal did not extend to the
 women of Athens, who lived in seclusion and were despised as
 inferior beings.

HRH, The Prince of Wales, Islam And The West

 Islamic countries like Turkey, Egypt, and Syria gave women the
 vote as early as Europe did its women -- and much earlier than in
 Switzerland! In those countries women have long enjoyed equal pay,
 and the opportunity to play a full working role in their
 societies. The rights of Muslim women to property and inheritance,
 to some protection if divorced, and to the conducting of business,
 were rights prescribed by the Quran twelve hundred years ago, even
 if they were not everywhere translated into practice. In Britain
 at least, some of these rights were novel even to my grandmother's
 generation!

Indian Ambassador M. N. Masud, Understanding Islam

 If true democracy is not confined to the form or model of
 government but is the way of life of a people wherein man is
 treated with respect and given dignity, irrespective of what he is
 or what he is not, then Islamic society, from the very birth of
 Islam, has been nearest to the ideal, much nearer to it than has
 been, perhaps, any other society in the recorded history of man.