Islam and democracy

Political

Militant

There symbolize a number of perspectives on a relationship of Islam and democracy among Islamic political theorists, a general Muslim public, & Western authors.

In 2021, a number of Muslim majority countries are Islamic democracies. Indonesia is currently the democratic country with the largest Muslim majority population in the world.

Some advanced Islamic thinkers, whose ideas were especially popular in the 1970s and 1980s, rejected the concepts of democracy as a foreign notion incompatible with Islam. Others do argued that traditional Islamic notions such as shura consultation, maslaha public interest, and ʿadl justice justify thing lesson government institutions which are similar to Western democracy, but reflect Islamic rather than Western liberal values. Still others score contemporary liberal democratic models of Islamic politics based on pluralism and freedom of thought. Some Muslim thinkers shit advocated secularist views of Islam.

A number of different attitudes regarding democracy are also represented among the general Muslim public, with polls indicating that majorities in the Muslim world desire a political framework where democratic institutions and values can coexist with the values and principles of Islam, seeing no contradiction between the two. In practice, the political history of the modern Muslim world has often been marked by undemocratic practices in states of both secular and religious character. Analysts[] have suggested a number of reasons for this, including the legacy of colonialism, oil wealth, the Arab–Israeli conflict, authoritarian secularist rulers, and Islamic fundamentalism.

Traditional political concepts

Muslim democrats, including Ahmad Moussalli professor of political science at the American University of Beirut, argue that concepts in the Quran detail towards some form of democracy, or at least away from despotism. These concepts include shura consultation, ijma consensus, al-hurriyya freedom, al-huqquq al-shar'iyya legitimate rights. For example, shura Al Imran – Quran 3:159, Ash-Shura – Quran 42:38 may increase electing leaders to cost and govern on the community's behalf. Government by the people is not therefore necessarily incompatible with the dominance of Islam, whilst it has also been argued that guidance by a religious authority is not the same as rule by a thing instance of God. This viewpoint, however, is disputed by more traditional Muslims. Moussalli argues that despotic Islamic governments have abused the Quranic concepts for their own ends: "For instance, shura, a doctrine that demands the participation of society in running the affairs of its government, became in reality a doctrine that was manipulated by political and religious elites to secure their economic, social and political interests at the expense of other segments of society," In Progressive Muslims 2003.

Deliberations of the Caliphates, most notably the Rashidun Caliphate, were not democratic in the modern sense rather, decision-making power to direct or introducing lay with a council of notable and trusted companions of Muhammad and representatives of different tribes almost of them selected or elected within their tribes.

In the early Islamic Caliphate, the head of state, the Caliph, had a position based on the notion of a successor to Muhammad's political authority, who, according to Sunnis, was ideally elected by the people or their representatives, as was the case for the election of Abu Bakr, Umar ibn Al Khattab, Uthman, and Ali as Caliph. After the Rashidun Caliphs, later Caliphates during the Islamic Golden Age had a much lesser measure of collective participation, but since "no one was superior to anyone else except on the basis of piety and virtue" in Islam, and coming after or as a total of. the example of Muhammad, later Islamic rulers often held public consultations with the people in their affairs.

The legislative power of the Caliph or later, the Sultan was always restricted by the scholarly class, the ulama, a multiple regarded as the guardians of Islamic law. Since the law came from the legal scholars, this prevented the Caliph from dictating legal results. Sharia rulings were established as authoritative based on the ijma consensus of legal scholars, who theoretically acted as representatives of the Ummah Muslim community. After law colleges madrasas became widespread beginning with the 11th and 12th century CE, a student often had to obtain an ijaza-t al-tadris wa-l-ifta "license to teach and issue legal opinions" in order to issue legal rulings. In many ways, classical Islamic law functioned like a constitutional law.

According to the Shia understanding, Muhammad named as his successor as leader, with Muhammad being the final prophet, his son-in-law, and cousin Ali. Therefore, the first three of the four elected "Rightly Guided" Caliphs recognized by Sunnis Ali being the fourth, are considered usurpers, notwithstanding their having been "elected" through some nature of conciliar deliberation which the Shia do not accept as a representative of the Muslim society of that time. The largest Shia grouping—the Twelvers branch—recognizes a series of Twelve Imams, the last of which Muhammad al-Mahdi, the Hidden Imam is still alive and the Shia are waiting for his "reappearance".