ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the fundamental role that Baghdad played in promoting the democratic ethos via an active public sphere of learned scholars, great theologians and schools of jurisprudence. It focuses on Islam phobic media discourse to analyse the collective forms of government and egalitarian social movements found throughout both the history and doctrine of Islam. Beyond the fact that the highest echelons of the state waxed and waned in their commitment to the Islamic doctrines and to democracy, lies the even more important, and more Islamic, legacy of the ulama who provide for us important insights into the ongoing struggle of the ummah towards democracy. The chapter explains that the re-examination of Iraqi Islamic history and politics not only raises a specific challenge to the received dichotomy between Western democracy and Oriental despotism, and reveals new and exciting ways of thinking about democracy in Iraq today.
