ABSTRACT

As I explained in the Introduction, Islam, in the modern context, represented in a mosaic of a multifaceted Muslim world, is facing a transitional historical crisis. A period of civilizational recession, cultural vulnerability and political instability is overwhelming the Muslim world now and for centuries. Nevertheless, the emergence of an Islamic model of Renaissance, which always presented itself as a guaranteed premise of prosperity and success, characterized almost all the national and transnational reform projects inMuslim countries. At the same time, a challenge was always represented in “another” civilizational and cultural alternative, which is less religion-centered but highly developed. This posed an important question on how far an Islamic project can be dependent on, or entirely independent from, a non-Islamic successful model. Democracy constitutes the core element in this challenge having proved its efficiency on a global level as the best political system that can promote social coherence, stability, progress, prosperity and other values that most Muslim countries lack today. This chapter is about the classical and modern Islamic political interpretations

and their relevance to the challenge of democracy. In the previous chapter, I made an attempt to locate Islamic diachrony in the context of modern social and political discussions by focusing on the Islamic perspective of pluralism. We could see that the Islamic norms concerning pluralistic and multicultural values have their universal elements beyond the peculiarities of faith and creed. On the one hand, this was necessary to clarify the boundaries of the “religious” and the “human” in the Islamic view of the mundane “otherness.” On the other hand, it was also crucial to form the basis for the discussed issues in this chapter. Primarily, as the term democracy is celebrated as a Western value and still inspires many writings in the West,1 any discussion on the compatibility or incompatibility of Islam with democracy involves, a priori, the issue of Islam and “otherness.” In the second place, democracy, as a political process and a social collective culture, presupposes pluralistic values and acceptance of otherness on multiple levels. Thus, moving now to the discussions of the Islamic discourse on democracy, the other modern and contemporary challenge facing the Muslim world, one can focus more on Islamic political thought and the institutionalization of a potential Islamic state on democratic principles.