ABSTRACT
The role of religious belief and practice in explaining the emergence and stability of particular political regimes in general is too large a subject to be discussed here (instead, see Anderson 2006a). Nor is there any need for me to consider Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” argument – as almost all writing on this topic these days seems to do (see Stepan 2000). The question of whether Islam and democracy in general are compatible has been written about mainly in the context of the Middle East, and with the implicit or explicit comparison with Christianity.1 Whether Hinduism is compatible with democracy receives almost no attention at all, even in comparative studies (Anderson 2006a: 197; Stepan 2000).
