Liberty, Democracy in the World of Islam?
The people speak. What they are saying is becoming a passionate adage for a new age of social and political yearning in the Middle East and North Africa. Lagging, in fact, much of the rest of the world. Which has already turned itself over in large part to emulating the West in achieving for their various countries some measure of what we term democracy. A wish of the people to govern themselves.Not as the ancient Greeks envisioned such governments of the people by a rotating roster of citizens taking turns in administering government city-states. But in measured opportunities to cast ballots in elections that will reflect the peoples' choices of individuals tasked with the responsibility to govern on behalf of the people. Reflecting, in large part, by the measure of their governance, the peoples' wishes.
The upheaval taking place with surprising and surpassing speed in countries across the Middle East and North Africa has caught the world off guard, just as it has their leaders who doubtless felt they could govern forever with scant dissent, readily and easily tamped down. A population that has known nothing but a leaden hand of overweening might with complete disregard for their well-being can little envisage change.
But trample on peoples' dignity, expectations and rights to a truly unsupportable degree and the human soul resists, eventually finding strength in numbers. A situation which doubtless would never have erupted had not the means to communicate their universal dissatisfaction arisen through modern technology modestly accessible even by the indigent. Gather enough people together in one place with one collective thought and the many become one.
And mobs, which result, are unpredictable, threatening of order, leading to fearful chaos. They cannot be ignored. They can be attacked. But the same eyes of communication that enabled the people who became a ravening mob of outraged human sensibilities, also permit the outside world to become aware of what is occurring. And a leader that brings his tyrannical wrath down on his people incurs global contempt and censure.
Can, then, a region of the world with its long history of dictatorships and a downtrodden people, fighting one another for life-sustaining scraps, convert itself into anything approximating democracy? Is it indeed democracy that these people seek, even while clamouring for it? Or is it the freedom to live as human beings are meant to live, without the inexorable, resolute and sometimes-violent militancy of leaders intent on enriching themselves and maintaining power at the expense of civil empowerment?
Democracy does not automatically bring with it the hoped-for miracle of instant wealth through a fairer distribution of a nation's resources or employment opportunities. It does not confer on the new society, revelling in its new state of 'democracy', a universal civility that will give comfort to the minorities among them, the others, despised, of different ethnicity, religion, gender, or ideology.
People who have absorbed the lessons of their leaders to hold others in contempt will continue to do so. It served well as a diversion, to claim that the evil presence of others conspired to cheat the people of their rightful due. It will only be the majority 'freedom' in their version of democracy that will prevail. If it manages to survive the birth pangs, it will hardly be recognizable from the kind that exists in Western-style democracies.
Islam is not compatible with true democracy. For in Islam every minutest aspect of daily living is prescribed; conformity of adherence to Islamic precepts and its precise mode of conduct is demanded of the true believer. To do otherwise is to demonstrate that one is not prepared to submit to Islam, which demands, above all else, utter, total submission.
Labels: Africa, Human Rights, Islam, Middle East, Particularities/Peculiarities, Political Realities, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, March 03, 2011
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