...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

And speaking of the Muslim Brothers…: What’s Mo Elmasry’s take on Hassan's and Sayid's ‘hood? Well, back in 2004 he seemed to be trying to distance himself—sort of but not really—from what he concedes is its brand of  “extremism,” calling himself a “Muslim democrat”. And lest you think that’s kind of like calling yourself a “jumbo shrimp,” Mo attempts to show that it’s not:

….The Qur'an does not offer a specific prescription or recipe for an ideal political system. But it does recommend and praise the value of collective decision-making for the common good (42:38). And elsewhere, it elevates collective decision-making from the category of recommended processes to that of obligatory ones (3:159).  

Thus if modern democracy offers a practical methodology for achieving collective decision-making for the common good, it is not only compatible with Islam, but is virtually an Islamic political system with a Greek name.  

Good Muslim politicians who apply sound Qur'anic teaching to their theories should therefore call themselves Muslim democrats.  

In fact, this was the primary thesis of Muslim reformers during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the most important of whom were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad Abdu, and Rashid Rida (an Afghani, an Egyptian, and a Syrian, respectively).  

Each asserted that the values of freedom and democracy in the west are exactly what traditional Islamic teaching defines as justice (adl), right (haqq), collective decision-making (shura) and equality (musawat).  

These Islamic values relate to the rule of freedom and democracy, which consists of imparting justice and rights to the people, and affirming the nation's participation in determining its own destiny.  

Basically, they reframed and reformulated western democratic principles using Islamic terms, harmonizing Islamic teachings with western political, social and economic concepts.  

Other Muslim intellectuals, however, rejected the three western concepts of democracy, secularization, and the nation-state, saying they represented three direct contradictions of Islamic religious and political thought, and relying "for their authority on human rather than divine legislation ... formulated through secular rather than God-given laws."  

This group believed that no one can reconcile the conflicting ideologies of global Islam and western democracy without accepting the latter system's perceived drawbacks of intellectual dishonesty, spiritual blasphemy, and moral cowardice.  

This separationist point of view can be seen in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, a major figure of the Muslim Brotherhood who was executed by Egyptian authorities in 1966.  

Other Muslims thinkers agree with Sayyid Qutb. Among them is Abu'ala al-Mawdudi, a prominent Pakistani scholar. Both Qutb and al-Mawdudi reject the idealization of the three western values of democracy, secularization, and the nation-state, finding them corrupting to the human soul and to society.  

But if you ask me -- and I hope you will -- I am proud to be a Muslim democrat. And that is that.  

Notice how Mo doesn’t criticize Qutb’s “separationist point of view,” but does get in a backhanded swipe at the West’s supposed “intellectual dishonesty,” etc.  Also, how he never once mentions the dreaded “S” word (sharia)--the better to bamboozle us into believing that Islam and democracy are indeed compatible (when, clearly, that’s not the case).

And that last line is a tiny masterpiece of doubletalk: He’s proud to be a "Muslim democrat," but he won't slam the Bros, and he won’t own up to the fact that anyone who “applies sound Quar’anic teachings” is ipso facto following sharia, and therefore cannot conceivably be a “democrat” in any Western understanding of the word. What we have here once again is a wilful failure to communicate the difference between how the West and Islam understand such concepts as “peace,” “human rights,” and “freedom”. And that, to quote Mo, is that.

Posted by: scaramouche at 13:15 | link | comments

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