ISLAM THE BASICS

DEMOCRACY AND ISLAM
 
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Webster's New World Dictionary
 
  1. government in which people hold the power either directly or
  through elected representatives; rule by the ruled 2. a country,
  state, etc. with such government 3. majority rule 4. the principle
  of the equality of rights, opportunity, and treatment, or the
  practice of this principle 5. the common people, esp. as the
  wielders of power
 
George Kennan, Policy Planning Study 23
 
  ... we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its
  population ... Our real task in the coming period is to devise a
  pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this
  position of disparity ... To do so, we will have to dispense with
  all sentimentality ... We should cease to talk about vague and ...
  unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living
  standards, and democratization. (Written in 1948, for the U.S.
  Dept. of State, Mr. Kennan was awarded The Peace Prize of the
  German Book Trade.)
 
Howard Zinn, A People's History of The United States
 
  We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
  equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
  unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the
  pursuit of Happiness. . . Some Americans were clearly omitted from
  this circle of united interest drawn by the Declaration of
  Independence: Indians, black slaves, women. . . . . . the reality
  behind the Declaration of Independence was that a rising class of
  important people needed to enlist on their side enough Americans
  to defeat England, without disturbing too much the relations of
  wealth and power that had developed over 150 years of colonial
  history. . .
 
  At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton suggested a President
  and Senate chosen for life. The Convention did not take his
  suggestion. But neither did it provide for popular elections,
  except in the case of the House of Representatives, where the
  qualifications were set by the state legislatures (which required
  property-holding for voting in almost all the states), and
  excluded women, Indians, slaves.
 
Noam Chomsky, Secrets, Lies and Democracy
 
  A society can have the formal trappings of a democracy and not be
  democratic at all. The Soviet Union, for example had elections.
 
  The US obviously has a formal democracy with primaries, elections,
  referenda, recalls, and so on. But what is the content of this
  democracy in terms of popular participation?
 
  Over long periods, the involvement of the public in planning or
  implementation of public policy has been quite marginal. This is a
  business run society.
 
Karen Armstrong, A History of God
 
  Henceforth women were marginalized and became second-class
  citizens in the new civilizations of the Oikumene. Their position
  was particularly poor in Greece, for example - a fact which
  Western people should remember when they decry the patriarchical
  attiudes of the Orient. The democratic ideal did not extend to the
  women of Athens, who lived in seclusion and were despised as
  inferior beings.
 
HRH, The Prince of Wales, Islam And The West
 
  Islamic countries like Turkey, Egypt, and Syria gave women the
  vote as early as Europe did its women -- and much earlier than in
  Switzerland! In those countries women have long enjoyed equal pay,
  and the opportunity to play a full working role in their
  societies. The rights of Muslim women to property and inheritance,
  to some protection if divorced, and to the conducting of business,
  were rights prescribed by the Quran twelve hundred years ago, even
  if they were not everywhere translated into practice. In Britain
  at least, some of these rights were novel even to my grandmother's
  generation!
 
Indian Ambassador M. N. Masud, Understanding Islam
 
  If true democracy is not confined to the form or model of
  government but is the way of life of a people wherein man is
  treated with respect and given dignity, irrespective of what he is
  or what he is not, then Islamic society, from the very birth of
  Islam, has been nearest to the ideal, much nearer to it than has
  been, perhaps, any other society in the recorded history of man.