Can Islam accommodate democracy?, Islamic Ideology ,

Islamic Ideology

Can Islam accommodate democracy?

By Benjamin R. Barber

These arguments may in their polemical zealotry beyond rational rebuttal, but Professor Habermas would I think prefer that they be rationally confronted and refuted. That is certainly my view if we wish to get on with the difficult work of crafting democracy in societies that take religion seriously - nearly all societies. I want to offer six straightforward arguments, some historical, some sociological, and some philosophical - all reasonable and commonsensical in the broader sense of rational - that suggest why it is absurd to think that Islam cannot accommodate democracy or that democracy cannot accommodate Islam. A: It is not Islam per se, but religion tout court that stands in some tension with secularism and with democracy - a tension that is healthy rather than unhealthy in a free society. Augustine's Two Cities and Pope Gelasius's two swords speak to a world of the body and a world of the spirit, of the temporal and the eternal, the worldly and the ecclesiastic. These dualisms do not arise out of theology but inform theology with the deep logic of duality that defines our being. The opposition of morality and politics, and of divine or natural and positive law, is transferred to the opposition of church and state that produces troublesome but healthy tensions for societies everywhere.

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