When you tell an anti-democracy Muslim ideologue that it is entirely feasible to enshrine the Shair’ah in the country’s constitution and that you can restrict the legislative powers of the government within the boundaries of Islamic law, they tell you , “well, that is not what democracy is; that would be something different”. What that actually means is that they did not have any idea about the variations and flexibility of democratic theory, and have no concept about how existing democracies work.
There is no democracy anywhere in the world that I know of that operates the way they think it does, i.e., “whatever the majority wants, the majority gets”. Democracies all operate within the framework of the rule of law, and under constitutional restrictions. If a law is proposed that violates the constitution, it is immediately discarded. If anyone wants to change the constitution, it is extremely difficult to do; and indeed, amending the constitution is itself only allowed by the constitution itself; in other words, the constitution does not have to allow amendment if you don’t want it to.
You can easily limit the powers of the legislature to allow lawmakers to only pass regulations that adhere to the Shari’ah or that pertain to matters not dealt with by the Shari’ah (such as allocation of the budget, or the rate of tariffs, or the nutritional requirement of school lunches, and so on). Once you have established the Shari’ah as the constitutional law of the land, most of the work of the legislature will have little or nothing to do with matters of Islamic law; just as today in the United States congress, they hardly ever deal with constitutional issues.
There is no contradiction whatsoever between democracy and the Shari’ah. Anyone who believes there is a conflict neither understands democracy nor, indeed, the Shari’ah itself. Islam has never mandated dictatorship, and it is a slander to suggest that it does.
#عن_الديمقراطية
#on_democracy