Islam and Democratization in Asia By Shiping Hua

Islam can co-exist with the democratic process, and by highlighting the presence of democracy in several Muslim countries and the presence of Muslims in the West and in other places like India where democracy is well-established, have drawn attention to the fact that Islam and Muslims can thrive in democratic societies. ⁴

The challenge is not to argue that Islam and democracy are compatible—that debate is settled, although its conclusions are not widely acknowledged. The challenge for Muslim theorists is to go a step further and show how an Islamic democracy may be conceived and what its constitutive principles and architectural features will be. In this brief chapter, I will seek to approach democracy from within the Islamic context and describe the broad principles of Islamic democracy. In the debate on the compatibility of Islam and democracy, the idea of democracy has often been taken for granted and treated as a stable and uncontested idea; it is Islam that is approached from outside-in with a view to interrogate it to ascertain its ability to confirm to democratic principles. In this essay I shall adopt an inside-out approach. I will simply articulate what I believe should be the Islamic structure of governance and readers will be able to recognize its fundamentally democratic nature.

The Myth of Secularism and the Need for the Islamic State

Political theory inspired and influenced by European enlightenment has taken secularism as a necessary and uncontested condition for good governance. Even though this may or may not be empirically true, most Western ideologues assert the secular nature of Western polities while simultaneously taking the virtues of secularism for granted. As a Muslim intellectual living in the West, researching and teaching political theory and political philosophy, I have always marveled at the durability of the idea of secularism. For a civilization that boasts considerable sophistication in most areas, to assume that politics and religion constitute two separate realms or that the two can be separated is uncharacteristically naïve. This belief, not in separation of Church and State, but in the