Dear Mr. Javed Chaudry,

Thanks for the response. I will defer responding to your, over-simplified in my opinion, description of terrorism and guilty verdict to British people for bringing Blair back. I am certain that, sooner or later, we will be butting heads on that. Let's confine our discussion to the topic at hand.

While referring to Malaysia, my question was, are there some minimum requirements, a critical mass so to say, for a system to be qualified as a democracy? Your response was that while there are apparent problems with Malaysian model, it takes times for systems to evolve and Malaysia is already a better system than oil kingdoms anyway. I can take those statements and use them to justify the state of affairs in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Egypt. In fact, George W. Bush says identical things about Iraq as well. I understand that systems take time to evolve but if their direction is skewed to begin with, what good is the evolution? Let's stick to Malaysia to further explain my question. The Malaysian constitution's clause 3(1) states that the religion of the Federation is Islam. Now, this may sound like an innocent proclamation but it creates an automatic bias against a large population of Malaysian society that isn't Muslim. It deprives them of the equal footing that is a necessary ingredient of democracy in my mind. Clauses like that, present in almost all constitutions of Muslim countries, declare that the state has a stake in the religious affairs. Such a stake then opens the door to legislations that are biased against the religions that are different from state's religion. For example, in the year 2003, Malaysian government banned possession, publication, distribution and translation of Bible of a particular Christian sect saying that it endangered the peace of the population. This ban was, thankfully, lifted in a short time but the problem is not that particular ban, the problem is state's power to make such laws. Similar challenges appear regularly in Malaysia. Although some legal experts in Malaysia say that the Shariah courts are totally subservient to civil courts, there have been well known incidents of civil courts refusing to intervene because of the fear of disrespecting religious feelings of people. I have the best of the wishes for Malaysian experiment but in the absence of the fundamental requirements of a democracy, I wouldn't call it democracy in-progress.

On to the next point. You wrote,

"Regarding your question about Maududi, yes, this is the same one. He proposed a God centred or a theo-democracy. What I understand from this is that the Quran to be as the basic Charter of Rights and Freedoms."

I mentioned Maududi because the most surprising thing in your presentation at the seminar was your description of him as an advocate for the cause of democracy (you also said the same about Khomeini and whatever is true for Maududi is true for Khomeini as well). Whatever Maududi espoused was no doubt god centered but I have hard time calling it a democracy of any shape or form. A state formulated on Maududi's thoughts will impose special tax on it's non-Muslim populace and issue death sentences on people who convert out of Islam. That's not theo-democracy, it's theocracy plain and simple.

Before you point it out, let me state that I neither know nor care if the 'true' Islam agrees with those laws or not. Your Islam obviously doesn't but Maududi's Islam, and for that matter Islam of almost all the major experts of Islam, finds no difficulty with such laws. This point has been totally lost in this discussion. I like your Islam and I am much more comfortable with it than any other brand but your Islam is diametrically opposite to the ideology of the overwhelming majority of Muslims. If there is to be an "Islamic democracy", it probably will be on the lines of the Islam as envisioned by the mainstream scholarship of Islam; in other words, it won't be a democracy at all. When you say that Islam has nothing against democracy, I wish that you always qualify that with "Islam, as understood by Javed Chaudry". Your Islam consists of Quran and an Arabic dictionary. Maududi's Islam is much more than that. Unfortunately, people like you who maintain rational reasons for their religious beliefs have come,  gone and forgotten but Abu Hanifa and Imam Bukhari are still with us in all their glory and any discussion of compatibility of Islam with democracy must be held keeping that very fact in mind.

In the conclusion, since you have said it repeatedly that Quran is a basic charter of rights and freedom, let me say that that's hardly a concern. If you remember, Tahir Qazi asked a very important question: "will of people for the people or will of god for the people?". The question is whether Quran is immutable or not? Can Quranic laws be suspended if a society deems them inappropriate or is that beyond of the power of the society? Can, for example, an Islamic society formulated on your vision of Islam, change the inheritance laws as specified in Quran and legislate that daughters will have equal share as sons in the estate of the parents if the parents hadn't established a will?

Regards,

Rafi Aamer

May 5, 2006