Subuhi Ansari has shown us the aesthetics of an open marketplace of ideas, as in the Athens made famous by that king of philosophers, Socrates (“The unexamined life is not worth living”) and his disciple Plato—the teacher of Aristotle—whose system of thought has had a profound influence on Christian theology and Western philosophy.  

Compare the universality of those minds with what we are witnessing in Muslim countries today, where two of the most powerful influences appear to be the rantings of the racist Maulana Maududi or the edicts of Salman Rushdie’s unsuccessful fatwa-wallah murderer Ayatollah Khomeini and his henchmen.  

I shan’t even mention the scourge of Wahhabism or the interpretationism of that superficial corpus of learning called the Hadith. 

What I do wish to share with you is something to advance Ms Ansari’s idea of keeping the flow of ideas alive in order to advance the evolution of the Muslim ummah as part of an open, egalitarian, cosmopolitan society without any conflict of ideas as suggested by the parochial oxymoron “Islamic democracy.”  

Like some others on this forum, Ms Ansari maintains “an Islamic country cannot be a democracy . . . because of the religion.” 

By examining the esoteric teaching of Socrates, we cannot escape the conclusion that Muslims have to resolve within themselves the problem of participating in personal democracy (as in a regulated life through self-governance, self-discipline, etc.) vis-à-vis autocratism (as in being compelled by religious edicts and motives from the ivory towers of a Muslim State).  

Having said that, the onus is on the individual, both you and me, dear reader, to take up the challenge to accept the things we cannot change, to change the things we can change, and, in the words of St Francis of Assissi, to cultivate a personal wisdom to know the difference.  

Endlessly narrating history does not make us any wiser. History is much like Religion; neither Religion nor History can do anything to change our plight—just as Islam (an abstract idea) is helpless to do anything for Muslims who simply parrot those words in Arabic. 

Rashid Mughal 

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