Dear Mustayeen Ahmed Khan: 

In your marathon counterpoint to Muhammad Ahsan Khan’s position that Democracy and Islam make very strange bedfellows indeed, you demonstrate a deep respect for early Islamic history and the history of the world in general. Your approach is highly intellectual and hard-nosed, yet it also demonstrates a lack of insight that may help us resolve why neither Democracy nor Religion of any kind has succeeded in making our world a better place for all humanity to live peacefully with one another since the dawn of creation. 

It appears that Muhammad Ahsan Khan is quite well known to you from before, since you say “his writing [‘as usual’] appears to be a collection of [‘anti-Islamic’] populistic ideas [and that] he’s fond of playing to the galleries.” Be that as it may, I wish to bring to your attention some salient features of this discussion on why democracy has failed to take root in Islamic countries.  

Quite simply, the paradigms of Islam and those of Democracy remain diametrically opposed and therefore cancel each other out. In our contemporary setting today, Islam and Democracy are actually busy killing each other off. In my view, both Democracy and Islam are products of human failings since the beginning of time and both systems succumb, as it were, to the greater force of will beyond one’s control.  

Have you ever wondered, I ask you, what prevents human beings of every colour and stripe from abandoning their intellectual crusades and their murderous tendencies to destroy each other in the name of God? In other words, what prevents us from getting to a point from where one may glimpse the light of reason, truth, or self-realization? 

I don’t think the crux of this discussion is whether Democracy existed “in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan” six centuries before the birth of Christ, or whether Islam was there when Adam opened his eyes to behold Eve in that perfumed garden up there; no sir. We are simply exploring why democracy has failed to take root in Muslim [or Islamic] countries.  

So bear with me, please, because escaping into the past (by reciting chapter and verse from history) or into the future (by reciting chapter and verse from religion) is not going to resolve our problem in the present moment, in the eternal now. Please tell me what all this means to you as a well-read intellectual. Do you see any sense in what I am trying to show you in this moment? 

I am surprised that on the one hand you say that Plato favoured a “government by the philosophers” as the best of a bad choice, just as everyone on this forum is philosophizing why Democracy has failed to take root in Muslim lands. On the other hand, you say, “Modern psychology [teaches] that the intelligence quotient of a group of people (mob), is always low [among] those who deify Democracy and the ‘sovereign will of the people’.” I say we’re dealing here with our own inherent ignorance amid a sea of what you call “institutionalized opposition.”  

Finally, you suggest there should be some standard criteria for notions of “sovereign people, sovereign power, sovereign laws” because, in your own words, “A constantly changing standard is irrational, unjust and an outrage to common sense.” Against all this you suggest “the great advantage of Divine Laws is that they are immutable,” whereas “People’s laws . . . change and you have no fixed reference in a society,” and “What if [tomorrow] the people decide to decriminalize bestiality or incest?” 

As someone who is free of any romantic moonshine about the moral charms of primitive history or the glories of paradise in God’s future kingdom, I ask you to tell me who told you that “Divine Laws are immutable” and also why human beings are so full of nostalgia for a past that is dead and a future that will never be born unless we change the way we think. Heaven and Hell, after all, are nothing more and nothing less than states of mind. 

Rashid Mughal

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