Dear Mr. Mustayeen Khan (Reference to your Post #92):

 Kindly allow me to be part of your dialogue with Mr. Ahsan Khan.

 The discussion “Why has democracy not taken root in most Muslim countries” seemed to have faded away. Thank you for your input to rekindle it with some ideas; not necessarily all of them are new but still deserve attention and analysis as we come across them repeatedly.  

The history of democracy, which you have dug out of civilizational antiquity, is hard to meaningfully connect with the topic under discussion because humans can no longer benefit from a debate, who invented the wheel? The same is true of democracy also. The social experiments and experience has brought humans to the point where the right of ruling on hereditary basis has unanimously been knocked down.

 I think you understood democracy utterly differently when you called it ‘Institutionalized Opposition’. Democracy is institutionalization of human ideas of collective living and making laws as opposed to divinely ordained laws for humans. And sure, democracy does not always get it right. It may also mean failure like other humans endeavours. But this is a point of celebrating human failures because seeds of human future lie in the flexibility of human ideas and not in the rigidity of so called “Divine Laws”. The divine law has been failing humans for no less than past 10,000 years that history has recorded so candidly.

 Let me try to root out one misconception that all Islamist including yourself, knowingly or unknowingly, put forward as an argument to rationalize “Why has democracy not taken root in most Muslim countries”. You proposed, “Islam has nothing to do with it”. It appears quite a few times in your post in bold letters.

 Islam has nothing to do with it. Well, it is not the whole truth. Islam has a lot to do with it if not all. First, please consider that Islam does not and cannot exist in a vaccuum. Any attempt to distance Islam from Muslims is not going to fly well. Muslims are the face of Islam and nothing else; period! If Islam was carved out by a divine hand and not meant to be subservient to Muslims’ ill-will, where is the power of moving finger of God to get the Islam the way it was intended to be? I think you need to reconsider the very fundamentals of your ideas because Islam (or any other religion for that matter) was not as divine as you conceive it to be.

 I think you make your best point in Para #14. You wrote: “I firmly believe that the primordial reason that there is no democracy in the Third World Countries, be they Muslim or non-Muslim states, is the suppression of the intellectual development of the masses”. How true! Have you ever thought though, what are reasons for suppression of intellect other than theory of colonialism, which has definite merits? You are also right about some other parts of the world also where there is no stable democracy yet. But lets keep our focus on Muslim countries for now to stay close to the topic.

 You know that Muslims have been the rulers in large part of the world for almost one thousand years prior to buckling to colonialism. The real question is what was the reason for suppression of intellectual development during pre-colonial period in the Muslim world? Please let me know if you think that divine-Islam (or any other religion) has seeds of rationalism and enlightenment in it for intellectual development.

 With kind regards. 

Tahir