May 15, 2007

THE ONLY REASON TO HAVE DEMOCRACY IS TO SECURE LIBERTY:

The struggle to advance democracy in the Arab world: Democratic progress is slow. Promoting liberty and freedom may be more fruitful. (John Hughes, 5/16/07, CS Monitor)

Installation of democracy of the Jeffersonian character is unlikely. Where reform is budding, the outcome may be freer structures of representational government, but not necessarily patterned upon those of the United States or the West. They are more likely to incorporate local customs and traditions. Islamic countries would probably develop governmental systems that pay heed to religious beliefs. Afghanistan and Iraq are examples.

Considering the speed at which secular democracies are dying, that's a very good thing. Indeed, it's why Islam has a future.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 15, 2007 8:44 PM
Comments

Yes, it is the great hope for the Islamic world. But it is also the greatest danger to the Islamic public square.

Until the faith as a whole learns to deal with the nutjobs (e.g., the Wahabbis, the Taliban, the Mookies and Nasrallahs and Khameinis), the addition of religious toxin to the body politic is just a muzzein call away.

Posted by: jim hamlen at May 15, 2007 10:40 PM

It was the nutjobs who made the Anglo-American model. If Islam didn't have Cromwells it would be time to worry.

Posted by: oj at May 16, 2007 6:38 AM

The "nutjobs" written of are following the Boxerite path of ressentment and blind reaction, the same psychopathology which propped up Communism all those years.

The spiritual jailhouse is so sick, so disordered, that cultural diffusion makes its collapse inevitable. The nutjobs see this and they lash out.

Cromwell had the Gospels; the nutjobs have what the Holy Father warned us of at Regensburg. They are bereft of the institutions to shepherd their reformation. Cynical exploitation of the religious impulse to prop up worldly power was their origin; it has been their existence, up to the present day. Should they reform themselves out of it, they will cease to exist.

Posted by: Lou Gots at May 16, 2007 9:12 AM

The Koran suffices, though the Gospels include the key ingredient. We're just suffusing Sunni Islam with it as we did Judaism--Shi'ism already contains it.

Posted by: oj at May 16, 2007 12:24 PM

That's it. You have it. What's the matter is that the jailkeepers see it coming as well, and that they are not going quietly.

Posted by: Lou Gots at May 16, 2007 1:39 PM

They aren't going. Just being Reformed.

Posted by: oj at May 16, 2007 7:02 PM
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