The events with Turkey have crystallized something inside me that was not so clear before. I hate Islamists more than I love democracy.
Of course I’d prefer liberal democracy over just about everything, but that does not seem likely in the middle east. Some of the bastions of relatively moderate Islamic democracies are turning more and more Islamist by the year it seems. Bangladesh is producing enough radical Islamists to go out and murder/silence secular public figures in the streets and in their homes with machetes or stabbed to death in the street. The response? Seemingly lukewarm from the public, there are a smattering of trials, but even the police and investigators have come under assault, one woman was murderer in front of her daughter, not because she was secular, but because she was the wife of a superintendent investigating some of the murders.
Shift to Turkey. From what I’ve read the military was set up in part by a previous dictator, Ataturk, to safeguard the democracy against Islamist forces. They were charged with stepping in if some Islamist leaders went too far and tried to peel back the secular democracy he established. And it worked, several coups have been engaged in over the years, and each time power was shifted back with elections to less Islamized factions.
Until These past few days. After years of consolidation and building of of his own Islamic infused police force that acted as a second army of sorts, years of jailing journalists and dissidents, removing judges and anyone who did not go along with the new Sultan Erdogan, he has been gifted a failed coup on a platter. He has all the justification he needs to purge the last safeguard of secular democracy in Turkey. As a result, they will get more and less democracy. The Islamists will raise Erdogan up as the new dear leader, freedom of speech and religion and thought and dissent will be radically stamped out. A new tyranny will rise in the ashes of the imperfect edifice that was built so long ago.
I find all of this incredibly tragic. It’s like the second fall of Constantinople. If the results of democracy = Islamic theocracy, because that is how much of a rotted out husk of beliefs and values the population is made of, I’d rather take a more benign dictatorship.
Am I alone? What would you all choose?
Just in general, I’d choose (ick) a secular dictator over any religious dictator. The secular guy is after something I comprehend: naked power. The religious guy is after something more intrusive: my soul.
The secular dictator will take my money and make rules against criticism.
But the religious guy is going to make me attend his church, pray, fast, eat only his choice of foods, maybe get the end of my penis cut off, etc. He wants my soul.
Secular dictator; “Islamic democracies” wouldn’t stay democratic for long, nor do the ones that sell themselves as democracies, like Iran, have a good record.
I don’t care which religion the country’s leaders and/or majority population are, so long as they’re happy to let others worship or not as we will, and do not insist on imposing their religious strictures on everybody. But this applies as much to “do not make any business on Sundays!” (pamphlet from an extreme-left Spanish party, seen this past weekend; apparently they don’t realize the hospitality industry exists) as to what to wear or what professions are people allowed to be.
I’m hardly a fan of the Mullahs, but while I’m no fan of the Iranian government, Saddam’s Iraq was far worse his people were far more terrified of him than most Iranians were of the either Ayatollah.
Granted, it’s very debatable as to which governments are “secular” in the Middle East and which aren’t.
Saddam would have had you tortured and killed for saying he was “secular” and people will notice Erdogan’s personal nemesis, who he’s demanding the US extradite to him is a Muslim cleric.
I’d also wish the OP had chosen to explain what exactly he meant by an “Islamic” democracy.
I do not think that such a thing as an “Islamic Democracy” (or any religious democracy for that matter) can exist. Religion is inherently undemocratic. That is why the constitutions of most countries we consider democratic contain safeguards to prevent the establishment of a state religion.
On the other hand I also believe that the “benign dictatorship” is a myth. A dictatorial rule may *appear *benign to those who manage to stay on its good side. I am sure there were those who honestly believed Batista, Franco, Pinochet and even Saddam to be benign.
To answer the OP: As much as I dislike Erdogan, I do not believe that the rule of a military junta would have been a better alternative.
What are you trying to tell me? Every place where a vote happens is a democracy? The Pope gets elected by the conclave of cardinals. So he is a democratic leader? Hardly.
The votes you have mentioned all have one thing in common: They are very limited in what they actually can change, because they happen within the framework of a religious dogma that by its very definition is considered unchangeable.
Democracy doesn’t require diverse people or viewpoints. If a country is 99% Muslim and votes (secret ballot, no voter fraud) to impose sharia law, then that’s democratic.
A democracy doesn’t have to be Western, liberal or benign.
All you’re saying there, really, is that religion is inherently undemocractic in the sense that science is inherently undemocratic, or literary criticism is inherently undemocratic or . . . well, you can multiply the examples yourself.
All these are various forms of quest for some kind of truth, and what they all have in common is that the validity of any truth-claim doesn’t, ultimately, depend on whether the claim is popular or not. A scientific assertion may be true or it may not be true, but scientists don’t test that by putting it to a popular vote. They have other ways of evaluating the truth of their claims; ways which they consider to be superior. And the same goes for those who advance religious or philosophical claims. Hell, even the Straight Dope doesn’t attempt to combat ignorance with a series of opinion polls.
I think in the present context the question is this: if someone appeals to religious values to cast light on political questions or structures, are they going to end up with an undemocratic polity? You can, obviously, because we know that undemocratic theocracies exist. On the other hand, you don’t have to; Christian democracy is a dominant political ideology in Europe, and so far it has failed to subvert democracy to any noticeable extent.
And we can see the same range of outcome when we look at what happens when people appeal to secular values or ideologies. Certainly, appeal to secular principles of the Enlightenment has given us the admirable example of the United States, but it also gave us the Terror in revolutionary France, and Stalin, and Mao.
It’s true that most Islamic democracies are, well, not quite up to snuff as democracies. They tend to be unstable, and democracy is often limited and/or fragile. On the other hand, this is also true of a great many democracies which are not Islamic (or not religious at all) and if we are honest the common factor may be limited socioeconomic development or regional instability or postcolonial disruption or a host of other factors.
Indeed it does not. But it has to uphold the Demos (the people) as the absolute ruler. A religion cannot do that. No religion provides the people with the authority to steer the course of society. The law is enshrined in religous texts and must not be changed. That is not democracy.
Absolutely. Science is not democratic. It does not have to be. Nor does it claim to be.
But in a democracy the people are entirely free to apply or ignore the findings of science. (And they do that a lot. :()
What country would be an example for “Christian democracy”? As far as I know most predominantly Christian states have established secular democracies. That is: Even though the majority of the people are of the Christian faith, the government is not bound by the words of the Bible nor does it have to answer to any religous authority.
Hiker - Denmark is, at least in the very most literal of senses, a “Christian Democracy”, given that it is a constitutional monarchy with Protestant Christianity enshrined as the state religion by law.
That said, despite not having an actual separation between church and state, it is among the most de facto secular countries in the world - among other things because while Christianity is enshrined as the state religion, the church is very much subordinate to the state, and religious freedom is completely and entirely protected.
Saddam was first and last a Baathist, who were always suspicious of religion in politics.
And lets have a look at Iran, Khomeini and the mullahs have presided over an era which has seen Iranian women literacy rates go from about a third to near universal, women make up over half of all university grads and the mullahs actually liberalized divorce and family law.
In Pakistan, Zia-ul-Haq (whose legacy is generally poisonous) actually saw the first large scale movement of ordinary working class women into professional life. He is the one who appointed the first female heads of departments and civil service chiefs and judges. He also managed to get the largest investments in womens health, ever.
For some reason, most westerners seem to see women’s empowerment through the lens of sexual mores and nothing else.
The important thing is, does the islamic democracy have a constitution and a bill of rights that guarantees basic human rights, and a tradition of rule of law, including seperation of powers? If so then I’d rather have the islam democracy please.
Indonesia has been mostly democratic since Suharto left power in 2008. It does have separation of powers and a constitution, and officially has freedom of religion. It’s currently 87% muslim. It’s by no means perfect, corruption is rampant and there’s been killings of christian minorities in various parts at times. Still I’d rather live in Indonesia any day than in Saddam’s Iraq or Syria under Assad before the current civil war.
Which country on earth has the Government formally bound by a “religious authority”. I am sure you can name some; and explain their constitutional status.
The Supreme Leader of Iran ( Rahbar) has a hell of lot more power than you’re admitting to, and has been known to use it. There’s a big difference between a constitutional monarchy like the UK where the Queen never actually uses her reserve powers and the situation in Iran.
The Iranian constitution, while containing democratic elements, is mostly that of a theocracy. Among other things it mandates that the most powerful office, that of the supreme leader of Iran, can only be held by an Islamic cleric.
In practice, the council of guardians has and uses the power to approve candidates in democratic elections to exclude reform-minded candidates from the process, thus removing the option to decide on the political course of the state from the people who should be the sole sovereign in a democracy.