In “Morsi’s Tactical Retreat” in FrontPage this morning, I discuss why Morsi hasn’t really given up his dictatorial aspirations:
All
the pundits whose credibility was on the line for their uncritical
hailing of the “Arab Spring” uprisings can breathe a sigh of relief:
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi has, according to Fox News,
“agreed to rescind the near-absolute power he had granted himself.”
Well, that’s a relief! Democracy in Egypt is saved! The “Arab Spring”
really was about democracy and pluralism after all, and this proves it!
All is well! Isn’t it?Actually, no. As everyone knows except Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, James “Clueless”
Clapper, The Muslim Brotherhood is dedicated to imposing the rule of
Islamic law in Egypt and around the world. And as is evidenced by the
fact that the two foremost Sharia states in the world today, Saudi
Arabia and Iran, are both authoritarian regimes with dismal human rights
records, Sharia is much more compatible with dictatorship than it is
with republican, representative government.That makes it likely that while Morsi has had to retreat for the
moment, he has not given up his goal or changed his overall objective:
to turn Egypt into a Sharia state in which one is not free to do
anything but serve Allah.The Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, however, the former face of the notorious
(and failed) Ground Zero Mosque project, begs to differ. He wrote
recently in The Daily Beast: “Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi rode to power
at the head of the Muslim Brotherhood with the promise that he would
create a government based on Sharia, the Islamic law. So it is ironic
that by granting himself sweeping powers,
including immunity for his decisions against judiciary appeal, he has
violated one of the central principles of Sharia: no one is above the
law.”Rauf said that “for the past six years, I have been working with some
of the leading Muslim scholars to create a Sharia Index to determine
what an authentic, tradition-based Islamic state ought to look like.”
The conclusion? “The majority of our scholars concluded that a
representative democracy, which can determine the collective will of the
people, is the best contemporary method of determining God’s will.”In this, however, as so often in his case, Rauf was being less than
honest. The primary evidence for this is historical: Rauf’s scholars
supposedly concluded that “a representative democracy, which can
determine the collective will of the people” was the best expression of
Sharia government, and yet never in the history of Islam from its
beginnings to the present day was a Sharia state ever a representative
democracy. Turkey has since the end of World War I been the closest
thing to a representative democracy that Muslim countries have, but it
only became one when, under the rule of Kemal Ataturk, it decisively and
explicitly rejected Sharia for a Western model of governance.Has it just been bad luck, or some kind of coincidence, or some
combination of malignant forces (Zionists!) that has prevented Muslim
states from forming representative democracies? Or have they failed to
do so because Sharia itself tends toward authoritarianism? Certainly
Muhammad is said to have counseled what appears to be unconditional
obedience to rulers: “You should listen to and obey your ruler even if
he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin”
(Bukhari 9.89.256). Nor is he recorded as having set up any kind of
voting system or representational government for the nascent Muslim
community — and as he is the supreme model for emulation for Muslims
(cf. Qur’an 33:21), that is a decisive point.Rauf likewise doesn’t give any hint of the fact that Sharia, in a
systematic and thoroughgoing manner, denies equality of rights to women
and non-Muslims. Anything close to “representative democracy” that
adhered to the classic tenets of Sharia would limit the voice of both
groups in the government, and thereby undercut its claim to be a
representative democracy in the first place. Muslim men may be accorded
some consultative or even supervisory role in ensuring the ruler’s
adherence to Sharia, but that in itself does not a representative
democracy make.