Islam, or nations that are theocratically ruled by militant majorities of Muslim populations, are not democracies.  I have just finished reading an article, After Jihad, in the issue #1 Fall 2003 of the NYU Alumni Magazine.  It was written by Noah Feldman author of After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy.  This article is a piece that is taken out of context of the book and we are left with recitations of the notion that Islamic nations that are not democracies in the American and European tradition, will eventually be democracies as a logical consequence of the American model of a super-power.  That super-power is challenged by the Arab masses resenting American cultural imperialism as well as the American might that supports Israel.

What is missing from this simplistic sample of the book, are history and religion.  History teaches that the development of Arab and non-Arab Muslim nations has proceeded through a non-democratic process of dissolution of an Ottoman imperium that had a tradition of autocratic suppression of independent thinking and submission to authority. Thinking, out of the box of K’uranic sudras, was not allowed unless that thinking was conformist. There were few democratic expressions in revolt against temporal or spiritual leaders in Muslim lands.  There is no tradition of being far from homelands so that self-rule and self-determination could develop. The lock on people’s minds in poor lands is a theocracy where poorly educated fundamentalist local preachers incite the populace – not against the injustices of their own society – but against the far off American super-power, that supports oppression against Palestinians.

These people have a distorted history seen through the lens of belief that Israel, with the help of the United States, occupied Muslim lands. Israel does not help its own cause by building a wall that includes settlements of Jews in “Palestinian” areas. Even when it is understandable that Israel retaliates against the “suicide” bomber who is a terrorist and murders innocent people, the popular cry is “Death to the Jews”, Death to Israel and Death to America.  These people have no real understanding as well as a distorted history of their own misery.  Therefore, they strike out against the clearly designated Satan and Infidels.  The tradition of Jihad goes directly to Mohammad who made a holy war against pagan Arabs. The Hegira, or holy journey from Medina to Mecca, is nothing less than the first of a series of wars that enveloped Jews and Christians and gave them no choice but to submit to Islam. Where these did not submit they were accorded, as “People of the Book”, second-class citizenship who must pay special taxes.

These Muslim countries, these lands where democracy is suspect in the same way the American cultural invasion is resented, are not democracies.  The people do not take votes to decide what course their countries will follow.  They are mobs on the streets that some airheads think are expressing a democratic will by rioting against policies of the democracies.  The mobs of barely literate followers of fundamentalist conservative religionists are not democratically empowered.  They are clearly the “mobocracy” of which our conservative forefathers were afraid.  To speak of Islam and democracy is to take a great leap of sophomoric confidence that the future will be played out in the favor of democracy.

That is what it is all about; SUBMISSION to the will of Mullahs and Muftis rather than the will of the people. Their fundamentalism inflames the tinderbox of third world countries.  Islam does not and may not choose democracy.