Thursday 18 September 2014

Islam doesn't allow separation of mosque and state

Allaa Al Aswany writes interestingly in "Is Egypt doomed to autocracy?"
He quotes a professor thus:
A professor of Middle East studies at the University of Haifa, David Bukay, argued that “the Islamic world is not ready to absorb the basic values of modernism and democracy” because “individual rights and freedoms inherent in democracy do not exist in a system where Islam is the ultimate source of law.” For his part, the Iraqi intellectual Abdel Khaleq Hussein considered that Arab-Islamic culture imposed a pattern of patriarchal relations beneath the absolute authority of the father figure, who is also the tribal chief. In this view, the Arab state was an extension of the tribe.
Quite. But then Al Aswany goes into an argument of equivalence.  That Europe also had its autocrats, but got over them.
So, we are are invited to infer, Islam could also move from dictatorship to democracy.  The (in)famous "Islamic reformation".
The fatal flaw in this argument is that Islam has no concept of separation of mosque and state.  And to even suggest it is to risk death for apostasy or blasphemy in most of the Islamic world.