To judge a political system look at the hallmarks. Hallmarks matter!

The ideal state to all practising Muslims is one based on quranic law, the Shariah; the ideal state to most Westerners is one based on liberal democracy. The hallmarks of both systems of governance are totally different. It is these different hallmarks which render the two political systems totally and utterly immiscible.

Quranic law is believed by the faithful to derive directly from three sources: the Qur'an, the Muslims' holy book (the first source of jurisprudence); the Sunnah, or the way Prophet Muhammad lived his life; and Ahadith, or the sayings of the Prophet, stating what the Prophet approved. The first two sources are indispensable, and no Muslim is able to practise Islam without reference to them.

It goes without saying that quranic law is prescriptive and rigid in the extreme. Furthermore, according to Muslims, quranic laws are valid for all time. There is little scope for revision in them. Punishments that were stated 1400 hundred years ago are to be the same today. Islamic principles and practises are therefore immutable.

Nothing is too great or too small for the Islamic state to interfere in. The state then decrees actions to be haram (forbidden by Allah), or halal (allowed by Allah). Naturally, all those things that Allah is said to have forbidden become matters of illegaility in a country governed by Shariah law. The personal judgment of the judge, or qaddi, plays little part in the interpretation of laws based on the Shariah: The judge is there not so much to interpret the rigid laws, but to ensure that they be abided by, and that sentences and punishments be meted out according to Shariah law.

All power in an Islamic political system rests with Allah, and filters down through his vice-gerents here on earth. Quite naturally, such political systems are utterly dogmatic. Parliamentary aids to deliberation and negotiation are dispensed with; so the whole system soon resembles a dictatorship. There is no room for party politics in a political system based on quranic law. This is surely one of the main reasons why we have seen very little development of democracy throughout the centuries in countries dominated by Islamic culture. This is really no co-incidence. In fact, even where there are more political parties than one, they can only vie with each other to pass this law based on Islam, or that one. Creative political thought and creative interpretation of policies have little or no place in such societies.

In these societies, forces are soon at work to coerce the people to abide by Allah's laws. This goes for the private sphere as well as the public one. One is told how to live one's life, and one has to abide by these rules and regulations, or risk the consequences, which we all know can be grave indeed.

It goes without saying that in such political systems, television, the Internet, newspapers, journals and magazines are all heavily censored, as are films and videos. The state will decide what the people are allowed to have exposure to. Of course anything that is considered to be in any way subversive to the Islamic state is brutally suppressed.

This goes, too, for morality. Quranic law naturally also interferes with people's morals. This is why we hear of women being stoned to death for adultery, people's hands and feet being cut off for theft, and people being lashed for the drinking of illicit alcohol.

Basically, all things which go against the Qur'an or the Sunnah are declared illegal. The hallmarks of the Islamic way are therefore rigidity, censorship, state interference in private lives, ruthlessness in the application of quranic laws, coercion, intolerance, and fear of falling foul of these Draconian laws. The objectives of an Islamic government are in no way limited; of course, such a government ends up being oppressive.

Contrast this scenario with the liberal democratic way. In our system, laws are passed through parliament as a response to needs. As circumstances and the mores of the public change, so do the laws governing the land. We see a very clear example of this in laws governing homosexuality. Even in my lifetime, homosexuality in the United Kingdom has gone from being a jailable offence to one totally tolerated. Indeed, the UK government has recently passed legislation to enable homosexual couples to marry. Laws governing divorce, too, have changed dramatically in my lifetime. Now, divorce is no longer viewed with great disapproval, and couples seeking one find one very quick and easy to obtain.

In a liberal democracy, all power filters up from beneath, from the ordinary people who vote at the polls. The leader is allowed to govern by virtue of the people's choice. G. H. Sabine, in his excellent book, A History of Political Theory described the hallmarks of a liberal democracy today. He had this to say:

The liberal assumption ... is that government can more reasonably be made a matter of continuous consultation, discussion, and negotiation, with frank acceptance of the fact that a state has to content itself with limited objectives and the employment of limited means. It depends on assuming that, though a human community depends on agreement, one useful form of agreement is just agreement to differ. It depends also on assuming that, given intelligence and good will, a concensus can be reached which provides enough agreement to support collective action, and that the latter can be reasonably effective without being oppressive. It makes the generally empirical assumption that open discussion is after all the best test of an idea, and it has therefore candidly to accept the conclusion that politics is intrinsically controversial and its precedures partisan. For entirely legitimate interests even the most homogeneous society in fact often conflict, and again, empiricism leans toward the position of the Common Law, that letting each side state its own case, even at the cost of bias or a degree of mendacity, is after all the best way of getting at the truth or reaching a fair decision. From this liberal point of view a government is first and foremost a set of institutions designed to regularize public reflection and discussion, and the weighing of contrary claims to the end of evolving a workable policy. A government is undoubtedly an organization of power, and Bentham was quite right when he said that law exists to make people do what they would not do without it. But power exerted after a rational weighing of claims is morally different from naked force, and it may well be more intelligent. For human wisdom consists less in certainty than in a built-in corrigibility. ... They [the members of government] presume on the part of government a fair recognition that it acts on a consensus that is almost never complete, and that in acting on the will of the majority, it has still to keep a decent regard for the minorities it does not represent. They presume that government will give to minorities the right to organize and propagandize , that minorities will observe the line between opposition and subversion, and that both sides will observe self-restraint in contaminating the sources of public information. The system requires sincere acceptance of that fact that no party's tenure of power ought to be perpetual, that an organized opposition is a necessary part of a liberal government, and that only legitimate methods may be used to keep it out of power. It requires a set of constitutional institutions to support, and as far as possible to enforce, this kind of political morality. And above all it requires a community with a strong sense of its own solidarity and concern for the public interest, with a generally educated population, and probably with a degree of experience in working the required institutions.

It is clear to see that the hallmarks of a liberal democracy contrast very sharply with those of a political system based on quranic law; moreover, the immiscibility of the two systems of governance should be obvious to all.

©Mark Alexander