A Quote by Munira Mirza
There is clearly a conflict within British Islam between a moderate majority that accepts the norms of Western democracy and a growing minority that does not.
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[N]o one's ever been able to show me any difference between democracy and brute force. It's just a majority ganging up on a minority with the minority giving in to avoid getting massacred.
In capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the minority. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the period of transition to communism, will for the first time create democracy for the people, for the majority, along with the necessary suppression of the exploiters, of the minority.
As a matter of fact the majority of the Muslims living in our society are moderate people. But don't make the mistake that even though there are moderate and radical Muslims that there is a moderate or a radical Islam.
The distinction between radical Islam and moderate Muslims is important, as are the differences between Sunnis and Shiites, and between militant and mystical Islam.
There is no radical or moderate Islam. There is only one Islam and that is the Islam from the Koran, the holy book. That is the Islam from Mohammed. There are no two sorts of Islam.
The United States of America or the Western countries, they don't have a problem with Islamists as long as they are neoliberal capitalists and promoting the economic order. And the best example is the petro-monarchies. The petro-monarchies, they don't want democracy. They say there is no democracy in Islam. But they are within the economic system.
Barack Obama's devastating. His policies and his presidency are devastating. But I have this confidence that he's not gonna succeed in total transforming this country into a Western European socialist democracy where the vast majority of the population just lays down and accepts it.
It's not that we have two different kinds of Islam. I acknowledge the fact that we have two kinds of people. There are moderate Muslims and non-moderate Muslims. But there is really only one Islam, and this is the Islam of the life of Muhammad, of the Quran, of the Hadiths, of the Sunnah.
I dont agree with those who think that the conflict is simply between two religions, namely Christianity and Islam... To me, the key conflict is between irrational blind faith and rational, logical minds.
Where it is the majority religion, Islam does not recognize religious freedom, at least not as we understand it. Islam is a different culture. This doesn't mean that it's an inferior culture, but it is a culture that has yet to connect with the positive sides of our modern Western culture: religious freedom, human rights and equal rights for women.
The word "democracy" is a Western word obviously. It doesn't exist in Arabic. Democratiya is a loan word. We in the Western world make the great mistake of assuming that ours is the only form of good government; that democracy means what it means in the Anglo-American world and a few other places in the West, but not many others. Muslims have their own tradition on limited government. Now in Islam, there is a very strong political tradition. Because the different circumstances, Islam is political from the very beginning.
Rules of Order state that ... No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organisation .... but No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become the majority.
Majorities can be wrong, majorities can overrule rights of minorities. If majorities ruled, we could still have slavery. 80% of the population once enslaved 20% of the population. While run by majority rule that is ok. That is very flawed notion of what democracy is. Democracy has to take into account several things - proportionate requirements of people, not just needs of the majority, but also needs of the minority. Majority, especially in societies where the media manipulates public opinion, can be totally wrong and evil. People have to act according to conscience and not by majority vote.
It's perfectly OK that there are certain people who do not accept Islam at all. Therefore, to announce that I am a Muslim can rub some people the wrong way. But my aim is to show that those governments that violate the rights of people by invoking the name of Islam have been misusing Islam. They violate these rights and then seek refuge behind the argument that Islam is not compatible with freedom and democracy. But this is basically to save face. In fact, I'm promoting democracy. And I'm saying that Islam is not an excuse for thwarting democracy.
[T]aking the Third into account does not bring us into the position of pragmatic consideration, of comparing different Others; the task is rather to learn to distinguish between false conflicts and the true conflict. For example, today's conflict between Western liberalism and religious fundamentalism is a false one, since it is based on the exclusion of the third term which is its truth: the Leftist emancipatory position.
Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
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