Ислам и демократия

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The article analyzes the range of opinions on the problem of compatibility of democracy with Islam that have emerged among the Islamic scholars. It is established that the impossi-bility of democratic governance in a Muslim country is deduced by Western intellectuals both from the peculiarities of the Islamic religion and from the natural anger, aggressive in-tolerance, and a tendency to violence attributed to Muslims. Muslim intellectuals who sub-stantiate the incompatibility of democracy with Islam proceed from the unacceptable identi-fication of democracy with its liberal model. Their argumentation is reinforced by the demonstration of those social vices that the liberal democratic countries of the Western world have encountered and from which the Muslim ummah is protected by the strict ob-servance of the spiritual and moral precepts of the religion of Allah. The author derives the historical diversity of models, forms and versions of democ-racy from the specific historical features of the development of peoples and countries, from the political traditions of their state organization, the social and class structuring of socie-ties, national mentality, dominant religion, etc. The author concludes that the specific mod-els of political governance that have established themselves in Muslim countries are evi-dence of their better adaptation to solving urgent development problems. On this basis, the attempts of apologists of a unipolar world to present the values of liberal democracy as “universal” democratic values and to impose them on the Muslim world as the only accepta-ble ones for countries following the path of democratic development are subjected to critical analysis. The author argues that liberal democracy as a form of exercising power is impossi-ble in a Muslim country due to the complete disregard by liberalism of the Islamic factor of the state and political organization of the life of the Muslim ummah. However, in a Muslim country, a democracy that corresponds to the ideological values of the Islamic religion, which differ in many ways from the secular values of liberalism, can be established.