Al Shabaab, a Somali Islamic fundamentalist militia affiliated with al-Qaeda, which has been active since 2006, has conquered wide swathes of the country, and now runs them surprisingly efficiently for a backward theocracy (as does the Taliban in Afghanistan), is fundamentally opposed (no pun intended) to democracy.
Interviewing one of the group’s senior leaders, who reportedly has a $5 million bounty on his head issued by his adversaries, a Western-oriented journalist questions him about why his group fights against liberal democratic forces within Somalia.
“Why are you against democracy?” the reporter interrogates him.
This is how the militant answers:
Our understanding of this war is that our religion is being attacked… Democracy is a religion for non-Muslims. It’s against our beliefs and identity. We are Muslims. Islam and democracy cannt be compatible. Democracy is about the people’s choice. What we believe is that the legistlation is for none but Allah.
If only all Islamists in the West were so forthcoming in their analysis.
The Quran differs from the New Testament in that it explicitly serves as the basis of law — the founding document of a Muslim state in the same way the Constitution serves as the foundational document of American democracy.
“Sharia is Islam’s legal system,” the BBC reports (emphasis added). “It is derived from the Quran, Islam’s holy book, as well as the Sunnah and Hadith — the deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.”
In the instance of a Muslim who has been Westernized and secularized, he or she only subscribes to the tenets of liberal democracy by ignoring the teachings of the Quran that come into explicit conflict with the concepts of pluralism and equal representation under the law. Picking and choosing which portions of scripture to toss aside and which to embrace is the only way this can be achieved.
Instead of an acknowledgment of the irreconcilably different values espoused in Islamic religious doctrine and the secular legal doctrine that serves as the basis of governance in the West, we are treated to an endless and exhausting sophistry.
For example, when a Danish cartoonist depicts the Prophet Mohammed in an unfavorable light, as is his birthright per the Renaissance and Enlightenment, Islamists in Europe respond with violence, which they believe is their legal right under Islamic law, which forbids depictions of him.
Then, a Muslim apologist not willing to be honest about what his religion teaches appears on corporate media and babbles about something called “strategic discourse”, whereas a man actually committed to the Western value of free speech would have told his religious fellows to kick rocks.
Theocracy in any form is not compatible with Western values. This issue was settled in the West hundreds of years ago with no ambiguity: there will be no union of church and state.
Yet as Europe and, to a lesser extent, North America import Muslim migrants to the tune of millions per year and then fail to assimilate them, the settled debate is resurrected — only this time under the auspices of respect for “diversity” and “tolerance” and whatever.