Borrowed from Naked Boy Chronicles:
Here are the rules:
1. Grab the nearest book
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences (#5,6,7) on your blog, along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it. Just grab what is closest. No cheating.
But classical Islam, developed in the seventh and eighth centuries, contains few of the ideas that we associate with democracy today. Elie Kedourie, an eminent student of Arab politics, wrote "The idea of representation, of elections, of popular suffrage, of political institutions being regulated by laws laid down by a parliamentary assembly, of these laws being guarded and upheld by an independent judiciary, the ideas of the secularity of the state... all these are profoundly alien to the Muslim political tradition."
Certainly the Quranic model of leadership is authoritarian.
from The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria
1 comment:
This really was the first book to which I was closest. Honest.
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