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To: long-gone who wrote (86610)	6/7/2002 3:02:00 PM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116836

<<Can you name some democratic Moslem governments? >> Canada. They just elect Mohammed every 4 years. If you ask somebody who comes from a Muslem country what government you would trust, the strong man dictator, or the demagogues who solicit votes in the name of Mohammed, they will tell you take the dictator anyday. The clerics are a tyranny of a far worse, rabble rousing nature. There are like the Spanish Inquisition, they never burn at the stake, rather it is the "people's righteous anger" that takes over and does the dirty work. It seems there is never a shortage of people to interpret the wishes of these populist terrorists to a finely divided degree. People make much of the unilateral governments of Mubarak, Assad, Zeroual, Mushareff, and Megawati, but the alternative is often chaos and finally a worse tyranny. So what is the answer -- how do we have the peaceful, reasonable, democratically elected governments that gurantee freedoms in post-feudal muslim states? Is democracy, or more properly a representative cyclically elected government system too fragile a beast for these states? If so, why is this so? Why does it work in the USA and to an extent in Europe and not elsewhere? Why does it implode in Latin America? The answer may lie in the long running authority systems that Muslim states have. They have never achieved separation of church and state. They were formed by religious revolution in the first place, have never accepted other forms of thought and view as subversive anything that denies the primacy of control by religion. The groundwork for the separation of church and state was made first by Jesus Christ who told his followers to pay heed to the laws of the state, as lip service. This allowed revolt against the Romans, but weakened the role of religion in politics. It is perfectly possible for the Moslems to have democracy, elected representatives, and their religion too, but their clerics will not give up political control. They lust after power. Moslems have used the obediance to God as the obedience to the cleric de facto and this power is intoxicating. It rivals the power held for centuries the Catholic Church, also occupying the moral high ground steadfastly amongst its flock. No matter how firm the democracy in a Muslem country, it will always play second fiddle to the interpretations of God's one word by clerics. In Turkey Kemal Attaturk gained authority by being a general who saved Turkey from western Attack. When he dealt with clerics who troubled his government, he gave them a choice. Modernize, as he put it, or die. The Turks have always been tough. Turkey has been safe from religious rebellion ever since. Unless a cleric was subverting the state in some corrupt way, the same policy would be hard to do today. Clerical government is too subject to whim of the interpreter, and not as accountable among all, it would seem. The organization of state and administration of departments is not its field. The purveyors of good for the immortal soul is not concerned too deeply with the rigours of temporal necessity. Those who have argued for changes in the Sharia are felt to be tampering with the basis for belief. But we are not sure that God approved the Sharia personally. To obviate man's ability to make decisions on good and right would be to to equally question the ability of men in times past revered as prophets to make the same decisions for a different time and circumstance. It is the will and purity of justice that is important, not the details of its execution. EC<:-}