Is there a conflict between traditional Islam and the Western idea of democracy and freedom?
Not necessarily. First of all, democracy is a means to an end. It is not one single institution. Democracy simply is the Greek word for “the rule of the people.” The voice of the people must be heard. There’s no innate contradiction [with Islam]. If somebody says, “Well, why wasn’t Thomas Jefferson born in Cairo?”, the answer is, of course, that in the West itself, it was [a] long, historical process from the Magna Carta and so on until George Washington and Jefferson and [the] American constitution and modern democracies. For most of its history, the Christian world was like the Islamic world. It had an emperor, or a king, or some kind of absolutist monarchy. The fact that this development took place in a particular area of the world called the West doesn’t mean this was part and parcel of Christianity. Christianity accommodated itself to it. There’s no reason why Islam cannot accommodate itself to democracy — unless by “democracy” we mean cutting off the voice of God. That’s somethi
