What problems does democracy face in the Islamic world?
First of all, without the full separation of state and religion, it will be difficult to build a true democracy. This does not mean that a society cannot maintain its religious traditions. In India for instance, Muslims who chose to stay when Pakistan was carved out of the old British Raj opted for a secular state whilst preserving their own Islamic heritage as far as their personal status was concerned. In this case we speak of heritage, not legal rules and regulations. If there is no separation between state and religion, what do the people elect? The second problem is Wahhabi influence. Wahhabism is based on the notion that power comes from God and a human’s only power is to execute God’s will. Finally, the greatest problem is how to transplant democracy into a context that is different from that of the West. This is quite clear in places like Iraq and Afghanistan where ethnic groups, tribes and clans come between the state and the individual. Each group is to some extent self-gover
