Islam and Democracy

Abstract

Edgard Weber raises the issue of the societal statute given to an individual in different cultures. Evidently, an historic change has occurred. To illustrate this, he puts forth the case of the Muslim-Arabic culture, which grants the individual in society a statute different from that of other Western, Judaic-Christian cultures. The author centralizes his study on the concept of democracy and shows the distinctiveness of the Islamic conceptions of State and of the individual when compared to the West’s. Plainly, it would be erroneousto affirm the superiority of one system over the other. Rather, the issue is, before anything else, a matter of comprehending the function each system fulfills, of understanding how both may begin the next century in better conditions, and of seeing how these realizations may lead mankind towards a more universal dimension that banishes the demons of racism, exclusion, and war.