ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Democracy in Islamic Political Thought [Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935)] Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935) saw that the reason for the backwardness of the ummah was that ' .

the Muslims have lost the truth of their religion, and this has been encouraged by bad political rulers, for the true Islam involves two things, acceptance of the unity of God and consultation in matters of State, and despotic rulers have tried to make Muslims forget the second by encouraging them to abandon the first.'[^20] He stressed that the greatest lesson the people of the Orient can learn from Europeans is to know what government should be like.[^21] In his book Al-Khilafa (The Caliphate) he stresses that Islam is guidance, mercy and social-civic policy.

About the latter, which he seems to use as a synonym for politics, he says: 'As for the social-civic policy, Islam has laid its foundations and set forth its rules, and has sanctioned the exertion of opinion and the pursuit of Ijtihad in matters related to it because it changes with time and place and develops as architecture and all other aspects of knowledge develop.

Its foundations include that authority belongs to the ummah, that decision-making is through shura, that the government is a form of a republic, that the ruler is not favored in a court of law to the layman - for he is only employed to implement Shari’ah and public opinion, and that the purpose of this policy is to preserve religion and serve the interests of the public .

.'[^22] Nineteenth-century Islamic political thinkers, who were clearly influenced by European democratic thought and practice, tried to establish a resemblance between democracy and the Islamic concept of shura. Faced with a crisis of government augmented by the autocracy and corrupt conduct of Muslim rulers, they sought to legitimize the borrowing of aspects of the Western model they believed were compatible with Islam and capable of resolving the crisis.

However, the trend changed in the aftermath of the First World War and following the demise of the Khilafah (Caliphate), whose abrogation, in 1924, shocked the Muslims in spite of the fact that many of them had suffered greatly at the hands of some Ottoman rulers. The Khilafah was an administrative legacy that for many centuries represented a moral shield and a political entity.[^23] The challenge was no longer despotism.