ISLAM SECULARISM AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY pdf

Islam Secularism and Liberal Democracy

ISLAM SECULARISM AND LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.

 —Karl Marx And, topping democracy, this most alluring record, that it alone can bind, and ever seeks to bind, all nations, all men, of however various and distant lands, into a brotherhood, a family.

It is the old, yet ever-modern dream of earth, out of her eldest and her youngest, her fond philosophers and poets….

 For I say at the core of democracy, finally, is the religious element. All the religions, old and new, are there.

 —Walt Whitman

 Christianity has functioned for the normative self-understanding of modernity as more than a mere precursor or a catalyst.

Egalitarian universalism, from which sprang the ideas of freedom and social solidarity, of an autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, of the individual morality of conscience, human rights, and democracy, is the direct heir to the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love.

 This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of continual critical appropriation and reinterpretation.

To this day, there is no alternative to it. And in light of the current challenges of a post national constellation, we continue to draw on the substance of this heritage. Everything else is just idle postmodern talk.