[Islam-Online- Politics]

If the Islamic-Western discourse has taken place within the frame of a particular power formation, the liberal-democratic variant represents its most potent constitutive practice. The nature of this power relationship is likely to assume new dimensions of potency given the apparent annulment of the balancing constraints within Western intra-discursive legitimations. Islam is about to engage a liberal democracy invigorated by a fresh victory over its communist archrival and consolidated by totalizing claims of superiority.34 In the absence of communism as a challenger in the politico-moral arena, new challengers will have to be created and vanquished, and old ghosts will have to be rehashed and exorcised. Islam poses a most likely candidate, and Muslims' commitment to their faith shall be tested to the limit.
If Muslims are to engage liberal democracy, it is most vital for them to recognize not only what the latter says, but, more importantly, what it does not say. They shall have to distinguish the "conflicting logics of sense and implication," with the object of exposing that liberal democracy as a text need not say what it means nor mean what it says.35 In other words, they will have to discern its practical meaning to them, which may be totally different from that in the West.
Through Jacques Derrida's instrumental method of analyzing language,36 binary oppositions could be unravelled by showing how a single term carries a meaning and its antithesis in its own structure. It allows us to use a language without subscribing to its premises, and to "operate according to the vocabulary of the very thing that one delimits.37 It becomes the strategy "of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself."38
An Islamic discursive engagement with liberal democracy will necessarily entail the deconstruction of the truth/veil, freedom/domination binary oppositions. The privileged first two single terms will have to be exposed as "accomplices" of the "violent hierarchy," which controls the latter two terms axiologically and logically.39 "The task is . . . to dismantle the metaphysical and rhetorical structures which are at work in [the text], not in order to reject or discard them, but to reinscribe them in another way." 40 This could show that behind liberal democracy's appropriation of the concept of freedom lies a structure of domination inherent in its very meaning.
Such a methodological approach allows us to engage in the political practice of dismantling the logic by which this particular system and its concomitant political and social structures maintain their force.41 This force came to be held in place not by any conclusive logic, but by the dominant impositions of metaphor and rhetoric. As Richard Rorty puts it:
We are heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and art, science and philosophy and so on. This rhetoric has formed the culture of Europe. But to proclaim our loyalty to these distinctions is not to say that there are "objective" and "rational" arguments for adopting them.42
In its broadest terms, liberal democracy refers to the limitations and locus of state power respectively.43 John Hallowell, however, has indicated that the relationship between liberalism and democracy historically has been so intimate that they were often spoken of as synonymous terms.
Bertrand de Jouvenal, furthermore, has pointed out that "discussions about democracy . . . are intellectually worthless because we do not know what we are talking about."44 And Robert Dahl has observed that "there is no democratic theory-there are only democratic theories."45 Democracy, that is, has become the "loosest label of its kind."46
As used in this article, liberal democracy will refer simply to the discursive manifestations of the Western world. Liberal democracy reflects a secular legitimizing principle, representative of the Western cultural and political systems. Through a medium of tolerance, it reduces ultimate authority from the religious domain to the popular realm, and separates public morality, as socially and contingently determined, from private morality, thereby relaxing religious consciousness and its structural cohesiveness without directly confronting it.
Contrary to the Western conventional understanding of religion as a social phenomenon, the Muslim Ummah defines itself as a religious phenomenon and a consciously Islamic existence. Its essence is defined in terms of the Divine purpose of creation: ?I have only created jinns and men that they may serve me.47 Thus, institutional formations constitute mutually supportive organs of an inseparable private and public religio-morality which encompasses all fields of cultural, literary, artistic, and philosophical knowledge. The Ummah, as a will, provides the structural constraining parameters for the creation and preservation of an Islamic consciousness, formed and shaped by, and in harmony with, the precepts of revelation.
Two inherently dissenting principles are evident. One is Islamic, which defines opinion as an exertion (ijtihad) within the framework of a universal and normative standard of truth, and one is secular, where opinion-as a function of a separate private-public conscience-is expressed in the free market. The secular state reduces religion to the level of opinion, leading gradually and inevitably to the secularization of human consciousness.
Much of the potency of liberal democratic discourse lies in this ability to relax religious consciousness for eventual omission from public life. This it does without making claims to eliminations and without confronting religious consciousness at any stage. In an Islamic context, such a relaxing process can mean nothing but a condition of de-Islamization, and therefore by definition irreligiosity. In its essential characteristics, secularism is irreligious, and therefore anti-Islamic. By extension, so is liberal democracy.
In as far as it denies any principle superior to individuality, and in as far as it reduces knowledge to rational, free market choices, liberal democracy espouses pragmatic and inductive principles consistent with its essential logic. Rationality and motivation, according to this logic, are determined by the individual pursuance of self-interest defined in material terms. Rationality in this sense becomes a foundational order of knowledge pertaining to the understanding of human nature.
From an Islamic point of view, the claim that a rational human being is one who pursues only his own self-interest does not necessarily constitute a metaphysical truth.48 From an Islamic perspective, a human being is intrinsically equipped with the necessary qualifications to see his self-interest and beyond, and is therefore responsible-guided by revelation-to create structures reflective of this understanding. This understanding opposes the reductionist approach towards a human rationality incognizant of the non-rational dimension of human essence.
The credibility and legitimacy of an Islamic state order, therefore, is based largely on deductive reasoning, while that of liberal democracy is based largely on induction. Thus, Islamic Shura (consultative counsel) and liberal democracy should not be confused as similar or synonymous. In fact, Shura and liberal democracy represent two entirely different systems of knowledge-two different epistemologies. A state structure which is bound to constrain individual rational and non-rational choices according to the precepts of the Islamic system of knowledge cannot therefore, in the words of Binder, be a liberal polity.49 Edward Said was eminently to the point when he defined the purpose of his seminal study on Orientalism:
My hope is to illustrate the formidable structure of cultural domination and, specifically for formerly colonized peoples, the dangers and temptations of employing this structure upon themselves and upon others.50
Those dangers and temptations threaten the very foundation of consciousness formation in the Islamic world. The liberal democratic discourse, as the political manifestation of the predatory Western epistemology behind the veil of freedom, is in effect a consciousness imposition and therefore, by definition, a dominative project. Through its bifurcatory impact, it creates dependent and attached indigenous elites as instruments of this discourse. More than an idea or an organizational principle, liberal democracy emerges into a practical interest which bounds the commitments of those elites to the West. These problems constitute structural flaws in the very basis of democracy. For a process of conscious divorce or reversal to be consummated, this whole conceptual edifice will have to be dismantled as an idea, a structure, and an interest. A monumental task no doubt.
In confronting the Western discourse, Islam can only shape, rather than adapt to, reality. To do so, Islam will have to be re-politicized and restored to its true essence as a political religion capable of overcoming historical conditions. Only by reversing the "violent hierarchy" which governs much of the understanding of Islam in Western discourses could Islam become a positive constituent of existence, and only then could it regain its essential characteristics as a weltenshauung in its own right.

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