An interesting article….first off, have you heard of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) or United Council of Action? The political space you speak of for radicals or theocrats lies within this party. The majority of Lal Masjid students came from the smaller improvished province of NWFP (which should be refered to as Pashtoonistan, as it properly represents the ethnic majority of the Province and not the British imposed label of “North Western Frontier Province”).

The majority of these students were venting for the day where they and their families will see Social and Economic justice which is logically equated with Islam…..The unequal distribution of wealth, lack of economic opportunity, segragation between the haves and have nots in our society (the elites being the secularist and the poor religious being the theocrats within our society) are the primary reasons that a fringe community within our society has taken arms and seeks to benefit from the chaos that is being created from our Political, Judicial, and Military crisis.

What about the rest of us? Those of us who don’t believe in a theocratic state or a secular state…I call this group of people the lower and middle class within our society. It is us the lower and middle class of our great nation who have an opportunity to change the state of affairs in our country.

But how?…let me show you…. First we need to make a sharp distinction between Islam as a Divine belief system and Islamic Democracy as a humanly developed political system. This difference between the human and the Divine will open unlimited possibilities of interpretation and re-interpretation of Islamic law as well as deconstruction and construction of the Muslim identity in our society.

Islam as a belief system (religion) should only be compared with other religions, and not with modern Western Liberal Democracy. The rise and fall of Islamic Democracy should be historically compared with the rise and fall of Western Liberal Democracy. A necessary component of Islamic Democratic thought is that, with the exception of the Prophet’s (Peace be upon him) society, there have not been any perfect Muslim societies, with complete collective Islamic self-awareness. This allows us (Islamic Democrats / Progressive Muslims) to move forward in achieving a modern Islamic Democratic state with a pluralistic society, newly developed self-awareness and human rights; a government which strives for peace, justice and prosperity for all its citizens.

Furthermore we the Progressive Muslims reject secularism, theocracy, and communism as political systems to imitate. Yet we believe that our Muslim citizens can and should benefit from the knowledge of other societies to update their thinking (in terms of social, economic, political, and scientific knowledge) in order to keep pace with the dynamic changes of the world and to contribute knowledge for the betterment of humanity as a whole

Salam,

Ahmed Akhtar (Progressive Muslim Party)