264 No god but God
political inheritors to overturn those rights. Yet one need simply recall
the Prophet’s warning to those who questioned his egalitarian meas-
ures in Medina—“[They] will be thrown into Hell, where they will
dwell forever, suffering from the most shameful punishment” (4:14)—
to recognize that acknowledging human rights in Islam is not simply a
means of protecting civil liberties, it is a fundamental religious duty.
Nevertheless, the Islamic vision of human rights is neither a pre-
scription for moral relativism, nor does it imply freedom from ethical
restraint. Islam’s quintessentially communal character necessitates
that any human rights policy take into consideration the protection of
the community over the autonomy of the individual. And while there
may be some circumstances in which Islamic morality may force the
rights of the community to prevail over the rights of the individual—
for instance, with regard to Quranic commandments forbidding drink-
ing or gambling—these and all other ethical issues must constantly be
reevaluated so as to conform to the will of the community.
It must be understood that a respect for human rights, like plural-
ism, is a process that develops naturally within a democracy. Bear in
mind that for approximately two hundred of America’s two hundred
fifty years of existence, black American citizens were considered legally
inferior to whites. Finally, neither human rights nor pluralism is the
result of secularization, they are its root cause. Consequently, any
democratic society—Islamic or otherwise—dedicated to the prin-
ciples of pluralism and human rights must dedicate itself to following
the unavoidable path toward political secularization.
Therein lies the crux of the reformist argument. An Islamic
democracy is not intended to be a “theo-democracy,” but a demo-
cratic system founded upon an Islamic moral framework, devoted to
preserving Islamic ideals of pluralism and human rights as they were
first introduced in Medina, and open to the inevitable process of polit-
ical secularization. Islam may eschew secularism, but there is nothing
about fundamental Islamic values that opposes the process of political
secularization. Only the Prophet had both religious and temporal
authority, and the Prophet is no longer among us. Like the Caliphs,
kings, and sultans of history’s greatest Islamic civilizations, the leaders
of an Islamic democracy can hold only civic responsibilities. More-
over, there can be no question as to where sovereignty in such a sys-