Abu Musab al-Zarqawi denounced elections in Iraq

gucci shoes for men

Today, radical Islamists are the last holdout against these powerful forces of modernity. For Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual fathers of Al Qaeda, true Islam could be salvaged only by warring against the modern world on all fronts. He wanted to "take apart the entire political and philosophical structure of modernity and return Islam to its unpolluted origins." A very different kind of Muslim leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, clearly identified modernity with the Enlightenment and rejected both. "Yes, we are reactionaries, " he told his opponents, "and you are enlightened intellectuals: You intellectuals do not want us to go back 1,400 years."
These most radical Islamists, along with Osama bin Laden, also reject that great product of the Enlightenment and modernity: democracy. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi denounced elections in Iraq on the grounds that "the legislator who must be obeyed in a democracy is man, and not God." Democratic elections were "the very essence of heresy and polytheism and error," for they made "the weak, ignorant man God's partner in His most central divine prerogative--namely, ruling and legislating." As Bernard Lewis has written, the aim of Islamic revolution in Iran and elsewhere has been to "sweep away all the alien and infidel accretions that had been imposed on the Muslim lands and peoples in the era of alien dominance and influence and to restore the true and divinely given Islamic order." One of those "infidel accretions" is democracy. The fundamentalists want to take the Islamic world back to where it was before the Christian West, liberalism, and modernity polluted what they regard as pure Islam.