Are They Ready for Democracy?

It's frequently said that Islam is poorly adapted for democracy. When you consider sacred verses, there does seem to be a good case for incompatibility.


"...totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys;" or,

"If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, 'Let us go and worship other gods,' don't give in or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must surely put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death and then the hands of all the people."


Any religion that believes that its enemies should suffer total destruction, family genocide and livestock eradication, or that anyone not following the faith not only should be, but MUST be killed by you certainly does not seem fit for democracy. The thing is those quotations didn't come from the Qur'an - they came from the Bible.

Anyone who doubts that Christianity can be just as violent and intolerant as Islam is ignorant of both history and current events. Christianity is filled with holy wars of conquest and the murder of innocent populations - and many of them not comfortably in the distant past.

Everyone who thinks the Ten Commandments should be posted in every school and courthouse ought to be reminded about God's Army, an armed Christian militia rebelling against the Buddhist military government of Myanmar. Under the Christian banner of establishing a "government based on the Ten Commandments," God's Army has killed more than a million people - far more than al-Qaeda has. God's Army is infamous for its forced conscription of child-soldiers.

For anyone building a case for the basic incompatibility of Christianity and democracy there are scriptures to prove it. You can find far more violence, far more intolerance, and far more destruction from God in the Bible than you will ever find in the Qur'an - if only because the Bible is longer.

But it's not that one religion is better. It's not that one religion is more violent. It's that theocratic democracy is an impossibility. That's just as true for Christianity as it is for Islam