Siyasa: A Political Process For Muslim America

The greatest obstacles to the participation of muslims in America's political process are a few subtle difficulties in what muslims believe is Islam. These result from their historical disfranchisement in muslim law as well as from contemporary political division among the muslims throughout the world, with most contemporary parties campaigning in America.¹

The inclination of people to "follow the fore-runners" is accentuated among muslims by explicit demands of the religion: in America, the people thus indicated have not been readily accessible or identifiable.² Separation of faith from politics removes the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of most muslims, and the entry of muslims into the American political process has been largely a matter either of pragmatism or ambition. Pragmatic parties find that the broader issues of muslims generally are costly in terms of their constituents' political needs: unable to secure the global interests, they gain little credibility as fore-runners. Contrarily those who raise the muslim banner are usually able to achieve only cosmetic results, while practical progress on larger issues such as foreign policy or domestic social programs remains costly but unattainable. Muslim America, like Christian America, is only selectively granted political concessions, and must otherwise join the process as individuals in the local community. Only American Judaism has been able to shape public policy at will as a religious minority on a State and national scale.

The influence of these factors is gradually diminishing, as a result of a conscious effort among muslims in America to be a force in political affairs at least proportionate to their numbers. There is a widespread sense that the religion itself offers resolution of these efforts, but imported methodologies for deaing with republican politicial institutions have uniformly failed in the countries of their origin; while offerings from scholars of western academic disciplines fail to satisfy the need for religious clarity. Numerous efforts are underway to formulate political policy, but as yet religious insight has not delivered the necessary theoretical and historical basis of such policy-making to American muslims.

An analysis of the intersection of muslims with the American political process must examine shared social tendencies. There are a number of stereotypical fantasies that obscure these: three such deceptions must be exposed.

The first is the dehumanization of the world's muslims as harem-scare'em chauvinistic brigands oppressing invisible, imprisoned, ignorant, voiceless, faceless, downtrodden women.

Muslim women can read and remember and do. They are the repositories of the culture and steep their families in it. Islam elevated women over men in this respect, with the simple statement "Motherhood is akin to prophecy" attributed to Muhammad sallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam, and with specific demands placed upon men to serve women. Motherhood rules the muslims.

No class of women is more assiduously protected or attended than muslim women. This is so true that many muslim men deliberately leave the ludicrous cartoon Arab unaddressed, knowing that their daughters and wives, like women in any society, readily accept any increase or opportunity, whether or not their men can afford it.

Thus the provenance of the political responsibility of muslims is universal, not obtaining only among men, or to the exclusion of women. A duty imposed on men, it is an option for women, to engage social process to secure family, community and humanity from oppression of any kind. Muslim women are full participants in society, visible or not.

The second contrivance is the notion that muslims engage in political affairs in order to transform society into a prison for non-muslims, that the banner of Islam will veil the women, close the movies, kill the pagans and force everyone to pray five times a day. This also is deliberate falsification.

No other religion spread into the world by preserving and protecting the communities it encountered, with no pressure to embrace the new Revelation, as did Islam. The muslim liberation of Jerusalem from the Roman Occupation secured the inhabitants in their entirety from dispossession of any kind, and did not require of the Christians or Jews of Jerusalem any concession whatever. It is in fact those very same Christian communities who are being dispossessed and destroyed today by the Israeli Occupation of the Holy City.

Similarly history records that the Golden Age of Judaism -- so described by Jewish historians -- occurred in Muslim Spain; and that Jews, Christians and muslims lived together peacably in the Holy Land under muslim rule from the fall of Rome until the contemporary Zionist rape of Palestine.

Islam is more liberal than the United States in its protection of free exercise of religion. Islam announces a general prohibition of pork and alcohol, each defined as an intolerable corruption analogous in this context to heroin or cocaine; yet throughout the history of the muslim world, followers of other faiths have not been restrained from producing pork or alcoholic beverage even under the strictest of muslim regimes. American law today literally criminalizes Christian elders who allow minors to join wine communion ceremonies of the church: Islam does not reach into the communities of a differing minority within its population.

The third deception is the attack on Islam as inherently anti-democratic, anti-Western, and anti-American.

Islam established the first constitutional federal republic in human history. Muslim political thought in the contemporary debate begins with the formation of this political community by a written constitution at Medina in 622 A.D., in which distinct Jewish states, secure in their religion by Law, were originally sovereign in the new republic as of right.

The community of muslim faithful, as the federal suzerain constrained by its own republican Law, reserved the power to make peace and war, conduct diplomacy, and adjudicate unresolveable dispute between all other included communities, the federated states; which otherwise retained their traditional sovereign governments, commerce, and bilateral relations. This pattern, securing to each federated community the continuation of its own sovereign law, political administration and religious integrity, was followed by all successor formations of state and is followed today.

It is thus a fraud to assert that Islam is somehow antithetical to America's political institutions or that the two are inherently incompatible. America's federal republic derives entirely from the very foundations of Islamic polity, as it became known to Europe from returning Crusaders.

Islamic fundamentalism simply does not qualify as an enemy for a West to which it largely gave birth.

Neither does America qualify as an object of universal muslim animosity.

Americans are not the cynical, drunken, amoral libertines portrayed by the American media. Neither do they comprehend, nor are they complicit in, the foreign policies promoted against muslims by the Israeli Lobby and its associated freemasonry.

To be sure, this institutional opposition to Islam has insinuated itself into strategic positions within the American political bureaucracy, and enemies of the muslims can be found throughout the institutions of American society. But these malfeasants betray the very premises of American political freedom and must do so conspiratorially lest they be dislodged, as occurs regularly when they are clearly exposed.

The priorities of Americans are nearly identical with those of muslims: stability, family, productivity, opportunity and toleration merely begin the list of truly shared values. The actual privileged class in America and in the muslim world is children, whose prospect for a better future is paramount. Unlike the Israeli Occupation of the Holy Land, neither Americans nor muslims attack their opponents' children, as an object lesson to expel parents or for any other reason.

Cooperation across lines of personal differences is also a hallmark of American society, which has united the energies of an eclectic populace in enhancing the quality of life for friend and foe alike. Feud, vendetta, and other perpetual animosities are abhorrent to Americans, who with rare exception remain prepared to resolve disputes and end conflict in favor of amity and a more profitable cooperation. This also is required of muslims by their faith, in explicit terms, and the muslims respond religiously.

There is thus very little to preclude influence by muslims on American public policy, apart from entrenched opposition to precisely that, other than errors in the understanding of muslims concerning the process or concerning themselves and their relationship to political participation. It is these errors that inhibit their impact on political affairs.

It is a challenge to isolate the errors believed by muslims concerning the conduct of their political affairs, but not to identify the instance of their accretion.

Islam introduced a new order of the ages to humanity, but not in a vaccuum. Whole communities of religious scholars from Judaism and Christianity were waiting in Mecca and Medina for the arrival of a final Revelation to re-establish God's Sovereignty over human affairs following the dissolution of the Kingdom of Israel. Israel, a conditional Covenant for God's Chosen People, was charged to inform humanity of a future Covenant that would be universal, not Hebraic, and would extend not "from the river of Egypt to the Euphrates" but to the ends of the earth. When God fulfilled this eternal promise to Abraham, many were already waiting to enter its social contract of government by consent of the governed.³

Islam did suffer an early fracture of its political unity, which persisted a scant thirty years following the end of the Revelatory period; that is, through the terms of four successors. This cannot be attributed to failed Promise, however, but rather to cataclysmic expansion and spectacular success. Following this, political division of the muslims has persisted through the present, while the motive force of muslim political leadership has remained the concentration of its power and resistance to further division.

Primary among the centripetal forces, however, were the muslims themselves, who scarcely remembered the limited reach of the Law and its specific limitations on the coercive power of their leadership, but who turned increasingly to their political institutions for resolution of an increasingly broad range of disputes. A proliferation of partisan ideologies, most of them recognizable today as of pre-Christian origin, contributed to this corruption. Faced with this increasing burden of government over matters more of ambition than entitlement, the governors devised a proliferation of offices and an extended jurisprudence; against the resistance of religious scholars and historians among the people, who knew ratification by the people was required for the investiture of each new administration. Thus, authority had to be found or devised, first to coerce each new allegiance, then to construct the institutions of extended political authority, and finally to divest the people of their political prerogatives and rights. The authority to do all this had to come from the scholars and historians themselves, many of whom were systematically hunted down by the regime and killed when they refused to support the process: some escaped.

Those who took their places "agreed" that several Arabic words of the Qur'an had acquired religious technical meanings that the grammar does not support, but which effectively disfranchised the muslim people and barred them from public affairs. Those meanings persist today as classical law, with no other effect: it is enough to lend stability to any form of regime.⁴

What remains is a very carefully preserved and comprehensive body of historical and religious scholarship which includes the complete revelatory system and maintains the community entire, but which has been subtly interpolated also with an inclination toward autocratic partisan control of its originally pluralistic and republican institutions.⁵

Islamic Fundamentalism, a recurrent thread in muslim society since the beginning 1400 years ago, addresses this accretion and seeks to retain the Islam that existed from the beginning of the Revelation through the lives of the first four successors, a period of half a century.

This period is recorded and re-recorded in more extensive detail than any half-century before or since, the present notwithstanding; and it has been discussed and re-examined exhaustively throughout fourteen centuries of dedicated scholarship, of which it has been the central focus. It is safe to say that not all conclusions have been drawn that may be drawn from this historical cataclysm, which became suzerain in the space of the following century over most of the world now considered to have been civilized at the time, and persisted for a millennium as suzerain in successively degraded forms. Pax Islamica, however, was merely a by-product.

It is somewhat comparable to the first few picoseconds of nuclear detonation, which is over and done with prior to the expansion of the fireball: from this incandescent moment in history came also an academic imperative that directly produced those mathematical, physical, medical, astronomical and social sciences that underlie the entirety of modern civilization, with all of its social and technological achievement. And every community of faith has been rejuvenated by Islam.

It is this core of human liberation that is the nucleus of Islamic Fundamentalism.⁶

Excluded from their own political process, muslims reasonably question their relationship to the considerably accessible American republic in which they live, which is a federal, constitutional, democratic republic. Three of these descriptors have already been shown to arise from Islam: the democratic attribute does as well.⁷

The political institutions of the United States, constructed on the Medina model but carefully disassociated from their source, yet look as if they were designed by a band of muslims and left to persist or not, without muslims among the parties. As soon as the pious would depart, the corrupt would rush to take their places: exactly the fate that awaited the early muslim community, described by Muhammad sallallahu 'alaihi was-sallam in those terms. American political institutions have likewise been used to strip the people of their fundamental rights and liberties.

Most of the Constitutional guarantees of the Bill of Rights have been eroded by Supreme Court interpretation until they exist today only as historic documents but not as positive law. "Free exercise" of religion does not mean exercise at all, but rather opinion; the "right to keep and bear arms" does not mean right but rather a privilege of good citizenship that may be forfeited or conditioned as Congress may decide. A person may be "twice put in jeopardy" for the same offense if prosecuted by a State and, after acquittal, by the United States; and "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution" are not "reserved to the States respectively, or to the people," but to later enactments by Congress, which has long since intruded its powers into the States as well as into the affairs of the people, with Supreme Court ratification.

Yet the democratic basis of the American republic is stated in its Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness --

"That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

In sum, the American republic was constituted for the purpose of securing to Americans the rights given them by the Creator, and arose entirely from those inherent human rights.

Islam possesses a catalog of those rights, and institutes the political authority of the people on the terms enumerated by the first successor as he accepted the enduring mandate:

"I have been given authority over you but I am not the best of you. If I do well, help me, and if I do ill, then put me right. Truth consists in loyalty and falsehood in treachery. The weak among you shall be strong in my eyes until I secure his right if God will; and the strong among you shall be weak in my eyes until I wrest the right from him. If a people refrain from struggle in the way of God, God will smite them with disgrace. Wickedness is never widespread in a people but God brings calamity upon them all. Obey me as long as I obey God and His apostle, and if I disobey them you owe me no obedience."

In Islam and in America, then, one purpose of the state is the same: to secure God-given rights of the people, even at the expense of destroying and reconstituting governments. What distinguishes the American polity is the absence of the muslims' comprehensive mandate to secure to all people all rights given by God: the Constitution denies such mandates to the nation, originally leaving to future Amendment the enumeration of any such rights. America is explicitly not religious, let alone Islamic.

But to suggest that muslims are forbidden to engage a political process because it is not Islamic is to suggest that during thirteen years of determined oppression in Mecca, the muslims were politically inert: we know this not to be the case. Moreover, the muslims are known also to have acted individually, independently of central direction, in this process.

It is known that Muhammad sallallahu 'alaihi was-sallam participated in a war defending his tribe at Mecca for four years, starting when he was fifteen; following which he was a moving force behind a formal political pact among the pagan tribes of Mecca to help all victims receive justice, which he continued to reaffirm throughout his life. The idea that muslims in America may not engage the political process of America, or that they can do so only under central direction, has to do with a radical nationalism that has been brought to America from abroad, but has no support in the rich history and tradition from which Islamic Fundamentalism arises.

The fact that a place is rife with corruption, treason, treachery, ambition, lies, avarice and immorality did not deter the muslims from carrying their struggle for justice there, until that place turned out to be the tyrannical Abbasid Caliphate after 750 A.D., during the second muslim century. It was then that the pious scholars went into hiding lest they be used to legitimize tyranny under color of Islam: no such danger exists in America.

The American Constitution pretends to only part of the role, in American society, that the muslim polity held in the world for over a thousand years; arguably it has not done even the job it has contrived and purported to do. But neither have the muslims continued to fulfill their mandate.

Muslims share a universal imperative to struggle for justice and oppose oppression at the expense of all other interests. Their mundane affairs, such as maintaining the integrity of their business relations, capitalizing the poor, educating the young, and producing wealth and services, are all entirely internal to the muslim community. No external political engagement is necessary: aside from trade, the muslims are distinct in their affairs and are positively instructed to maintain such an inward distinction.

The struggle for justice is another matter altogoether: "Oppression is worse than slaughter" and must be stopped. Every muslim is told "When you see injustice, stop it with your hand; when you cannot, stop it with your tongue; and when you cannot, then despise it in your heart, and this is the least of faith." This is an undeniable and inescapable mandate to all.

Thus the entry of muslims into the American political process rests on either of two premises: trade and the establishment of justice. Of the two, trade is pragmatic and mundane, allowing opportunity for others to learn of the integrity of muslims; while justice is the banner of Islam and the religious duty imposed on the muslims as a people. That the milieu in which the muslims pursue these objectives is not an Islamic environment is, and always has been, part of the definition of the duty: beyond the muslim world or within.

In the realm of public law, muslims are charged to persuade, by reasoned, mannerly articulation of their views, that corruption of public office, murder, rape, and armed robbery are quite rightly capital crimes; that inheritance, contracts, liability and interest are not the property of conglomerate interests and law firms but the province of pluralistic justice accessible to the people in timely manner; that participation in public affairs must arise from freedom of individual enterprise and the protection of opportunity rather than for perpetuation of parasitic bureaucracy or a tyranny of the majority; that foreign aid must be conditioned on its application to the benefit of humanity rather than for conquest and genocide. These also are rights given by God to humanity, which must be secured against governments and officials who betray the public's trust while drunk on its power.

The muslims have a political program that is universally beneficial and non-exclusive: it is a legacy for the entirety of humanity, not the exclusive possession of the muslims alone. Republican democracy is admirably suited to the advancement of that estate: the capacity to discern self-interest is not a uniquely muslim trait. It is not the muslim duty to see that the right is accomplished in the Name of God or for pious motive: it is to see that it gets done, while it is the muslim who must act with consistently correct intention.

Thus muslims enter the political process in response to a mandate for justice: they are on a mission from God, and otherwise do not belong there. It is not a matter of taking Islam to others: God sends whom He wills to the mosque, the church, and the synagogue. Rather the muslims bring sincerity, integrity and devotion to the principles on which republican democracy is built, securing God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of good. In the contemporary arena where a major issue is the freedom to commit infanticide, where an entire political party supports reduction of Palestine by genocide, and a growing constituency insists on a freedom to suicide, the presence of muslims can only make matters improve.

There is no higher calling for a muslim than to serve the cause of justice: Islam arose and prevailed to enforce this blessing from God. Politics is a sacred duty, demanding religious dedication: that Americans seem to have forgotten these truths does not free the muslims to deny them.

Arise, Believers, and serve.

Footnotes

[1] Political division: by definition, the muslims are one community. This is so in the minds and hearts of muslims, if not in the world, to a greater degree than in any comparable group. There are several commonly accepted ritual foundations within the community, grounds of belief and practice, which distinguish without dividing; and broad tolerance of differences in political ideation, judicial policy, and conduct of public affairs. The result in the re-emergent historical muslim world is a complex diversity of regimes and contending parties; in America, the result is a party to match each regime and party abroad, and a corresponding multiplicity of approaches to participation in the political process. Many may be represented in a mosque community. back

[2] The people thus indicated: there is a growing recognition among muslims that good manners requires the acceptance by muslims in America of the political leadership of indigenous American muslims. This ideal is frustrated in practice, however, by several factors influential in the various social sectors.

First, the historical preponderance of muslims in America has been among immigrant groups, many of whom are multi-generational and well-situated, assimilated into American society from their immigrant forebears. As these communities have, for the most part, only recently established mosques and centers, and lack experience as a broader political religious community, they reflect the multiplicity of issues and approaches of the historical muslim world, together with the difficulties of conjoining matters of faith to the success they have attained on the more pragmatic basis of local constituency. There is a general relegation of any broader political leadership to muslim clerics and scholars, whose influence is circumscribed by a de facto separation of faith and politics both in the experience of the immediate community and in the more recent history of the traditional millennial muslim world. Thus the clerics and scholars have the means for discerning the issues and positions of concern to muslims, while the tools they have to effect public policy pertain to the religious legitimacy of muslim government and are thus inapplicable in the American political environment. Meanwhile, the multiplicity of approaches and issues arising from the diverse historical origins of their communities makes unification of effort on even one such issue virtually unattainable.

Second, the development of Islam among the indigenous American population, with a very few notable exceptions, has been hampered by the process of sorting out the many schismatic representations of Islam that have been imported. These communities, arising among the perennially disfranchised black populations of the industrial cities, have largely been led by fore-runners whose experience in the American political process has been either opportunistic or shaped by radical nationalism of one kind or another. Simultaneously, their experience with historically established muslims has been influenced both by prejudice and dismissal and by the activities of opportunists whose ambitions require "token" Americans, expendable fanatics, or a group receptive to their imported or experimental formulations of political Islam. Indigenous Islam is not situated like the many groups of assimilated immigrants, and the differences are profound and alienating.

Third, the growth of Islam in America is following a course that is unique in the history of Islam, which last experienced significant territorial spread centuries ago. The political fabric of America contains religious threads from every native and immigrant sector, which shaped the political environment and continue to influence it. Muslims in America may enter the political process directly, rather than after generations of slow growth and increasing organization and influence, and the resultant political expression reflects the nascent nature of the community as well as its manifold internal division, along with the disabilities of each.

Fourth, the banner of Islam in America is nothing if not contested. Political community is explicitly the nature of the muslim community, and is given at least lip service throughout the spectrum of diversity. Claims to the allegiance of the muslims are implicit in every rallying cry, and historically have precluded unity as a result of their conflicting ambitions and sectarian origins. There is no universally perceived community of interests and internecine struggle is the norm.

Finally, most Americans who have accepted Islam (as contrasted with those born to it) have done so for reasons of faith, without realization of the included political responsibility, or for reasons of politics, without realization of the absolutely religious character of muslim political activity. Thus the very population of muslims targeted by good manners for political leadership is more often either unprepared politically or unprepared religiously for the responsibility. back

[3] Waiting for the Revelation: there were also many who were waiting, as they had waited for Jesus, to steal the design in its infancy. They had done this with early Christianity, using it to legitimize the pagan Roman Empire in the fourth century, while elsewhere it retained is Abrahamaic character awaiting the Messenger "like unto" Moses, who arrived where expected. Islam has simlarly been applied, but without acknowledgement of the origin of the teachings except within initiatory lodges, temples and houses, where Islam and its methodologies of political unity are most often the basis of the secret society, while some preserve the religious practice and teachings as well. back

[4] Disfranchisement: the entirety of what is today set forth by muslims as Islam rests on a presumed but unrecorded universal agreement among muslims as to the meaning of the Qur'an; the words of the Prophet sallallahu 'alaihi wa sallam; analogies drawn from the acts of the first generations; and unanimity of the earlier generations of muslims. These four sources of all contemporary muslim law were themselves each validated by the authority of 'Ijmaa', a thoroughly democratic ratification by universal agreement, alleged to have occurred, but not recorded, in the second muslim century.

This process reached its culmination in the third muslim century with the establishment of distinct systems of jurisprudence. By the fourth century the muslims had been effectively divorced from the conduct of their political affairs, their earlier active participation reserved to "the fore-runners" of the first three generations of muslims and to the rulers and clerics thereafter; and by the end of the fifth century, the voice of dissent had been stilled and its argument reduced to the hostile accounts of the new priestly classes. back

[5] Classical scholarship does not readily disclose this necessarily broad-brushed view of itself, of history and of jurisprudence, but quite clearly establishes that the foundations of contemporary Islamic Law and political expression reside in a ratification -- by 'Ijmaa' -- of understandings purportedly held in the second muslim century as infallible in and of themselves, without dependence on the textual sources on which they are purported to rest. There are no earlier sources that are not redefined by this assumed second-century 'Ijmaa'. back

[6] Core of human liberation: this liberation has only begun in America. The reason for this is that scholarship has been rare in America, for three main reasons.

First, the earliest muslims to reach America neither brought scholars with them, nor did they seek other than assimilation into the society that had conquered their previous rulers. Successive generations have begun to reach their faith and community, but the doctrines they have inherited or imported have not begun to address the question of traditional scholarship for Muslim America.

Second, and particularly devastating for recent refugee immigrants who do not seek assimilation and loss of their religious culture, and for indigenous groups without an Islamic cultural background, has been a virtual flood of popular literature from parties in formerly colonial territories, evolved as victims of colonialization fought in westernized societies to recover their muslim cultures. This literature has a strong component of dialectical materialist radicalism and is primarily reactionary in nature. It couches the revolutionary anti-colonialist fervor in muslim rhetoric, is extremely intolerant of western culture in general and of America in particular, and is eagerly advanced in the media as Islamic Fundamentalism, which it is not, and a new enemy for America, which it imagines itself to be.

Third, a second wave of literature arises from western-educated, English-speaking muslims who seek to re-interpret Islam in terms of Western democratic liberalism, on the basis of the democratic affirmation of doctrines in the second muslim century by 'Ijmaa'. This approach conveniently ignores the fact that this alleged universal ratification was itself the device of a tyrannical regime installing itself, and was just as quickly relegated to history as impossible of further attainment. Nonetheless these writings, which have a result re-defining its cause, are popular both with western scholars excited about the spread of liberalism and with muslims who seek a place for Islam in the democratic process.

These influences produce an intellectual environment that is overwhelmingly complex, susceptible to emotional sensationalism, and vulnerable to manipulation from without by means of direct challenge and provocation, popular or luminary attention or favor, or any illusion of success in the highly intoxicating realm of political influence. This is not the best environment in which to penetrate 1400 years of intense scholarship carried on in the Arabic language.

What has been and continues to be required is the complete dedication of indigenous students, entering Islam from an American society in which it is visibly absent, to the acquisition of the core material of Islam, transmitted professorially by life-long practitioners, and their return equipped for the religious duty of political administration. This is at once a necessary and a perilous undertaking, yielding too many dangerous near-successes and too few capable administrators. At work in America for a century, this process has yet to produce enough public servants to equal the task. back

[7] Islam declares the sole Source of values, and thus of legislative authority, as The Creator Alone. Further the Law, as such, is written and finalized and not susceptible to amendment or repeal. Its scope and jurisdiction are total, and need no expansion or extension of their provision. This view obviates the need for legislative activity among the governors of a society, and simultaneously defines their responsibility and limits their authority. Societies still need to conduct their affairs, but the processes for this activity prescribed by the religious Law are those familiar to any political party that carries on political administration. The repository of political power, conditioned by the Law, is the entirety of humanity, distributed among its varied and diverse communities.

Democracy, conversely, postulates the source and authority of law as the governed. There is no end to legislative activity, and the scope and provision of the law are constantly in flux, the jurisdiction inconstant and contestible. In practice, sovereignty is exercised by agenda-driven parties with internal government that is usually anti-democratic, although the formulation of the party's agenda may be -- and often is -- more democratic than in the society at large.

There is a tremendous disparity in these two approaches to sovereignty, and the union of faith and state has been mistakenly dismissed as a valid approach by the democratic societies.

This dismissal is more apparent than real, even in America, where the vast majority of the people seek a return to traditional morality in law after the licentiousness and secularism lately promulgated via the Supreme Court. back

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