Abstract
Samuel Huntington has described the future of the world as a clash of civilizations, especially of the democratic (Western) and Islamic worlds. The relations between their ideologies are moving in this direction: there is general antagonism in this sphere; aware of its material-financial and military-political superiority, the liberal West has become too aggressive. This has increased the radicalism and animosity of the Islamic groups fighting for human minds, particularly in ideological terms. In his article “The Road from Tashkent to the Taliban,” Zeyno Baran, di-rector for international-security and energy pro-grams at the Nixon Center, was quite right when he said: “It is time to name the war correctly: this is a war of ideologies, and terrorist acts are the tip of the iceberg.”1
References
Z. Baran, “The Way from Tashkent to Taliban”www.nationalreview.org], 2 April, 2004.
Discussions of the relations between Islam and democracy are very much in vogue now. The clerics and liberally minded philosophers insist on a very similar or even close nature of both systems, while radical Islamists concentrate on their differences.
This is what Azerbaijanian specialist in Islam Hikmet Hajji-zadeh thinks (see: NG-Religia, No. 004 (16), 15 April, 1998.)
For a more detailed discussion of the role of the clergy and Muslim clerics see: Z.I. Levin, “K voprosu o sotsial’noy roli musul’manskogo dukhovenstva,” Islam i sotsial’nye struktury stran Blizhnego i Srednego Vostoka. Collection of articles, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1990, p. 130.
Seyed Mohammad Khatami, Traditsia i mysli vo vlasi avtoritarizma, Moscow State University Press, Moscow, 2001, p. 9.
It is well known that Hizb ut-Tahrir regularly explains its attitude toward democracy in books and leaflets such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Kalifat (The Caliphate). The party has published several books on the subject: Demokratia—sistema neveria (De-mocracy is a Faithless System) that condemns acceptance of democracy as a blasphemy. All its program works have been trans-lated into the Central Asian languages.
Islam has created a system of assessments of behavior of its followers from farz (obligatory) to harom (prohibited). When imposing their political views on others the party’s apologists always appeal to these categories in an effort to mobilize the entire Muslim society to fight for their political aims.
Iu.A. Iudin, Politicheskie partii i pravo v sovremennom gosudarstve, Forum-Infra-M publishing group, Moscow, 1998, p. 64.
For more detail, see: Graham E. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2003; Is Islamism a Threat. A Debate [http://www.meforum.org/meq/dec99/debate.shtml].
The recent terrorist acts of 29-31 March, 2004 in the Bukhara Region and in the city of Tashkent cast doubt on these statements. According to Prosecutor-General of Uzbekistan R. Kadyrov the investigating bodies found indirect evidence of Hizb ut-Tahrir’s involvement in these events.
See: Z. Baran, op. cit.
See: A. Lijphart, Demokratia v mnogosostavnykh obshchestvakh: sravnitel’noe issledovanie (Democracy in Plural So-cieties), Aspekt Press, Moscow, 1997, p. 38.
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