At 10:53 PM 9/28/01 EDT [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >to authoritarian democratic (Egypt, Algeria, Bangladesh), to >Islamic dictatorships (Iran, Sudan, Afghanistan).
I'm admitteldy not up on Bangladeshi politics, but I thought that their democracy was doing reasonably well and had at least a semblance of a multi-party system. I also would not include Iran with Sudan and Afghanistan in terms of form of government, anyways, as Iran did manage to elect Khatami over the cringing of the Ayatollahs. JDG They did, but Khatami has no real power. Nor does the the Parliament. Khameini still runs the country, pretty much completely, and he's an absolute despot. Bangladesh is a democracy, but certainly not a _liberal_ one by any stretch of the word, and the radical islamic parties are gaining power there quite a bit. Egypt is simply authoritarian - calling it democratic means that someone actually believes that Mubarak received 90% of the vote in the last election. Algeria is run by the military, which took over when Islamist parties won the last round of elections and essentially proposed to end democracy - so the military did it first, since they wanted to preserve a secular state. Indonesia's democracy is about a year old and, again, propped up by a secular military, and Bosnia's is largely a creation of the NATO powers. Turkey is a sort-of democracy in that every time the Islamic parties win an election, the military overthrows the government. While I do not believe that Islam is incompatible with democracy, it is worth noting that there aren't exactly hordes of Islamic democracies out there. I would strongly recommend the superb article in the Atlantic Monthly _The Roots of Muslim Rage_. I can't think of the link offhand, but it is very easy to find off the Atlantic website. Gautam
