We could mean the machinery that we use to try to make the government accountable to the governed. This sort of system is certainly consistent with the Christian principle that the greatest must be the servant of all. It isn't unique to Christianity: the Greeks, Romans, and some German tribes also used various sorts of democratic machinery. I note that the machinery didn't always work. The Athenians developed a tendency to indulge in short-sighted legislation. And I don't recall any description of ways of recalling abusive German chief-kings. We all know what happened to Roman democracy: the real power moved away from the Senate.
Pretty plainly just having the machinery doesn't guarantee that you will get liberty or good government. GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. If the people want to sell the seed corn to fund a big party, the expected consequences follow. And did.
We could mean democratic machinery plus a culture that values liberty. But, as has been pointed out, that culture also has to value order and responsibility. And justice. And have a sense of "all being in this together." If the culture doesn't honor "all being in this together" you get "democracies" like those all over Africa, in which a job-holder's first obligation is to his family and tribe; everybody else can wait. There's no internalization of the concept of a public servant.
We can see how these various cultural requirements appeared in Western culture. Some (like the notion of a public servant) did come from Christianity, others (like "all in this together") are local and circumstance-dependent.
Am I missing something here? Islam doesn't much value liberty, but does value order and responsibility and justice (though not universal justice: slaves and dhimmis don't count). In place of the public servant you have God's servant. Potentially this means rulers are more dedicated and responsible, in practice the title frequently engenders swollen egos.
So far it seems as though Islam might be compatible with democracy.
But then there's sharia. If lawmaking is God's prerogative, humans only have room to make the occasional interpretation; and only the those steeped in religious knowledge ought to tinker with interpretations.
With that attitude, democracy can't be much more than an add-on.
I've read some of Esposito's books, and I'm not nearly as hopeful as he seems to be. Will reformation help? Unless what you mean by "reformation" in Islam is a re-evaluation of sharia and incorporates skepticism of how well faillible humans can implement God's law, I don't see how democratic trends can withstand the charge of impiety.
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