Democracy and Islamic Rationality

The rationality of the epistemic and value system is based on epistemology, cosmology, anthropology and axiology. Since widely differing views are presented are on each of these factors, we must admit that we will have different types of rationality. Religious types of rationality are clearly differentiated from secular ones. Of course, we may find various types of rationality in these two spectra. It is clear that Islamic rationality is not the same as the Christian and Jewish types of rationality and it is wrong to assume that modern secular rationality is the same as ancient Greek or Roman secular rationality. However, each of these kinds of rationality has its own specific requirements and outputs. As a special way of managing communities, democracy may be approved by some types of rationality and rejected by other types. Considering democracy from the view of Islamic rationality, the present paper seeks to estimate the relationship between the two. Addressing this issue is important because many experts believe that democracy is the outcome of secularism and it develops only in the atmosphere when secularism prevails. This paper attempts to refute this claim and prove that the reverse of it is true.