KingMamba
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I wrote that because many people were saying that the first caliph was elected by vote, and by that statement, implying that it amounted to democracy. It doesn't - it only amounts to an elective monarchy.
Now, coming to your part about the rashidun caliphate - it was not a democracy in the sense in which we use the term today. There are many kinds of democracies as well, but when we say "democracy" these days, we mean at least a representative democracy, maybe a liberal democracy.
When you say that the caliphate had a parliament, I assume you mean the majilis? If so, those were not bodies of elected representatives, which is what a parliament in a representative democracy is. These majilis (they went by a few other terms too, and I cannot recollect those from memory) operated differently in different parts of the caliphate, and as far as I know, they were not composed of a bunch of people voted from specific regions. That is, it wasn't like one member was elected from one province and so on. There were general guidelines on who can become a member, but REPRESENTATION of people by area was not part of the concept. I know that this is true of most of these majilis. Maybe there were some parts where it was practiced in the way modern democracies function - I am not aware of any.
Another thing to note is that in modern democracies, each arm of the govt has a specific function. (Seperation of powers and all that.) The function of the elected representatives is law making. Most of the majilis solely functioned to elect a caliph - that is a good practice, but that is not what we expect our representatives to do today. Or the majilis acted as an advisory council for the caliphs. All this is very different from what we call representative democracy today.
Don't get me wrong, the system of the early caliphate was probably a HUGE improvement over anything that those regions had seen. Only the greeks, 500+ years before them, and in a different geographical region, had invented a better system, to the best of my knowledge. For their time and place, their system was much better than anything else.
However, we have a superior system of governing in the modern day concept of a liberal democracy. Universal adult franchise, general elections, multiple political parties, separation of powers between different branches of govt, universal rights and liberties, these are all necessary conditions for a state to be called a classical democracy today. Most of these did not exist (or did not exist together in any province) in the caliphate. And that is not surprising since, just like other branches of human knowledge evolve, so does political and administrative thought. Just like we know a lot more about science or engineering than people did a thousand years back, we also have better administrative systems today, because we can learn from all the good and bad systems tried in the past.
And that is why it is silly to ask whether something we have today confirms to what we had in the long past. What is a good system of governance should be analysed and arrived at through reasoning, not on the basis of what people in the 7th century did. To ask whether democracy is "Islamic" or not is as silly and pointless as asking whether lightbulbs are Islamic or not. I am pretty sure that the early caliphate did not use electricity or railroads or lightbulbs - does that make any of these unislamic? Should we use railroads or lightbulbs, or should we travel only on camels? How do we decide that question? Not by asking what the people in the early caliphate did, but by using our reasoning to arrive at an answer. The answer of course is that fluorescent lightbulbs are a lot easier and cheaper and efficient to use than oil lamps or wood, and railroads and motor cars are much more efficient than camels. And that is why we discarded one for the other. And that is why today we should shun earlier systems of governance, and adopt the newer ones, if the newer ones are better - which of course should be analysed through reason.
(By the way this talib dude's AK-47 is also unislamic. He should fight with swords, which is what muhammed and his followers did. Same reasoning that he uses to condemn democracy.)
Fair enough analysis.
