The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Response to Ellen Goodman regarding democracy

Response to Ellen Goodman regarding democracy
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) - Friday, April 17 2009, 1:39:46 (CEST)
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Dear Ellen,

Thank you for your letter and constructive criticism of my website. My responses are detailed below.

In your e-mail you state:
You have printed very inaccurate "history" on your website.......Westerner's do NOT believe that democracy sprang from Periclean Athens and there was no suggestion of democracy in the Roman Empire.........Rome had a constitutional republic until the time of Augustus when it became an imperium.


>>> My sentence on my website states quite clearly:
“The West’s erroneous belief is that democracy miraculously sprang out of Greek civilization in the fifth century B.C. and was utilised by the Roman Empire and arguably gave rise to the great moments in the construction and propagation of Western civilization."

From that I am implying that the average person on the street who has watched movies such as 300 comes away thinking that Greek democracy is culturally connected to our modern day system of Western democracy.

What your article states however is that just like Mesopotamian collective governance regressed when passed onto the Greeks around 7th century BCE, it also regressed but may have disappeared after the Greeks passed it onto the Romans.

In your e-mail you state:
The only Western institution that survived the collapse of the Roman Empire was the Roman Catholic church.......constitutional literature was lost to the West until it resurfaced in the Islamic world in the 11tth and 12th centuries .Aristotle was revived by Arabs and Jews such as Avicenna (ibn Sina 980-1037) and Salomon Ibn Gebirol (1021-70) The greatest philosopher of the time was Averroes (Ibn Roschd 1126-98)

Unquestionably there were great centres of Arab/Muslim culture in the 11th and 12th centuries but no where have they given rise to constitutional theories of government/public law etc.

>>> That may be considered "history" from a Western perspective but other sources may beg to differ. In fact the very Western term, The Dark Ages points to just how one-sided and Orientalist Western history truly is. The Dark Ages may have seen a cultural decline in the West but over in the Middle East this period came to coincide with an Arab renaissance producing the likes of Al-MawardiAl-Mawardi. He was was an Arab faqih of the Shafii madhhab; he also made contributions to tafsir, philology, ethics, and literature....
Known in Latin as Alboacen (972, Basra, Iraq - 1058, Iraq) He was one of the most famous thinkers in political science in the middle Ages. He was also a great sociologist, jurist, and mohaddith. He served as Chief Justice at Baghdad and as an ambassador of the Abbasid Caliph to several important and powerful Muslim states. Al-Mawardi made original contributions in political science and sociology. In these fields, he wrote three monumental works: Kitab al-Ahkam al-Sultania, Qanun al-Wazarah, and Kitab Nasihat al-Mulk. Al-Mawardi formulated the principles of political science. His books deal with duties of the Caliphs, the chief minister, the cabinet, and the responsibility of and relationship between the government and citizens. He has discussed the affairs of state in both peace and war. Kitab Aadab al-Dunya wa al-Din was his another masterpiece in Ethics. He was the author and supporter of the Doctrine of Necessity.


In your article you state:
To sum up, it is clear from the above that what distinguishes the “West” is its slow evolution to a form of government which has responded to new challenges and situations; where the powers of government are limited by law; where the arbitrary use of force is curtailed; where Joe and Jean Bloggs cannot be deprived of their freedom to worship as they please, to vote as they please, to assemble not quite as they please and do a myriad other things including voting at regular elections.

>>> The first laws originated in the code of Hammurabi and were passed onto the Romans in the form of the Twelve Tables. Furthermore in various parts of the ancient Middle East as Ben Isakhan's article demonstrates, in the context of Lagash’s resistance to state-imposed terror and despotism as well as the growing animosity between church and state that we find evidence of collective political action against oppressive systems of power and the first recorded use of the word “freedom.”

In your article you state:
Most important, indeed essential, for the development of constitutional government is for the state to be the sole agency that can legitimately exercise force. In Iraq and Afghanistan this is not so. Armed militias proliferate. Nor is there in such countries a concept of civil society or nationalism. Accordingly, voting tends to be along tribal, religious and/or ethnic lines.

>>> Now this one-sided Orientalist view is quite disappointing from someone who teaches law. You conveniently forget to state that it was the CIA who supported the Baa’th party coup led by Saddam during the 1970s. It was Rumsfeld who sold him weapons used to suppress the Iraqi people who tried to rebel against his rule, and it was George W Bush who illegally invaded and occupied Iraq breaking up an oppressively run state into mini fiefdoms run by militia. The cold war and the then superpowers are also directly responsible for the military support and then abandonment of Afghanistan to other violent militia. For you, a lecturer in law, to ignore the root cause of these conflicts and blame the victims who have fallen back on the ethnic, tribal and religious roots is quite abhorrent and flies in the face of all precedents including Nuremburg and the Hague convention.

I welcome further e-mails on this subject with you and hope we can continue this civil discussion.

Kindest regards,
David Chibo
www.gilgameshgames.org



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