In short, far from being the government of fools pushing the people towards folly or disaster, democracy contains the promise of overcoming the fads and illusions of any one individual or group. The angularities of each get corrected by those of the other in the melting pot of collective decision-making. History shows that the assemblies of the ignorant masses have done less harm to humanity than those great men whose greatness lay in their egos rather than in their vision. This happened because they stood isolated and alienated from the common man, the housewife, the farmer and the worker. The wisdom of the common man is rooted in his experience of sufferings and deprivations, and its value is far greater than the 'sophistry and illusion’ of the unverified and unverifiable theories of   'learned fools’.9

Alternatives to Democracy:  If, for argument's sake, we reject democracy, what alternatives remain? It would be futile considering such abstract or Utopian alternatives as 'Islamic democracy’, ‘party less democracy’, 'Ram Raj’, or ‘Post-Soviet Communism’. What appears to be an excellent system on paper may function badly, in practice, because of the complexity of human affairs and the unintended consequences of human choices. An ounce of experience of how western democracy has actually worked has more educative value than tons of arguments in favour of any abstract system.10 Thus, the only alternatives worth considering are military dictatorship and Soviet Socialism, i.e. Communism in current parlance. What has been termed 'Euro-Communism' has recently emerged in some parts of Europe under Russian hegemony. To the extent that plural parties function freely and fair elections are held in these eastern European countries, the new system may well be deemed as democratic. The effective alternatives to democracy are, therefore, Soviet Communism and military dictatorship. For the present we may profitably ignore variations in different models of Communist governments and focus our attention on their common feature-- the single party system and the absence of free and unfettered public expression of opinion instead of the present system of internal debate in the top echelons of a monolithic Communist party. 

The intra-party freedom of expression permitted in the Soviet Union fails to pre-empt the rise of the attitudes and politics of secrecy, conspiracy and violence in Communist society. It is true that plural democratic parties and the electoral power of the masses tends to breed corruption and appeasement in society. But the single party system breeds the evil of conspiratorial dissent in the body politic, and this, to my mind, is a greater evil. I, for one, hold corruption in a free society to be a lesser evil than conspiratorial politics in an authoritarian regime. 

Long experience shows and confirms that authoritarianism (no matter how benign to begin with) inevitably degenerates into tyranny. In the final analysis, our choice is not between benign authoritarianism and corrupt democracy, but the evils generally associated with the two. Now while a corrupt democratically formed government can be democratically changed and reformed, a corrupt or tyrannical authoritarian establishment cannot be de-established without recourse to methods fraught with the evils of conspiracy and violence. In short, the demon inside the ballot is less evil than the demon in the bullet.

4. Democracy and Sovereignty of God

Can the foregoing idea of democracy be reconciled with the view that sovereignty belongs to God alone? Is there not a basic contradiction between the idea of democratic freedom and the idea of total surrender to the 'Book and the Example of the Prophet’? This crucial point merits detailed consideration.