רק באמצעות התורה אפשר להנהיג מדינה

Educated Muslims, chagrined by the newfound potency of their European rivals, asked: What are they doing right and what are we doing wrong, or not doing at all? Representative, constitutional government was high on the list. The nineteenth century saw the rise of elected assemblies in a number of Western countries, and democracy in our current sense was beginning to take hold. Many Muslims suspected that here--in this most exotic and alien of Western practices--lay the secret to the West's wealth and power, and hoped that the adoption of constitutions and the creation of elected legislatures in the Islamic world would redress the civilizational balance.

Getting used to the idea was not easy; the first Muslim visitors to the West disliked much of what they saw. The earliest detailed deion of England by a Muslim traveller is a fascinating account by Mirza Abu Talib Khan, a Turko-Persian resident of Lucknow who was in England between 1798 and 1803. He watched the House of Commons in action, and his comments are enlightening. The government and opposition MPs sitting on their benches facing each other across the chamber reminded him of trees full of parrots squawking at each other, a common sight back home in India. When he learned that the purpose of the noisy assemblage was to make laws, he was shocked. The English, he explained to his readers, had not accepted a divine law and so were reduced to the expedient of making their own laws, in accordance with the experience of their judges and the requirements of their time.