More Bernard Lewis
“Some features of classical Islamic civilization, such as tolerance, social mobility, and respect for law, are distinctly favorable to democratic development...Socially, Islam has always been democratic, or rather, egalitarian, rejecting both the caste system of India and the aristocratic privilege of Europe...[There remains] the political difficulty - the total absence of any conception or experience of representative or limited government of any kind. It is this, no doubt, that underlies the theory that democracy cannot work in Islamic lands. That there is a predisposition to autocratic government among Muslim peoples is clear enough; that there is an inherent incapacity for any other has yet to be proven.”