Afghan Students Debate Faith and Elections
Religious experts tell young voters that choosing leaders has always been an important part of the faith.
Afghan Students Debate Faith and Elections
Religious experts tell young voters that choosing leaders has always been an important part of the faith.
The role of elections in a Muslim society was explored in a debate hosted by IWPR in the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif.
Addressing the 100 students from Balkh University who attended the event, Mofid, a lecturer in Islamic studies, began by explaining that holding elections was not only a right but also an obligation for Muslims, even if the experience of the past 12 years in Afghanistan had failed to convince people of the value of democracy.
Maulana Abdul Basir Behrawi, a religious scholar, said ways of selecting leaders had been debated since the early days of Islam, and the religion, and the basic concepts remained the same even if the format had changed over time.
In response to a question about the role of clerics in elections, Mofid said, voters were now equipped to make their own choices.
“Our people will now accept or reject things on grounds of well-founded logic and argument, whereas in the past they might have accepted something just because they’d heard it from others,” he said.
Asked by a female student of law and political science whether the 2014 elections would actually improve anything, Mofid replied, “We have no other option than elections, so the more we develop the process, the better the outcome will be.”
This report was produced as part of Open Minds: Speaking Up, Reaching Out – Promoting University and Youth Participation in Afghan Elections, an IWPR initiative funded by the US embassy in Kabul.
