Why democracy is incompatible with an Islamic state?

Let me state that my provocative title does not mean that democratic form of government cannot exist in a country with the Muslim majority. What I point out is that what is called "democracy" by the dictionaries can only exist in the Western paradigm of the "nation-state," which started to emerge in the Early Modern Europe.

Namely, the nation-state, an outgrowth of the national monarchy, is the Hobbesian Leviathan, which has two following distinct features. First, it possesses monopoly on violence, i.e. all violence unless performed by the state army or police is prohibited and is punishable according to the legal code. Second, there is a fiscal monopoly so well written into the sixteenth amendment to the US Constitution. Government alone has the right to extract money (taxes) without voluntary consent and equivalent promise in goods and/or services. All private extractions are called stealing or robbery dependent on the situation. Part of the fiscal arrangement is that government pays salary to its own officials rather than allows them to collect fees directly from the population. The opposite situation is called "corruption" or "graft" and is prosecuted.

I remind the reader that nothing of a kind existed in the European Middle Ages. Ordeals, i.e. judicial combat between litigating parties, vendettas and private warfare of the feudal lords were the norm. Equally true was the payment of the dues and tithes to the lord of the manor, the Church and upkeep of the public officials.

To establish the Leviathan, the Early Modern European Governments, not without a few civil wars along the road, developed a compromise with the populace, which was to
be entitled to certain modicum of control over these two monopolies through their elected representatives or supposedly impartial mediators called judges. The mechanisms of this control got codified (except for Britain) and received the name of "electoral democracy."

None of that could be ever imagined in the dualistic system of Sharia Law. In theory, the ruler is supposed to wage the perpetual war, jihad, against the enemies of Islam. However, he has few other societal functions beyond raising resources for fighting with the infidels. Internal administration of the Islamic state is theoretically in the hands of two groups of people, qadi(s), who interpret Sharia and Adath, the local customs as allowed by Islam, and imams, spiritual and cultural leaders of the village communities and tribes. There is no European Leviathan; the right of the Western parliaments to legislate, e.g. marital affairs or school curricula, would be as alien to Ibn Haldoun as the dictates of the PTA on the circle of friends of her daughter would seem strange for American soccer mom. When Soviet or American occupation troops established puppet legislatures in Afghanistan, they viewed them as they would view their own deliberative bodies.
Even if the elections-- as in Soviet Union, or American-occupied Iraq-- were fictions, the legislatures were assumed to be legitimate bodies of political elites. But for the local population their "delegates" were not delegated any powers, which
the population itself was forbidden to exercise from now on. It does not mean they are not taken seriously by the Muslim tribesmen. American soccer moms take school coaches very seriously, they want them to be proficient in their sports, not to molest children and otherwise to be good role models for their offspring. Yet, they do not perceive in this situation a delegation of parental power any more than the Afghanis and Iraqis accord political power to their "elected representatives." Equally impossible is to expect a creation of modern army in a state permeated by the Sharia ideology because the power structure of the Middle Eastern armies is not a functional hierarchy but repeats to a large extent distribution of power between tribal and party groups in the larger society.

All that is not being said to bolster the claims of Western superiority. The society
based on the above principles was better organized and generally wealthier than
the states of the medieval Europe. It did not suffer from stultifying bureaucracy and oppression of contemporary China and the Byzantium. Moreover, typical "western" societies had their own pangs of achieving modernity. For instance, Napoleonic system relatively painlessly replaced multiple local authority of the landowner, parish priest, member of parliament, etc. with a single figure of prefect personifying French state in its entirety. When there were attempts to copy this system in a newly unified Italy, simple subjects of Victor Emmanuel could not accept it, especially in the agrarian South. The tag of war between Leviathan of the modern nation-state and the overlapping authorities of the Church, landowners, mafia, military aristocracy,
businessmen civil servants and party bosses, each with his own claims on spoils and goodies to pass around, continued at least until late 1980s (some think it is still there). Russian Empire, only by the end of the XIX century, established pretty effective domination over alternative centers of military and fiscal power in the Central Russia. Yet, when confronted with reality of pogroms in the Southern Russia, imperial officials demonstrated to the European dignitaries a genuine incomprehension that the state was required to stop what they perceived as intercommunal violence. It is easy to blame that on antisemitism but imperial bureaucrats were equally at loss dealing with depredations of Russian settlers in Siberia with respect to indigenous peoples and were hardly more "backward" in that than their American, Canadian and Australian counterparts. In large chunks of Siberia before the Bolshevik coup it was still a powerful owner of a gold mine or a fur-trading outpost who performed local administrative functions instead of the government. In the 1990s this arrangement re-emerged in the phenomenon of the "oligarchs" but, contrary to the popular lore, they were not creations of emerging capitalism but a throwback to premodern statehood.

One concludes that the Sharia state was far from unique and represented natural, for the medieval economy, compromise between the central and local powers. It is futile to impose the instruments of the industrial-era governance such as "free and fair" elections, professional civil services and technocratic armies on the societies, which never were Leviathans in the first place when the Western Leviathan is itself under attack from the powers of multinational corporations and institutionalized cronyism of the elites of the American South. Otherwise, one needs to imitate the methods of dealing with coranic scholars and village elders employed by Ataturk, Saddam Hussein or Nasser and Assad. Besides poor moral choices, these methods are difficult to implement in the era of Kalashnikovs, Stingers, cell phones and the Internet.