While there is a long and well-established tradition in Islamic jurisprudence on the issue of human rights, the concept of representative democracy which we in the United States enjoy today has been a very recent development, beginning essentially with the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789.

Even after these defining events, it is clear that it took well over a century to make what we would today consider the proper advances to correctly apply the notion of representative democracy. For example, it was not until 1920 that suffrage was extended to women by the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.

While the basic institutions of democracy were being developed in the West and while the disparities between theory and practice were slowly being corrected, most of the Muslim world was under the grip of colonialism. This, to a great extent, precluded a similar development within the Islamic world. Hence, there is no historical representative democratic precedent in Islam upon which to rely. Therefore, the specific laws of the political machinery need to be developed for the new era of nation-states. This development, like all of Islamic jurisprudence, would rely on the principle sources of the sharia (Islamic law).