Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (33 page)

The big question for Islamic politics, therefore, is not whether the
umma
should accept theocratic rulers. Few Muslims believe in the existence of such men who can speak on behalf of God. But a larger number of Muslims do believe in something else: an Islamic form of government. This, they believe, is a state based on the “system” that Islam supposedly ordains, which they hope will answer the problems plaguing Muslim societies. But is there really such a thing?

A
N
I
SLAMIC
F
ORM OF
G
OVERNMENT
?

For starters, the Qur’an clearly does not include a definition of government. It repeatedly counsels believers to obey the Prophet, who was the head of the Muslim community, but it does not specify what would happen once the Prophet was gone. One verse merely says, “Obey . . . those in authority from among you,” but it doesn’t specify who these people will be and how they will come to power.
⁷
Another oft-mentioned Qur’anic concept is
shura
, (mutual consultation), which means that Muslims should listen to each other’s views, but it is, again, not specific.
⁸

In other words, the Muslim scripture is almost silent on the fundamental issues of politics. In the words of a Muslim scholar, it instead gives the impression that “matters concerning political rule and administration [are] not considered to be within the purview of divine revelation.”
⁹

Moreover, as Muslim tradition holds, the Prophet also was silent about political theory. On his deathbed, he left neither a political heir nor even an institution like a church to help the community govern in his absence. His famous Farewell Sermon ends with a very modest declaration of heritage: “I leave for you the Qur’an,” he simply said, “you shall uphold it.” (The two other versions of this sentence add to the Qur’an either the “Tradition” or the “Family” of the Prophet—terms that respectively, and clearly, reflect the Sunni and Shiite perspectives. Yet, even in these versions, there is still no reference to any political entity that the Prophet left behind.)

So, when the Prophet died in the summer of 632, the Muslim community had no political blueprint to follow. So the elders of the community sat down and discussed what to do. They, not too surprisingly, did their reasoning within the political norms of their time and milieu. Finally, in line with the Arab custom of having tribal chieftains, they decided to elect one of their group, Abu Bakr, as the new head of the Muslim community.

Thus was born the institution known as the caliphate. It was a temporal body created by humans according to historic conditions. It was certainly based on Islamic norms—reflected in the belief that the caliph must rule with piety, justice, and righteousness. But it was also based on the circumstances of seventh-century Arabia. Had those earliest Muslims been citizens of an Athenian democracy, perhaps they would have created an assembly, not just a single leader, informed by Islamic norms.

Yet still, a few centuries after its founding, the caliphate came to be regarded by some Muslims as a requirement of Islam, rather than as a temporal institution to govern Muslims. The scholar who first made the argument for a caliphate as a necessity of religion was al-Ashari, who, as mentioned earlier, was one of the founding fathers of the Traditionist school and a strong critic of the Rationalist one.
¹⁰
Another Traditionist scholar, al-Mawardi, further developed the idea and theorized an Islamic form of government structured around the caliphate.

Meanwhile, the Rationalist school had a less statist attitude. Some Mutazilites had argued that a government was not a religious obligation, and if every individual complied with the law, justice and peace would prevail even without a state.
¹¹
Others said that a government was necessary—but out of rational considerations, not religious rulings.

Yet, as we also saw in the earlier chapters, the Traditionist side dominated mainstream Islam, along with the idea that the caliphate is a part of the religion. As a consequence, the idea that Islam is inseparable from the state became a commonly held Muslim attitude.

A G
LOBAL
C
ALIPHATE
(
OF
G
OLD AND
S
ILVER
)

Debate on the caliphate reopened only in the twentieth century, particularly after 1924, when Turkish ruler Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the Ottoman caliphate. I criticized this decision in earlier chapters, for it led to a vacuum of authority in the Muslim world, opening the way to various forms of Islamism. Yet this is a political evaluation. Religiously speaking, the abolition of the caliphate was not an offense, for it was not a religiously required institution in the first place, as argued persuasively first by Seyyid Bey in the Turkish parliament and later by Ali Abdel al-Razik at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
¹²

Seyyid Bey, a professor of Islamic jurisprudence, argued that the caliphate—unlike Catholicism’s papacy, which is “religious and spiritual”—was a political institution and as such could be replaced by a popularly elected government. (He also claimed: “Islam is a pro-liberty religion in law as in knowledge and sciences.”)
¹³

In his notable book
Who Needs an Islamic State?
, contemporary Muslim thinker Abdelwahab El-Affendi also criticizes the idea of a caliphate as a religiously required institution. “The Caliphate was not an end in itself,” he reminds us, “but a means to an end, which is the achievement of justice and the preservation of the nation.”
¹⁴
The Traditionist scholars who idealized the caliphate, El-Affendi argues, had simply confused the means with the end. Moreover, they regarded the “ad hoc decisions” made by the early caliphs “as precedents with normative significance.”
¹⁵

Contemporary Islamists not only preserve the same misconception—that Islam provides a blueprint for a state—but they also make it the very core of their political program. They see the caliphate as a religious obligation and declare its reestablishment as their main goal. As a model, they look not at the more recent Ottoman caliphate but the “original” one—created in seventh-century Arabia. The result is a radical utopia aimed at restoring the political conditions of that time and milieu.

Alas, there’s even a push to bring back the social and economic conditions. One of the greatest champions of the “global caliphate” cause, the UK-based Hizb ut-Tahrir, “a political party whose ideology is Islam,” proudly states the following on its website:

It is the duty of the Khilafah State to make its currency in gold and silver, and to work on the basis of gold and silver, as it was during the time of the Messenger of Allah.
¹⁶

With the same line of reasoning, one could argue that a caliphate state, “as it was during the time of the Messenger of Allah,” should operate on the basis of horses and camels—and not cars, trains, planes, and other innovations of the “infidels.” One could also argue that this state, “as it was during the time of the Messenger of Allah,” should arrange its communications on the basis of personal couriers and homing pigeons—and not phones or the Internet. Never mind the fact that the Hizb ut-Tahrir folks themselves most probably use cars, trains, and planes, and, quite obviously, the Internet.

The nonsense of such reasoning is all too obvious. At its core lies the fundamental mistake of the Islamists: They don’t realize that what they call “the Islamic state” was nothing but the political experience of the earlier generations of Muslims. That experience was informed by Islam, for sure, but it was also shaped by the temporal realities of the centuries in which they lived.

The right question, then, is: What should be the political experience of the Muslims of the twenty-first century?

We should not look for an imagined “Islamic state,” in other words. We should instead seek, as El-Affendi puts it, “a state for Muslims.”
¹⁷

E
MBRACING
D
EMOCRACY
—
AND
E
VEN A
S
ECULAR
O
NE

Once we start looking for “a state for Muslims,” we will soon end up with a commonsense solution. Since no particular Muslim can claim to have theocratic authority, and since there are all sorts of Muslims with diverse views, ideas, and aspirations, the only system that will be fair to all would be one that would include all of them in the political process: a democracy, as Muslim thinker al-Farabi envisioned a millennium ago.
¹⁸

Yet a fundamental question remains: Should the legal system of this “democratic state for Muslims” be based on the Shariah?

At first glance, this question is meaningless, for if a state is democratic, its legislators are free to adopt any legal tradition that they deem appropriate. If they want to incorporate elements of Roman law, let’s say, that’s fine, they can do it. If they want to legislate in line with the Shariah, again, that’s fine. Its logic would not be too different from the reasoning used in some states of the United States to support capital punishment—that it is “the law of God.”

However, incorporating elements of “the law of God” via a democratic process is one thing, enacting it as official doctrine is another. In the latter case, the system will cease to be democratic for two reasons. First, not everyone wishes to live under “the law of God.” Even the most conservative Muslim societies include secular citizens and non-Muslims, who would prefer other laws. Second, not everyone agrees on a definition of “the law of God.” The Shariah has always had many different interpretations, and the number of these interpretations has risen today with the advent of more modernist schools. So, whenever a state decides to make the Shariah its official legal code, it inevitably will opt for one of its many possible interpretations and dismiss all others. And, in that case, “the law of God” will cease to be the law of God. It will simply be the law of men—ones who are self-righteous and arrogant enough to claim to know the mind of God.

Thus, a “democracy based on the Shariah” will be neither a democracy nor based on the Shariah. It will be an authoritarian state that imposes its own version of the Shariah, which inevitably will serve its own subjective and earthly purposes. (Or it will lead to tensions and clashes among Muslims who believe in different versions of the Shariah. A case study for this was Pakistan’s ill-fated attempt at “the Islamization of laws,” which led to internal conflict because the various religious factions could not reach consensus on what the true Islamic law is.)
¹⁹

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na‘im, a Sudanese-born professor of law at Emory University, has pinned down the problem well. “Enforcing a [Shariah] through coercive power of the state negates its religious nature,” he notes, “because Muslims would be observing the law of the state and not freely performing their religious obligation as Muslims.”
²⁰
Hence, he argues, the best state for Muslims is a secular state that will allow people to “be a Muslim by conviction and free choice, which is the only way one can be a Muslim.”
²¹

At this point, perhaps we should note the big difference between a
secular
state and a
secularist
one. The former is a state that is neutral to religion and respects the right of its citizens to live by their faith. A secularist state, on the other hand, is hostile to religion and wants to curb its influence in public life, and even in the lives of individual citizens.
²²
It is hard to reconcile Islam—or any other religion, for that matter—with secularist states. But why should Muslims not be content with secular ones that respect religious freedom?

S
HARIAH
W
ITHOUT
I
SLAMISM

The objection to the question above might come from a perceived conflict between the secular state and two important notions toward which many Muslims feel sympathetic: “political Islam” and the Shariah. Let’s look at them one at a time.

In the past few decades, the term
political Islam
has become quite controversial, and even infamous, for good reason: It has been dominated by the Islamists, whose goal is the creation of a totalitarian “Islamic state.” But in fact, there can well be a political Islam whose goal is just to represent and defend Islamic values within the rules of a democracy. Some core values of Islam—such as justice, rights, and family values—clearly have political implications, and Muslims are absolutely justified to advance them via political means such as parties.