The Principles of STATE and GOVERNMENT in ISLAM
By Muhammad Asad
Chapters: The Issue before Us | Terminology and Historical Precedent | Government by Consent and Council | Relationship between Executive and Legislature | The Citizens and the Government | Conclusion |
Chapter VI
CONCLUSION
The Obstacles in Our Way
Here ends our discussion of the fundamental shar'i principles which must find their expression in the constitution of a state that is to be Islamic not only in name but also in fact.
I have not attempted to set forth in this book anything like a "blueprint" for the constitution of a state. I have merely tried to bring out some of the self-evident injunctions of Islam relevant to the problem of state and government, to discuss the modalities of their application to present-day needs, and to draw attention to the legal provisions which must under all circumstances be included in a constitution that claims to be Islamic. Within the narrow confines of this task, I have endeavored to show that Islam offers us a definite, clear-cut outline of a political law of its own, leaving it to the ijtihad of the time concerned to elaborate the details.
Needless to say, a mere discussion of the forms and procedures that ought to underlie the organization of an Islamic state cannot do full justice to the entire scheme of Islam. For Islam is much more than a program of political action: it is a system of beliefs and morals, a social doctrine, and a call to righteousness in all individual and communal concerns; it is a complete, self-contained ideology which regards all aspects of our existence—moral and physical, spiritual and intellectual, personal and communal—as parts of the indivisible whole which we call "human life." But precisely because the ideology of Islam is so complete and so self-contained, its adherents cannot live a truly Islamic life merely by holding Islamic beliefs. They must do far more than that. If Islam is not to remain an empty word, they must also coordinate their outward social behavior with the beliefs they profess. Such a coordination of attitude and endeavor is impossible unless the whole community is subject to the socioeconomic laws of Islam: and so it is only within the framework of an independent ideological state built on the principles of Islam and endowed with all the machinery of government, legislation, and law-enforcement that the ideals of Islam can be brought to practical fruition.
In a world like ours, which for the most part is governed by concepts of nationalism along racial or, at best, along purely cultural lines, the concept of an Islamic state is so far removed from what the rest of the world regards as "modern" and desirable, that the advocacy of a religious ideology as the basis of state-organization is bound to encounter formidable opposition. Most people of our time have grown accustomed to accepting racial affinities and historical traditions as the only legitimate premises of nationhood: whereas we Muslims, on the other hand, regard an ideological community—a community of people having a definite outlook on life and a definite scale of moral values in common—as the highest form of nationhood to which man can aspire. We make this claim not only because we are convinced that our particular ideology, Islam, is a Law decreed by God Himself, but also because our reason tells us that a community based on ideas held in common is a far more advanced manifestation of human life than a community resulting from race or language or geographical location.
We should not underestimate the difficulties that will confront us should we decide to give to our polity the contents and forms demanded by Islam. For one thing, it is no easy task to achieve a truly Islamic polity after the centuries of debasement and slavery which have sapped the strength of the Muslim community and undermined its social morale. During the period of their political decay, the Muslims have lost a good deal of their cultural self-confidence as well, and many of them find it difficult today to avoid thinking in Western terms of "state" and "nation" and to think in Islamic terms instead. They blindly follow Western patterns of thought in the naive belief that everything which comes from the West must be more "up-to-date" than anything which they, the Muslims, could produce out of themselves; and this conviction leads them to an irresponsible application of Western political concepts to all that happens in their own society. On the other hand, many conservative Muslims who, in word and deed, insist on the maintenance of all traditional forms and, consequently, oppose the Westernization of their community, base their opposition not so much on the real values of Islam as on the social conventions evolved in the centuries of our decadence. Their minds seem to work on the assumption that Islam and the conventions of Muslim society are one and the same thing (which every thinking person knows is an utterly false assumption) and that, therefore, everything that implies a departure from the conventions evolved in the course of our history—both with regard to our social habits and our approach to the problem of state and government—goes against Islam; and that, therefore, it would be the duty of an Islamic state to give permanence and legal sanction to all the social forms in which we have hitherto been living. In other words, these conservative elements within our society seem to take it for granted that the survival of Islam depends on the maintenance of the very conditions which, because of their sterile rigidity, now make it impossible for Muslims to live in accordance with the true tenets of Islam. This, the reader will admit, is very poor logic; but however absurd these assumptions may be, they nevertheless provide the basis on which the minds of our conservative critics operate. Their unwillingness to concede the necessity of any change in our social concepts and habits drives countless Muslim men and women to a helpless imitation of the West; and their insistence that a modern Islamic state would have to be an exact replica of the "historic precedents" of our past is apt to bring the very idea of the Islamic state into discredit and ridicule.
Apart from the difficulties arising from our own cultural decadence and the centuries-old stagnation of Muslim thought, any attempt to reorganize our countries on truly Islamic lines invariably arouses apprehensions in the non-Muslim world and causes it to place all manner of obstructions, direct and indirect, in our way toward this ideal. Ever since the Crusades, Islam has been misrepresented in the West, and a deep distrust—almost hatred—of all Islamic propositions has become part and parcel of the Western cultural heritage. The Westerners see in the tenets of Islam not only a denial of many of the fundamental beliefs of their own religion but also a political threat. Under the influence of their historical memories, of the centuries of passionate warfare between the Muslim world and Europe, they attribute to Islam—quite unjustifiably—an inherent hostility toward all non-Muslims; and so they fear that a revival of the Islamic spirit, as manifested in the idea of the Islamic state, might revive the slumbering strength of the Muslims and drive them to new aggressive adventures in the direction of the West. To counteract such a possible tendency, the Westerners are doing their utmost to prevent a resurgence of political power in Muslim countries and a restoration of Islam to its erstwhile dominant position in Muslim social and intellectual life. Their means of combat are not merely political; they are cultural as well. Through the instrumentality of Western schools and of Western-orientated methods of education in the Muslim world, the distrust of Islam as a social doctrine is being systematically planted in the minds of the younger generation of Muslim men and women; and the principal weapon in this campaign to discredit Islam is being supplied, unconsciously, by the reactionary elements within our own society. By insisting that the political forms and procedures of a contemporary Islamic state must strictly follow the pattern evolved in the early period of Islam (an insistence for which there is not the slightest warrant in Quran or Sunnah), these self-appointed "guardians" of Muhammad's Message make it impossible for many educated Muslims to accept the shari'ah as a practical proposition for the political exigencies of our time. By representing the idea of jihad, in clear contradiction to all Quranic injunctions, as an instrument of aggressive expansion of Muslim rule over non-Muslim territories, they sow fear in the hearts of non-Muslims and fill many righteous Muslims with disgust at the thought of the injustice which such a tendency so obviously implies. And, finally, by claiming (again, without any warrant in Quran or Sunnah) that the sharFah imposes on us the duty to discriminate, in all social aspects of life, between the Muslim and non-Muslim citizens of an Islamic state to the detriment of the non-Muslim minorities, they make it impossible for the minorities to bear with equanimity the thought that the country in which they live might become an Islamic state.
In order to overcome the apprehensions of the non-Muslim world in general and of our non-Muslim citizens in particular, we must be able to show that the sociopolitical scheme of Islam aims at justice for Muslim and non-Muslim alike, and that in our endeavor to set up a truly Islamic state we Muslims are moved by moral considerations alone. It is, in short, our duty to prove to the whole world that we really intend to live up to these words of the Quran:
"You are the best community that has been sent forth to mankind [in that] you enjoin right and forbid wrong and have faith in God."(1) Our being a righteous community depends, therefore, on our being prepared to struggle, always and under all circumstances, for the upholding of justice and for the abolition of injustice for all people: and this should preclude the possibility of a truly Islamic community ever being unjust to the non-Muslims living in its midst. The other difficulty before us—the one brought about by the sterile, formalistic views of the "conservative" Muslims regarding the nature and the methods of an Islamic state—can be surmounted only if we approach the problem of the political law laid down in Quran and Sunnah in a creative spirit, independently of all "historical precedents" and all time-bound interpretations handed down from previous generations. In other words, we must be able to demonstrate, over the objections of our "conservatives," that the Law of Islam is not merely a subject for hair-splitting books of fiqh and wordy Friday sermons, but is a living, dynamic program of human life: a program sovereign in itself, entirely independent of any particular environment, and therefore practicable at all times and under all conditions: a program, in brief, that would not only not hamper our society's development but would, on the contrary, make it the most progressive, the most self-reliant, and the most vigorous of all existing societies.
(1) Quran 3: 110.
The Need for a Code of Laws
I cannot conclude this discussion of the principles of the Islamic state without saying a few words about the need for a codification of Islamic Law.
We have seen that the foremost duty of an Islamic state consists in enforcing the ordinances of the shariah in the territories under its jurisdiction (2); and to this end we need a concise, clearly comprehensible code of shar'i laws. But where is such a code to be found? The obvious answer is: In the nass ordinances of Quran and Sunnah. But have these nass ordinances ever been brought out in their entirety and presented to the Muslim community without the deductive additions elaborated by conventional fiqh? The answer is, unfortunately, never. Instead of being given a true, simple—and therefore easily understandable—picture of Islamic Law, the Muslims are presented with a gigantic, many-sided edifice of fiqhi deductions and interpretations (a secondhand Islam, as it were) arrived at by individual scholars and schools of thought a thousand years ago. But these deductions and interpretations are not only many in number and most complicated: they frequently contradict one another in the most essential points of law. The views as to what Islam aims at and how a Muslim should behave in social and political matters are certainly not the same with, say, a Sunni faqih of the Hanafi school, a "Twelver" Shi'i, or a Sufi —not to mention many lesser schools of thought. Which, then, of the various fiqhi systems should an Islamic state adopt as the basis of its code of public law?
(2) See chapter iii, section on Guiding Principles.
One might, of course, argue that every Muslim country should utilize for this purpose the fiqhi teachings to which the majority of its population adheres: thus, in a country inhabited predominantly by Hanafis, Hanafi fiqh should supply the basis of public law; in a predominantly Shi'i country, Ja'fari fiqh and so forth. But there are at least two weighty objections to such a procedure. On the one hand, none of the existing fiqhi systems truly corresponds to the needs of our time, being largely the outcome of deductions conditioned by the experiences of a time very much different from our own. And, on the other hand, it is inconceivable that in a state which claims to be Islamic, the fiqhi teachings acceptable only to one part of the population (even though that part be numerically preponderant) should be imposed on the minority within the community against its will, thus reducing it to the status of a minority in the political sense as well: for such an arbitrary procedure would flagrantly offend against the Quranic principle of the brotherhood and equality of all Muslims. Consequently, an Islamic state must have at its disposal a code of the sharfah which (a) would be generally acceptable to all its Muslim citizens without distinction of the fiqhi schools to which they may belong, and (b) would bring out the eternal, unchangeable quality of the Divine Law in such a way as to demonstrate its applicability to all times and all stages of man's social and intellectual development.
That this twofold necessity is keenly felt in the modern world of Islam is evident, among other things, in the suggestions often made to the effect that the teachings of the existing fiqhi schools of thought should be harmonized among themselves and thereupon "revised in the light of modern thought and of modern conditions of life." It seems to me, however, that such an attempt would not only defeat its purpose but might even lead to most unfortunate developments as regards the attitude of the Muslims toward the problem of the shari'ah as such.