The Principles of STATE and GOVERNMENT in ISLAM</span>

The Principles of STATE and GOVERNMENT in ISLAM
By Muhammad Asad

First, a "harmonization" of the various schools of Islamic fiqh—however desirable on the surface—cannot possibly produce a code that would be simple and, therefore, accessible to a non-specialized Muslim of average intelligence, for it would amount to no more than an artificial co-ordination of the innumerable and highly speculative "deductions" of which the conventional fiqh (of all schools) is largely made up: and the result would be a still more complicated system of speculative fiqh.

Second, such a coordination would only perpetuate the confusion existing in the minds of many Muslims: a confusion between what has been ordained by God and His Apostle (in other words, what the Law-Giver has stipulated as law, in terms of law, in the nass of Quran and Sunnah), on the one hand, and what generations of Muslim scholars have thought about the Law, on the other. Thus, our concept of the shariah would again be chained to the ways of thought prevailing at a particular period of history—that is, to human, time-conditioned thought.

Third, an attempt to "revise" the sharl'ah in the light of modern conditions is bound to destroy the last vestige of permanency and stability which a Muslim instinctively—and correctly—associates with the concept of Divine Law. For if revision is necessary now, it will certainly again become necessary a few decades hence, when "modern conditions" will again have changed: and so on and on, until the Law of Islam will be entirely revised out of existence. If this were justified, what right would we have to claim that the Law-Giver has conceived the Law of Islam as an eternal proposition? Would it not, in that event, be much more appropriate to say that this Law, instead of creating conditions, is subservient to them—and that, therefore, it cannot be a Divine Law?

Our confusion cannot be resolved by such a defeatist attitude; it cannot and never will be resolved by our giving in on the point of the eternal validity and the unchangeable quality of the Divine Law. On the other hand, we cannot successfully maintain this validity and this quality unless we summon our courage to separate, with an utter disregard for all conventional attachments, God's true shariah from all man-made, deductive, fiqhi laws. Briefly, the reduction of Islamic Law to its original scope and extent—the plain, self-evident (zahir), unequivocal ordinances of Quran and Sunnah—is the only way for the Muslims to regain a genuine understanding of Islam's ideology, to overcome their cultural stagnation and decay, to shed that pernicious automatism now so prevalent in religious thought, and to make the sharilah a living proposition for and in an Islamic state.

Method of Codification

For any Muslim community that is resolved to live according to the tenets of Islam and to translate its social and economic program into political action, the first step to be taken must be a codification of those nusus of Quran and Sunnah which contain self-evident laws relating to matters of public concern. In the context of an Islamic state, the procedure should be, I believe, somewhat along these lines:

(1) The majlis ash-shura shall elect a small panel of scholars representing the various schools of fiqh, fully conversant with the methodology and history of the Quran and the science of hadith, and entrust them with the codification. Under their terms of reference, they will have to concentrate exclusively on such ordinances of Quran and Sunnah as (a) answer fully to the linguistic definition of nass—that is to say, injunctions and statements which are self-evident (zahir) in their wording, having a particular meaning which does not admit more than one interpretation; (b) are expressed in terms of command (amr) or prohibition (nahy); and (c) have a direct bearing on man's social behavior and action.

(2) While a selection of nass ordinances from the Quran is comparatively easy—because only one text is to be considered—the application of the above principles to afyadith will necessitate a thorough examination of each item against its proper historical background. Only Traditions which meet the highest standards of historical and technical criticism are to be considered, while Traditions which leave the slightest opening for legitimate objections regarding their authenticity should be excluded from the outset. (This, of course, does not mean that Traditions which are slightly defective from a purely technical point of view but otherwise bear all the marks of authenticity should not be utilized occasionally for the purposes of ijtihad: what I wish to stress here is merely the inadmissibility of using such Traditions as material for the short code under discussion.) Particular care must be taken to differentiate between ordinances intended by the Prophet to be valid for all times and circumstances, and ordinances which were obviously meant to meet the needs of a particular occasion or time. This latter group of ordinances usually reveals itself as such in the very wording adopted by the Prophet, or in the accompanying explanatory remarks of the Companion responsible for the hadith in question; and occasionally the time-bound quality of an injunction contained in one hadith becomes evident through other ahadith relating to the same subject. Whenever no indication to the contrary is available, a nass ordinance emanating from a duly authenticated Tradition must be regarded as having universal validity.

(3) It is obvious that, in order to establish the short code, we must not confine ourselves to selecting disjointed verses of the Quran or individual ahadlth: in each and every instance, the entire context of Quran and Sunnah must be taken fully into consideration. It sometimes happens that a Quran verse which, by itself, does not seem to express a legal ordinance assumes the quality of a nass law as soon as it is read in conjunction with another verse or with an authentic fyadith. Still more frequently the same holds true for the Prophet's Sunnah. We should not forget that most of the existing ahadlth give us no more than fragments of the Prophet's sayings or describe isolated incidents (often taken out of their historical context) in his life as leader and legislator: consequently, a legal ordinance ensuing from the Prophet may on occasion reveal itself as such only when we place several authentic ahadith side by side, or read the relevant hadith in conjunction with a corresponding Quran verse. In any event, one should never overlook the fact that Quran and Sunnah form one integral whole, elucidating and amplifying one another: and so the proposed shart code must contain cross references ranging over the whole context of both.

(4) The nass ordinances of Quran and Sunnah thus established should be placed together, arranged under specific headings relating to the various aspects of Muslim social and political life, and circulated among competent scholars throughout the Muslim world with a view to obtaining suggestions and criticism, especially with regard to the method by which ordinances based on ahadlth have been treated. Stress should be laid on the fact that it is not intended to "reduce" Quran and Sunnah to the extent of the nass ordinances contained in them: it should be made clear that this codification aims at no more than bringing out the ordinances which—by virtue of their zahir quality—are not subject to conflicting interpretations and can, therefore, constitute the largest possible common denominator between the various fight schools of thought. The fact that all statements in Quran and Sunnah which may be interpreted in more than one way will a priori (under the original terms of reference issued to the codification committee) be excluded from the purview of the code will not only make the code acceptable to all Muslims, of whatever sect or fiqhi persuasion, but will also result in a code of public law that is small in volume, extremely concise, and therefore easily accessible to the understanding of every Muslim man and woman of average intelligence and education.

(5) The criticisms and suggestions received from the scholars among whom the proposed "minimum" code of shart ordinances has been circulated shall be considered on their merits and utilized in the final revision of the collection, whereupon it shall be submitted to the majlis ash-shura for adoption as the Basic Law of the land.

Toward New Horizons

If we codify the social ordinances of the shariah on the lines suggested above, the political ideology of Islam (taking the term "political" in its widest sense) will stand forth with a clarity which has hitherto been denied to it. Every one of its statutes will convey a precise meaning which admits of no conflicting interpretation; and every Muslim will know that, as a Muslim, he is bound to accept the unchallengeable authority of these shar'i laws. The need for learned ijtihad will not thereby be abolished; it will be, if anything, intensified. We must remember that the true shariah (consisting of the nass ordinances of Quran and Sunnah) was never intended to cover every detail and every possible constellation of our lives, but is only a framework within which we are expected to unfold our creative powers and in the light of which we have to regulate our daily affairs. If we remember this, we realize at once how immense the field is within which we must exercise our independent reasoning. Naturally, there will always be differences between the various results of ijtihddi thinking. But what of it? Once the sociopolitical laws of the shari'ah are established as the unchangeable basis of Muslim communal life, to all our differences of opinion on non-shari matters will apply that immortal saying of the Prophet which I have already quoted elsewhere in this book:

"The differences of opinion among the learned within my community are [a sign of] God's grace."

As things stand at present, nobody in his senses can claim to discern an evidence of "God's grace" in the dissensions and differences of opinion which have converted the modern world of Islam into a formless, chaotic, culturally unproductive mass of humanity. Lacking fundamental agreement as to what the sociopolitical Law of Islam really implies, these dissensions and differences of opinion do not increase our creative powers: rather they increase our doubts, our despondency, our cultural defeatism, and our disgust with ourselves and with our ideological heritage. And things are bound to go on in this way — which is leading to a gradual abandonment of Islam as a practical proposition and so to the ultimate dissolution of our culture — unless and until we rouse ourselves to the long-neglected task of codifying the sociopolitical laws of the shari'ah and adopting them as a basis for our communal life. So long as this is left undone, the Muslims are bound to hold widely divergent — and therefore futile — views as to the social paths on which Islam expects iis to progress: until, in the end, all our ideas of progress will be entirely divorced from Islam.

Do we Muslims wish this to happen? Or do we wish to make it clear—to ourselves no less than to the rest of the world—that Islam is a practical proposition for all times, and therefore for our tune as well?

The ideology of Islam is as practicable or as impracticable as we Muslims choose to make it. It will remain impracticable if we continue to confine our concept of Islamic Law to the fiqhl concepts of our past; but its practicability will at once become apparent if we have the courage and imagination to approach it with fresh and unprejudiced minds, and exclude from its orbit all conventional, fiqhi "deductions." Obviously, such a reorientation of thought will be a painful process to many of us. It will imply a radical break with many habits of thought to which the Muslims have grown accustomed in the course of their history; the abandonment or modification of many social customs which have been "sanctified" by the usage of centuries; the renunciation of the complacent conviction that all the ways and byways of Muslim social life have been authoritatively and finally laid down in this or that book of fiqh: and all this will mean our moving forward toward horizons as yet uncharted. And because such a prospect is frightening to the more conservative among us, any endeavor directed toward this end will undoubtedly provoke a most lively resistance, especially from people who have made a kind of "vested interest" out of their unquestioning reliance on the views of the great fuqaha' of our past, and a kind of virtue out of their own timidity in intellectual and social matters. But this opposition must not be allowed to deter us if we are conscious of desiring the triumph of Islam, and nothing but Islam.