Countless millions of Muslims pray to God five times a day: "Guide us the straight way—the way of those upon whom Thou hast bestowed Thy blessings". Thus, every one of them invokes the Creator on behalf of all men and women who are willing to believe in Him—"guide us"—and not merely on behalf of himself or herself alone: consciously or unconsciously, a Muslim who recites these words of the opening surah of the Quran is asking God to show the "straight" or "right" way to the community as a whole. In further analysis, this amounts to praying for guidance not merely in spiritual or ethical concerns but also in everything that pertains to the community's practical ways—that is to say, its social configuration and political behaviour.

The realization that questions of society and politics are closely connected with spiritual problems and cannot, therefore, be dissociated from what we conceive of as "religion" is as old as Islam itself. It has always been alive in the minds of Muslim thinkers and in the emotions of the less articulate masses throughout Muslim history. Indeed, a very large part of that history has evolved under the impetus of a deep-seated longing for the establishment of what has been loosely, and often confusedly, conceived of as the "Islamic state": a longing which is very much in evidence among the Muslims of our times, and which is, none the less, subject to the many confusions that have made the achievement of a truly Islamic polity impossible in the past millenium.

For, let us be clear in our minds on one point at least: there has never existed a truly Islamic state after the time of the Prophet and of the Medina Caliphate headed by the Prophet's immediate successors, the four Right-Guided Caliphs, Abu Bakr, 'Umar, 'Uthman and 'Ali. That Medina Caliphate was truly Islamic in the sense that it fully reflected the pristine teachings of both the Quran and the Prophet's Sunnah, and was as yet unburdened by later-day theological accretions and speculations. Whatever forms of state and government came into being in Muslim countries after that first, earliest period were vitiated, in a lesser or higher degree, by ideological deviations from the erstwhile simplicity and clarity of Islamic Law, or even by outright, deliberate attempts on the part of the rulers concerned to deform and obscure that Law in their own interests.

Hence, the past thousand years or so of Muslim history can offer us no guidance in our desire to achieve a polity which would really deserve the epithet "Islamic". Nor is the confusion lessened by the influences to which the Muslim world has been subjected in recent times. Modern Western mentality does not take kindly to endeavours aimed at the establishment of religion as the dominant factor in a community's or a people's life; and since Western civilization, based on superior technology and scientific development, undoubtedly dominates the world today in both its "Capitalist" and "Marxist" manifestations, it is not surprising that educated Muslims can only very rarely avoid being influenced by Western political thought in either of its two formulations.

And so, the Muslims' longing for a truly Islamic polity stands today, despite—or perhaps because of—its intensity, under the sign of utter confusion. This confusion manifests itself in many ways—not the least of them being the application of the purely Western term and concept of "revolution" to essentially Islamic movements and goals. Such a misapplication of terms and concepts does not help the Muslims to understand what the idea of an Islamic polity really implies: it makes them only more confused, and more helplessly dependent on non-Islamic political thought and imagery.

There is, I am convinced, only one way for us Muslims to come out of this confusion: we must look for guidance to no other sources than the Quran and the Sunnah, and to rely on no authority other than the explicit Word of God and the explicit teachings of His Last Prophet.
This was my endeavour twenty years ago, when I wrote "The Principles of State and Government in Islam". The book was published in 1961 in English by the University of California, and was followed by Arabic and Urdu translations.

As the original English-language edition has been out of print for many years, I am now placing it anew before the public in the hope that it may contribute something towards a realization of the great dream common to all those to whom "Islam" is more than an empty word, as well as towards a better understanding of Islamic ideology by the non-Muslim West—an understanding so vitally needed in our time.

M.A.
Tangier, April 1980

PREFACE

This book represents a development of ideas first set forth in my essay, Islamic Constitution-Making, which was published in English and Urdu under the auspices of the Government of the Panjab in March, 1948.

At that time I was Director of the Department of Islamic Reconstruction, a government institution devoted to the elaboration of the intellectual and sociolegal principles which should underlie our new society and our new state. Among the problems which preoccupied me most intensely was, naturally enough, the question of the future constitution of Pakistan. The shape which that constitution should have was then, as it is now, by no means clear to everybody. Although the people of our country were, for the most part, imbued with enthusiasm for the idea of a truly Islamic state—that is, a state based (in distinction from all other existing political groupments) not on the concepts of nationality and race but solely on the ideology of Quran and Sunnah—they had as yet no concrete vision of the methods of government and of the institutions which would give the state a distinctly Islamic character and would, at the same time, fully correspond to the exigencies of the present age. Some elements of the population naively took it for granted that, in order to be genuinely Islamic, the government of Pakistan must be closely modeled on the forms of the early Caliphate, with an almost dictatorial position to be accorded to the head of the state, utter conservatism in all social forms (including a more or less complete seclusion of women), and a patriarchal economy which would dispense with the complicated financial mechanism of the twentieth century and would resolve all the problems of the modern welfare state through the sole instrumentality of the tax known as zakat. Other sectors—more realistic but perhaps less interested in Islam as a formative element in social life—visualized a development of Pakistan on lines indistinguishable from those commonly accepted as valid and reasonable in the parliamentary democracies of the modern West, with no more than a formal reference in the wording of the constitution to Islam as the "religion of the State" and, possibly, the establishment of a "Ministry of Religious Affairs" as a concession to the emotions of the overwhelming majority of the population.

It was no easy task to construct a bridge between these two extremes. What was needed was the outline of a constitution which would be Islamic in the full sense of the word and would also take the practical requirements of our time into consideration: a demand that was justified by our conviction that the social scheme of Islam supplies valid answers to problems of all times and all stages of human development. Nevertheless, the existing Islamic literature offered no guidance in our difficulty. Some Muslim scholars of earlier centuries—especially of the 'Abbasid period—had bequeathed to us a number of works on the political law of Islam; but their approach to the problems had naturally been conditioned by the existing cultural environment and by the sociopolitical requirements of their time, and the results of their labors were therefore inapplicable to the needs of an Islamic state in the twentieth century. The available modern Muslim works on the same subject, on the other hand, suffered as a rule from too great a readiness to accept the political concepts, institutions, and governmental methods of modern Europe as the norm to which (in the opinion of these authors) a modern Islamic state should conform: an attitude which in many cases resulted in the adoption by these authors of many concepts which were diametrically opposed to the true demands of Islamic ideology.

Thus, neither the works of our predecessors nor those of our contemporaries could furnish a satisfactory conceptual basis on which the new state of Pakistan should be built up. Only one way remained open to me: to turn to the original sources of Islamic Law—Quran and Sunnah—and to work out on their basis the concrete premises of the future constitution of Pakistan independently of all that has been written on the subject of the Islamic state. In pursuance of this aim—and aided by the many years of study which I had previously devoted to the Quran, the science of hadith, or Tradition, and the methodology of fiqh, or jurisprudence —I decided to draw the theoretical outline of an Islamic constitution on the strength of the clear-cut political injunctions forthcoming from the Quran and from authentic ahadith. While the fundamental principles underlying this outline were provided by the Quran, most of the relevant details and the method of their application were gained from about seventy sayings of the Apostle of God bearing on various sociopolitical aspects of the community's life. The result of my endeavors was the above-mentioned lengthy essay on Islamic Constitution-Making. Owing to political developments which need not be discussed here, only very few, if any, of my suggestions have been utilized in the (now abolished) Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan: perhaps only in the Preamble, adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1949, can an echo of those suggestions be found.

Now, after the unfortunate experiences of the past decade, the problem of Pakistan's constitutional future is still unresolved; and it seems to me, therefore, that a discussion of the principles which ought to underlie the constitution of an Islamic state has not outlived its usefulness. On the contrary, the very fact that none of the existing Muslim countries has so far achieved a form of government that could be termed genuinely Islamic makes a continuation of the discussion imperative—at least to people to whom Islam represents the dominant reality in their lives. The present book is an attempt to keep that discussion alive. Unavoidably, some of my conclusions will give rise to controversy; but I have always believed —and believe now more than ever—that without a stimulating clash of opinions there can be no intellectual progress in Muslim society; and that the Prophet's saying,"The differences of opinion among the learned of my community are a sign of God's grace," has a positive, creative value which has only too often been overlooked in the course of Muslim history—to the detriment of Muslim social progress.

I cannot conclude without expressing .my deep gratitude to the Haji Anisur Rahman Memorial Society of Karachi, who have sponsored and encouraged this work and made it possible for me to present it to my fellow-Muslims of Pakistan.

Muhammad Asad

DEDICATED TO MY DEAR BROTHER AND FRIEND
TUN DATUK PATINGGI
ABDUL RAHMAN BIN YA'KUB
OF SARAWAK

First published 1961 by University of California Press
New edition 1980 Dar al-Andalus Limited, 3 Library Ramp, Gibraltar
Reprinted 1981 Reprinted 1985 Reprinted 1993
Copyright © Pola Hamida Asad, 1980
All rights reserved
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form