The West makes a natural mistake in their understanding of Islamic tradition, assuming that religion means the same for Muslims as it has meant for most other religious adherents ever since the industrial revolution, and for some societies, even before that; that is: a section of life reserved for certain matters, and separate from other sections of life. This is not the Islamic world view. It never has been in the past, and modern attempts of making it so are seen as an aberration.
Islam: A Total Way of Life
Islam is a “total way of life.” It has provided guidance in every sphere of life, from individual cleanliness, rules of trade, to the structure and politics of the society. Islam can never be separated from social, political, or economic life, since religion provides moral guidance for every action that a person takes. The primary act of faith is to strive to implement God's will in both private and public life. Muslims see that they, themselves, as well as the world around them, must be in total submission to God and his Will. Moreover, they know that this concept of His rule must be established on earth in order to create a just society. Like Jews and Christians before them, Muslims have been called into a covenant relationship with God, making them a community of believers who must serve as an example to other nations by creating a moral social order. God tells the Muslim global nation:
“You are the best community raised for mankind, enjoining the right and forbidding the wrong…” (Quran 3:110)
Throughout history, being a Muslim has meant not only belonging to a religious community of fellow believers but also living under the Islamic Law. For Islamic Law is believed to be an extension of God’s absolute sovereignty.
God is the Only Sovereign
God is the absolute sovereign in Islam, and is therefore the only Lord of heaven and earth. Just as He is the Lord of the physical universe, to the true Muslim believers, God is the Lawgiver for every area of human life. Just as He is the Master of the physical world, God is the Ruler of the affairs of men in Islamic doctrine. Thus God is the supreme Lawgiver[1], the Absolute Judge, and the Legislator Who distinguishes right from wrong. Just like the physical world inevitably submits to its Lord by following the ‘natural’ laws of the universe, human beings must submit to the moral and religious teaching of their Lord, the One Who sets right apart from wrong for them. In other words, God alone has the authority to make laws, determine acts of worship, decide morals, and set standards of human interaction and behavior. This is because,
“His is the Creation and Command.” (Quran 7:54)
The Separation of Institutional Religion & the State
As we have mentioned, in Islam God is acknowledged the sole sovereign of human affairs, so there has never been a distinction between religious and state authority. In Christendom, the distinction between the two authorities are said to be based upon records in the New Testament of Jesus, asking his followers to render unto Caesar what was his and unto God what was His. Therefore throughout Christian history until the present times, there have always been two authorities: ‘God and Caesar’, or ‘the church and state.’ Each had its own laws and jurisdictions, each its own structure and hierarchy. In the pre-westernized Islamic world there were never two powers, and the question of separation never arose. The distinction so deeply rooted in Christendom between church and state has never existed in Islam.
The Vision of an Islamic State
The vision of an Islamic state and the purpose of its political authority is to implement the divine law. Thus, the ideal Islamic state is a community governed by the Law revealed by God. This does not entail that such a state is necessarily a theocracy under direct rule of the learned men of religion, nor is it an autocracy that vests absolute power in the ruler. The function of the Islamic state is to provide security and order so that Muslims can carry out both their religious and worldly duties. The Caliph[2] is the guardian of faith and the community. His role is not so much checked by the ulama (religious scholars), but enhanced by them because they provide him religious and legal counsel. He also appoints judges who resolve disputes in accordance with Islamic Law. There is a certain level of flexibility in regards to the system of governance and its establishment in Islam, however, religion must be implemented fully into state and society.
Islam and Democracy
In order to discuss productively the topic of democracy, one must first understand the origins and meanings of the concept itself. But, for the sake of brevity, it can be said that, according to the “modern” and most rudimental understanding of the term, Islamic thought does conform to some of its aspects. One such aspect is the fact that Muslims have a right to appoint their rulers, hold them accountable and, when need be, to remove them from office. Islam does not, however, empower the system of government with the right to absolve or change the legislation of the religion in society, nor does it leave them the right of creation of novel legislations. Rather, legislation is the right of God alone, and religion must be pivotal in deciding the validity of any new law. Bypassing this right of God amounts to the unforgivable sin of polytheism, for it from the basis of the belief in the Oneness of God that He and only He has the right of legislation. What this means is that the people or their elected officials do not have a right to make permissible what God has forbidden, or to declare forbidden what God has made permissible. Both in granting them such a right and then following their legislation is their elevation, making them lords like God, and this is what is meant by polytheism. No-one has the right to change the Law of God, and His Law is superior to and supersedes all man-made laws.
Setting the boundaries of interaction between Islam and democracy, Muslims today are debating the relationship of Islam to democratic institutions in their societies. While most Muslims wish for greater political participation, the rule of law, government accountability, freedoms, and human rights, there are many different ways to achieve these goals. To some, Islam has its own mechanisms which preclude democratic institutions. Still others contend that Islam is fully capable of accommodating and supporting democratic institutions. Engaging in a process of reform, they argue the compatibility between Islam and certain types of ‘democracy’ by using traditional Islamic concepts like consultation (shura) between the ruler and the ruled, community consensus (ijma), public interest (maslaha), and scriptural based opinion (ijtihad). These mechanisms can be used to support forms of government with systems of checks and balances among the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches. However, rulers of authoritarian states tend to ignore, discourage, or suppress democratic institutions.
In general, one can see that Islam is a religion which not only governs the private religious life of an individual, but also mandates and regulates all aspects of public life. As the notion of worship in Islam is not restricted to mere rituals but inclusive of all deeds of obedience and goodness, so too does the concept of religion extend to all avenues of life on Earth. To a Muslim, the concepts of religion and state are inseparable. In keeping this principle respectfully in mind, whatever the form of government a Muslim society chooses to implement, all its constituents must be in direct concordance to the precepts of religion. By no means can the system of governance exclude, absolve, or interpolate any mandate of the religion, and this is yet only another example of the pure monotheistic nature of Islam, and that all rights due to God are rendered to Him alone, and none else.
The Quran and the Sunnah have been the guide of Muslim political and moral activism throughout the centuries. The example of how the Prophet Muhammad and his companions led their lives and developed the first Muslim community serves as a blueprint for an Islamically guided and socially just state and society.
More than a prophet, the Prophet Muhammad, may the mercy and blessings of God be upon him, was the founder of a state. In the era of the Prophet Muhammad and his successors, all Muslims belonged to a single community whose unity was based upon the interconnection of religion and the state, where faith and politics were inseparable. Islam expanded from what is now Saudi Arabia across North Africa, through the Middle East and into Asia and Europe. Historically, Islam has been the religious ideology for the foundation of a variety of Muslim states, including the great Islamic empires: Umayyad (661–750), Abbasid (750–1258), Ottoman (1281– 1924), Safavid (1501–1722), and Mughal (1526–1857). In each of these empires and other sultanate states, Islam was the basis of the state’s legal, political, educational, economic, and social institutions.
By the 11th century the Islamic world was under attack by the Turks and the Mongols. They were not conquered by Islam; rather, they entered the Islamic world as conquerors and converted to Islam over the following centuries.
Over the last two centuries the Islamic world has been under another transformation from the West. The Europeans who came in the 19th and 20th centuries to militarily colonize the Muslim world did not convert like the Turks and Mongols. For the first time, Muslims were politically subjugated by the European empires of Russia, Holland, Britain, and France.
The 20th century was marked by two dominant themes: European colonialism and the Muslim struggle for independence. The legacy of colonialism remains alive today. Colonialism altered the geographical map of the Muslim world. It drew the boundaries and appointed leaders over the Muslim countries. After WWII, the French were in West and North Africa, Lebanon, and Syria; the British in Palestine, Iraq, Arabian Gulf, the Indian Subcontinent, Malaya, and Brunei; and the Dutch in Indonesia. It replaced the educational, legal, and economic institutions and challenged the Muslim faith. Colonial officers and Christian missionaries became the soldiers of European expansion and imperialism. Christianity was seen by the colonialists as inherently superior to Islam and its culture. This attitude can be seen in the statement of Lord Cromer, the British counsel in Cairo from 1883-1907, “…as a social system, Islam has been a complete failure. Islam keeps women in a position of inferiority…it permits slavery…its general tendency is intolerance towards other faiths…”
European colonialism replaced Muslim self rule under Islamic Law, which had been in existence from the time of the Prophet Muhammad, by their European lords. The colonialists were modern Crusaders – Christian warriors going out of their way to uproot Islam. The French spoke of their battle of the cross against the crescent. The only difference was that the Europeans came, this time, not with cavalry and swords, but with an army of Christian missionaries and missionary institutions like schools, hospitals, and churches, many of which remain in Muslim countries to this day. The French seized the Jami’ Masjid of Algiers and turned it into the cathedral of Saint-Philippe with the French flag and cross on the minaret, symbolizing Christian domination.[1]
The Muslim world’s centuries of long struggle with Western colonial rule was followed by authoritarian regimes installed by European powers. The absence of stable states has led many to ask whether there is something about Islam that is antithetical to civil society and rule of law. The answer to this question lies more in history and politics than in religion. Modern Muslim states are only several decades old and they were carved out by European powers to serve Western interests.
In South Asia, the British divided the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan, giving portions of the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir to each of them. The conflicts that resulted from these actions have led to the deaths of millions in the communal warfare between Hindus and Muslims, the civil war between East and West Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh, and conflicts in Kashmir over Indian rule that persist to the present day. In the Middle East, the French created modern Lebanon from portions of Syria, and the British set the borders for Iraq and Kuwait and created a new entity called Jordan. They also created a new country called Israel, ousting non-Jewish locals and taking land once belonging to Christians and Muslims and surrendering it to a foreign Jewish authority. Such arbitrary borders fed ethnic, regional, and religious conflicts including the Lebanese Civil War between Christians and Muslims, the occupation of Lebanon by Syria, the Gulf War, which resulted from Saddam Hussein’s claim to Kuwaiti territory, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict which need no further explanation.
Political and economic models were borrowed from the West to replace the Islamic political and economic systems after independence from colonial rulers in the mid-twentieth century, creating overcrowded cities lacking social support systems, high unemployment, government corruption, and a growing gap between rich and poor. Rather than leading to a better quality of life, Westernization led to the breakdown of traditional family, religious, and social values. Many Muslims blame Western models of political and economic development as the sources of moral decline and spiritual malaise.
Unelected governments, whose leaders are kings, military or ex-military officers, rule the majority of countries in the Muslim world. State power is heavily reliant on security forces, police, and military, and where freedoms of assembly, speech, and press are severely limited. Many Muslim states operate within a culture of authoritarianism that is opposed to civil society and a free press.
In addition to influencing those who came to power in emerging modern Muslim nation-states, Europe, and later America, forged close alliances with authoritarian regimes, tolerating or supporting their non democratic ways in exchange for, or to ensure, Western access to oil and other resources.
When people ask themselves why the Muslim world is distraught with violence and unrest, the answer can surely be found in the colonial interference, both past and present, in the region. Therefore, any future success depends upon returning to a society which is governed by the principles of the people who live in it, one in which all its affairs are governed by Islam.
