Rethinking Islamic Politics: God, Enlightenment and the Modern State (original) (raw)
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From Islamic Modernism to Theorizing Authoritarianism
American Journal of Islam and Society
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modernist Islamic reformers have proposed more “objectives of Islamic law” or maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah and argued that the maqāṣid-oriented approach indicates that Islamic priorities include the modern principles of democracy, social justice, human rights, and government accountability. This paper considers the evolution of maqāṣid and its relationship with the traditional framework of uṣūl al-fiqh. Subsequently, it addresses how the new maqāṣid discourse has been politicized. It analyzes the use of maqāṣid by Shaykh ‘Abdullah Bin Bayyah in his recent declarations concerning the UAE’s policies against regional democracy. This paper argues that Bin Bayyah’s interpretation of maṣlaḥah (legal benefit) and his adoption of the idea of absolute obedience to the ruler (walī al-amr) are not based on the traditional interpretation of the sacred texts that have been adopted by Salafists and Traditionalists. Rather, it is deeply rooted in the maqāṣid di...
Islamic Insight, 2019
As a part of the International Consortium for Law and Religious Studies (ICLARS) series on law and religion, Arif A. Jamal’s Islam, Law and the Modern State,which emerged out of his doctoral thesis,is a renewed contribution which comments on the relationship between Islam and the modern state through the prism of legislation as far as policy formulation is concerned. The main problem addressed by this book is the Muslim societies’ attempts to relate their inherited pre-modern legal and politicalheritage to the modern political order. This involves the role of religion in constitutional structures. Jamal proposes justice as discourse as a renewed framework that could be applied in the Muslim contexts without compromising Muslim heritage andliberal values and principles.Jamal focuses on contemporary Muslim societies due to the challenge of Islamism arising in countries like Iran, Afghanistan, and Syria. However, its analysis is not confined to any particular country rendering its content to philosophy rather than ethnography. Criticizing the marginalization of the role of religious deliberation, the book aims to break out of the dichotomy between a theocracy and anti-religious secular which are oft-suggested solutions for the public role of religious reason.
"The Islamist movements of the current age such as the Ikhwan al-Muslimin of Egypt and the "fundamentalist" movement of Algeria, (the FIS) for example, adhere to a popularly held belief that Allah is the ultimate sovereign and law-giver. It is further believed that the ruler is merely God's representative on earth, with the `ulama being the true repositories of divine knowledge as willed by God. Hence, the legitimacy of a parliamentary body in modern democratic systems as a bonafide law-making body is considered by these movements as being unacceptable according to Islamic political philosophy, as they understand it. It is supposed that the interpretations and decrees (fatawa) of the religious scholars are of a sacred nature, and entirely god-given. With regards to the decisions and judgements of non-`ulama, be they economists, politicians, specialists in law, medicine, or human behaviour, not to mention environmentalists, it is thought that they are ungodly, and religiously speaking, illegitimate. However, if one looks at the realities on the ground, then one finds that the Muslim countries of the post-colonial era have all evolved legislative bodies to deal with the need for a continuous process of law-making. It is the task of this thesis to analyze the Islamist objections to the role of humans in exercising their sovereignty as law-makers, through the use of reason, pragmatism and utility, underpinned by the underlying value of, `considering the best interests of the people'. It is also a contention of this thesis that the fundamentalist concept of an Islamic state in contemporary times will have to adjust to the major political trends unfolding in the modern world, trends such as pluralism, multi-party democracy, tolerance of political as well as social, cultural and legal diversity. It is intended to explore the real motivations behind the Islamist appeal to the sole sovereignty of Almighty Allah, and the exclusive role of the "shari`a" as the regulator of social norms. Is it an authentic depiction of "the one and only political philosophy of Islam," or is it rather just another alternate interpretation and representation of Islam--among many other competing claims of valid interpretations and representations--that has newly emerged as a recent phenomenon, and as a `modern' response to the very challenge of modernity and modernization. "
Review: Asma Afsaruddin (ed) ‘Islam, the State, and the Political Authority’ (2011)
Encompassing Crescent (EC) Monthly magazine (online), New York, 2013
The book under review, Islam, the State, and the Political Authority (edited by Asma Afsaruddin), is a collection of 12 essays and an “Introduction” (by the editor). Divided into two parts, Part I, “Medieval Section” (chapters 1-6) and Part II, “Modern section” (chapters 7-12), highlight, collectively, the “temporality” of the discussions concerning specific aspects of the Islamic political tradition(s). It offers rich scholarly studies that challenge the view concerning the assumed monolithic ‘Islamic State’ and a single model of political authority, “theocratic caliphate”, by investigating both Sunni and Shi‘i political literature, and by combining both medieval and modern theories and theorists. The book is broad in scope and diverse in themes, and thus is a welcome addition to the existing scholarship on the relationship between Islam and political authority, and will prove very useful and helpful for those interested in the Islamic political thought (in general) and for those knowing the various complexities and trends Islam and politics (in particular).
Divergent Statecrafts: Between Islamic Governance and Modern State Power
Ummatics Colloquium, 2024
This paper provides a theoretical basis for navigating an articulation of Islamic governance in contrast to the structures of the modern nation-state. Modern states, characterized by centralized power, vast surveillance, bureaucracy, and coercive control, fundamentally differ from Islamic governance models, which prioritize decentralized, community-based frameworks. Drawing on critiques of Islamic movements’ reliance on state power, the paper contends that the modern state’s secular, coercive nature precludes the organic development of an Islamic technology of the self, or a model of self-governance that fosters moral accountability. Three core features of the modern state—surveillance, law and punishment, and bureaucracy—are examined and contrasted with Islamic governance practices. Where surveillance in the modern state is panoptic and disciplines individuals through pervasive monitoring and psychological control, Islamic principles discourage spying and private intrusion, emphasizing moral guidance over authoritarian control. Similarly, modern punitive measures, which target individuals for reformation through imprisonment and psychological correction, diverge sharply from Islamic legal practices that are less invasive, focus on corporeal punishment, and encourage communal resolution rather than state intervention. The modern state’s bureaucratic rationalization, which enforces standardization and centralizes authority, is also at odds with the decentralized, interpretive nature of Islamic governance, with its reliance on independent jurists and localized community institutions such as waqfs to maintain social and legal order. The paper argues that an Islamic approach to governance—grounded in the language and categories of jurisprudence (fiqh)—offers an ethically grounded alternative that deviates sharply from the coercive mechanisms of the modern state, and encourages, in turn, an epistemological shift in Muslim theorizing of governance and social order.
What is Wrong with Tajdid? The Non-Liberating Search for a Post-Colonial Muslim Theory of Law
The paper I would like to present to you today is an experiment in which I attempt to begin to raise some of the most pressing theoretical concerns that pertain to my work. Thus, I kindly ask you not to see it as a straightforward presentation, in the sense of making present in this epistemic space we are currently occupying, what is otherwise absent. Rather, it is better seen as an attempt to provoke the audience to respond to some of the conceptual complexities that, I suggest, are central to the work of those of us who study the history and development of ideas.
Reinventing Islam, Sublating Modernity: A Conflict of Enlightenments
Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence (special issue: Conflicting Conflicts, edited by E. Lapidot & L. Di Blasi , 2020
The present paper aims to show how the return to Islam initially conceived by Muslim reformists has not been simply a conflictual reaction to the secular ideology sustaining modernity, but rather an effort to transform Islam into a religion within modernity. It argues that this return has in fact been a major paradigm shift within the theologico-political discourse of Islamic tradition and that it is this very shift that led to the reformation of this religion. In this perspective, this study shows how the reactivation of sharia by reformist thinkers did not mean a rejection of the Islamic intellectual tradition, but it was precisely the result of the encounter between this tradition and the modern social sciences. The paper then reconstructs the dialogue between Muslim reformists and 19th century European thinkers, dialogue which was crucial in shaping Islamic reformation. It shows to what extent reformed Islam was a response of Muslim reformers to the diagnosis of the project of modernity made by European reformist thinkers such as François Guizot or Auguste Comte. Through their confrontation, the paper develops a comparison between the theoretical backdrop of European modernity and the premises of Islamic reformation as two alternative conceptions of the Enlightenment project. By discussing Kant, Foucault, Habermas and Koselleck's thesis on the historical and philosophical roots of the European Enlightenment, this study ultimately seeks to understand in which way the theological structure of Islam has led the project of the Islamic Enlightenment in an analogous but fairly differentiated direction.
The future of Muslim politics:: Critique of the [] fundamentalist'theory of the Islamic state
Futures, 1991
This article considers the future of Muslim political thought in the context of growing de-lslamization and the dominance of western institutions. The 'fundamentalist' theory of the Islamic state-total mobilization of Muslim societies under a universal state-is criticized as religiously an immanentist heresy, and politically a totalitarian nightmare. Proposed here is a way out of the moral and intellectual crisis in Islamic political thought through the principle of Shura meaning that Muslims must evolve their own form of representative government. The ever-increasing integration of traditional cultures into a global meta-system, whose all-important socioeconomic and moral-political institutions are firmly under the control of western powers, has created a surge of political activism among the marginalized peoples of the world. Even Muslim ideologues, the traditional ulema, have reacted against the continued erosion of Islamic identity, which is the ultimate consequence of western dominance, by producing their own battle-cry of 'back to the Islamic state'. Only a total mobilization of Muslim societies under the banner of a universal state, they have argued, will stem the rising tide of de-lslamization and generate power for the declining polity of Islam. Without doubt, the 'fundamentalist' vision of Islam as state introduces radical, indeed heretical, ideas in the religious doctrine. And yet, ever since the vague notion of an ideological Islamic state was presented earlier this century, Muslim political thought has become totally mesmerized by the mystique of the state. In the concept of the Islamic state, it claims to have discovered not only an authentic norm of historical criticism but also the insight that the state constitutes an indispensable principle of order in Islam without which the law, indeed the faith itself, does not come to fruition.