7 Forms of political
participation in Muslim
political heritage
In recent years a number of studies on political participation in the Muslim world have been published, each a case study on a single Muslim country. These studies have provided us not only with general information but often also with insight into the structure of society, the political processes, and the character of political leaders involved in them. The case method, although very important, is not enough for an assessment of an overall picture of the political culture that has dominated these Muslim countries for many centuries. A broader understanding of Muslim political culture is needed to understand various forms of participation that support or reject the political sphere dominated by the regimes and the leadership that have rationalized or legitimized the existing order. In a comparative study of Muslim political thinking about structures and their underlying social forces we need to correlate religious and cultural aspects that intersect various forms of political participation throughout the social-political history of Muslim peoples. I want to contend in this chapter that Islam is not the only source of beliefs about political participation; a number of traditions, Arab tribal, Persian–Byzantine among others, have influenced the ways in which Muslims have conceived of their political space and their participation in them. And, although the Muslim world has increasingly blurred the line between religion and politics with major implications for political consciousness and participation in modern times, it is my contention that some sort of functional secularity has always predominated in negotiations about political space independent of religious presuppositions about its management. More pertinently, I will demonstrate, contrary to the views held by a number of political analysts, both Muslims and Westerners, that the terminology of the classical legal tradition of Sharī‘a is not very helpful in garnering norms and values that are operative in the political culture of Muslim societies to gauge the forms of participation that have been present in spite of the lack of consensual politics in Muslim countries.
Let me also clarify from the outset the distinct sense in which I use ‘political participation’ in an Islamic context. I avoid ‘instrumentalist’ understandings of the phrase common among traditional political theorists. By political participation they refer to public acts of private individuals with the intent or effect of influencing government action either directly by affecting the making or implementation of public policy or indirectly by influencing the selection of people who make those policies. In the Islamic context, even under the influence of modernization and secularization, we need to identify plural forms in which political participation takes place depending upon what Muslims understand by what they are doing in the public sphere as members of the community. In the classical Islamic sources one reads about the duty to acknowledge the lawfully established authority within the category of the religious obligation imposed by the Sharī‘a on its followers. Among the Shī‘ite minority the idea that the sole legitimate authority was invested in a rightful successor of the Prophet, the Imam, became the source of oppositional political activity in the community. The Shī‘ites invariably regarded the historical caliphate as usurpatory and illegitimate. Even among the Sunni Muslims, who were not engaged in resisting the Sunni caliphal authority as such, opposition to tyrannical or unjust rulers was regarded as obedience to God. Political quietism or a policy of quiescence and acceptance of existing circumstances until a qualified leader could establish an ideal Islamic polity was regarded by both the Sunnis and the Shī‘ites as a political strategy to avoid the greater evil of chaos in society.
Further reflection on political quietism indicates that among the Shī‘ite minority a religiously sanctioned practice of ‘prudential concealment’ or ‘precautionary dissimulation’ to await a more opportune time to overthrow tyrannical rulers functions both as a principle of survival and a strategy for political regrouping. The religiously sanctioned duty to uphold justice at all levels of social–political interaction puts the burden on the adherents to engage in what has been identified in the books of Islamic social ethics as the duty to ‘command good and forbid evil’ (al-amr bi-l-ma‘rūf wa nahy ‘ani-l-munkar). While it is true that the question of justice, however subjective and contingent upon different points of view that both the leaders and the people bring to their understanding of the human condition, informs Muslim political culture in its context-dependent political action, it has served as an important doctrine in Islamic public theology. On this view, religiously required prudential concealment among minority groups counts as an act of resistance to unjust authority because the conceptual meaning derived from this kind of political quietism that incrementally leads to overt political action qualifies as a kind of political endeavor to challenge the unjust authority. According to its practitioners, the ‘wait and see’ activity under its dissimulation strategy is regarded as the only legitimate and prudent activity that is going to influence the policy about the change of regime. In order to account intelligibly for covert acts under autocratic regimes as concealed oppositional acts in Muslim political culture – a culture that is actually dominated by repressive politics and a total absence of observable participation of the people in the state’s political processes – political participation is entrenched within its constitutive context. It is in the constitutive contexts that one can discover the guidelines and instruments of legitimate political behavior in Islamic thought.1
These constitutive contexts reveal distinct groups of political participants in Muslim societies. Moreover, it is these groups that negotiate their political space with sensitivity toward their religious beliefs, which direct their choices under the repressive political systems that are generally averse to the overt public participation in determining their political ends. In other words, political participation in the Muslim community is not limited to casting one’s vote at the polls; rather, as political activity under prudential concealment reveals, it includes religiously sanctioned political activity that sustains a public order that is not necessarily just and legitimate, and yet regarded as religiously necessary for the well-being of its membership. As such, my interest in the phenomenon of prudential concealment goes beyond textual discussion to include empirical observation that uncovers incremental political participation under adverse conditions imposed by Muslim autocratic rulers. Within the limits set for this chapter, obviously, I cannot go into the historical development of Muslim political culture in the context of taqīya-oriented strategies of minority survival in all its periods. Moreover, the limited scope of the study does not allow me to examine the Sunni–Shī‘a polemics concerning this strategically important practice among the Shī‘ite communities under various intolerable political conditions.2 The main objective of bringing up prudential concealment as a political strategy is to demonstrate that although in the early period when the Shī ‘taqīya figured almost as a required obligation, in the subsequent centuries when the Shī‘ites had gained political power (sixteenth century onward) taqīya lost its strategic value and was considered as not only in abeyance but, by some, as forbidden.3 The exception, however, is for the Shī‘ite minorities living under governments such as Saudi Arabia, for instance, when taqīya functions as some kind of ‘political correctness’ under favorable conditions, otherwise as a survival strategy when the religious authorities of these countries engage in systematic demonization of and discrimination against the Shī‘ites living among the Sunni majorities. In fact, since the 1978–79 Iranian revolution, following the political gains of Hizballah in Lebanon, and the Shī‘ite political ascendancy in Iraq since the American occupation, according to the majority of the Shī‘ite scholars, taqīya is null and void because the community does not live in fear anymore and there is no need to practice prudential concealment of one’s true beliefs.4
Having recently completed two studies in the area of democracy and human rights, I can explain participatory acts with a particular reference to the frameworks of the participants, be they individual or collective, to indicate the conceptual development that reveals political participation in Muslim societies to depend on the conceptual template that we use to interpret political activity. Without imposing the theoretical framework that is extraneous to the culture under discussion it is possible to observe diversity in individual political acts in their cultural and religious contexts.
Individual and society in Muslim political culture
Modern political discourse with its secularist universalistic appeal has the tendency to devalue communitarian identities founded upon collective constraints and sanctions that provide the necessary social environment for practical connections between individuals and groups. To obscure the very pattern of their connection is detrimental to the development of individualist assumptions of moral autonomy, which actually depends upon an individual’s ability to function as a member of society. Without ignoring the tensions that are part of social existence caught up by contradictory patterns of social agency, participatory politics can ill afford to absolutize individual moral agency by freeing the individual from collective restraints that are needed for the smooth functioning of political order.
Issues of political participation under the autocratic political systems in the Muslim world are faced with contradictions in terms of concern for valuation of diverse religious and communal identities, commitments and desiderata. In many ways, political culture in the Muslim world is in competition with contemporary liberal politics because historically Arab tribal culture was first and foremost where arguments for political participation were articulated in terms of human responsibility to institute the good and prevent the evil. Moreover, early Qur’anic references to the human natural constitution (fitra) articulated the human ability to know right from wrong and to advance in building a society that reflected such an ethical presupposition in its public order. Paradoxically, although universalist in their ethical presuppositions, political cultures that emanated from religiously formulated ideas of political activity were both relativist and locally sensitive. The Muslim community from its inception had to reconcile the universality of its claims with the particularity of its Arabic culture and ethical idiom that played a dominant role in forging human relationships as the critical core of their collective and individual identities. Like any other transcultural and transnational community, the Muslim community had to settle the contradictory injunctions that pointed at times to the inclusive universal language of Islamic revelations, and at other times to the exclusive particular communal system which defined the group’s adherence and identity as the bearer of the historical message.
Consequently, the ramifications of communitarian ethics and the dynamics of local particularism were part and parcel of Islamic political culture in the context of a world-wide community made up of different nations and cultures. Here we are face to face with claims and counterclaims of rights and obligations in the political sphere informed by religious commitments and responsibilities. This is the core problem in the acceptance of religious claims as having legitimate place in the public forum. The secular political discourse is based on the so-called public versus private distinction which would place religious commitments and grounds for action in a sphere isolated from that of public discourse and public choice. At stake is the place of various religious considerations into both public discussions about political activity, ranging from individual Muslims on religious grounds publicly condemning such acts as homosexuality or the collective Muslim denial of women’s right to marry outside the community in accordance with the religious duties in the Sharī‘a. A public discourse claims to have an integrity of its own and requires the Muslim community to abide by a neutrality requirement of the secular public order to maintain peace and harmony in society. This secular demand for public discourse is founded on the premise of universal reason which actually excludes making moral and metaphysical claims bearing on political choices in terms understandable only in the context of Islamic revelatory guidance embedded in the Qur’an and the Tradition. Traditional Muslim leaders have a problem with the position that rejects the rights of the people to decide political questions by what they regard as the best reasons rooted in a transcendent sphere of Islamic revelation. The issue of proper public discourse and choice is of concern for all religious communities who must share a public forum with other religious groups, without insisting on the idea of the whole truth connected with their own truth claims.
Religion, in general, is not oriented around autonomous dictates of self-regarding and rights-bearing consciousness. Rather, it seeks to define the self as constituted by the experience of transcendence. It is in this connection that the religious perspective of Muslim traditionalists becomes critical to explore. In the absence of the ecclesiastical authority mediating between God and humanity in all those acts that one performs as part of one’s direct relationship to God, the Muslim tradition defined the communal context to include only interhuman relationships. In this manner, Islamic public discourse defined itself by leaving individual autonomy within its religiously-based public order by freeing the individual to negotiate his/her spiritual destiny without state interference, while requiring him/her to abide by the public order that involved the play of reciprocity and autonomy upon which a regime of claims and entitlements is based. Religious sensibilities, however, are firmly founded upon a language of duties and responsibilities which define one’s direct or indirect participation in the political sphere.5 When injustices occur in the public sphere the critical religious question that functions as pangs of conscience in Muslim culture is whether an individual should undertake to oppose such acts openly to redress the situation, or should he/she wait for an appropriate time to do so under a legitimately recognized authority. Under the rubric of rebellion against unjust authority in the Islamic legal tradition one can examine a variety of rulings dealing with the requirement of individual political participation when certain conditions pertaining to leadership, intention and the principle of proportionality – in terms of success in deposing tyrannical rulers – are fulfilled.
That a distinction in sensibilities exists between religious and secular discourse in the matter of legitimate political activity in the public sphere cannot be denied. The definition of the individual as a rights-bearing citizen – a concept that is absent in Islamic legal discourse – is of a different nature from the definition of the inviolable self (nafs dhī ḥurma) within the Islamic legal idiom. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that the secular and religious estimations of individuals do not trump one another. The emphasis on individuals bound by obligations (mukallaf) does not necessarily negate the notion of an individual possessing freedom to act in his/her own interest in the context of communal existence. In fact, it is important to underscore plurality in the estimation of human personhood and its relation to the community. Indeed, this plurality exists not only in Islam but also within different interpretations of secularism about an individual’s relation to one’s religious commitments and community and to the overarching secularized public sphere in the modern nation-state. It is for this reason that it may prove useful to inquire into the Islamic idiom for a new or different way of framing the terms of human valuation and worth, one that may well allow a mediation between public and private desiderata not always given to the categorization of political activity.
The problem with individual political action informed by religious commitments and desiderata is the potential for the entanglement of these commitments with public discourse and public choice that affect other individuals, whether religious or not. There are certainly boundaries in the public sphere that must be recognized, without insisting that others agree with particular choices made, individually or in a group, on the basis of their religious reasons that necessarily apply only to those who have declared their commitment to abide by its dicta. Thus far, the attitude of hostility, intolerance, and militancy against those who reject a particular response to the political issues has been the main source of conflict in Muslim societies. Is there something in the public theology of Islam that can mitigate this hostile attitude by clearly demonstrating the classical heritage? Is there something that recognizes the existence of a private realm separate from the public one, one that allows for ethical pluralism to determine interhuman relationships, without diminishing the role of religious commitments in developing what John Rawls calls a social democratic constitutional polity?
Decoding Islamic secularity
Traditional Muslim leaders have viewed secular political language and its demand for neutrality in the public sphere as detrimental to the development of moral sensibilities in the communal context of political activity. For them, the major step in the development of particularly Muslim political discourse is to disestablish the secular character of public discourse and public policy that, for all practical purposes, aggressively acts and speaks in public as if God or religion did not exist. Muslim reformist discourse has, to a large extent, pursued a secular agenda by raising a number of objections to the intrusion of Islamic juridical and religious claims into the public forum. In this section of the chapter, I want to explore the Islamic tradition’s relationship to the public sphere, and to argue how one might plausibly appreciate the nature of the public forum to determine what Muslim leaders must consider an improper intrusion of religious claims qua Muslims into the public forum and public policy that affects all citizens in a modern nation state. This I will do by exploring the Islamic tradition and the manner in which historically Muslim religious commitments became functionally attuned to the public forum in being primarily oriented to proper governance in which the right to individual worship and belief became part of the religious ethos of Islam. My argument is built upon the classical Muslim legal theory that clearly circumvented any human intrusion in the realm of an individual’s spiritual relation to God, leaving it in the private domain of human social existence. Moreover, despite the fact that Islam treated the private and the public realms as an integrated whole, it is significant that the legal tradition that developed in detail Islam’s relation to power recognized by default functional secularity with separate jurisdictions for the individual’s relation to God (spiritual). It also recognized the individual’s relations to other humans and society (temporal), thus keeping the plausibility of construing the public forum and its discourse separate from the private domain of the individual’s connection with transcendence.
It is important to keep in mind that Islam acknowledges functional secularity as a default arrangement to allow for the emergence of a civil structure that is not overburdened by its comprehensive doctrines. From its inception, the Muslim polity had to deal with cultural and religious diversity in society even when the political authority was exercised by Muslims. Muslim scholars had to grapple with the issue of the meaning of what the Muslims call niẓām ‘urfī – loosely translated as ‘customary social order’ or even ‘secular system’ without denying God or religion a say in its overall functioning. Muslim scholars laid down the basis for organization within the community by distributing the tasks in the two categories of individual (farḍ ‘ayn) and collective duties (farḍ kifāya). Individual duties were those duties for the performance of which each individual was personally responsible, whether others performed them or not. In contrast, most of the duties that one performed in relation to other individuals were regarded as necessary to maintain the public order. The principle of secularity in the sense of an absence of religious control over public discourse, individual choice, and community life, as would obtain in a limited democracy was formed on the basis of the relation of the community to non-adherents. Under this principle the sectarian character of religious claims was exchanged for social stability through supporting a multi-faith polity. Hence, the adherents of other religions were allowed to continue in their own religious allegiance, as protected subjects, as long as their form of public life was not too blatantly inconsistent with the public order that recognized the general good of all as defined by Islamic values (not very different from the Rawlsian defence of a social democratic constitutional framework). Thus only those who had personally undertaken the obligations of Islam were expected to live in accordance with the teachings of Islam in their personal and public lives.
Here the public theology of Islam regarding the self-subsistent moral worth and agency of every human person, independently of revelation, forms the cornerstone of the integrated and yet distinct private individual conscience and the communal tradition as a bedrock of a good Muslim life. This doctrine supports the internalized moral authority of human conscience; but it generates the sense of responsibility towards others as an important step for an individual in the pursuit of perfection within the orders and institutions of the community. The relationship between individuals in the community provides the terms of group membership that takes into consideration social definitions of community in such a way that community does not function as the antithesis of individual interests and concerns. Rather, the community strengthens a sense of solidarity that requires individual acts of worship to translate into new meanings to provide motivations for men and women for the development of an ideal social order reflecting this-worldly and other-worldly prosperity.
To speak about Islamic functional secularity derived from its public theology raises an important epistemological question: whose version of Islam supports the phenomenological integrity of an inclusive public forum, leaving the privately and individually constituted conscience to determine its spiritual destiny without the intrusion of any secular or religious authority? I do not intend to gloss over the diversity that exists among Muslim scholars about special claims of Islamic revelation on its adherents, societies, and states that claim to be founded upon Islamic political values. To determine what Muslims must hold to consider themselves legitimately tolerant about the special claims of Islamic tradition on individuals, societies, and public order, it is important to recognize the diversity of Muslim religious appropriations for public discourse. For the purposes of this chapter, I will identify three variable categories of Islamic tradition that appear to be prevalent in the community at large:
a. Islam as a civilization and its influence as a culture throughout the regions of the world where it spread as a religious tradition. As one of the highly successful civilizations and the major global cultural traditions, Islam is acknowledged as an influential component of the political order seeking to establish justice and inclusive spirituality. As a significant force in shaping the presuppositions of a universal world civilization and as a cultural tradition that has shaped and adjusted its own moral understandings in different social and political environments, this Islam seeks guidance from its own history. Indeed, by stepping back from many of the traditional cultural prohibitions (empowerment of women in general, including the licitness of their assuming public role, and other related issues), as well as by not insisting on literal adherence to traditional Islamic notions (the doctrine of predetermination, submission to authoritarian rulers for the sake of avoiding the greater evil of dissension and chaos), this form of Islam tends to reduce the judicial and the dogmatic to the mystical (different forms and orders of Sufi affiliations and communal celebrations), cultural public rituals (fasting of Ramadan and other festive public celebrations), and well-staged public rituals (Friday and Festival worship attended by rulers and public officials and now the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, as a show of Muslim unity and power in the divided world of nation states).
b. Islam as a religion and philosophy for humankind. Islam, in this sense, is acknowledged as possessing the fullness of God’s revelation to humankind, offering unique insight into the importance of God’s merciful justice and concern for humanity. Though the revelation is particularistic and addressed to a specific community in their language, the grounds for moral conduct and the substantive moral discernment are available to all human beings through their natural constitution created by the Almighty and All-compassionate God. Since a good moral life is taken to be a sufficient condition for attaining this-worldly and other-worldly prosperity (falāḥīya), Islam does not regard itself as the only repository of human salvation, and, in this sense, it cannot make exclusivist claims (e.g. the claim that Islam is the privileged way to the divine truth and salvation). Furthermore, because ethical knowledge is grounded in human nature informed by intuitive reason, Islamic morality shares moral sensibilities with all other human beings equally endowed with that divinely ordained nature (fiṭra). Islamic morality develops its moral principles guided by conventional wisdom and moral insight discerned by living with others in society. Strictly speaking, this form of Islam has no peculiarly Islamic morality, only a special ground or motivation for moral conduct disclosed through revelation (e.g. ‘instituting the good and preventing the evil’ and the reward and punishment for acting against the divinely ordained natural constitution).
The underlying thesis of this genre of Islam is that because the rationality of Islamic ethics is held to be the same as that of moral secular viewpoints, it subscribes to a general secular progress in moral insights. Those in turn establish religious insights as compatible with public reason. Since this genre of Islam affords centrality to the overlapping consensus in the matter of moral commitments that affect not only communal bonds but also advance intercommunal relations in the public forum, the moral premises and rules of evidence are culturally inclusive and capable of advancing received moral commitments for the public good.
c. Islamic tradition as the unique and exclusive experience of the Truth. This genre of Islam is popular among Muslim seminarians. Islam, according to this account, is the only complete revelation of God to humankind. Islam not only offers a special motivation for moral conduct, but the full content of the religious life which, if properly lived, could lead to salvation. In order to be saved, one needs the right belief, which should precede right conduct. Living a good moral life for virtue’s sake is recognized as insufficient for salvation, in that salvation requires obedience to God’s revealed guidance. Human prosperity in this and the world to come is achieved by bringing the world to affirm what is disclosed by revealed reason, not merely that disclosed by secular reason acting independently of divine guidance. Moral progress is achieved insofar as secular morality comes to conform to religious morality (e.g. by instituting the good and preventing the evil as required by the Tradition). This account of Islam is exemplified by what I have identified in this chapter as traditional Islam.
This traditional Islamic perspective maintains that moral truth is the result neither of sensory empirical evidence nor of discursive reason. Truth as a rightly ordered relationship with transcendent God is beyond discursive rationality. As a result, its traditional commitments cannot be brought into question by supposed moral progress grounded in developments in philosophical and metaphysical reflection.6 Finally, this traditional form of Islam recognizes the external forms of religious practices – the rituals – as secure and sufficient means to affect salvation without any need to relate them to the moral progression of the individual or the community.
These three categories are not in any sense exhaustive. They simply enable outsiders to understand the source of religious conflicts in the Muslim world when it comes to limit or delimit religious discourse in Muslim societies. When it comes to the demand for neutrality requirement for the public discourse it is the third genre, the traditional perspective, that poses the most significant threat to the public forum that aspires to bind persons apart from any religious commitments. More to the point, in the context of this chapter, in order to advance the argument that political activity in Muslim societies must be understood in its constitutive context, there is a need to sit in dialogue with the kind of Islam that regards religious considerations as critical in shaping the public forum and its discourse. The dominant culture of secular liberal agnosticism is marked by an affirmation of the priority of liberty as a value, as well as by an affirmation of equality of opportunity as a central societal goal. In the public forum, as Rawls argues, reasons, considerations, and interests must be articulated in general secular terms involving no claims to special knowledge (supernatural revelation, for instance) or transcendent considerations like God’s will in the religious law so that the demand for women’s participation in public life, for instance, may not be viewed as deviation from God’s established tradition.
Accordingly, the goal of secularity in the Islamic tradition is to broaden the scope of traditionally exclusive claims of a privileged status and access to moral and metaphysical truth. In this sense, Islamic revelation regards religion, morality, and community working in unison to advance an individual to recognize that through creation morality becomes grounded in universal intuitive reason geared to reflect discursively to access reasons for one’s beliefs and actions. From its inception Islam shaped its public discourse by grounding its morality in a critical rationality that sought a correlation between revelation-based and rational premises to forge an important doctrine that religious and secular reasons are not at odds when it comes to determining the public good. Unlike Christians, who as citizens must separate themselves according to the demands of secular rationality not grounded in the Christian tradition, Muslims could and did articulate their public discourse with reference to reciprocal religious and secular reasoning as citizens.
From individual integrity to community-centered salvation
Let me now turn to the theology of community-centered salvation and its negative impact upon the development of political participation among Muslim peoples. The main purpose of this theology was to neutralize the sense of outrage that people felt towards the corrupt Muslim rulers, and shift individual attention from demands of their reform or removal to an autonomous ideal community under the Qur’an and the Tradition. The process was gradual, but it was carefully crafted by the ulema, who, although in agreement with the public sentiment against the ruling dynasties, found the regime change and the ensuing political turmoil far more dangerous to the survival of the community. This was the genesis of the transformation of the Qur’anic emphasis on individual integrity and morality to a deceptive sense of salvation through membership in the community. This shift from individual to collective salvation could not have come about without inculcating an unquestioning submission to absolute political authority, the Imam, with whom, according to the Qur’an, the people will come in God’s presence to be judged collectively.
The Qur’an spoke about both individual as well as collective final judgment when God will call people with their leader (imam). However, the community-centered salvation also required the ulema to centralize the salvation by limiting it to only one of the several communities that had sprung up under various political leaders and Imams. In the absence of an ecclesiastical body that could speak on behalf of the entire community, Muslim jurists sought to gain the support of the rulers to uphold one school of legal thought as the official theology of the state, whose nominal head was the symbolic caliphate devoid of any real power. This process centralized disparate groups under the title of ‘People of Community and Tradition’ (ahl al-sunna wa al-jamā’a) whose main spokespersons were the jurists under the patronage of the rulers, who depended on the jurists to provide them with religious legitimacy to exercise political authority over the community. Minority groups that refused to join the main community were either marginalized or forced to go underground. This laid the foundation of internal hostilities and intolerance of any dissension within the Muslim community. The history of Baghdad in the ninth and tenth centuries is replete with instances of intracommunal hostilities between the followers of different rites and schools of thought. Today, Sunnī-Shī’ite sectarianism and the violence generated by exclusive claims are very much entrenched in this centralized communal piety that has proven to be least tolerant to minority claims to salvation.
There are two concepts at the heart of the theoretical and practical formulations about the Islamic order that provide incontrovertible evidence about the political shift from individual to community-centered rights and responsibilities for creating and maintaining just order on earth. Both these dimensions are important to understand the Islamic framework as well as the ideological changes that have taken place in the Muslim world today. In the Islamic order, which is inclusive of the private and the public, these two concepts are composed of the theoretical creed and political philosophy.
As a member of the community the individual cannot claim obedience as his right. It is actually his duty. In contrast, obedience is the right of God, his prophet and those who are invested with authority. However, if obedience is the right of these authorities because of this investiture, then due to the fact that individuals in the community live under their governance it becomes a duty on them, a duty they cannot avoid to start with. As for disagreement, it is part of an individual’s right in the group that is formed around a well-defined creed and specific practice. But these two founding concepts, that is, obedience and disagreement, cannot be applied without restriction, since everything is implemented in accord with certain prerequisites, restrictions and conditions.
Islamic society emanates from an indisputable foundation, which is that the ruler’s restraining power is an inevitable condition for the establishment of this society. Ghazālī, speaking about the absolute necessity of political power to manage human affairs, maintained that religious public order cannot be achieved without secular public order, which needs an imam (leader) who is obeyed (al-imām al-muṭā’). Earlier than Ghazālī, this opinion was already formulated in the juridical tradition where the necessity of appointing an Imam who is obeyed was well established. To be sure, assertion of the importance of religious order was the first condition in such a society, but without political backing it was insufficient on its own. Forceful political power, hence, guaranteed the social-political legitimacy relying on the religious order for its rightness and its success. Nonetheless, this could not be accomplished except by means of just politics which was formulated by Muslim thinkers in their works on the principles of governance, and governance in accord with the Sharī’a based on the following verse:
God commands you to deliver trusts back to their owners; and when you judge between the people, that you judge with justice. Good is the admonition God gives you; God is All-hearing, All-seeing. O believers, obey God, and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you. If you should quarrel on anything, refer it to God and the Messenger, if you believe in God and the Last Day; that is better, and fairer in the issue. (Q. 4:58–59)
Muslim commentators do not have a problem in the matter of obedience to God and the Prophet, since it is clear that the execution of God’s commands and prohibitions are dependent upon obedience to the Prophetic practice. However, they have raised questions about the identity and obedience to those ‘invested with authority.’ Who are they? While that question has entangled the political history of the Muslim empire, the other fundamental question that has occupied the jurists is the extent of the obedience to this third category. Is this obedience to those ‘invested with authority’ obligatory under all circumstance and all times? In other words, is there a right for a Muslim to dissent from this obedience and defy the authority of those ‘invested with authority,’ and thereby endanger the unity of the community and its perpetuity under such leaders? If the rejection of obedience is legitimate, in what sense it is so?
Anas b. Mālik, one of the early and prominent associates of the Prophet, relates a tradition in which the Prophet advises Muslims regarding their rulers: ‘Listen and obey, even if a black slave with a shaggy head rules over you!’ In another tradition, the Prophet is reported to have said: ‘The one who obeys me obeys God; and the one who disobeys me disobeys God. The one who obeys the ruler (amīr) obeys me, and the one who disobeys the ruler disobeys me.’ There are numerous traditions like these in which obedience to the ruler is linked to the obedience to God and obedience to the Prophet, hence legitimating this political act through religious justification.
The fact is that limitation on the absolute authority of the rulers was applied only in the situation of strife among the community members, whereas obedience was required in conformity with one’s ability to obey at all times. Nevertheless, some traditions cautioned against claims that justified the duty of obedience to those in authority, while divesting the people of the right to dissent, thereby necessitating the estrangement of the ruled from the ruler in the event of the ruler demanding obedience in the matters that led to the disobedience of God’s laws. Obedience to the ruler was obligatory and effective as long as he did not command disobedience to God’s laws, because there was no obedience in that matter. However, the prevailing state of affairs among the Sunnites from the early times was to counsel the rulers, on the one hand, and to discourage armed insurrection leading to civil strife, on the other. By issuing a verdict against the people’s right to depose a ruler even if he is wicked, Muslim jurists rejected the right to rebel against the ruler.
This trend of silencing the individual’s right as part of one’s religious commitment has continued in the modern times. Instead of demanding reform of the ruler to comply with democratic politics, the religious establishment has ignored particular moral commitments in favor of authoritarian communal politics. Among the leading contemporary Sunni scholars Muḥammad Sa’īd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī has reasserted the classical juridical vision regarding the ruler and the ruled without critically analyzing the rights language that is at stake in this political discourse:
The Imam is the guardian over all matters that affect the generality of Muslims. It is for this reason that he is the protector of all those who do not have a protector. Therefore, his discretion in their affairs is conditional upon the assessment of the public good; that is, they do not become effective unless its public interest aspect becomes apparent. However, God has imposed a duty on the people to obey him with a view to this exercise of authority (wilāya) which he enjoys through investment, and which stands validated as long as he keeps in mind the good of the people and endeavors to implement it wherever necessary. In other words, obedience to him is not because of his domination (siyāda) which he enjoys over them; rather it is exclusively because of his efforts in implementing the people’s general welfare and the people making it possible for him for ordering the good of the people through this investiture.7
To recapitulate the public theology that advocates obedience of the rulers, both among the ancient and contemporary Muslim leaders, it maintains obedience and prohibits armed insurrection as two important political strategies. In their communal life Muslims must adhere to the public order validated by Islamic juridical tradition as part of their religiously sanctioned responsibility. The right of any individual to oppose such power is undesirable, in spite of the fact that there is an explicit ruling prohibiting obedience of the government in the event of such obedience leading to disobedience of God. Yet, this does not mean approval or endorsement of the wicked. As a matter of fact, denying the right to engage in armed insurrection did not mean negation of other forms of protest or passive resistance. Historical accounts dealing with the Muslim political experience present examples of passive resistance that resemble peaceful civil disobedience. There are situations of silence or reticence which in themselves publicize the disobedience to the rulers. It took many forms, including the refusal to work for these unjust governments, or visiting those in power, or reconciling oneself to persevere under their banner, or avoiding civil strife, or leaving the announcement of their opposition to these unjust rulers for the Day of Judgment. These attitudes and stances were matched with attitudes of those who are described by Ghazālī as ‘relentless in their religion’ (al-mutaṣallabīn fī al-dīn) who in the political history of Islam represented ‘opposition power’ that struggled against the hostile government and strove to attack it with weapons or secret revolutionary organizations. They justified their insurrection by means of particular claims or through traditions of the Prophet in the vein of the ascetic Muslim leader in the eighth century, Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 728):
The best martyr of my community will be a man who stands up to an unjust ruler and commands him to do good and forbids him from doing evil, and the ruler kills him for that. Such a person is the martyr (al-shahīd). His station in the paradise will be between Ḥamza and Ja’far [the Prophet’s uncles who were killed in the battlefield].
This well-known dissenting force in the history did not become obsolete with the end of the classical age of Islam. It has emerged once again in the modern period among the militant Muslim movements. These are the movements which have taken the duty of preventing evil to its extreme, not limiting it to tongue and heart; rather, they have taken it to the use of force as in the early period, following the advice regarding the duty of preventing evil which says:
Anyone among you who sees evil should change it with his hands, that is, by force; if he cannot, then with his tongue; and if still he cannot, then with his heart. This is the weakest expression of the faith.
This did not shackle coerced obedience or passive disobedience and prevent civil strife and seclusion. It simply maintained limits over revolution and armed insurrection.
Concluding remarks
To summarize, obedience to God, the Prophet and those invested with authority is obligatory. There is a difference of opinion on its limits and actual manifestation in the society. This is captured in those traditions which describe the legitimacy of the power that is used by the government to coerce obedience. However, any person who is compelled to submit to this authority is conceived as the possessor of rights – some natural and some legal. As for the individual’s natural rights they are related to his capacity (al-istiṭā’a), since if obedience to God, the Prophet, and those invested with authority is the goal of religious commitment and responsibility, then this can be attained as long as that individual has the capacity to obey. Naturally, this capacity is potentially responsible for the totality of principles and rules that enable a person to bring about the fulfillment of the duty of obedience. In this connection, investigation of other aspects of Islamic religious-ethical thought is indispensable. These include: the question of justice, the principle that rejects the imposition of obligation beyond one’s capacity, the condition that the government or the ruler or the one invested with authority are bound to obey God and the Prophet, that is, the ordinances of the Sharī’a, and so on. Since these conditions cannot be fulfilled, the repudiation of obedience, insurrection or armed resistance become a legitimate solution, and the implementation of human rights becomes possible. This means that lack of commitment on the part of the ruler or the government to implement God’s rights and the rights of people or citizens, as treated in the details of the books dealing with the principles of governance and social management, leads directly to the right of an individual to dissent and to oppose, as a legal-moral necessity.
Obviously, as the principle of correlation demands, if obedience is treated as a duty then its opposite, that is, dissent, must be regarded as a right. However, the community-centered theology does not treat dissent as any kind of intellectual disagreement. It treats it as a social and political threat to the well-being of the entire community. Its religious integrity is allusive, since it is treated as a moral-civil offence with sanctions that clearly violate an individual’s human rights to the free exercise of religion. This is one of the fundamental problems in the classical tradition where dissent is treated as an evil act requiring restraint by political authority. This problem also extends to apostasy which, if treated as a purely religious offence, according to the Qur’an, does not carry capital punishment. Human courts have no jurisdiction over such cases which strictly fall under the human–God relationship. But, if this expression of personal freedom in choosing one’s religious community becomes translated as a political act of repudiation of one’s communal affiliation, then the punishment for it clearly leads to a human rights violation.
Notes
1 Khalid Abou El Fadl, ‘Aḥkām al-Bughāt: Irregular Warfare and the Law of Rebellion in Islam,’ in Cross, Crescent, and Sword: The Justification and Limitation of War in Western and Islamic Tradition (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 162 cites all the relevant juridical sources on the issue.
2 The polemical literature on the subject has been examined by Etan Kohlberg in his studies on the Shī‘ite practice during the classical and medieval periods of the Shī‘ite history. See, for instance, ‘Some Imāmī-Shī’ī view on Taqiyya,’ in Journal of American Oriental Society, Vol. 95 (1975), pp.395–402.
3 In recent years, more particularly, after the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, a number of Shī‘ite scholars have regarded taqīya as redundant. See: Muḥammad Ḥusayn Faḍl Allāh, al-Islam wa manṭiq al-quwwa (Dār al-Islāmīya, 1979). It is important to keep in mind the constitutive context of the Shī‘ite community in Iran and Lebanon at this time when the Iranian revolution was at its peak and Israel had invaded south Lebanon. Accordingly, an active political response was prescribed to overcome the passive resistance suggested by taqīya.
4 In the contemporary literature there is hardly any discussion about taqīya, especially under the powerful religious leadership in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. The political gains have actually translated into open confrontation with Sunni leadership. Iran’s newly established University of Muslim Legal Rites (madhāhib-e islāmī) now invites Sunni scholars in al-Azhar for intra-faith dialogue.
5 Hence, the works on Islamic jurisprudence as a rule categorize religious duties in terms of their being obligatory (wājib or farḍ) and the penalties, whether in this world or in the hereafter, that an individual accrues if he misses them. See: Abdulaziz Sachedina, Islam and the Challenge of Human Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 151.
6 Ebrahim Moosa, Ghazali: The Poetics of Imagination (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), critically evaluates modern Muslim revivalist attitudes to rational inquiry in the light of classical traditional debate between theological-juridical and philosophical discourses.
7 Muḥammad Sa‘īd Ramaḍān al-Būṭī, ‘Alā ṭarīq al-awda ilā al-islām: rasm li-manāhij wa ḥall li-mushkilāt (Beirut: Mu’assasa al-Risāla, 1992), pp. 64–65.