The four sources of his Islamic constitution
Mawdudi’s salafi credentials rest in his return to the frameworks of a set of paradigms that existed during what he perceives as Islam in its original, ‘pristine’ condition. This may be termed his golden age narrative or his transhistorical perspective and are important for Mawdudi declares them to be his ‘four sources’ for what would be his Islamic constitution. This chapter will consider in some more detail these paradigms in an attempt to determine how accurate Mawdudi is in perceiving them in this manner. Inevitably the conclusions that will be drawn are obvious, for utopia by its – and human beings by their – very nature is that which is non-existent. However, a great deal can be revealed by adopting a more critical–historical approach to these paradigms in understanding where Mawdudi and other similar revivalist movements go astray.
It [the Qur’an] is the first and primary source [of the Islamic constitution], containing as it does all the fundamental directions and instructions from God Himself. The directions and instructions cover the entire gamut of man’s existence. Herein are to be found not only directives relating to individual conduct but also principles regulating all the aspects of the social and cultural life of man. It has also been clearly shown therein as to why should Muslims endeavour to create and establish a State of their own.1
Mawdudi considered an Islamic form of government to be a moral imperative, for it is ultimately the only way for which natural, God-given laws can be translated into a concrete form. Hence, there is a movement from the metaphysical to the physical, from the transhistorical to the actual historical. For this to become reality, Mawdudi’s starting point is with the Qur’an. As the above quote demonstrates, the Qur’an, so far as Mawdudi was concerned, is a blueprint for every aspect of human life, if only it is interpreted correctly. He also argues that the Qur’an makes clear that Muslims should strive to create an Islamic state. Submission to God is not merely an individual and his relationship with God, but a political demand for an Islamic state.
However, although undoubtedly the Qur’an is rife with variously translated terms such as ‘Lord’ and ‘Sovereign’,2 the question arises as to whether such terms can be equated with political sovereignty. In other words, does divine sovereignty necessarily lead divine guidance in the affairs of the state: to give orders, decide on policy and to render decisions? Does God’s regency allow for the freedom of human beings to engage in political discourse independently of God? If it is indeed the case that God’s will, as dictated in the Qur’an, is sufficiently detailed to allow for absolutely no room for interpretation or human reason in relation to contemporary affairs of state, then it would logically follow that humankind has no room for independent action or, indeed, no need for it. Although the Qur’an is ‘comprehensive’ in the sense that it covers an incredible amount of subjects as diverse as social legislation, commentaries of events at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, salvation, Satan, the day of judgement, biblical events, parable, prophecies, faith, and so on, it would be something of a struggle to determine any specific instructions on the complexities of modern life and certainly not ‘all the aspects of social and cultural life of man’ as Mawdudi states. The Qur’an is composed in a rhythmic style, making considerable use of symbolic and allegorical imagery, and is full of allusions and indirect explanations that allow for a multitude of interpretations. Within the Qur’an, there are well-established principles: for example, the Prophet Muhammad often engaged in consultation (shura) with others before coming to a decision3 and God approved of such virtues as ‘justice’ and ‘kindness’4 but these principles, if that is indeed what they are, do not in themselves allow for concrete ways and means to apply them to everyday modern affairs in a political state.
In the tradition of many Islamic scholars, Mawdudi extrapolates specific verses from the Qur’an to support his thesis. For example, he quotes sura 3:159 ‘Take counsel with them in the conduct of affairs, and when you are resolved, put your trust in God.’5 This quote is provided by Mawdudi to show that a head of state should engage in mutual consultation, but the argument is fallacious in that the verse is making reference to the activities of the Prophet, but not heads of state in general. There is an ‘is–ought’ gap between the specific to the general that does not seem justified. As will be considered below, the importance of Muhammad as a paradigm for political rule is highly significant, so if Muhammad ‘sought counsel’, then so should rulers of an Islamic state. Can this specific reference be extrapolated to apply to all heads of state and, more pointedly, is it even correct to say that Muhammad was a head of state in the way Mawdudi understands him to have been? Interestingly, in First Principles of the Islamic State, Mawdudi goes on to say that the head of state can nonetheless exercise his veto, whether or not those he consults reach a unanimous or even a majority verdict. He bases this conclusion, not on the Qur’an or even on hadith, but on the ‘conventions of the Caliphs and the judgements of the eminent jurists of Islam’.6 The Qur’an, however, does not explicitly give such excessive authority to a temporal leader.
Mawdudi also makes reference to the Qur’an to point out that it emphasizes that the state can exercise ‘coercive power’7 to enforce a moral code upon the people by quoting sura 57:25: ‘We have sent Our apostles with veritable signs, and through them have brought down scriptures and the scales of justice, so that men might conduct themselves with fairness.’ Further along, Mawdudi quotes sura 22:41: ‘God is powerful and mighty: He will assuredly help those who, once made masters in the land, will attend to their prayers and render the alms levy, enjoin justice and forbid evil.’ Both these quotes are interpreted by Mawdudi in a political sense: the first quote, with reference to ‘men’ he interprets as ‘the state’; the second with reference to ‘masters in the land’ to, again, ‘state’. Such references need not imply a political entity, however, for it seems equally justifiable to interpret it to mean the common theme within the Qur’an of guardianship of the environment, of a ‘vicegerency’ that is non-political but more akin to man as ‘priest on earth’, as guardians of God’s creation. What political form, or forms, these guardians may take is irrelevant.
That the Qur’an does not make specific mention of the state as a force of Islamic authority leads Mawdudi to quote the well-known hadith, ‘God brings to an end through the State what He does not eradicate with the Qur’an’, but this is acknowledged today by a number of scholars as unreliable. This is a trap that Mawdudi frustratingly keeps falling into: after digging unsuccessfully into the depths of the Qur’an for a justification of his ideology, he resorts to unreliable hadith literature. ‘Sovereignty’, defined as the highest unlimited power, rests with God. Therefore, when Mawdudi states that ‘sovereignty belongs only to God. He is the lawgiver. Any person, even a prophet, is not entitled to issue orders or withdraw the orders [of God]’,8 then no legislation in a state can be passed without first reference to God. Of course, this raises crucial problems, not least of which is that God does not personally intervene in the everyday complexities of modern-day living and the Qur’an is not comprehensive enough to provide detailed legislation however expert one might be in the symbolic and hermeneutic interpretation of the Qur’an. Mawdudi, in his interpretation of the Qur’an, frequently adopts an atomistic, unintegrated approach which does not take account of social conditions that existed in his time. Qur’anic significance rests upon the reader’s ability to deduce general principles to Qur’anic solutions to rulings upon specific and concrete historical issues:
In building any genuine and viable Islamic set of laws and institutions, there has to be a twofold movement: First one must move from the concrete case treatments of the Qur’an – taking the necessary and relevant social conditions of that time into account – to the general principles upon which the entire teaching converges. Second, from this general level there must be a movement back to specific legislation, taking into account the necessary and relevant social conditions now obtaining.9
This is essentially a hermeneutical task. While Mawdudi has a point in arguing that the Qur’an, being the word of God, has a certain timelessness and universality, it is also a text revealed to a particular people, at a particular time, in a particular place, in a particular language. The Qur’an’s ‘general principles’, such as justice, equality, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and conviction, freedom of association, and so on10 reflect the Qur’an’s timelessness and relevance in the quest for universal truths and – so far as one is able to speak of the universality and objectivity of morals – are principles that are, or should be, upheld in any society. Note the following remarks, made back in 1883, by the Indian scholar Chiragh Ali:
The Koran does not profess to teach a social and political law … The more important civil and political institutions of the Muhammadan law, Common Law based on the Koran are mere inferences and deductions from a single word or an isolated sentence … In short the Koran does not interfere in political questions, nor does it lay down specific rules of conduct in the Civil law. What it teaches is a revelation of certain doctrines of religion and certain rules of morality.11
Making the transcendental into the earthly always results in a degree of necessary interpretation. The Qur’an does not explicitly outline a structure for an Islamic state, although that is not to say that as a holy text it does not have an important place in framing a Muslim’s relationship to the world. However, that need for the Qur’an to provide a ‘framework’, an ‘essence’, if you will, seems radically different from Mawdudi’s claim that the Qur’an provides directions and instructions that ‘cover the entire gamut of man’s existence’. The Qur’an is undoubtedly central to the Muslim collective consciousness, even more so than the Prophet. All Muslims read it, all Muslims are familiar with the text, although the degree of familiarity is incredibly varied of course: some know the Qur’an via translations, others have read it in Arabic, although possibly with limited understanding, while others know the whole of the Qur’an by memory, having devoted much of their lives to interpreting it. The problem arises in the extent to which the fundamental tenets of the Qur’an can be determined and, if this is indeed possible, how those tenets can be applied to an Islamic state and whether it is indeed contingent upon an Islamic state.
Mawdudi undoubtedly is guilty of a literalist interpretation of the Qur’an, completely ignoring the important tradition of a hermeneutic understanding of the text. It is important because it raises the question of how we are to make sense of the Qur’an given that the reader comes from a different time period, culture, and possibly different language and place, from the text. This question gets at the very root of hermeneutics, a term originally defined by Carl Braaten as, ‘the science of reflecting on how a word or an event in a past time and culture may be understood and become existentially meaningful in our present situation. It involves both the methodological rules to be applied in exegesis as well as the epistemological assumptions of understanding.’12 However, since Rudolf Bultmann, the term hermeneutics is ‘generally used to describe the attempt to span the gap between past and present’.13 Essentially, every reader brings to the text his or her own ‘baggage’ of beliefs, perceptions, expectations, and so on, to the extent that it would be ‘absurd to demand from any interpreter the setting aside of his/her subjectivity and interpret a text without pre-understanding and the questions initiated by it [because without these] the text is mute’.14 Mawdudi sets out with the premise that the Qur’an is a ‘scientific’ text, that Islam is ‘scientific’, possessing within it all the knowledge of the world. However, even this understanding of science as ‘value neutral’ has come under question in recent years. The object cannot be seen by the subject in an objective way.
Again, however, Mawdudi is not so simplistic or coherent. At some points he argues for the comprehensive nature of the Qur’an, yet he also said in Towards Understanding the Qur’an, ‘Although the Qur’an addresses itself to all of humankind, its contents are, on the whole, vitally related to the taste and temperament, the environment and history and customs and usages of Arabia.’15 Here, Mawdudi is acknowledging that it is neither possible nor desirable that the Islamic state of the sixth century be recreated in the twentieth. At the same time, the Qur’an possesses a timelessness and universality. It is one of those perennial concerns that preoccupy all monotheistic belief systems: how to reconcile a timeless, immutable God with what appears to be ‘tadrij’, ‘progressive revelation’. Even Sayyid Qutb noted that, ‘We see how the Qur’an took [society] by the hand step by step, as it stumbled and got up again, strayed and was righted, faltered and resisted, suffered and endured.’16 The Qur’an was not transmitted as one whole text, but as a response to the demands of concrete situations. This is evidenced from parts of the Qur’an, for example: ‘We have divided the Qur’an into sections so that you may recite it to the people with deliberation. We have imparted it by gradual revelation.’17 When the unbelievers ask, ‘Why was the Qur’an not revealed to him entire in a single revelation?’,18 the response is, ‘We have revealed it thus so that We may strengthen your faith. We have imparted it to you by gradual revelation.’19
In tackling, or struggling, with an understanding of the Qur’an, Mawdudi was insistent that this required complete obedience to God, as opposed to the use of human free will. This view certainly came into conflict with that of many of the ulama, even, who argued that choice is crucial in matters of faith. For Mawdudi, it is choice that has led to the decline of Islam into the malaise it currently is. Mawdudi simply does not trust human beings to make the right decision, at least not most of them. Rather, they must blindly obey those who ‘know what is best’, and it is therefore logical for there to exist a hierarchical state structure to ensure that all Muslims are virtuous. The comparisons with Plato’s Republic are quite remarkable. Yet Mawdudi, despite his wide reading and expertise in the Islamic sciences, has a curious tendency to ignore the complexity of the religion and instead reduces it to the bare bones of obedience to God through a rigid political command structure. The Deobandi ‘alim Muhammad Manzur Numani wrote that Mawdudi completely misunderstood what Islamic revelation was all about, which ‘is not an establishment of a government, but the promotion of faith and piety … [and the] gaining of God’s favour’.20 The very complexity of the Islamic faith is its very undoing so far as Mawdudi was concerned. This reflects his ‘salafi’ nature: his desire to rid of Islam of all those accretions of the years that are impure. Here, Mawdudi’s view of history is important because, whereas most scholars see the past as Islamic history, Mawdudi sees most of it as ‘jahiliyah history’. Although Muhammad certainly had an interest, as well as a great deal of knowledge, in Islamic history, he nonetheless saw most of it since the end of the ‘golden age narrative’ as corrupt and impure: interesting, certainly, but not giving us a window to any Islamic truths. It follows, therefore, that any revival in Islam requires simply ignoring all that came after the period of the Rashidun.
The fact that it has often been argued that Islam as a religion has been separate from politics through much of its history would not hold much water for Mawdudi, therefore, unless it can be shown that this was also the case during the period of the golden age narrative, which, for Mawdudi, is the only truly ‘Islamic’ history. For Mawdudi the true spirit and intent of Qur’anic revelation (istinbat-i ahkam) was as a socio-political text, not simply a poetic work to be enjoyed and, as we have noted, it is not just a source for legislation, it is the source. Mawdudi did agree that the Qur’an was revealed in piecemeal fashion and that it was revealed to a specific community and, to Mawdudi’s credit, his own commentary on the Qur’an is written in modern Urdu and in a style that encourages a study of the meaning of the Qur’an beyond mere recitation. Yet, at the same time, for Mawdudi the meaning of the Qur’an was obvious and should be taken obediently at face value. There are no ‘hidden meanings’ that are suggested within, especially, Sufi and Shi’a tafsir. In many ways, it reflects Mawdudi’s unwillingness or inability to engage in intellectual debate with the Qur’an, for he would have seen this as engaging in intellectual debate with God, which is nothing more than hubris. The Qur’an, the word of God, is a political manifesto and must be obeyed, but, of course, it must also be understood if one is to obey it correctly.
When Mawdudi looks back into Islam’s early history, he does not see individuals struggling to determine a personal relationship with God. Rather he sees an activist communal religion, setting out to change society for the better and to lead to a new world order. There is only one true religion, and that is Islam. In fact, Islam is not a religion, it is din. Although the term din literally means ‘religion’, for Mawdudi it meant something much more, for it was the true religion; all other belief systems that call themselves religion are not din. To become a true Muslim, one must stop following the beliefs and practices of ‘their’ religion, purge themselves of these impure accretions, and obey the will of God. Only then can one truly call himself a Muslim. This view of din is reminiscent of the writings of the renowned Indian traditional scholar and reformer Shah Wali Allah Dehlawi (1703–62). Dehlawi developed a theory of the relationship between revelation and its socio-historical context by arguing that the ideal form of din (which he interprets to mean primordial ideal religion) is synonymous with the ideal form of nature. The actualized manifestations of the ideal din descend in successive revelations depending upon changing material and historical conditions. Every succeeding revelation reshapes the world into a new gestalt which embodies din. Din, though in essence unchanging and universal, adapts in form to fit within the contemporary customs, faiths and practices of the receiving community. Dehlawi uses the analogy of God as the physician who prescribes medication according to the needs, temperament, age, and so on, of the patient.
Determining what this din is remains the problem, and there is a danger of prescribing the wrong medication for the patient. However, ultimately, much more problematic is equating the revelation of the Qur’an with scientific discoveries. Again, the similarities with Plato are evident: politics as a science in the same way a doctor is a scientist. If the state is sick, then a cure can be found and, for Mawdudi, the cure is to be found in the Qur’an: ‘found’, not ‘questioned’. Yet, the Qur’an is not a medical encyclopaedia. We are not dealing merely with a text, but an interactive process between the reader and the author and so it needs to be seen more of an organic entity than a static text.
Mention has already been made above concerning the need for a hermeneutical approach to the Qur’an, it is worth our while briefly summarizing the important contribution made by two scholars: Fazlur Rahman (1919–88) and Mohammed Arkoun (b. 1928).21 Rahman was a key proponent of the modernization of Islam, while arguing for the need for metaphysical solace and guidance. As he states in Islam and Modernity:
If metaphysics enjoys the least freedom from assumed premises, man enjoys the least freedom from metaphysics in that metaphysical beliefs are the most ultimate and pervasively relevant to human attitudes; it is consciously or unconsciously the source of all values and of the meaning we attach to life itself … Metaphysics, in my understanding, is the unity of knowledge and the meaning and orientation this unity gives to life. If this unity is the unity of knowledge, how can it be all that subjective? It is a faith grounded in knowledge.22
Rahman has been criticized for doing the opposite of Mawdudi by downgrading many of the hadiths23 his aim was to create a Qur’anic Weltanschauung is admirable and much needed. Rahman’s attack on the salafis rests on it being a form of revivalism that is both anti-western and antimodern and sets out to demonstrate how different Islam is to other systems of belief and practice, notably those practised in the west. Rahman would agree with Mawdudi that education of Muslims is vital, but he differs concerning what form that education should take. Moving away from a transhistorical (or ‘normative’, as Rahman calls it) approach to the text, Rahman argues that while it is very important to study the Qur’an in the context of its general ethos, it is also necessary to assess its pronouncements against a backdrop of the historical–social milieu from which it emerged:
It is strange … that no systematic attempt has ever been made to understand the Qur’an in the order in which it was revealed … by setting the specific cases of the … ‘occasions of revelation’, in some order in the general background that is no other than the activity of the Prophet (the Sunna in the proper sense) and its social environment.24
There is at least a unanimity concerning what Fazlur Rahman calls ‘the situational character of the Qur’an’.25 In other words, we can accept that verses were revealed in a progressive manner within the context of particular social conditions. As Muslim society took shape, the Qur’anic revelations kept up with the changing circumstances. However, although historical context is important, the Qur’an is also a living whole and an organic interpretative text. For anyone committed to determining how Qur’anic injunctions can be applied to societies of today, the Qur’an, ‘despite it being clothed in the flesh and blood of a particular situation, outflows through and beyond that given context of history’.26 Therefore:
The challenge for every generation of believers is to discover their own moment of revelation, their own intermission in revelation, their own frustrations with God, joy with His consoling grace, and their own guidance by the principle of progressive revelation.27
The objective, then, is not to search for accounts of isolated historical incidents which occurred during Muhammad’s era and then attempt to construct a ‘politically correct’ view for the modern world. Rather, an understanding of the Qur’an in its historical context must be understood in relation to its integrated whole and definite ethos.
The Algerian scholar Mohammed Arkoun is an example of a proponent of combining modern hermeneutics with literary criticism. He differs from Rahman, particularly, in being less essentialist. He has embarked on an ‘intellectual crusade’28 by arguing for pluralism within Islam and an acceptance that the text is subject to multiple interpretations and favours an historical approach to Islam:
the main intellectual endeavour represented by thinking Islam or any religion today is to evaluate, with a new epistemological perspective, the characteristics and intricacy of systems of knowledge – both the historical and the mythical.29
As a professor at the Sorbonne, Arkoun has a great affinity with modern French scholarly thought, notably influenced by the writing of Paul Ricoeur and Michel Foucault. His method is deconstructive, adopting a sociological and anthropological approach to Islamic studies. To do this it is necessary to start with the Qur’an, for:
historically, everything started with what I called the ‘Experience of Medina’ including the communication of the Qur’an received as revelation and the historical processes through which a social group, named believers (mu’minun), emerged and dominated other groups – named unbelievers, infidels, hypocrites, polytheists (kafirun, munafiqun, mushrikun).30
To this end, Arkoun presents a hermeneutical methodology in which realities are expressed through what he refers to as a ‘system of signs’.31 These ‘signs’ include activity, experience, sensation, observations and, significantly here, scripture which all together provide ‘a locus of convergent operations [i.e., perception, expression, interpretation, translation, communication] which engages all of the relations between language and thought’.32 The Qur’an, then, is part of a ‘system of signs’ that is bound to history, which raises a fundamental question for Arkoun: ‘How can we deal with the sacred, the spiritual, the transcendent, the ontology, when we are obliged to recognise that all this vocabulary which is supposed to refer to stable, immaterial values, is submitted to the impact of history?’33 Faith is organic in the sense that it is ‘shaped, expressed and actualised in and through discourse’.34 In addition, although Arkoun distances himself from the salafis, he has little truck with classical Islamic theology or jurisprudence because its epistemological claims are a product of ‘the ruling class and its intellectual servants … [and] are authoritative only because they refuse to be engaged by the changing scientific environment’.35 Arkoun is radical in providing a historical perspective of the Qur’an as it achieved textual objectification. This objectification, which resulted in the Qur’an being a closed canon, is, Arkoun argues, actually a result of often-ignored historical contingencies. Some of the ‘imperfect human procedures’36 which determined the shape of the written word he refers to as ‘oral transmission’,37 the use of ‘imperfect graphic form … conflicts between clans and parties … and unreported readings’.38
This approach is far removed from Mawdudi, and even that of Rahman, for the inevitable consequences of Arkoun’s methodology is existential, resulting in no universal ‘essence’ contained within the Qur’an at all except that of the collective memories of the group which can only be maintained, ‘only as long as the cognitive system, based on social imaginaire, is not replaced by a new, more plausible rationality linked to a different organisation of the social historical space.’39
If we follow Arkoun, there is a danger that we are left with nothing solid; only a shifting text and a collection of individuals with their own individual autobiographies that may, or may not, be expressed collectively as memory and signs. Arkoun demonstrates how far hermeneutical methods – and philosophy more generally – has gone since Mawdudi’s time, but may leave us in a vacuous state, lacking moral certainties. Such a picture seems to make Islam as a religion irrelevant as a guide for life and, perhaps, this signifies the general trend in the perception of religion as a whole: historically noteworthy, but not epistemologically credible.
This [the Sunna of the Prophet] is the second source. It shows the way in which the Holy Prophet translated the ideology of Islam in the light of Qur’anic guidance into practical shape, developed it into a positive social order and finally elevated it to a full-fledged Islamic State.40
While Mawdudi argues that the Qur’an is sufficiently comprehensive to cover every aspect of life, other paradigms can be looked to in order to see how din is put into practice. For Mawdudi, prophethood and the prophetic traditions (Sunna and hadith) are all part of his ‘structure’, his ‘order’, his din. It serves as an ideal for Muslims to follow, a model of Islamic leadership of the perfect state. Mawdudi makes reference to the Sunna of the Prophet:
if a person or society is honest and steadfast in its contract with Allah, it must scrupulously fashion its entire life in accordance with the Book of God and the Sunna of the Prophet.41
Mawdudi looks to the Prophet as the ideal statesman, and Medina as the ideal Islamic state; an age of unity between the religious and the secular with Muhammad as its head. Muhammad no doubt provided leadership and guidance to his followers on both a temporal and spiritual plane, but this confluence of politics and religion that existed in the state of Medina has led Mawdudi to stress that there was no separation in Islam between the spiritual and the secular during the time of the Prophet. Mawdudi makes constant references to Muhammad as an archetype of political and religious authority, and it is a reference that is common among many contemporary discourses in Islamic scholarship. If, indeed, it is the case that Muhammad was the perfect ruler of an Islamic state, then any discourse on an Islamic state will be framed within that context. If, however, Muhammad is perceived as being ‘merely a messenger’, then the Prophet’s stamp upon political discourse fades into insignificance: one must look to other sources for guidance.
Again, more recent scholars have called for a historical–critical method to be adopted when considering the extent of Muhammad’s authority for, although the Qur’an does make references to the Prophet, it reveals little about his life. One thing we can surmise from the Qur’an is that the message transmitted by God via Muhammad changes in nature and content between the early Meccan suras and the later Medinan suras. The message at Mecca was more concerned with the nature of God (as just, merciful, One, and so on) and was primarily directed towards the conversion of individuals, although concerned with what was perceived as a ‘social malaise’ which consisted of a breakdown of old tribal values, of asabyah, as certain Meccans – notably the Quraysh – grew in wealth and power. This account is available in a huge amount of modern literature and will not be recounted here. The Medinan suras, however, are much more concerned with social, economic and political issues. Personal salvation is much more closely linked with the survival of the community, the umma.42 As a result, there is more legal material in the Medinan suras, such as rules concerning halal and haram.
The state of jahilliyah was not as chaotic as Mawdudi might suppose, however, and strong social structures already existed at the time of Muhammad, otherwise society could not survive. Thus a corpus of ideas on economics, morality, politics, and so on, would have worked reasonably effectively, though no doubt – like all systems – with its flaws. It seems unlikely that Muhammad introduced a whole new political system from scratch. Rather, any contribution Muhammad made to the construction of a political system would really have been a different approach or attitude to institutional and organizational bodies that were already in existence. There is a problem we encounter when Mawdudi talks of Islam being an independent system, a completely different and unique ideology of its own, because it is actually very difficult to separate Islam from other contemporary ideologies in the first place. The fact is, all ideologies borrow from each other and do not spring up in isolation. Even if provided by the Divine, that guidance must be translated into recognizable human constructs that existed at the time in sixth-century Arabia.43
In trying to understand the status of the Prophet, the Qur’an has severe limitations, and so we must look to the hadith literature. In fact, in terms of being governed by narrative paradigms, the importance of the hadith cannot be overstated. Among Islamic scholarship, hadith literature has achieved an almost semi-sacred status for its paradigmatic acts and pronouncements from the mass of legal precedents upon which Islamic law, sharia, is erected. Mawdudi acknowledges this:
if a person or society is honest and steadfast in its contract with Allah, it must scrupulously fashion its entire life in accordance with the Book of God and the Sunna of the Prophet.44
Therefore, seeking hadith for guidance is a political act and provides an invaluable view of Muhammad’s authority. For example, such hadith as the following, ‘That which the prophet of God hath made lawful is like that which God himself has made.’45 Or, ‘I have left you two things, and from them you will not stray as long as you hold them fast. The one is the book of God, the other is the law of his prophet.’46 These two quotes certainly stress the importance of Muhammad’s sayings and deeds, yet the following two hadith seem to temper this:
My sayings do not abrogate the word of God, but the word of God can abrogate my sayings.47
I am a mere human being. When I command you to do anything about religion in the name of God, accept it, but when I give you my personal opinion about worldly things, bear in mind that I am a human being, and no more.48
We can see from the quotes above that it is difficult to determine the degree of authority Muhammad had and whether it is accurate to suggest that Muhammad translated Islamic ideology into a ‘full-fledged state’ as Mawdudi argues. In terms of sources the earliest biography (sira), by Ibn Ishaq (AD 704–67), is not extant: we have the edited version by Ibn Hisham (d. 833), and a section of Al-Tabari’s account of the Mecca period, which also uses Ibn Ishaq.49 Other sources that are generally regarded as reliable are the later works by al-Waqidi (d. 822)50 and his secretary Ibn Sa’d.51 In addition, there are also the six sahih (sound) hadith of al-Bukhari (AD 810–70), Muslim (AD 817–74), Abu Daud (AD 817–88), al-Nasai (d. 915), al-Darimi (AD 797–868) and Ibn Maja (AD 824–86). However, all have been criticized in recent years,52 although Bukhari’s53 is still the most critically acclaimed by Muslims and non-Muslims alike.54 However, the fact remains that within the sira–hadith there is much divergent and contradictory material. For example, on the number of campaigns Muhammad led after the hijrah; dispute over the first male convert,55 the order of the ghazwa, the number of visits Muhammad made to Mt. Hira, the order of revelations and the period of time between the first and second revelation, and so on.
For our purposes here, we need to determine the extent to which Muhammad created a theo-democracy. In other words, to what extent is Mawdudi’s concept of Muhammad a historical reality, or is it more accurate to consider his vision as ‘transhistorical’? If it is the latter, then the whole thrust of Mawdudi’s argument is severely weakened. If it is the case that Muhammad was not a supreme leader in all matters, both social and political, then the paradigm of an Islamic leader, or the leader of an Islamic state, takes on a much different persona than that portrayed by Mawdudi and, in consequence, that of many other Islamic scholars to this day. Although perhaps specific details concerning the order of the ghazwa, and so on, are not so important ultimately, what is of importance is how much authority Muhammad possessed. Mawdudi obviously portrays Muhammad as possessing a degree of religious and political authority that seems almost unequalled in history, certainly in Islamic history. Yet this is a portrayal of a transhistorical figure, once more, divorced from the historical–critical lens.
To this end, there are other sources other than the Qur’an and the hadith we can look to for an idea of Muhammad’s authority. In particular, the constitution of Medina,56 possibly constructed some five years after the hijra, is important here because it gives a good insight into the authority of Muhammad and how the new order of the umma was perceived. With a few exceptions,57 this document is considered authentic, although there is some debate as to whether it was a single document or two or more that have been combined.58
The document begins:
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate! This a writing of Muhammad the prophet between the believers and Muslims of Quraysh and Medina and those who follow them and are attached to them and who crusade along with them. They are a single community (umma) distinct from (other) people.59
What follows are nine articles which state that the nine subdivisions of the community (that is, the ‘Emigrants of Quaraysh’ and the eight clan groups of the Aws and Khazraj) are to be responsible for such matter as, for example, blood money. Muhammad’s position, as Prophet of God, was one of arbiter of disputes between these tribes. This does not seem like Muhammad was an ultimate authority, and this seems highly unlikely given the fierce independence of Arabic tribes of the time. Montgomery Watt60 has suggested that Muhammad would have made some form of ‘contract’ with Medina before the hijrah, possibly along the lines of the constitution of Medina, by which the Emigrants of Quraysh acted like a clan of its own with an alliance with the eight Medinan clans among common enemies.
A scholar who cites the Medinan constitution as an example of ethnic and religious pluralism is Ali Bulaç (born in Turkey, 1951). Bulaç’s research regarding the Medinan constitution is invaluable, as he notes the uniqueness of Medina, certainly within the context of the Arabian peninsula.61 Importantly, Bulaç points out that, for the first time, a community was created that did not rely upon the traditional Arabic blood and kinship ties, but rather consisted of a group of people from diverse geographical, ethnic and cultural backgrounds that all identified themselves as part of a distinct social group. Why is this research significant in terms of Mawdudi? Mawdudi’s whole premise relies upon a vision of an Islamic society, his ‘transhistorical’ vision, as being fundamentally Muslim in make-up. Consequently, as will be shown in the next chapter, Mawdudi’s state, his ‘theo-democracy’, leaves non-Muslims in a position of disenfranchisement. Mawdudi relies upon the paradigm of the first Islamic state, Medina, to support his view of the umma as ‘pure’ in Islamic terms, yet if it can be can be shown that the umma was essentially diverse in terms of religious belief then Mawdudi’s paradigm lacks any historical credence. For example, Bulaç states that at the political level, the Prophet Muhammad was the chief of only one of the nine kinship groups which, in total, was effectively a confederacy of the tribes. Bulaç cites a census that was taken in Medina during Muhammad’s prophecy which records a population of around 10,000 people, of which only 1,500 were ‘Muslim’, in the sense of submission to God and an acceptance of Muhammad as the Prophet of God. To suggest that Muhammad had any kind of ‘kingly’ role over the whole of Medina seems way off the mark and highly unlikely. Instead, Muhammad had to possess incredible leadership and charismatic skills in holding together a society that was pluralistic in nature:
Of course, the religious message would be propagated; but no one would be coerced to convert through force and pressure; those who converted would meet no opposition, as they had in Mecca.62
Bulaç goes on to describe how, when the Mahajirun arrived in Medina, the chiefs of the families gathered and the first articles of the Medinan constitution were decided upon. Importantly, the constitution was the product of negotiation and consensus among the tribal leaders, rather than a list of commands forced upon the community by Muhammad and the Ansar. Bulaç states that it is ‘unimaginable’63 that the Prophet, having sneaked out of Mecca in the middle of the night to migrate to Medina, would be in any position to dictate to those who gave him refuge. Admittedly, Medina had suffered wars and internal conflicts for over one hundred years, and so they would have been open to Muhammad’s skills as arbiter and peacemaker, hence the constitution. However, the constitution is remarkably ‘modern’ in many respects, consisting of constitutive principles that allow for a diversity of ethnic, religious and social groups. Participation, rather than domination, is necessarily the starting point, reflecting the common interest of the community as a whole, rather than one particular group:
In such areas as religion, law-making, judiciary, education, trade, culture, art, and the organisation of daily life, each group will remain as it is and will express itself through the cultural and legal criteria it defines.64 Article 42 of the Constitution states that cases of murder and fighting shall be taken to Muhammad, but in this sense the Prophet acts as ‘arbiter’ and is a position that was agreed amongst the various groups when situations arise when conflicts cannot be settled internally: ‘In this arrangement, the Prophet did not act as a “judge” but as a “referee”.’65
Only a brief account of Bulaç’s arguments can be given here, but the important point is that a picture is presented of an umma that is far more inclusive and pluralistic than one might, and Mawdudi might, suppose. Islam comes across as effectively pragmatic, rather than dogmatic, recognizing the needs of different religious and ethnic groups within a broad framework of essential values that all the groups could readily adhere to. Determining what their values are (and the sources of these values) is, of course, the problem. For any Muslim, Mawdudi’s ‘four sources’ outlined in this chapter will be very important, but it is in the interpretation of these sources where one Muslim may differ greatly from another. Mawdudi’s ‘transhistorical’ understanding of the four sources is, I hope, as demonstrated here, divorced from historical reality:
The document concerned [the Medinan constitution] is not an artificial utopia or a theoretical political exercise. It has entered written history as a legal document employed systematically and concretely from 622 to 632 … Briefly defined, the Medina Document is the legal manuscript for political unity.66
These conventions constitute the third source of Islamic Constitution. How the Right-guided Caliphs managed the Islamic State after the passing away of the Holy Prophet is preserved in the books of Hadith, History and Biography which are replete with glittering precedents of that golden era.67
As an important third source for Mawdudi’s Islamic state, the question as to how ‘glittering’ these precedents were is of utmost importance. Many Islamists, Mawdudi among them, make reference to a ‘Golden Era’ of Islam; a period that is portrayed as a pure Islamic state. In appealing to traditional hadith and histories, the Islamist sees ultimate authority resting with the Rightly Guided Caliphs. They are seen as ideal Islamic rulers, by and large, who governed an ideal Islamic state. However, just how much authority really rested with the Caliphs? Did they possess as much legitimacy over all spheres of life, specifically the political, as has been suggested?
Historically, the Islamic community has lived in separate polities ranging from tribal societies to modern republics and has thus been ethnically, linguistically and religiously diverse. They have been subject to constant changes brought about by dynastic challenges and popular insurrections and, occasionally, by somewhat religiously motivated reformist movements; but, despite that, modern historians do not generally define a period of Islamic history as a ‘golden age’ in the sense of a unified Islamic umma – although the closest may well have been under Muhammad, his authority was laid to rest with his death.68
There were to be no prophets after Muhammad, and so an important symbol of religious authority was lost after his death. The state of the umma was extremely fragile at this stage and it could well have broken up again; Mecca reverting back to its mala (council of clan leaders) and Medina back to tribal war. Abu Bakr was elected partly because he came from a relatively insignificant clan with no pretensions to power; it was a falta – an affair concluded with haste and without much reflection to avoid the very real danger of tribal conflict and, according to Moojan Momen,69 to put down any prestige for the Prophet’s house of Hashim. However, Abu Bakr’s status as Khalifat Rasul Allah was not one of particularly great power: not only was his secular authority limited, but also his religious authority was much more circumscribed than that of Muhammad. In fact, at the beginning of his reign he was only a part-time Khalifah, as he continued to be a merchant.70 However, in his short reign of only two years, he maintained the Medinan regime, bringing the breakaway tribes back into the fold of the umma through the policy of ridda (apostasy) wars. Importantly, however, Abu Bakr was by no means an absolute ruler, for he had to rely on the loyalty of powerful tribal leaders who saw it in their own interests to remain united.
Before Abu Bakr died in AD 634 he designated his successor, Umar b. al-khattab, in the form of a recommendation. His succession was then secured by obtaining pledges of support for Umar from several prominent persons. However, Umar, in reality, had no more authority than his predecessor. Umar’s original title was ‘Khalifah to the Khalifah of the Prophet’; a rather cumbersome title which was replaced with the shorter ‘Amir al-Mu’minin’. Although ‘amir’ can be variously translated as ‘prince’, ‘commander’, ‘leader of the blind’, ‘husband’, ‘adviser’ or ‘counsellor’, the latter title of ‘counsellor’ is the most appropriate in this case. ‘Mu’minin’ is best translated as ‘believers’ rather than ‘submitters’ as some scholars have suggested.71 Many of the fiercely independent tribes would have been unwilling to accept a title that implies submission. Like any other traditional Arab leader he was only to advise and persuade, never to command. This situation would have been a matter of pragmatism as much as anything else, for the Muslim empire was expanding at such a remarkable rate it would have been impossible for the Khalif to pull all the strings. Although he had the power to appoint commanders and governors and, at times, give them detailed directions regarding their responsibilities, he had no means of enforcing these directions.
By the time Umar was assassinated, the empire was far too large for any one person to control it. A council of six men was appointed to decide the leadership, with the position going to Uthman b. Affan.72 The career of Uthman is well documented, and the term ‘glittering’ seems hardly appropriate in most of these historical accounts. Uthman was criticized heavily as a result of such actions as replacing governors with his own relatives and claiming a larger share of the booty. In addition, he is responsible for the ‘authorized version’ of the Qur’an which might seem a sensible action, considering the situation of the time with differing versions and much debate over the Qur’an’s authority, but the fact that it raised the issue of the authority of the Khalif to propagate one version provides evidence that the religious power of Uthman had its limitations.
After the death of Uthman, political authority was effectively in the hands of the Umayyad family, led by its most able member, Mu’awiya, the governor of Syria. The fourth Khalif, Ali, maintained a brief but fragile coalition before he too was assassinated in AD 661. With the rise to power of Mu’awiya, any claims to supreme religious authority were scrupulously avoided. The powerhouse moved from Medina to Syria and, to state it very briefly, there followed a period of cautious government and a series of civil wars within a rapidly expanding empire. Rulers, on the whole, were practical, but hardly concerned with reconciling the religious with the temporal. When we therefore trace the history of the Rashidun, it is extremely difficult to find much to support Mawdudi’s vision of this period as containing a series of ‘glittering precedents’ and a ‘golden era’. Instead, the Rashidun era is replete with power struggles, assassination and political intrigue left as a result of the vacuum created by the death of the charismatic Prophet Muhammad.
These rulings which comprise the fourth source, are the decisions of top-ranking jurists in regard to various constitutional problems of their times. They may not be conclusive on this subject, yet it cannot be gainsaid that they contain fundamentally the best guidance for a proper understanding of the spirit and principles of Islamic Constitution.73
Mawdudi does not detail exactly how much authority the rulings of past ‘great jurists’ would have in his Islamic state, nor does he specify which rulings. After the period of the first four Caliphs, a great variety of differences in legal and dogmatic opinion appeared in different centres in Iraq, the Hijaz, Syria and Egypt, each attaching themselves to a ‘great jurist’. These differences of legal thought were largely due to the various ways in which the Qur’an was interpreted, and it is a characteristic of Islam that wherever it has settled it has adopted much of local customary law. Consequently, one could speak of many ‘local Sunnas’.
From the middle of the eighth century, fiqh became more immutable. By the tenth century the ‘gates of ijtihad’ were finally closed, and the doctrine of the early jurists came to be invested with an authority that they themselves never claimed for it. Generally, the jurists had insisted upon the individual and fallible nature of their doctrines because of the personal allegiance that developed towards them to the degree that they attained the status of personality cult. The great jurist al-Shafi’i, the father of Muslim jurisprudence, consistently refused to be associated with any new school of law based upon the passive acceptance of his teachings, although this did not prevent the creation of the al-Shafi’i school.74
With the legal schools finally established, further judges could only imitate (taqlid) their doctrines. This may well have not been so problematic provided Islamic society was not, on the whole, subjected to any major paradigm shifts. However, with the coming of western infiltration, sharia law could not adapt, being largely the product of the idealism of medieval jurists. The notion of the sharia as the comprehensive and preordained system of God’s command – a system of law having an existence independent of society, had led to an introspective science divorced from reality and largely ignored by rulers.
Mawdudi uses the terminology of Islamic jurisprudence by referring to the judiciary as the qada. Traditionally, and somewhat idealistically, sharia courts had a single qadi (judge), making no provision for courts with a plurality of judges, nor for any system of appeal. There is no jury system, the single qadi being the judge of both the facts as presented and of the law as written. Nor is there any formal provision for representation. One party, the plaintiff, only, shoulders the burden of proof and must normally produce two witnesses to give oral testimony of the truth of his claims. Note that these witnesses must be adult male Muslims, although in special cases two women can make up one man – woman perceived as only half the rank as man in legal terms. To qualify as a witness, a person must possess the quality of adala (high moral integrity). There is no test of the credibility of the witness on the facts to which he testifies by cross-examination or any other means, which obviously restricts the scope of the judge’s process of fact finding. The judge is not required to weigh the evidence of one side against that of the other and come to a decision on the balance of probabilities. In effect, he has only two preliminary tasks to perform: to determine, first of all, which party carries out the burden of proof and, second, whether the witnesses that are to be called are qualified, on grounds of integrity of character, and so forth, to testify or not. In cases of conflicting testimony where the qadi feels unable to come to a correct decision on the basis of the evidence produced, he is allowed to abstain from judgment.
Because of such idealism, the qadahas rarely, if ever, worked in practice. In fact, there has never been an independent judiciary in the true sense of the term.75 Ultimately, the rift that existed between the ideal scheme of law as expounded by the jurists and the actual legal practice in Islam was recognized and ratified by legal scholarship under the doctrine known as siyasa shar’iyya (government in accordance with the precepts of divine law). Writers on constitutional law, from the eleventh century onwards, assert that while the sharia doctrine embodies the ideal order of things for Islam, the overriding duty of the ruler is to protect the public interest, and, in particular circumstances of time and place, the public interest might necessitate deviations from the strict sharia doctrine.
In effect, the political ruler is recognized as the fount of all judicial authority, with the power to set such bounds as he sees fit to the jurisdiction of his various tribunals. This doctrine is, of course, based on the assumption that the ruler is ideally qualified for his position in terms of religious piety and knowledge of the ‘divine law’. Mawdudi sees no problem here, by stating that the head of state – regardless of the judgements of others – can always exercise his veto.76
Since the latter part of the nineteenth century, sharia law has had to be largely abandoned in relation to commercial law, general civil law and criminal law largely because of modern western infiltration. As a result, Islamic nations would adopt – wholly or partly – the legal codes of which ever European country dominated their area at that time. Although family law has remained within the jurisdiction of the sharia courts, sharia law has had to be modified or abandoned. Mawdudi’s emphasis on the courts of law enforcing the divine code, and his despair that this is being violated ‘at present in almost all the Muslim states’77 can be understood if one is referring to such countries as Turkey in the 1920s abandoning the sharia altogether in favour of the Swiss Civil Code, but Mawdudi’s romanticism of past ages would not help, leading to a ‘return’ to outdated systems of law which do not reflect contemporary society:
The tension, then, between idealism and realism in Islamic law can be simply expressed in terms of the distinction between legal doctrine and legal practice. A realist approach to the question of the role of law in Muslim society has meant in the past, and means even more so today, that the idealism of the doctrine both in matters of substance and procedure, has perforce had to give way to the needs of State and society in practice.78
By allowing for change, modern Muslim societies have attempted to adapt to contemporary situations while keeping within the general spirit of Islamic principles; for example, the principle of equality has allowed for the improvement – though, in many respects, still far from satisfactory – in the status of women. Countries have borrowed European sources of law and absorbed them within the Muslim way of life, causing a process of evolution rather than revolution. As such, the divine command can be perceived as itself visualizing a changing social order, rather than being submerged in idealism.