Islamic Government

Dec 30, 2012 Features / Columnists, Ravi Dev

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After several rounds of voting in Egypt, the latest being the referendum affirming a new constitution, western observers continue to express alarm over the victories of President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.  They are concerned about the ‘democratic’ commitment of those that form the government, dubbed “Islamicists” because of their commitment to an Islamic conception of politics.
The issue of “politicised Islam” has wider relevance that just Egypt. The western world, especially the US, insists that “good governance” and “democracy” are two of the planks on which it will conduct its relations with other states. Such a view, however, makes some assumptions about political participation that clash with Islamic thinking, which guides more than a billion people across the globe. Iran provided an earlier opportunity for the west to go beyond their reflexive denunciations of “violations of democracy” and grapple with an alternative paradigm for arranging the affairs of mankind than the nation state that we are used to.
While Imam Khomeni was, and most of Iran is, Shia, compared with most of the rest of the Islamic world who are Sunni, their scholars and religious leaders, by and large, do not differ on the central point that Khomeni made in his foundational treatise Islamic Government. To wit that Western powers are determined to twist the meaning of Islam in order to serve their “imperialist agenda”. “The preachers they (the imperialists) planted in the religious teaching institution, the agents they employed in the universities, government educational institutions, and publishing houses, and the orientalists who work in the service of the imperialist states—all these people have pooled their energies in an effort to distort the principles of Islam.”
Whether one agrees with Khomeni or not that there is a conspiracy in action, it is now widely accepted (in western academia, at least) that “religion” is a social construct, which can be deployed as a trope to mask socio-political agendas. The problem manifests in the first instance in the way in which the term “religion” has come to be understood in the west as opposed to that in Islamic doctrines. While there are definitions of “religion” in every area of study in the west, the presumption that there was some objective thing called “religion” out there in the world has only recently been accepted in academic circles as a fiction. As Talal Assad pointed out, we cannot discuss religious concepts and symbols outside of the social system that bequeathed meaning on those concepts and symbols. Islam and Christianity were nurtured in different societies.
In the west, Christianity is the paradigmatic “religion”, which provides their generic categories to define all other religions. In the evolution of its position, the Christian concept of “giving unto Caesar what is Caesar’s” produced a dualistic division of the sacred and the profane and the fundamental notion of “secularization” that religion was confined to a private space and not to be intertwined with affairs of state. Almost every Islamic scholar and every “Islamicist” politician vehemently reject this apolitical definition of “religion” when it is applied to Islam. It is difficult for westerners to conceive of a situation where even those Muslims who may condemn violence as a political tool would accept the position of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian thinker, executed in 1966, who regarded all secular forms of government, including democracy (and socialism) as blasphemy, pure and simple. In Islam, one cannot divorce God from governance.
Some Muslims would extend the argument that all human agencies of power are a violation of the sovereignty of God and the best that can be done is for governments to be guided by the tenets of the Qur’an as interpreted by the religious scholars. This is the position that Imam Khomeni took when he expounded the concept of velayat-e faqih – guardianship of the jurist – as government appropriate for Muslims. Most Muslims would accept this notion of religious guardianship over the body politic and it is this position that troubles western observers. The latter, however, would not accept that their notions of ‘democratic’ government were also guided by ‘religious’ precepts – in their case Christianity. The European “Enlightenment” project might have given such precepts a different epistemological basis, but their ontological foundations remained unchanged.
Islamists, in Egypt and elsewhere, reject the western notion of ‘democracy’ divorced from the tenets of Islam. It is pushed, they believe, by those who wish to keep Muslims subjugated, since it would serve to prevent deviation from the Sharia – the word of God. By definition, under this worldview, such rule has to be just – since the Sharia can properly prescribe no other path. While scholars may sometimes differ on specific applications on the tradition, once one accepts the concept of “guardianship”, the foundation can never be eroded, since the entire edifice could possibly collapse.
Unless the west understands this concept of governance, they will continue to be ‘disappointed’ with the unfolding of the “Arab Spring” in all the Islamic countries – whether Sunni or Shias.

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