Is Islam Undemocratic?

Parvez Manzoor
Sep 15, 1998

Modernity has given us a de-divinized public order. It has suppressed
the truth of the Soul for the harmony of the City. It has reduced the
mandate of Divine Vicegerency to a commitment to civil morality. Our
civilization no longer represents any cosmic truth, it partakes of no
transcendent order of being and recognizes no human purpose beyond
existence. Indeed, by redefining the End (eschation/Akhira) as an
immanent order of society, modernity has abolished quest for
transcendence from public order altogether. In place of the bliss of
the soul, it offers in the city, and for the mystery of the
Here-after, it substitutes the promise of the Here-now.

Contrary to the modern truth, holds that salvation of the Soul
takes precedence over in the City. The believer confronts the
mystery of being as l'homme and not as le citoyen. The sacrosanct
discourse of the addresses the individual soul, the singular
Muslim who is not a political being. Indeed, for all the compelling
logic of its communitarian ethic, the Islamic vision is more
transcendent than mundane, more symbolic than pragmatic, more
paradigmatic than strategic. The true guardian of would rather
damn the whole of history a thousand times than part with a single
text. not existence is the real home of the believer.

Paradoxically, the Sacred, long banished from the precincts of the
Secular City, now besieges it with a vengeance. Donning the garb of
'fundamentalism', it challenges secularity on its own immanentist
ground. Realizing that the problems of a historically existent society
cannot be exhausted by waiting for the end of the world, now
promotes itself as the politics of immediate return. Indeed, committed
to the glories of this world, it proffers its own model of the
earthly paradise. Thus, while the Leviathan of modernity has not
succeeded in devouring religious , the that has resurfaced
from the abyss of is afloat the raft of Messianism: it is
immanentist, radical and totalitarian.

Today, the of is under siege by a new
worldliness. Challenged by the immanentism of the state-idea from
within and by the of the modern orthodoxy from without, the
Islamic tradition stands indicted for being hostile to the humane
of , freedom and tolerance. The Islamic truth of the
believer, it is claimed by outsiders, cannibalizes on the right of
the citizen. The sovereignty of as a trans-temporal and
trans-existential , then, compels us to sift the half-truth of
the world from the full truth of our . In combating the new
worldliness, in other words, the believer needs to identify the true
demons of our age and not exhaust himself in a futile game of
shadow-boxing

In reflecting over the dialectics of and existence, we would do
well to remember that while is pre-eminently a religious ,
a doctrine of truth, modernity's mistresses - freedom, and
- are all ideologies of method. They are all theories of
practice, philosophies of means and an instrumentality that cares nothing
for any ultimate cause or goal. Whereas the revealed truth of
cannot allow itself to be disenfranchised by any human - democratic or
despotic dictate, the methodological half-truths of the world,
having no stake in man's ultimate purpose or goal, are concerned only
with the niceties of procedure and form. Hence, only when ,
wedded to atheistic humanism, lays claims to being a doctrine of
truth, or when interprets itself as an epistemology, does
it clash with the of . For by conceiving itself as a
doctrine of truth, does not merely affirm the political idea
of the will of the people, it repudiates the religious idea of the
truth of as well! In sum, where there is no temptation on the
part of the collective will to suppress the truth of the Soul, to
subjugate the autonomy of individual conscience, the truth of
and the method of can cohabit within the same existential
chamber. And that goes for the historical space occupied by the Muslim
polity as well.

As for liberty, the revealed of holds that, whatever the
contingencies of existence, the moral man is always bound to 's
. He is the one who barters his freedom for obedience, submits his
will to 's will, and becomes a Muslim. Hence, the Islamic
tradition knows of no 'libertarian discourse of ' against 's
revelation and its injunctions. It is also because of the revelational
imperative that the of can never free itself from the
ultimate ends of existence and degenerate into a mere stratagem for
survival. Indeed, Islamic existence may neither become a Promethean
bid for an earthly paradise nor remain a pathetic quest for security
in the solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short life of man.

The morally binding of , it goes without saying, is not
contingent upon the ordinances of any ruler or state: it is truly
trans-political. Or, as understood by our classical tradition: after
the termination of Prophecy, no rule has the right to demand absolute
obedience. For every post-Prophetic rule is worldly rule, and every
post-Prophetic state, Muslim or non-Muslim, under the guidance of the
Faqih or under the governance of the Sultan, is 'fallible'. The
state, as a historical phenomenon, accordingly, neither incarnates
the nor represents the truth of but constitutes a
contingent entity that has its jurisdiction over the bodies of men,
not over their conscience. Hence, the same rationale for submission,
which ties the moral man and his conscience to the imperatives of the
revelation, cannot be applied to the citizen's relationship with the
temporal state. Revelational conscience of the individual and not the
political power of the state is sovereign in the House of .

Given the insight that Islamic conscience must always maintain its
autonomy in the face of political authority, any Islamic rationale for
obedience to a historical, contingent, state is a matter of voluntary
assent, an ijma of the Umma, and not an
article of . It is only for the sake of existential security and
common good that Muslims constitute a polity in a limited sense.
is the truth of , polity is its method. For all its
transcendental rationale, governance in is a dispensable
communitarian business, not an indispensable affair of . No
wonder that our tradition understands it the believer's fard kifaya.

Given the contractual nature of the Islamic polity, then, Muslims are
fully justified in demanding from the state whatever political
liberties and civil that they deem desirable. Conversely, the
Muslim state - in contradistinction to the Prophetic Regime - must, on
its part, guarantee the believer indemnity against its own (mis)rule;
it must offer safeguards against its infringement of the believers'
. The purpose of the Islamic contract, whatever its political
trappings, then, is to deny the state any totalitarian claims,
theocratic or otherwise. Indeed, to submit to the coercive power of
the state only conditionally and not absolutely, is not only an
Islamic imperative but that of any moral doctrine that upholds the
sovereignty of the good. Indeed, it is the only orthodox political
interpretation of the ineluctably religious doctrine of Khatm
an-Nubuwwa (Finality of the Prophethood of Muhammad (S)).

The Islamic debate on civil and public liberties will start when we
stop confounding State with Paradise, political order with divine
order, contingency with eternity, in the manner of the secularists!
Indeed, we must rectify our propensity for conceiving the State in
terms of the regime of , mistaking an immanent polity for a
transcendent moral order. (Obviously, the only exception is the
Prophetic regime, which, being under the direct command of through
the revelation, represents a unique - and unrepeatable - instance of
's rule, theocracy. Hence, it is the only state within history
that may demand unconditional obedience from the Muslim. However, this
is one exception which ends every other rule; it renders all further
claims to theocratic illegitimate and un-Islamic.)

Given the fact that 'theocracy' is only possible under the Prophetic
rule, it would follow that - whatever the sacred logic of the
classical theory and the secular fury of modern revivalism - the
believer and the citizen are not doomed to live a life of
perpetual strife in the House of . Indeed, as long as the state
lays no claim to 'incarnating' the transcendent truth of , as
long as it does not put on the theocratic mantle, it may be assured of
the believer's loyalty, albeit a limited and conditional one. Only
when the temporal state makes the ultimate pretense of directing the
citizen's destiny beyond dahr or dunya, (thus usurping the
authority of the Prophet) does it loose its right to obedience. A
false imam is more dangerous than a false sultan.

To proclaim the eternal truth of and strive for the bliss of the
soul, however, is not to renounce the half-truth of the City. It is
simply to uphold the moral authority of revealed truth, and its
attendant religious conscience, over the coercive power of political
order. Inasmuch as the problem of creating in the City does not
abolish the quest for the meaning of existence, the democratic method
does not exhaust the religious search for truth. Hence, even if the
religious of and the political methodology of
have been presented as mortal enemies by the misguided champions of
religious piety or by the self-appointed guardians of 'world order',
they can, and indeed must, coexist. And this cohabitation must take
place not only within Muslim polities but within the emerging Global
City of humanity as well.

There is no divine decree that, in obeying the imperatives of ,
Muslim political order must perforce become despotic and
undemocratic. Indeed, if there is any Islamic precedent with regard to
method, it is just the opposite, as is amply borne out by the
traditional doctrine of Ijma. Classical
(not to be confounded with the traditional Muslim polity) -
unnegotiably religious by temper and inclination, is thoroughly
democratic. Modern - militantly political in theory and practice
- seems to be going in the opposite direction. By so doing, however,
it also puts into question its own Islamic credentials.