The Divine and the Human
\r\nMuslim countries need to set aside the pointless, counterproductive, and empty quarrel over the conflict between secularization and Islam and/or Islamism (which masks important issues by reducing to so-called essentials the relations between religion and state, glossing dangerously over the substantial variances in historical experience that separate the two civilizations); far from these warped controversies, Muslim countries must give serious and sustained consideration to the relationship of Islam to authority in its many forms. From the outset, Muslim scholars in their work of interpretation distinguished between divine authority on the one hand, as expressed in the texts bearing upon the credo (aqida), worship (ibadat), and religious duties and prohibitions (wajibat, muharramat), and human authority on the other hand, which, in social affairs (muamalat) must manage the primary sphere of the permitted through consultation (shura) and a majority decision-making process. The distinction between the two levels of authority is absolutely not foreign to Islam; it is, in fact, an essential teaching in a religion that has neither a clergy nor a religious hierarchy. These legal stipulations can be found in the works of the founders of Islamic legal philosophy (usul al-fiqh: the fundamentals of Islamic law and jurisprudence), figures like Jafar as-Sadiq or ash-Shafii, in both the Sunni and Shiite traditions.
\r\nThe history of Islam and of its cultural and social references demonstrates that rationality, criticism, recognition of the status of the individual, and of social and political dissent (up to and including the legitimate challenge of particular dynasties, despots, or religious castes) are an integral part of Islamic civilization. The principled position of Ibn Rushd (Averroes), whose Decisive Treatise criticizes state authoritarianism, is not at all remote from the stance of his predecessors, the Muslim scholars of the dominant Islamic legal tradition, who rejected any attempt by the state to impose any particular school of jurisprudence. Malik ibn Anas (711-795), who in the name of jurisprudential pluralism stood steadfast against the efforts of Caliph al-Mansur (714-775) to declare his work, al-Muwatta, as the state’s sole legal standard, or Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780-855), who resisted attempts by the state to impose a single doctrine on the createdness or uncreatedness of the Quran, stand out as examples.
\r\nHow curious, and disturbing that in the West only Ibn Rushd’s position is credited (undoubtedly because of its philosophical proximity to Locke’s Letter concerning Toleration) to the detriment of scholars who, despite their courageous struggles and stands, have gone unrecognized as thinkers and intellectuals. Even more disturbing, in Muslim majority societies, Muslims themselves accept what amounts to a reductive and biased reading of the history of Islamic thought. This is no small matter: it locates outside the purview of religion the distancing of oneself from the state, criticizing it and opposing its despotic character (politically, doctrinally, legally, and religiously)—in keeping with a very “Western” way of what a secular “thinker” or “philosopher” should be. In so doing, it overlooks the critical rationality and political independence of Muslim scholars like Malik ibn Anas and Ahmad ibn Hanbal, whose courage cost them years of imprisonment (though, historically, they were far from the only ones). They are seen as too “religious” to be recognized as having early drawn a distinction between the two authorities, divine and human, doing so not only as Muslim scholars but also as legal philosophers, according to the categories of the Western social sciences.
\r\nMuslims must reconcile themselves with this aspect of their history; they must study it anew instead of either ignoring their own past and their own being, or seeing themselves through the prism of the West’s reductive view of Islam, its values and its multiplicity of tradition. It is time to rediscover how the two powers—the divine and the human—are articulated, but also to relearn the ways of relating to knowledge, and to the independence of rationality and science.
\r\nCompiled From:
\r\n \"Islam and the Arab Awakening\" - Tariq Ramadan, pp. 79-83