Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

HUMAN RESPONSIBILITIES

Responsibility comes from the word “response,” and one might say, in the Islamic context, that all of our responsibilities issue from that original response to God, when, according to the Quran, before the creation of the world God addressed all the children of Adam asking them, “Am Human Responsibilities and Human Rights 277

I not your Lord?” and they said, “Yes” (7:172). In this affirmation lie all our responsibilities as human beings, for in saying “yes” we accepted the Divine Trust(amanah) , which we must bear in this world. At the heart of this trust resides the affirmation of Divine Oneness and acts of worship and service. The very word for servant (‘abd) of God is related to the word for worship and service (‘ibadah). To accept to be God’s servant and to represent Him in this world means, above all, worshiping and serving Him. All the rights we have issue from the fulfilling of our responsibilities, and in the Islamic perspective responsibilities always precede rights. Although everyone these days speaks all the time of human rights and little of human responsibilities, in practice, even in the modern West, in many cases responsibilities precede rights. For example, we have to be responsible drivers before we are given the right to drive on public roads, and we have to accept the responsibility of mastering the laws of the land before being given the right to practice law. In Islam this relationship is not a matter of expediency, but of principle, and its acceptance dominates the cultural and intellectual landscape.

Now, we have responsibilities not only toward God, but also toward His creation. Traditional religious texts, in fact, delineate a hierarchy of responsibilities for human beings.

At the apex are our responsibilities and duties toward God through acts of worship and service and obedience to His Law. Then there is the responsibility one has toward oneself.

Since human life is sacred and is not created by us, we are responsible for trying to keep our souls as well as bodies healthy and not causing ourselves spiritual or physical harm (unless it is in battle or some other cause for the welfare of others or in self-defense). Therefore, as already stated, suicide is considered a grave sin in Islam. The modern idea that “This is my body and I can do whatever I want with it” is totally absent from the Islamic perspective; Islam states, “My body is not mine, for I did not create it- it belongs to God.” Responsibility to ourselves also, of course, involves our soul and mind. Our greatest responsibility to ourselves is, in fact, to try to save our soul and to be good. This is not at all a selfish act, because one cannot do good unless one is good, and to save one’s soul is also to introduce virtue and goodness into the ambience in which we live. We also have the responsibility to our minds to seek knowledge and the truth to the extent possible.

Next in the hierarchy we have responsibility toward society, starting with our family. This set of responsibilities ranges all the way from working honestly to support ourselves and our families, to performing acts of charity, to respecting others and strengthening community bonds, to supporting and sustaining all that is positively creative in human society. The vast spectrum

of these social responsibilities is delineated in traditional works on theShari‘ah and ethics and cannot be enumerated here. Furthermore, the world around us is not limited to the human sphere-

we also have responsibilities toward animals and plants and even inanimate parts of nature such as water, air, and soil.

This latter set of responsibilities involves what modern Western writers now refer to as environmental ethics. Our rights on all different levels derive from the acceptance of our responsibilities, which precede our rights in a principial manner. To flout responsibilities in the name of inalienable rights is not at all within the Islamic perspective and is considered putting the cart before the horse.

The question arises, however, about those who do not fulfill their responsibilities. Do they then have no rights? In everyday life in society it is not difficult to provide an  answer. If we do not fulfill our responsibilities at work, we will be fired and have no right to receive a salary, or if we have too many traffic violations, which means that we are irresponsible drivers, our license and right to drive will be taken away. The question becomes more difficult in the modern context when we refer to that first category of responsibilities, that is, our duties and responsibilities toward God. In modern society, the rights of citizens do not change whether those citizens fulfill their responsibilities toward God or even believe in God or not.

Some in the West have contrasted this state of affairs with the situation in the Islamic world and claim that, from the Islamic point of view, such persons would have no rights. This assertion is, however, not at all true. If certain Muslims fall into religious and intellectual doubt even about God’s existence, their right to the protection of their life and property by society still remains as long as they do not try to impose their views on others or act against social norms and laws. Even if they hold philosophical discussions on such matters, their basic rights cannot be removed.

Needless to say, throughout Islamic history some have been imprisoned or occasionally even put to death for theological and religious reasons, but usually their situation has involved a political dimension, and in any case such occurrences have been much rarer in Islamic history than in Western history. The usual Islamic theological and juridical reasoning followed for the protection of such people is that as long as a person is alive, he or she may always come back to God, and that therefore the life of such a person must be protected like any other. As for performing acts of worship, that is between each individual and God, and Islamic society cannot force anyone to carry out acts of worship. What is expected of everyone is to observe theShari‘ah as law in public and as it concerns others and not to break religious injunctions publicly; this is analogous to prohibitions in the Christian or even post-Christian West against performing acts against public morality.

HUMAN RIGHTS

It is only in light of this understanding of human responsibilities that the question of human rights must be considered.

To comprehend the meaning of human rights in the Islamic context, it is essential to ask how Muslims refer to the concept of “rights” and what they understand by it. In Arabic the basic term for “right” is haqq, which is first of all a Name of God, who is al-H. aqq, that is, Truth and Reality.

The term haqq also possesses the meaning of “duty” as well as “right,” obligation as well as claim, law as well as justice.

It means also what is due to each thing, what gives reality to a thing, what makes a thing be true. Its derivative form, ih. qaq, means to win one’s rights in a court of law, while another derivative, tah. qiq, means not only to ascertain the truth of something, but on the highest level to embody the truth. The term haqq, which is one of the richest in the Arabic language, involves God, the Quran (which is also called al-h. aqq), law, our responsibilities before God and His Law, as well as our rights and just claims.

Everything by virtue of the fact that it exists has its haqq, which means both responsibilities to God and rights. Each thing has its due by virtue of the nature with which it has been created. Rights do not belong to human beings alone, but to all creatures. Today, as a result of an emphasis of human rights over the rights of other creatures, we are rapidly destroying the natural environment, and as a result people now speak of animal or plant rights. This latter perspective  is perfectly in accord with the Islamic view, according to which rights are not the prerogative of the human state alone, but belong to all creatures. In the deepest sense “rights” means to give each being, including ourselves as human beings, its due (h. aqq).

Turning to the more specific question of human rights as currently understood in the West, according to Islam human beings have rights that are directly related to the responsibilities they have accepted as God’s servants and vicegerents on earth. These rights range from the religious and personal to the legal, social, and political. The first rights of human beings concern their immortal souls. Men and women have the right to seek the salvation of their souls, which Islam, like other religions, considers our first duty toward ourselves and toward God, to Whom we must offer our souls. This right means the freedom of conscience in religious matters. God does not wish to compel His creatures to believe in Him, but wants them to do so on the basis of their own free will and conscience. To obey the laws of society is one thing, but to be coerced to have faith is quite another. The great drama of every human soul to accept or reject the call of Heaven is inseparable from the human state itself, and Islam, while emphasizing our duties to God, also emphasizes our right and even duty to engage in this drama. No external authority can take this right- and duty-away. Furthermore, the right to practice one’s religion or not to, as long as the latter does not destroy social norms and laws, is at the heart of the Islamic understanding of human rights. The rights of non-Muslims to practice their religion is also guaranteed by Islamic Law, as mentioned above, unless it is a pseudo-religion or cult, which Islam has opposed as much as have

Christianity and other traditional religions. Needless to say, the understanding of what constitutes an authentic religion and what constitutes a cult is not the same in the traditional Islamic world and in modern Europe and America, where many cults, some quite dangerous, dot the landscape, but the principle of the right to the practice of one’s religion, whether it is Islam itself or any of the other heavenly inspired religions, is ingrained in the Islamic understanding of human rights. Furthermore, in this crucial matter there is no difference between men and women, who stand equal before God.

Next are personal rights pertaining to one’s life, property, personal choices, and so forth. According to the principles of Islam, which have not always been followed any more than have those of Christianity, every human being has the right to life and the possession of property unless he or she commits crimes, as a result of which society takes away certain or all of these rights. Human beings also have the right of choosing their personal way of living in such matters as what form of livelihood to engage in, whom to marry, how to raise their family, where to live, and so on.

Of course, in every society there are external constraints, including economic ones, that do not always allow these rights to be fulfilled according to one’s wishes, but the principles are there. For example, in contrast to many premodern societies, Islamic society allowed each individual according to the law to learn and practice whatever profession he or she wanted and in practice could follow.

Likewise, according to Islamic Law both women and men have the right to choose their spouse. Now, in practice there have often been family pressures and economic and other considerations that have limited this right, especially for many women, but the social pressure exerted by many families has had nothing to do with the rights accorded by Islam to both men and women to choose their mates freely.

In this matter, again, the situation in the Islamic world has  not been very different from that in various Western societies until quite recently and in many cases even today.

In speaking about personal rights, one must remember that the thrust of the message of Islam is not only to give rights to human beings to perform this or that act, but especially to encourage them to lead a good life in every way possible. If certain personal rights such as sexual promiscuity have been taken away in Islam, it has been done in light of what religion considers to be the attainment of the good, which is the goal of human existence and the purpose of human rights. From the religious point of view, not only must rights follow obligations, but they must themselves be conditioned by various “thou shalt nots” in order to guarantee the rights of others and also the right of our immortal soul to be protected against the tendencies toward evil that each of us bears within himself or herself.

As for legal rights, which include the right to equality before the law and the right to a trial and self-defense, they are defined and in principle defended by Islamic Law itself.

They include the right to be treated equally before the law, right to a fair trial and self-defense. In traditional Islamic society, where the Divine Law

was widely applied, these matters were handled according to extensive procedures developed by Islamic jurists. Since the nineteenth century in numerous Islamic countries many of the laws as well as court procedures have come to be based on European models, while the judiciary has at the same time lost much of its independence. Needless to say, in many instances tyrannical governments have prevented the legal rights of many from being upheld, and consequently today there is a great deal of pressure by Muslims within various Islamic societies to allow everyone to live according to the rule of law and to have the legal rights of all members of society respected. When we speak of legal rights in Islam, we do not therefore mean simply what is going on in the Islamic world today, but the teachings of Islam itself.

Even more problematic than legal rights in the Islamic world today are political rights, which, in their current Western understanding, are, of course, a modern idea neither understood nor applied in other parts of the world in the same way as they are in countries that are culturally European. The whole array of historical processes-democracy rebelling against dictatorship, freedom of the individual versus tyranny, transformation from the England of George III to the America of Washington and Jefferson, the Third Reich and present-day Germany, the Gulag and Yeltsin’s Russia-belong to Western history and do not have their equivalents in the Islamic world, which has had its own distinct struggles in the colonial and postcolonial periods. It is not possible to delve into all these issues here, but we must always remember the differences in the historical experiences of Islam and the modern West. What we need to focus on, however, is the classical Islamic ideal of political rights, which serves as a background for all that goes on in this domain today in various Islamic countries.

Traditionally, Muslims were to be consulted in matters of rule, and each person had the right to live in justice and the right to fight against injustice and oppression. With the rise of secularism, many people in the West saw the rule of God through religion as tyranny and identified the tyranny of their rulers with the tyranny of religion, as is seen so clearly in the French Revolution. In contrast, in the Islamic world the tyranny of worldly rulers was never identified with what agnostic philosophers in the West called the tyranny of religion, and in this matter there are certain resemblances  between the views of Islam and those of America’s founding fathers. Nor must the situation in the present-day Islamic world be confused with what occurred historically in the West, despite the presence of a small but vocal secularized minority in various Islamic countries for whom political rights mean freedom from tyrannical rule as well as secularization in the Western sense.

In much of the Islamic world today, Muslims are governed by dictatorial regimes, usually supported by the West if they happen to have a pro-Western stance and preserve Western interests. Muslims see Islam as a means of protecting themselves against this worldly tyranny as they had done in ages past. One of the appeals of so-called fundamentalism is this deeply rooted Islamic view of the role of religion in protecting the people from tyranny. In any case, under no condition should the lack of political

rights in many Islamic countries today be seen as being simply the Islamic understanding of this matter. In the political realm there is much turmoil in the Islamic world today resulting from the consequences of the colonial period, the destruction of many traditional institutions, and the establishment of governments that are not based on the culture and religion of the people themselves. These governments are supported and sustained by powers from another civilization that still dominate much of the Islamic world and make it impossible for authentic structures and norms to be born from within Islamic society itself. If there were really free elections in the Islamic world today, in nearly every country there would come to power a less Western-oriented regime; it would not be necessarily anti-Western, but it would place the interests of Islamic society itself above everything else.

Many who criticize Islamic countries for their lack of political rights are shedding crocodile tears, for in their hearts they are happy that such is the case and that in not many places in the Islamic world are members of society allowed to exercise their political rights according to classical Islamic teachings.

In discussing the whole question of human rights, it is essential to realize how the cultural values of each society determine to a large extent its understanding of this term.

At the present moment many in the West consider human rights to be universal. Yet the Western understanding of this term has itself changed over time. Moreover, over the years Western powers have often used this issue for political gain and sometimes with astounding hypocrisy, which has amazed not only non-Westerners, including Muslims, but also those in the West who believe sincerely in human rights as they understand them. In addition, the issue of human rights has become central in the struggle between forces of globalization and forces seeking to preserve local cultures, economies, and ways of life. One cannot in all honesty discuss human rights on a global scale without turning to these issues and also to the different understandings that various cultures and civilizations, including the Islamic, have of human rights on the basis of their understanding of what it means to be human.

Let us for a moment compare priorities in human rights according to the secular and the Islamic understandings of what it means to be human. From the secular point of view, the human being is a purely earthly creature and what matters most is the rights of the individual as a purely earthly being. If one curses God or Christ on the street today in some American city, nothing will happen legally, but if one insults an individual, one can be arrested or sued. Clearly in this perspective, the rights of the individual stand above not only those of God, but also those of faith as a social and  public reality. The priorities in the Islamic world are reversed. The rights of God stand above the rights of human beings, and for a person to insult the religion of others is not considered a right at all, even if the prevention of such an act decreases one’s individual rights. The same holds true for questions of morality, including sexual morality, over which there has been so much debate during the past few decades even in America and Europe, and the issue of “freedom of speech” as individual right versus the rights of the public.

This difference in priorities came out clearly a few years ago in the infamous Salman Rushdie affair, where a writer of Islamic Indian background living in England wrote a blasphemous work seeking to denigrate and destroy a central part of Islamic sacred history. The publication of his work led to riots, which resulted in several deaths, and finally to his condemnation to death by Ayatollah Khomeini, followed by severe reaction from Western writers, especially secularist ones. One side argued that what was most important was the right of the individual to free speech; the other championed the right of a society to preserve its sacred history.

Lest one think that this is only a dichotomy between Islam and the West, one should recall that blasphemy laws are still on the books in Great Britain, although they do not include blasphemy against Islam. In any case, it was difficult in the Rushdie affair for either side to understand the intensity of the indignation of the other, for each was operating from within a different worldview and with a different set of priorities.

If a debate were to be carried out today on the question of the understanding of human rights and the hierarchy presumed within it, one of the Westerners on the panel might say that Muslim women have few rights. A Muslim mother might answer that Western children have few rights;

their most basic right, that of having a full-time mother, has been taken away by a new economic system in which many mothers are forced to spend, at best, a couple of hours each day of so-called quality time with their children after a full day’s work and in a state of fatigue. The Muslim might add that, after the need for a mother, the most basic right of a child is to have two parents, and that this right is taken away from nearly half of the children in many sectors of Western society by complex socioeconomic factors and the prevalent “morality,” which places the desires of the individual above responsibility in marriage to one’s spouse and children. A Westerner might say that most Muslims do not have the right to a vote that counts for anything. A Muslim might respond that he agreed, but, as important as the right to vote was, along with it came the “right” to gain a livelihood in a just and reasonable manner and not by struggling from morning to night as a result of difficult economic conditions, many of them due to what is called the international economic and political order. Other Muslim debaters might further add that in their village, they always voted for their village elder on the basis of his experience and character, whereas in so many places, especially America, the choices offered in an election are strongly conditioned by the pressure of financial factors that have nothing to do with authentic democracy.

The debate could continue for a long time, but at the end the Muslim interlocutors would thank their Western counterparts and state that they were grateful for their concern, but that if they really wanted to be friends and fellow human beings, they should not impose their views but ask the Muslim team what they considered to be the rights that were most missing in their lives and that their Western  friends could help to realize. If human rights are related to love of humanity, they must be combined with humility,

not hubris. One of the Muslims might ask a Westerner if she would like to experience humiliation instead of humility.

What would happen if a group of human rights activists in Cairo with access to all the international media kept holding press conferences, at which a few token Americans were present, on the rights of battered women and alcohol abuse or the tragedy of adolescent pregnancy in America?

Would this moralistic hectoring be real concern for human rights in America, or an attempt to humiliate those who are unlike the activists and hold a value system the activists do not accept, even if the activists’ own value system is in constant flux and transition?

Anything less than mutual respect in understanding the other side makes a sham of the question of human rights.

And when the issue of human rights is used as a tool for policy by Western powers, it tends to nullify the efforts of those in the West who, with sincerity and good intention, are seeking to help others all over the globe to preserve the dignity of human life, a belief that not only Muslims, Christians, and those from other religions, but also many secularists share.

FREEDOM FROM RELIGION VERSUS FREEDOM OF RELIGION

The very thought of freedom creates joy in one’s mind and heart, and there is no man or woman in the East or West who does not cherish freedom. But what is freedom? We need to answer this question in a fundamental way, especially since “freedom” has now become a shibboleth of the West, especially America, that is then presented to the world as the highest ideal. To answer the question in the Islamic context, it is first necessary to remind ourselves how religions in general view this matter.

The very word “religion” in English comes from the Latin religare, meaning “to bind,” which seems to be the opposite of “to free.” The Ten Commandments, which form the foundation of Jewish and Christian morality, consist of a number of “thou shalt nots,” that is, limitations rather than freedoms. The Gospel of John (8:32) speaks of the Truth, which will set us free, but only if one accepts the conditions set by Christ, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matt. 8:34). In the Indian religions freedom is also identified with deliverance from the bondage of all limitation, or what Hindus call moks´a, and from the recurring cycles of samsaric existence, or the chain of births and deaths in the world of becoming, which Buddhism emphasizes. In most sacred scriptures freedom is identified with release from the limitations of our own existence, rather than the freedom of the individual qua ego. As many Muslim sages have said, religion is to enable us to gain freedom from the self and not to abet the freedom of the self.

Metaphysically speaking, God alone is infinite; so God alone is absolute freedom. Every mode of separative existence is limitation and to some degree bondage. Only in God are we truly free, and He has given us free will in order that we may freely submit this free will to His Will in order to gain genuine freedom, freedom from the prison of our limited egos and our never-ending passions generating unending waves of unreal wants and desires, which are then turned into needs. Once it was asked of the prince of the Sufis of Khurasan, Bayazid, “What do you want?” He answered, “I want not to want.” That is ultimate freedom,  which Islam, like other heavenly inspired religions, places at the center of its teachings. That is why the Quran, like the Bible or the Vedas, for that matter, never speaks of freedom in quantitative and earthly terms, but seeks to help one unbind the tethers that confine one’s immortal soul to the dictates of the lower passions. And that is also why Sufism, the inner dimension of Islam concerned with spiritual training of the soul, speaks so often of freedom, but always as freedom from the self, not of the self. In the deepest sense even our outward love for freedom is nostalgia for the freedom of the infinite expanses of the Divine Empyrean.

The attitude of Islam toward freedom is based on this metaphysical reality. Like other traditional religions, Islam sees its role as that of helping human beings to overcome the clutches of the power of their lower souls and thereby to be able to gain real freedom, rather than to foster an individualism that, in the guise of freedom, only strengthens the bonds of slavery of our immortal soul to that powerful slave master within it that is

the agent of rebellion, passion, concupiscence, and ultimately bondage. This highest sense of freedom has, however, never prevented Islam from believing that human beings should possess the freedom to live in dignity in this world and to practice their duty toward God as His servants and toward His creatures as His vicegerents. Indignation and rebellion against tyranny have always been encouraged in Islam.

There is, however, an important distinction that needs to be clarified. For a person of faith, whether Jew, Christian, or Muslim, to love God and obey His commandments is not considered a loss of freedom. In contrast, those who have lost their faith regard that submission itself as a loss of freedom. In the American Revolution, the founding fathers made clear that the freedom of religion was a cardinal human right, but for many during the more than two centuries that have followed, this right has come to mean freedom from religion, not of religion. Current cultural wars in America over school prayer and other issues pertaining to the separation of church and state bring out this distinction clearly. Now, obviously the secularizing experience of the West during the past centuries has not been shared by the Islamic world, and most Muslims still live in the world of faith, in which submission to God is not seen as a curtailing of one’s freedom any more than going to church and obeying the teachings of Christ would be seen as a restriction of freedom for a devout Christian. In both cases the acceptance of the authority of God would be seen as the gateway to the gaining of real freedom. It is simply meaningless for secularized Western intellectuals seeking to flee religion in order to gain “freedom” to try to apply their existential plight to Muslims who still live in the world of faith.

The love of God and surrender to His Will do not mean, however, for one moment that Muslims therefore have no interest in political and social freedom. The human desire for freedom according to who one is and what one’s cultural values are is a universal trait, and throughout history Muslims have shown as much desire for freedom for themselves and their society as anyone else, as the courageous wars of independence fought against the British, the French, the Russians (which is still going on in Chechnya), and others bear witness. Paradoxically, after all these struggles, most Muslim societies came to be saddled with governments that have provided less freedom to them than before. Not only because of modern technology, which makes the state so much more powerful than in earlier times, but also because of the loss of many traditional institutions, the modernized parts of the Islamic world  enjoy less freedom today than they did before the modern period. The contrast between talk about freedom by the West and pursuit of self-interest, usually of an economic nature, which causes support of oppressive regimes in much of the Islamic world, is certainly not lost on the general Islamic public.

If one asks if Muslims want freedom, the answer is definitely yes. But the vast majority of Muslims would add that, first of all, for them freedom does not mean freedom from God and religion; they would embrace other freedoms, provided they do not destroy their faith and what gives meaning to their lives. Second, they would point out that to be free means also to be free to understand what one means by freedom. They certainly do not want

“freedom” to be imposed on them as an ideology by a more powerful West that knows better than they do what is good for them. Coercion under the guise of freedom is still coercion.

What Muslims would like most of all is to be allowed the freedom to confront their own problems and find their own solutions. During all those centuries when the West was experimenting with all kinds of ideas and institutions, from the French Revolution to Napoleon, from the Bolshevik Revolution to Fascism and Nazism, from laissezfaire capitalism to socialism and back, the dynamic came from within Western civilization itself and the West had the freedom to develop as it did, for better or worse, without outward constraint. There was no external force, no powerful civilization breathing down its neck and preventing it from acting freely from within itself to create new institutions and norms as it deemed necessary. The Islamic world does not have such a privilege. The very Western civilization that talks of freedom has placed numerous constraints on the Islamic world in the name of protecting its own “interests,” constraints that are greater obstacles to freedom of action than any that could come from within Islamic society itself.

Under such pressure some Muslims during the last century turned to Western liberalism, others to Marxism while the Soviet world was still alive, and yet others to politicized forms of Islam. But none of these movements has been free of the external constraints the West did not have to face in its own recent historical development. In any case, the Islamic world certainly seeks its freedom, but wishes to do so according to its own understanding of the nature of the human state, its ultimate goal of freedom in God, and, in light of that reality, freedom in the human order. Muslims are no less intelligent than other communities, and if given the freedom, they could discern for themselves between venom and the elixir of life offered to them in their societies.

What the Islamic world would like most from the more powerful West, which keeps preaching freedom, is to be given this freedom by the West itself, so that the Islamic world can respond to the challenges of the present-day world on the basis of its own inner dynamic. But most in the Islamic world realize that this wish is not going to be realized and that the West’s geopolitical and economic interests in the Islamic world take precedence over the question of real freedom. And so Muslims must find a way themselves to struggle for freedom, rule of law, and human rights, all Islamically understood, while under unprecedented external and internal constraint and without sacrificing the possibility of that spiritual freedom that is the ultimate goal of human life on earth.

Muslims agree that Islam is pertinent to all conditions and circumstances, including therefore the present one.

Hence serious Muslims must seek to act correctly and to  seek freedom despite outward constraints and not to blame their own lack of initiative and drive and their inability to overcome inertia on outside forces. It is possible to live Islamically even in the most difficult historical circumstances and to seek at least certain kinds of freedom on the basis of Islamic understanding,

even in situations where both external and internal constraints are ever present.

CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM RESPONSES TO THE ISSUE OF FREEDOM AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Far from being passive to the challenges posed by the West on the issues of freedom and human rights, during the past few decades many Islamic responses have been issued by those who have tried to analyze what freedom is for an Islamic society today beyond going to the ballot box, and what both theoretical and practical engagement on the question of human rights involves. In most Islamic countries there are now human rights groups, opposed by some governments and even considered agents of the West in others. There have also been extensive discussions among theologians, philosophers, and jurists, including some of the most eminent traditional authorities, on the question of Islam and human rights. Many deliberations, conferences, and debates at the beginning of the fifteenth century of the Islamic calendar, corresponding to the early 1980s, led to the publication of an Islamic declaration of human rights that gained the support of many traditional Muslim authorities and many notable organizations and has become widely disseminated throughout the Islamic world.

Based totally on the Quran and Hadith, the rights enumerated in this document include the right to life, freedom, equality, and prohibition against impermissible discrimination; the right to justice, fair trial, protection against abuse of power, protection against torture, protection of honor and reputation, and asylum; the rights of minorities; the right of participation in the conduct and management of public affairs; the rights of belief, thought, and speech; freedom of religion, free association, freedom to pursue what concerns the economic order, protection of property, social security, and founding a family and related matters; the rights of married women; and the right to education, privacy, and freedom of movement and residence.

A skeptical Westerner might say that these are simply modern Western concepts of human rights couched in Islamic terms. The reality of the matter is that every one of these rights is supported by Quranic andHadith references.

Surely what constitutes the content of human rights, and not its form, is not specifically modern, but is to be found in one way or another in moral and spiritual teachings of various religions and the writings of moral philosophers from many lands stretching from China to France, including, of course, those of the Islamic world. What this and similar documents present are responses of the Islamic world to the challenge posed by the West on this matter, but the substance of the response comes from Islam itself.

Some may say that even if these are Islamic ideals, they are not realized in the Islamic world today. Such an observation is true to some extent, but not absolutely. But the Islamic world is not unique in this matter. No society from China to Mexico lives up to such ideals. Nor does the West itself live up to these ideals completely, as one sees in the continuous presence of racism in America. To be fair, one would have to say that some of these ideals are more fully realized in the West and some in the Islamic world, if the full gamut of human rights in relation to our duties to God  and His creation are taken into consideration. In any case, the mainstream of Islamic

thought does not have a dispute with the West, even its secularist component, on the question of the substance of human rights or even the necessity of their implementation. Where there is a basic difference is on the relation between human rights and human responsibilities and also on our rights vis-à-vis God’s rights over us and the rest of His creation. On this issue many Western Jewish and Christian thinkers are in fact closer to their Muslim counterparts than to their secularist compatriots.

On the practical level, despite numerous political and social obstacles, in recent years in several Islamic countries there have been developments toward greater respect for the law and the rights and freedom guaranteed therein. In countries as different as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Iran, there is an attempt afoot to develop what is called an Islamic civil society governed by law, a society that would not be secularized yet be a civil society in which the rights of citizens would be guaranteed. The dichotomies established by so many so-called experts in the West between a “theocracy” and a secular society and government in the Islamic world are simply false and do not apply to the Islamic world. Saudi Arabia or Iran are not theocracies in the Western understanding of this term, and Egypt is not secular.

The Islamic world today is in the process of responding to the challenges posed by modernism in this as in other domains. Many experiments are under way in countries as different as Turkey and Iran. And because this process is carried out under conditions in which there is not complete freedom either within or without, sometimes extreme forms of action manifest themselves with tragic consequences.

But these tragic eruptions must not make one forget that on the deeper level something much more basic is happening. And what is happening is the response to the difficult challenges of the modern world by a major world civilization, which, despite its current political and military weakness, has the spiritual resources to emphasize the significance of human dignity and the rights that God has bestowed upon human beings and at the same time to never tire of emphasizing that all our rights issue from the fulfillment of our responsibilities to God and His creation and that without accepting our responsibilities emphasis upon our rights alone can turn us into a species that is at once endangered and endangering.

TRADITIONAL, MODERNIST, AND “FUNDAMENTALIST” INTERPRETATIONS OF ISLAM TODAY

All that has been said thus far provides the necessary context and framework for understanding the recent developments in the Islamic world. Until the impact of European colonialism on the heart of the Islamic world, there were those who fought against Western rule in the extremities of the “Abode of Islam,” but there were no Muslim modernists or fundamentalists. Muslims were all traditional and fitted into the complex pattern of the spectrum of Islam outlined above. But with the advent of European domination of the heartland of Islam, represented by the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798, the period of diverse reactions and interpretations leading to the contemporary period began.

The European encroachment upon the Islamic world had actually begun over two and a half centuries earlier with the Portuguese and later Dutch and British domination of the Indian Ocean, which had been a major economic lifeline for Islamic civilization. There had also been European invasions of North Africa, the decisive defeat of the Ottoman navy in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, which cut the Ottomans off from the western Mediterranean, and the defeat of the Ottomans in their siege of Vienna in 1683, which marked the beginning of the waning of their power. But none of these events, nor the Dutch colonization of the East Indies, nor British penetration into India, moved the minds and souls of Muslims as did the conquest of Egypt. That event awakened Muslims to a challenge without precedence in their history.

The Quran states, “If God aideth you, no one shall overcome you” (3:159). In the eyes of Muslims, twelve centuries of Islamic history had demonstrated the legitimacy of their claim and the truth of their call. God had been “on their side” and aided them over all those centuries, notwithstanding the defeat of Muslims in Spain and the destruction of the Tartar kingdom by the Russians, because these were at the margins of the world of Islam and lack of internal unity was considered as the reason for these defeats.

Otherwise, wherever Islam had gone, it had become victorious; even the powerful Mongols had soon embraced Islam. But these Europeans, whom Muslims had neglected for so long and considered their cultural inferiors, were now dominating the Islamic world and there was no possibility of their accepting Islam as the Turks or Mongols had. They claimed themselves to be superior and were so proud of their own culture that they showed no interest in anything else. This situation created a crisis of cosmic proportions with eschatological overtones.

Several attitudes could have been taken in face of this crisis, and in fact every one of them was adopted by one group or another. One view held that Muslims had become weak because they had strayed from the original message of the faith and had become corrupted by luxury and deviations.

This was the position of the so-called puritanical reformists, of whom the most famous, the eighteenthcentury Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab from Najd, lived in fact before the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt at the end of the

eighteenth century, but whose message sought to respond to causes for Muslim weakness. Although his message remained mostly in Arabia, this type of puritanical reformism, which was usually against Sufism, Shi‘ism, Islamic philosophy and theology, and the refinement of classical Islamic cities as demonstrated in the arts, became known as the Salafiyyah, that is, those who follow the early predecessors, or salaf, disregarding the thirteen or fourteen centuries of development of the Islamic tradition from its Quranic and Prophetic roots.

A second possibility was to turn to eschatologicalhadiths concerning the end of the world, when, it was said, oppression would reign everywhere and Muslims would become weakened and dominated by others. As a result of this focus, a wave of Mahdiism swept across some areas of the Islamic world in the early nineteenth century, ranging from the Brelvi movement in the northwestern province of present-day Pakistan; to the movements of Ghulam Ah.mad and the Bab already mentioned; to uprisings by major figures in West Africa, of whom the most significant, although his career began somewhat earlier, was ‘Uthman Dan Fadio, the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate, whose influence spread even to the Caribbean; to the Mahdiist movement of the Sudan, which inflicted the only defeat on the British army in the nineteenth century. As with every millennialist movement, this Mahdiist wave gradually died down, in this case by the second half of the nineteenth century.

The third possibility was to say, in the manner of European modernists, that the regulations of Islam were for the seventh century and times had changed; therefore religion had to be reformed and modernized. The modernists began in Egypt, the most famous of whom were Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who was of Persian origin, and Muh.ammad ‘Abduh. They also appeared in Ottoman Turkey, especially within the Young Turk movement; in India, with such figures as Sir Sayyid Ah.mad Khan; and in Persia, which produced several other figures besides al-Afghani, whose effect was, however, more local. These modernists varied in their degree of modernism and approach, but in general they were great admirers of the West and of rationalism, nationalism, and modern science. The most philosophical of all of them was Muh.ammad Iqbal, who belongs to the end of this first period of response to the West, which lasted until World War II. When Western scholars speak of Islamic reformers, they have mostly such figures in mind, along with the so-called puritanical reformers. From the ranks of the modernists rose nationalists and liberal thinkers, men who sought to modernize Islamic society, on the one hand, and fight against the West in the name of national independence, on the other. The colonial wars fought against Western powers for national independence by such figures as Ataturk, Sukarno, Bourgiba, and others were carried out in the name of nationalism, not Islam.

Consequently, when Western powers left their colonies, at least outwardly, in many areas they left behind them ruling groups who were Muslim in name, but whose thinking was more like that of the colonizers they had replaced.

There were, of course, also groups of fighters for independence who were not modernists at all, but traditional Muslims, often associated with various Sufi orders. They usually carried out military resistance to preserve their homelands with a degree of nobility and magnanimity that deeply impressed their European enemies. One can cite as a supreme example of this type Amir ‘Abd al-Qadir, the great Algerian freedom fighter and Sufi sage; his opponent, a French general, wrote back to Paris saying that fighting against the Amir was like confronting one of the prophets of the Old Testament. Another notable example is Imam Shamil, who fought for years in Caucasia against Russian encroachment. The example of the saintly nature of these men and the manner in which they treated their enemies as well as noncombatants, no matter what the other side was doing, is of the utmost importance for Muslims as well as Westerners to remember in the present-day situation.

Most of the Islamic world in the period between, let us say, 1800 and World War II did not react in any of the three manners described above. They were the traditional Muslims for whom the life of theShari‘ah as well as the Tariqah continued in its time-honored manner. There were, of course, continuous renewals from within that must not, however, be confused with reform in its modern sense. Many great scholars of Law continued to appear and Sufism was rejuvenated in several areas, especially in the Maghrib and West and East Africa, as we see in the rise of the Tijaniyyah and Sanusiyyah orders as well as the appearance of such great masters as Shaykh al-Darqawi, Shaykh Ahmad al-‘Alawi, and Shaykh Salamah al-Rad.i, all of whom revived the Shadhiliyyah Order. Nevertheless, the modus vivendi of traditional Muslims was not reaction, but continuation of the traditional Islamic modes of life and thought.

After World War II most Islamic countries had become politically free, except for Algeria, which gained its independence in 1962 after a war that cost a million lives, and Muslim areas within the Communist world. The general population of Muslims had expected that with political independence would come cultural, social, and economic independence as well. When the reverse occurred, that is, when with the advent of political independence Westernized classes began ruling over a deeply pious public, as can be seen in countries as different as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Pakistan, major reactions set in that can be seen throughout the Islamic world to this day.

The old modernist and liberal schools of thought became discredited, as did the modernists as a political class, which had failed to solve any of the major problems that society faced in addition to suffering humiliating defeats, especially in the several Arab-Israeli wars. Nevertheless, modernism continued, often with a new Marxist component, and remained powerful because it controlled and still controls the state apparatus in most Muslim lands. But its intellectual and social power began to wane and weaken nearly everywhere except in Turkey, where Ataturk’s secularism remains strong, held in place by the force of the army. Iran was the first country in which a political revolution removed the modernist government in favor of an Islamic one. A process of internal Islamization also took

place, gradually and without revolutionary upheaval, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Malaysia, the Sudan, Jordan, Egypt, and some other countries, and that process continues.

As for what is called “fundamentalism,” the earlier form of it as found in Saudi Arabia became transformed in many ways. By the 1960s there was a general malaise in the Islamic world caused by the simple emulation of a West, which, according to its leading thinkers, did not know where it was going itself. Many people, even among the modernized classes, turned back to Islam to find solutions to the existential problems posed by life itself and more particularly the actual situation of Muslims. The desire of the vast majority of people was to be left alone to solve the problems of the Islamic world, to preserve the religion of Islam, including the revival of theShari‘ah , and to rebuild Islamic civilization, but the dominant civilization of the West hardly allowed such a thing to take place. Many organizations were nevertheless established to pursue these ends by peaceful means, chief among them the Ikhwan al-Muslimin, or Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in the 1920s by H. asan al-Banna’, and the Jama‘at-i islami, founded by Mawlana Mawdudi in 1941, both of which remain powerful to this day.

In the past few decades this desire to preserve religion, re-Islamicize Islamic society, and reconstruct Islamic civilization has drawn a vast spectrum of people into its fold, all of whom are now branded indiscriminately in the West as “fundamentalist.” The majority of such people, however, pursue nonviolent means to achieve their goals, as do most Christian, Jewish, or Hindu “fundamentalists.” But there are also those who take recourse to violent action, nearly always when they are trying to defend their homeland, as in Palestine, Chechnya, Kashmir, Kosovo, or the southern Philippines, or sometimes in exasperation to defend their faith and traditional cultural values, as one sees in occasional violent eruptions in Indonesia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.

But to act Islamically is to act in defense. Those who inflict harm upon the innocent, no matter how just their cause might be, are going against the clear teachings of the Quran and theShari‘ah concerning peace and war (to which we turn later in Chapter 6). In any case, the unfortunate use of the term “fundamentalism,” drawn originally from American Protestantism, for Islam cannot now be avoided, but it is of the utmost importance to realize that it embraces very different phenomena and must not be confused with the demonizing usage of the term in the Western media.

Disappointment among Muslims with the lack of true freedom after the attainment of political freedom after World War II also led to a new wave of Mahdiism, as seen in the coming of Ayatollah Khomeini to power in Iran at the time of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (which was a major event in modern history and which definitely possessed eschatological overtones), the taking over of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1980, and the appearance of Mahdi-like figures in Nigeria during the last two decades.

There is no doubt that there is again a presence of Mahdiism in the air throughout the Islamic world, as there are millennialist expectations among both Jews and Christians today.

As for traditional Islam, in contrast to the first phase of the encounter with the West, from the 1960s onward it began to manifest itself in the public intellectual arena and to challenge both the modernists and the so-called fundamentalists.

Scholars deeply rooted in the Islamic tradition but also well acquainted with the West began to defend the integral Islamic tradition, the Tariqah as well as theShari‘ah , the intellectual disciplines as well as the traditional arts. At the same time they began in-depth criticism not of Christianity or Judaism, but of secularist modernism, which was first incubated and grew in the West, but later spread to other continents. Such scholars base themselves on the universality of revelation stated in the Quran and seek to reject the substitution of the “kingdom of man” for the “Kingdom of God” as posited by modern secularism. Their criticisms of the modern world have drawn much from Western critics of modernism, rationalism, and scientism, including not only such traditionalists as René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Martin Lings, but also such well-known European and American critics of the modernist project, including modern science and technology, as Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, and Theodore Roszak. The traditional Islamic response began with those trained in Western-style educational organizations, but during the past two decades has come to also include figures from among the class of religious scholars, or ‘ulama’, and traditional Sufis. These scholars and leaders seek to preserve the rhythm of traditional Islamic life as well as its intellectual and spiritual traditions and find natural allies in Judaism and Christianity in confronting the challenges of modern secularism as well as globalization.

The great majority of Muslims today still belong to the traditionalist category and must be distinguished from both secularist modernizers and “fundamentalists,” as the latter term is now used in the Western media. In fact, it would be the greatest error to fail to distinguish the traditionalists from the “fundamentalists” and to include anyone who wishes to preserve the traditional Islamic way of life and thought in the “fundamentalist” category. It would be as if in contemporary Catholicism one were to call Padre Pio and Mother Teresa “fundamentalists” because they insisted on preserving traditional Catholic teachings. It is essential to realize that the notion of extremism implies a center, or median, of the spectrum; phenomena are judged “extreme” according to their distance, on either side, from this designated center. Unfortunately in the Western media today, that center is usually defined as the modernizing elements in Islamic society, and it is forgotten that modernism is itself one of the most fanatical, dogmatic, and extremist ideologies that history has ever seen. It seeks to destroy every other point of view and is completely intolerant toward any Weltanschauung that opposes it, whether it is that of the Native Americans, whose whole world was forcibly crushed by it, or Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam, or for that matter traditional Christianity or Judaism. Orthodox Jews have as much difficulty resisting the constant assault of modern secularism upon their worldview and religious practices as do Hindus or Muslims. If one is going to speak of “fundamentalism” in religions, then one must include “secularist fundamentalism,” which is no less virulently proselytizing and aggressive

toward anything standing in its way than the most fanatical form of religious “fundamentalism.”

In the case of Islam, there are today certainly religious extremists of different kinds, but they do not define the mainstream, or center, of Islam. That center belongs to traditional Islam. And that center is the one against which one should view fanatical religious extremism, on the one side, and the rabid secularist modernism found in most Islamic countries, but especially in such places as Turkey, Tunisia, and Algeria, on the other. Traditional Islam is not opposed to what the West wishes to do within its own borders, but to the corrosive influences emanating from modern and postmodern Western culture, now associated so much with what is called globalization, that threaten Islamic values, just as they threaten Christian and Jewish values in the West itself. But the philosophy of defense of traditional Islam has always been to keep within the boundaries of Islamic teachings.

Its method of combat has been and remains primarily intellectual and spiritual, and when it has been forced to take recourse to physical action in the form of defense of its home and shelter, its models have been the Amir ‘Abd al-Qadirs and Imam Shamils, not the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution or homegrown models of Che Guevara.

To understand events in the Islamic world today, even the most outrageous and evil actions carried out in the name of Islam, it is necessary to have a context within which to place these actions, in the same way that Westerners are able to place Jonestown, Waco, bombs by the Irish Republican Army, Serbian ethnic cleansing, or the killings carried out by Baruch Goldstein or Rabbi Kahane’s group in context and not to identify them simply with Christianity or Judaism as such. This context can only be provided by looking at the vast spectrum of Islam outlined above. Yes, there are those in the Islamic world today who have taken recourse to military action and violence using modern technology with the supposed aim of ameliorating real or imaginary wrongs and injustices. Considering the history of the recent past, it is hardly surprising that such extremist illicit and morally reprehensible actions by a few using the name of Islam should take place, especially when injustices and suppressions within Islamic societies are added to external ones. Nor does asking why despicable actions take place in the name of Islam by the few and coming to understand the background of these actions in any way condone or excuse them.

The vast majority of Muslims still breathe in a universe in which the Name of God is associated above all with Compassion and Mercy, and they turn to Him in patience even in the midst of the worst tribulations. If it seems that more violence is associated with Islam than with other religions today, it is not due to the fact that there has been no violence elsewhere-think of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the atrocities committed by the Serbs, and the genocide in Rwanda and Burundi. The reason is that Islam is still very strong in Islamic society. Because Islam so pervades the lives of Muslims, all actions, including violent ones, are carried out in the name of Islam, especially since other ideologies such as nationalism and socialism have become so bankrupt.

Yet this identification is itself paradoxical because traditional Islam is as much on the side of peace and accord as are traditional Judaism and Christianity. Despite such phenomena, however, if one looks at the extensive panorama of the Islamic spectrum summarized below, it becomes evident that for the vast majority of Muslims, the traditional norms based on peace and openness to others, norms that have governed their lives over the centuries and are opposed to both secularist modernism and “fundamentalism,” are of central concern. And after the dust settles in this tumultuous period of both Islamic and global history, it will be the voice of traditional Islam that will have the final say in the Islamic world.

CHAPTER THREE: DIVINE AND HUMAN LAWS

And now We have set thee (O Muhammad) on a clear road (Shar‘) of Our Commandment; so follow it, and follow not the whim of those who know not.

Quran 45:18

It is the Law of God which has taken course aforetime. Thou wilt not find any change in the Law of God.

Quran 48:23

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW IN ISLAM

One of the most difficult aspects of Islam to understand for modern Westerners is the “philosophy of law,” which provides the conceptual foundation for theShari‘ah (literally, “road” or “path”), or Divine Law, in Islam. Since Christ did not promulgate a law like those of the prophets of the Old Testament and the Prophet of Islam, but rather came to break the letter of the law in the name of the Spirit, religious law in the West developed in a very different manner than it did in Islam. Even during the Middle Ages, when Western society was thoroughly Christian, everyday laws were drawn from Roman sources or common law. These sources were clearly distinguished from Divine Law, which in the Christian context involved spiritual principles and not ordinary laws dealing with society in general. Moreover, Christian theologians developed an elaborate doctrine of natural law, which does not have an exact counterpart in Islam, although there are striking developments worthy of comparison in this domain within the two traditions.

Originally, natural law meant a system of rights or justice common to all human beings and derived from nature. St. Thomas Aquinas provided the greatest elaboration of this concept, stating that eternal law exists in God’s mind and is known to us only in part through revelation and in part through reason. For St. Thomas, the law of nature is the “participation of the eternal law in the rational creature.”

Human law, based on precepts that human beings can derive by their own reason, must be a particular application of that law. Now, although Muslim theologians also debated among themselves whether our God-given reason can know the good without revelation, they did not develop a theory of natural law such as one finds in Thomism. Their view was closer to that of John Duns Scotus and Francisco Suarez, who believed that the Divine Will, rather than reason, was the source of law. In any case, even in the Middle Ages there were differences between the Islamic and certain of the predominantly Catholic schools of theology concerning the philosophy of law.

From the Renaissance onward laws became more and more secularized in the West, and they came to be seen as ever-changing regulations devised and defined by society to be made and discarded as circumstances dictate. And with the rise of parliamentary democracy, these laws came to be made and abrogated by the representatives of the people.

Within the context of such a background, it is easy to see why the understanding of the Islamic, and more generally the Semitic, concept of law, which is associated with the Will of God and is meant to determine society rather than be determined by it, poses such a problem for modern Westerners.

Yet such a view should not be so difficult to understand in the West if one only turns to Jewish Law and the Old Testament, which is of course also a part of Christian sacred scripture. In the Old Testament is stated a clear theology that determines the meaning of law for human society.

According to it, God is the Transcendent Reality Who is all powerful and sovereign over human beings. He is the only ultimate sanction of law, and

the laws of human society are the embodiments of His Will. In the Bible, law is designated as God’s commandments (mitsvah; as in Deut.11:13), teaching or instruction (torah; Gen. 26:5), utterance (davar; Deut. 4:13), and norm (mishpot; Exod. 21:1), along with other expressions. Violation of law is seen not only as an offense against society, but also as a moral sin and a violation of God’s order to humanity, for which human beings are accountable to God (Gen. 20:6; Lev. 19-

20, 22). The Bible makes no distinction between religious and secular offense against the law, and the law is seen as a norm by which not only men and women, but all beings must abide (Gen. 2:11-17; 9:1-7). For the rabbis, there was no distinction between fas, God-given laws, and lex, human laws, as claimed by the Romans; all laws were seen as expressions of God’s Will.

Now, this whole understanding of the meaning of law in the Bible corresponds very much to that of the Quran. If modern Westerners were only to grasp what the Old Testament says about law or how contemporary traditional Jews comprehend and practice Talmudic Law, it would be much easier to understand the “philosophy of law” in Islam. For Muslims also, God as the supreme and transcendent Sovereign has revealed His Laws through His prophets. TheShari‘ah is the concrete embodiment of the Divine Will, and in its most universal sense it embraces the whole of creation; what we call laws of nature are “theShari‘ah ” of various orders of corporeal reality. There is no distinction between the religious and secular realms, although the existence of non-Shari‘ite laws are recognized in practice, as we shall see later.

In the Islamic perspective, Divine Law is to be implemented to regulate society and the actions of its members rather than society dictating what laws should be. The injunctions of Divine Law are permanent, but the principles can also be applied to new circumstances as they arise.

But the basic thesis is one of trying to make the human order conform to the Divine norm, not vice-versa. To speak of theShari‘ah as being simply the laws of the seventh century fixed in time and not relevant today would be like telling Christians that the injunctions of Christ to love one’s neighbor and not commit adultery were simply laws of the Palestine of two thousand years ago and not relevant today, or telling Jews not to keep Sabbath because this is simply an outmoded practice of three thousand years ago.

Modern secularists might advance these arguments, but it is difficult to understand how Jews or Christians who still follow their religious tradition could do so. As far as Christianity is concerned, how Christians hold the spiritual teachings of Christ to be immutable can be a key for the understanding of how Muslims regard theShari‘ah . As for Jews, such an understanding should be even easier, because the Islamic understanding of Divine Law is so similar to that found in Judaism, and theShari‘ah and Halakhah hold very similar positions in the two religions, respectively.

As in Judaism, for Islam Divine Law is more central than theological thought to the religious life. One can be a very serious Muslim without interest in kalam, or Islamic theology, but one cannot be a serious Christian

without interest in Christian theology unless one is a mystic or pietist. One could, in fact, say that what theology is to Christianity, theShari‘ah , or Divine Law, is to Islam. To be a Muslim is to accept the validity of theShari‘ah , even if one is too weak to practice all of its injunctions, and to understand theShari‘ah is to gain knowledge of the formal religious structure of Islam. Even those who have sought to go beyond the formal level, through the Tariqah to the absolute Truth, which transcends all forms, have never ceased to revere theShari‘ah and to practice it. The greatest philosophers of Islam from Avicenna to Averroës practiced theShari‘ah ; so did the greatest saints and mystics, such as Ibn ‘Arabi, who wrote that his heart was the temple for idols and house for the Torah, the Gospels, and the Quran, but who never broke the Divine Law or stopped saying his daily prayers, promulgated by theShari‘ah , until his death.

The transcending of the Law in Islam in the direction of the Spirit has never been through the flouting of the Law, through breaking or denying its formal structure, but by transcending it from within. If there have been exceptions for those crazed by the love of God and in a paranormal state of consciousness, they have been there as exceptions to prove the rule. To speak of Islam on the level of individual practice and social norms is to speak of theShari‘ah , which has provided over the centuries guidelines for those who have wanted or wish today to live according to God’s Will in its Islamic form. When we hear in the Lord’s Prayer uttered by Christ “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” for the Muslim His Will is expressed in theShari‘ah , and to live according to this Will on earth is, first of all, to practice the injunctions of the Divine Law. It is on the basis of this practice, meant for all Muslims, that the saintly can then surrender their whole will to the Will of God.

God, then, is the supreme Legislator (al-Shari‘ ).

Through His Laws, before which according to Islam all men and women are equal, human life is sanctified. The Divine Law embraces every aspect of life and removes the distinction between sacred and profane or religious and secular. Since God is the creator of all things, there is no legitimate domain of life to which His Will or His Laws do not apply. Even the most ordinary acts of life carried out according to theShari‘ah are sanctified, and persons of faith who live a life according to the Divine Law live a life immersed in grace, or what in Arabic is called barakah.

Their life gains meaning, and they move through the journey of life certain that they are following a road (shar‘) designated by God, a road that leads to salvation and felicity in the ultimate encounter with Him. To live according to theShari‘ah in both form and inner meaning is to live an ethical life in the fullest sense.

THE SOURCES OF THE SHARI‘AH AND THE METHODOLOGY OF ISLAMIC JURISPRUDENCE

The most important source of theShari‘ah is the Quran, which some scholars claim to be the only basic source; all other sources serve only to elucidate and elaborate the roots and principles contained in the Sacred Text. There are some 350 legal verses, or what Western law calls juris corpus, in the Quran. Some of them deal with specific legal issues and penalties for illicit and illegal acts. A large number deal with the principles of the acts of worship and in some cases the details of such actions. Another group of verses deals with commercial and economic issues. In addition, many verses deal with the questions of justice, equality, evidence in law, legal rights, and so forth. Together these verses constitute only a small part of the Quran, but they are essential as the roots of Islamic Law.

The injunctions of the Quran would not, however, be fully understood without theSunnah and Hadith of the Prophet, which constitute its first commentary. The Quran orders Muslims to pray, but how to pray was learned from the model established by the Prophet. After the Quran, therefore, theSunnah and Hadith are the second most important source of theShari‘ah . All schools of Law, Sunni and Shi‘ite alike, accept these two as the absolutely necessary sources for Islamic Law. It is important to note that it was only after the canonical collections of Hadith were assembled in the ninth century that the definitive work on the methodology of jurisprudence was produced by Imam al-Shafi‘i.

OtherShari‘ah sources are accepted by some schools and not by others. They include qiyas, or analogy, in its juridical sense, which technically means the extension of a Shari‘ite ruling or value from a known and accepted case (asl ) to a new case with the same effective cause, legally speaking. These sources also include ijma‘, or consensus, which is usually considered to be the consensus on a legal matter of the legal scholars who are specialists in theShari‘ah , but which in Islamic history has also been the consensus of the whole community over a long period, as in the case of the banning of slavery and the acceptance of tobacco as being halal, that is, legally acceptable rather than forbidden. There is, in fact, a hadith of the Prophet that asserts: “My community shall never agree on error.”

Then there is istihsan, or equity, which differs from equity in Western law in that in the latter equity relies on the concept of natural law, whereas istihsan relies on theShari‘ah ; otherwise, they are similar in that both are concerned with the idea of fairness and conscience in law. Finally, in this brief account one must mention mas.lah. ah mursalah, or considerations of public interest that are harmonious with theShari‘ah and the objectives of the Lawgiver.

An important point here is the position within theShari‘ah of human custom and law as distinct from the Divine Law. What in classical texts is called ‘urf or ‘adah, meaning human custom or habit, is considered valid in theShari‘ah itself if such a custom or habit does not contradict or contravene theShari‘ah . Therefore, human laws not derived from the Divine Law can become integrated into the Islamic legal system as long as they do not oppose the edicts of theShari‘ah . This occurred often

throughout Islamic history. Divine Law is referred to asShar‘ , and human law is referred to asqanun (from the Greek word kanon, which is also the source for the word “canonical” in Western law). Paradoxically, nonreligious law in Islam uses the same term as religious or ecclesiastical law in Christianity.

From the point of view of theShari‘ah , to follow theqanun of any country in which one finds oneself is itself commended as long as thatqanun or law does not contradict the injunctions of theShari‘ah .

Historically and in contrast to the modern period, there was much harmony betweenShar‘ andqanun in the Islamic world, and traditional Muslims did not feel any appreciable tension between Divine Law and human law.

This tension is a modern phenomenon that began in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the abrogation of theShari‘ah in certain Muslim countries and the forced implementation of various European legal codes, for example, in Persia, Egypt, Turkey, and North Africa. In these and similar countries, needless to say, the substitution of European laws for theShari‘ah created a tension between private religious life and the public domain and drew the majority of the population further away from their governments, which they began to view as anti-Islamic or at best indifferent to Islam.

In the hierarchy of the sources mentioned above, the Quran stands at the highest level, followed by theSunnah andHadith . An elaborate methodology was developed to deduce rulings from these sources and create the body of Islamic laws. This science of deriving juridical decisions from sources is called the “principles of jurisprudence” (us.ul al-fiqh ) and is central to Islamic Law. Althoughfiqh itself originally meant “understanding” or “knowledge” in general, gradually it came to be associated with the “science of the law,” or jurisprudence, corresponding to what the Romans called iurisprudentia. It deals with the body of the law and ways of concluding legal views from the principles and sources of the law.Fiqh has, therefore, a more technical legal meaning than theShari‘ah , which includes moral laws and the general framework for the religious life of Islam.

Fiqh, according to traditional authorities, is knowledge of the practical regulations and rules of theShari‘ah acquired by reference to and detailed study of the sources.

Although the fifth and sixth Shi‘ite Imams, Muh.ammad al-Baqir and Ja‘far al-Sadiq, said much aboutfiqh and its principles, it was Imam al-Shafi‘i who, in his Risalah (“Treatise”), established the systematic methodology for deriving laws from the sources. To exercise such an intellectual undertaking is called ijtihad, and the person who can give fresh views on matters of law by going back to the sources is called a mujtahid. In the Sunni world the “gate of ijtihad” closed after the tenth and eleventh centuries, when the major schools were established, whereas in the Shi‘ite world it has remained open to this day and in each generation the mujtahids have derived the laws from the established principles and sources, which for

Shi‘ites are the Quran, theHadith of the Prophet, and the teachings of the Imams.

Through the meticulous following of the methodologies elaborated inus.ul al-fiqh , the major schools of Sunni Law already mentioned, that is, the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi‘i, and Hanbali, came into being, as did the Twelve-Imam Ja‘fari School and the Zaydi, Isma‘ili, and ‘Ibadi schools. Since the last century, a great debate has taken place in the Sunni world about opening the “gate of ijtihad” again, and in both the Sunni and the Shi‘ite worlds, fundamental discussions are taking place today about the future development and application of theShari‘ah to Islamic society facing major new challenges, including those issuing from biotechnology and all the problems that it poses for ethics.

In this domain the recent responses of Jewish and Christian thinkers are close to Muslim ones, and the followers of the three monotheistic faiths can certainly collaborate together on many issues in the fields of bioethics and environmental ethics.

TheShari‘ah can best be understood through the use of the symbol of the tree, mentioned in the Quran: “Seest thou not how God coineth a similitude: A good saying, as a goodly tree, its roots set firm, its branches reaching into heaven” (14:24). This symbol has many levels of meaning, one of which concerns theShari‘ah . Divine Law is like a tree whose roots are sunk firmly in the ground of revelation, but whose branches extend in different directions and have grown in various ways. The firmness of the roots does not mean that the tree is not living. On the contrary, it is the very firmness and immutability of the roots that guarantee the flowing of the sap into the branches and the continuous life of the tree. TheShari‘ah has developed in many different cultural and political climates over the centuries.

It has harbored many differences of interpretation, and yet it has remained theShari‘ah . Today it is faced with unprecedented challenges both from within the borders of the “Abode of Islam” and from outside, but it remains a living body of law that Muslims consider the concrete embodiment of God’s Will for them to follow on the basis of their faith and free will.

TO WHOM DOES THE SHARI‘AH APPLY?

According to all schools of Islamic Law, the injunctions of theShari‘ah of Islam apply to all Muslims, male and female, who have reached the legal age and only to them. All Muslims are in principle equal before the law, whether they are kings or beggars, women or men, black or white, rich or poor. The Quran especially emphasizes that its injunctions concern both men and women in several verses where both sexes are addressed clearly and in a distinct manner, as when it says:

Verily, men who surrender unto God, and women who surrender, and men who believe and women who believe, and men who obey and women who obey, and men who speak the truth and women who speak the truth . and men who give alms and women who give alms, and men who fast and women who fast, and men who guard their modesty and women who guard (their modesty), and men who remember God much and women who

remember-God hath prepared for them forgiveness and a vast reward. (33:35)

In a society ruled by theShari‘ah and in which Muslims are the majority, accepted religious minorities are absolved from following the IslamicShari‘ah except in that which concerns public order. According to the IslamicShari‘ah itself, Jews, Christians, and other “People of the Book,” which in India included Hindus and in Persia the Zoroastrians, have their ownShari‘ah , and therefore their personal and communal affairs should be left to them. This is how the “community system,” or millat system, of the Ottoman world functioned for many centuries. In the millat system the central government, although Islamic, recognized fully the social, economic, and especially religious rights of established minorities, so that there was no danger of the majority destroying the presence or identity of minority groups. Under the Ottomans the rights of Jews and Christians were guaranteed by the state itself. Although there were occasionally social frictions, by and large there was certainly much greater tolerance between various groups than what we have observed in Yugoslavia since its breakup, with all those horrendous acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide that followed.