Interesting article..what do you think ?
The strange, sad story of Ali Abd al-Raziq shows the obstacles that a secularist Muslim intellectual must overcome
Comments (8) Faisal Gazi guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 9 April 2009 16.42 BST Article history
For most Muslims “secularism” remains a loaded term, equated to everything from mild eccentricity to an unnatural act of blasphemy. Part of the reason why secularism is eyed with such suspicion in the Muslim world is because it is seen as an interloper from the world of Judeo-Christian ideas, far removed from the framework of the Shari’a and therefore a threat to Islam itself. Muslim thinkers who put secularism above the dogma of a theocratic Islamic State have been few and far between.
The first Muslim scholar to formally champion secularism was the Egyptian judge, Shaykh Ali Abd al-Raziq (1888-1966), in his seminal work al-Islam wa 'Usul al-Hukm (Islam and the Principles of Governance), published in 1925. The controversy and events that followed the publication of this tract marked an apogee in the debate on religion and its role in politics, waged in the Islamic world between the forces of orthodoxy and reformism.
The book provoked fierce opprobrium from within the orthodox establishment of Cairo who took exception to its uncompromising ideas. As punishment, al-Raziq was made to face the Council of the Greatest Ulama of al-Azhar, where he was stripped of his qualifications and his right to practice. The day after the Ulama had ruled against him, a reporter interviewed al-Raziq and asked him to explain the main points of his book. He replied:
The main points of the book, for which I have been condemned, is that Islam did not determine a specific regime nor did it impose on the Muslims a particular system according to the requirements of which they must be governed; rather it has allowed us absolute freedom to organise the state in accordance with the intellectual, social and economic conditions in which we are found, taking into consideration our social development and the requirements of the times.
Abd al-Raziq first point of call was to affirm, quite correctly, that the two textual sources of the Shari’a, which are the Quran and the Sunnah (Traditions of the Prophet), make no mention of the Caliphate or any form of State as we understand it. The Quranic verses that traditional fuqaha (scholars) commonly attribute as proof of the legal requirement of the Caliphate actually do nothing of the sort. There are certainly verses which enjoin Muslims to obey God, the Prophet and the “holders of authority” (ulu’ l-amr) but opinion on the meaning of the term’ authority’ differ. Some scholars have thought it to mean the Prophet’s contemporaries and others the Ulama.
Another extraordinary accomplishment of Abd al Raziq’s work was to refute the notion that the Caliphate was based on the doctrine of Consensus or Ijma. Ijma is one of the four essential predicates of Shari’a law by which it grants divine fiat. In the 14th century, a scholar named Ibn Khaldun claimed that the Caliphate was derived from an Ijma and thereby, almost single-handedly, elevated the status of the Caliphate to the level of dogmatic axiom. Ibn Khaldun does not claim the Caliphate is the only possible form of Islamic government but he does state that it had the backing of the Companions of the Prophet thus endowing it with the status of religious obligation.
Al-Raziq disagrees politely, but fundamentally, with Ibn Khaldun. His view was that the formation of the Caliphate was based on nothing more than political necessity and not on Ijma, thus denying its juridical basis and the notion of the Caliphate as an article of Muslim faith. Rather than acquiesce to Caliphs, Muslims have never been in a position, al-Raziq claimed, to make the kind of free choice on which Ijma must be based. On the contrary, Muslims have had to suffer “Caliphates of Tyranny”, instances of which abound in Islamic history; a theme which he touched on next.
Although Caliphal patronage of the study of science, philosophy and the arts has been colossal, Muslim thinkers have always been thin on the ground and uncharacteristically muted in the area of political science. The reason for this, al-Raziq claims, is because the Caliphs, imbued as they were with the virtue of divine authority, actively discouraged criticism and political thought. In fact, Caliphates were more often than not, established by force and maintained by despotic rule.
It is worth remembering that a book denouncing the Caliphate would have been highly problematic for King Fuad of Egypt in 1925. Bearing in mind that Abd al-Raziq’s book was published only a year after Mustafa Kemal had unilaterally abolished the Ottoman Empire, this was a time when the Sunni Ulama were seen to be in a state of siege. In addition, members of the religious elite of Egypt were at the time lobbying for the Caliphate to be relocated from Turkey and re-established in Egypt. King Fuad was seeking the office of Caliph for himself and it was no secret that the Al-Azhar fuqaha were in bed with the royal establishment of Egypt.
So it is understandable why so many eminent scholars of the day were lining up to launch brickbats in al-Raziq’s direction. One critic of his book, the preeminent scholar Rashid Rida, called it “the latest attempt of the enemies of Islam to weaken and divide it” although this did not stop him from adopting some of al-Raziq’s conclusions himself, when he would later declare that Shari’a cannot be codified as State law.
Although the orthodox establishment never succeeded in reviving the Caliphate in Egypt after 1925, they did silence the free and honest debate that al-Raziq’s book could have begun. The good news is that Muslims both here and abroad are continuing that conversation started by Shaykh Abd al-Raziq, more than eighty years after it was so peremptorily interrupted.