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| How Should the West View Islam’s Political Aspirations? |
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The militant version of Islam is said to be trying to 'capture' governments. The metaphor here is the hunter seeking to trap his prey; it is a violent metaphor for a process that in western societies occurs quite peacefully every few years at election time. If Muslims desire government by Islam then is that by definition an aggressive ambition? The vilification of Islamic political ambition is the more odd because most of the existing, western backed, governments in the Muslim world are tyrannical and have already been established by force, and are being maintained against the wishes of their people by force. Nevertheless, Islamic political aspirations do run counter to liberal secular thinking in the west, and it is natural that secular thinkers would be concerned about these aspirations and seek to make a judgement upon them. The problem lies in the use of aggressive metaphors that prejudge such aspirations as in some way illegitimate and militant, thereby distancing the western mindset from the possibility of accurately understanding Islam and re-evaluating their own political philosophy in the light of the intellectual challenge from Islam.
If we reject violent metaphors about capturing government can we ask what role Muslims believe Islam should have in government? Asking Muslims, however, entails asking ourselves - which Muslims? This brings us full circle back to the proposed dichotomy of 'Islam' and 'militant' Islam. A recent survey by the BBC overcame the problem by asking a wide selection of Muslims from around the world and a very large proportion agreed on the desirability of Islam's traditional ruling system centred on the role of an elected Khalifah who is the basic executive power in the Islamic state.
We could also consider two religious texts that serve as a reference point today for defining the relationship between the temporal and sacral in the eyes of Christians and Muslims respectively. The first is the biblical account of Jesus answering one of his Jewish questioners on the then tricky issue of paying taxes to the Romans: "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's". The second is the Quranic injunction: "Oh you who believe, obey Allah and obey the messenger and those in authority amongst yourselves". At first sight both could appear passive and non-committal as regards politics, but while the former has come to be seen by a majority of Christians today as ample justification for accepting the secular creed of adhering to spiritual matters and leaving politics to the temporal authorities of the day the latter is widely understood by Muslims as demonstrating the subordination of the temporal authorities to the divine authority of Allah and the prophet Muhammad. For Muslims the temporal authority is subsumed and dependent upon obedience to Allah; it works in two ways: first the Muslim is obliged to obey the temporal authority and second this authority owes its legitimacy to obedience to the divine authority. The temporal authority is 'from amongst you'” and not any authority, such as that of the biblical Roman army of occupation, and this authority has a specific character in that it must implement the Islamic systems of life. This understanding formed the basis of Muslim political life since the establishment of the ruling system by Muhammad in the year 622CE until the destruction of the state in 1924. While the racial or tribal identity of its leaders, and the titles attributed to them (Khalifah, Sultan or Amir) changed many times and was sometimes the subject of passionate disagreement the political philosophy and the general structure of the state's apparatus was not a point of variance.
Should the political nature of Islam arouse fear, and could Islam even be a source of hope? To answer such a question it is necessary to accept from the aspirations of Muslims, thirteen centuries of history and a wealth of religious texts that Islam is political in nature. From this starting point western thinkers can make their own studies and draw the conclusions that they believe to be valid.
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