This is the first of a projected ten part series on Islamic law and democracy. Today, I will describe the alleged normative contradiction between God’s law and democracy. I am not of the Islamic faith, so I welcome any corrections, especially those coming from practicing Muslims.

Index of the Entire Series:

Introduction and Symbolic Sovereignty (this entry).

Substantive Sovereignty.

Consultation.

The Election of the Caliphate.

The Primacy of Shari’ah Reexamined.

The Scope of Shari’ah.

The Contract Between Ruler and Ruled.

The Role of Interpretation in Islamic law.

Islam and the Modern Nation-State.

Introduction:

For a Muslim, any discussion about the ideal form of government must start with Shari’ah, which is God’s law. Muslim theories of the State generally do not question why the State exists; the discussion begins with the assumption that God is the ultimate sovereign in the polity, and that His law determines the proper scope of rights and obligations for individuals and for society.

The State in Islam is therefore, fundamentally, a religious community, and juristic theories of the State draw upon the established sources of Islamic law and on the principles of religion (usul al-din). These sources include: the sunna, including teachings of the Qur’an and the hadith (traditions of the Prophet), as well as the practice of the early Islamic community, and the interpretation of these sources (through qiyas or analogy, reinforced by the infallibility of ijma or the consensus of the jurists).

Part I: The Contradiction

The role of Shari’ah in the Islamic State is both symbolic (normative) and substantive. Thus, the sovereignty of God presents two primary objections to the idea of an Islamic democracy. The first objection (which I will address today) is that God and Shari’ah, rather than the people and the popular will, must occupy the symbolic or normative role of the sovereign in society. The second objection (which I will turn to on Monday) is that Shari’ah, not the will of the people, must ultimately decide substantive issues of law.

Symbolic Sovereignty:

In Islamic theology, God is all-powerful and the ultimate sovereign over all creation. It is upon this exclusive and unitary sovereign authority that Islamic law is built. Abul ‘Ala Mawdudi, a Pakistani scholar whose works are read throughout the Muslim world and who is the founder of the Jameet-e-Islami, expressed his belief in God’s sovereignty over the State in the following way:

The belief in the Unity and Sovereignty of Allah is the foundation of the social and moral system propounded by the prophets. It is the very starting point in Islamic political philosophy. The basic principle of Islam is that human beings must, individually and collectively, surrender all rights of overlordship, legislation and exercising of authority over others. No one should be allowed to pass orders or make commands on his own right and no one ought to accept the obligation to carry out such commands and obey such orders. None is entitled to make laws on his own authority and none is obliged abide them. This right vests in Allah alone.

For Mawdudi, the doctrine of God’s absolute divine sovereignty is implicit in God’s role as the creator and sustainer of the universe. God’s will “prevails in the cosmos” and his commands must be “established and obeyed in man’s society”. God’s political dominion (hakimiyyat Allah) flows from His position as the sole object of man’s worship and devotion, commanding man’s entire surrender and submission. “It is this submission to the revealed law and surrender of one’s freedom to it that has been assigned the name of Islam (surrender) by the Koran”. In the Islamic State, then, God is, in a normative sense, the sovereign.

In a democracy, by contrast, the people are normatively sovereign. The word “democracy” is a Greek term that literally means “rule by the people”. If sovereignty is understood in it’s literal sense (as signifying the entity within the State possessing the highest unlimited power) then the “sovereignty of the people” in the democratic State can arguably be said to be a usurpation of God’s rightful sovereignty. Since both God and the people cannot simultaneously rule over the polity, the argument goes, there can be no such thing as an Islamic democracy.

The essence of this first objection seems to be that God’s will must, as a normative or philosophical matter, occupy the place of ultimate authority within the Islamic State. Thus, contemporary fundamentalists frequently use slogans such as “Dominion belongs to God” (la hukma illa li’llah) in order to rhetorically set Islam in opposition to democracy. Similarly, Mawdudi famously argued that Islam is the “very antithesis of secular Western democracy” because, in a Muslim society, “it is God and not Man whose will is the source of law”, while in a democracy “the philosophical foundation… is the sovereignty of the people”. And even scholars such as Bassam Tibi of the University of Göttingen have argued that “Shari’a stands in contrast to popular sovereignty and is thus, on all grounds, incompatible with the nation-state.”

In Islamic law, then, God’s sovereignty is the normative foundation of the polity. Bernard Lewis described classical Islam in this way, “The Islamic state was in principle a theocracy – not in the Western sense of a state ruled by the Church and the clergy… but in the more literal sense of a polity ruled by God. In principle, the state was God’s state, ruling over God’s people; the law was God’s law”. The polity cannot be secular because “to Allah belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth: He forgiveth whom He wills, and punisheth whom He wills. But Allah is [ever] Forgiving, Most Merciful.” (Qur’an, Sura Al-Fath 48:14). Because God’s will must occupy the normative space reserved for the highest authority in the State, democracy is seen by many Muslims as another form of jahiliyyah, or ignorance of divine guidance.

This opposition stems in part from religious arguments, which will be examined in future installments, but it also often stems from a reflexive cultural rejection of anything Western. Thus, secularization and democratization have been seen, by some Muslims, as a form of cultural domination at the hands of Western powers and as a threat to the Islamic way of life.

On Monday, we’ll turn to the argument that Shari’ah must take substantive precedence over democratically-derived laws.