by Mohamed Ousman (Islamic Movement, Crescent International Vol. 54, No. 12, Sha'ban, 1446)
Islam is an ideology, a constitution, a bill of rights and a moral understanding of life, existence, and destiny. The foundation of Islam as well as its principles and tenets are the precursors of every law that comes out of its well-integrated construct.
Life has to fit within a legal system that is founded upon scripture. This is the litmus test of iman and kufr. The Islamic morality that blossoms into an Islamic legality is at odds with political systems that are not grounded in scripture and once applied, even for the stated purpose of achieving social justice, end up inflicting their citizens with social ills and injustices.
There is no doubt that Allah’s scriptures and Prophets teach morality and good behavior. But the insistence on values undergirded by morality should extend into a larger effort of remaking and remolding society in accordance with the will of the Creator. A moral impulse needs a legal complex of the same source and nature.
Human existence and social life cannot progress in a significant and meaningful way without a symbiotic relationship and a complementary kinship between what is moral and what is legal. The conscience in the soul and the court in society have to be of the same formative material. If they are made of separate and incompatible notions, ideas and convictions, then life will become miserable, objectionable and harmful.
Islamic legal procedures are only effective in an Islamic society with high moral standards. Regardless of the number of Muslims in an un-Islamic society, even if they are a plurality as is the case in the majority Muslim countries, Islamic legal procedures will not be enough. There has to be a set of moral standards to refer to, a public morality to rely upon, and a moral system to hold everything together.
In most contemporary societies, the internal convictions of man belong to God while the external codes belong to Caesar. To heighten the schizophrenia, this world’s punishment is man-made while the coming world’s punishment is God-made. This world of run-amok multiple authorities is tearing humanity apart: religiosity is pulling it in one direction and civic formalism in another.
Along with this is the absence of a systematic and consolidated understanding of deen. Allah links the personal and the social, or “religion and state.” His deen is the unification of human order, labor and life. Building the human conscience goes hand-in-hand with building human society; both must be done on the basis of divine morality and legality.
A vibrant, robust, closely and firmly networked society extends its moral affirmations and convictions into its social scope and arrests unjust propensities. In other words, a society is healthy because it promotes the ma‘ruf and demotes the munkar.
Society, however, is made up of people, and so for this to happen, responsible people within the society, who are willing to do whatever it takes to contain the munkar and bolster the ma‘ruf, have to go public with this critical task. The high moral standards of such a society cannot be suffocated in masjids. The psychological delinquency and social bankruptcy of the kafir pacesetters of Bani Isra’eel centered around their unwillingness to curb any public expression of immorality or wickedness.
What separates a moral society from an immoral one is that the former does not permit sin and evil to become the mainstream norm. The force of socializing people toward a morally responsible way of life fosters the growth of a civic conscience that makes it difficult, if not semi-impossible, for sin and evil to spread.
Society has the capacity and wherewithal to prohibit sinful acts that, if left unchecked, devolve into criminal routines. It also has the power to punish aberrations from the moral norm with deterring penalties. When the people of a society coalesce around virtue and godly values, the emotions, tendencies, and expressions of immorality and criminality are at their minimum.
One aspect of the deen is that it is a chain of command. Allah is the source of ethics and laws, and humans are the organized benefactors and implementers of these integrated principles and laws. If human morals do not proceed into their social range and if human laws are not rooted in their moral conscience, then man has not yet actuated his Islam or self-submission to Allah.
Allah does not permit any government to overrule the dictates of an individual’s God-given heart; nor does it permit a society to escape these divine laws and standards on the basis of “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” In the divine order, he who renders, the object that is rendered, Caesar and all else are God’s.
Indeed, all non-Islamic societies have problems when it comes to human principles, individual values and moral standards because they are based on the denial of Allah’s authoritative divinity and the guidance He has provided.
In Allah’s system there is no tension between humanity and the world around. The affairs of heart, society and universe are blended into the construct of an Islamic order on earth. This is the nature of things when man has one divine authority who has endorsed for mankind one deen—an integrated system that has no room for separation of “church and state,” segregation of values and politics, and sequestration of morality and militancy.
The world was made for humanity provided we act responsibly, with moderation and good-intent. There is a divinely sanctioned compatibility between man’s nature and the universal system. This is to be understood and acted upon within a legal and social framework that comes from Allah because Allah’s natural structure works with His moral structure.
If society is founded upon Qur’anic principles of social justice, then the vast majority of rationalizations will lead to prosperity; conversely, if society is founded upon principles of self-interest for special interests, then the vast majority of rationalizations will lead humanity to destruction and ruin. Any legal system that promulgates laws contrary to this God-given nature will fail sooner or later because it goes against the innermost feelings in man.
When this truth is affirmed, humanity realizes that Allah, the single eternal Deity, is the generator of morals and values and the author of rules and laws. Any value system or legal system that violates or collides with the meanings and definitions given by the one God to humanity through impeccable Prophets and sanctified scriptures, is corrupt and unlawful. Having one Deity means having one constituency of a personal and public order.
Allah wants humanity to have a government on earth. A government has different levels. The first level is not local government; it is the government of the conscience—a government that is constructed inside a person’s sense of right and wrong, his moral sense.
Many commands in the Qur’an are the building blocs for this “unseen” government. At this level, with Allah’s supervision and care, humanity begins to construct their earthly government in the image of their Allah-given conscience such that when the government of the courthouse comes into being later on, it is an extension of the conscience that has been raised by the Justice-Giver and explained by His words of equality and fairness.
As such, there needs to be a form of organization to move ahead with the word of Allah, and that organization needs the discipline of a competent leader. We, Muslims, must organize our social and political life in a direction that leads to terminating all immoral activities in our societies. This can only be achieved when Muslims acquire power, in the framework of an Islamic state whose policies and institutions reflect the consciences of the Muslim people.
The Muslim Ummah is a central Ummah (Ummatan wasatan), that is preoccupied with setting the ideological and moral standards and dispensing justice and equity. The Prophet set a community of people on a course of rightfulness and lawfulness in the nascent Islamic state in Arabia; so it is expected that his Ummah should be able to orient humanity on a course of collective right-mindedness and public adjudication.
Do Muslims, often living under secular governments and obsessing about implementing Islamic laws, have a competent leader under whose leadership Muslims are terminating immoral activities in society? Or do we imitate Bani Isra’eel who integrated apostles and scriptures into the sphere of their religious ego, whims and desires? Allah addresses the formal and legalistic attitude of Bani Isra’eel when it came to compliance with Allah’s teachings and principles. Their conventional, customary and ceremonial approach to Allah had to do with the letter of His word and not with the spirit of His word. We are not required simply to pay lip service to Allah and become legalistic Jews.
It was not enough for Muslims to “sound” Islamic; they had to have Islamic character. And it was not enough for them to have individual Islamic characters; they had to consolidate these characters within an Islamic public. And this Islamic public cannot exist without the moral and legal authority that come directly from understanding, assimilating, and actualizing the meanings of the words in this divine Book.
This does not mean that laws are unnecessary; on the contrary, they are needed to protect civil order. Laws are to be enforced vigorously in the domain of social or civic interaction. They help to deter crime and limit civil wrongs and law-breaking. The implementation of law is of obvious and immediate benefit to the overall well-being of any social order. But the imposition of laws and legalities to try to enforce matters relating to taqwa in the heart will have no benefit, and in some cases may even be counterproductive. Legal authority eventually erodes if there is no popular support for laws and regulations. When people—in their hearts—are not convinced of “virtue,” virtue becomes impossible to impose.