There is as much politics in Islam as there is politics over Islam. Much less intellectual space within Muslim communities is devoted to discuss the former phenomenon. An honest, intellectual confrontation of the political nature of Islam is yet to take center stage within modern Islamic intelligentsia. Any voice that dares to suggest the obsoleteness of the less relevant political tenets of Islam is immediately expelled from the discourse on the charge of “anti-Islam” propaganda. In less sophisticated, daring circles, the expulsion may cause one to be called an “apostate,” for all practical reasons a rather fearful term. The most revitalizing, refreshing ideas challenging the status quo are often stifled to an obscure death by the mere fear of being ostracized. Instrumental in institutionalizing the exclusionary tradition is the codified version of Islamic law, Sharia. The phenomenon that worries me is not that Islam, as a cultural component, may contribute to the legal codes but that of declaring Islam as the law by which a state must be governed. States that have experimented with Sharia as the public law, a phenomenon that the Prophet made no allusions to, accomplished little besides forcefully filled mosques, dishonest discussion, compromised dignity and coerced submission, the kind that God would not even care to heed. The model of Islamic law as a means of modern state policy has proved abysmal for Muslims.
A constitution is either secular or it is not. Sharia is no exception to this inevitable binary. The middle path suggested by the overly enthusiastic zealots or pseudo intellectuals is a bluff at best. A supposedly tolerant, liberal constitution loses all legitimacy to being secular when the vague caveat “no law must be made against the tenets of Sharia” supersedes all other clauses in the constitution. A secular state cannot be the protector or propagator of any religion, otherwise it resolves to be another disguised theocracy.
The codification of Islamic law, at least in the current context of nation states, is problematic in that it fools the citizens, mostly Muslims, into a contract that seems democratic in appearance, only waking them up to the catastrophic reality of living in a theocracy. Whether openly theocratic regimes like the Islamic Republic of Iran or the masterfully disguised religious state of Indonesia, philosophically there is little difference between the two.
Indonesia, where apostasy is a punishable offense, is the much touted example of secularism and Sharia coexisting in the modern world. However, nothing can be farther from the truth. A state that continues to publicly flog women sentenced by Sharia tribunals where her testimony is half in weight to that of a man is being passed off as secular, the tragedy is beyond grief. Seeing such disgusting buffoonery find a decent audience within reasonable Muslim communities, how accomplished must the zealots and closeted Islamists feel?
The treatment of Muslims, men, women and girls, in countries where Islamic law assumes public space is heart wrenching. Not only does it strip Muslims of any sense of individuality and dignity of intellect, it also impresses upon these injuries the insult of needing guidance from the clerical class. The daily indignation that women undergo in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Afghanistan over the alleged immodesty of a slippingheadscarf barely matches the humiliation that Sharia imposes upon them when standing in the court of law. Needing four male eyewitnesses to prove the claims of rape else get charged with sins against chastity, unequal laws of inheritance, unequal weight of testimony in matrimonial affairs. These are the realities of Sharia assuming political authority, regardless of the context and irrespective of the interpretation.
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is probably the most overwhelming evidence that vindicates my claim. Captured impeccably in Ryzard Kapuscinski’s "Shah of Shahs," that I highly recommend, is the message of the Iranian people who were betrayed by their own revolution. Looking back at the revolution, the non-clerics stress, in the words of Abdolkarim Soroush, a leading Iranian philosopher and a former revolutionary, that Islam was a means to the revolution, not an objective of it. Political Islam gulped the offsprings of its own revolution. Members of the current Iranian intellectual elite, the ones who’ve managed to circumvent persecution by the clerical regime, caution against the devastation that religion causes in the constitutional space.
Muslims assert more constitutional rights in non-Islamic states than the other way around. Israel, India, United States, United Kingdom, Bosnia, Turkey and a host of other countries that extend the same constitutional guarantees to all their citizens, Muslim or not, woman or not. Is it not a laurel of secularism that allows ardent Islamists to demand Sharia tribunals to be introduced in London and not be apprehended for it?
The line of reasoning that I’ve assumed is not new to Muslims. An entire tradition of preventing the Mullah from becoming the Majesty began as far back as the eighth century by the Mu`tazilites who advocated the ideas of rationality and secular governance without compromising one’s faith as a believing Muslim. Sadly they met the same fate as most outspoken intellectuals today, of being denounced as heretics and were put to the sword by literalists, the Ash'arites, in the war of rationality against ignorance. The Mu`tazilites deemed it worthy giving up their lives to protect the tradition of rationality and to preserve the spirit of Islam, hoping that the ones to follow would do the same. Have we Muslims not given up on the tradition of Khayyam, Hafez, Rumi and Ghalib, who lived and wrote and died in an attempt to save the massacred tradition of rationalism within Islam? Islamism will continue to demolish Islam until Muslim communities preserve each other’s right to be rational even if that means protecting the heretics.
Alluding to the religious clerics Omar Khayyam, a celebrated persian poet, said,
“And unto you, maggot minded fanatic crew
God revealed a secret and denied it me,
go, go, what matters it,
Believe that too."
— Omar Khayyam
