Islamic Political Thought Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The basic assumption of Islamic political thought is that the believers’ primary objective is being able to lead a life in accordance with Ibada and Hisba—that is, adhering to the Quranic injunctions to do service in the name of God and to do good and prohibit evil. The Quranic injunctions are embodied in the Sharia, which is law comprising rulings in the Quran (God’s word) and Hadith (narratives of Prophet Muhammad’s sayings and doings and, for the Shia, the narratives of their twelve Imams also). In this the Islamic state is pivotal because it assumed and was accorded a moral mission to enforce the application of Sharia with a view to ensuring that believers performed the duties of Ibada and Hisba. This task entailed four responsibilities: safeguarding the community from moral and physical danger from within and without, safeguarding the community against schisms and heresy in accordance with the rulings of the ulema (religious scholars), enforcing the rules of the good moral life as they were set forth in the Quran and Sharia and interpreted by the ulema in accordance with the various schools of law, and being just and ensuring justice.

On the basis mainly of Hisba (doing good and preventing evil), it was considered a command of God that the Muslim community should resist or disobey a government that violated the precepts of the Sharia. Other than morally sanctioned rebellion or civil disobedience, the only means available to the community to protest wrongful acts of a sovereign were the protests and warnings of religious leaders. These generally took two forms: the first one was fatwas, that is, formal rulings by one or more of the ulema based on Sharia. But the ruler could get around a fatwa by having a counter fatwa issued by a mufti (official deliverer of fatwas) under his control or one who simply disagreed with the original fatwa. Theoretically under Islamic notions of government, the state’s judiciary and executive powers were limited by the Sharia.

The Modern Period

In the modern period beginning with the dominance and influence of the West over Muslim countries in the nineteenth century, Islamic political thinking and practice underwent important changes. Most modernizing states in the Muslim world derived law, at least theoretically, from Western-style legislative processes and institutions, including parliaments, which could ultimately have authority over Sharia. But there is continuity between traditional and modern concerns in this regard: to the older discussions of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) of the place of Sharia in governance were added questions relating to democracy in general and specifically where sovereignty lay in the Islamic polity: in the people or in God’s commands?

Dialogue With Western Modernity And Muslim Reformers

In many ways modern Islamic political thought has been one of an adjustment to Western political domination. Muslim political thinkers have reacted in different ways to the question of the place of Islam in modern politics: from advocating secularism (separating politics from religion) to re-instating salafism, a return to Islam as it was practiced during the time of the prophet and his companions. Among the Islamic political thinkers who more or less rejected incorporation of Western forms of democracy into Islamic political thinking were Hasan Al-Banna (1906–1949) and Sayyid Qutub (1906–1966). Others such as Maulana Maududi (1903–1979), Imam Khomeini (1902–1989), and Muhammad Asad (1900–1992) considered democracy to be compatible with an Islamic polity as long as Sharia remained the supreme source of legislation and lawmaking and the latter did not contradict the former. In varying ways, these authors, among others, saw no incompatibility between representative government and the supremacy of Sharia. This position follows from the concepts of ijtihad (independent reasoning—a ter m used by earlier Muslim scholars to refer to independent legal reasoning on matters about which they were not in agreement), ijma (consensus of scholars), and qiyas (analogical reasoning), which are applied by jur ists in complex ways within Shar ia—reasoning that allows for change and innovation to be incorporated into the Islamic polity. Ijtihad is often posed as being opposite to Taqlid (the unreflective reproduction of tradition), but this view is problematic in relation to understanding Islamic political thought. The orientalist thesis that the Islamic legal tradition became ossified—that the gates of ijtihad were closed—after the first formative years of Islam, is untenable. Argued change in relation to particular circumstances was always important to the Shar ia, and its flexibility was retained through such technical devices as custom (urf), public interest (maslaha), and necessity (darura).

In any case, a tradition passed down in history imperceptibly accumulates something new and is never an exact copy of a previous tradition, including in the political realm. A case in point is the way some modern Muslim scholars (such as Sayyid Qutub) would classify most Islamic countries as being in a state of jahliyya (ignorance or barbarism), a situation that Arabia was in before the advent of Islam.Their strategy to end this situation does not entail exact copying of the methods by which the original jahliyya was ended. It often means putting an end to contemporary jahliyya, using present-day discourses and practices including modern technology, media, and even armed conflict and establishing a state based on Sharia. Another example of change within tradition is that classical Hanafi doctrine forbade torture to extract evidence, but later Hanafi fiqh accepted it for reasons of expediency.

The practice of including or rejecting forms of political innovation (bida) falls within the parameters of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence comprising the four schools of the Sunni tradition—Hanafi, Maliki, Hanbali, and Shafi—and that of the Shia including the Jafaria), which grades laws and acts according to the stipulations of the Sharia: mandatory (wajib), recommended (mandub), permitted (jaiz), disapproved (makruh), and forbidden (haram). Islamic political thought is located within this Sharia-bound matrix of discourses and practices. These concepts, including the historical situations in which they are located, can explain the change and continuity in and the connection between the past and present of Islamic political discourses and practices.

Bibliography:

Asad,Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Black, Antony. The History of Islamic Political Thought: From the Prophet to the Present. New York: Routledge, 2001.
Enayat, Hamid. Modern Islamic Political Thought. New York: Macmillan, 2005.
Majid, Anouar. Unveiling Traditions—Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.
Schulze, Reinhard. A Modern History of the Islamic World. London: I.B.Tauris, 2000.

This example Islamic Political Thought Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.