Now that even the pro-zionist Democratic Alliance has celebrated recognition of Muslim marriages, Muslims in South Africa can reflect on their priorities and understanding of Islam. This article is intended for people who think, not for those who are accustomed to blindly following traditions. They will not derive any benefit from it.
Islam is a movement and understanding it originates from a movement. Islamic Movement, generally, is the consolidation of the political will of people who identify themselves as Islamic to bring about their self-determination. The Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) led the most successful Islamic Movement. His example gives us the definition, origins and methodology of the Islamic Movement.
In the world of ideas and politics, there are other movements with other ideologies and paradigms. The Islamic paradigm is independent; it is supposed to function within all societies on earth.
The Islamic Movement is the movement of committed Muslims to establish an Islamic state, i.e. the manifestation of Allah’s power and authority on earth. The collective effort to fulfil the responsibility of building an Islamic state and its final definition, which is the end process of the Islamic Movement, is determined by the people of its time. Only a clear understanding of Islam, its concepts and terminology will enable establishment of the Islamic state.
The first priority for Muslims is to clarify our thought processes and cleanse our thinking. Much confusion exists among Muslims precisely because we live a schizophrenic existence. We want to implement Islam in our lives but we also want to use un/anti-Islamic tools to implement Allah’s system. Such tools will not enable us to implement Allah’s system. We have to be clear about this.
The way Islam was originally presented to the world was a process of understanding the problems that Muslims faced in their attempt to socialize Islam. That is why the Qur’an was not revealed in one go, all at once. Allah could have done so but it did not happen that way.
The way it happened was that a few ayaat were revealed to deal with a real life situation. Once that condition was adjusted, the society progressed to another level. When it encountered another problem, new ayaat came down to solve it. Muslims incrementally functioned as such, under the supervision of scripture, until they finally had Islamic self-determination under the leadership of Allah’s Prophet and the consolidated will of the people.
Within this context Islamic thought is at work; not the ivory tower intellectualism that most Muslims are infected with these days. Islam is not socialized through prefabricated answers that the clergy and political class offer these days. They take an economic, political, military, financial etc. issue and say, for example, on the issue of inequality “how can Islam legally navigate the issue of inequality?”
Inequality is created by the non/anti-Islamic worldview. Islamic answers come to an Islamic society. Muslims have to reframe society and solicit Islamic answers for the emerging Islamic society that they have to build.
In building such a society, Imam Muhammad Al Asi, the award winning mufassir of The Ascendant Qur’an, points out that Allah’s guidance miraculously blends the moral and the legal into one behavioral pattern, neither demanding nor tolerating in the individual or social human character any tension, which may result from an emphasis on one side at the expense of the other.
Morality cannot expand without legal protection, and legality cannot be asserted without moral assurance. When ethics and laws are together operating in harmonious partnership, then and only then will there be justice.
Injustice is the clash of morals and laws. Nobody who has an inconsistency between his official beliefs and his personal standards is qualified for divinely-legitimate leadership.
Muslims neither neglect legality, which is the socialization and institutionalization of morality, nor do we slight morality because it is the individualization of legality. We do not go to the Christian extreme of dismissing the legal necessity of social life because of a total emphasis on the spirit of the word, in the process killing the spirit of the kingdom.
We also do not go to the Jewish extreme of overlooking the spirit of the scriptures and in the process evolving laws without love. We know that morality needs a legal system to help it expand and we also know that legality needs a moral standard of divine origin to help it contract.
But what emanates nowadays from the Muslim clergy and political class and their institutions? Sadly, they do not reflect the Qur’an and the sunnah even though they selectively cloak themselves with convenient words from Allah and His beloved Prophet. They lack the will, determination and motivation that the Qur’an and the sunnah instill and embed to bring together the moral and the legal, in other words to re-frame society.
The reason for this distance is because non-thinking Muslims often confuse an ‘Aalim, Islamic scholar, with those who pretend or masquerade as ‘Aalims. The ulama, Islamic scholars, inherit from the Prophets the mantle of truth to pursue holistic justice.
If these pretenders and masqueraders pursued holistic justice, South Africa would not be in the miserable state it is in today and the clergy-class would not pursue partial justice in the form of Muslim Personal Law (MPL) legislation.
Graduates from religious seminaries consider themselves on top of the world yet they and their congregants are pious citizens under a system of kufr and shirk. The thrust of their active lives is not in the service of Allah but subservient to business and political interests or in amusement with petty discourses that divide Muslims into bite size chunks.
The ulama should focus on those who rival Allah’s power and authority. This prevailing status quo mentality among the clergy-class that cloaks itself in a veneer of Islam does not “pack a punch” against the leaders of society who are increasingly belligerent towards Allah’s guidance and are causing society to drift further away from Him. This mentality has to change urgently.
Muslims have to break out of their traditional legal shell that has substituted for Islam and Iman (secure commitment), and re-capture the guidance from Allah and His Prophet. In order to do so, Muslims have to be confident and mature enough to arrest the “he/she is creating fitnah (social sedition)” mentality based on “he/she not graduating from our (specific) religious seminary” each time an issue arises. Issues must be addressed in a mature and transparent way by opening our minds, hearts and institutions to alternate Islamic viewpoints.
Short circuiting this thought process with shady, escapist answers and religious blackmail will increase friction among Muslims. This is not because the Qur’an and the sunnah generate friction. They will always be paramount, essential, relevant and eternal as they provide the blue print for Muslims to socialize them. Yet, they will never be socialized in the absence of robust brotherly discussion that includes all Muslims.
The status quo clergy and political class who have assumed positions of leadership framed their discourse on the MPL legislation outside the atmosphere of the Qur’an and the sunnah. They lacked ideological clarity and were reactionary, myopic, divisive, petty, ad nauseum. This has led to a collective demotivation to sacrifice for revolutionary change and the occupation with ineffective pursuits. We thus stand condemned.
Do you pledge yourselves to parts of scripture and reject [other] parts? The only recompense for whoever does that is disgrace in worldly life; and on the Day of Resurrection they will be consigned to most grievous agony (The Ascendant Qur’an, Surah Al-Baqarah, verse 85).
Those who were held responsible for the Torah [and its commandments and instructions] and then did not honor/satisfy that responsibility are analogous to an ass that carries illustrative [and helpful] books [but cannot benefit from them] (The Ascendant Qur’an, Surah Al Jumu‘ah, verse 5).
The schizophrenia and ideological bankruptcy of the status quo clergy-class was exposed as they interjected the words “kafir, murtadd, deficiency in iman” etc. into the discourse when their colleagues tried to legitimize the un-Islamic judicial system by the introduction of “Islamic legislation” with flawed arguments. The pro-MPL clergy and political class set the stage for Muslims to seek justice from the un/anti-Islamic judiciary, while the anti-MPL clergy class registered affidavits and objections with the same un/anti-Islamic judiciary!
Irrespective of what legislation the clergy and political class shove down the societal throat, society is not on the sirat al mustaqim. Any attempt to implement the shari‘ah piece-meal coupled with a reaction outside the atmosphere of the Qur’an and Sunnah to prevent it does not make anyone a mu’min or kafir.
A mu’min or kafir has thought through their ultimate position. In this instance, the divided Muslim clergy and political class and their blind followers have not thought through the Qur’an and the sunnah, actual position of the Prophet, and what he would have done had he been here.
When proponents of the Islamic Movement opposed the MPL legislation, the shar‘i grounds and arguments were based on the impeccable sirah not in the dogmatic, out of context and out of touch with reality manner of the clergy-class. When the fringe/splinter groups among the clergy-class opposed it, they made a circus of the opposition and people who saw the merits of opposing it lost interest.
Alas, the absent public Muslim mind is exacerbated by the absent Muslim public behavior of taqwa, a concept whose original intent was to guard against Allah’s power presence and retribution to the extent that His power-presence eclipses all other “powers”; not today’s secular distortion of piety.
Once Muslims acknowledge these deficiencies, we would know that we have no business to pre-maturely codify any aspect of the Shari‘ah into the unjust judicial system. The question to be asked and answered is: did the Prophet of Allah begin his revolution in Makkah with legality or ideology? A sincere answer using Allah and His Prophet as the yardstick would have resolved this conundrum.
The Islamic Movement is confident that Muslims are able to address all our problems internally, once there is a Qur’anic and Sunnatic public mind. The status quo clergy-class have neutralized and ignored the revolutionary pulse of the Qur’an and sunnah that transforms society from godless to Allah-centric and castrated the ability of people to think. Allah revealed the Qur’an to people but nowadays people do not have thinking minds!
For revolutionary efforts to be revived, people en masse have to re-activate their minds because along with the Shari‘ah came hikmah (wisdom). And then, people en masse have to cultivate taqwa. People are not muttaqun when they criticize powerless or ignorant people yet are conveniently mute and cowardly when establishments and governments rival Allah’s power and authority.
Nowadays, people fast forward and “want to apply the Shari‘ah” without any wisdom, without the preceding thought process and without taqwa! Unlike Muslims in the formative years of Islam 1400 years ago, we want to promote the wahy (revelation), in the absence of the aql (disciplined rationality!)? What is the value of the Qur’an and sunnah without a thinking mind?
Could society progress and appreciate their application without the faculty of thought and reasoning? Saudi Arabia embodies the application of Shari‘ah without wisdom and taqwa.
There are two ways to think of what Allah says. The right way is to analyze and to approach the extent of the wisdom in Allah’s divine words without depreciating the intent and purpose of those words. The wrong way, i.e. the Israeli way, is to question the words not for the sake of acquiescent understanding but for the sake of pooh-poohing the intent and purpose of the common sense and apparent meanings included in the divine statements.
Obviously, Muslims are instructed to think of the heavenly words but they are not counseled to have their thinking lead them to question the discretion and foresight of the revealed guidance.
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