Mohamed Ousman
The Qur’an is concerned with salvation of the human spirit. It approaches humans from all possible directions to try to offer them a way to Allah and a way out of misery and intense unhappiness. When corporal punishment is used within society it is only one way of accomplishing or trying to accomplish the end result: human salvation. Punishment is never an end and it is not the only means to be used in the overall program of scripture.
The legislative process does not begin from scratch, or from a combination of human sources. There are divine commandments, heavenly laws, and God-given codes that man has to understand, contextualize, and then place within a moral order of society. This is not a matter of state imposed interference in the soul of man or in the substance of society. The “state” is the outgrowth of the moral intensity and the ethical propensity of the Islamic social milieu.
The Qur’an is an integral whole; no one is permitted to pick and choose, at his discretion, what he wants from this undivided scripture and what he does not want. Legitimacy belongs only to Allah and His Prophet. Therefore, governments that derive their legal system from any reference besides Allah and His Apostle, are illegitimate and illegal.
Submitting to Allah’s step-by-step approach to criminalizing immoral and unacceptable elements in social relations has to be taken into consideration now that the world is similar to the one that witnessed the first social transformation. In the process of outlawing immoral and unacceptable elements in social relations the Muslims were gaining power and building their own state.
When they gained enough power and had established a solid state covering significant territory, they finally put an end to immoral and unacceptable elements in social relations. But while they were building up to that “legal” eventuality, other moral and social instructions had to be pronounced so that immoral and unacceptable elements in social relations would become morally distasteful in the conscience and the mind of the Muslim public. This is what distinguishes an Islamic political and social order: its government is an extension of its people’s individual and collective consciences.
Moral standards do not become law by the authority of law enforcement agencies or the power of the state. They become law by their popularity and their overwhelming public espousal. Peoples’ hearts have to be in the high standard of ethics they set for themselves. Once morality becomes the heartbeat of the populace it should become their binding and lawful norm.
Islam is not a cut and dry legal system. It is the extension of the moral character defined by Allah and personified by Muslims into the social ambiance of human interactions and relations. It is this integration of the moral core in a Muslim with their social responsibilities that cannot tolerate any immoral and unacceptable element in social relations.
There are no laws in an Islamic state that do not fit the Islamic sense of right and wrong. So if present-day Muslims are to resuscitate this process as rasul-Allah began it, they have to explain the hateful character of usury and its consequences.
There has to be a stage-by-stage dismantling of an immoral psychology, then immoral theories and education, then immoral promotions and ads, and then immorality in its last bastions, must be declared an illegal and illegitimate activity. Obviously, none of this can be done effectively without a power base, a government, and a popular opinion that will be solidly in support of the legal measures once they are enacted and implemented.
Before the implementation of any laws and legalities, an Islamic state and society cannot even carry the Islamic label unless it has first fulfilled its moral outreach and satisfied its ethical standards. Therefore, a moral Islamic society coupled with a responsible Islamic state is required to offer its people, regardless of faith, creed or denomination, the necessities of life in which there is no need, no distress and no necessity to acquire something belonging to another. The representatives of Islamic standards have to set a standard of living that guarantees the essentials people need to get on with their lives before they are duty bound to eliminate from society the tendency by individuals to possess what does not belong to them.
It is worth repeating that penalties outlined in the merciful Qur’an are applied only after all effort to eliminate the motive and the need for committing such offenses. In the mature Qur’anic frame of reference, the social atmosphere is cleansed of all serious injustice and institutionalized mistakes.
Serious penalties cannot be part of a legal system that targets people because government officials have the power and ordinary citizens do not. In an Islamic social reality it is not the power in the hands of the government that gives it the right to apply these divine laws; it is the moral high ground a government acquires which gives it the right to extend morality into the rest of society. And applying the divine laws comes after all other means have been exhausted and the only way to clip vice out of a virtuous society is the application of such laws.
An Islamic court does not have the authority to punish surreptitious homosexuals, who commit their moral violation in secret. But when homosexuals try to “normalize” their faulty and defective sexual behavior in public then the moral consensus and moral authority represented by a moral government has the license to administer the penalty.
The Qur’anic prescription for moral and honorable behavior was elucidated before the Islamic state in Madinah. Adultery and promiscuous sexual relations were considered inappropriate and illicit in Makkah as shown by 17:32 and 23:1–5. Such ayat promoted moral rectitude when there was no Islamic state.
Homosexuality and adultery are in the first instance a violation of the divine moral code. In the second instance, they are a social crime. And it becomes the responsibility of an Islamic state once it is founded to help individuals so inclined from expending their sexual impulse in the wrong way.
Preaching and teaching need to be augmented with a social momentum that is capable of publicly repudiating these immoral lifestyles. The social momentum has to be organized into a form of government that is capable of representing the popular will: in this case outlawing prostitution and same-sex marriages.
There can be no Islamic din without this necessary progression from moral convictions to social commitment to governmental administration. This patterned advance and onward motion becomes the Islamic din.
For homosexuality and adultery to be renounced by the moral conscience of the people, the process has to gain popular consensus. Society as a whole needs to express its aversion and opposition to same-sex cohabitation and extramarital sexual affairs.
Once an individual’s strong belief is joined with society’s judgment of conviction, then a representative government has to place this “value” into a legal framework by taking corrective measures against those who violate this moral harmony by trying to legalize prostitution or to legitimize homosexuality.
Prophets were not content with stating a moral value. They wanted to develop a responsible attitude that binds moral values to social practice and cohesion. They wanted to rearrange social priorities through the will of their own people, and then they wanted their people to adjudicate deviation with a legal system that springs from their moral code. And both the moral code and the legal system were the subject matter of all scriptures that were revealed by Allah to all these Prophets throughout the ages and centuries.
Today, sexual “permissiveness” is presented with an air of acceptability because it is a form of “personal freedom.” Any moral argument presented against adultery and prostitution is dismissed as outdated or fanatical.
There is connivance between a lax moral code of individuals and a “discretionary” legal system. And, if there is not a strong conscience to restrain and discipline the sexual urge and drive, then no dictatorial government—even in the name of Allah—will be able to fill in for that absent conscience.
The issue is so sensitive that even an Islamic authority cannot take munafiqs (dual loyalists) to court and prosecute them for “potential” sabotage or “possible” linkages with the mushriks and kafirs. Their intentions are not grounds for prosecutorial procedures. The close-knit Islamic social order is required to keep an eye on them.
Unlike autocratic and authoritarian regimes who when they suspect some of their own citizens of aiding and abetting an enemy spy on them to substantiate their suspicions, an Islamic government cannot be demeaned or shamed for such invasion of privacy. Instead, the Islamic social order deals with the problem by exerting moral pressure on those who show symptoms of cavorting with the kafirs and the mushriks.
The Islamic approach to exciting commitment requires attitudes to adjust voluntarily and willingly to the moral standards of Allah as outlined in His Book and the Sunnah. The legal aspect of a scriptural society is an extension of its moral component. Morality needs some basic laws to grow and flourish. Likewise, for immorality to decline and disappear, some basic laws are needed.
The Qur’an works on the moral and the legal fronts in a fair and balanced way. Souls, hearts, and consciences are paired with procedures, laws, and punishments.
Active knowledge of these issues is not simply meant to raise the moral quality of individuals, but more importantly and more urgently to raise the moral quality of society. For in the long run, moral individuals can only survive within a moral society.
What a world of difference between the Prophetic model and the Mullahs rush to establish “Islamic Courts”. They short-circuit the entire history of scripture and Prophethood in an attempt to pursue a spiritless and mercyless legalistic “Islam” that has more in common with the Pharisees than Allah’s guidance and His Prophet’s methodology.
(Based on The Ascendant Qur’an: Realigning Man to the Divine Power Culture by the award winning mufassir, Imam Muhammad Al Asi.)
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