Islam and Politics - The Stimson Center

Amit Pandya | 95
maintenance of a state that follows specific Islamic teachings. For all these points of view,
Islam functions as the presumptive source of legitimacy and of both moral and intellectual
authority. It is less a description of a particular political program and more a normative
source of legitimacy.
Divisive debates have sometimes arisen within the realm of Islamic politics. When religious
rhetoric and objectives are employed by political actors, the religiously devout sometimes
Controversy abounds over the attempt to accommodate shariah, understood as sacred law, to
the formal legal systems of states. A totalistic view holds that shariah must be adopted wholesale,
effectively rendering religious scholars the sole jurists in society. There is contestation over the
significance of shariah for contemporary Muslim societies. For example, does the obligatory sovereignty
of Allah allow constitutions of states to embody popular sovereignty? Is this sovereignty delegated
by Allah, or a lesser form of sovereignty over a more limited realm, with the state occupying
less space than society? In some instances heated debate takes place between what independent
religious scholars demand and what official and domesticated institutions such as ulema councils
propound.
In some Muslim societies, what is understood as “shariah” in fact reflects actual practice, and
therefore includes traditional and customary norms and practices derived from local pre-Islamic
cultures, or shared with non-Muslim communities. For example, in popular discourse in Afghanistan,
the term is frequently used simply to describe all normative law, Islamic or customary, as well as
all legal institutions, formal ones of the state as well as traditional dispute resolution ones such as
shura and jirga.
The doctrinal and intellectual suppleness of the idea of shariah, no less than that of “justice” in the
West, suggests that the juridical is but one dimension; that there is a broader philosophical and ethical
dimension to be considered. Shariah thus provides simultaneous guidance for the requirements
of an Islamic State, an Islamic Society, as well as for the Truly Muslim Person.
The complexity is conveyed in the often-expressed idea among Muslim progressives that Islamic
penal justice can legitimately only be administered in a just society, which embodies Islamic economic
justice. It is also conveyed by consideration of the effort among progressive Muslims to move
beyond the formalist view of shariah as inert and static rules toward one that looks at the duty to
embody its animating values. This progressive tradition (typified in the work of the Malaysian Chandra
Muzaffar) began in recent decades with calling upon shariah as authority for struggles against
poverty, corruption, and denial of human rights. It has now begun to look at other contemporary
challenges such as environmental degradation and terrorism to seek frameworks that simultaneously
answer to Islamic authority and to emerging contemporary global norms and challenges. The
dissident Iranian thinker Abdolkarim Soroush, author of Reason, Freedom and Democracy in Islam,
looks to democracy as the best safeguard against human error in the interpretation of the exact
requirements of shariah.