The Qur'an and the Secular Mind; A Philosophy of Islam (2008) - Shabbir Akhtar

34 Quranic Islam and the secular mind
for his faithful believers like a loving father for his children (Q:5:18). It repudiates
the Christian doctrine of God as father. This is remarkable since the notion
of paternity combined with divinity would have been especially welcome in the
patriarchal culture of Arabia. Indeed it would have been easier for the pagan Arabs
to accept Muhammad as ‘the son of Allah’ rather than as the messenger of Allah.
In the event, Islam proposes a political model of absolute divine kingship: a benevolent
ruler and his subjects. God is the sovereign whose laws are promulgated and
enacted by his spokesmen, the prophets. Islam contains no call to an imitatio Dei
since what is required is obedience to God’s will by obedience to his apostles,
not imitation of the divine nature or moral life (Q:4:59, 64, 69, 80–1; 24:51–2).
Christians participate in the moral life of God by imitating Christ. Again, Jews
observe the Sabbath and share by association in the divine holiness and joy of the
seventh day of creation.
This sets Islam apart. Jews struggle with God convinced that they, as the original
people of covenant, matter to him. 32 Christians seek a human partnership with the
divine in the enterprise of incarnational Christology, an enterprise Muslims dismiss
as blasphemous mythology. The Quranic God does not morally need humankind.
It is a legal relationship tempered by mercy and love. Jews and Christians read this
fact backwards into the character of the Quranic God and dismiss him as cold and
indifferent. Such a God could not be great. Muslims retort that such ‘indifference’
is not a denial of his greatness but rather its true quality. The deadlock here is
permanent.
After the age of revelation ends and prophecy ceases, the deputy (khalīfah),
a human and fallible leader, rules righteously by following Quranic guidelines.
The four caliphs who succeeded Muhammad were ‘the rightly guided successors’
(al-khulafā’ al-rāshidūn). But, unlike Muhammad, they were not divinely guided.
Tracing the trajectory of the divine will as it is inserted into politics explains
why Islam’s political institutions are, unlike those of Christianity, distinctively
Islamic. This organic link between the faith and the polis derivative from it is
alien to the western post-Enlightenment notion of religion. Neglect or denial of
this organic connection creates the needlessly insoluble problem of explaining
why the post-Enlightenment model of religion, as an apolitical form of privatized
piety, is rejected by modern Muslims. It is coherent to privatize a religious creed;
it is incoherent to privatize a law code.
Islam was born as a faith and an empire, a twin birth. Muslims created an
empire while Christians inherited an empire. Admittedly, early Islam assimilated
the cultural products of Byzantium and Persia, enthusiastically employing
talented Jews and Christians to build the new cosmopolitan, multi-lingual and
multi-legal Muslim civilization. This is true but irrelevant. In tracing the trajectory
and dilemmas of modern Islam, we must remember that Islam was, from its
birth, a compulsively political and indeed politically successful religion. To say
that politics and religion – two interests segregated theoretically and often practically
in the modern occident – have been wrongly joined in the Islamic imperium
is to assume without evidence that the association of any religion with politics
must always be a disguise for illegitimate political power. It is senseless to accuse