The American Muslim (TAM)

The Future of Democracy and the Arab Spring

Dr. Robert D. Crane
Posted Jul 14, 2011 •Permalink • Printer-Friendly Version

The Future of Democracy and the Arab Spring

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

CONTENTS:

I. Political Freedom
II. Khilafah – The Concept of a Caliphate
III. Shurah – Importance of Consultation
IV. ‘Ijma’ – Role of Consensus
V. The Arab Spring

I. Political Freedom

The first three of the most basic purposes of the maqasid al shari’ah (normative principles of Islamic jurisprudence) as described in Chapter 5 above, entitled “The Shari’ah: Universal Principles of Human Responsibilities and Rights”, address the human relationship with God. These three are: awareness of God (haqq al din); awareness of the transcendent nature of the human person (haqq al nafs); and respect for the human community (haqq al nasl). A fourth one deals with respect for God’s creation in our physical environment (haqq al mahid). These are the guiding sources of transcendent justice.

The next four basic purposes address the human responsibilities to translate this awareness into institutions, programs, and policies that facilitate the political, economic, gender, and intellectual components of social justice.

The first of the four is the responsibility to promote political self-determination of persons and communities. This maqsud is known as haqq al hurriyah or more popularly as political freedom. This is the classical Islamic framework for discussing democracy and Islam.

The three major hajjiyat or secondary goals within this higher purpose are khilafah, shura, and ijma. The latter two call for institutions and policies to actualize and implement the first one. An additional hajja, which is merely assumed, is an independent judiciary to serve as a check on the first three.

Each hajja of the three in haqq al hurriyah addresses universal issues or principles, as well as some of concern primarily only to Muslims. The most universal issue raised by khilafah is whether global governance should be based on “might makes right” or “right makes might.” The primary issue raised by shura is whether the “state should take precedence over the “nation.” The central issue of ijma is whether the transcendent values in a nation’s culture are more important in the success of constitutional governance than those explicitly stated as concepts without reference to religion.

II. Khilafah

The concept of khilafah is perhaps the most contentious issue in Muslim history, because it means that both the leaders of a community and the followers are both equally responsible directly to God. The root khalafa means either to follow after, to substitute for, or to represent as a deputy. In Islamic thought every human being is a khalifa who carries the amana or trust to be a steward of creation as part of one’s worship of our loving Creator. This means politically that the highest responsibility both of those who govern and those who are governed is directly to God.

These three hajjiyat in combination are designed to produce not freedom in the sense of self-worship or lack of values, but self-determination in the sense of freedom for persons and communities to become what they were created to be, which is the purpose of all the maqasid al shari’ah.

This means not only that persons and communities should govern themselves but that people have a responsibility to cooperate in creating, maintaining, and operating institutions most appropriate in their own culture to assure that they are governed by people who are governed by God.

This dual responsibility introduces an inherent tension between freedom for persons to govern themselves as individuals and their responsibility to respect those who through such institutions have the right and duty to govern them. The art of maintaining a balance between these two responsibilities constitutes the art of governance by maintaining a balance between shura, which is the responsibility of the government to respect the responsibilities and rights of the governed, and ijma, which is the duty of the governed to reach a civil consensus on their values and corresponding needs in order to guide the government in fulfilling its responsibilities to those it governs.

Unfortunately, in every society there is a tendency for self-proclaimed leaders to act as if they were substitutes for God. And there is a corresponding tendency for their followers to worship them even to the extent of denying all human responsibilities and human rights both for themselves and for others.
The simplest threat to political justice is dictatorship by a dictatorial oligarchy that seeks only power without regard to what anybody thinks about them. The most complex threat, which is largely a product of the modern age, is the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which by definition requires mass thought control in order to eliminate even the possibility of opposition.

These two threats have posed the major political challenge both in theory and practice throughout much of Muslim history. The major issue has always been and still is today, first, how to understand the institution of the caliphate and, second, how to maintain it.

The two most quoted ahadith in this regard are the Prophet Muhammad’s statement that Muslims should refer matters of dispute to him as the leader, and his statement, “Whoever accepts a tyrant is guilty of tyranny.”

The most articulate and assiduous of the scholars on the meaning of the Islamic caliphate was Ibn Taymiya, who lived at the time of the Mongol invasion. Some Muslims, notably the Hanbalis, claim to honor Ibn Taymiya as their mentor, but they distort his most essential teachings. For example, many Muslims condemn Sufism as inherently un-Islamic, but they seem to be unaware that Ibn Taymiya was a Sufi who condemned the Sufi extremism that was spreading as a populist movement in his day. He also was an ardent supporter of the khilafah but not as an institution of military or even political governance.

Salafi extremists, among whom Osama bin Laden was the most famous, claim that Ibn Taymiya supports their call for a one-world government under a single Caliph. In fact, Ibn Taymiya developed a sophisticated understanding about the Islamic doctrine of the khilafah that demolishes the extremists of his day and of ours. Ibn Taymiya was a political theorist who was imprisoned by the reigning Caliph and died in prison ten years later for opposing the extremism both of tyrants and of their opponents. He was in fact a model of those who both understand the sources of extremism and the means to counter it. His mission was to deconstruct extremist teachings doctrinally in order to marginalize their adherents.

One of his modern students writes rather poetically that extremism comes when pan-Islamists “operationalize a unity of belief in a human community of monist monolithism rather than in a boundless love for all of God’s creation in a transcendent Islamic cosmopolis.” Extremism comes when people substitute a political institution for themselves as the highest instrument and agent of God in the world, when they call for a return of the Caliphate in its imperial form embodied in the Ottoman dispensation. It comes when they call for what Shah Wali Allah of India in the 18th century called the khilafat zahira or external and exoteric caliphate in place of the khilafat batina or esoteric caliphate formed by the spiritual heirs of the prophets, who are the sages, saints, and righteous scholars.

In the late Abbasid period of classical Islam, according to Naveed Sheikh, “The political scientists of the day delegitimized both institutional exclusivism and, critically, centralization of political power by disallowing the theophanic descent of celestial sovereignty into any human institution.” In other words, they denied the ultimate sovereignty claimed by modern states since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which elevated states to the ultimate level of sovereignty, in place of the divine, thereby relegating religion to the periphery of public life or excluding it and with it morality altogether.

The late Abbasid scholars, faced with a gradual process of creeping despotism, denied the divine right not only of kings but of every human institution, and they condemned the worship of power and privilege that had brought corruption upon the earth. For insisting on this foundation principle of Islam, the greatest scholars throughout Muslim history were imprisoned, some for years and decades. This is precisely why Muslims traditionally have considered them to be great.

Ibn Taymiya completed the process of deconstructing the ontological fatalism of caliphatic thought by restricting the role of the caliphate to what perhaps the greatest Islamic thinker of all time, Abu Hamid al Ghazali, had called an ummatic umbrella functioning only to protect the functional integrity of Islamic thought rather than to govern politically. Ibn Taymiya asserted that the unity of the Muslim community depended not on any symbolism represented by the Caliph, much less on any caliphal political authority, but on “confessional solidarity of each autonomous entity within an Islamic whole.” In other words, the Muslim umma or global community is a body of purpose based on worship of God. By contending that the monopoly of coercion that resides in political governance is not philosophically constituted, Ibn Taymiya rendered political unification and the caliphate redundant.

The principal proponents of the esoteric caliphate, the khilafat batina, have been the Shi’a scholars, because they were the most oppressed of the oppressed under the most un-Islamic of the Muslim emperors. This may explain why they have always emphasized that purpose takes priority over practice, meaning that the legitimacy of practice must be determined by higher purpose.

The first of the six greatest Islamic jurisprudents universally recognized by Muslims, was Imam Jafar al Sadiq (d. 148 A.H.), who also happened to be the sixth of the Shi’a imams. Building on his nomocentric conception of Islamic law, his followers developed the concept of justice as part of a distinctive Shi’i creed, which was known as the ‘usul al din or “roots of the faith.” Its five articles of faith are tawheed, ‘adl , nubuwwat, imamat, and ma’ad. In these ‘usul al din, justice or ‘adl, known also as ‘adala, is a basic paradigm of thought and action, preceded only by tawheed, which is recognition of the existence of God and of the universe as a coherent manifestation of God’s Being. Justice comes even before recognition of prophethood, the third governing principle, which teaches that divine love, mercy, and justice are manifested through human exemplars. Within the science of justice or ‘ilm al ‘adl, a set of human rights developed which were known as the maqasid al shari’ah or universal and essential purposes of Islamic jurisprudence.

Both the ‘usul al din and the maqasid al shari’ah were first systematized by Shaykh Muhammad ibn al Babawaih, known as Shaykh Saduq, who died in 381 A.H. According to Nasir Shamsi, who is one of the leading Shi’i scholars in America and twenty years ago translated Shaykh Saduq’s most important work, I’teqadia, the Shaykh’s 300 books consolidated the doctrine of uninterrupted ijtihad or intellectual creativity, which never died out in the Jafari school of law even though it was occasionally politically eclipsed, just as it was everywhere else.

The Shi’a have no formal doctrine of the Caliphate because they consider that the descendents of the Prophet Muhammad, salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa salam, inherited his leadership, at least in transcendent or spiritual matters. The issue of the Caliphate arises when an occasional ayatollah, like Imam Khomeni, claims the spiritual right to rule politically on the basis of his doctrine of wilayat al faqih, which in turn is an anomalous politicalization of an ancient concept that referred mystically to the walaya of the insan al kamil or “Perfect Man.”

The orthodox Shi‘i concept of ultimate authority requires reliance on human reason, not in the sense of qiyas or analogy, which is considered to be unnecessary, but on the induction of principles from the Qur’an and hadith, especially those from Imam Ali, and their use in deducing guidance on specific issues. This process requires two tiers of scholarly interpretation. The first tier is known as the ikhtilaf generation of scholars who laid out the range of acceptable diversity of opinion. The second tier consists of the later jurists who summarize and restate the earlier scholarship with explanatory notes, somewhat like the Midrash and Talmud as successive levels of understanding the Torah.

The key to this process is how to “reveal the opinion of the Imam,” whether living as in earlier times or later “in occultation (ghaybah).” The task is to reach a constructed consensus (ijma’ murakab) on possible answers to a legal problem, beyond which further answers are considered to be out of the ball park. The opinion of the Imam by definition supports this range of answers. If further scholarship and ijtihad or scholarly endeavor produce a consensus on one of these answers, this then reveals the opinion of the Imam.

In practice, this has been another means to assure that the Shi‘i scholars of Islam will remain independent of the political rulers and can serve as a check on any abuse of authority, just as the scholars throughout the history of Sunni Islam have done, even though almost all of the great Sunni scholars throughout history have been imprisoned for attempting to carry out this responsibility.

III. Shurah

The second of the three hajjiyat in the maqsud of haqq al hurriya in the maqasid al shari’ah, other than the independence of the scholars and of the judiciary, is known as shura or consensus.

The major issue in the doctrine of shura is whether this calls for direct democracy, in which the voters tell the rulers what to do, or representative democracy, in which the rulers take the concerns of the voters under advisement but are not bound blindly to represent them. This second or indirect form of democracy is practiced in what is known in Western thought as a republic. Those who support a republic, in fact, are the most ardent enemies of even the word “democracy.” The task of the Islamic jurisprudent is to address whether and how a balance of both approaches is possible.

Developing a balance is the task of a constitution. The first constitution in human history is said to be the Constitution of Madinah, known as the Sahifat al Madinah or the Mithaq al Madinah. Many Muslims refer to this Islamic constitution as combining both the Qur’an as the Word of God and the Constitution of Madinah as the Prophet Muhammad’s understanding and practice of it.

When the various tribes living in Madinah invited the Prophet Muhammad to become their leader as a means to overcome their inter-tribal rivalries and bring peace, prosperity, and freedom, there was no such thing as a state in the modern sense. In fact, such a modern concept was not invented until more than a thousand years later, even though there were empires, like the Persian, Chinese, and Incas, based on the modern concept of might makes right. In the Covenant of Madinah the various autonomous tribes were incorporated in a single confederation with common rights and responsibilities. The Prophet called this confederation an umma or single community composed of different ethnic and religious ummas as sub-groups.

The wording included the following key provisions:

In the name of God, the Most Compassionate in Being, and the Most Merciful in Action, this is a document drawn up by Muhammad, the Prophet, peace be upon him, for the believers and the Muslims from Quraysh and Yathrib, and whoever joins them and takes part in their struggle for their cause. They are one nation, distinguished from all other people. …

Believers are one another’s ally against all others. Anyone from the Jews who joins us shall have our support and share equal rights with us, and shall suffer no oppression nor fear an alliance against them. … The Jews shall bear their expenses and the Muslims shall bear theirs in wartime. They are required to render support against anyone who fights any party to this agreement. …

On whatever you may differ, the final verdict rests with God and with Muhammad, peace and the blessings of Allah be upon him.

There was also a common law based on the practice of the Prophet Muhammad and the traditional laws of each religious group. The Islamic shari’ah as a body of law and jurisprudence, like all the other Islamic disciplines, developed over the course of the centuries. At the time of the Madinah Covenant there was no state machinery to enforce the law, no police and no regular military, and not even an established judicial system. All social life was voluntary.

This changed when the Prophet died and especially when peoples in distant places embraced Islam, which led to the growth of power centers that eventually evolved into independent empires based on principles that were un-Islamic from the perspective of the original community of the Madinah Covenant.

The perversions of basic Islamic principles modeled on this Covenant eventually reached the extent that some 20th-century Muslims invented the oxymoron of the “Islamic State” based on the principle that a rigid and narrow concept of the shari’ah must be imposed even on non-Muslims. This went beyond even extremists of other religions who wanted to impose a “Jewish state” or a “Christian state” or a “Hindu state” on Muslims.

The spread of Islam fortunately brought the original concept of confederation to America almost 700 years ago, as explained in the lengthy article on the subject by one of the two authors of this book, Robert D. Crane, entitled “Reviving the Classical Wisdom of Islam in the Cherokee Tradition, published in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org on October 3, 2004.

According to the Cherokee traditionalists in his own family, specifically in the Ani Waya clan, which the U.S. federal government officially outlawed in 1905, the Cherokee religion came in the form of a book that was brought in a great fleet of ships out of the east when the Cherokees lived on an island where it was never cold. After three generations, the bad people from the south killed almost everyone on all the islands and destroyed the book. The remainder of the Cherokees immigrated west to the Great Land.

Their mass migration from a tropical island in the Caribbean to the Yucatan Peninsula in the late 1300s was verified by the leading Meso-American archeologist, T. B. Irving (Al Hajji Ta’alim Ali). He was the only person who had recorded the relevant inscriptions.

After some more generations the bad people attacked again. This time the Cherokees all migrated north and eastwards to find the lost book, because they knew that it came out of the east. This is the origin story according to the Ani Waya clan, which has now been corroborated by documents in Timbuktu.

In hidden libraries that have been found in Timbuktu on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert in Mali, scholars have now found thorough documentation of a great expedition of da’wa that the Emir of Mali, Abu Bakr, sent across the Atlantic in 1310 A.C. after he met Chinese Muslims in the hajj. Scholars do not seem to be clear on whether he was hoping to bring Islam to China or to America, because there is evidence that at least two earlier Muslim expeditions had visited America, one in 1100 going westward from Africa and the other in 1178 eastward from China. When the first expedition did not return, Emir Abu Bakr sent a second expedition two years later in 1312, reportedly including Mandinga members from what is now Liberia. The detailed manifests of each of the Emir’s ships are now of historical record.

The remarkable similarities between the Abrahamic religions and the traditional Cherokee religion precede and preclude any possibility of adoption from European influences. The Cherokee origin stories include Adam and Eve, the flood, the Tower of Babel, Abraham, the crossing of the Red Sea, Moses, the wandering in the wilderness, and the ark. The traditionalist Cherokees started every prayer with Ya Allah and prayed five times a day and fasted during Ramadhan. They even had recreated the hajj, but the details have always been kept highly secret from people who do not speak Cherokee as their native language. Professional anthropologists who write books on the Cherokee religion provoke hilarious laughter among the traditionalists.

The significance of this indigenous background of Islam in America is the fact that the Cherokees are the only Native American nation with a history of a written language and that they brought with them from the Yucatan to what is now Georgia and the Carolinas a sophisticated political system that included government by confederation of autonomous groups, as well as an advanced system of law that prompted them to send their most able scholars to study law in England as soon as they encountered the Europeans in the early 1700s.

The Cherokee were so advanced, with towns numbering in the thousands and two-story brick buildings, that by the year 1500 they had established a vast trading empire and were adopted by the Iroquois in what is now New York State as a new tribe by the name of Tuscarora, which formed the basis of a new Iroquois confederation. This is significant because the transmission of the principles of the Madinah Covenant were transmitted through the Cherokee and Iroquois as the founding principles of the Great American Experiment in the holistic symbiosis of order, justice, and liberty.

Jefferson said that he borrowed the American system of government from the Iroquois confederation. According to the historian Anthony Wallace, Jefferson was familiar with the Iroquois and maintained contact with the leaders of a great religious revival among the Iroquois from about 1800 to 1810. He spent some time with their greatest religious leader, known as Handsome Lake of the Seneca, and not only corresponded with him but invited him twice to the White House.

The origin of this religious rebirth, like that of the coeval rebirth among the Cherokee further south, lay in their response to the destruction of the native way of life by the white settlers, especially by the introduction of alcohol and gambling, and by the destruction of the nuclear family and of moral community. It was also a reaction against the missionary efforts of the Christians who wanted the Iroquois to assimilate into Western society and disappear. Handsome Lake was convinced that his people could not adopt Christianity without adopting everything bad about Western society along with it. This origin of the Seneca rebirth was not known to Wallace, but he recounts in detail the revival of this religion and Jefferson’s admiration of it.

The traditionalist Cherokee political system was based on governance from the bottom up, rather than from the top down as was common in Europe. This was expressed in the concept of multi-layered sovereignty known today as confederalism or the sovereignty of nations within a regional grouping or “state.” The ultimate sovereign was Allah and he governed through the individual members of the Cherokee nation, each of whom carried the amana to be a representative of the divine on earth. The nation was composed of autonomous bands or clans, such as the Ani Waya. The members of each band chose their leaders through a system of indirect election of four communities. One community represented the warriors, one the religious leaders, one the merchants, and one the judicial community. These four elected leaders in turn elected the head of the band, and the heads of the bands elected the leader of the nation. In the Iroquois confederation, the nations were joined in a single umma or community of nations.

The Iroquois adopted the best of the Cherokee religion, and this is what most impressed Jefferson in later years. The religion as revived by Handsome Lake opposed both cultural assimilation, which is suicide, and cultural nativism, which is the continuation of a culture based on worship of one’s own ethnic group rather than on the enlightened understanding of divine revelation and natural law. According to Wallace’s book, The Death and Rebirth of the Seneca, Handsome Lake’s primary message consisted of four basic principles:

1) All people came from the same source, a transcendent God, and thus are equal in dignity.

2) All religions are legitimate paths to God. Therefore one should not blame the Christians for not accepting the divine revelation that he was reviving. They should follow their religion until they understand that the religion that he was reviving teaches a truer knowledge of God.

3) Violence results from ignorance of true religion. Therefore knowledge is the most powerful weapon against war, and war is almost never the best solution to conflict.

4) More important than knowledge is love of the transcendent God, because love is the path to knowledge.

Much research remains to be done to connect Jefferson’s then unique concept of federalism with Islamic concepts of religious and political pluralism. The efforts of both the Cherokees and Iroquois to conduct interfaith meetings with the Europeans as equals impressed the Christian missionaries, since such religious pluralism and interfaith outreach without any effort to convert others was almost unknown in the Christian world.

Jefferson tried to keep his personal relationship with God secret and largely succeeded, though recent research in his twenty volumes of hitherto secret personal correspondence should shed much light on this, including the influence of Islam.

Perhaps his major message was the same as that taught by the Cherokee and Iroquois. No people, he said in his various writings, can remain free unless they are educated; education consists above all in knowledge of virtue; and no people can remain virtuous except within a religious framework, whether it be Christian or of some other faith tradition, and unless this framework of respect for the divine legitimacy of cultural and religious pluralism and for the power of interfaith cooperation pervades all public life.

This is the profound wisdom of the Great American Experiment, but we have just begun to explore its ancient roots.

IV. Ijma’

The third leg of the triad, other than khilafah and shura, critical to the maqsud of haqq al hurriyah is ijma. This is the responsibility of the individuals in society to portray a consensus on the values that they want their elected representatives to understand and apply.

Much is made of the statement by Thomas Jefferson in a letter advocating “separation of Church and State.” Secular revisionists like to interpret this as a denial of any transcendent values in public life and especially of their source in divine revelation and natural law as the basis for any consensus in public life. American traditionalists give an opposite interpretation by emphasizing the background of this letter in Jefferson’s insistence that freedom of religion requires freedom from state-sponsored religious dogmas, as well as freedom for the transcendent values that can emerge from the exploration of a natural law tradition that traces back to pre-Renaissance Europe.

The most acclaimed modern Islamist in Europe, Tariq Ramadhan, perhaps without knowing it, is one of the most articulate representatives of classical American traditionalism. He was a student of his father, Sa’id Ramadhan, who married the daughter of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan al Banna, and for many years was the imam of Geneva’s central mosque in Switzerland. In his talk on April 10, 2007, at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs Tariq Ramadhan addressed the issue of transcendent law and its derivative implications for political freedom. Unfortunately, he had to address his audience by video, because three years earlier the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under the new Patriot Act had branded him a “terrorist.” “The issue,” he said, “is not the relationship between church and state but the relationship between dogma and rationality.”

He explained that this is just as much an issue among Muslims as among any Christians and Jews in America. He elaborated five principles that are basic to Islam and to democracy, namely, the rule of law, equal rights for all citizens, universal sufferage, accountability of government, and separation of powers. These may serve as the tahsiniyyat or programmatic principles and implementing institutions of both shura and ijma, which are two of the hajjiyat of the maqsud known as haqq al hurriya.

America is a classic example of a nation founded on a consensus that truth and justice derive from a higher source than human dictate and that political justice includes all the specific requirements or hajjiyat that Professor Ramadhan enumerated. This acknowledgement in the American consensus, in fact, is why the Great American Experiment in self-governance succeeded reasonably well in translating the specifics of political justice eventually into practice.

Part of this acknowledgement is awareness that the principles and praxis of just governance are still threatened and always will be, regardless of any constitutional formulations. Acknowledgement of this vulnerability is the surest protection against pressures to sacrifice them, whether by the demos or people against the tyrant or by the tyrant against the demos or mob. Benjamin Franklyn at the Constitutional Convention in 1789 wisely warned that he was bequeathing to future generations not a democracy or a monarchy but “a republic, if you can keep it.”

The central issue in the role of ijma or consensus as part of the three requirements of haqq al hurriyah or political freedom is whether it is sufficient to arrive at consensus formally in a political process or whether this consensus must already precede the formal process as part of the cultural background that produced the governing political system and its embodiment in a formal constitution.

If consensus is the product of majority vote, not as a technique of government but as an ultimate source of truth, then the result is “democracy,” which can become the worst form of government. If consensus on the nature of political freedom and of human responsibilities and human rights is the product of faith-based understanding, dialogue, and cooperation, and is rooted in the culture, then this is a “republic” and can be the best form of government.

All the founders of the Great American Experiment in self-government understood the distinction between the two. Over time, however, this bed-rock principle of American constitutional governance was overlooked in the rush to spread “freedom and democracy” and “democratic capitalism” as America’s gift to the world, for whatever reason, and even at the point of a gun.

The issue is whether the transcendent values that define enlightened global governance (khilafah) and recognize the fundamental rights of the nation above those of the state (shura) should also be the primary determinants of a nation’s governing values and therefore of its unwritten consensus (ijma).

From the perspective of grand strategy, the issue is one of paradigm management. As explained in Dr. Robert D. Crane’s 83-page position paper, The Grand Strategy of Justice, Islamic Institute for Strategic Studies, April 2000, the recent emergence of Islam as the most powerful alternative to American global hegemony has crystallized strategic thought into a choice between conflict management and conflict resolution. The first paradigm calls for the pursuit of stability through creative destruction based on military, economic, and political power. The second calls for the resolution and sublimation of conflict based on the vision of peace, prosperity, and freedom through justice rooted in an ecumenical and transcendent consensus on human purpose.

Both of these two paradigms are present in every civilization and among the followers of every religion. The challenge is to rehabilitate the role of religion in rejecting the first paradigm and encouraging the second as a key to developing civilizational renewal through a new global paradigm and praxis.

As newcomers to the art of paradigm management, Muslims can appreciate the contributions of Islamic wisdom or hikma to civilizational renewal by first studying the philosophical origins of traditional American thought, much of which came both directly and indirectly from the mutual civilizational enrichment among Muslims, Christians, and Jews during the flowering of ecumenical culture in Andalus almost a millennium ago.

The traditionalist origins of the American civilization can be traced back to the Scottish Renaissance and beyond this to the concepts of natural law developed by Roman Catholic scholars in conjunction with their Muslim peers. The conclusion of American traditionalists, which is shared by their counterparts among Muslims, is that no written constitution can ever mean more than the unwritten constitution or underlying culture that produced it.

Similarly, the institutions, programs, and policies that flow naturally from a higher consensus among a community’s members cannot last long if the consensus itself falters or fails. The institutional superstructure may then be perverted or replaced to deny the original purpose of human community. This is why the transcendent and universal purposes of normative law must be respected as the source of the social purposes and these as the product of their higher purpose.

An entire library of great books on American traditionalism has appeared during the past half century, among which the most comprehensive are Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind, Henry Regnery Company, 1953, 556 pages, and The Roots of American Order, 1974, 3rd ed, 1991, Regnery Gateway, 540 pages. Both of these carry forth Edmund Burke’s revival of the Scottish Enlightenment during the mid-1700s as leader of the minority party in the English Parliament, which was the exact opposite of the secular fundamentalist “European Enlightenment” against which it served as a corrective.

The term “conservative” in this traditionalist library equates with what was understood as liberal two hundred years ago because it focuses on the transcendent nature of human responsibilities and rights. The term “order” is synonymous with that in classical Islam. “Order”, as used in the American traditionalist lexicon, according to Kirk, means “a systematic and harmonious arrangement – whether in one’s own character or in the commonwealth. Also ‘order’ signifies the performance of certain duties and the enjoyment of certain rights in a community.” He distinguishes two kinds of roots: “We can distinguish two sorts of roots, intertwined: the roots of the moral order, of order in the soul; and the roots of the social order, of order in the republic. Old and intricate, these roots give life to us all.”

In Dr. Crane’s book, Metalaw: An Islamic Policy Paradigm, Islamic Institute for Strategic Studies, May, 2000, and further in his article, entitled “Metalaw: The Ultimate Challenge,” in Humanics: The International Journal of Systems and Ethics, no 1, 2010, the maqasid al shari’ah are explained in some detail, and “metalaw” is defined on page 49 of the metalaw book as another term for the maqasid: “The future of humankind in the coming century may well depend on whether or not the extreme fundamentalists will retreat to the fringes in the face of a rising groundswell of awareness that immanence and transcendence, perhaps paradoxically, are two sides of the same coin, which we may call metalaw. … The challenge is how to project this holistic and necessarily ecumenical vision through the traditionalist or classical wisdom that produces and sustains it. The immediate issue of meta-law is whether the traditionalist movement of classical America, which gave rise to the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution, can work together with the resurgent forces of classical Islam to renew civilization in a time of worldwide cultural decline.”

Kirk writes in Roots: “It is not possible to live in peace with one another unless we recognize some principle of order by which to do justice. … The higher kind of order, sheltering freedom and justice, declares the dignity of man. It affirms what G. K. Chesterton called ‘the democracy of the dead’ – that is it recognizes the judgments of men and women who have preceded us in time.”

The basic paradigm of traditionalist thought both in classical America and classical Islam is that order, justice, and freedom are interdependent. When freedom is construed to be independent of justice, there can be no justice and the result will be anarchy. When order is thought to be possible without justice, there can be no order, because injustice is the principal cause of disorder. When justice is thought to be possible without order and freedom then the pursuit of order, justice, and freedom are snares of the ignorant.

The path of transformation begins in the individual soul. In Surah al Rad, 13:11, the Qur’an reveals, “Verily, Allah does not change a people’s condition until they change what is in their inner selves,” Ina Allaha la yughairu ma bi qaumin hata yughairuu ma bi anfusihim. In other words, reliance alone on political and social panaceas of structural change in political, social, and economic institutions are ideological delusions. On the other hand, equally utopian is personal transformation without community solidarity in the work of social justice, which consists not in charity but in perfecting defective institutions in order to broaden individual ownership of productive wealth and thereby secure responsive and responsible government. The founders of the Great American Experiment did not always practice what they preached, but they entrusted the destiny of the American people to proper education in this profound wisdom.

The consensus that gave rise to America is not reflected so much in its revolutionary actions but in its reformatory ethos, similar to that in Madinah at the time of the world’s first constitutional republic. The appearance of order can be obtained by superficially trying to maintain the status quo. But, the substance and reality of order can be achieved only by a strategy of dealing with the inevitable changes that occur in persons and societies. Changes promote order only if they promote justice. Justice can have no meaning except as an expression of the law of God, because secular and subjective concepts of justice always end up in the denial of dignity and freedom.

The balance worked out in the American system of government between order and liberty required many centuries of preparation, and it has survived despite two centuries of challenges from extremists. Totalitarian democrats have favored centralized government to serve the majoritarian mob. Libertarian anarchists have sought in practice to fight all government as an enemy of the individual.

These extremists have failed because the American system of government was created by the consensus and practice of the American colonists long before the adoption of the American constitution of 1789, and because the mores or customs of Americans, rather than the ideologies of utopian theorists, have controlled the political process. Edmund Burke represented the American consensus and was much more influential than the contract theorists, like John Locke. Locke posited the source of moral authority in human beings, whose alleged highest goal is freedom

Americans traditionally have excelled in long-range vision and purpose, because they are deeply religious, perhaps more than any people on earth, and feel that their Creator has endowed them with a manifest destiny. This can easily be perverted to self-worship verging on the demonic, but when this happens the original consensus eventually provides the needed corrective, and God willing, will continue to do so in the future.

The traditionalist American consensus is properly suspicious of what Irving Babbitt called “idyllic imagination,” often based on egocentric ambition, as opposed to “moral imagination,” which operates modestly in the realm of the possible. Americans distrust ideologues, because the very concept and word “ideology” came from the horrors of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic aftermath. Americans have preferred the path of patience, practicality, and compromise, perhaps precisely because traditionally they have relied on God more than on themselves in the pursuit of the higher purposes that they share with other communities and civilizations and with all of humankind.

I. The Arab Spring

Philosophers, political scientists, and moral theologians in the Year 2500 may seek examples of policy paradigms that either saved or destroyed civilization in the 21st century.

The so-called Arab Spring is a good example of what Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions exactly half a century ago called a sudden shift from a paradigm of stasis that did not recognize possible change to a paradigm of radical change that made all prior forecasting and planning irrelevant.
The new stage of unexpected change in what became known as the Arab Spring is now recognized, but the new question is whether this will lead to chaos and whether the chaos, in accordance with chaos theory, will produce its own underlying order and a new stasis. Will the Arab Spring lead to reformation through institutional change or will it merely dissipate into the inchoate rage against injustice that precipitated it? If there is a new reality, how does one recognize and measure it and how can one forecast and shape its future, so that it does not revert back again to the former reality or worse.

The classical Islamic approach to these issues is developed in Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s new book, Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition, most specifically in Chapter 8, entitled “Islamic Education, Philosophy, and Science”. This is further developed in this three-volume textbook, Islam and Muslims, specifically in chapter 18, based on text from Fuad S. Naeem, entitled, “The Role of Knowledge in Islam: Islamic Theology, Philosophy, and Sufism”.

The best measure of the future in the Arab World or anywhere else in the world may be the process of developing constitutional paradigms designed specifically to provide normative guidance to shape the future. This is part of what one might call the new discipline of paradigm management.

The two most diametrically opposed paradigms are order and justice as ultimate values. If order through power is the dominant paradigm the choice will be between militant Islamists and militant secularists. The opposite paradigm might be formulated as peace, prosperity, and freedom through faith-based, compassionate justice, which could produce order as a by-product.

If the second paradigm of justice is chosen as a prism for understanding and shaping reality, the next challenge is to define truth and justice and incorporate the result into constitutions. This is the subject of a projected book, entitled Constitutional Paradigms in the Traditionalist History of the World Religions.

The premise of this approach is that all the world religions in one way or another incorporate subordinate paradigms in the unending search for truth and justice. These happen to be the same universal principles or essential purposes of normative jurisprudence that form the essence of both classical Islamic thought from the third to sixth Islamic centuries and of the classical American thought that led from the Scottish Enlightenment to the American Revolution.
This traditionalist ontology and epistemology in a modern context is found in the article by Donald Livingston cited above , who explained the difference between Locke, who modern political scientists believe motivated the American Revolution, and Hume, who many historians believe was far more influential. In contrast to Locke, Hume held that truth, justice, and order are not created and sustained by human reason alone or by an ideological compact, but are part of the primordial inheritance of every human being, which can be accessed through the world religions and the universal principles embedded in them, but often not observed.

The extent to which these universal principles are acknowledged and supported in the new constitutions of the Arab World, regardless of whether they are linked to any particular religion, will determine the future of justice in the Muslim world and the future of Muslims in America.

The superficial manifestations of change in the Arab Spring are the subject of hundreds of commentaries, but few go beneath the dynamics. Why, for example, did the Arab Spring produce reform in Morocco but revolution in Libya and Syria? Why could and did the army in Egypt facilitate the insurgents, but could not and did not need to in Tunisia? Why did peaceful reform fail in Bahrain? Each case is unique and requires its own historical and paradigmatic explanation.

Common to them all, however, is the search for human dignity, which, in turn, comes from the universal human rejection of injustice and from the universal search for truth as the source of justice.

The Arab Spring is considered to provide proof that Muslims are just as concerned about human rights as are any Christians. But why are Christians in the modern era so concerned about human rights? The answer is that the culture of all the Abrahamic peoples is based on the authority of prophets, and all prophets taught the same message about truth and justice, even though their followers routinely disobeyed them.

The core message of revelation to the Prophet Muhammad may be contained in the single verse, wa tamaat kalimatu rabbika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “The Word of your Lord is fulfilled and perfected in truth and in justice”. (Surah al An’am, 6:115) Jesus said, “To this end was I born, and for this came I into the world, to bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth hears my voice” (John 18:37)

In his article, “According to Jesus, Bible, and Qur’an – What is Truth”, Irshaad Hussain goes to the heart of the question. Pilate then said unto him, “What is truth?” (John 18:37-38)

Hussain’s explanation of the deeper meaning in this exchange is worth repeating verbatim. “‘What is truth?’, he says, but he does not voice the question as a genuine query - it is a rhetorical question, a statement describing reality as Pilate observes it - there is no truth, there are only constructed ideologies and practical necessities and people act based upon these and function within the social/economic/political realms generated by these constructs. Right and wrong, truth and justice exist only within the relativistic confines and context of these constructs.

“Pilate’s response is a quintessential modern response - in a world of relativity, ‘what is truth?’ In a world dominated by pragmatic realities, ideological loyalties, and political manipulation what, indeed, is truth?

“Jesus answers Pilate’s question with silence. And so perhaps it is presumptuous for us to seek an answer, or to listen for elucidation from within his quiescence. Yet this is a question which is a very human one - and one that every age has struggled with and sought to answer in different ways - some from the vantage of faith, some from philosophical logic, some from the rationalism of science, some from postmodern relativism, some from an individualistic mix of different avenues - it is a question which has been approached from every conceivable direction. Pilate asks the question cynically, rhetorically - seemingly not truly seeking an answer - and he receives only silence. But perhaps, in the case of Jesus, even his silence can become a potential exegesis, a speech of subtle elucidation - a pointer, not to a single answer, but to a direction which may take us to a mode of understanding.

“Pilate’s world is governed by ideological fealty to the empire and a path governed by pragmatic decision making. His choices hinge, not on any particular concern with distinguishing between truth and untruth (he perhaps is unconcerned to even contemplate what these might mean), but on the weighing of threats and inconveniences to the empire, on the politics of dealing with the constituents of the empire, and on his own personal ambitions within this milieu. Pilate acts and reacts, as we all tend to do, within the limits and parameters of the surrounding society and his own ideological loyalties - juggling personal ambitions and personal compunctions with the realities of his time, and his place within the Roman hierarchy. There, pragmatism and political and economic realism, not some “abstract” truth, carries weight. For Pilate, as perhaps for many of us, existing worldly “realities” overwhelm truth rendering it irrelevant to immediate events.

“Jesus’ taciturn silence in response to Pilate’s ‘What is truth?’ is indicative of the vast gulf that stretches between someone like Jesus and someone like Pontius Pilate - a sign of the chasm between two modes of understanding, one mode being rooted in the mundane and the other rooted in deeper modalities - one mode bespeaking the cynicism inherent in Pilate who the world had bent to its connivance (and who in turn sought to further the empire’s influence by his own exercise of authority), the other indicating the certainty of one who sees the world as only a passing shimmer rippling across the surface of Reality. Between these two viewpoints there is an unbounded void.

“Pilate’s independence is no independence - it is action tightly bound within the confines of a limited and worldly set of controls and inputs - the rules of the empire he serves, the relationship with Herod and Tiberius, the local politics of the province he governed - Pilate no doubt weighed all these inputs and made decisions that best suited the current situation according to his own internal ranking of the hierarchy of importance of these inputs. This is human nature shaped and governed by worldly circumstance, unmoored from higher realities.

“But Jesus speaks from an entirely different realm of inputs - between his world and Pilate’s the gulf is so vast that Jesus’ answer to ‘what is truth’, can be nothing other than silence.

“If truth is what corresponds most fully to reality, then the truth Jesus acts upon stems from the realities that extend from the throne of God down to the earth of this world. These constitute the foundational metaphysical verities that encompass, penetrate, and underlie the worlds of the heavens and the worlds of matter - not the fabricated constructs of human power structures. Truth, in the sense that Jesus speaks of it, is found along the vertical dimension of reality - that dimension which cuts through a hierarchy of existence that stretches from this world to God.

“So Jesus acts upon a truth that goes so deep and that has such a powerful grounding in the foundations of reality itself, that every word he speaks and action he performs has a solidity and deep resonance and spiritual potency arising from its integral connection to the throne from which the reality of the world emerges and from which it draws its subsistence.

“‘For man does not live by bread alone but from every word that proceeds from God’. (Matthew 4:4) God’s words are the engendering, shaping, and sustaining commands which hold the world in existence, from instant to instant. These words are truth - they are the essential substance that shapes reality.

“‘The first truth and the foundation of all truth is God – ‘God is the Truth (the Real)’ (Qur’an 22:6). His right over His creation is above all other rights.

“‘And He has created in accordance with His nature: ‘We created not the heavens and the earth and what is between them but through the Truth (the Real - Haqq); and the hour will most surely come, so turn away (from the ignorant and heedless) with kindly forgiveness’” (Qur’an 15:85)

“And He has placed within each creature’s essence a truth and a nature that can connect it with other truths. ‘Our Lord is He who gave each thing its creation, then guided it.’ (Qur’an 20:50)

“Through this nature, truth can connect with truth – ‘Every one that is of the truth hears my voice’. (John 18:37)

“By this connection and attraction, He (God) makes possible the connection between the ones who bring the truth (the Prophets) and the ones who accept the truth – ‘And he who brings the truth and (he who) accepts it as the truth. ...’ (Qur’an 39:33) Those whose hearts are on the paths of the prophets, whose beings have a resonant identity with them, whose spirits are seeking congruence with theirs - they are the ones who accept the truth.

“And He sends truth in the form of revelation, as guidance – ‘And with truth have We revealed it, and with truth did it come.’ (Qur’an 17:105) This is why there is the potential for revelation to enact an alchemical transformation in the one who approaches its truth with their own intelligent and honest sincerity.

“And the truth overturns falsehood, revealing falsehood’s self-seeking and ephemeral nature – ‘We cast the truth against the falsehood, so that it demolishes it, and lo! it vanishes away.’ (Qur’an 21:18)

“In the Qur’an, truth is repeatedly connected with reality at its deepest and most profound levels. So Jesus’ being is integrally connected to the realities that permeate and suffuse all aspects of creation from the heavens to the earth and all that is in-between. Jesus draws upon and manifests that truth in each glance, in each word, and in each silence. He manifests the truth in the most appropriate manner in each individual action, in each separate time and place, to each person and group - he gives to each aspect of creation he encounters, that which is most appropriate to it. Sometimes he gives healing, sometimes an awakening, sometimes harsh words (to the hypocrites) and reprimands, sometimes specific guidance, sometimes silence, but always, it is truth - conveyed in the most effective manner since its root is firmly established in the full depth of reality. He is a Word from God - cast into Mary’s womb. ‘O Marium (Mary), surely Allah gives you good news of a Word from Him, who is the Messiah (Christ), Isa (Jesus) son of Marium, worthy of high honor in this world and the hereafter and is of those who are in near proximity (to Allah)’. (Qur’an 3:45)

“God’s word is the truth - so when Pilate asks, ‘what is truth’, the answer is manifest before him. At that juncture, the silence of Jesus’ presence was the most potent response.

“The totality of absolute Truth is only possible within the unique singularity and unknowable hidden essence of God - there all contradictions and oppositions find their termination and reconciliation. But here, in the world in which we presently dwell, the Prophets drew upon their profound connection with the unseen, they recognized the true nature of things, they understood the vast substance of the ocean of reality upon whose surface the ephemeral world floats unaware (‘You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.’ (James 4:14)) They gave to each thing they encountered its rightful due, drawing out from each its unique truth - the nature with which it was created - since it is by standing on truth, by being true to one’s profound metaphysical nature that one acquires substance, and gains a firm foothold in reality. And it is from this acting on truth, from ‘bearing witness to the truth’ (John, 18:37), that the felicitous bond with the ultimate Truth, Al Haqq, emerges. ‘God is the Truth (the Real – Al Haqq)’ (Qur’an 22:6)