As-Sayyid Hani Fahas(*)

It seems we are still being invited to start afresh and to begin from where Aristotle invited us to begin, i.e. from making a definition, without necessarily firmly committing to the Aristotelian precepts of the limits and patterns of concepts, complete or partial, building on the list of the five schools of thought organised by Aristotle. If there is an internal logic to the movement of issues and concepts, then it is accorded a degree of disproportionate relativism which creates a superficial logic, deficient of perceptual inclusiveness in its component parts and epistemological efforts. Accordingly, it is possible to make a definition without falling into the pitfall of stereotyping or fixating the Aristotelian precepts, whilst maintaining the possibility of making use of the definition in the secondary division according to the Aristotelian prescription and within limits.

On this basis, is what we are talking about here, i.e. religion and the state, a problem or a dilemma? Is it a problem, i.e. an issue with neutral objective dimensions, such as the problem of borders between states, which is generally resolved and ends with an agreement between the two sides? Or is it a dilemma, such as the dilemma of the Arab/Israeli conflict, whose dimensions or objective determinants overlap with subjective dimensions. The latter come on the one hand from the Jewish side; the issue of Judaism and Zionism; the Occupation movement and the interest groups, values and ideas that justify it; and on the other from the Arab regime, cognitive and political, old and new, with its complications and handicaps. Subjective dimensions come also from the Palestinian Diaspora and the complications, difficulties, etc, connected to it.  This means that no solution to this conflict can be definitive unless one of its parties comes to an end. That is more or less the meaning of a dilemma. The solution, I say with reservation, is a compromise which requires a further compromise. The time gap between one compromise and another in cases of a dilemma extends and shrinks in accordance with the balances of power and the extent of dominance or if one of them can close the dilemma issue, the determinants of which accumulate with the long passage of history. Even longer is needed to solve it definitively, because it reproduces itself on the same permanent constants and variables and is by its nature controversial.

In the case of religion and the state, neither religious fatwas [legal opinions] nor secular fatwas are sufficient or suitable. We should note in this sort of simplification that the meaning of the fatwa is essentially an issue between religious people in general - and religious people involved in the campaign for political projects in particular, and between secularists in general - and the holists amongst the secularists in particular. The latter are distinct from democrats, who translate their secularism in a broad civic sense, accommodating all of the diversities that the pure secularists see as the nursery of contradictions for which there are no mediators and no solutions except through the abolition of one polar opposite for the benefit of the other: a choice between the existence or the absence, with no space for grey matters, as is the case for the state and religion in discourses, or many of them.

If the issue took the form of a problem, where the prevailing side was objective and concrete, not full of memories, dreams and feelings, then I would now be able to turn to the side of secular holism so that we could agree together on the separation of  religion and the state, between the Islamic religion – my field – and between the state, drawing out the definitive borders between the two, in contrast to the Islamists, who abolish the borders between religion and state and mix between them, without building on any priority rights between religion and politics and worship and politics, to put it simply. If I were to say to them - here is your proof, they would say that the Prophet (Peace be Upon Him) formed the state in al-Medina and became its leader when the opportunity arose for him to secure its apparatus and instruments (land – constitution – the reigning institution), and that – as a legitimate line of argumentation - the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs in its general behaviour, was an extension of the Prophet’s age, and the legitimacy or acceptance of what came afterwards is uncertain. They would finish by dealing with the state as a religious duty, maintaining that the denial of its necessity was equal to Kufr (unbelief), warranting the death penalty, and imposing a blockade around you and I. The Sunnis would adhere to the Caliphate state that resembles nothing within the limits of what is available today or tomorrow except the Sultanate state, contrary to the model of the Rightly Guided Caliphs age which was open to discussion, with the evident lack of the presence of a single mechanism for the transition of power and the appointment of the Caliph. The Shi’a would adhere to the custodian state, the Wilayat al-Faqih of the just jurist deputizing for the inviolable Imam, as a term of reference modernised from the time when it was necessary to adapt the relation with the coercive authority in the absence of the Imam. This developed extremely slowly in latter centuries into the public and total Wilyat al-Faqih, in contrast to the limited Wilayat [custodianship] over matters of Hisba [calculations – pronouncements of right and wrong] by one of the jurisprudents until the beginning of the last century. With the constitutional revolution the Umma's custodianship over itself, the legislation of the pluralist democratic state, was jurisprudentially authorised. Similarly, elections were a means of appointing the ruler who became much closer jurisprudentially to the civic ruler, with the evident peculiarity of Islam as a culture and a Sharia in the life of Muslims and their associations and social regimes. Before the oppositionist Shi’a Islamic movement became based on the policy of the Shah’s regime and following on from the regime in Imam Khumeini’s custodianship, there was Shi’a Islamic activity on the issue of government and the state. This took the form of the party political organisation, affected, in its theoretical commonality, by the thought of the Muslim Brotherhood and Sayyid Qutb in particular and the book ‘Mu’allam ‘ala al-Tariq specifically. It was taken up permanently by the Dawa party intellectuals, with the martyr Sayyid Muhammad Baqer al-Sadr at their fore, to fix the particular Shi’a characteristics of the project, which ended up by crystallizing the political jurisprudential disagreement between the Dawa trend and the Imam’s trend. The party pushed to change its discourse to postpone the state project. The consideration of the civic pluralist state on democratic bases is the current undertaking, which explains the party’s entry into the Iraqi ruling transitional council in spite of its complications at the beginning of the occupation and the continuation of participation in the political project and the confused construction of the state with party pressure for participation and monopolisation most of the time on purely political grounds. Dr Ibrahim Ja’afari insisted on clinging to the premiership.

So…. the Wilayat al-Faqih eventually ended up with the Iranian custodianship, and the state was built on the strength of it. But that does not conceal the fact that the yield from the Iranian experience until now is a civic Islamic state. It is a state with modern institutions and methods, in spite of disagreement over the slow implementation from the centre of the faqih in this state, which brings the issue to a level of contradiction, provoking a struggle to solve it; either by the predominance of one of the two sides over the other, or by the prominence of a moderate trend to balance things out, which may permit new developments to return once again to the struggle over new givens between reformation or conservatism.

If there is a lesson to be learnt from seeking enlightenment from these events on the Iranian scene, then it is that the modern state, as a condition and a changeable matter, can be adapted to Islam – that is – it can be considered an Islamic state, in conformity with Islam, without this conformity being void of complexities, problems and tensions or free of peculiarities. Returning to the starting point, I say: I can try to break out of the blockade by entering into the intellectual and historical contest which is at odds with my essential case between the religion and the state. Beginning with a historical example, in the Sahifat al-Medina [Medina document] arranged by the Prophet (Peace be Upon him), there is a system for societal pluralism under the umbrella of the state, i.e. a division of belief from politics, by making politics ‘the state’ – communal, comprehensive and embracing, and making belief culturally incorporated and organised, focussing on the state as an indispensable social necessity. If the Prophet (Peace be Upon Him) and the Companions with him and after him took on the state, then it was based on a commitment to two necessities:

On the one hand, the necessity of the state. (‘The people must have a prince, be he devout or licentious’).
On the other, the necessity of learning in the formation of the state, as an aspect of the academic capacity and competency that must be perfected through vocational and ethical conditions (the justice of the ruler). The people of learning, administration and politics at that time, or those times, where the Prophet (Peace be Upon Him) and his Companions and followers, and the followers of his followers, without initial opposition and without surrendering the credential of the concept of righteousness as a generalisation. If, amongst the Muslims there were people of other faiths and cultures meaning that pluralism reached the level of equilibrium or numerical evenness, then there was another origin contained in the matter – the origin of the consultative (Shura) state. The latter is respected by Islam as a religion, a law and a cultural entity, and it is respected by other religions on the basis of their monotheistic origin in addition to the unity of mankind, and also on the basis of their being foundational cultural entities for their societies. Consultation in the state was included in the structure of Muslims’ culture, just as Islam is a candidate to be nominated for inclusion in the structure of the culture appertaining to the people of those cultures in areas such as Lebanon. At that time the associative state was not able to find either the concept or the civic formula: i.e. the associative formula - for the people of the City, which was consistent with the civilisational complexity of life's structure and its associations through which the state is considered to be a state of individuals who do not form a constitutional part of it. Their rights from it and duties to it come through the channels of religious or doctrinal associations, on the basis that the project of the state is a project of deliverance in this world governed by religious values, and the associative community does not guarantee deliverance except to the extent that the project of the state reflects well on it without oppressing anyone else…. This means that through the political democracy that is realised or extended to the social level there is justice on the basis of freedom or liberties ordered by production, circulation and exchange. At this point I can confirm the individualism of worldly deliverance, allowing us to abolish the argumentation of political and sectarianism and cronyism, and I can confirm it by means of the individualism of deliverance in the next world, which itself is compatible with God's divine justice though which Tawhid [God's unity] is achieved, according to Islamic writers.
 

'Every man's fate we have fastened on his own neck: On the Day of Judgment we will bring out for him a scroll which he will see spread open (It will be said to him: 'Read thine (own ) record; sufficient is thy soul this day to make out an account against thee'. [al-Isra: 13 – 14].

'Then when the trumpet is blown, there will be no more relationships between them that day. Nor will one ask after the other.' [al-Mu'minin: 101].

'To Us shall return all that he talks of And he shall appear Before bare and alone'. [Maryam: 80].

'And Every one of them will come to Him singly on the Day of Judgment' [Maryam: 95].

'And behold, ye come to Us bare and alone as We created you For the first time.' [al-Ana'am: 94]

'Whoever works evil will be requited accordingly' [al-Nissa: 123]

'On that day man will flee from his brother, his mother and father, his companion and his son'. ['Abasa: 24].

Were it not so, then how could we guarantee the adequacy of formal fidelity without the ethical commitment and the just behaviour of the Ahl al-Bayt [prophet's family], Peace be Upon Them, and 'Ali Bin Abi Taleb who addressed Malik Bin Ashtar when he made him Wali of Egypt, saying: 'may the most beloved of your affairs be such as this – the most central in truth, the broadest in justice, and do not play the savage lion with them, taking over their livelihoods. They are of two types. Either they are your brothers in religion or you counterparts in creation'. What does the civic state mean? What does individualism mean? Something that does not violate the community , demolish nor comprise it, what does it mean, if not the complete equality that created symmetry in creation through the power of fraternity in religion as a rationality committed to justice, whereby the ruler is put under the responsibility of the ruled in the sense that he is a hireling, as Imam 'Ali expressed it? And how could it guarantee the emulation of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, including ‘Umar Bin ‘Abdul ‘Aziz, the glowing model of impartiality and justice who began to apply justice in his own home to restore rule to the family and then to the people. ‘Umar who before he became Caliph, bought a garment for one thousand dirhams and it was rough on his body, and after he had become Caliph bought one for two dirhams and it was coarse on his body. ‘Umar who began his rule by trying to unite with the ‘Alawis and the Kharijites in dialogue and recognition of difference until he paid the price of his life for the pluralism that he sought and was committed to, concurring with one who terminated his rule by saying: ‘Do not fight the Kharajites after me: he who seeks the truth and errs is not like he who seeks falsity and attains it.’

And so, the disagreement does not emerge from the generic origin. As for fighting, all history and all thought witnesses that 'Ali was in a position of defence, always seeking a mutually satisfactory compromise, even if it was at the expense of the private project which he withdrew in the face of the public project, and he remained attached to its correctness and theoretical superiority. Governing the criterion: 'I will submit, on condition that the affairs of the Muslims are entrusted and there is no violence in them except in exceptional cases', How can it be God's justice for Paradise to be open to the Shah of Iran or Saddam Hussain and for it to be closed to Mother Teresa? If it was His will then Pinochet and Pol Pot and Milosevic will be delighted with a justice that favours the killer over the killed. God forbid!

The Wilayat al-Faqih undertaking by the religious state in the Shi’a Islamic trajectory, versus the Sultanate Caliphate in the Sunni Islamic trajectory; and the contentiousness of the Wilayat al-Faqih issue in Shi’a Islamic legal thought due to the disagreement over the meaning of its evidence and the complexity in the language of this evidence between the judge and the Wali in the form of the ruler, in addition to disagreement over its sources that are established by knowledge of the hadith and learning, and the aloof or rejectionist stance of most of our jurisprudents throughout the long history of this evidence, meant that leading Shi’a jurisprudents after the great occultation in the first third of the fourth century Hijri (329 Hijri) were occupied with adapting their legitimate relationship with the state. They rejected or accepted the expanding or contracting limits between one station and another according to the measure of justice and the area of freedom available, from the era of the Albuihi to the age of the Ottomans passing through the Abbasids in their various stages and finishing with the most severe cruelty and ignorance in the Seljuk era, up until the two Safavid and Qajar eras, and going on to the al-Bahlawi, on the basis that when there is no 'Dawla Faqiha' [jurisprudential state], then there is no custodianship for the jurist in the absence of the inviolable Imam, and that the deputyship of the just jurist does not exceed what is agreed upon in matters of Hisba [Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong]. The Sunni Islamic jurist settled the matter prematurely and with al-Mawardi legally grounded the predominant state. Al-Mawardi at the time was a political faqih to the Shi'a Albuihi state where the senior Shi'a jurisprudents were found (al-Aayid, al-Murtada and al-Tawsi). Even the authorisation for appointing the Caliph - legitimised by the ‘Ahl al-Hal wa al-‘Aqd’ - those who lose and bind [the elite actors] - reached the stage of justifying the predominance or overpowering nature and legitimacy of the state.

This was because the circle of the elite " people of Aqd and Hal"  were narrowed in terms of the reality, that people "of Aqd and Hal" become one and single and this decision becomes binding on all. Hence, the conception of crown prince emerged against the text of the previous Imam with the subsequent Imam to the Shiites as a source of contention between their groups: what would perish and what would remain.

because the circle of the elite worked to block off the Caliphate XXXXX the same and their decree was obligatory for everyone. From here the ‘Wilayat al-Ahd’ [custodianship of the contract] came about, juxtaposing the text of the former Imam with that of the present Shi'a Imam, which comprised a source of disagreement between their groups: what would perish and what would remain.

The Imam Shaikh Muhammad Mahdi Shams ad-Din says in his book ‘The Regime of Government and Administration in Islam’ proceeding from the issue in Sunni Islamic jurisprudence that what is considered in the appointment of the Caliph is the consensus of the elite in the Islamic Umma. Some of them who met in the Caliphate’s centre (first of all Medina) agreed on the condition of the purity of the succession. Some of them did not stipulate their consensus; some of them were content with five of them [agreeing], and some of them were content with one.  All together, they ‘maintained that the elite’s pledge of allegiance had no value in itself, and its value was that it revealed this person to whom the pledge of allegiance was made had been nominated by God and His Prophet to be their Caliph on earth. [According to them] the role of the Caliph was entirely the role of the Prophet, although the Prophet was appointed directly by God, whereas the Imam was appointed by the elite.’

This behaviour is not currently agreed upon by the people of political Islam, who are adopting the Islamic state project, and the contemporary undertaking in this sphere has infringed and encroached on all dimensions of the Sultanate state from the Umayyad era to the Ottoman age and is connected to the method and application of stipulations of efficiency and justice, irrespective of the mechanism of forming the state. At a time when there is a Shi’a jurisprudential trend paving the way for the undertaking of the civic state from an epistemological position which does not put it in opposition to religion or as its antitheses, but rather methodologically distinguishes between religion and politics from one perspective, and between religion and the state from another, and limits control over the Umma, it is for the Prophet and the Imam, provided that he is present, and in his absence the Umma becomes the master of control over itself. There are jurisprudents using the term ‘the Umma’ in its general literary and historical sense; i.e. without requisitioning the right of the Islamic peoples to establish their nationalist state on the basis that unity as a subjective equivalent to Tawhid [God’s unity] is preserved in the unity of public assembly that preserves the investitures of unity in the multitude and respects the investitures of the multitude in unity. There is no reason to ignore the fact that there are Sunni jurisprudents - from Muhammad ‘Abdih to ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Razzaq to contemporary intellectuals and jurisprudents, who engage with the Shi’a civic trend in a communal space which extends daily through dialogue and the inclusive or clear adoption of the transformation of what is moderate into a collective institution avoiding dangers and extremism posed to religion and worldly affairs at one. This method ties in with the Quranic text that speaks of appointing Caliphs and says that to God, the Caliphate means government:

 ‘O David! We did indeed make thee a vicegerent on earth: so judge thou between men in truth (and justice): Nor follow thou the lusts (of thy heart),’Sad 26.

 Building on the foundations in the verse on the appointment of the Caliph:

 ‘We did indeed offer the Trust to the Heavens and the Earth and the Mountains; but they refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof: but man undertook it;- He was indeed unjust (to himself) and ignorant(of its results)Al-Ahzab72’.

So it is God Who appointed man as Caliph and the concept of this Caliphate in Islam, and God deputized the human community to govern and lead the universe socially and naturally. On this basis the theory of the people governing themselves and the legitimacy of the human community governing itself is established.

I will avoid generalising and launching into my convictions and prejudices, although the things said by other proponents of the religious state are convictions, or prejudices in the end, and we should be aware of letting ourselves go and generalising things that are not certain knowledge, but rather efface knowledge. Despite my deep respect for Iran, it is not yet complete, and it does not appear that it will be completed in a comprehensive way: i.e. with complete conformity between religion and the state, because the problem of the reformists, whether they conquered or were defeated, means that the area of agreement over the project of the successful religious state was never unanimous, whether during the period of Imam al-Khomeini, or now. Meanwhile the space for objection extends into the religious and the civil realms together. This by its nature creates the opportunity for those who want to do so to say that the issue is a dilemma, even in the religious centre, let alone in the Taliban and al-Qa’ida, and even in the centre of the exemplary Muslim brotherhood. There have been speeches about the dilemma of the problem, and the last such text is the covenant of the Islamic Society in Beirut. The behaviour of Hizbullah in Lebanon since the beginning of the nineties, despite my conviction that the experience in Iran had become forced to exceed itself, any development to its theoretical framework in keeping with its organisational situation as a civic state will bring it to its logical end by transforming the Wilayat al-Faqih from a restrictive belief into a nurturing idea on the progressive path in the civic trend.

Even if we are satisfied that our situation in Lebanon for example will not devolve into a contest surrounding the state and religion, there remains the contest over the state and sectarianism. Until we develop a more civic character in content and form, I confirm that whatever resentment some people see in religious and sectarian pluralism in Lebanon, there is grace within it – the grace of our obligation and commitment to the civic state, and we are invited to rescue this grace which is mixed with resentment, i.e. through more democracy at the expense of sectarianism perhaps it will cease and the different sects will remain as social joints continuing from the nationalist origin under the cover of the law.

Confident in the law that there is always either too much of something or too little, immoderation or negligence: I complain that I have difficulty with the secularist holist, ideological discourse, that overlooks the dilemma in the issue considering it as a problem that can be solved by a fatwa [legal opinion] by the faqih, or the popularisation of political secularism.

I will be frank: the founding Islamic text, the Quran first and foremost - because its authority is certain, even if its meanings are probable [Thani], meaning that it gives certain knowledge, and sometimes varied and multiple articles of knowledge – is not compulsory in its findings except to whoever commits himself to it (they are committed to what they have committed themselves to). This is a basic precept in the sphere of jurisprudential disagreement.

The Quran does not describe a state, but it describes a community. If the Quran is the horizon of religious law, then the faqih [jurist] cannot transgress it. This means that it is not his business to describe the form of the state or the way of forming it, rather he describes its justice and oppression and urges justice and strongly dissuades oppression, so that if the oppression reached an excessive level, jurists on both sides of the political strata have learned to work together for change, on the basis of justice, impartiality and progress. Freedom is one of the conditions and here the jurisprudent plays his role in the first rank as an individual citizen and civilian. In the philosophical foundations of the issue, the society may be seen as a cultural challenge into which religion enters in its invariable form, whilst in the state there is variation. The variable is methodologically preserved in what is fixed, just as what is fixed is preserved in the variable, but without any specific prior plan, because the state as a social necessity is a mobile concept which is evaluated by its conditions.

Are these long preludes sufficient to call for an agreement now that the issue is a dilemma and not just a problem, and this dilemma can be transported into a series of sub-branches of dilemmas, the dilemma of religion and the state, of the individual and the community, of religion and the civic society; the dilemma of religion as an essential or historical entity, the dilemma of religion as a subjective and objective regulator, the dilemma of religion and politics, the fixed and the variable, the sacrosanct and the historic, the past and the present and the questions of the future, the dilemma of democracy and secularism in their constitution as a ready-made description or a concept which is shaken by and open to history and memory and the private structures of different peoples. All of these dilemmas meet with a series of questions leading on from them. Questions like who guarantees that the definitive separation between religion and state will not change into a secularist religion (every philosophy has its own metaphysics). This is what Marx posited early on. Isn't President Chirac's behaviour a sort of religion against religion? So secularism is in danger of being changed into a closed creed, and creeds do not construct civilisation: it is rationality that constructs it. Rationality is both created and creates, and where it not so then it would not be rational. Questions asking about the need for transcribing the experience of the Church with the State, first established at the convention of Niqiya (325 hijri), and the mutual and continuous sources between the state and religion, and recording them in Islam. Senior 'Ulama have openly stated in their long history that Islam is a civic religion: the inaugurator of the city whose text is revealed to the city and not the other way around.

If our model for imitation is Turkey or Tunisia, then I have some reserves, because the secular or civic state is a project for renaissance and modernity according to the hypothesis, and the negative experience of the Ottoman state is not enough to serve as a pretext for abruptly ending the civic or secular state separated from religion for the sake of progress and modernity in their methodological sense.

If we are serious about searching for a solution, then we must desist from simplification, revolutionary tendencies and monopolisation – i.e. - the solution requires us to desist from cognitive idleness. We need a workshop focussing on what is communal in the multiple fields of learning; we need an historical intellectual bloc with plural and reciprocal learning and visions; and we need to attach importance to particulars and tune them to be integrated with the general picture. I will stop my circumcision and say: the solution may be in the production of our own secularism to exercise methodological criticism of secularism…. As for critiquing religion, that has never ceased, and most of our Ulama are the critics. Ijtihad [independent judgement] means just that, or else it has no meaning or has ceased to be. As for fiqh [Islamic jurisprudence], it makes judgments on topics subject to change, and those judgments are changed according to their topics unintentionally i.e. through their internal laws, and on the basis of the dialectic over imitation and innovation. In addition to that, the cognitive newcomer enters into the mechanism of interpreting the text differently, allowing it to be applied to different cases without falling prey to contradiction or cancelling out the text.

I suggest that together we investigate the project of the state of Medina and thereby preserve our religions and our civic societies, and that we engage with it as the origin of citizenship.
 
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* Islamic Intellectual, Lebanon