"Religion is for God, and the Nation is for All" and Islam as Ornament
Earlier today on Al Jazeera (the Arabic station), a strong secularist Syrian intellecual from Paris was engaged in a spirited but polite debate with a spokesperson for the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, suggesting that the latter should be welcome with the Syrian opposition, so long as he accepted the mantra "Religion is for God, and the Nation is for all". For you Arabic speakers الدين لله و الوطن للجميع This the spokesperson would not do.
But what he would accept, he said, and did accept repeatedly over the course of years, as did his organization, was the principle of absolute equality under the law for all, irrespective of ethnicity, sect, religion or gender. That legitimacy and authority (marja'iyya was the Arabic term he used) was determined by the ballot box and not granted to any particular ethnicity, religion or sect, that the state was required to have regular, free elections in which majorities would shift and in which each citizen had a perpetual right to participate irrespective of religion, sect, ethnicity and so forth. This did not satisfy the secularist.
Which when a person is a hardened legal realist might well leave them wondering what the heck that was all about. The Brotherhood fellow said precisely the same thing as what the secularist wanted, just differently, you might well think. He pretty much agreed to something that accords all of the people a voice and makes the state theirs, not God's, with rules that can be created and defined by the people, not God, so long as participation is on equal footing through some sort of fair process policing that sounds like it would be enshrined constitutionally, That's John Hart Ely, not Osama Bin Laden. So why the debate over the term?
Part of it is historical, in that the secular forces historically used this mantra from the time of Feisal I, naturally Islamists grew in opposition to that, and so it's sort of like asking a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee to sing about John Brown capturing Harper's Ferry with his nineteen men so true even if the descendant's view of race is far closer to that of John Brown than Robert E. Lee.
But there is something else here too. It is one thing for an Islamist party, or even your average devout Muslim, to accept some basic principles of secular rule. Full equality, equal access to ballot box, people decide who rules, etc. I think the "one man one vote one time" fear was real, back in the 1980's, but Islamists appear in elections nowadays, they even can win them, in Iraq for example, and yet they seem fairly democratic. Not liberal,but democratic. ISCI wins an election, then loses it, the Sadrists rise and fall, and their response when they fall is not to return to militia, but figure out how to expand the base. Primaries, social services and the like. Anyone who reads my posts knows I'm not a Sadrist, but the idea that we have to suppress them because they constitute a threat to the democratic state is just at this point silly--secularist paranoia, crazy as (Herman) Cain, who apparently spends his nights worrying about sharia law in US courts.
Yet they can't quite SAY that God's place is whatever the people choose, and the people will afford Him greater or lesser weight based on electoral result even if that's what authority determined by ballot box and not religious sect means. They can't SAY they don't want the state to be Islamic even if they are describing a secular state. They can't SAY that shari'a is anything but the premier source of legislation when anyone who has spent ten minutes in a room with Arab commercial lawyers knows most of them couldn't tell you three things about shari'a and commerce (remember the prohibitions on interest and speculation are only two). They can't SAY that legislation that offends Islam is fine constitutionally, even if alcohol, money interest and premarital sex are all legal activities in most of these places and the courts find some way to find law as it exists quite fine. It's one thing to advance core secular political ideas, another not to clothe them in Islam as ornament. And even another to come out and state explicitly that God doesn't own something and has no business in it, only the people do, which is more or less what the "to God is religion and to the people is the state" means. That they will never accept.
Yet in all of this is irony. What the Islamist now will accept and demand is precisely what the secular forces demanded of him decades ago. Islam as identity and Islam as ornament, but Islam as absent otherwise in constitutional structure, and absent even in law beyond family law and inheritance. It's a fairly unambiguous retreat. So roll over Awlaqi and tell Sayyid Qutb the news . . . .
HAH
But what he would accept, he said, and did accept repeatedly over the course of years, as did his organization, was the principle of absolute equality under the law for all, irrespective of ethnicity, sect, religion or gender. That legitimacy and authority (marja'iyya was the Arabic term he used) was determined by the ballot box and not granted to any particular ethnicity, religion or sect, that the state was required to have regular, free elections in which majorities would shift and in which each citizen had a perpetual right to participate irrespective of religion, sect, ethnicity and so forth. This did not satisfy the secularist.
Which when a person is a hardened legal realist might well leave them wondering what the heck that was all about. The Brotherhood fellow said precisely the same thing as what the secularist wanted, just differently, you might well think. He pretty much agreed to something that accords all of the people a voice and makes the state theirs, not God's, with rules that can be created and defined by the people, not God, so long as participation is on equal footing through some sort of fair process policing that sounds like it would be enshrined constitutionally, That's John Hart Ely, not Osama Bin Laden. So why the debate over the term?
Part of it is historical, in that the secular forces historically used this mantra from the time of Feisal I, naturally Islamists grew in opposition to that, and so it's sort of like asking a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee to sing about John Brown capturing Harper's Ferry with his nineteen men so true even if the descendant's view of race is far closer to that of John Brown than Robert E. Lee.
But there is something else here too. It is one thing for an Islamist party, or even your average devout Muslim, to accept some basic principles of secular rule. Full equality, equal access to ballot box, people decide who rules, etc. I think the "one man one vote one time" fear was real, back in the 1980's, but Islamists appear in elections nowadays, they even can win them, in Iraq for example, and yet they seem fairly democratic. Not liberal,but democratic. ISCI wins an election, then loses it, the Sadrists rise and fall, and their response when they fall is not to return to militia, but figure out how to expand the base. Primaries, social services and the like. Anyone who reads my posts knows I'm not a Sadrist, but the idea that we have to suppress them because they constitute a threat to the democratic state is just at this point silly--secularist paranoia, crazy as (Herman) Cain, who apparently spends his nights worrying about sharia law in US courts.
Yet they can't quite SAY that God's place is whatever the people choose, and the people will afford Him greater or lesser weight based on electoral result even if that's what authority determined by ballot box and not religious sect means. They can't SAY they don't want the state to be Islamic even if they are describing a secular state. They can't SAY that shari'a is anything but the premier source of legislation when anyone who has spent ten minutes in a room with Arab commercial lawyers knows most of them couldn't tell you three things about shari'a and commerce (remember the prohibitions on interest and speculation are only two). They can't SAY that legislation that offends Islam is fine constitutionally, even if alcohol, money interest and premarital sex are all legal activities in most of these places and the courts find some way to find law as it exists quite fine. It's one thing to advance core secular political ideas, another not to clothe them in Islam as ornament. And even another to come out and state explicitly that God doesn't own something and has no business in it, only the people do, which is more or less what the "to God is religion and to the people is the state" means. That they will never accept.
Yet in all of this is irony. What the Islamist now will accept and demand is precisely what the secular forces demanded of him decades ago. Islam as identity and Islam as ornament, but Islam as absent otherwise in constitutional structure, and absent even in law beyond family law and inheritance. It's a fairly unambiguous retreat. So roll over Awlaqi and tell Sayyid Qutb the news . . . .
HAH
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