Introduction
The revolutionary events that engulfed the Arab world beginning with the fall of the Tunisian dictator, Zain al-Abidin Ben Ali, in January 2011 brought to the fore long-standing concerns about the relationship of Islam to democracy.
With the failure of the January 25th Revolution in Egypt to usher in a democracy, the collapse of Syria into an all-out civil war, and the establishment of a fragile democracy in Tunisia, conventional analysis has laid the blame for the failure of these revolutionary moments to consolidate democracy on the uncivil and undemocratic role that Islam plays in Arab societies, with Tunisia proving the point: its provision success was largely a result of the fact that its Islamist movement, the Nahda, had become sufficiently diluted in its Islamic commitments that consolidation of democratic rule became possible. Assuming this is true, then the problem of democratization in the Arab world is essentially a theological problem: Muslims, to one extent or another, must either cease being Muslim, or radically revise their inherited understanding of Islam, in order to create space in which democracy can take root. Presumably, the reason why religion must retreat to make room for democracy is that there is an inherent and un-resolvable tension between the claim of democracy that it is the people who should rule, and the claim of religion (at least Islam) that God should rule.Even if this were true, however, and even if we imagined a radical reformation of Islamic teachings that satisfied the demands of those who wish to see Islam retreat so that democracy takes root, we would still need to have an Islamic account of democratic self-governance, so long as it is plausible to believe that at least a substantial minority of Muslims will continue to adhere to traditional Islamic beliefs. This is so because theocracy is not the only threat to democracy.
Democracy also requires an active body of citizens that voluntarily complies with the law. If a substantial portion of the citizens refuses to accept the duties of citizenship and the legitimacy of state law because they deem the obligations of citizenship and the substance of state law to contradict their obligations to God, there is a grave risk that the state will fail in winning the voluntary cooperation of the citizens. In this case, the state will inevitably have to rely on force to implement its will, thereby reinforcing authoritarian rule. As long as a substantial number of citizens in a polity believe in divine sovereignty, therefore, even if that sovereignty is only actualized in the next life, a theoretical account that reconciles the claims of divine sovereignty to the temporal sovereignty of the state must be provided.1This chapter will provide an overview of how the pre-19th-century tradition of Sunni theology and law attempted to reconcile the claims of divine sovereignty to temporal sovereignty, and how its solution to this problem points the way to a normative theory of democratic self-government for Muslim peoples. It begins with a brief account of the distinctive political theology of Sunnism. It then turns to Shihab al-Din al-Qarafi’s understanding of the institutional architecture of Islamic law, and its relationship to the state and individual Muslims. The chapter then turns to the law of the caliphate and demonstrates how, in its mature form, it provided a solution to the problem of political ordering that emerges from Sunni political theology and Sunni conceptions of law by offering a model of government that incorporated the fiduciary ideals found in both consensual relationships, such as the private law of agency, and in non-consensual relationships, such as the duties of guardians over orphans, fathers over minor children, and administrators of endowments to the endowments’ beneficiaries. The Sunnis’ fiduciary conception of state provided a normative basis for both limiting state power and authorizing it to make positive law.
Although such law was not justified by reference to revelation, it could nevertheless be morally binding, provided it met certain pre-requisites (shunt), even if its content went beyond that which revelation commanded. Finally, the Sunni fiduciary theory of the state also provides normative grounds for explaining why democracy is the most effective means of actualizing the Sunni ideals of government insofar as it is the most effective means of giving effect to the ideal of representation that is at the heart of Sunni ideals of political legitimacy. The chapter will conclude with examples of how this Sunni theory of the state could be used to legitimate popular government with robust legislative powers that would authorize the promulgation of morally binding positive law that could resolve many of the historically controversial rules of historical Islamic law without relying on either controversial or far-fetched interpretations of revelation.21