Scholars' Corner

Religion and the State:
An Islamic Perspective

Professor Sulayman S. Nyang
Howard University

Good evening, rabbis and religious leaders from the Baltimore area and beyond, distinguished ladies and gen-tlemen. I am very happy to join you again for a second discussion on the Islamic view of the relationship be-tween religion and politics, or religion and the state.

When we look at religion and the state in the Islamic context, we have to look at it historically and theologi-cally. In the course of my presentation you will see me traveling on the historical path, while at the same time drawing your attention to certain theological arguments that have been made over the centuries by Muslim theologians and thinkers. Of course, the issues become more relevant today because of the impact of modernity on Muslim societies; the whole question of seculariza-tion; the redefinition of citizenship; the relationship between citizenship and the state, citizenship and reli-gion; and the relationship between one religion and another under the rubric of a political society.

We may consider Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism as the major religions of humankind that have consequences politically for other groups, especial-ly religious minorities. When you look at Islam historically, what you recognize is that one of the prob-lems -- and it has also been a boon to some extent for some Muslims -- is the fact that the Prophet Muhammad succeeded politically during his lifetime. This has conse-quences for Muslims in the sense that the historical and the theological became conflated in terms of the under-standing of politics. This has created a precedent that some Muslims have used, as if theology sanctioned the historical manifestation and the historical manifestation justified the theology. This notion has occasioned de-bate within the Muslim community as it pertains to recent events.

If you look at the young Muslim community in Mecca, where the Prophet spent most of his ministry or most of his career as a prophet, you find that the Muslims were a minority living under a political system controlled by the non-believers. If you look at the Quranic verses we call "Meccan verses," you will see the Quran sanctioning some kind of pluralism, even though it deplored the prac-tices of the idol worshipers who controlled the power. In that case, the Quranic verse would say: "To you your religion, and to us our religion." So you can see the co-existence, even though there is no acceptance of idolatry, because political power was in the hands of the non-believers.

When the persecution in Mecca became very severe, the Prophet asked his followers to find sanctuary in Ethi-opia, where Christians ruled. There they were refugees, but they were accepted by the Christian ruler. That was the first migration for Muslims. Later on Muslims would find sanctuary to the north of Mecca in what was called Yathrib [Medina]. In the second location, where they found sanctuary in Medina, the Muslims now found themselves in a situation where they formed a majority, but there were Jewish minorities and other groups who did not believe. Muslim historians would say that in Medina the Prophet was able to exercise political authority by virture of a contract (they used the term "covenant") that was worked out between the dominant Muslim group and the other groups that were not part of the Muslim community.

If you read Muslim political thought, you will see some of the Muslim writers will try to go back to Medina and say, "Here you have an idealized state where the Muslims became the majority but somehow they worked out a covenant with the other groups." Of course, some of the critics of Islam will say, "But when they became domi-nant in Medina, they were able to use state power to suppress some of the other groups that were not toeing the dominant party line." Thus there was tension, not only in the Muslim community, but also among the members of a subgroup within the Muslim community who were looked upon by the majority as hypocrites. They called them Munafiqun. This was one of the earliest instances where there was conflict between citizenship defined by religion and citizenship defined by sociology and politics. That kind of internal pluralism continued to be a problem in many Muslim societies throughout the centuries.

The other kind of pluralism is external pluralism, the rela-tionship between the young Muslim community headed by the Prophet himself, and the Jewish community, which was the most significant minority, religiously speaking. Here you have a seesaw: there were times when relations were very good, and times when relations were not very good. This situation is embodied in various texts in the Quran. That's why, when you read the texts in the Quran with regard to the relationship between the Muslims and the Jews, there is no verse that applies across all times. The texts have specific contexts in terms of the contestation for power in Medina at any particular time.

So when you really look back at the nature of politics in Medina, you can see that Muhammad emerged not only as a prophet, but also as a lawgiver; he became a statesman and a politician of some sort. This would become an example for many Muslims in the sense that some Muslims, especially militant Islamics today, want to recreate Medina. They say, "We want to go back to the ideal model." But that was about 1,400 year ago, human history has changed, and there has been a lot of trans-formation in the nature of politics and power. But this is a model that appeals to some of the Islamic militants today who would like to replicate contemporaneously what happened historically in the life of the Prophet. So you can see the tension there with regard to what has happened in recent events.

When Islam moved out of Arabia and the majority of the people who were living within the Islamic community were Christians, there were now two groups that were coexisting with this emerging Muslim political force. You had the Christian majority, which had been the dominant group, part of the Byzantine empire, which the Muslims conquered; and you also had Zoroastrians, who were Iranians and who were now also part of this emerging political state. This happened after the death of the Prophet, so there was no revelation. The Muslim scholars and jurists had to create the relationship between these groups and the emerging state. Some of the Muslim jurists came up with a term, which is not in the Quran, that they used to define these new groups that were part of the political system but were not Muslims.

So you have within the political system two distinct categories. There were those men and women who were Muslim and whose membership in the society was defined at two levels -- at the political level, and at the religious level. So in this case, given the Medinan model, you have the conflation of political identity and religious identity. The non-Muslims, those people who were called ahl al-Kitab in the Quran, meaning "the people of the book," i.e., Jews and Christians, became part of the community, but they were not given certain rights that Muslims had. They were not allowed to go to war and fight for the state. In exchange for not going to war, they paid a poll tax. So the Muslim army was exclusively reserved for Muslims. Muslims would go and fight and die for the political state, but Christians and Jews would pay poll taxes but would not be on the battlefield. That was one of the attributes of citizenship that was denied to Jews and Christians. They could support the war effort, but in a non-combatant capacity.

At that time the governments were not organized as they are today. You had only one person who was the caliph, and he had his council of advisors. His council of advisors formed an exclusively Muslim enclave. In that regard again, the whole question of citizenship and political participation was religiously defined. The group that was called the dhimmi, meaning "the people of the book," became part of the system, but they were also not part of the system, if we look at it in modern terms and how we define citizenship in the modern society today. In terms of the military, they were not involved. Neither did they pay zakat [obligatory charity]. All members of the Muslim community had to pay 2.5 to 5% of their assets every year, whereas the ahl al-Kitab paid a poll tax that was much less than the tax that the Muslims were supposed to pay.

What complicated the whole question of political identity and citizenship at that time was the fact that the Chris-tians and the Jews were somehow bracketed from the legal system in the sense that each of these two communities handled its own affairs in terms of juris-prudence. If you were a Jew and you had any kind of civil or criminal matter, that matter would be dealt with by your community. The rabbis would arbitrate among Jews. The same thing was done with the Christians. We see echoes of that also much later in the history of the Muslims in the Ottoman empire, when they had what they called the Milet system. The Milet system was a reformulation and modification of the dhimmi practice that was tried in Syria when the Muslims expanded out of Arabia into Syria and Baghdad.

The problem is that when you move beyond "the people of the book," those who were Abrahamics -- Christians and Jews, you also have Buddhists and Hindus living in Muslim societies. What do you do with these people? How do you classify them? Some of the Muslim jurists tried to stretch the category of dhimmi, saying that these too were also "people of the book," and they also received revelation of some sort, although possibly it was distorted. This was not in the Quran; the Quran did not provide a basis for their acceptance. But the statements attributed to the Prophet Muhammad lent credence to what the jurists tried to do, because one of the statements was that God sent His messengers to all human beings, and He sent His law to all human beings. So there is no ethnic group, no tribe, no race, no soci-ety in history that could claim on the Day of Judgment that they had no prophets. The total number of proph-ets came to 124,000. These were the people sent as messengers by God to all humankind at different periods in history. On the basis of this non-Quranic passage attributed to the Prophet, some of the political leaders and the jurists (fuqaha) began to play political casuistry. They stretched the term dhimmi, which was exclusively applied to Jews and Christians because they were closer to the Muslims, in order to provide room for the Zoroastrians, the Buddhists, and the Hindus. This was especially true in Iran, and in South Asia when Muslims became dominant there and some of those groups were beginning to live under Muslim rule.

Many Muslim thinkers throughout history have debated the nature of politics and religion. The first instance in Islamic political history when the nature of membership in the community became problematic was when the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, was assassinated. That raised the whole issue of who is a member of the political community, why, and what is one's relationship to the state. After the assassination of Uthman, Ali Ibn Abu Talib, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet, was voted by the majority of the people in Medina to be the successor. This was contested by Muawiyya, which raised the first political contestation as to the legitimacy of the ruler and the basis on which people identify with him or her.

Then one of the first radical puritanical groups that resorted to terrorism, the Kharijites, also emerged. They came up with their own understanding of the nature of society, who belongs and who does not belong. For them anyone who did not fit the criteria they spelled out for membership would be consided an unbeliever and be killed. So a fellow Muslim who did not meet their criteria could easily be disposed of because they felt that he did not belong, he was not really a genuine citizen, because their understanding of theological or religious membership defined their political understanding of membership. So in this case they conflated religious membership with polit-ical membership, but they added to it their own subjective interpretation as to who belongs or who does not belong. Of course, this created a lot of havoc in the history of Islam.

As a result of the political state of affairs at that time, there were a number of people who came up with dif-ferent philosophical reactions to the nature of power, the nature of the political community, and the role of the individual in the political community. There were, for example, those people called in Islamic history the Murjiites. Those are people who decided to sit on the philosophical fence, letting others fight it out while they left everything to God. Another group was called the Mutazilites. They were the rationalists. The Mutazilite school disappeared, but it has been resurrected over the last 150 years as a result of the Islamic encounter with modernity and the greater celebration of rationality among humans today. The Mutazilite school in Islam defined membership in terms of being a believer, but it also provided elbow room for diversity because of a belief that the human being has to apply reasoning in relating to other people. On the basis of rationality one can create that elasticity and open up the field. This made them very different from the Murjiites, who would sit on the fence, and from the Kharijites.

Yet another school of thought became dominant. These are the Asharites. Many of the Muslim thinkers who came subsequently -- people like Imam Al-Ghazali and others -- came to reinforce this position. What they found was that, in order for us to be good believers, the most important thing really is for us not to conflate political power and spiritual life. We should not assume that those who have political power are going to be very righteous and spiritual. The most important thing in society is to make sure that there is law and order and stability. Better to be governed by a benign dictator so that we can realize our dream of serving God here below than to have absolute freedom and chaos where we cannot even serve God.

In the original arrangement, political leadership was fused with spiritual leadership. Those who succeeded the Prophet combined in their person both spiritual authority, by virtue of being successors to the Prophet, and political authority, by being the custodian of the state. The relationship between them and the members of society was defined on the basis of the people's recognition of the legitimacy of the leader and their willingness to pledge their loyalty and obedience to him. This is something like the modern notion of balloting: when you vote for a candidate, in an Islamic sense you are pledging loyalty and obedience to that person so that he would be your political authority -- as the Quran says, you give loyalty and obedience to God, to the Prophet, and to "those who can tie and untie." This means they have state power, and this gives them the authority to jail people or to free them. They also have the authority through the state and through the law to punish people by taking their life, if need be, because they pose a threat to society.

As a result of this development, what happened in many Muslim societies is that there was a gradual bifurcation of political power, which was increasingly taken over by people who controlled the military, and not by the scholars or by the religious leadership. Historically, then, you begin to find scholars saying, "Since we no longer have the duality, the religious leader-cum-politician or statesman ruling us, as it was under the example of the Prophet and those who succeeded him, now what we have to do is to make sure that whosoever captures political power shows fidelity to the body of laws called Shariah." This is how the whole question of Shariah entered the political equation. During the life of the Prophet, Shariah as Muslims know it today did not develop, because during his life the Prophet was the source of legal development. He received revelation, and people acted on the basis of that revelation. So he became not only a prophet, but also a lawgiver.

As a result of the termination of prophecy, people had recourse to the Quran as the basis of political legiti-macy, and they also had recourse to the body of statements and deeds attributed to Muhammad (the hadiths). This is how pluralism developed among Muslims in the sense that there were many schools of thought -- the Maliki, the Shafai, the Hambali, and the Hanafi schools -- with regard to interpreting the Shariah through the Quran or the texts attributed to the Proph-et. All the different schools that existed were lumped together under the Sunni tradition. So Sunni political thought was very much pluralized by virtue of this diversity of opinion as to how to interpret the example of the Prophet and how to interpret the Quranic texts. The political leader running the society was scrutinized by the fuqaha, the jurists, who were looking at his actions and decisions in terms of their fidelity to the Quran. So the jurists became the people who made sure that the leader did not deviate from the Shariah. Of course, some of these jurists ended up in jail because the leaders were not always willing to obey or accept their inter-pretations.

These jurists were able to do what American jurispru-dence calls today "judicial review," something that in the American context is traced back to Justice Marshall, where the Supreme Court can say, "That is unconstitu-tional." In the Islamic tradition, the fuqaha, the jurists -- who were not organized the way the Supreme Court is organized; these were independent scholars -- were watching what the leader was doing, and they were watching the body of law that was being practiced in the society. So if they saw that the sultan, the ruler, was beginning to contravene the established practice of Islamic Shariah, they would say, "This is not in ac-cordance with what we know of Shariah"; and they would try to strike it down. Of course, they had no legal means to implement [reform]. Some of them ended up in jail because the sultan may not have liked their inter-pretation of the Shariah or the judgment of his behavior. At that time they did not have the modern institution of the last two or three hundred years that we now identify as the "separation of powers." So you had this body of scholars who were watching the texts. They knew the texts. They knew what was done by their an-cestors, who were jurists, and they knew the practices and traditions. But they were really not institutionally supported in any kind of division of power to the point that they could [change] institutionally what they felt was wrong.

Power was in the hands of the sultan, who controlled the armies. He was able to do what he wanted to do so long as he was able to convince the majority of the people in the society that he was not going against Shariah. I think this has become the acid test historically in terms of Muslim society, and this has also accounted for authoritarianism in Muslim societies. To the point that today, if you look at many of these Muslim countries, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and others, the government structure is based on Shariah, and the leaders of that society will claim that they are living according to Shariah. Of course, the opposition will say that they are not living up to the Shariah. But they don't have any institutional mechanism by which to put the leaders' feet to the fire. The only way you can have any kind of change is when you have this kind of uprising. That becomes the basis of political uprising in Islam. Muslims scholars got divided on this issue. There were those who felt that it was better to have a benign authoritarian ruler who did not allow chaos in the society than to have people insisting on their rights to the point that you had chaos in the society.

Now how do you balance citizenship rights on the one hand, and the power of the state on the other? This is an issue that is still unfinished business in many Muslim countries. This is where we come to modernity, and the manner in which modernity has affected Muslim socie-ties. If you look at Muslim political thought and political practices over the last two hundred years as a result of Muslim encounter with an increasingly powerful Western society that has also gone through political transforma-tion beyond medieval politics, the point that is usually missed by both Muslims and Western people is the fact that over the last two or three hundred years, human beings have gone through a major revolution in terms of defining the nature of politics, the nature of citizenship, and the relationship between the church and the state. The advantage that Westerners now have vis-à-vis the Muslims or the Buddhists or the Hindus and some other groups is that many of the issues that are being grappled with in Muslim societies have been dealt with before by Western societies.

When Henry VIII challenged the pope and got away with it and was able to establish a new relationship between church and state, you now had somebody who combined in his person the role of the pope and the role of the king together. In this regard you now have a precedent that has been established for human history. The Queen of England does not rule anymore because over time, going back to the time of John and the Magna Carta, the authoritarian kings have been forced by democratic forces in English society to yield greater power to Par-liament, to the point that the Parliament now wields the power that previously was monopolized by the king. This becomes very important for Muslims: Will the Saudi Ara-bian king travel the British path in defining citizenship in Saudi Arabia? If you look at the world system today, there are five models of church-state relationship, and the Muslim world is being forced by modernity to re-examine its own past and its own history and see to what extent it is going to adjust to one of the five. One of the five, by the way, is drawn from the Muslim world. That's Indonesia. I'll give you these five models, and then I'll sit down.

If you look at the nature of the relationship between church and state and how these new relationships have evolved as a result of the human encounter with modernity, you can see where the Muslims are now being forced to look at the whole question of citizenship, the nature of religion in society, and the relationship between church and state, both domestically and internationally. The five models that have emerged as a result of the encounter with modernity are the following. I already mentioned the revolution that was brought about by Henry VIII in England and the evolution of British society to the point that it is today, where you have Queen Elizabeth II as the head of the Church of England, the Anglican Church, and she is also sitting on the throne. So in her case, she is wearing two hats: She is the reigning queen of England, and at the same time she is the head of the Church of England. That model is very different from the American model. In the American model, President Bush is not the head of any church. In fact, the Constitution does not allow him to do that. In England the Queen is the head of the church, so in England there is a preference for the Church of England. But that preference does not translate negatively at the expense of Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and others living in England.

In Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, the authoritarian regimes will have to yield two things. In Saudi Arabia, the ruling leadership must not only accept full citizen-ship for Jews who may be Saudis, or Christians who are Saudis; but, more significantly, the ruling families or the ruling authorities must be willing to allow another body to exercise the powers that they now exercise. That's what happened in England historically.

The American model is different from the British model, as I just pointed out to you, in the sense that the First Amendment allows a unique thing. This is one thing Americans take for granted. They should fight to keep that. What makes Americans different from all human groups historically, what makes American society unique in the history of humankind is that the Americans are the only human group that did not begin its history with a king. All other groups started with kings. Italians had kings, Poles used to have kings, Russians had kings, right? Chinese, Africans, all of them. Americans don't have a king. Hamilton wanted George Washington to be called George I, but Patrick Henry and Jefferson and Madison said, "Hell, no! No, no, no!"

France is the third model. The French, unlike the Ameri-cans, were fighting two monsters, according to their rhetoric. They were fighting the king and the church. When President Bush took the oath of office, he could hold the Bible. No French president will hold a Bible. That's anathema! You can't do that in France. You become president holding the Bible to take office? No. Because the church was defeated in France, and they came up with the concept of laïcité. I will illustrate this to show you how the American model is different from the French model. This is likely because of the combina-tion of history and political ideology for the French secular revolutionaries, Robespierre and others.

In France the Catholic nun is dressed almost identically as the Muslim hijabi. You cannot make a distinction. But why is it that in France the Catholic nun is accepted and the Muslim hijabi is not accepted? The reason is very simple, and it is French logic, Cartesian logic. The Cath-olic nun represents a defeated symbol, whereas the hijabi woman reminds the French republic of defeat in Algeria. That is one of the reasons why the French are very puzzled by America. Here Jews can wear kippot, Muslims can wear their hijabis, and the Sikhs can wear their turbans, something you cannot do in France unless you are part of the defeated symbols. These are things we have to think about seriously.

Now when you go to the Soviet Union, when the Com-munists ruled, and in Cuba and in North Korea, where you have the remnants of Communism, they came up with the notion that you cannot be religious. If you are religious, you must be really intoxicated; they called religion "the opium of the masses," right? If you insist on being a devout Christian or a Muslim, you end up in a mental asylum. That's what happened in Russia.

Among the Indonesians (until they had these recent clashes between the fundamentalist groups, who in many cases are fanned from overseas by the interna-tional fundamentalist cartels), the founding fathers recognized that in Indonesia they had five principles. They have Muslims, they have Christians, they have Hindus, they have Buddhists, and they have other tribal religions. All of them were accommodated in Indonesia until, lo and behold, you have these Islamic fundamen-talist groups who are now saying, "We want to take over the power of the country, and we want to make it very Islamic because you don't really practice Islam." So what happened? They went back to the Kharijites, the people who require that everyone fit their definition of a Muslim. Those people became a threat to the Indonesian socie-ty. That is one of the reasons why Indonesia became one of the few countries where there is a minister of religious affairs. Do we have one in America? No, we don't need it. Can you imagine Russian having a minister of religious affairs? Unthinkable. Can you imagine France having one? No way!

That's why I tell people, and I tell this to Muslims, in order for Muslims to wrestle with the questions of modernity, they have to address some of these funda-mental issues that have been debated in the West over the last two hundred years. Before some of these issues were resolved, there were fights between Catholics and Protestants, and then between various denominations. In the end they resolved the issues. In America the founding fathers did not want any of that trouble in Europe, so they came up with a new experiment.

If you want to understand these five models, the best way is to use the dancing analogy. You see, in England the British model favors the Anglican Church. In terms of a dancing metaphor, what the government in England is saying is, "You can all dance to your music the way you want, whether you are Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, or Hindu, but I prefer to dance with Lady ‘X’ occasionally." That favors the Anglican Church in a limited way. In the American situation, the state is saying to all the different religious groups and people who don't believe in religion at all, "Do your thing, but for heaven's sake, don't turn up the decibels too high. You'll drown out the others." What the French are saying is, "You can do your dance, but we are not listening. Don't dance to the point that you insult the national flag and the national ideology of laïcité." The Indonesian model is saying, "O.K., all these different religions in Indonesia, you can all dance your dance, but whenever we who control the state feel like dancing, we can dance with you anytime." Thank you very much.

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