I wanted to share some misgivings I had about an op-ed I read recently in the Washington Post. In it a professor of Islamic law attempts to reassure Americans who fear that Muslims want to impose sharia on everyone else. His argument is that classical Islamic jurisprudence distinguishes between fiqh, the rules governing personal religious conduct, and siyasa, the rules by which governments maintain order and promote the public good.
He explains:
Even Muslims can miss this distinction. Too often, I hear American Muslims approach an election by looking for which candidate or policy most closely reflects the religious rules by which they personally live.
I think the author has inadvertently identified the principal weakness in his own argument.
The problem isn’t whether Islamic jurisprudence contains such a distinction. I’ll take his word for that. The problem is that not all Muslims make it. Indeed, he acknowledges as much himself.
There is a tendency in religious communities, hardly confined to Islam, to conflate religious obligations with customary practices. “The way we’ve always done things” becomes “the way God commands us to do things.” Once that happens, distinguishing between personal religious observance and public law becomes considerably more difficult than the author suggests.
There is another complication. Not all Muslims agree about who possesses the legitimate authority to make siyasa. Some believe that authority properly belongs to the caliph. Others recognize different forms of political authority. The author’s suggestion that an American Muslim entering the voting booth is, in effect, standing in the shoes of the sultan is an interesting analogy but not one that all Muslims would necessarily accept.
Nor does accepting the distinction between fiqh and siyasa settle the matter. The author argues that government should act in the public good. But what constitutes the public good? A devout Muslim might quite sincerely believe that requiring everyone to observe certain religious rules would benefit society as a whole. The distinction between personal religious obligations and public policy doesn’t resolve that disagreement.
There is also a difference between acknowledging the authority of a government and regarding that government as religiously legitimate. Muslims who reject the latter may nonetheless accept the former. That distinction deserves consideration, too.
The author illustrates his argument with abortion. He suggests that a Muslim woman deciding whether to have an abortion is asking a question of fiqh, while deciding whether abortion should be prohibited by law is a question of siyasa. I understand the distinction. But if she believes abortion takes an innocent human life, why would that belief cease to inform her understanding of the public good when she enters the voting booth? Secular voters face precisely the same problem.
My principal objection is that the author is attempting to answer an empirical question with a theological argument.
The question that concerns Americans who fear the imposition of sharia is not whether a scholar can construct an interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence compatible with religious pluralism. It is whether Muslims who participate in American political life actually accept that interpretation and act accordingly.
Those are two very different questions.
It would be equally mistaken to assume that all Muslims want to impose their religious practices on others. Islam is not monolithic, and neither are Muslims. But the existence of a jurisprudential distinction between fiqh and siyasa tells us little about how widely that distinction is accepted or how it is applied in practice.
I don’t doubt the author’s sincerity. I think his argument for religious pluralism is worth making, particularly to his fellow Muslims. What I question is whether it provides the reassurance he intends for non-Muslims.
Indeed, when he acknowledges that even Muslims can miss the distinction on which his entire argument depends, he has supplied a reason for asking the very questions he is trying to put to rest.
When this country was founded, religious freedom was pretty much limited to Protestants, and those Catholics and Jews who were around were looked at askance. That nonsense didn’t go away until well after the election of John Kennedy.
The last Caliph was Abdulmecid II, who died in 1924. Thereafter, the Turkish Parliament abolished the Caliphate, so that’s a problem. I’m not sure Shias recognized it anyway. They have ayatollahs.
By the way, when I was on tOSU faculty, I met many students and faculty from Muslim countries. They were largely secularized and westernized, no jihadis or zealots.
One has to note that some Christians also try to impose their religious rules on all Americans, viz the various attempts to require posting of the Ten Commandments in schools and government offices. When I was a boy in Boston, my homeroom schoolmaster insisted that we listen to a reading from the KJV every morning, that in a room full of Catholics and Jews and precious few Protestants—because, of course, everyone used the KJV. Someone should have told Bishop Sheen.
So, from my own experience, Protestants are a bigger problem than Muslims.
In general, true believers try to impose their beliefs on everyone, because otherwise the beliefs are not “true.”