الإسلام والغرب: نحو عالم أفضل

Islam and the West… for a better world @

compartmentalised and integrated. Compartmentalisation was the function of freedom, diversity and societal autonomy, while integration and unity reflected the influence exercised by the ‘ulama on the outlook of the jama‘a and the fabric of its moral values. From the early stages of Islamic history, the body of the Muslim ‘ulama , the learned men, grew independently of, and most of the time in opposition to, the state. By the second Hijri century, the ‘ulama would succeed in precluding the state from possessing the right of legislating. Derivation of laws from the primary Islamic sources became, thus, a duty of the ‘ulama class, a development that would then be incorporated into the fundamentals of Islamic legal theory by al-Shafi‘i in the third Hijri century. In other words, by depriving the state from controlling the process of legislation, the ‘ulama not only set the limits for the expansion of the state power but also cast doubt on its claim of ultimate legitimacy, and placed it in debt to the ‘ulama themselves. Expressions of the faith, the living shari‘a , therefore, lay not with the state, but with the community of believers. By the middle of the Abbasid period the whole nexus of social organisations: waqf , education, artisan and merchant associations, courts, ifta’ (juriconsultation), and market inspection ( ihtisab ), were all in the hands of the ‘ulama class. 19 From the community’s perspective, the condition of the state, powerful or weak, just or unjust, was largely irrelevant to the condition of Islam and society. The pervasive influence of the ‘ulama made shari’a the all-embracing discourse of society, the basis of its moral order, the source of its laws and the referential framework of its worldview. But if renunciation of shari‘a is tantamount to society’s abandonment of its Islamic identity, only by embracing the community could shari‘a flourish as a living discourse. 19 On the making of traditional Islamic Society, see Basheer M. Nafi, The Rise and Decline of the Arab-Islamic Reform Movement (London: ICIT, 200), 4-9. On the relationship between the ‘ulama and the state in the early Islamic era, see Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), vol.1 349; Ira Lapidus, “The Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic Society,” International Journal of Middle east Studies , 6 (1975): 363-85.

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