The complaint we frequently hear, and make, is that the governments in the Muslim world are not Islamic; that they either do not implement Shari’ah, do not implement ENOUGH Shari’ah, or that they mix Shari’ah with secular laws. I have seldom met any Muslims who do not agree with this criticism, seldom met any who do not vocalise it; but I have met even fewer Muslims who can actually go into detail about what this criticism actually means.
If we are serious about this, it seems to me we need to get more specific.
We need to make a detailed analysis of the constitutions, legal code, penal laws, legislative system, and governmental structure of each individual country in the Muslim world, and categorise each element according to its compliance or otherwise with the Shari’ah (with evidence).
Obviously, the mere existence of non-Shari’ah regulations does not, in and of itself, constitute a contradiction with Shari’ah, unless these regulations supersede or replace extent revealed laws without valid justification. Even the lack of implementation of some aspects of Shari’ah may be rationalised in some way, and those rationales need to be scrutinised. We also need to agree upon a basic standard of minimum compliance to accurately categorise a government as “Islamic” or otherwise; what are the basal requirements for a government to be considered Shari’ah compliant?
For too long, our answer to that question has been the vague statement that they must “implement Shari’ah”; but that is too abstract to fulfill; unless we want to declare that Shari’ah government only existed for 30 years in our history after the Prophet’s death.
Note that none of the successive governmental forms described by the Prophet that would emerge after his death were described by him as invalid, and he forbade toppling them, unless they were guilty of open disbelief (indicating that non-adherence to the Minhaj ‘ala Nubuwwa does not, in and of itself, constitute open disbelief).
So, if we want Islamic reform of our governments, we need to conduct a serious appraisal of them, law by law, policy by policy, system by system; and produce specific critiques of how each can be improved.