There is nothing binding upon us about the political models adopted by the Companions after the death of the Prophet ﷺ. They organized authority according to what made sense to them at that time and place; it was not a matter of Divine Revelation. It is simply a mistake to assume that because the Sahabah or the early generations of Islam adopted a particular model of government, that this model is THE Islamic model, and any other approach is bid’ah. That is quite absurd. There is nothing cast in stone about how a ruler is to be selected, or how the government should be formed or managed. They strove to adopt the best approach possible which would most effectively uphold the Shari’ah and serve the interests of the Muslims, that was their methodology, and that should be our methodology. The time, place, culture, and circumstances in which they were making these decisions differ from today in more ways than we can list; it follows then that our decisions will be different if we indeed adopt their methodology. The absolute, explicit laws are fixed and do not change, the system for implementing them, however, is not fixed at all.
There is no Islamic reason whatsoever why the population should not have a say in the policies that affect their lives; there is no Islamic reason whatsoever why the people should not choose who their policymakers should be. As I have said many times, the work of government is not to constantly reinvent the legal foundations of the society. Once the fundamental laws are established, as they are in a country’s constitution, or in the case of an Islamic government, the Shari’ah, government simply deals with the social, economic, and political issues within the context of those laws, regardless of who is elected to, or removed from office. It is not as though every time you hold an election the country’s constitution is suspended and the new administration rewrites the legal framework of the society.
Look at any issue in the US, for example the debate over gun ownership. The US Constitution guarantees the right to own a gun. No matter what they may want to see enacted in terms of regulating gun ownership, anti-gun activists can never lobby to make it illegal across the board to own a weapon, because that would be unconstitutional. No law can be imposed that violates the fundamental laws of the country. The US Constitution happens to include provisions for changing the constitution, but there is no reason why a constitution must contain that provision; and certainly no reason why such a provision could not be limited in scope if it were to be included. For example, changes could be allowed to a constitution as long as they did not undermine or deny the supremacy of the Shari’ah.
We have to finally get past this ludicrous notion that democratic mechanisms are somehow contrary to Islam. Democratic processes are our best chance of achieving a more Islamic government; our best chance of countering the colonizing, imperialistic influence of multinational corporations and financial institutions. The West has been working for decades to eliminate the possibility of democracy in our countries precisely because they know that this would make us independent, free, and no longer subservient. And now we actually have Islamists telling us democracy is kufr, so we won’t even think about having a right to participate in policy making. This is the ultimate trick we are playing on ourselves.
We urgently need to discredit this utterly false argument.
#عن_الديمقراطية
#on_democracy