Muslim majorities all around the world express their desire to have Shari’ah established as the law of the land where they live; but what does this mean to them? They are not scholars of the law and jurisprudence. For most of them, and for most of us, the issue is vague and abstract. It simply means a government that is just, fair, free of corruption, and not subservient to the West. Most laymen could not tell you much more than this about what Islamic government means. And I include most Islamists in the term “laymen”, for no, they are not scholars either, most of the time. You will hear them talk about the Hudood and about Zakaat, and perhaps the banning of Riba; but no one who advocates Islamic government has much more detail to offer than this.
The opponents of Shari’ah are similarly uninformed, and are even further from any grasp of what Islamic government means.
And the fact of the matter is, this is not a discussion that will ever end as long as no one even knows how to define the terms. Saudi Arabia says they have Shari’ah. Qatar says it is Islamic, so does the UAE, and Kuwait, and in Egypt, the Shari’ah is recognized as the primary source of law in the country. But who among the Islamists regard any of these governments as “Islamic”? Without an actual scholarly definition, we are just dealing with subjective interpretations.
Who among the Islamists can define what an Islamic government is? How it differs from any of the existing regimes that claim to be following Shari’ah? Who among the Islamists even knows what are the explicit absolute legal rulings of the Qur’an and Sunnah? Who among them knows which matters of Fiqh are unanimously agreed upon and which have permissible differences of opinion? No, the Islamic government they advocate is one of their own imaginations; it must be, because they have no design for one.
If a government were established tomorrow that met every requirement defined by the scholars for a genuinely Shari’ah compliant, Islamic government, there would still be Muslims condemning it as un-Islamic, and there would still be Islamists complaining about it. The general public would criticize because we don’t have enough knowledge to know what Islamic government means, and the Islamists would criticize because they are in the business of calling governments un-Islamic.
There is no satisfaction possible from this discussion.
What we can do, and what we should do, is simply to focus on certain issues, particular policies, and specific demands relating to the laws and behavior of our existing governments, to try to change them, reform them, correct them, and make them more compliant with Islamic law and principles.
Now, apart from that, we have another struggle, which is the struggle for independence. It is an anti-imperialist struggle against the domination of corporate power, the economic enslavement of our countries, the subjugation of our societies to the Empire of Capital. This is not something that can be postponed, for the possibility of reforming our governments while they are subordinate to the global owners of capital is absolutely non-existent. We must free ourselves from corporate colonialism before we can hope to rehabilitate our governments. And it would be far more useful for us to focus on this struggle than to continue with the abstraction of establishing an Islamic state which no one can even define.