MI Paper: Major Writings by Kalim Siddiqui
Processes of error, deviation, correction and convergence in Muslim political thought
By Kalim Siddiqui
Bahira was a Christian monk living in Busra. Abu Talib, the Prophet's uncle, had taken Muhammad, then 12 years old, to Al-Sham with a trading caravan. There, Bahira recognized the signs of future prophethood in Muhammad, as told in Christian sources. Bahira advised the Prophet's uncle not to take Muhammad too far into Al-Sham, for fear that the Jews might recognize the signs and try to harm the boy. Many years later in Makkah, another Christian, Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a cousin of the Prophet's wife Khadija, also recognized the signs of impending prophethood in Muhammad's early experiences in the cave of Hira, and delivered a similar warning.
Neither Bahira nor Waraqa knew that Muhammad was the promised prophet, but both shared a sense of history derived from their religion, Christianity. They knew that a prophet would come; they did not know when or where or who he might be. Each recognized the condition of jahilyyah that prevailed in their time required the coming of a prophet. Bahira and Waraqa were relying on Christian sources that were, even in their time, unreliable. Today, 14 centuries after the completion of the Qur'an, the final message of Allah, about which there is no doubt, and after the coming of the last Prophet, it should be easier to recognize signs foreshadowing current and future events.
How accurately we can do so depends on our understanding of the Islamic framework of history. For example, we do not know when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala created the first man, Adam, who was also a prophet. But what we do know is that between Adam, the first Prophet, and Muhammad, the last Prophet, there were perhaps as many as 124,000 other prophets, may Allah's peace and blessings be upon them all. The point is that Allah subhanahu wa' ta'ala clearly took great care and a very long time preparing the world for the coming of the last prophet and for the completion of His message to mankind. All this cannot have been for a matter of about 1,400 years or thereabouts before the end of the world.
The view of history that we Muslims must take is that of course the end of the world will come, but its timing is known to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala alone. He has not shared this knowledge with anyone, not even the prophets. It is, therefore, idle to speculate about it. In the meantime we must remember that, 1,400 years after the completion of prophethood and revelation, Islam has yet to create a world in the image of itself, according to the Creator's own prescription for the world and everything in it. Perhaps a more realistic view is that though Islam as a message and a model was completed 1,400 years ago, the main business of history, that is, bringing all mankind to Islam, is incomplete.
This raises another question: if the very long time before the completion of Islam was merely a ‘preparatory period', how do we explain the last 1,400 years? The jahiliyyah before Islam was perhaps an insufficient experience for man to realize the consequences of deviating form Islam. It may be useful to view these 1,400 years as a practical demonstration of what happens to mankind, especially Muslims, when they deviate from the sirat al-mustaqeem. This could only be demonstrated after Islam had been completed, not before. Perhaps the neo-jahilyyah that prevails in the world today is just such a demonstration.
The deviation form Islam is of two sorts. There are those who never entered Islam, chose to fight it, and built for themselves a civilization and culture of kufr and jahilyyah. Today this civilization of kufr and jahilyyah is represented by western civilization. The civilization is global and includes many non-western sub-cultures, such as the Chinese, Japanese and Indian sub cultures. It also includes some residual religious traditions, for example, post-Renaissance Christianity, zionist-Judaism and militant Hinduism, all of which insist upon repudiating and rejecting Islam. Lastly, the western civilization also includes those Muslims who have, under the influence of colonial domination, accepted the validity of secularism as a way of life. These Muslims represent all the ruling classes in Muslim societies today. The second type of deviation is within Islam. Such deviation is spearheaded by those ulama, of all schools of thought, who, for whatever reason, have accepted and legitimized political, social, cultural and other systems that do not conform with the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet, upon whom be peace. Examples of such deviation, including deviant theology, can be found everywhere.
However, deviation within Islam is mostly error that has accumulated with the passage of time. Such error is relatively easy to correct because the overall framework of Islam that bind the Ummah has now been breached.1 The corrective power of Islam is represented by the inherent taqwa of even those who have erred. There have always existed ulama, of all schools of though, who were willing and able to eliminate error and to bind the Ummah together.
The number of the so-called Ulama committed to fitnah and permanent divisions in the Ummah has always been small, though vocal because they have also enjoyed the political patronage of rulers' bent upon transforming error into long-term, even permanent, deviation. This process of deviation began with Banu Umaiyyah and continues today under the Saudi regime. The nation-States established in the Muslim world by the colonial powers and their ‘Muslim' agents are also designed to make our political deviation permanent.
Some 15 years ago we in the Muslim Institute set out to discover those in the Umma. Both ulama and ordinary Muslims, who would be prepared to participate in the task of research to determine the area within Islam where those suffering from internal error and deviation would be prepared to converge. Our instinct told us that one single Ummah2could only be superficially and temporarily divided. Another instinctive hypothesis that guided us was that the error and subsequent divisions in the Ummah were primarily political and, therefore, temporary. This meant that the process of correction and convergence would have to be led by wither the rewriting of Muslim political thought or by the ‘big bang' effect of a major political event. We were naïve enough to postulate that we could rewrite Muslim political thought and to hope that, some day, our formulations might generate a major political event.3
History, as we now know, had other ideas. Islam, despite error and deviations within it, is such a powerful system of beliefs and ideas that it was bound to produce its own answer to the ills of the Ummah. We should have known all along that Islam, if it was the Whole Truth from Allah, would also include within it the capacity to generate corrective processes at crucial moments of history. Before the coming of the last Prophet, upon whom be peace, this was done by successive prophets who appeared at intervals. Now non-prophetic agents, such as individuals, movements and revolutions perform the role of correction and convergence. Once motivated and activated by the historical situation, the corrective agents must have had the power to move the entire body of Muslims, the Ummah, towards convergence at a central point within Islam. In recent times a number of individuals, and the movements they inspired, have tried unsuccessfully to emerge in the role of the central corrective agents, but failed. Among these were Hasan al-Banna (founder of al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoon) and Maulana Abul Ala Mudoodi (founder of the Jama'at-e Islami). It would seem that the Islamic State could only perform the role of the central corrective agent. Those who failed, failed precisely because they could not establish the Islamic State. The act of establishing the Islamic State would appear to be necessary for a successful transition to the role of the central corrective agent to end error and deviation within the Ummah.
Support for this view is found in the Seerah of Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace. As an individual in Makkah the role of the Prophet was limited to bringing a handful of individuals to Islam. Yet even while in Makkah the Prophet sought and found State protection for his small and of followers. This is the significance of the migration of many early Muslims for Makkah to Abyssina. Once, after the hijrah to Madinah, Islam had undergone transition to Statehood, the spread of Islam to the peninsula was rapid and total. Islam is incomplete without the Islamic State; there is no room for dispute on this point. It has far-reaching implications for the da-wah work undertaken by well-meaning Muslims, as well as for the da'wah work into which the energies of Muslims are being diverted today by those committed to the status quo. That Saudi regime in particular spend vast amounts of money on da'wah in order to absorb the energies of many Muslims throughout the world and to divert them into dead-end activity. But the chief instrument of da'wah is the Islamic State; da'wah without the Islamic State is like an invitation without an address.
The political nature of Islam and the Prophethood of Muhammad, upon whom be peace, was clearly understood by the Quraish of Makkah from the beginning. When the Quriash approached him with a ‘deal' they also offered him kingship. The delegation of the Quraish was led by Utbah ibn Rabiah. The incident is documented in all books of Seerah. The goal of Muhammad's Prophethood was not his personal power or kingship, but the transformation of the area into an Islamic State. Many years later Makkah fell to Islam as the result of a military expedition mounted by the Prophet from the Islamic State that had been consolidated around Madinah. It is the Islamic State that bears the main responsibility for da'wah.
The point that is obscured in modern, apologetic literature of Islam, and neatly sidestepped by the orientalists, is that Islam is not only a message, Islam is also a method. The message of Islam carried by the methods of pacifist Christian missionaries is unlikely to yield the desires results. Such an approach may help to turn Islam into a ritualized religion, but it cannot achieve the goals of Islam. The complete message of Islam includes the method of Islam. This is why there is so much emphasis in Islam on the Sunnah and the Seerah of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace. And this is why the procedures and the historical processes required to establish the Islamic State are inseparable parts of Islam. Islam, therefore, is incomplete without the Islamic State.
The ‘Islamic parties' that emerged during the colonial period often did not grasp this essential point. They understood and presented Islam within the framework of European-style social democracy. For them the Islamic State was only a slightly updated and ‘Islamized' version of the post-colonial nation-State. It only required then winning an election and 'coming to power'. These ‘Islamic' political partied did not realize that there was a colonial legacy to be undone and dismantled. In their simplistic thinking the ‘Islamic State' of their conception would be built on the secular and nationalist foundations of the colonial independent State. What is undoubtedly true is that some of these political parties had perhaps unwittingly borrowed many of their ideas from sources outside Islam.4
The ‘act' of establishing the Islamic State itself comes at the end of a prolonged process of corrective action amongst those ‘lost' within Islam. In the Sunni tradition, one must admit, this corrective process has still hardly begun. Political thought in the Sunni tradition is still lost in the diversions caused by the ‘Islamic parties', Arab nationalism, the Khilafat movement in India, and the easy availability of political patronage for most of the last 1,400 years.
In the Shi'i tradition, on the other hand, the first significant step in the right direction was taken early in their history, as rejection of compromise with existing political systems. Its roots go back to the rejection of Yazid's authority by Imam Husain and his subsequent shahadah at Karbala. The next major corrective step came many centuries later, after Iran had been converted into the Shi'I school of thought in the early part of the sixteenth century. It appeared as a debate among the Shi'I Ulama on what seemed to be a technical matter. This debate, in the seconds half on the eighteenth century was between two groups of ulama known as usli and akhbari. The akhbari (or communicators) held the view that, during the gha'ibah (occultation) of the Twelfth Imam, it is not permissible for religious scholars to engage in the use of reason to enact a certain judgement, to apply the principles of the law to a specific problem or situation. All that could be done was merely to have recourse to hadith (hence the name akhbari), and by sifted hadith reach a conclusion about any particular issue. This school tended towards a total abolition of the discipline of jurisprudence. The ulsi ulama, on the other hand, held that, during the absence of the Twelfth Imam, it was permissible to engage in independent reasoning. One qualified to do so was the mujtahid: he who uses his reason guided by the principles of the shari'ah to make decisions action upon which the general body of Muslims could solve their problems. All Muslims who are not mujtahids must follow the guidance of one who is. This is known as Taqleed. The senior mujtahids, who came to be followed by large numbers of Shi'I Muslims, were call maraje (singular marja or marja'-I taqleed). The argument was won by usli ulama and the akhbari position was abandoned. Hamid Algar points out that ‘the Revolution in Iran, at least the particular shape it was taken, the form of leadership that it has enjoyed and continues to enjoy, would also be unthinkable without the triumph of the usli position... in the eighteenth century.5
The emergence of the usli ulama can be described as the development of a self-correcting mechanism within the Shi'I tradition. How important this was for the world of Islam as a whole is only just beginning to become apparent. In the first phase of this self-correcting process, two things have happened: first the doors of ijtihad were thrown open; and second, there emerged ulama, the marje'-I taqleed, who often exercised greater influence, even powers, than many rulers. For all practical purposes the maraje came to represent an ‘Islamic State' within the larger territorial State. The traditional Shi'I position, that all political power in the absence of the Twelfth Imam was illegitimate and should not be sought, was deep-rooted and the maraje functioned within the umbrella of the Qajar dynasty that has replaced the Safavids in 1795. Throughout this period, from 1795 to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the primary concern of the ulama of Iran was to limit the inevitable illegitimacy of the existing government. It was in this framework that Mirza Hasan Shirazi gave his famous fatwa in 1892 on the consumption of tobacco in Iran being haram if its production and marketing were undertaken by a British monopoly. The ulama's participation in the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (1905-1909) was also made possible by the wider concerns of the usli school.
The otherwise powerful usuli establishment suffered from two weaknesses. The first was the senior ulama's self-imposed abstinence from seeking ultimate political authority; and the second was the multiplicity of the maraje. At any one time a number of Grand Ayatollahs claimed large followings, and often competed among themselves for followers (muqallideen). The two handicaps are closely linked. So long as the ulama did not contemplate the exercise of supreme political power there was no need for a single leader, and so long as there was no single leader, a kind of marja of the maraje, the exercise of ultimate political authority could not be contemplated. These self-inflicted disabilities appeared so entrenched in Shi'I theology that the ruling classes, the dynasties (the Pahlavi sine 1926) and their British and American backers, did not feel threatened from Qum. But the usuli revolution had also opened the doors of ijtihad, begun by usuli ulama, led to the ultimate step, in terms of Shi'i theology, of setting up the Islamic State in the absence of the Twelfth Imam. This is what we have come to call the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
The Sunni ulama, equally ‘lost' within Islam, have still not begun the long an painful task of clearing away the debris of their failures, recovering from their self-inflicted disabilities, and breaking the habit of supine obedience to patronizing rulers. At the moment the worldwide network of ‘court ulama' who serve the Saudi regime (and other secular governments) are the most error-ridden and deviant body of people lost within Islam. If the Sunni ulama would only lift the veil of their prejudice, they should see that Ayatollah Khomeini has brought the Shi'i caravan back to the point where we all started in the first place. In a fatwa issued on January 6, 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini said that Islamic government represents ‘absolute sovereign power as delegated by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to the Prophet, upon whom be peace. This, said Ayatollah Khomeini, ‘is the most important of the Divine precepts (ahkam) and takes precedence over all other secondary Divine precepts'. Ayatollah Khomeini added: ‘If the powers of Islamic government are to be confined within the framework of secondary Divine precepts, then the form of divine rule and absolute sovereignty as delegated to the Prophet, upon whom be peace, would be a senseless and hollow phenomenon.' If this was so, he added, the legislative and administrative powers of Islamic government would be severely restricted. Ayatollah Khomeini went on to give several examples of legislative, administrative, military and economic policies that would be impossible to implement if the Islamic government was bound by secondary Divine precepts. These included the acquisition of private property for major public works, such as new roads, compulsory military service, foreign trade, prohibition of hoarding, customs and excise, taxation and fair pricing of goods and services. Ayatollah Khomeini then argues that ‘Islamic government, which is part of the absolute sovereign power of Allah, Prophet upon whom be peace, is one of the primary precepts of Islam and takes precedence over all the secondary precepts'. The concept that the political power exercised by the Prophet must be inherited in full by the rulers who follow him has always been clear in Sunni thought. This is exactly how the khulafa al-rashidoon understood the source of their authority. The Islamic State is only an extension of the authority of the leader, who is a khalifah (na'ib or vicegerent) of the Prophet. This fatwta from Ayatollah Khomeini7 has completed the long process of corrective action within the Shi'i school that has been at the very heart of the akhbari/usuli controversy. It should be noted that some residual influence of the akhbari position still persists not only in Iran but to a much greater degree among the Shi'i ulama of Iraq, India, Pakistan and Bahrain and among their followers. The leading edge of Shi'i political thought, that of Ayatollah Khomeini and his close associates, has emerged only since the death of Ayatullah Burujirdi in March 1962. It was only then that Ayatollah Khomeini began to give lectures on political issues critical of the Shah and exploring the possibility of government by mujtahids. He was repeatedly arrested during 1963 and exiled to Turkey the following year. In 1965 he moved to Najaf, the great centre of Shi'i learning in Iraq. It was during a course of lectures on Islamic government delivered there in 1970 that he developed the concept of vilayat-I- faqih. This, his fatwa of January 6, 1988, it is probably no exaggeration to say that Ayatollah Khomeini corrected the political deviation of the entire Ummah that began with the advent of the Umaiyyad rule. In terms of the legitimacy of the leadership of the Islamic State, Ayatollah Khomeini restored the situation as it existed during the rule of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth of the khulafa al-rashidoon. This means that, for all practical purposes, in terms of State and politics in Islam, the Ummah has been returned to a point very close to the time of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace.
During this very short period, from 1962 to 1990, history has moved at an extraordinary pace. Students of history are familiar with the leapfrogging relationship that exists between political ideas and political events. At times ideas run far ahead of events, and at other times events shape ideas. For example, the great usuli school that challenged and eventually defeated the akhbari orthodoxy in Shi'i thought can be traced back to Allama Hilli (Jamaluddin Abu Mansur Hasan ibn Yusuf) in the fourteenth century. From the time of his death in 1325 to the triumph of the usuli ideas in Iran in the eighteenth century the pace of change was slow. In the nineteenth century in Iran the usuli ulama, especially the maraje, began to influence political events.7 From 1978-79 until now virtually all political thought, Shi'i and Sunni, has been shaped by the events in Iran. The ideas and followers of Ayatollah Khomeini are pushing the frontiers of usuli thought towards a total convergence of all political thought in Islam. It is possible that Ayatollah Khomeini, like Allama Hilli before him, was himself not aware of all the wider implications of his ideas and ijtihad. It is almost certainly the case that the interpretation of the Imam's fatwa on January 6, 1988, will be long debated by Shi'i and Sunni ulama, both inside and outside Iran.
However, at present and for the limited purpose of the argument developed in this paper, the realization that politically one part of the Ummah at least has achieved a position that puts it within two or three decades of the Prophet is an exhilarating experience. We are liberated from the responsibility for at least some parts of our history. We can shed the guilt that haunts us for belonging to a tradition of continuous error and deviation. We can stop having to defend or justify what goes by the name of ‘Islamic history' and dynastic malukiyyah. We can also ‘black box'8 a great deal of the divisive theology written and promoted during this period. This would allow a new kind of usuli revolution to spread to all schools of thought in Islam and to open up the doors of ijtihad in all traditions of thought. We can once again begin to feel historically closer to the Prophet, upon whom be peace. This newly achieved proximity, though largely a matter of perception establishes new spiritual and intellectual links with the Seerah and the Sunnah of Muhammad, upon whom be peace.
Once we place ourselves within this time frame close to the Prophet, virtually all-subsequent sources of error and deviation in the Ummah disappear. The disabilities imposed by our long fruitless commitment to essentially indefensible positions also fade away. Or at least the option of liberating ourselves from such historical handicaps is now available. Ayatollah Khomeini had to endure resistance from conservative Shi'i ulama on his original ijtihad of the vali-I faqih's rulership in the absence of the Twelfth Imam. His decree that the vali-I faqih is the khalifah (na'ib) of the Prophet and that the Islamic State, too, enjoys the same powers as conferred upon the Prophet by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wipes the slate clean for all Muslims, especially the ulama. Once this position is taken up, it does not matter whether one is Sunni or Shi'a. All positions within Islam are valid and true. But none more so than the position that takes us closest to the Prophet's time, especially a position that enables us to establish a Leadership (and a State) that derives its authority as the khalifah (vicegerent) of the Prophet, upon whom be peace. Such is the capacity to generate self-corrective processes that exists within Islam.
But the process that leads to corrective action needs better understanding. Error and deviation within Islam soon begin to accumulate unacceptable results. It was this accumulation of unacceptable results that must have sparked off the akhbari/usuli controversy among the Shi'I ulama more than two centuries ago. The triumph of the usuli position clearly corrected most errors of earlier ijtihad, but not all. However, the opening of the doors to further and more fundamental ijtihad had to the emergence of maraje who filled the vacuum of leadership caused by the occultation of the Twelfth Imam. Once the role of leadership had been taken up by a small number of maraje, they were set on a course that would eventually produce a single leader. But a single leader in Islam is only possible within the framework of the political power of Islam established in the Islamic State. If the corrective process begun by the usuli ulama was to continue, then the eventual emergence of a single marja as the marja of the maraje was inevitable. And this could happen only within the framework of what we now call the Islamic Revolution in Iran, or the act of establishing the Islamic State. The process of ijtihad that preceded the Islamic Revolution, and the emergence of an Islamic State led by a vali-I faqih, produced, within ten years, a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini as khalifah or na'ib of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace.
The Ayatollah's latest fatwa could only come after the new Islamic State had experienced the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of performing its proper executive, legislative and judicial functions without the ultimate source of authority and power in Islam as khalifah of the Prophet. The absence of such authority from the vali-I faqih and the Islamic State was clearly an error, and the results of such error soon accumulated and were found to be unacceptable. In a sense the authority as khalifah already existed but had not been claimed or clearly understood. The Ayatollah then made the authority explicit and unambiguous. Ayatollah Khomeini did not, for reasons that can be guessed, put in so many words, but the fact is that he then became khalifah al-Rasool, or vicegerent of the Prophet, upon whom be peace. We can now safely assume that the demise of what Dr. Ali Shari'ati called Safavid Shi'ism is now all but complete, though some irritant traces of it in Shi'I rituals and culture will persist for some time. We have also seen that the act of establishing the Islamic State is the most powerful corrective agent in Islam. This is because, in the political process, even small errors soon lead to large and visible results that are clearly unacceptable. What this means is that error in matter of theology affects rituals and ibadah and can persist for a long time, or even for ever, without causing harm to Islam or the Ummah. Perhaps it is also true that within Islam a wide range of variations is possible in peripheral areas of fiqh. These variations do not amount to error or deviation. In actual error are those who allow such peripheral areas of fiqh to cause heated debate and controversy among Muslims. In itself, this diversity in Islamic practices does not usually lead to cumulative results that reach unpredictable levels. But this may happen in conditions when error and deviation on larger issues of leadership, State and politics in Islam reach dangerous levels, leading in turn to the disintegration of the Ummah. In conditions of extreme disintegration, such as those prevailing in parts of the Ummah today, the peripheral issues may also cause bloodshed. This is why the existence of any kind of Muslim rule, including, mlukiyyah for the greater part of our history, did not allow peripheral issues to cause bloodshed on a large scale. In India, for instance, open and bloody conflict between Shi'i Sunni Muslims was unknown during the Mughal rule. In recent years the disintegration of the polity in Pakistan has reached a similar stage, causing bloody conflicts among Muslims. It is widely suspected that the post-colonial secular rulers in Muslim nation-States deliberately create such conflicts to divert attention from the convergence of Islamic thought in matters of leadership, State and politics. This also explains the relentless propaganda against the Shi'i school of thought that has been unleashed by the west generally and by secular Muslim rulers in particular. They know that their only chance of survival lies in the ability to obstruct and abort Islam's processes of corrective action, preventing them from reaching the Sunni areas of the Ummah.
The fact is that the process of correction of error and deviation within the Shi'I tradition is now almost complete, at least so far as Iran is concerned. Some parts of Shi'i opinion outside Iran are suspicious of the changes that Ayatollah Khomeini's ijtihad has achieved. It is also known that within Iran there are ulama who have seep reservations. However, these are unlikely to halt the powerful forces of internally generated corrective action. We must now outline in brief the degree of error and deviation within Islam that is found in the Sunni tradition. The Sunni political experience is, of course, very different. For the Sunni Muslims there was no vacuum of leadership, only a gradual decline in its quality. The Sunni school recognizes the pre-eminence of the first four khulafa, the khulafa al-rashidoon. The qualitative change that occurred when Mu'awiyyah ibn abi Sufyan became, in his own words, the first malik (king) of the Muslims, is also known and recognized. There is no difference between the Shi'i and Sunni understanding of the events and issues that led to Imam Husian's shahadah at Karbala. The root of political error and subsequent deviation in the Sunni school lies in the easy acceptance and almost automatic bai'ah that was given to rulers of known political deficiency and moral corruption. This happened because opposition to the established ruler came to be regarded as a greater fitnah than the ruler's known deviation from the classical standards of private and moral excellence laid down in Islam. This gave many Sunni activists easy access to the courts of the rulers and to political patronage. Under these circumstances, and so long as Muslim rulers wielded considerable power and presided over vast empires, there was little pressure to re-examine established positions. The vastness of the Islamic empire and civilization, the emergence of large cities and seats of learning, and the political dominance of the world of Islam over all else, lulled Sunni Muslims into a false sense of security and self-righteousness. The initial error and deviation form Islam that malukiyyah represented, was hidden by the rapid expansion and success of the political power of the Muslim State. The initial thrust that was given to the political history of the Muslims by the Prophet, upon whom be peace, and the khulafa al-rashidoon was used by subsequent rulers to hide their own error and deviation. It was inevitable, therefore, that eventually the error and deviation heralded by malukiyyah would multiply and lead Muslim society inexorably towards moral decay and political and military decline. This decline was not obvious so long as Muslim armies kept the enemies of Islam at bay or recovered any ground that was lost, such as the recapture of Jerusalem from the Christians by Salah al-Din Ayyubi.
The full extent of the cumulative damage that had been caused to dar al-Islam during hundreds of years of progressive decline and decay under malukiyyah became obvious when the European powers began to emerge in their imperialist role. In a hundred years or so before the defeat of the Uthmaniyyah State in the 1914-1918 war, virtually the whole of the world of Islam had passed into European hands. After 1919 the European powers consolidated their hold on the Arab heartland of Islam by dividing it up into client States. Mustafa Kamal completed the demolition of the last political remnant of dar al-Islam by formally abolishing the khilafah in 1924. The cumulative effect of initial error and deviation had reached its logical conclusion and Islam has lost all semblance of political and military presence in the affairs of mankind. No result could be more unacceptable. But the habit of supine obedience that the Sunni ulama had cultivated during several centuries was not to be abandoned at once. Even the realization that a catastrophe had overtaken them has been slow to emerge. Apart from the popular emotions stirred by the Khilafat Movement in India during 1919-22, there was little reaction among the Sunni ulama. Their immediate response appears to have been in line with their traditional role. They busied themselves with trying to seek political patronage from the new political order -from the new Saudi ‘kingdom' in the tradition of malukiyyah, and from the new nation-States, and even from the colonial States of the infidels. These rulers were only too anxious to provide these ulama with a sense of security and political patronage in return for political subservience. The two men who made valiant but futile attempts to revive the political fortunes of Islam were Hasan al-Banna and Abul Ala Maudoodi. We should note, however, that neither was a traditional alim.
They and their parties, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoon, and the Jam'at-e Islami, also ended up on the side of the status quo, enjoying extensive and lucrative patronage from Saudi Arabia. Even the ‘Islamic State' of their conception differed little from the welfare-oriented, liberal and democratic States of Europe. With little or no support from the Sunni ulama, such attempts did not amount to much. We have to admit that the kind of corrective action that began with the success of the usuli school among the Shi'I ulama has yet to begin in the Sunni tradition. It can be argued that the nature and degree of error and deviation in the Shi'i school was different from those in the Sunni School. There is weight in this argument. But there are three common features that should be noted without attempting to find their sources in theological formulations. These are:
1. The akhbari ulama, during the Safavid dynasty in Iran (1502-1747) were as open to political manipulation by the rulers as Sunni ulama at any time in history, including the modern period.
2. The error and deviance in the Shi'i school had left Shi'i ulama politically as ineffective as the Sunni ulama of today.
3. The Shi'i ulama, before the usuli revolution, has closed the doors on ijtihad as firmly as the Sunii ulama have done up to the present time.
The revolution in Iran would not be possible without the prior clearing up, through ijtihad, of a number of issues peculiar to Shi'i theology. It is beyond the scope of this paper to list the issues awaiting ijtihad by Sunni ulama. Nor is it possible to speculate about what it would take far an intellectual movement to emerge in the Sunni school comparable in scope and extent to the usuli movement in the Shi'i school. Many in the Sunni school would argue that their deviation was only an error of judgement that led to compromise with the malukyyah. Be that as it may, the fact is that the effect of that compromise has been devastative. The result is that most Sunni ulama today suffer from all the failures of understanding of political issues that were common among akhbari Shi'i ulama before the usuli revolution.
The modern malukiyyah represented by the Saudi 'royal family', and all the other secular, nationalist regimes that rule over colonial-style nation-States in Sunni areas, would dearly like the Sunni ulama to wait for an usuli revolution of their own. This would give the rulers a comfortable breathing space of at least two hundred years; long enough, in their view, for the secular culture and civilization of their choice to take root and to destroy the influence of Islam on succeeding generations. The Sunni ulama must avoid this trap at all costs. There are several good reasons for not waiting for an usuli revolution in the Sunni school. There is no reason to believe that every part of the Ummah has to undergo a similar experience before error and deviation can be corrected. The Shi'i ulama of two hundred years ago did not have the advantage of having seen and experienced an Islamic Revolution in another part of the Ummah. They had to generate corrective action form within the Shi'i school; hence the usuli commitment to ijtihad. In addition, two hundred years ago, while the Shi'i ulama had not yet experienced the total collapse of what they regarded as the Islamic State. Today the Sunni school has not only experienced the total absence of the centralized power of Islam, it has also experienced prolonged political subservience of all parts of the Ummah to kufr. The business of terminating the dominance of kufr over Islam and the Ummah is too urgent to require an intellectual revolution to precede it. Finally, perhaps one usuli revolution in any one part of the Ummah is enough for all parts of the Ummah. This is because the corrective process within Islam, once started, must lead those engaged in it to common ground in Islam acceptable to all Muslims. It would not be a corrective process in Islam if it were acceptable to stop at the boundaries of a popular school of thought.
In the case of Iran we have seen that, for a long time, ijtihad by usuli ulama only affected issues most commonly identified with the Shi'i school. Later the same process became Islamic rather than Shi'i. When the Islamic movement in Iran mounted its assault to bring down malukiyyah, the final act of establishing the Islamic State had begun. The final stages of transition form the Islamic movement to the Islamic State have been called the Islamic Revolution. The demands of the Islamic movement and the Islamic State are such that these stages cannot be negotiated successfully by those adhering to a single school of thought. The act of establishing the Islamic State is such a liberating experience that all other boundaries within Islam become irrelevant and insignificant. At first this realization comes only to the senior leadership, while the rank and file celebrate the victory of their own school of thought. The Islamic state, therefore, cannot be a Shi'i or Sunni State. Either it is an Islamic State or it is not. To be an Islamic State it must be acceptable as such to all Muslims; and, to be acceptable to all Muslims, the leader of the State must rule as the khalifah or na'ib (vicegerent) of the Prophet. Upon whom be peace. That was the point of the fatwa of Imam Khomeini on January 6, 1988.
Neither Bahira nor Waraqa knew that Muhammad was the promised prophet, but both shared a sense of history derived from their religion, Christianity. They knew that a prophet would come; they did not know when or where or who he might be. Each recognized the condition of jahilyyah that prevailed in their time required the coming of a prophet. Bahira and Waraqa were relying on Christian sources that were, even in their time, unreliable. Today, 14 centuries after the completion of the Qur'an, the final message of Allah, about which there is no doubt, and after the coming of the last Prophet, it should be easier to recognize signs foreshadowing current and future events.
How accurately we can do so depends on our understanding of the Islamic framework of history. For example, we do not know when Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala created the first man, Adam, who was also a prophet. But what we do know is that between Adam, the first Prophet, and Muhammad, the last Prophet, there were perhaps as many as 124,000 other prophets, may Allah's peace and blessings be upon them all. The point is that Allah subhanahu wa' ta'ala clearly took great care and a very long time preparing the world for the coming of the last prophet and for the completion of His message to mankind. All this cannot have been for a matter of about 1,400 years or thereabouts before the end of the world.
The view of history that we Muslims must take is that of course the end of the world will come, but its timing is known to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala alone. He has not shared this knowledge with anyone, not even the prophets. It is, therefore, idle to speculate about it. In the meantime we must remember that, 1,400 years after the completion of prophethood and revelation, Islam has yet to create a world in the image of itself, according to the Creator's own prescription for the world and everything in it. Perhaps a more realistic view is that though Islam as a message and a model was completed 1,400 years ago, the main business of history, that is, bringing all mankind to Islam, is incomplete.
This raises another question: if the very long time before the completion of Islam was merely a ‘preparatory period', how do we explain the last 1,400 years? The jahiliyyah before Islam was perhaps an insufficient experience for man to realize the consequences of deviating form Islam. It may be useful to view these 1,400 years as a practical demonstration of what happens to mankind, especially Muslims, when they deviate from the sirat al-mustaqeem. This could only be demonstrated after Islam had been completed, not before. Perhaps the neo-jahilyyah that prevails in the world today is just such a demonstration.
The deviation form Islam is of two sorts. There are those who never entered Islam, chose to fight it, and built for themselves a civilization and culture of kufr and jahilyyah. Today this civilization of kufr and jahilyyah is represented by western civilization. The civilization is global and includes many non-western sub-cultures, such as the Chinese, Japanese and Indian sub cultures. It also includes some residual religious traditions, for example, post-Renaissance Christianity, zionist-Judaism and militant Hinduism, all of which insist upon repudiating and rejecting Islam. Lastly, the western civilization also includes those Muslims who have, under the influence of colonial domination, accepted the validity of secularism as a way of life. These Muslims represent all the ruling classes in Muslim societies today. The second type of deviation is within Islam. Such deviation is spearheaded by those ulama, of all schools of thought, who, for whatever reason, have accepted and legitimized political, social, cultural and other systems that do not conform with the Qur'an and the Sunnah of the Prophet, upon whom be peace. Examples of such deviation, including deviant theology, can be found everywhere.
However, deviation within Islam is mostly error that has accumulated with the passage of time. Such error is relatively easy to correct because the overall framework of Islam that bind the Ummah has now been breached.1 The corrective power of Islam is represented by the inherent taqwa of even those who have erred. There have always existed ulama, of all schools of though, who were willing and able to eliminate error and to bind the Ummah together.
The number of the so-called Ulama committed to fitnah and permanent divisions in the Ummah has always been small, though vocal because they have also enjoyed the political patronage of rulers' bent upon transforming error into long-term, even permanent, deviation. This process of deviation began with Banu Umaiyyah and continues today under the Saudi regime. The nation-States established in the Muslim world by the colonial powers and their ‘Muslim' agents are also designed to make our political deviation permanent.
Some 15 years ago we in the Muslim Institute set out to discover those in the Umma. Both ulama and ordinary Muslims, who would be prepared to participate in the task of research to determine the area within Islam where those suffering from internal error and deviation would be prepared to converge. Our instinct told us that one single Ummah2could only be superficially and temporarily divided. Another instinctive hypothesis that guided us was that the error and subsequent divisions in the Ummah were primarily political and, therefore, temporary. This meant that the process of correction and convergence would have to be led by wither the rewriting of Muslim political thought or by the ‘big bang' effect of a major political event. We were naïve enough to postulate that we could rewrite Muslim political thought and to hope that, some day, our formulations might generate a major political event.3
History, as we now know, had other ideas. Islam, despite error and deviations within it, is such a powerful system of beliefs and ideas that it was bound to produce its own answer to the ills of the Ummah. We should have known all along that Islam, if it was the Whole Truth from Allah, would also include within it the capacity to generate corrective processes at crucial moments of history. Before the coming of the last Prophet, upon whom be peace, this was done by successive prophets who appeared at intervals. Now non-prophetic agents, such as individuals, movements and revolutions perform the role of correction and convergence. Once motivated and activated by the historical situation, the corrective agents must have had the power to move the entire body of Muslims, the Ummah, towards convergence at a central point within Islam. In recent times a number of individuals, and the movements they inspired, have tried unsuccessfully to emerge in the role of the central corrective agents, but failed. Among these were Hasan al-Banna (founder of al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoon) and Maulana Abul Ala Mudoodi (founder of the Jama'at-e Islami). It would seem that the Islamic State could only perform the role of the central corrective agent. Those who failed, failed precisely because they could not establish the Islamic State. The act of establishing the Islamic State would appear to be necessary for a successful transition to the role of the central corrective agent to end error and deviation within the Ummah.
Support for this view is found in the Seerah of Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace. As an individual in Makkah the role of the Prophet was limited to bringing a handful of individuals to Islam. Yet even while in Makkah the Prophet sought and found State protection for his small and of followers. This is the significance of the migration of many early Muslims for Makkah to Abyssina. Once, after the hijrah to Madinah, Islam had undergone transition to Statehood, the spread of Islam to the peninsula was rapid and total. Islam is incomplete without the Islamic State; there is no room for dispute on this point. It has far-reaching implications for the da-wah work undertaken by well-meaning Muslims, as well as for the da'wah work into which the energies of Muslims are being diverted today by those committed to the status quo. That Saudi regime in particular spend vast amounts of money on da'wah in order to absorb the energies of many Muslims throughout the world and to divert them into dead-end activity. But the chief instrument of da'wah is the Islamic State; da'wah without the Islamic State is like an invitation without an address.
The political nature of Islam and the Prophethood of Muhammad, upon whom be peace, was clearly understood by the Quraish of Makkah from the beginning. When the Quriash approached him with a ‘deal' they also offered him kingship. The delegation of the Quraish was led by Utbah ibn Rabiah. The incident is documented in all books of Seerah. The goal of Muhammad's Prophethood was not his personal power or kingship, but the transformation of the area into an Islamic State. Many years later Makkah fell to Islam as the result of a military expedition mounted by the Prophet from the Islamic State that had been consolidated around Madinah. It is the Islamic State that bears the main responsibility for da'wah.
The point that is obscured in modern, apologetic literature of Islam, and neatly sidestepped by the orientalists, is that Islam is not only a message, Islam is also a method. The message of Islam carried by the methods of pacifist Christian missionaries is unlikely to yield the desires results. Such an approach may help to turn Islam into a ritualized religion, but it cannot achieve the goals of Islam. The complete message of Islam includes the method of Islam. This is why there is so much emphasis in Islam on the Sunnah and the Seerah of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace. And this is why the procedures and the historical processes required to establish the Islamic State are inseparable parts of Islam. Islam, therefore, is incomplete without the Islamic State.
The ‘Islamic parties' that emerged during the colonial period often did not grasp this essential point. They understood and presented Islam within the framework of European-style social democracy. For them the Islamic State was only a slightly updated and ‘Islamized' version of the post-colonial nation-State. It only required then winning an election and 'coming to power'. These ‘Islamic' political partied did not realize that there was a colonial legacy to be undone and dismantled. In their simplistic thinking the ‘Islamic State' of their conception would be built on the secular and nationalist foundations of the colonial independent State. What is undoubtedly true is that some of these political parties had perhaps unwittingly borrowed many of their ideas from sources outside Islam.4
The ‘act' of establishing the Islamic State itself comes at the end of a prolonged process of corrective action amongst those ‘lost' within Islam. In the Sunni tradition, one must admit, this corrective process has still hardly begun. Political thought in the Sunni tradition is still lost in the diversions caused by the ‘Islamic parties', Arab nationalism, the Khilafat movement in India, and the easy availability of political patronage for most of the last 1,400 years.
In the Shi'i tradition, on the other hand, the first significant step in the right direction was taken early in their history, as rejection of compromise with existing political systems. Its roots go back to the rejection of Yazid's authority by Imam Husain and his subsequent shahadah at Karbala. The next major corrective step came many centuries later, after Iran had been converted into the Shi'I school of thought in the early part of the sixteenth century. It appeared as a debate among the Shi'I Ulama on what seemed to be a technical matter. This debate, in the seconds half on the eighteenth century was between two groups of ulama known as usli and akhbari. The akhbari (or communicators) held the view that, during the gha'ibah (occultation) of the Twelfth Imam, it is not permissible for religious scholars to engage in the use of reason to enact a certain judgement, to apply the principles of the law to a specific problem or situation. All that could be done was merely to have recourse to hadith (hence the name akhbari), and by sifted hadith reach a conclusion about any particular issue. This school tended towards a total abolition of the discipline of jurisprudence. The ulsi ulama, on the other hand, held that, during the absence of the Twelfth Imam, it was permissible to engage in independent reasoning. One qualified to do so was the mujtahid: he who uses his reason guided by the principles of the shari'ah to make decisions action upon which the general body of Muslims could solve their problems. All Muslims who are not mujtahids must follow the guidance of one who is. This is known as Taqleed. The senior mujtahids, who came to be followed by large numbers of Shi'I Muslims, were call maraje (singular marja or marja'-I taqleed). The argument was won by usli ulama and the akhbari position was abandoned. Hamid Algar points out that ‘the Revolution in Iran, at least the particular shape it was taken, the form of leadership that it has enjoyed and continues to enjoy, would also be unthinkable without the triumph of the usli position... in the eighteenth century.5
The emergence of the usli ulama can be described as the development of a self-correcting mechanism within the Shi'I tradition. How important this was for the world of Islam as a whole is only just beginning to become apparent. In the first phase of this self-correcting process, two things have happened: first the doors of ijtihad were thrown open; and second, there emerged ulama, the marje'-I taqleed, who often exercised greater influence, even powers, than many rulers. For all practical purposes the maraje came to represent an ‘Islamic State' within the larger territorial State. The traditional Shi'I position, that all political power in the absence of the Twelfth Imam was illegitimate and should not be sought, was deep-rooted and the maraje functioned within the umbrella of the Qajar dynasty that has replaced the Safavids in 1795. Throughout this period, from 1795 to the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the primary concern of the ulama of Iran was to limit the inevitable illegitimacy of the existing government. It was in this framework that Mirza Hasan Shirazi gave his famous fatwa in 1892 on the consumption of tobacco in Iran being haram if its production and marketing were undertaken by a British monopoly. The ulama's participation in the Constitutional Revolution in Iran (1905-1909) was also made possible by the wider concerns of the usli school.
The otherwise powerful usuli establishment suffered from two weaknesses. The first was the senior ulama's self-imposed abstinence from seeking ultimate political authority; and the second was the multiplicity of the maraje. At any one time a number of Grand Ayatollahs claimed large followings, and often competed among themselves for followers (muqallideen). The two handicaps are closely linked. So long as the ulama did not contemplate the exercise of supreme political power there was no need for a single leader, and so long as there was no single leader, a kind of marja of the maraje, the exercise of ultimate political authority could not be contemplated. These self-inflicted disabilities appeared so entrenched in Shi'I theology that the ruling classes, the dynasties (the Pahlavi sine 1926) and their British and American backers, did not feel threatened from Qum. But the usuli revolution had also opened the doors of ijtihad, begun by usuli ulama, led to the ultimate step, in terms of Shi'i theology, of setting up the Islamic State in the absence of the Twelfth Imam. This is what we have come to call the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
The Sunni ulama, equally ‘lost' within Islam, have still not begun the long an painful task of clearing away the debris of their failures, recovering from their self-inflicted disabilities, and breaking the habit of supine obedience to patronizing rulers. At the moment the worldwide network of ‘court ulama' who serve the Saudi regime (and other secular governments) are the most error-ridden and deviant body of people lost within Islam. If the Sunni ulama would only lift the veil of their prejudice, they should see that Ayatollah Khomeini has brought the Shi'i caravan back to the point where we all started in the first place. In a fatwa issued on January 6, 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini said that Islamic government represents ‘absolute sovereign power as delegated by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala to the Prophet, upon whom be peace. This, said Ayatollah Khomeini, ‘is the most important of the Divine precepts (ahkam) and takes precedence over all other secondary Divine precepts'. Ayatollah Khomeini added: ‘If the powers of Islamic government are to be confined within the framework of secondary Divine precepts, then the form of divine rule and absolute sovereignty as delegated to the Prophet, upon whom be peace, would be a senseless and hollow phenomenon.' If this was so, he added, the legislative and administrative powers of Islamic government would be severely restricted. Ayatollah Khomeini went on to give several examples of legislative, administrative, military and economic policies that would be impossible to implement if the Islamic government was bound by secondary Divine precepts. These included the acquisition of private property for major public works, such as new roads, compulsory military service, foreign trade, prohibition of hoarding, customs and excise, taxation and fair pricing of goods and services. Ayatollah Khomeini then argues that ‘Islamic government, which is part of the absolute sovereign power of Allah, Prophet upon whom be peace, is one of the primary precepts of Islam and takes precedence over all the secondary precepts'. The concept that the political power exercised by the Prophet must be inherited in full by the rulers who follow him has always been clear in Sunni thought. This is exactly how the khulafa al-rashidoon understood the source of their authority. The Islamic State is only an extension of the authority of the leader, who is a khalifah (na'ib or vicegerent) of the Prophet. This fatwta from Ayatollah Khomeini7 has completed the long process of corrective action within the Shi'i school that has been at the very heart of the akhbari/usuli controversy. It should be noted that some residual influence of the akhbari position still persists not only in Iran but to a much greater degree among the Shi'i ulama of Iraq, India, Pakistan and Bahrain and among their followers. The leading edge of Shi'i political thought, that of Ayatollah Khomeini and his close associates, has emerged only since the death of Ayatullah Burujirdi in March 1962. It was only then that Ayatollah Khomeini began to give lectures on political issues critical of the Shah and exploring the possibility of government by mujtahids. He was repeatedly arrested during 1963 and exiled to Turkey the following year. In 1965 he moved to Najaf, the great centre of Shi'i learning in Iraq. It was during a course of lectures on Islamic government delivered there in 1970 that he developed the concept of vilayat-I- faqih. This, his fatwa of January 6, 1988, it is probably no exaggeration to say that Ayatollah Khomeini corrected the political deviation of the entire Ummah that began with the advent of the Umaiyyad rule. In terms of the legitimacy of the leadership of the Islamic State, Ayatollah Khomeini restored the situation as it existed during the rule of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth of the khulafa al-rashidoon. This means that, for all practical purposes, in terms of State and politics in Islam, the Ummah has been returned to a point very close to the time of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace.
During this very short period, from 1962 to 1990, history has moved at an extraordinary pace. Students of history are familiar with the leapfrogging relationship that exists between political ideas and political events. At times ideas run far ahead of events, and at other times events shape ideas. For example, the great usuli school that challenged and eventually defeated the akhbari orthodoxy in Shi'i thought can be traced back to Allama Hilli (Jamaluddin Abu Mansur Hasan ibn Yusuf) in the fourteenth century. From the time of his death in 1325 to the triumph of the usuli ideas in Iran in the eighteenth century the pace of change was slow. In the nineteenth century in Iran the usuli ulama, especially the maraje, began to influence political events.7 From 1978-79 until now virtually all political thought, Shi'i and Sunni, has been shaped by the events in Iran. The ideas and followers of Ayatollah Khomeini are pushing the frontiers of usuli thought towards a total convergence of all political thought in Islam. It is possible that Ayatollah Khomeini, like Allama Hilli before him, was himself not aware of all the wider implications of his ideas and ijtihad. It is almost certainly the case that the interpretation of the Imam's fatwa on January 6, 1988, will be long debated by Shi'i and Sunni ulama, both inside and outside Iran.
However, at present and for the limited purpose of the argument developed in this paper, the realization that politically one part of the Ummah at least has achieved a position that puts it within two or three decades of the Prophet is an exhilarating experience. We are liberated from the responsibility for at least some parts of our history. We can shed the guilt that haunts us for belonging to a tradition of continuous error and deviation. We can stop having to defend or justify what goes by the name of ‘Islamic history' and dynastic malukiyyah. We can also ‘black box'8 a great deal of the divisive theology written and promoted during this period. This would allow a new kind of usuli revolution to spread to all schools of thought in Islam and to open up the doors of ijtihad in all traditions of thought. We can once again begin to feel historically closer to the Prophet, upon whom be peace. This newly achieved proximity, though largely a matter of perception establishes new spiritual and intellectual links with the Seerah and the Sunnah of Muhammad, upon whom be peace.
Once we place ourselves within this time frame close to the Prophet, virtually all-subsequent sources of error and deviation in the Ummah disappear. The disabilities imposed by our long fruitless commitment to essentially indefensible positions also fade away. Or at least the option of liberating ourselves from such historical handicaps is now available. Ayatollah Khomeini had to endure resistance from conservative Shi'i ulama on his original ijtihad of the vali-I faqih's rulership in the absence of the Twelfth Imam. His decree that the vali-I faqih is the khalifah (na'ib) of the Prophet and that the Islamic State, too, enjoys the same powers as conferred upon the Prophet by Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala wipes the slate clean for all Muslims, especially the ulama. Once this position is taken up, it does not matter whether one is Sunni or Shi'a. All positions within Islam are valid and true. But none more so than the position that takes us closest to the Prophet's time, especially a position that enables us to establish a Leadership (and a State) that derives its authority as the khalifah (vicegerent) of the Prophet, upon whom be peace. Such is the capacity to generate self-corrective processes that exists within Islam.
But the process that leads to corrective action needs better understanding. Error and deviation within Islam soon begin to accumulate unacceptable results. It was this accumulation of unacceptable results that must have sparked off the akhbari/usuli controversy among the Shi'I ulama more than two centuries ago. The triumph of the usuli position clearly corrected most errors of earlier ijtihad, but not all. However, the opening of the doors to further and more fundamental ijtihad had to the emergence of maraje who filled the vacuum of leadership caused by the occultation of the Twelfth Imam. Once the role of leadership had been taken up by a small number of maraje, they were set on a course that would eventually produce a single leader. But a single leader in Islam is only possible within the framework of the political power of Islam established in the Islamic State. If the corrective process begun by the usuli ulama was to continue, then the eventual emergence of a single marja as the marja of the maraje was inevitable. And this could happen only within the framework of what we now call the Islamic Revolution in Iran, or the act of establishing the Islamic State. The process of ijtihad that preceded the Islamic Revolution, and the emergence of an Islamic State led by a vali-I faqih, produced, within ten years, a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini as khalifah or na'ib of the Prophet Muhammad, upon whom be peace.
The Ayatollah's latest fatwa could only come after the new Islamic State had experienced the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of performing its proper executive, legislative and judicial functions without the ultimate source of authority and power in Islam as khalifah of the Prophet. The absence of such authority from the vali-I faqih and the Islamic State was clearly an error, and the results of such error soon accumulated and were found to be unacceptable. In a sense the authority as khalifah already existed but had not been claimed or clearly understood. The Ayatollah then made the authority explicit and unambiguous. Ayatollah Khomeini did not, for reasons that can be guessed, put in so many words, but the fact is that he then became khalifah al-Rasool, or vicegerent of the Prophet, upon whom be peace. We can now safely assume that the demise of what Dr. Ali Shari'ati called Safavid Shi'ism is now all but complete, though some irritant traces of it in Shi'I rituals and culture will persist for some time. We have also seen that the act of establishing the Islamic State is the most powerful corrective agent in Islam. This is because, in the political process, even small errors soon lead to large and visible results that are clearly unacceptable. What this means is that error in matter of theology affects rituals and ibadah and can persist for a long time, or even for ever, without causing harm to Islam or the Ummah. Perhaps it is also true that within Islam a wide range of variations is possible in peripheral areas of fiqh. These variations do not amount to error or deviation. In actual error are those who allow such peripheral areas of fiqh to cause heated debate and controversy among Muslims. In itself, this diversity in Islamic practices does not usually lead to cumulative results that reach unpredictable levels. But this may happen in conditions when error and deviation on larger issues of leadership, State and politics in Islam reach dangerous levels, leading in turn to the disintegration of the Ummah. In conditions of extreme disintegration, such as those prevailing in parts of the Ummah today, the peripheral issues may also cause bloodshed. This is why the existence of any kind of Muslim rule, including, mlukiyyah for the greater part of our history, did not allow peripheral issues to cause bloodshed on a large scale. In India, for instance, open and bloody conflict between Shi'i Sunni Muslims was unknown during the Mughal rule. In recent years the disintegration of the polity in Pakistan has reached a similar stage, causing bloody conflicts among Muslims. It is widely suspected that the post-colonial secular rulers in Muslim nation-States deliberately create such conflicts to divert attention from the convergence of Islamic thought in matters of leadership, State and politics. This also explains the relentless propaganda against the Shi'i school of thought that has been unleashed by the west generally and by secular Muslim rulers in particular. They know that their only chance of survival lies in the ability to obstruct and abort Islam's processes of corrective action, preventing them from reaching the Sunni areas of the Ummah.
The fact is that the process of correction of error and deviation within the Shi'I tradition is now almost complete, at least so far as Iran is concerned. Some parts of Shi'i opinion outside Iran are suspicious of the changes that Ayatollah Khomeini's ijtihad has achieved. It is also known that within Iran there are ulama who have seep reservations. However, these are unlikely to halt the powerful forces of internally generated corrective action. We must now outline in brief the degree of error and deviation within Islam that is found in the Sunni tradition. The Sunni political experience is, of course, very different. For the Sunni Muslims there was no vacuum of leadership, only a gradual decline in its quality. The Sunni school recognizes the pre-eminence of the first four khulafa, the khulafa al-rashidoon. The qualitative change that occurred when Mu'awiyyah ibn abi Sufyan became, in his own words, the first malik (king) of the Muslims, is also known and recognized. There is no difference between the Shi'i and Sunni understanding of the events and issues that led to Imam Husian's shahadah at Karbala. The root of political error and subsequent deviation in the Sunni school lies in the easy acceptance and almost automatic bai'ah that was given to rulers of known political deficiency and moral corruption. This happened because opposition to the established ruler came to be regarded as a greater fitnah than the ruler's known deviation from the classical standards of private and moral excellence laid down in Islam. This gave many Sunni activists easy access to the courts of the rulers and to political patronage. Under these circumstances, and so long as Muslim rulers wielded considerable power and presided over vast empires, there was little pressure to re-examine established positions. The vastness of the Islamic empire and civilization, the emergence of large cities and seats of learning, and the political dominance of the world of Islam over all else, lulled Sunni Muslims into a false sense of security and self-righteousness. The initial error and deviation form Islam that malukiyyah represented, was hidden by the rapid expansion and success of the political power of the Muslim State. The initial thrust that was given to the political history of the Muslims by the Prophet, upon whom be peace, and the khulafa al-rashidoon was used by subsequent rulers to hide their own error and deviation. It was inevitable, therefore, that eventually the error and deviation heralded by malukiyyah would multiply and lead Muslim society inexorably towards moral decay and political and military decline. This decline was not obvious so long as Muslim armies kept the enemies of Islam at bay or recovered any ground that was lost, such as the recapture of Jerusalem from the Christians by Salah al-Din Ayyubi.
The full extent of the cumulative damage that had been caused to dar al-Islam during hundreds of years of progressive decline and decay under malukiyyah became obvious when the European powers began to emerge in their imperialist role. In a hundred years or so before the defeat of the Uthmaniyyah State in the 1914-1918 war, virtually the whole of the world of Islam had passed into European hands. After 1919 the European powers consolidated their hold on the Arab heartland of Islam by dividing it up into client States. Mustafa Kamal completed the demolition of the last political remnant of dar al-Islam by formally abolishing the khilafah in 1924. The cumulative effect of initial error and deviation had reached its logical conclusion and Islam has lost all semblance of political and military presence in the affairs of mankind. No result could be more unacceptable. But the habit of supine obedience that the Sunni ulama had cultivated during several centuries was not to be abandoned at once. Even the realization that a catastrophe had overtaken them has been slow to emerge. Apart from the popular emotions stirred by the Khilafat Movement in India during 1919-22, there was little reaction among the Sunni ulama. Their immediate response appears to have been in line with their traditional role. They busied themselves with trying to seek political patronage from the new political order -from the new Saudi ‘kingdom' in the tradition of malukiyyah, and from the new nation-States, and even from the colonial States of the infidels. These rulers were only too anxious to provide these ulama with a sense of security and political patronage in return for political subservience. The two men who made valiant but futile attempts to revive the political fortunes of Islam were Hasan al-Banna and Abul Ala Maudoodi. We should note, however, that neither was a traditional alim.
They and their parties, al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoon, and the Jam'at-e Islami, also ended up on the side of the status quo, enjoying extensive and lucrative patronage from Saudi Arabia. Even the ‘Islamic State' of their conception differed little from the welfare-oriented, liberal and democratic States of Europe. With little or no support from the Sunni ulama, such attempts did not amount to much. We have to admit that the kind of corrective action that began with the success of the usuli school among the Shi'I ulama has yet to begin in the Sunni tradition. It can be argued that the nature and degree of error and deviation in the Shi'i school was different from those in the Sunni School. There is weight in this argument. But there are three common features that should be noted without attempting to find their sources in theological formulations. These are:
1. The akhbari ulama, during the Safavid dynasty in Iran (1502-1747) were as open to political manipulation by the rulers as Sunni ulama at any time in history, including the modern period.
2. The error and deviance in the Shi'i school had left Shi'i ulama politically as ineffective as the Sunni ulama of today.
3. The Shi'i ulama, before the usuli revolution, has closed the doors on ijtihad as firmly as the Sunii ulama have done up to the present time.
The revolution in Iran would not be possible without the prior clearing up, through ijtihad, of a number of issues peculiar to Shi'i theology. It is beyond the scope of this paper to list the issues awaiting ijtihad by Sunni ulama. Nor is it possible to speculate about what it would take far an intellectual movement to emerge in the Sunni school comparable in scope and extent to the usuli movement in the Shi'i school. Many in the Sunni school would argue that their deviation was only an error of judgement that led to compromise with the malukyyah. Be that as it may, the fact is that the effect of that compromise has been devastative. The result is that most Sunni ulama today suffer from all the failures of understanding of political issues that were common among akhbari Shi'i ulama before the usuli revolution.
The modern malukiyyah represented by the Saudi 'royal family', and all the other secular, nationalist regimes that rule over colonial-style nation-States in Sunni areas, would dearly like the Sunni ulama to wait for an usuli revolution of their own. This would give the rulers a comfortable breathing space of at least two hundred years; long enough, in their view, for the secular culture and civilization of their choice to take root and to destroy the influence of Islam on succeeding generations. The Sunni ulama must avoid this trap at all costs. There are several good reasons for not waiting for an usuli revolution in the Sunni school. There is no reason to believe that every part of the Ummah has to undergo a similar experience before error and deviation can be corrected. The Shi'i ulama of two hundred years ago did not have the advantage of having seen and experienced an Islamic Revolution in another part of the Ummah. They had to generate corrective action form within the Shi'i school; hence the usuli commitment to ijtihad. In addition, two hundred years ago, while the Shi'i ulama had not yet experienced the total collapse of what they regarded as the Islamic State. Today the Sunni school has not only experienced the total absence of the centralized power of Islam, it has also experienced prolonged political subservience of all parts of the Ummah to kufr. The business of terminating the dominance of kufr over Islam and the Ummah is too urgent to require an intellectual revolution to precede it. Finally, perhaps one usuli revolution in any one part of the Ummah is enough for all parts of the Ummah. This is because the corrective process within Islam, once started, must lead those engaged in it to common ground in Islam acceptable to all Muslims. It would not be a corrective process in Islam if it were acceptable to stop at the boundaries of a popular school of thought.
In the case of Iran we have seen that, for a long time, ijtihad by usuli ulama only affected issues most commonly identified with the Shi'i school. Later the same process became Islamic rather than Shi'i. When the Islamic movement in Iran mounted its assault to bring down malukiyyah, the final act of establishing the Islamic State had begun. The final stages of transition form the Islamic movement to the Islamic State have been called the Islamic Revolution. The demands of the Islamic movement and the Islamic State are such that these stages cannot be negotiated successfully by those adhering to a single school of thought. The act of establishing the Islamic State is such a liberating experience that all other boundaries within Islam become irrelevant and insignificant. At first this realization comes only to the senior leadership, while the rank and file celebrate the victory of their own school of thought. The Islamic state, therefore, cannot be a Shi'i or Sunni State. Either it is an Islamic State or it is not. To be an Islamic State it must be acceptable as such to all Muslims; and, to be acceptable to all Muslims, the leader of the State must rule as the khalifah or na'ib (vicegerent) of the Prophet. Upon whom be peace. That was the point of the fatwa of Imam Khomeini on January 6, 1988.