The Impossible State: Wael Hallaq’s Reading Of Theocratic State

By Grace Mubashir, New Age Islam 10 April 2023 The American war on terror has produced much literature about Islamic/Islamist politics. The Arab Spring set off in 2011 engendered seminal transformations in the understanding of Muslim politics. The works are rhetorical at best, if not overtly Islamophobic. Wael Hallaq’s book ‘The Impossible State; Islam, Politics and Modernity’s Moral Predicament’ approaches the issue from the Western fallacies of nation-states and the colonial roots of current demands of Muslim states delivering Islamic law. This book is a bold attempt to deconstruct the theme of the Muslim State from the contradictions inherent in the Western conceptions of state and society. This book is presented as a heuristic resource for Western academia and public intellectuals. Islam is presented as evolving ideology in competition or complement to social developments. He argues the demand of Muslims for Islamic government as a natural progression for searching alternative to Western colonialism or its cultural and political vestiges. The book introduces the deconstruction of Islamic politics along with sociological and political undercurrents leading to popular demand for the Islamic State. This book is the continuation of Hallaq’s earlier work ‘Can Sharia Be Restored’. This follows with another work titled ‘Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge, in which he critically studies bias in the Western world in understanding Islam and Muslim society. The book starts with his avowed stand of the Islamic State is an impossible project, even if anointed in its mutilated, diminutive forms. He says, “This book is an ethical critique of modern nation-states. Nation-states are the product of Western modernity. Thus, Islamic state based on Western nation-states is impossible and a misnomer. Because according to Islam, it eschews all but characters of modern state like homogeneity, ethnicity and territorial integration”. He points to the contradiction by elaborating the legislative process in Islamic State and the nation-state. In a nation-state, people or representative body is entrusted with sovereign rights for legislation, but in the Islamic case it is the divine prerogative. The Sharia is the legal basis of the Islamic State. In nation-states laws are text-based, centralized, and entirely bureaucratized; the law is the monopoly of the state to be warped as per social demands. But in Islam, the legal system is decentralized and ever-evolving. Rulers are just custodians, one among many implementing agencies of Sharia. Islam totally rejects the modern concepts of state's sovereignty. By pointing out the unalienable contradictions in the conception of the state as per West and Islam, he asserts the impossibility of an Islamic State modelled on the Western nation-state. He finds the different sources of two models of State as the primary contradiction between the both conceptions. The modern State in the West is the political process of Western modernity while the Islamic state is fashioned according to Sharia. According to him, the central domain of the Western State is technology whereas Islam’s is morality. He conducts spatial and chronological analysis of both models to aver his argument of the impossibility of the Islamic State in the modern era. Islamic State was fragmented, with multiple semi-independent peripheries delivering administration and justice as per local needs. A decentralized education system and justice dispensation aided this polity. When colonialism found this diversity as commercial impediment, they for the first time in Islamic history brought out the unification attempts, betraying the incompatibility in the process. He laments the deplorable condition where the interpretive vibrancy of the Islamic State was lost in the process and the Sharia legal system served to facilitate colonial power. In the process Islam was rendered rigid and text-based codes, effacing its diversity. He rues the fact that the violence of the modern state motivates the people to look for alternatives and in Muslim lands people turn to the Islamic version, unaware of its impossibility in the modern world. The "paradigmatic Islamic government" based on a morally sound "paradigmatic sharia" that could not support absolutism and a top-down disciplinary system is contrasted by Hallaq with this European development. Muslims ruled without the authority that belonged to God. They lacked legislative authority, which remained in the hands of ulama who served as the arbiters of divine law. Hallaq refers to "executive sultanism" as the "transient dynastic rule" denoted by the current Arabic word for "state," dawla (p.66). According to Hallaq, slave troops made up the armies of Muslim sultans because "Islam never understood conscription." In the Muslim community, disciplinary measures were implemented via self-regulatory moral technology from the bottom up. He contends that an updated "Islamic State" is thus "the Impossible State." “The modern state cannot be constructed on ethical grounds, nor can it ontologically operate as a moral entity. It “does not seek to enter the moral realm,” nor is it its duty “to make us good.” Any moral argument adduced in politics and in the framework of state domination is, in the final analysis, nothing but a political argument, a way to legitimize “political ambition, he argues”. This is not a novel view; writing since the 1940’s, Muhammad Asad lamented that the “Sharia had now come to resemble nothing so much as a vast old-clothes shop where ancient thought-garments, almost unrecognizable as to their original purport, are mechanically bought and sold, patched up and re-sold, and where the buyer’s only delight consists in praising the old tailor’s skill”. Islam is a morally superior culture that rejects the idea that fact and norm can be separate, and for which the term "political" only refers to executive rulers of revolving dynasties who remain outside the community's developing close relationship with its jurists and whose function is to levy taxes, raise armies, and impose marginal regulations. Contrary to the pitiful plight of the modern Western citizen, whose subjectivity is fashioned by the state for its own selfish utilitarian ends, in this universe, "the care of the self" by the individual Muslim to fashion oneself as moral in accordance with the dictates of the Sharia is the organizing principle of life. For Hallaq, “the Islamic tradition is composed of the theoretical-philosophical, sociological, anthropological, legal, political, and economic phenomena that have emerged in Islamic history as paradigmatic beliefs and practices”. He talks about Caliphate as a political metaphor. A political code and being where Islamic moral values are upheld and the hegemony of the state is circumscribed by Sharia to protect people and their property. He also lies bare the incompatibility of modern political ideas like democracy, secularism and relativism to Islamic concepts of state and politics. He discusses in detail the Islamic concepts of politics from historical and jurisprudential perspectives. Although the book was an attempt to understand the Islamic State after ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and Levant) announced their so-called Islamic State, this book will help understand the wider debates around Islamic State from a wider perspective in comparison with Western polity. In order to give Muslims a way to achieve the good life, Hallaq draws on the extensive moral corpus of Islamic history. Along the process, he establishes that neither the Muslim faith nor the Islamic world are the exclusive sources of political and social "crises of Islam." Muslims can interact more effectively with their Western counterparts by acknowledging the similarities between these crises and the present conditions of both the East and the West. This book is searing criticism of Islamist/ political Muslims who aspire to a modern Islamic State. In the last chapter, he analyses the politics of proponents of Islamism. Islamist politics seeks to remodel Islamic State according to Western nation-states. In such a scenario state will overwhelm Sharia and local elites will be the guardian of Sharia and polity, which Islam does not consent to. He underlines the political projects of Islamists as an attempt to bring Islamic law totally under the watch of the state, and the state will have (im)moral rights over citizens. He posits the Islamist movements as reactions from local elites to perceived failures of Western polity to provide ethical governance along with human development. The book also has been criticized by many quarters. Talal Asad sees the book as a faint attempt to comprehend Islamic politics and criticized the author’s understanding of Islamic polity. He asks the vital question of if Sharia is dead beyond even the marginalized implementation that modern political projects allow, what is the relevance of Islam as a political system? But the book is a laudable attempt to understand Islamic State and the fallacy of Islamist politics. ----- A regular columnist for NewAgeIslam.com, Mubashir V.P is a PhD scholar in Islamic Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia and freelance journalist. URL: https://newageislam.com/books-documents/wael-hallaq-impossible-theocratic-state/d/129524 New Age Islam, Islam Online, Islamic Website, African Muslim News, Arab World News, South Asia News, Indian Muslim News, World Muslim News, Women in Islam, Islamic Feminism, Arab Women, Women In Arab, Islamophobia in America, Muslim Women in West, Islam Women and Feminism