To Be Radical Is To Be Muslim - The Shepherd and the State

How can we deconstruct a Western framework?

We’re all Westerners. Geography is irrelevant. Your state of mind is Western. Whether you live in the geographic west, in places like North America, Europe, or Australia, or in the historical Muslim world, you’re a Westerner. In fact, those living in the Muslim world often are more Western-minded than Westerners themselves.

It’s a subtle, underlying mindset. An intellectual framework. A lens through which you view yourself and the world around you. It’s difficult to perceive, but it shapes everything. Chances are that unless you were raised in a Mongolian yurt with no satellite television or internet, you approach the world through a Western framework.

I often advise my students that if they truly want to think “Islamically” (whatever that might mean), they need to deconstruct their Western frameworks first. At the risk of sounding like a New Age spiritualist who reads bad translations of Rumi: “you can’t fill a cup that’s already full”.

So what does this mean? How can we deconstruct a framework that supposedly has us by the choke hold? We can identify three realms that expose the Western framework and allow for contrast:

• Socio-political individualism

• Religious democratization of authority

• Progressive notions of history

In each of these realms, I argue that we tend to think primarily through a modern, Western lens. Any alternative to this lens would be a radical departure.

This piece focuses on the socio-political realm, with future entries treating the questions of religion and understandings of history.

Freedom Without Responsibility

The modern order, in all its various forms, is predicated on individualism as the assumed natural state of man. This is fairly easy to see in a place like America, where the entire raison d’etre for the country in the first place is a desire to further individual freedom at the expense of the overbearing state. Personal freedom to do whatever you want (so long as you’re not harming anyone else) is taken for granted.

The relationship of the individual with society and governance around him is based on this notion of personal freedom. Generally, we expect little from those around us and in return expect to give little back. Responsibilities and obligations are not at the forefront of our minds, our individual freedom is.

This isn’t new. When Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the early 1800s, he wrote about American individualism that “Such people owe nothing to anyone and, as it were, expect nothing from anyone. They are used to considering themselves in isolation and quite willingly imagine their destiny as entirely in their own hands.”

Even Europe’s more communal, pseudo-socialist model remains rooted in individualism. There the state is larger, more powerful, and more intrusive into people’s lives. It restricts freedom to levels that Americans could never tolerate. But it’s still based on the idea that the individual is the primary unit of society and that his comfort and safety are of utmost importance. The state acts as the ultimate arbiter between individuals. When some individuals economically exploit others, the state acts to fix the problem and protect the ones being exploited.

In both the American and European models of state and society, the focus is on the individual’s relationship vis a vis other individuals. The individual’s responsibility towards others is either minimized (as in the American context) or taken over by the state (as in Europe).

Be a Shepherd

The Western framework has no concept of taklif: individual responsibility. Within an Islamic framework the legal-ethical role of responsibility far overshadows any inherent freedom that man possesses. The individual possesses responsibility in proportion to his authority. In the very least, an individual with no authority over anyone else is responsible for himself and management of his own moral and religious life.

Someone in political office has a higher level of responsibility due to having a higher level of authority. They must not only guard themselves against immoral or extra-legal behavior, and must also provide for the dissemination of morality and goodness in the society that they preside over. The religious scholar has a responsibility to the intellectual tradition, to faithfully interpret and transmit revelation.

Meanwhile, the modern Western mindset is to think of each of these levels through the lens of freedom. What freedom does the individual have to do whatever he wants? What freedom does the ruler have to rule as he sees fit? What freedom does religion have in relation to arbitrary and ever-changing notions of morality?

Since unrestricted freedom is obviously destructive, the Western framework is obsessed with the creation of legal checks on freedom at all levels. Individuals are checked by laws protecting them from harming other individuals. Rulers are checked by laws that stop them from abusing their power to enrich themselves. Religions are checked by laws that ensure the public face of the religion abides by the dictates of the state.

Needless to say, such laws often don’t work at all. Individuals still transgress against other individuals, rulers still act in a corrupt manner to enrich themselves at the expense of their constituents, and religions still don’t always toe the state line. What’s the solution? More laws, of course. The Western framework continues to entrench itself in a system that has proven to be unworkable by design.

It’s like the urban planner, who when he sees an 8 lane highway that’s constantly congested decides to add one more lane of traffic in each direction instead of seeking an alternative such as rail infrastructure. “Just one more lane will fix traffic,” is the transportation equivalent of, “Just one more law will ensure freedom and justice.”

The entire framework itself is unworkable because it’s not based on anything inherent in man, or in nature itself. Nature, whether we’re talking about our physical environment or the cosmos as a whole, operates based on order. Everything has a role, and it fulfills that role. Man is part of this natural order. Man has a role. Man has responsibilities. That role is not to act with freedom and impunity until governmental law impedes him. It is to fulfill his responsibility within that order. That responsibility looks different for an individual, for the leader of a state, and for a religious scholar. But at each level there is an understanding of responsibility that underpins the relationship of the individual with society around him.

"Every one of you is a shepherd and every one is responsible for his flock. The ruler is a shepherd over the people and is responsible for his flock. A man is a shepherd over the members of his family and is responsible for them. A woman is a shepherd over the household of her husband and his children and is responsible for them. A slave is a shepherd over the property of his master and is responsible for it. Beware, every one of you is a shepherd and every one of you is responsible for his flock."

From this Prophetic narration an entire socio-political theory of community and state can be constructed. It is based on a recognition of one’s role in the socio-political order and what responsibilities come with that role. There are elements of freedom, sure. But individual freedom is not the bedrock of this society. Responsibility is.

What would a 21st century model of governance based on this notion look like? It can look like anything. But it can’t look like the past. Past polities were based on the historical context within which they existed. The Ottomans and Mughals, who were contemporaries, organized their governments in drastically different ways due to the contexts within which they operated. And both of them differed in form from earlier polities like the Mamluks, Abbasids, and Umayyads.

A new socio-political model can be constructed for the modern day. It can be based on man’s responsibility instead of his freedom. And it can take any number of external forms from monarchy to constitutional republic to a loose confederation of states. But it must be predicated on something natural and universal. Individual responsibility must form the foundation upon which a facade of governance can be built.

Be Radical

This is a radical intellectual departure from Western thought. It upends the entire notion of citizenship that we all take for granted today. We’re all Westerners whether we like to admit it or not.

But within this Western framework, the cracks are showing. At both the intellectual and communal levels, people increasingly recognize the system’s failures. Despite its promise to deliver a just and equitable political system based on individual freedom, liberalism has failed. People ask questions about why their elected officials represent the interests of corporations and unhinged genocidal states instead of their constituents. They see that despite promises of freedom being a net good for the individual, families have collapsed as parents neglect their responsibilities to their children and children in turn do the same to their parents.

Everywhere the signs of a crumbling social order are present. The reaction is to be radical to seek out alternatives. Some flavors of leftism seek to replace the current order with an even more powerful state that would have more freedom to impose its will to ostensibly protect individual rights against the transgressions of other individuals. The right, meanwhile seeks to criminalize non-conformity in an effort to manufacture homogeneous, chauvinist nation-states in which personal freedom is maximized and man’s responsibility to others is essentially non-existent.

But none of these solutions is actually a departure from the current order. They still take for granted the notion of individual rights and freedoms as the basic building block of a socio-political order. They’re doubling down on a failed system.

If you want to be radical, you need to look outside the failed system for a solution. You need to critically analyze your own intellectual framework and determine whether it’s based on objective truth about reality, or if it’s a constructed attempt to invent a new order based on an unnatural understanding of man’s role in society and the cosmos.

To be radical is to reject false freedom, embrace taklif, and ground your politics in Truth, not in the fantasies of European philosophers. Simply, to be radical is to be Muslim.