What Does An Islamic Government Look Like?

An alternative conception of Islamic governance that goes beyond just implementation of law

In 2022 I attended a conference in Abu Dhabi that was all about “strengthening the values of citizenship and coexistence.” I didn’t really want to go. This was not long after the UAE normalized relations with Israel in the so-called “Abraham” Accords, part of their foreign relations tour de farce which tends to leave a trail of destruction and death in its wake. Between the UAE’s foreign policy of supporting oppression in all its various forms and its internal policies of building a society on the backs of modern slavery, it’s never really been high on my bucket list of places I wanted to visit.

In any case, I decided to attend in order to at least speak some truth in a venue that would surely be filled with falsehood and platitudes. It ended up being far worse than I had expected. From the keynote speech of Abdullah bin Bayyah to the grand muftis of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, there was one consistent theme: Western liberalism is essentially Islamic, and Muslim nations need to wholeheartedly and uncritically adopt American and European governance, social order, and intellectual thought. To do so was “Islamic” in their eyes.¹

Needless to say, my short talk on developing native Islamic educational structures based on a 1400-year tradition of Islamic education instead of imitating Western models wasn’t received particularly well. My colleague who came with me was received even worse, with his mic being cut off halfway through his scathing critique of the Gulf’s approaches to political and social philosophy.

I wasn’t surprised at the organizers’ hostility toward our approach. I expected that. What I was surprised at was that the hundreds of attendees of the conference seemed to also be on the same page: whatever the West advocated for was “Islamic,” and whatever didn’t align with liberal principles was considered a distortion of Islam and to be disregarded as a vestige of the past.

Ironically, it’s often in the geographical West where Muslims advocate the exact inverse of this under the assumption they’re promoting a truly “Islamic” worldview. It’s here that young, zealous Muslims talk endlessly about the importance of enacting the shariʿah as the law of the land in Muslim countries, about how re-establishing a khilafah is the only form of Muslim governance that’s permissible, and about how we need to return to old forms of political, social, and cultural organization.

In reality, however, these well-intentioned Muslims are just as Western-minded as those in the Muslim world advocating for Westernization. They’re still only capable of viewing politics and history through a lens built on modernity. To them, if the West is all about freedom, then Muslim society should be all about restriction through law. If the West is all about cultural progressivism, then Muslims should be stagnant: dressing, speaking, and acting according to the norms of some arbitrarily selected point in history. If the West advocates for equality, then the Muslim world should exhibit an excessively unequal social order predicated on sex, race, or ethno-linguistic background.

What is “Islamic” in this approach turns into a caricature. It ends up simply mirroring whatever Western hegemony advocates for, with little to no introspection on what truly makes a society or a government “Islamic.” Historical events and texts from our intellectual tradition are cherry-picked in order to create a narrative that lacks any understanding of context and is far too narrow-minded to ever be feasible in the first place.

So we have to ask the question: What is Islamic governance? If it is more than a dry reading of fiqh texts and the heavy-handed implementation of law and public order, and it’s not an uncritical imitation of Western liberalism, what could it be based on? How would it differ from modern forms of political organization seen around the world? Is it regressive or progressive? Is it a flexible, living thing, or a rigid structure to be imposed on society?

Wahdat al-Wujud As A Framework

To answer these questions, I advocate that we zoom out a bit. More than a bit, actually. Zoom out beyond the Muslim world, the Earth itself, the galaxy, and all material existence in general. Zoom out beyond other, unseen realms. Zoom out beyond the realm of the souls, the angelic existences, all the way to the origin of all existence.

The premise of the philosophical theory of wahdat al-wujūd is that existence as a whole is one. It rejects a duality of existence in which there is Allah’s existence and then creation’s separate existence. Our existence, and the existence of all other created things, is entirely dependent on, and emanates from, Allah’s unitary existence.²

Simply put, we’re like a shadow. When the sun shines on a body and projects a shadow onto the ground, what is the nature of that shadow’s existence? It appears to have an existence of its own, but it’s nothing more than a representation of something far more “real” than it is. It maintains some of the characteristics of the original (size, shape, outline, etc.), but it could never fully represent or comprehend the three-dimensional object it came from.

In this understanding, all of creation is like a shadow of Allah’s true, real existence. There’s a lot more that can be said about this philosophy, rooted in a spirituality-based understanding of the Qur’an and Sunnah, but it suffices for our purposes to describe wahdat al-wujūd as an emanative schema of existence. All of existence emanates from Allah’s true existence.

This also includes His Names and Attributes, which are themselves emanations. Because in true unicity there is no multiplicity. Allah is not a thing that can be divided into parts. He is simply One.

But according to this, the emanation of Allah’s Names and Attributes poses a potential problem. Among Allah’s Names are some which denote great power and majesty (such as al-Qahhār – The Overpowering and al-Muntaqim – The Avenging), while others denote gentleness and tranquility (such as al-Rahmān – The Compassionate and al-Latīf – The Gentle). As existence emanates into the created realms, what is to prevent the Names of majesty from overpowering and overshadowing the Names of compassion?

There must be an arbiter, tasked by Allah with maintaining order and justice within creation. In the schema of wahdat al-wujūd, this arbiter is often known as the Haqīqa Muhammadiyya – the Muhammadan Reality.³ Volumes have been written explaining this concept and how it manifests in this metaphysical understanding of wahdat al-wujūd and its relationship with the Names and Attributes. But for our purposes it suffices to note two aspects of it:

The first is that at the highest levels of emanative existence, the Haqīqa Muhammadiyya acts as an arbiter that maintains order and tranquility in metaphysical existence. It acts to prevent the majestic Names and Attributes from overshadowing the compassionate ones. Creation as a whole exists in a balance between Allah’s Jalāl (Might) and His Jamāl (Beauty).

The second aspect to this is the physical reality of the Prophet Muhammad. Acting as the final prophet and messenger, he was tasked with bringing order and tranquility to our material realm. At times this required enacting compassion and beauty (such as his refusal to punish the people of Taif after they physically abused him) and at other times it required enacting power and majesty (such as going to war in order to remove the oppression of Quraysh). The social and political order that he brought about was predicated on justice. Sometimes that justice was brought about through beauty. At other times it was brought about through majesty.

If all of creation is a shadow cast by the truly Real, then Islamic governance must be a shadow cast by Divine justice—neither rigid nor formless, but shaped by the balance of majesty and mercy at the heart of existence.

An Islamic Political Theory

What does all this metaphysics and philosophy of existence have to do with the practical reality of governance and law? This understanding of existence and governance of the metaphysical realm can act as a mirror for us to create structures for the governance of the physical realm.

Just as the Haqīqa Muhammadiyya is tasked with maintaining metaphysical order in this emanative scheme of creation, temporal political authorities are tasked with maintaining order in their realms. The role of a Muslim ruler is to maintain the balance between the strong and the weak, to prevent the strong from overpowering and taking advantage of the weak. At times this requires manifesting great power and majesty in order to remove oppression, both external and internal. At other times it requires manifesting compassion and gentleness to care for those who need extra help in order to survive and thrive.

Zooming down from governance of a polity to the governance of a family, a parent is tasked with much the same job. At times parenting requires power and majesty to enact order and good behavior out of children. At other times it requires gentleness and softness to show children the love they need in order to be emotionally and psychologically stable.

We can zoom down even further to the level of the individual. The body itself contains both power and gentleness. Our limbs, with their bones and muscles, manifest power and strength. Our hearts manifest gentleness and love. At times we need the power of our limbs and at other times we need the gentleness of our hearts in order to get through life. An imbalance in one direction or the other leads to oppression, both of ourselves and others.

What Is Islamic Governance?

So we arrive back to our original question: what is Islamic governance? It involves enacting justice, sure. But that’s not unique. All government systems throughout history have at least claimed to promote justice. More specifically, what does an Islamic government look like practically? Who’s in charge? How is power delegated? What kind of economic theory does it entail?

I argue that what makes a government Islamic is that it mirrors the reality of existence as a whole. At the top is a body tasked with recognizing the multiplicity of creation, with all the diversity of power, gentleness, majesty, and beauty that it entails, and ordering it in a way that prevents the strong from oppressing the weak. It maintains balance.

It doesn’t try to flatten what it rules over by making everything the same in the name of equality. It doesn’t give free rein for all to do whatever they like as long as they don’t harm anyone according to some vague, ever-changing definition of the word “harm.” But it also doesn’t act as a vengeful source of punishment that relishes in oppressing the masses to maintain order. It maintains balance.

Does this government that reflects the schema of wahdat al-wujūd have a king, a president, a sultan, a khalifa? That’s beside the point. You can call the ruler whatever title you like. You can create a government structure that suits the needs of the current social and political context so long as it maintains this underlying framework.

When Muʿāwiya took charge of the khilāfa in 661, he began to rule in the form of a king, with a throne and a palace in order to match the norms of his era. But when dealing with the Arab tribes of the Peninsula, he acted like a traditional Bedouin chief, a first among equals. When the Abbasids took power a century later, they instituted an efficient, expansive bureaucracy, with the Abbasid khalīfa sequestered to the palace, seldom seen in order to maintain an aura of mystery and power, in line with old Persianate norms of governance. When the Ottomans conquered Constantinople, they fashioned themselves as universal rulers, combining aspects of Mongol universal sovereignty with Byzantine emperorship, even taking the titles of Caesar and Khan.

I would argue that all these governments were “Islamic.” They were led by Muslims who maintained order and justice (most of the time) by mirroring the order and justice of the metaphysical realm in general. They took incredibly different forms, different titles, and maintained different social orders, but at the core, what made them Islamic wasn’t the form, but the underlying framework upon which the form was built.

That framework of order and justice can only be predicated on something universal, meta-temporal, and that supersedes social and historical context. It can only be based on an Islamic content: the guidance of the Qur’an and Sunnah. Embedded within this is an implementation of sharīʿah, but not as a heavy-handed rulebook with nothing more. It was always understood as a living, flexible thing, interpreted by the scholars of fiqh who at times differed on rulings, which then provided rulers with a rich corpus of law from which to derive their policies. It wasn’t about imposing the harshest laws in an attempt to keep the population restricted. It was about providing citizens with an avenue for engaging in the larger emanative schema of existence, aligning them with the order and justice of the metaphysical realm.⁴

To be clear, this understanding of Islamic governance is not infinitely flexible. It is fundamentally at odds with modern political theories like liberalism and communism. The unrestricted freedom and lack of communal responsibility of liberalism and the cynical materialism of communism are incompatible with an understanding of human existence based on Allah’s existence and the emanation of creation from Him. An Islamic government is based largely on the roles and responsibilities of individuals in relation to Allah, not on their freedoms or lack thereof in relation to the government and other citizens.

While the structure of modern Islamic government may take any number of forms (a constitutional republic, a monarchy, a caliphate, or whatever), the underlying framework must be based in a metaphysical understanding of the individual, of creation, and of Allah in order for it to be labelled as “Islamic”. It must be centered on the Creator’s sovereignty, not just practically in terms of implementation of Islamic law, but metaphysically, in terms of His rulership over all of existence and man’s seeking to act as a representative—a khalīfa—of that rulership.

1. One presenter, a president of a university in Mali, spoke with pride about how his university had used funding from the UAE to remove Arabic education from its curriculum in order to replace it with English and French, allowing their students to be more in line with the Western world instead of the Muslim. This is where I was first exposed to the UAE’s use of educational funding as a means to expand its soft power - a policy it attempts to enact among Muslim institutions in the United States as well.

2. While the theory of wahdat al-wujūd is most notably attached to the person of Ibn al-Arabi, it’s important to note that he simply gave it its most complete articulation. Aspects of creation’s non-existence in the face of Allah’s true existence are seen throughout the Islamic tradition, particularly among Sufis, many of whom (like al-Ghazali) pre-dated Ibn al-Arabi.

3. The Haqīqa Muḥammadiyya is also referred to in the tradition by other names, including al-nūr al-muḥammadī (the Muhammadan Light), ʿaql al-awwal (the First Intellect), and rūh Muḥammad (the Spirit of Muhammad). These names reflect different aspects of the same metaphysical reality across Sufi, philosophical, and theological contexts.

4. One example of this was the Ottoman Empire’s adoption of Maliki fiqh on questions of sailors lost at sea, despite the polity being ostensibly Hanafi. Whereas the Hanafi school would require absolute knowledge that a lost sailor is dead before allowing his widow to remarry (thus usually stipulating the widow waits decades to ensure her husband at least died of natural causes), the Maliki interpretation allowed for a far shorter waiting period, allowing widows to remarry and be supported by a new husband instead of being forced into a life of poverty and loneliness.