Notes On the Fiqh of Minorities

Ibn Maghreb

By now, there are a few studies worth checking out on the discourse of Fiqh of Minorities (FOM) for the Muslim diaspora in the Anglosphere. Unfortunately most publications from within academia read as practical apologia for the discourse, offering soothing reassurances and platitudes to the reader that all is well with the Ishmaelite hordes and that they are actually behaving themselves. Studies by the likes of March (Islam and Liberal Citizenship) and Fares Hassan (Fiqh al-Aqalliyyat) are some examples.

Others, particularly the likes of Shavit (Sharia and Muslim Minorities), stress with what can only be described as an excruciatingly earnestness to the outsider that the "wasati" discourse is the side one should be rooting for. Why? Well, because:

"The broad application of maṣlaḥa by wasaṭī jurists and the primacy their jurisprudence gives to taysīr and tabshīr suggest that at least one dominant version of Islamic law can be accommodated to demands made by liberal states and societies, even if these infringe on religious freedoms."

Shavit also goes on to reassure the reader:

"that jurists have proved largely disinclined to pass judgments on specific political issues, and that Islamic-based politics that adheres to shar‘ī norms has hardly developed in the West."

Clearly Shavit wants to reassure all concerned parties, that those pesky Saracens are far too engrossed in their fiqh to worry about the political ramifications - what a relief. I often find these works by outsiders incredibly revealing because they are written with a sort of candid arrogance. The authors assume, perhaps, that believing Muslims who affirm the epistemic reality of the Qur'anic revelation may never read their work or understand the political undertones of their claims. I also think that this bluntness, even from sympathetic and good-natured commentators like March, can be quite illuminating. March surmises in his work in rather Hickian fashion that distinct tribes can indeed reach the top of the mountain summit using different heuristics and arguments—the summit being, of course, Rawlsian liberalism. Here, he discusses how the FOM jurists framed the permissibility of Muslims serving and aiding the political and military structures of the non-Muslim Western establishment:

"Thus, when Muslim scholars can say that serving in a non-Muslim army, cooperating with non-Muslims, paying taxes to a non-Muslim state, or participating in a non-Muslim political situation do not require 'exalting the word of unbelief' or rejecting Islamic truth claims, those practices take on an entirely different ethical significance than if they took place in a state that proclaimed a perfectionist doctrine. Muslim jurists are able to describe these practices in exactly the way a Rawlsian liberal would: as necessary or reasonable demands of social cooperation, rather than duties arising from a shared conception of truth or virtue. Although some Muslim scholars object to the liberal state’s nonreligious foundation and claim to prefer to live as a minority in a Christian state, far more prefer—if the state is not going to be founded on Islam—that it be active only in 'political' matters, rather than spiritual ones. These jurists seem to be making the precise calculation that Rawls supposes either parties in the original position or citizens living under a 'constitutional consensus' will: that the most reasonable and rational response to ethical pluralism is to limit the range of political cooperation to secular, civil areas and to prefer state neutrality on questions of truth."

There have been, of course, critical responses to FOM from within the Muslim diaspora, but these have largely been drowned out or marginalized completely by the scholastic communities and larger mainstream Western political establishment, needless to say, for obvious reasons. Asif Khan's The Fiqh of Minorities—The New Fiqh to Subvert Islam remains, for better or worse, the only sustained critical appraisal of FOM grounded in a paradigm of political theory that departs from Rawlsian platitudes. Here, to the reader, I declare my open bias that I personally feel it is disappointing that a movement such as Hibz ut Tahrir is the only one capable of mounting such a critical appraisal, and this speaks volumes about how moribund and performative the discourse has sadly become.

FOM 1 to FOM 2

I think it is imperative to understand that the positions of FOM 2, as I term it today, which largely promote an uncritical acceptance of Western statism and electoral politics as the primary animating force for organizing the collective religious and cultural contours of the Anglophone faithful, did not happen overnight. Certainly, 9/11 was a catalyst, in fact, the catalyst. I would also caution that, in classic charitable Muslim fashion, we should look at some of the figures associated with FOM 1, such as Shaykh Yusuf al Qaradawi, Dr. Taha Jabir Alawani, and even Shaykh Bin Bayyah, with a certain gentleness. Retrospective post-mortems always deliver with them an unnecessary confidence in one's own abilities. Were I at the age where I was forced to make certain political and social choices that would govern the future attitudes of the faithful at that particular time and context, I'm certain I would have read the works of FOM 1 authors with great encouragement and accepted the consensus as it were.

Be that as it may, these three figures, all of whom spent their formative years outside of the West in Muslim-majority countries, provided the foundations for an uncritical acceptance that the Western nation-state and its mechanisms of electoral politics were a matter of urgent priority for Muslim communities. Muslims must participate. Some of their later commentators and students would go so far as to state that voting for one particular faction or tribe potentially becomes a matter of religious obligation. Others even adopted a more meta approach, arguing that participation within electoral politics was a type of valorous spiritual work. These attitudes are present to anyone who has read the primary sources of these three giants.

At this juncture, I find it prudent to state that invoking petty divisions of Ikhwani v Sufi v Salafi is counterproductive. Our friends in the high and mighty places of Western academia who have attained glittering tenure, scholarships, book deals, and media platforms are all too eager to offer another marvelous concoction—the Hollywood-esque dichotomy of "revolutionary" v "counter-revolutionary," "quietist" v "activist."

I suspect that if one is a judicious and careful enough reader, it is all but apparent that all the mainstream trends within Muslim communities on both sides of the Atlantic consolidated on a position of electoral participation as a matter of consensus. The degree to which they enthusiastically spread this message with zeal and pomp, of course, varies from trend to trend. However, at that point, this becomes more of a discussion about the aesthetics of participation rather than the issue of participation itself.

FOM 1 authors, in their work and approach, flattened the machinations, complexities, and difficulties inherent within the Western project of participatory liberal electoral democracy by taking all of its claims at face value without scrutiny. They believed in a liberal neutral state with a regime of impartial human rights and citizenship for all, backed by a patrician judicial class and reigned in by a fierce and independent media. The economy was never even considered. The political economy of the Central Banks not even given a single thought. Although there was clearly a lot of discussion about interest.

This fairy-tale undergirds the work of all FOM1 authors. To be quite honest, I would include myself in believing such a fairy-tale if I were active in the '90s faced with the dawning realization that a unipolar world was imminent and one simply had to make do.

FOM 1 elders, however, in due time, retired from their projects. Some stayed and served their local communities, while others chose to return to the Islamicate world, with the GCC being a particularly attractive option. However, they leave a corpus—a corpus that is left, for all intents and purposes, unexamined and largely intact without any additional critical remarks or addenda.

In this vacuum of critical reappraisal, particularly in the incredibly febrile situation of a post-9/11 world, FOM 2 actors emerge and not only accelerated their projects but mutated them to such a degree that one feels FOM 1 actors would look at FOM 2 with disgust. Personalities such as Tariq Ramadan, in particular, championed political participation, advocating for alliances with progressive social movements in the European continent. Similar occurrences transpired in the Anglosphere, and I suspect readers interested in this topic do not need that story rehashed for the umpteenth time.

However, I suspect a brief summary wouldn't be remiss and I do not see the point of taking names apart as most know now who is who. (Tariq Ramadan though deserved a special mention because of his work "Radical Reform" and in particular that famous conference with Sh. Hamza Yusuf at the Oxford Union)

A class of young, dynamic, and eloquent ulema and activists faced and burdened with the unenviable task of filling as spokespersons for entire communities are thrust in the spotlight. Faced with draconian legislation like the Patriot Act and other iterations like PREVENT across the Atlantic, they must have felt forced to arbitrate a form of religiosity palpable to the Western political establishment. FOM 2 thus emerges. FOM 2 is no longer just concerned about procedural Rawlsianism—the naivety that participation in electoral politics is a way of assuring communal health.

FOM 2 actively pushes the discourse towards the left and, in some pockets, to the far-left. However, this is not a subversive type of leftism. It pledges fealty and undying loyalty to incredibly bloated and dysfunctional political entities that advocate for statism—the Democrats in the States and Labour in the UK. FOM 2 unwittingly (if one is being charitable) offers an opportunity for Western political establishments to interfere in the cultural and social dynamics of communities. After all, if one wishes to have a seat at the table (a phrase heard ad nauseam), then this comes with certain terms and conditions. FOM 2 goes even further and explicitly attaches participation within a political model to the overall health of the religious aspirations of the community. In doing so, the mantra becomes one of "building alliances" and compromise, all ushered under the mantra of Maqasid—alignments must be made with minorities of all types, including "sexual minorities."

FOM 2 in the UK has reached its moment of reckoning with the election of two prominent politicians—Sadiq Khan in London as mayor and Humza Yusuf as First Minister. They are indeed the culmination of the ambition of the FOM 2 movement. This was the end goal—electing Muslims into the highest levels of political office in Western democracies—the ultimate safeguard to prevent the excesses of the expansionary surveillance state, at least that was the plan. I think. I hope. I'm not sure even the FOM 2 theoreticians truly understood what they were getting themselves into. Perhaps if there ever was a case of unintended consequences it was FOM 2. I understand our dear Prof Brown is busy entertaining indignant former allies about his recent apparent betrayal - how so very unfortunate. In contrast, their partners (perhaps to be soon, former partners as they themselves are cannibalised by the Frankenstein they created) in institutional activism in the Academy, media, and courts were well aware and made their move while they dithered and are dithering at this moment in time.

Sadly, what has happened is that these figures have become (or perhaps always were) part of the larger apparatus of statism in the country. Everything must be run through the Ministry of Truth; otherwise, it cannot be halal.

FOM 2 ironically started off, particularly in the Ramdanian conception, as being all about "grassroots activism." In the end, though, FOM 2 becomes a corporatized shell—its brown tokenism at the highest levels offering the same failed policies and dysfunctions of the existing decaying Anglosphere political establishment. FOM 2 indeed becomes centralized—it has become consolidated in the highest levels of Western academia, legacy media, political office, and even courts. It is no longer an organic network in touch with the grassroots. Hence the sensational divide between the FOM 2 orthodoxy and the average Muslim over the issue of the Navigating Differences document. Incidentally, the document is classic FOM 1 rhetoric. FOM 2 has become drunk on its own political successes, it has become impressed with the social and moral currency it has bought in the mainstream Western discourse and essentially betrayed the communities it was supposed to represent.

What next?

In my last blog, I argued about what I find to be the strengths of the Sunni tradition—decentralized networks of communities and ulema working without the primacy of state authority. Adopting a true polycentric order that escapes the gaze of the Centre, as it were. Here I find the words of Paul Kingsnorth of some comfort in his thoughtful piece. Electoral politics simply does not work at the state level—the aim should never be high public office. Perhaps our ambitions should be scaled back. Perhaps we should return to the local. Our advocacy in broader political culture should not be about expanding the role of the State in the hope that it will be a benign arbiter of peace. Rather, it should be about devolving as much authority as possible to the local level to empower orthodox Muslims. This can be done without participating in the farce of electoral politics. This can also be done in dialogue and conversation with other communities with similar, but not identical, dispositions who fear the tyranny of relativism as much as we do. An ecunemical jihad.

There are more fundamental questions at stake too—questions about political economy, developing alternative and parallel cultures and structures of finance, economics, scholarship, and media. This may sound grand, but it is far more realistic than attempting to govern from the highest public offices in tandem with opaque and dense centralized bureaucracies that are often backed by an aggressive intelligence apparatus.

There is also another uncomfortable question to ask. What if we fail? What if we cannot create out of the ashes of FOM 2 a polycentric order—localized and decentralized nodes of Islamic finance, grassroots organizations with ulema involvement, and all that good stuff? What if, in an age of impending programmable money and the political economy that comes along with that—for example, CBDCs, etc.—this is not feasible? I suspect then we should consider one camp which I have not hitherto mentioned—the hijra camp. Often ridiculed, laughed at, and mocked, they may be the ones who indeed have the last laugh.

I sincerely hope they do not. I'm a realist in the short term but an optimist in the long run. I believe that despite all that I have stated, the Muslim communities in the Anglosphere are incredibly resourceful and brave. There are good people willing to do the work, who are doing the work—actually, they have been doing the work for decades. Those are the people who are keeping the lights on for all the numerous masajid we have taken for granted. A reality that was not truly imaginable thirty or forty years ago. To truly unleash the potential of this community, the Islamic Secular and ulema in partnership should advocate for a vision of communal life that begrudgingly acknowledges the primacy of a State from a critical distance by minimal observation of its laws but refuses, on conscientious grounds, to participate in the farce of its dilapidated and crumbling cultures, norms, political economy and vapid proceduralism that hides beneath it a vicious relativism. This may be naïve, but I would argue it is less naïve than the proposition of FOM 2. The ultimate challenge would be to create new social and cultural structures that are the envy of the rest of the population. This alone and not theoretical discourse will convince the natives as it were the primacy of the Ishmaelite creed. Who knows? Perhaps it is not feasible but I do not see any other option. I hope we reach a post FOM-2 moment but I suspect we are heading instead towards critical mass. The only thing left is for it to collapse completely under the weight of its contradictions which year after year are becoming incredibly apparent even to the most good-hearted and congenial of normie Muslim.

And truly, God knows best.