Does medieval Islam have lessons for today?

Washington: In the medieval Sunni version of Islam, it was not for the subjects to remove or overthrow an unjust or cruel government, not because they couldn’t do it, but because they decided that the job would have to be left to God and that such rulers would answer to Him on judgment day.

According to Dr Patricia Crone, professor of medieval Islamic history at Princeton, institutional mechanisms for changing a bad government were lacking in the medieval Islamic concept of state. While in theory it was admitted that tyrants should be overthrown, in practice no councils, courts or other bodies were appointed to monitor the performance of rulers, to signal when they were violating the law, to declare them deposed, or to authorise the use of force against them if they refused to comply. Attempts to establish a mechanism of control were not made in medieval Islam, except on three occasions. It was the belief that all power came from God and the ruler exercised that power as a trust. The Sharia did not lead to constitutional government. The only way to deal with tyranny under this concept was for the subjects to “keep their heads down” while the tyranny lasted or to “grin and bear it”.

Prof Crone, author of over six books on medieval Islam and a respected authority in her field, told a meeting at the Middle East Institute on Wednesday that bad rulers weren’t normally put on trial anywhere in medieval times, that it only happened twice in Europe, in both cases marking the end of the medieval relationship between rulers and ruled. She pointed out that it was only after 1945 that politicians had come to be put on trial. It started with the Nurenberg trials, and more recently some Serbians figures were tried for war crimes. No modern Muslim politician has been tried, she said, and Saddam Hussein would be the first.

In early Islam, Prof Crone stressed, the ruler was considered as just another member of the Islamic community who was administering the state in accordance with divine law. Though this was compatible with the idea of putting him on trial if he abused his office, the only instance where a Muslim ruler was put on trial was in Samarkand in 1095 when Ahmed Khan was put before a panel of jurists and judges who ultimately charged him, not with bad government, but with apostasy.

Prof Crone said Islam was not incompatible with “popular government.” She said Islam could go perfectly well with popular government as far as she could see. Divine sovereignty, she added, is not incompatible with it, for God has to rule through someone, and why shouldn’t He rule through the people? She said that was one of the things the trial of Ahmad Khan showed, since, so to speak, God sat in judgement of the king, and it was the community as represented by the generals and the jurists who acted the role of God.

To a member of the audience who said that under the modern concept of sovereignty, the people were sovereign, but in Islam, sovereignty lay with God, she replied, “The contrast between divine and popular sovereignty is false.”

She said the closest to come to the Western view of the ruler and the ruled were the Kharjites, while one school, the anarchists, though advocating that tyrannical governments should be done away with altogether, never actually tried that. She said after the four “rightly-guided” Caliphs of Islam and the strife that followed their passing, before long, virtual kingship became ascendant. According to the classic Islamic view, she said, it is religion that creates the state and the government belongs to God. If God is taken out of the equation, medieval Muslims thought it would leave only individuals whowould do what they pleased. All Muslims also believed themselves to be slaves of God, not man. The rights and duties of a Muslim were set out in the Sharia, it was believed. — Khalid Hasan

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