CONSTITUTION-MAKING – Part 3
A Welfare State
وَلَقَدْ كَتَبْنَا فِى ٱلزَّبُورِ مِنۢ بَعْدِ ٱلذِّكْرِ أَنَّ ٱلْأَرْضَ يَرِثُهَا عِبَادِىَ ٱلصَّـٰلِحُونَ
Al-Anbiya (The Prophets) 21:105
While talking of an Islamic constitution, we must guard against one misconception which happens to be commonly prevalent, and which perhaps more than anything else has been responsible for the stagnation one finds Muslim societies the world over afflicted with. That misconception is that Islam, being a perfect code, gives us ready-made and cut-and-dried anything and everything we stand in need of to guide our footsteps in life.
Islam does nothing of the kind. Indeed, this kind of spoon-feeding would be tantamount to defeating the whole purpose of man’s life, robbing him of all initiative and drive, thereby stultifying the whole growth and development of his personality, reducing him to a mere robot. The entire glory of man’s life lies in his freedom to face it on his own, and on his own steer his course as best he may.
It seems the inelasticity, rigidity, the sterility which came to stamp the Muslim mind the world over during the past centuries was the direct outcome of putting Muslim thinking in this kind of leading religious strings. Whereas the Western mind explored ever-new vistas and regions of thought and life, thereby marching from conquest to conquest in every department of life. Muslim thinking was confined to barren, stereotyped grooves of doctrinal hair-splitting, thereby drifting away from the currents of actual life into the backwaters of intellectual stagnation.
Typical of this attitude was the reaction of the Baghdad Ulema when Halaku’s hordes were knocking at the gates of that seat of the Caliphate. Instead of rising to the occasion to organize the city’s defence, they went on debating hotly whether or not the crow’s flesh was a lawful food, which they had made into a big religious issue. The Egyptian Ulema, it is recorded, showed similar unawareness of the realities of life in the face of Napoleon’s invasion. When the news reached Cairo that the French fleet was already within Egypt’s territorial waters, they called upon the people to assemble in mosques and start chanting from Bukhari, the Book of Traditions, to ward off the impending threat.
This was a complete misreading of Islamic teachings, of which the whole essence is to make man learn to face up to realities, to stand on his own legs. Islam is the direct negation of the kind of escapism reflected in the above instances of false religiosity. Its sole purpose is to open man’s eyes to the realities of life and make him come to grips with those realities on his own.
In the matter of a constitution as well, Islam gives just the brief outline, leaving man free to fill in the rest of the picture as the social conditions or exigencies of the time demand. It gives the main objective that the State must keep in view and leaves the details as to the form or system of Government to the people themselves to determine. That objective has been summed up in verse:
وَلَقَدْ كَتَبْنَا فِى ٱلزَّبُورِ مِنۢ بَعْدِ ٱلذِّكْرِ أَنَّ ٱلْأَرْضَ يَرِثُهَا عِبَادِىَ ٱلصَّـٰلِحُونَ
Al-Anbiya (The Prophets) 21:105
”Surely the land shall be inherited by the Saalihoon among the people.”
”Saalihoon” (the righteous servants) is an all-comprehensive word, denoting people who are not only well-meaning but also capable of bringing peace and prosperity to the land. Commentators take this verse to refer to the Holy Land, Palestine. Even so, it enunciates a general principle that people who cease to properly manage a state are bound to lose it, to be replaced by another set of people who can really develop its resources and promote the people’s weal.
Another verse of the Quran enunciates the same principle on a universal scale, underlining a universal law of life:
وَأَمَّا مَا يَنفَعُ ٱلنَّاسَ فَيَمْكُثُ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ كَذَٰلِكَ يَضْرِبُ ٱللَّهُ ٱلْأَمْثَالَ
Ar-Ra’d (The Thunder) 13:17
”And as for that which is beneficial to the people, it stays in the earth.”
The people’s good – that is the only objective that a State must pursue; in fact, it is the State’s only justification for existence. As to the modus operandi to achieve that objective, Islam very wisely does not tie down man’s hands to any particular form or system. The forms of Government would naturally depend on the social conditions which vary from time to time and country to country. Even in the same country and the same society, the form of Government may change according to the exigencies of the day.
The concept of a Welfare State, which the Western people have evolved after centuries of experimentation and as a result of a prolonged struggle between the people on one side and the vested interests in various shapes and forms on the other was given by Islam as the very basis and the cornerstone of all Statecraft. One of the most formidable, vested interests that the people in the West had to fight against was the Church, which for centuries dominated the States of Europe in the name of God Whose representative on earth it claimed to be. In the name of religion, it put chains of the worst kind on the people’s minds, and for centuries blocked all paths of progress, inflicting on Europe what constitutes the darkest chapter of its history – an epoch when ignorance, fanaticism, poverty, and disease reigned supreme in every country of Europe.
It was Islam that came to its rescue, touching off the spark which led to the reformation and renaissance of which modern progressive European Society with its political institutions is undoubtedly the product. The cry of the Islamisation of the State in the post-war Muslim Societies is, at the bottom, a revival of the same controversy – the supremacy of the Church over the State – which took Europe centuries to shake off.
Here in Pakistan, the Ulema created quite a deadlock over the issue of the Constitution. While India, within a matter of weeks or months, adopted a constitution and set to develop the country, taking it from strength to strength, all we in Pakistan did was mark time, discussing what the Islamic Constitution was like, and wasted quite a few years over it.
The demand for a constitution became a regular political issue, incorporated in a joint Manifesto by the Ulema. And when a spineless Government at the Centre, shaking in its shoes at the popular agitation worked up over this issue, called upon the Ulema to oblige it by producing one for it, they let the cat out of the bag by replying that if you don’t know what an Islamic constitution should be you have no business to be in office. They would do it if installed in the seat of the Government. This was an ill-concealed bid to capture political power in the name of religion – an echo of the Church vs State controversy in the West.
Although the political decks have since been considerably cleared up of that loose emotional talk, the echo of Islam-in-danger still lingers, resulting in much-confused thinking. It is a pity that a religion that rescued Europe from the blighting nightmare of the Church stranglehold, should itself be made a stumbling block in the way of a stable Government and progressive society. It is history repeating itself. Everywhere in the Muslim world – from Turkey to Indonesia – we find the priestly class entrenched against the modernist, progressive elements, jeopardizing the stability of the Government and security of the country in the name of Islam.
There could be no greater travesty of Islamic teachings than to make them a cause of intellectual confusion and domestic dissensions, thereby frittering away the much-needed time, attention, and energy that should go to the country’s development and reconstruction.
It is time we get out of this vicious circle of confused thinking if we are at all to catch up with the advanced countries of the world. In Islam, the people’s good, including material prosperity, is both the highest religion and the highest statecraft. Faith in God itself has been described by the Quran as a paying proposition – calculated for the good of the individual as well as Society. Anything that retards progress and leads to stagnation is neither good religion nor good Government.
There is no such thing in Islam as life religious and life secular. Life in Islam is one indivisible whole. The worldly life is a tillage for the life to come is a well-known saying of the Prophet ﷺ. The idea as if the two are incompatible is again borrowed from the West, where Christianity avowedly stood for the inherent evilness of this worldly life and advocated its renunciation as the fulfilment of religion. In Islam, life is one continuous process, the grave, mistakenly considered to be the end of life, being in reality – the doorway to a new vista of life on a higher plane.
It is in light of this basically different attitude towards worldly life and religion that we should delineate the function of the State. That function has been succinctly summed up in the Quranic verse already quoted – viz., that the land shall be inherited by those who are capable of properly managing it and bringing it peace, progress, and prosperity. In other words, the sole objective of an Islamic State must be to become a truly Welfare State, eradicating poverty, ignorance and disease and raising the common man’s standard of life, health, education, and enlightenment. In modern political parlance, the State as such must be a secular State, devoting itself to the peace, security and prosperity of the people without getting entangled in endless theological discussions and dissensions, which, it can not be gainsaid, have been mainly responsible for the disintegration of Islam as a temporal power, and its stagnation and decadence as a society.
To incorporate a vague general statement in the Constitution that the State would be based on the Quran and Sunnah will not carry things very far. Muslims have been breaking one another’s heads in the name of the Quran and the Sunnah. The purpose of the State in the light of the Quran and the Sunnah must be stated in specific terms as the establishment of a Welfare State. In making Pakistan a truly Welfare State, such as in U. K., where medical aid and education are free for everybody, where unemployment is unknown, where there are pensions for the old and the widows and well-looked-after Homes for orphans and old people wil1 undoubtedly be the greatest fulfilment of Islam and the nearest approach to the Khilafat-i-Rashida.
M.Y.K.
(The Light – August 1, 1960)
