The problem of the power rotation in Islamic political ideology

By: Mohamed El-Dabouly

The “rotation of power” is one of the most important political concepts, which have been addressed by almost all the intellectual tendencies of state-building since the dawn of history – and until today – the circulation of power has actually fueled the tumult in many countries.

Contemporary political ideology has succeeded in refining the question of the struggle for power by identifying appropriate peaceful mechanisms for the transition of power, away from the non-peaceful mechanisms of assassinations and coups.

The peaceful mechanisms revolve around the philosophy of “freedom of choice” and competition between competitors; in order to reach power peacefully away from fighting, while at the same time contemporary political ideology organized the symptoms of  confidence withdrawal from the Governor.

In recent decades, the Islamic stream has also called for applying Islamic law as it is appropriate for current societies and it preceded the Western civilization in applying democracy, whereas the current democratic mechanisms, such as elections and parliaments, are similar to the concepts of allegiance and shura.

Therefore, the study will try to dismantle some of the concepts promoted by the intellectual concerning democracy in Islam, especially the concepts of allegiance and Shura.

From this point of view, the study revolves around a major question: How valid is the application of the concepts of allegiance and shura in Islam in the contemporary societies? This question will be answered through the following two points:

1- The principles of power circulation in Islamic political ideology from a modern perspective (main point).

2- The practices of power circulation in the Islamic history

The first point: The principles of power circulation in Islamic political ideology from a modern perspective. The power circulation in Islamic ideology is based on several principles which, in its entirety, constituted a framework for the power circulation, such: “Applying shari’a, justice, allegiance, obedience, and shura”.

Firstly: Applying Shari’a:

The idea of applying the Islamic law is the main idea, in which the Islamic groups’ ideas revolved around, and it means – from that angle – the ruling by the Book of God and the teachings of his prophet; that is to say that the applied laws are identical with them, and if they violated God’s law – as claimed by these streams – it is considered as infidelity and misguidance, according to the words of God in Surat Al-Maida verse (44) “And whoever did not judge what God revealed, these are the disbelievers.”

Secondly: Justice:

Every intellectual stream took its own value; liberalism raised freedom as their slogan; socialism put equality as a goal, while Islamic ideology took the value of justice as its primary target.

This is consistent with the words of Allah in Surat Al-Maa’idah verse 8: “O ye who believe! Be steadfast to God, the martyrs by …., and do not punish you, for some people will not adjust, be right. He is closer to piety and fear Allah. Allah knows what you do.

The noble decree urges Muslims to take justice as a fundamental value for them in governance and administration, and to make the reward for the administration of justice very large, for its applying justice is considered as a means of piety and closeness to God.

Thirdly: Applying Shura:

The concept of shura is one of the cultural concepts promoted by Islamic thinkers as evidence of the primacy of Islamic civilization in applying democracy; Where it means «non-exclusive rule and consultation of specialists; to explore their views, and the opinion of the most likely, and follow him».

Where the «non-monopoly rule and consultation of specialists; means to questionnaire their views, and choose the most proper opinion, and follow it».

The Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) was keen to follow the Shura approach in many of his works, and after that the Sahaabah followed it. Abu Hurayrah (may Allaah be pleased with him) said: “I never saw someone keen to take advice from his companions more than the Messenger of Allaah “Narrated by al-Shaafa’i.

The Islamic thinkers, assuming that the Shura was synonymous with the idea of contemporary parliaments, the    Islamists made the Shura one of the foundations for establishing the state, in accordance with the verse “Shura” (And their affairs is being discussed among them).

Despite the importance of the principle of shura, it remains a principle that was not developed by Islamic thinkers, in order to have clear mechanisms and tools that can be applied in its application, Islamic political history is completely devoid of the tools of achieving shura, except for the advice of the people of solution, and ministers.

Imam Abu Hameed al-Ghazali mentioned the importance of the role of ministers in facilitating matters of governance, advising the ruler and guiding him if he is not on the right track. He also specified some qualities that the minister should enjoy, including science and cleverness.

Despite the contribution of al-Ghazali to the importance of the role of the minister, and the people of the solution in giving advice; it did not address the mechanisms of choice, almost Islamic ideology set the conditions that must be met by ministers and the people of solution; it did not produce the mechanisms through which they can be selected.

Fourthly: allegiance:

Some confuse the concept of allegiance and the concept of election in the modern era, whereas, allegiance is the synonym of the concept of election in our time, in which it is known as: «Involvement of the citizens in the system of governance, through the allegiance of the guardian and pledge him to the full obedience»

But the researcher sees great differences between the two concepts, proving that there is no relationship between them at all:

1) The difference of purpose: The pledge of allegiance reflects the divine right granted to the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) alone – where he said in his saying: “Those who pledge to you will only swear to Allah the hand of God over their hands.” (10)

As well as saying: «Allah has satisfied with the believers when they pledge you under the tree, so he knew what was in their hearts and sent down the serenity on them and rewarded them with prosperity» Fath verse (18); The goal of allegiance is to support the Prophet (peace be upon him), and support the Islamic religion in the face of the oppression of Quraish during the reconciliation of Hudaybiyah, the allegiance during the era of the Prophet was directed to the Islamic religion not to the state.

On the other hand, the concept of election is linked to the theory of social contract, and is based on the philosophy of choosing citizens for their officials, that is, there is no divine mandate for some people to take over governance.

In short, the concept of election was found in order to achieve the power circulation, and the representation of citizens in institutions of governance and administration, contrary to the concept of allegiance, which is always associated with the achievement of Islamic call more than running the affairs of the state.

2) The conditions of the imamate and the candidate: The allegiance must be for the Muslim ruler, the wise, the Qurashi, the adult, one with the knowledge, it is not permissible to hold the imamate for non-Muslims or for women, and in many cases may not be held for non-Qureshi, but for many of the election laws, no mention was made of the candidate’s religion or gender.

3) The witnessing and secret ballot: The “witnessing on allegiance” is one of the most important elements, in the sense that it is not permitted for the allegiance to be secret, and must be witnessed by a mass of Muslims.

It is the opposite of the idea of election based on the principle of secret ballot; the candidate does not know who elected him, but only knows the numbers of voters, and the principle of secret ballot allows more freedom for voters in the selection of candidates contrary to allegiance, which is a public coercion to obey the guardian, as the non-allegiance may be interpreted as disobedience to the ruler.

4- The different mechanisms: Allegiance differ from the elections in the mechanisms that are carried out; the allegiance is dominated by direct personal trait in which the governor stands to receive the pledge hand to hand of the people of the solution, and in the case of remote places, its people are proclaimed the allegiance, or send a representative of the Governor.

On the contrary, the elections are free of personalization. A higher electoral body regulates the election and voting process, counting the votes and showing the winner and loser in the elections.

5) Competition and conflict: The allegiance rejects the idea of “competition”; the allegiance is for one person only, and the public entrusted with the allegiance either pledge it or not, in a matter similar to the case of the referendum; there is no competition; the elections are mainly based on competition between the candidates to collect more votes.

6) The election of the oligarchy: The Islamic political ideology divides the society into three social strata: the ruling class, is responsible for administration and governance, and the class of the people of solution, is responsible for advising the rulers and the general class of Muslims, and they have to obey the guardian.

It is clear from the former political class division that the responsibility of choosing rulers and their allegiance is confined to the class of people of solution only, without other Muslims. Many scholars did not favor the issue of public allegiance to the ruler, and they restricted it only to the people of solution.

Therefore, the Islamic political system, based on the allegiance of the people of the solution, can be characterized by the oligarchic system, which is based on the competence of a certain group of society to practice politics in an elected and judicious manner. The public can not engage in the affairs of the Authority.

This particular election, however, differs in form and substance from the elections process, which entrenchs the principle of citizenship. In other words, every citizen has the right to political practice under certain conditions, which are often available to all, either by election or by running for executive and legislative positions. The election of all kinds is devoid of the power of the people of solution in choosing, and allegiance to the ruler.

7) Conflicts and challenges: Electoral systems of various kinds organize the question of contesting and questioning the results of elections through a series of judicial proceedings. Current political systems also regulate the withdrawal of trust from elected officials. However, this is quite different in the system of allegiance. It is completely rejected and requires the killing of the disputed, and the issue of the breach of allegiance is according to many considered as infidels and retreating from Islam.

8) One candidate? Or multiple candidates? The last difference between allegiance and elections is the question of the number of candidates and the payers; the allegiance is for one person; on the other hand, some electoral systems allow voters the freedom to choose preferences among candidates.

Fifth: The obedience

The concept of obedience represents the flip side of the concept of allegiance; allegiance is an authentic variable that results in a dependent variable, which is obedience. The obedience of the guardian comes as a result of the allegiance of the Muslims to him, and obedience means obedience to the ruler according to the Holy Quran,

“O ye who believe! Obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those who command you. If you quarrel in something, send it to Allah and the Messenger. If you believe in Allah and the Last Day, that is better and better”.

Here obedience is accompanied by two conditions; the first is that to be for a Muslim guardian, and the second must be conditional on matching the governor’s orders with Islamic law.

But there is an important question: Is obedience is absolute? Or is it permissible to rebel against the Muslim ruler? This is one of the biggest problems facing Islamic political ideology, and before dismantling this problem it must be understood that obedience here is mainly related to applying the Islamic Shari’a law. This is the only agreed standard for achieving obedience. Other standards are still being discussed between jurists and thinkers.

Most of the Islamic literature confirms that it is not permissible to rebel against the ruler by the sword, unless the ruler reaches the stage of infidelity, and the call to leave prayer and lead the nation without the Book of Allah and the Sunnah! The scholars and religious scholars divided the categories of the unjust ruler and the extent to which it is permissible to go out as follows:

1- The derelict ruler: He is the ruler who is lenient in complying with the shar’i rulings. However, people have to obey him and it is forbidden to rebel against him.

2- The unjust ruler (who maintains the Sharia): The ruler may be unjust, here it is possible to isolate him by peaceful means only,  if peaceful roads are not available so it is not permitted to go for the armed choices in order to avoid the evil, which may affect the nation.

3) The unjust and apostate ruler: It is necessary to rebel against him with the sword by virtue of the hadeeth “except that you see him announcing his disbelief “, but if there is no ability to rebel against the ruler people must obey him and prepare for the ways they need to take in order to get rid of him.

However, some Islamic thinkers, especially the founder of the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, Ali Belhadj, believe that the issue of rebelling against the unjust ruler is an innate issue before the emergence of religions. He went to the need to rebel against the unfair ruler, in accordance with Islamic law.

In this context, he accused the jurists who forbidden rebelling against the ruler by continuing the ruling regimes and interpreting the religious texts to serve the unjust ruler. He cited, for example, the rebelling of al-Husayn ibn Ali over the rule of Yazid ibn Mu’awiyah and the rebelling of Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr and Sa’id ibn Jubayr, who refused to obey the unjust ruler and rebelled against him.

After extrapolating the two directions in interpreting obedience, it is clear that they agreed to link the issue of the application of Sharia with obedience; but they differed in understanding the Sharia; the conservative side defines the Sharia as keeping the prayers and the extent of the ruler’s call to faith or disbelief, and also calls for not rebelling against the disbeliever ruler, if it is not possible.

While the supporters of the mainstream Islam movement believes that injustice  are the core of the violation of Sharia and Sunnah; so it is necessary to rebel against the ruler.

The researcher believes that Islamic ideology did not reach a re-adaptation of the issue of rebelling against the ruler, with what is compatible with modern requirements; where:

1) The fatwas are related to the political status of the ones who say them. The scholars close to the authority reject the non-objection and disobey it. The scholars of the non-ruling kinetic tendencies are radicalists who call for power and support their views with many historical cases, such as the rebellion of Hussein bin Ali.

2) Radical jurists become conservatives when they come to power. When they reach power, they forbid to rebel against the ruler. For example, some of the Brotherhood’s closest sheikhs, such as Mohamed Abdel Maksoud, forbid to rebel against the isolated president, Mohammed Mursi, while he permitted the rebellion against President Abdel Fatah El Sisi.

The regime of the Wilayat al-Faqih is similar. In Iran, it supports some political unrest in Bahrain, under the pretext of resisting injustice and tyranny, while at the same time refusing to leave the Iranians to resist injustice and tyranny.

The second point: the practices of the power circulation in Islamic history.

This point begins with a major question: did Islamic history provide a real experience for a peaceful process of power circulation that can be relied upon as a cultural reference in regulating the process of power  circulation in contemporary societies?

Islamic history included many power-circulation tools, such as allegiance, succession, appointment, differentiation, and other tools, which will be explained as follows:

1) The allegiance of the people of the solution: The mechanism of allegiance to the people of the solution is one of the first mechanisms, used in Islamic history, and the closest to modern democratic mechanisms, such as elections, and the story of this mechanism to the post-death of the Prophet – peace be upon him – and the muslims argument around «El-Soqaifa allegiance».

After the death of the Prophet (PBUH), the Muslims were divided into two groups, one of them (immigrants) calling for the succession of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, as the the Muslims caliph, and the other group was El-Ansar who call for the appointment of Saad bin Abada as a caliph in a scene closer to the elections in the modern sense.

The two groups settled on the choice of Abu Bakr as the first caliph to the Muslims after fulfilling the conditions of the caliphate, the most important of which was to be from the Qurashi descent.

2) Appointment and recommendation: The second mechanism, which was used to achieve the rotation of power in Islamic history; it is known that Abu Bakr handed the governance and the  succession after him to Omar bin al-Khattab; after consulting some companions such as Othman bin Affan and Talha bin Obaidullah and Abdul Rahman bin Auf, The text of the covenant written by Abu Bakr al-Siddiq reads as follows:

“In the name of God the Most Gracious the Most Merciful, this is what Abu Bakr bin Abi Qahafa ruled in the last era of the world coming out of it and at the beginning of his reign in the Hereafter coming inside it; where the unbeliever believes and the ungodly trusts and the liar becomes honest, I make Umar ibn al-Khattab the caliphate after me. So, listen to him and obey him, if he apply justice, this is what I think of him and if not, so each person has what he acquired, and I wanted the good and I do not know the unseen: (and will know those who wronged any turning turned) [Poets of verse: (227).

3) The trade-off: The third mechanism used by the Muslims in achieving the rotation of power, was the differentiation between the number of political candidates to take the post of caliph, and this happened at the end of the rule of Omar bin al-Khattab; he chose six companions to choose between them in the selection of the next Caliph.

Abdul Rahman bin Auf took the process of trade-off between the candidates to take over the process of caliphate after Omar, until it settled on the choice of Uthman ibn Affan as the third caliph to the Muslims.

4) The abdication: The transfer of the rule from one ruler to another, through the abdication of power, for example, Hassan bin Ali waived the caliphate of Muawiya bin Abi Sufian to stop the Muslims’ blood shedding, and stop the sedition.

5) Inheritance: The most prominent mechanism in Islamic history, the ruler was working to inherit the rule to his son or brother, and also created the post of crown prince whose task takes power after the death of the ruler.

6) The allegiance of the commoners: This mechanism is closer to the idea of popular coups, which break out against the rulers,  descent to Imam Ali bin Abi Talib resort to this method, as they were surrounded by people whenever they go, and then begin to call for their right to rule and remove the existing ruler. The best example of this is the state of Adarsa in the Far Morocco, founded by «Idris bin Abdullah bin Hassan bin Hassan bin Ali bin Abi Talib», after fleeing the pursuit of the Abbasids.

7) The predominant: the most important means of power and authority circulation in a non-peaceful way, and Islamic history is full of many cases in which the power transfer from one ruler to another or from one family to another, the transfer of power from the Umayyad to the Abbasids was through bloody wars.

8) The trade-off: The trade-off is one of the most famous methods of the Islamic experience in the power transfer. A group of dignitaries decided to choose one of them as a caliph for Muslims.

Then they impose it by force on society. For example, at the Jabbiya conference 64 AH, it was agreed that Marwan ibn al-Hakam was the ruler of the Umayyads. Then the Umayyads worked to enable him to restore the Islamic countries, most of which came out of their control.

9) Political isolation: Other mechanisms included in the Islamic experience is the mechanism of political isolation and the transfer of power from one person to another, such as the transfer of Saladin to power in Egypt from the Fatimid caliphate to the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, under the leadership of Sultan Nuruddin Mahmoud.

Conclusion

Finally, we conclude that Islamic ideology has not succeeded in developing peaceful mechanisms for the transfer of power. Throughout Islamic history, we have witnessed no peaceful power circulation away from succession, except in a few cases, in the selection of adult caliphs.

The trend of the peaceful transfer of power in Islamic history has also taken a downwards turn towards non-peaceful tools such as coups and wars. The early Muslims began to choose and elect, as what happened in the state of Abu Bakr al-Siddiq and the legacy of inheritance and wars, as happened in the era of the Umayyads and Abbasids.

After the rule of the Caliphs, the only peaceful mechanism was succession. The rest of the mechanisms were overcome by the method of coercion and the imposition of force, and thus we conclude that the Islamic experience did not succeed in finding a civilized way out of the issue of the power circulation, in contrast to modern European civilization which succeeded in raising the question of the power circulation, and to reach peaceful mechanisms to achieve them.

The Islamic concepts of power circulation such as allegiance are still inadequate and can not be applied to the national countries that are dominated by the principles of citizenship, and the opportunity for non-Muslims and women to assume important political positions, while the concept of allegiance require the  Muslim ruler only to take over the rule

At the end of the study, intellectuals of the Islamic stream must realize the following facts:

1) Islamic civilization did not produce a renaissance of political ideology that can be inspired and applied at the present time, the ruler in most Muslim countries was the ruling over.

2) The challenges facing Muslim societies are now more complicated than before; in terms of the economic, social and cultural situation, the societies of the past had very simple needs, so the issue of the establishment of Sharia ranked first. Currently, the needs of the society are becoming more complicated, Which leads to a decline in the provision of Islamic law in the priorities of the rulers.

3) the modernity of the Islamic state in the era of the Sahaba (prophet’s companions) and its simplicity enabled them to apply political concepts such as the allegiance and Shura, but now the state getting more complicated; which requires a process of continuous development, and keeping updated by societal changes and political developments.