Control, legitimacy of 'ijtihad' debate

Phar Kim Beng, The Strait Times

Central to the decay witnessed throughout the contemporary Muslim world - a condition which has seen Muslims falling behind in science, literacy, mortality, economic development and democratisation - is the issue of ijtihad or independent reasoning.

To what extent are Muslims allowed to interpret their religious scriptures to meet present circumstances?

To non-Muslims, such a question might seem unreal. How else is one to live in the 21st century except by defining Islam in a way that is consistent with modern demands? It is as if Muslims live in the present with an eye permanently cast on the past - a cultural habit shared also, as some Western commentators have pointed out, by fundamentalist Christians.

But to the more than 60 Muslim governments the world over, the perennial debate about the 'gate of ijtihad' - whether it was closed hundreds of years ago or remains open - is real. For one thing, answering the question is inextricably tied up with the question of how much power the Islamic state must give up.

In other words, this is a zero-sum question with maximum consequence.

If ijtihad is allowed, it would mean religious authorities - right down to the individual Islamic scholar - can tell the government what is right or wrong. This is a real possibility, for Islam does not have a papacy to pronounce on any controversial issue.

Nevertheless, to progressive Muslim leaders like Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, himself an Islamic scholar, the 'gate of independent reasoning' was never closed. In their view, the works of leading Sunni jurists - represented principally by the scholarship of Iman Abu Hanifah, Imam Maliki, Imam Shafii and Imam Hanbali - were never meant to define the Quran and Hadith in a fixed manner.

Rather, they ably performed their religious responsibility by helping Muslims to decide for themselves what was 'permissible' and 'prohibited' in Islam - in their times.

Accordingly, their verdicts, or fatwa, were not meant to imprison future Muslims on such matters as to whether a Caliph should be a religious leader or whether establishing an Islamic state constitutes a compulsory duty for all Muslims, as extremists claim.

Opening a three-day International Conference On Muslims And Islam In The 21st Century in Kuala Lumpur last week, Datuk Seri Abdullah pointedly affirmed: 'The past fatwa might not be wrong when they were issued but they must take on today's challenges and situations. We do not hold to the theory that the door for ijtihad is closed.'

Datuk Seri Abdullah also said that fatwa should take into account new realities, so the Muslim community remains dynamic and progressive.

But this view cannot be openly accepted by many other Muslim governments. Saudi Arabia, for instance, is controlled by the Saud family, and they need a religious monopoly to perpetuate their dynastic rule.

To allow ijtihad in such countries would be to permit even crazed zealots like Osama bin Laden - who, by the way, is not even a religious scholar in the classical sense - the liberty to issue his extreme 'fatwa' or to challenge the House of

Saud, both of which Osama has in fact done.

So, why is Datuk Seri Abdullah able to make one argument in an open forum, while other conservative Muslim governments obviously cannot do so? At issue is the twin concept of control and legitimacy. Malaysia has both, while others do not.

Malaysia has a parallel legal system, allowing both English civil law and Islamic family law to operate in tandem. The religious authorities in the federal government, controlled directly by the Prime Minister's office, are sufficiently strong to withstand alternative interpretations from other Islamic elements in the country. If there are serious digressions, the Internal Security Act, part of civil law, can be invoked.

Other Muslim leaders cannot talk openly about ijtihad because their rule depends on shutting down public opinion in the first place. On the other hand, Datuk Seri Abdullah was returned to office in March this year with a tremendous popular mandate. He is a legitimate and well-qualified Muslim leader able to make progressive judgments on critical Islamic issues. Many other Muslim leaders lack both the mandate and religious credentials to even call a spade a spade.

Still, there is a risk in saying that ijtihad should always be permitted in the age of 'super-empowered individuals', to use a formulation of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

Islamic extremists will argue that they, too, have the right to make religious rulings separate from the state.

Therefore, while ijtihad should rightly be encouraged in Muslim societies to foster independent thinking, a caveat has to be inserted too: Ijtihad is definitely not meant to allow for interpretations which permit aggression, terrorism, suicide bombers or the use of Islam for all forms of mayhem and murder in the name of God.

The writer, currently doing his PhD at the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, will be senior analyst at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies in Kuala Lumpur from next month. He graduated from the International Islamic University of Malaysia in 1994.