Islam and Liberal Citizenship by Andrew F. March

Author:Andrew F. March [March, Andrew F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-03-26T18:30:00+00:00

6

Loyalty to a Non-Muslim State

Fulfill the Covenant of God when you have entered into it and do not break your oaths after you have affirmed them for you have made God your guarantor and God knows all that you do.

—Qur’an, Sūrat al-Nal (16):191

It is not righteousness to turn your faces towards East or West, but rather righteousness is . . . to fulfill the contracts which you make.

—Qur’an, Sūrat al-Baqara (2):177

In chapter 3, we came across a tradition of Islamic doctrines that constitute the Islamic foundation for rejecting civic loyalty to a non-Muslim state. Views akin to the following five positions are ubiquitous in Islamic juridical discourses:

1. A Muslim may never combat another Muslim in the service of unbelievers regardless of the cause.

2. A war for the sole purpose of expanding the space ruled by Islam and Islamic law is a just war, a legitimate form of jihād.

3. It may be the duty of every individual Muslim, even those residing outside the Islamic polity to contribute to a legitimate jihād, if so called by a legitimate Imam.

4. A Muslim may not advance the cause of unbelievers or uphold non-Islamic rulings and truth-claims.

5. A Muslim may not sacrifice his life for other than certain causes, of which defending a non-Muslim society is not one.

Given that, taken individually or together, these principles deny that a Muslim resident of a non-Muslim state may develop even minimal bonds of loyalty to it, especially when that might detract from loyalty to the Muslim community, I have argued that an Islamic doctrine of citizenship would require some formulation of contrary principles.

It is appropriate here to summarize my discussion from chapter 4 of what political liberalism might regard as the proper demands on citizens in terms of patriotism and contributing to a state’s self-defense. Traditional liberal justifications of conscientious objection to unjust wars, or general exemption from fighting in the case of committed pacifists, do not apply in the case of believing Muslim citizens. In their case, a reluctance to fight may be the consequence of the principle of al-walā’ wa’l-barā’: their solidarity with a community of fellow believers across citizenship boundaries or, inversely, even when hostilities do not concern Muslims on either side, their unwillingness to form deep bonds of solidarity with non-Muslims at all. The basic idea of greater solidarity with Muslims does not necessarily result in a doctrine contrary to the demands of citizenship from the perspective of political liberalism because communal solidarity is one of those components of a conception of the good that might be reasonable. Political liberalism does not demand that a deep, robust, emotional commitment to one’s political community and its system of governance be part of one’s comprehensive conception of the good. If a conception of the good involves a special concern for a certain community of fellow believers, then political liberalism objects only insofar as this special concern prescribes attitudes or actions that violate the legitimate political rights and needs of the community of citizenship. I thus argued

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