Blindspot!
From Issue: 720 [Read full issue]
Control of AuthorityOne can often read and hear, from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, a translation of shariah as meaning only and strictly "Islamic Law." This understanding and translation are significant: they reveal one of the reductions that took place within Muslim thought over the course of centuries. Ash-shariah, which had been the Way to the light from which the implementation of laws over time and in different environments was thought out, came to be reduced to a set of laws to be implemented formally, as they then were. This understanding and translation reveal reductions that have critical consequences.
Civil society, that of ordinary women and men, needs to wake up and call for legal councils and intellectuals to provide comprehensive, but precise and consistent answers to their social, cultural, economic, and political questions. The population, through its commitment and its legitimate demands, must take it on itself to seize control of the authority to which it is entitled. The shift in the centre of gravity of authority involves the return of ordinary women and men to full civic commitment, uncompromising critical questioning, and a collective, practical search for solutions. This is one of the aspects of the crisis and of the shortcomings that can be observed today in the Islamic Universe of reference, always with the same reflexes of defensive formalism as obsessed with otherness, whereas what should be initiated is a confident, universalistic reform movement, which is both wholly inclusive and positively assertive.
Compiled From:
"Radical Reform: Islamic Ethics and Liberation" - Tariq Ramadan, pp. 271-274