Confusion in Knowledge creates Loss of Adab (Recognition and Acknowledgement) which implies Loss of Justice

Sayyid Naquib al-Attas

“As to the internal causes of the dilemma in which we find ourselves, the basic problems can – it seems to me – be reduced to a single evident crisis which I would simply call the loss of adab. I am here referring to the loss of discipline – the discipline of body, mind, and soul; the discipline that assures the recognition and acknowledgement of one’s proper place in relation to one’s self, society and Community; the recognition and acknowledgement of one’s proper place in relation to one’s physical, intellectual, and spiritual capacities and potentials; the recognition and acknowledgement of the fact that knowledge and being are ordered hierarchically.

Since adab refers to recognition and acknowledgement of the right and proper place, station, and condition in life and to self discipline in positive and willing participation in enacting one’s role in accordance with that recognition and acknowledgement, its occurrence in one and in society as a whole reflects the condition of justice.

Loss of adab implies loss of justice, which in turn betrays confusion in knowledge. In respect of the society and community, the confusion in knowledge of Islam and the Islamic world view creates the condition which enables false leaders to emerge and to thrive causing the condition of injustice. They emerge and to thrive, causing the condition of injustice. They perpetuate this condition since it ensures the continued emergence of leaders like them to replace them after they are gone perpetuating their domination over the affairs of the Community.

Thus to put it briefly in their proper order, our present general dilemma is caused by:

1.                             1.  Confusion and error in knowledge, creating the condition for:

2.                              2. The loss of adab within the Community. The condition arising out of (1) and (2) is:

3.                              3. The rise of leaders who are not qualified for valid leadership of the Muslim Community, who do not possess the high moral, intellectual and spiritual standards required for Islamic leadership who perpetuate the condition in (1) above and ensure the continued control of the affairs of the Community by leaders like them who dominate in all fields.

All the above roots of our general dilemma are interdependent and operates in a vicious circle. But the chief cause is confusion and error in knowledge, and in order to break this vicious circle and remedy this grave problem, we must first come to grips with the problem of loss of adab, since no true knowledge can be instilled without the precondition of adab in the one who seeks it and to whom it is imparted.”

(p 99-100 “Islam, Secularism and the Philosophy of the Future” by Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas)

Further Reading:

Al-Attas’ Concept of Ta‘dib as True and Comprehensive Education in Islam – Wan Mohd Nor Wan Daud

http://allahcentric.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/the-loss-of-adab-and-the-fall-of-the-muslim-world-sayyid-naquib-al-attas/

Learning the Maqasid al Shariah!

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Over the long run, the most productive initiative by the still largely silent majority of Muslims in marginalizing Muslim extremists is to fill the intellectual and spiritual void that serves as an ocean in which the extremists can swim. This initiative can provide the favorable environment needed for Muslims to ally with like-minded Christians and Jews in order to show that classical Islam and classical America are similar, even though many people do not understand or live up to the ideals common to both.

This is the only way to convince the extremists that their confrontational approach to the “other” is not necessary; that the threat mentality of those who think only about their own survival and are obsessed with catastrophe and conspiracy can backfire; and that only those can truly prosper over the long run who can transcend their own self-centered interests in order to develop an opportunity mentality together with those who are no longer merely the “other” but now are a single pluralist community.

In order to fill the intellectual void,Muslims need to emphasize the universal Islamic principles, the maqasid al shari’ah, which spell out precisely what Michael Novak says do not exist in Islam. These maqasid, following the methodology instituted by the Prophet Muhammad and perfected in the architectonics pioneered six centuries ago by the master of the art, Al-Shatibi, are considered to consist of seven responsibilities, the practice of which actualize the corresponding human rights.


The first one, known as haqq al din, provides the framework for the next six in the form of respect for a transcendent source of truth to guide human thought and action. God instructs us in the Qur’an, wa tamaat kalimatu Rabika sidqan wa ‘adlan, “and the word of your Lord is perfected in truth and justice.” Recognition of this absolute source of truth and of the responsibility to apply it in practice are needed to counter the temptations toward relativism and the resulting chaos, injustice, and tyranny that may result from de-sacralization of public life.

Each of these seven universal principles is essential to understand the next and succeeding ones. The first three operational principles, necessary to sustain existence, begin with haqq al nafs or haqq al ruh, which is the duty to respect the human person. The ruh or spirit of every person was created by God before or outside of the creation of the physical universe, is constantly in the presence of God, and, according to the Prophet Muhammad, is made in the image of God. This is the basis of the intimate relationship between God and the human person as expressed in the Qur’anic ayah, “We are closer to him than is his own jugular vein.”
This is also the basis of the prayer offered by the Prophet and by countless generations of Muslims for more than a thousand years:Allahumma, inna asaluka hubbaka wa hubba man yuhibbuka wa hubba kulli ‘amali yuqaribuni ila hubika, “O Allah! I ask You for Your love and for the love of those who love You. Grant that I may love every action that will bring me closer to You.”


At the secondary level of this principle, known as hajjiyat or requirements, lies the duty to respect life, haqq al haya. This provides guidelines in the third-order tahsinniyat for what in modern parlance is called the doctrine of just war.


The next principle, haqq al nasl, is the duty to respect the nuclear family and the community at every level all the way to the community of humankind as an important expression of the person. This principle teaches that the sovereignty of the person, subject to the ultimate sovereignty of God, comes prior to and is superior to any alleged sovereignty of the secular invention known as the State.


This principle teaches also that a community at the level of the nation, which shares a common sense of the past, common values in the present, and common hopes for the future, such as the Palestinians, Kurds, Chechens, Kashmiris, the Uighur in China, and the Anzanians in the Sudan, has legal existence and therefore legal rights in international law. This is the opposite of the Western international law created by past empires, which is based on the simple principle of “might makes right.”


The third principle is haqq al mal, which is the duty to respect the rights of private property in the means of production. This requires respect for institutions that broaden access to capital ownership as a universal human right and as an essential means to sustain respect for the human person and human community. This principle requires the perfection of existing institutions to remove the barriers to universal property ownership so that wealth will be distributed through the production process rather than by stealing from the rich by forced redistribution to the poor. Such redistribution can never have more than a marginal effect in reducing the gap between the inordinately rich and the miserably poor, because the owners in a defective financial system need not and never will give up their economic and political power.


The next three universal principles in Islamic law concern primarily what we might call the quality of life. The first is haqq al hurriya, which requires respect for self-determination of both persons and communities through political freedom, including the concept that economic democracy is a precondition for the political democracy of representative government.


The secondary principles required to give meaning to the parent principle and carry it out in practice are khilafa, the ultimate responsibility of both the ruled and the ruler to God; shura, the responsiveness of the rulers to the ruled, which must be institutionalized in order to be meaningful; ijma, the duty of the opinion leaders to reach consensus on specific policy issues in order to participate in the process of shura; and an independent judiciary.


The second of these last three maqasid is haqq al karama or respect for human dignity. The two most important hajjiyat for individual human dignity are religious freedom and gender equity. In traditional Islamic thought, freedom and equality are not ultimate ends but essential means to pursue the higher purposes inherent in the divine design of the Creator for every person.


The last universal or essential purpose at the root of Islamic jurisprudence, which can be sustained only by observance of the first six principles and also is essential to each of them, is haqq al ‘ilm or respect for knowledge. Its second-order principles are freedom of thought, press, and assembly so that all persons can fulfill their purpose to seek knowledge wherever they can find it.


This framework for human rights is at the very core of Islam as a religion. Fortunately, this paradigm of law in its broadest sense of moral theology is now being revived by what still is a minority of courageous Muslims determined to fill the intellectual gap that has weakened the Muslim umma for more than six hundred years, so that a spiritual renaissance in all faiths can transform the world.

Read full article: http://www.globaljusticemovement.net/articles/islamicjurisprudence-rdc-0305.htm

Dr. Robert Dickson Crane is a scholar and a prolific writer and expert on subjects ranging from law to economics to international affairs and Islamic jurisprudence.

He is a co-founding board member and former Chairman of the Center for Understanding Islam, and Director for Global Strategy at The Abraham Federation: A Global Center for Peace through Compassionate Justice. In 1962 he co-founded the Center for Strategic and International Studies, while remaining of Counsel with his law firm until 1965. From 1963 to 1968, he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to Richard Nixon who appointed him as Deputy Director of the National Security Council in 1969. From 1982 to the present Dr. Crane has been a full-time Islamic scholar and activist.

Dr. Crane was a Founding Member of The American Muslim Council and from 1992 to 1994 served as Director of its Legal Division. In 1993, he was elected president of the Muslim American Bar Association, which he founded in order to organize Muslim participation in the American Bar Association's work on issues of conscience. From 1994 until the present he has headed his own research organizations [Santa Fe, New Mexico] focusing on paradigm management designed to shape the agendas of think tanks, which, in turn, direct public policy.

http://www.iiit.org/Portals/0/pdf/Dr%20Crane-Bio%20Sketch.pdf

Islamic Law: "Abnormal Abuse of Rules Can Neither Legalise The Abusive Practice Nor Render the Authentic Rules Null & Void"

This is an excerpt from The Muslim Conduct of State by Dr. Muhammad Hamidullah

(1)As has aptly been said: "When stable communities whether Tribes, or City-States, or States of a modern type are permanently contiguous, customs hardening in time into law never fail to regulate their intercourse. Ubi societas, ibi jus; wherever developed communities are brought in contact with each other, judicial relations must sooner or later be formed not mainly by agreement, tacit or express, but by the very necessity of the case, and partly from the same cruses as those which working internally create states." 

(8) Law (Fiqh) is variously defined by classical Muslim jurisconsults. "The knowledge of what is for and upon one" is a definition attributed to Abu Hanifah) which in other words may be rendered as "the science of the rights and obligations of man". A late authority, Muhibbullah al-Bihariy, introduces this all-embracing subject in the following words  of his book (compiled 1109 H.) : " The science of ascertaining religious commands (regarding practical affairs of life) by means of their detailed guides." [By guides he means authority or source of information.]


(9) A glance at the contents of works on Fiqh would reveal that they embrace practically all the affairs of human' life, material as well as spiritual. In view of the standard definitions given above and is the face of the contents of works do Fiqh, there remains not the slightest doubt that international law, i.e. the rules of State-conduct in times of war, peace and neutrality, form part of the ordinary law of the land, the Fiqh. These rules of conduct are generally dealt with in books on Fiqh under the heading Siyar i.e. conduct,

(10) Here a brief expose of the origin of law according to Muslim jurists may profitably be added. They say that man must always do what is good, and abstain from what is evil, and take scrupulous care of the intermediary grades of plausible, permissible and disliked. It is, however, not easy to distinguish between good and evil, especially when the matter concerns the subtleties of a complex civilised life beyond the pale of ordinary commonplace things. 


Practical needs would have required the possession of the power to legislate (or lay down definitely grades of good and evil [in] each and every matter) in the hands of Man, either individual, as jurisconsult, or collectively organised, i.e. a State. Yet mere reason, regarded as the touchstone of good and evil, is not without grave difficulties. For it is possible, and also a matter of fact -- so argue Muslim jurists -- that different persons opine differently regarding the same things. 

The belief in Messengers of God is useful even from the point of view of jurisprudence, in so far as the awe and respect due to their persons lead to the acceptance of certain fundamentals without further dispute, wherefrom other and further details may be elaborated. For this reason, the Muslim savants are very thankful to the generosity of God that He gave men along with reason certain chosen human Guldes to help them in the conduct of life. These selected and chosen ones pointed out what God commanded, God the real Sovereign and Lawgiver, regarding good and evil. 


Muhammad has been acknowledged by the Muslims as the Messenger of God; and whatever he gave them in his lifetime, commands as well as injunctions, in the name of his Sender, God, was accepted by the Muslims as indisputably final and most reasonable. 


These Divine Commands, known as the Qur'an and the Hadith - as we shall see later in detail - served practically all the needs of the Muslim community of that time. But human needs multiplied later in such a manner that express provision seemed to be available for some of  the new matters in either the word or deed of the Messenger, who himself had passed away, disconnecting the link whereby Man could receive Commands from his Lord. The consequent result would have been fatal and the fabric of Fiqh would soon have collapsed under the strain, had not there been express provision in the law itself for further elaboration. Credit must also not fail to be given to the Muslim jurists, after the death of the Prophet, who not only discerned this elasticity of the Divine Law, but also utilized it to its fullest extent. In time there emerged a complete system of law which served all the purposes of the Imperial Muslims, even at the height of their widest expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans.


(11) Thus law originated from the direct Commands of God; but the power retained by man to interpret and expand Divine Commands, by means of analogical deductions, and other processes, provided all that was required by the Muslims. In this way a dual need was served: that of sanctity to inspire awe in the minds of (hose who were intended to observe it, and that of elasticity or capability of development to meet the needs of times and circumstances.


(12) We have defined international law, first, as a part of the law of the land. The province of the law of the land is therefore, obviously, wider than that of international law; and we have no concern here with the portion of the law of the land which regulates internal affairs of the State or its subjects.


(13) We have also acknowledged customs as contributing to international law. No system of law can positively provide guidance regarding every detail of every matter. Completion of a list of obligatory and prohibited things, along with details of a certain number of permitted matters -- that is all any system of law can achieve Naturally the prevalent customs  general practice, and even innovations hardening in time into prevalent usage eye) regulate the relations in such cases. 


(17) It may be added that, for purposes of illustration, precedents from Orthodox Practice have freely been referred to. These alone are binding. Abnormal and temporary abuse or overlooking of certain rules by a Muslim State can neither legalise the abusive practice nor render the authentic rules null and void. 


http://muslim-canada.org/conduct_1.html This is an excerpt from The Muslim Conduct of State by Dr. Muhammad Hamidullah