The State and The People in Islam

The Muslims all over the world have been having a special relationship with the state, monarchy being the most prevalent system of governance. But in some of the states people have been tolerating dictatorship also. All these aspects have been discussed in this book. Remarkably, the west has proved to the most important agent of precipitating, ironically enough, two apparently contradictory trends in the Muslim world – modernisation and Islamisation. On the one hand, there is a sustained drift in favour of intellectual and social modernisation in almost all regions of the Muslim world from Morocco to Philippines and a growing urge and determination to strengthen their attachment with the fundamentals of Islam, on the other. The former is a cultural necessity and latter a desire to preserve their cultural identity. The present political upheavals and the well-known struggle between the modernistic and orthodox schools in the Muslim societies is a reflection of the confrontation between cultural necessity and cultural identity. Adoption of certain universal values of western culture, as prominently reflected in the recent reforms in Muslim personal laws in most of the Muslim countries, is out of cultural necessity while the revivalist movements insisting on Islamic values and world-view and preservation of Shari’ a, represent the desire to safeguard Muslim cultural identity. Recent developments in Muslim countries can be understood in the context of these two trends.