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"A New Reading on Authority and Guardianship (Wilayah): Ayatollah Muhammad Mahdi Shamsuddin." Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts

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Mavani, Hamid. "A New Reading on Authority and Guardianship (wilayah): Ayatollah Muhammad Mahdi Shamsuddin." Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 177–184. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350006195.ch-023>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 16:47 UTC. Copyright © Xavier Márquez and Contributors 2018. You may share this work for non- commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO A New Reading on Authority and Guardianship (wilayah): Ayatollah Muhammad Mahdi Shamsuddin Hamid Mavani Islam categorically rejects dictatorship because it always leads to oppression, persecution, and uprising.1 From the Islamic point of view, only the divine (most exalted), who has no partner or associate in His Lordship, Authority, and Guardianship (wilayah), has the right to govern and enjoy absolute rule. In essence, no human being has any right to rule over others. The rule and control of God is the only type of guardianship and authority that complies with human reason and intellect. Every mandate of authority and governance (hakimiyyah) for a human being requires a definitive proof. In its absence, therefore, no one has authority over another person, any other existent in the universe, or over nature, including over one’s own life and property. That these set limits cannot be transgressed is a fundamental principle under the subject of authority, as well as a matter that is well-established in jurisprudence and theology . 178 DEMOCRATIC MOMENTS [I]nvoking democracy while the infallible Imam is among us would be religiously unlawful, but . this is not the case during his Occultation. My jurisprudential opinion is based on the foundation of the ‘wilayah of the people resides with themselves’ (wilayat al- ummah ‘ala nafsi-ha).2 During the Occultation, any government that is formed with the people’s free choice and consent is religiously lawful. As such, one must obey it within the confines of the laws enacted with the people’s consent . in fact, if the people intentionally and freely form a government during the Occultation, then it is not a usurped state. Not only would there be no objection to assisting and co- operating with it, but it would be mandatory to do so if the general social welfare were at stake . .3 For such a government (consisting of Muslims and non-Muslims), professing Islam should have no impact upon a citizen’s rank, and one’s religion [or lack thereof] should not lead to any differences in terms of rights or preference. The same applies to one’s socio-economic status . From the perspective of dignity and personhood, in the sight of the law every person in an Islamic society is equal.4 Muslims subscribe to divine sovereignty and agree that only God, the True and Absolute Sovereign, has the authority and exclusive prerogative to legislate and determine the norms for the Muslim community. Muhammad, in his capacity as God’s designated Messenger, became His intermediary via revelation and, as such, was endowed with comprehensive authority and guardianship (wilayah) over the community. Thus the latter was duty-bound to obey and exhibit unquestioning loyalty and devotion (walayah) to him: ‘O believers, obey God, and obey the Messenger and those in authority (ulu al-amr)’ (Q. 4:59). There is no dissent among Muslims that God empowered the Prophet with some of His wilayah. For the Twelver Shi‘is, a restricted form of this wilayah was then transmitted to the twelve infallible Imams in succession. The Imam’s legitimacy derives from the explicit designation of the Prophet or the preceding Imam, as opposed to public acknowledgment. As such, so long as the Imam was present and accessible, the Shi‘is had to submit to him as the ultimate authority on all matters. However, the Twelfth Imam’s prolonged Occultation5 raised the question: Upon whom should his authority devolve: The qualified jurist wilayat( al-faqih), the attentive and A NEW READING ON AUTHORITY AND GUARDIANSHIP (WILAYAH) 179 discerning general community itself (wilayat al-ummah ‘ala nafsi-ha), or some other configuration? In modern Shi‘a political thought, two contrasting views of political authority can be found. For example, according to Ayatollah Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, the Qur’an prescribes no particular form of government as normative because it is more concerned about the final outcome – establishing a just and egalitarian society – than with how this goal is attained. Therefore, this matter is left up to the people and may assume different forms according to time and place: ‘If we study the Qur’an carefully, we see that the fundamental criterion it lays down for government is not a particular form or type – which it does not even present as a religious concern – but justice.’6 In contrast, during his exile in Najaf, Iraq, in 1970 Ayatollah Khomeini promulgated his version of the guardianship of the jurist (wilayat al-faqih), which he incorporated as part of the Iranian Constitution after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He argued that the jurist, by virtue of being the Imam’s indirect deputy, has both the mandate and the responsibility to interpret Islamic rulings not only on matters of devotion and personal affairs, but also in the social realm, and to manage the state’s affairs on the Imam’s behalf. Toward the end of his life, he stretched the scope of this authority to its farthest limit by proclaiming, in January 1988, that this individual can bypass the Shari‘a if (in his opinion) it conflicts with society’s general welfare and best interests. His concept of the jurist’s full-fledged authority and mandate as being equivalent in scope to that of the infallible Imams was a novel and radically different reading of the classical Shi‘i doctrine of Imamate, and one that had and still has a very limited following among senior and eminent jurists. Ayatollah Muhammad Mahdi Shamsuddin (1936–2001) of Lebanon,7 who criticized it, offered another paradigm that both accommodates religious diversity and pluralism and promotes a civil and democratic culture with a degree of separation of church and state, as we observe in the extract of his work that opens this chapter. Shamsuddin was born in Najaf, Iraq, into a family steeped in religiosity and scholarship that could trace its descent back to eminent Shi‘i jurists residing in Jabal ‘Amil (a Shi‘i district in southern Lebanon). His father, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Karim, was a famous cleric and teacher of religious studies who decided to move back to Lebanon when his son was 14 years old. When the teenager was asked what he wanted to do, he opted to continue his studies in Najaf despite the severe economic hardship that was the common lot of all religious students at the time. This experience left an indelible imprint upon his psyche and instilled within him a genuine empathy for the underprivileged and the dispossessed. He enrolled in the advanced and specialized stage of his studies under two pre-eminent jurists, Ayatollahs Muhsin al-Hakim and Abu al-Qasim al-Khu’i, and attained the rank of jurist with a license to issue legal opinions. He was also very familiar with 180 DEMOCRATIC MOMENTS the writings of Sunni scholars such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897), Muhammad ‘Abduh (d. 1905) and Taha Husayn (d. 1973), who greatly influenced his conception of Islam as a living religion that encompassed all aspects of individual and social life. The July 1958 revolution in Iraq caused Shamsuddin to embark upon a career of social and political activism. He issued proclamations and wrote anti-British articles in the intellectual periodical Al-Adwa’ al-Islamiyya. In 1969 he and Musa al-Sadr moved to Lebanon, where they established the Supreme Islamic Shi‘i Council (SISC) of Lebanon. In 1975 Shamsuddin was elected its vice-chairman, a post that he retained until 1978, when he assumed its helm upon Musa al-Sadr’s disappearance during a visit to Libya. An exponent and in many ways a pioneer of Muslim-Christian dialogue, he has a number of works to his credit on this subject and also advocated Sunni-Shi‘a rapprochement. Shamsuddin speculated early on that Islam, being a comprehensive religion, requires the apparatus of an Islamic state to implement its teachings. He surmised that Islam must have legislated both a political system and a perfect social system. In a later work he revised his position by stating that the revelatory sources contain no clear-cut evidence to sustain this viewpoint and that, as a matter of fact, the issue of government requires rational deliberation and does not belong to any jurisprudential category that demands unquestioned obedience.8 The outcome of this deliberation was the concept that the mandate to govern resides with the community itself. Given that establishing a government is a necessity and that there is no categorical proof in favour of one group having a monopoly on governance, he favoured popular sovereignty. This is in stark opposition to Khomeini’s proposed model, in which the public plays no major rule and all authority is vested in the jurist. Given the special context of Lebanon, namely, multiple faiths and sectarianism, Shamsuddin espoused a notion of ‘civil government’ (al-dawlat al-madaniyyah) with an explicit public role for religion in terms of providing ethical foundations for individual conduct. Matters dealing with personal status laws (e.g. marriage, divorce and inheritance) and acts of worship remained under the purview of the jurists for the latter requires expertise and also because he was apprehensive of the erosion of religion.
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