Towards developing Islamic legislation
Written by Dr. Abdullah Ahmed Al-Naeem
Translated and presented by: Hussein Ahmed Amin
Sinai Publishing, Cairo 1994
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It seems that the Egyptians have become accustomed to and have continued to believe that their country is a source of intellectual radiation in the Arab and Islamic worlds. This is because few of their intellectuals pay attention to the intellectual fruits of the countries surrounding their country, or appreciate the damage that will inevitably result from this isolation and neglect. More than a quarter of a century has passed since the appearance of a book in Sudan, the book “The Second Treatise on Islam” by the martyr Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, which was prepared by the most important attempt by a contemporary Muslim to develop Islamic legislation and reconcile Islamic teachings with contemporary requirements, without it receiving in Egypt (or in an Islamic country outside Sudan, as far as I know) the attention it deserves, and without us seeing it having an influence on the trends of our thinkers, intellectuals, and the public. Our people, although they contain a basic revolutionary idea, I have no doubt in their ability, once accepted by Islamic public opinion, to provide solutions to most of the problems surrounding the application of Sharia, within an Islamic framework.
In the book we have a comprehensive presentation of this idea and other ideas advocated by the late Professor Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. However, it does not hurt to summarize the main idea as follows:
A careful look at the content of the Holy Qur’an and the Sunnah of the Prophet reveals two stages of the message of Islam: Meccan and Medinan. The message in the first stage is the eternal and fundamental message, a message that affirms the inherent dignity of all human beings, without regard to gender, race, religious belief, or anything else. This message was characterized by equality between men and women, and complete freedom of choice in matters of religion and belief. As for the method of calling for it, it is based on persuasion with rational arguments, and argumentation in the best way, without the slightest amount of coercion or coercion.
If the polytheists rejected this high level of the message, and it seemed clear that society as a whole was not yet ready to accept it, the more realistic message came in the Medinan period, and its provisions were implemented. Thus, aspects of the message of the Meccan period, which were not amenable to scientific application in the historical context of the seventh century AD, were suspended and replaced by more practical principles. However, the pending aspects of the Meccan message were not placed forever as a source of Sharia, but rather its implementation was postponed until appropriate conditions were available in the future.
I previously mentioned in the introduction to my book, “The Sad Muslim’s Guide to the Requirements of Behavior in the Twentieth Century,” that much of what we perceive of religion is the product of certain historical and social calculations, and of human additions from successive eras. These calculations and additions have cast a thick veil over the essence of religion and its fundamental and eternal truths. Religion does not arise in a vacuum, but rather appears in a specific society and a specific time, and its teachings are necessarily shaped by and take into account the circumstances of that society and the requirements of that time. It is therefore an absolute truth that occurred within a historical context, and appeared in a social environment whose features were reflected in it, in order for it to gain acceptance, gain the majority of them, and ensure its spread. Just as it is impossible for a person to carry water except in a vessel, or to keep a gaseous chemical element unless mixing it with a foreign element turns it into solid tablets, the religious message with its universal and eternal truths can only be communicated to a specific society, in a specific historical era, which makes it inevitable that the message will pay the price for that in the form of the temporary intruder, the local incidental, the non-essential and the essential. If the eternal message did not take into account the receiving device of the person it seeks to address and reach, it would be lost in the ether and impossible to capture. Ensuring that it is captured and received requires wrapping the message in what is not at its core, translating the eternal global content into a local dialect, taking into account the harshness of minds, the weak level of culture and civilization, and stubborn clinging to inherited concepts and traditions. If the message insists on maintaining its purity and not being colored by local and historical circumstances, it will be wasted and no one will accept it. If the message had been colored when it was delivered in the historical context, and then insisted on remaining as it was, despite its spread to new social environments and the passage of historical eras over it, and refused to be shaped by the circumstances of those new environments and the requirements of era after era, it would have been impossible for it to meet the spiritual needs of the people of the new societies and eras with the same effectiveness with which it met the needs of the people of the society and era in which the message came.
This is based on my opinion at the time I wrote the introduction to my aforementioned book. I am now inclined to say with Professor Mahmoud Muhammad Taha that the message of Islam, with its eternal universal truths, was conveyed during the Meccan period without taking into account the harshness of minds and the weak level of civilization of the Arabs at that time, and without being colored by local and historical circumstances. In my opinion, this is also what Ali Abd al-Razzaq wanted to say in his book “Islam and the Principles of Governance” in 1925, although he expressed his intention in terms characterized by some contortion, and what the British historian Arnold Toynbee expressed explicitly in his last book, which is:
Mankind and Mother Earth in 1976, which was published a year after its author’s death.
However, Professor Taha goes further than any of us, and brings the idea to its logical conclusion: according to him, the ancient jurists, among the founders of the edifice of Islamic law, were on their side, as they interpreted the principle of abrogation on the basis that later texts of the Qur’an and Sunnah (i.e., the Medinan period) abrogated or canceled all the texts of the previous Meccan period, which seemed to contradict them. The question that arises from this is whether such copying is permanent, such that the oldest Meccan texts remain ineffective forever. Mahmoud Taha believes that this statement is rejected, given that if it were true, there would be no meaning in citing the older texts. He also argues that saying that abrogation is eternal means depriving Muslims of the best aspects of their religion. Therefore, he proposes developing the foundations of Islamic law, and transferring them from the texts of the Medinan period to the texts of the Meccan period that preceded it. This means that the interpretive principle in development is nothing more than a reversal of the process of abrogation, so that it now becomes possible to implement the provisions of texts that were abrogated in the past, and to abrogate texts that were applied by traditional Sharia, in order to achieve the necessary degree of reform of Islamic law.
Mahmoud Taha wrote in “The Second Treatise of Islam” saying: “The development of Sharia law, as we mentioned earlier, is a transition from one text to another, from a text that was the timekeeper in the seventh century and ruled, to a text that was considered at that time to be greater than the time and was abrogated. God Almighty said: Whatever verse We abrogate or forget, We bring down something better than it or something similar to it (Surat Al-Baqarah, 106). His saying: We do not abrogate a verse, meaning: We do not cancel. And we remove from the ruling of a verse... His saying, or we forget it, means: We postpone the action of its ruling... We bring better than it... It means: It is closer to people’s understanding and more in the ruling of their time than forgetting... or something like it... It means: We return it itself to the ruling when its time comes... It is as if the verses that were abrogated were only abrogated for the ruling of the time, so they are postponed until that time comes, then they have become the owner of the time. It will have the ruling, and thus it will become the decisive verse, and the verse that was decisive in the seventh century will now be abrogated... This is the meaning of the ruling of the time: the seventh century has the verses of the branches, and the twentieth century has the verses of the foundations.”
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The reader may be surprised by this unusual reading of the verse, as it is in the Qur’an in our hands (not a single verse is abrogated or forgotten). However, Al-Tabari, in his interpretation, says: “... and others read that (or we forget it) with the fatḥah of the nūn and a hamza after the sīn, meaning: we delay it, from your saying, ‘I forgot this matter, women and women make it forget it’ if you delay it... and among those who read that was a group of companions and followers, and a group of reciters of Kufa and Basri recited it... The interpretation of those who read that is also: We do not change a verse that we have sent down to you, O Muhammad, so that we invalidate its ruling and prove its error. Or we delay it, postpone it, and confirm it, neither changing it nor invalidating its ruling. We bring something better than it or similar to it.” This is the interpretation that Mahmoud Taha adopted, and one of his most prominent students and collaborators adopted it, namely Dr. Abdullah Ahmed Al-Naim, the author of this book in our hands.
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The doctor was in close contact with his spiritual teacher, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, over a period of seventeen full years, which ended with the execution of Taha in Khartoum on charges of apostasy from Islam on January 18, 1985, at the direction of the then President of the Republic, Jaafar al-Numeiri, whose regime fell only one year and seventy days after he killed this prominent Islamic thinker. Abdullah Al-Naim participated actively and positively in the “Republican Brotherhood” movement led by Mahmoud Taha in Sudan. He was arrested with him in the period between May 17, 1983 and December 19, 1984. He, the able jurist and head of the Public Law Department at the Faculty of Law at the University of Khartoum, made a commendable contribution to defending the accused among his colleagues in the movement and ensuring their release. However, he was forced after the execution of his professor, the elimination of the movement, and the paths parted. He encouraged its supporters to emigrate abroad, as he translated Taha’s book “The Second Treatise of Islam” into English, and wrote this book in English, which I had the honor of translating into Arabic.
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The book is, in fact, a mixture of Taha’s thought and Al-Na’im’s thought. The basic idea of Mahmoud Taha that we summarized a little while ago is the one that Al-Na’im took as a starting point for him in his current book: its commitment and growth. He provided us with answers to the questions that might arise in connection with it, and with the systematic, sequential application of it in the fields of constitutionalism, human rights, criminal law, and international law, and with the historical extrapolation of Islamic thought related to issues related to it. Public law, benefiting in all of this from the legal background that was available to him, and which was not available to his professor, Engineer Mahmoud Mohamed Taha.
This is the case with every brilliant, intelligent, creative student of a distinguished leader of thought. He did not stop at the extent his teacher had reached, nor did he keep the idea in the state that that thinker had left it in. Rather, he went with all sincerity and determination to grow and develop the idea in order to reach its logical results and apply it to various fields.. Here, then, he plays the role of Plato in relation to Socrates towards Mahmoud Taha. Just as we find it difficult to attribute this or that opinion to the author or his teacher in the face of many of the opinions contained in Plato’s dialogues, so we also find it difficult to attribute some of the ideas contained in the current book. Our description of it as a mixture was a bit of a stretch, and because of the honorable author’s insistence, in my conversations with him, on attributing every credit to his teacher. However, the reader’s comparison between Taha’s books and Al-Na’im’s book is enough to make it somewhat easier for us to realize the reality of the essential, constructive and creative additions to Al-Na’im. I will add here a statement that I am almost certain that Dr. Al-Naim will resent it, reject it, and turn away from it, which is that my admiration for his book exceeded my admiration for the book “The Second Message of Islam.” As for the reason for this, I mention it, and I am almost certain that some Arab readers will resent it, reject it, and turn away from it. It is that Al-Na’im’s book was originally written in English, a language that hardly allows the loose, constructive rhetorical style that unfortunately characterized the late Sudanese leader’s book, and its readers do not like to stray from the standards of specific, precise thought.
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However, I reflect, correct, and ask for forgiveness... I am certain that if Al-Na’im had written his book in Arabic, the book would have been characterized by the same degree of calm, objectivity, accuracy, and strict scientific spirit that distinguished the English original... Rhetoric and loose constructional style are not among the characteristics associated with Arabic except in the eras of its decline. As for calmness, objectivity, accuracy, and a strict scientific spirit, all of them are traits in Abdullah Al-Naim’s personality, and it is inevitable that they will be reflected in his writings. Recipes that I felt in him since my first meeting with him in Cairo on March 29, 1993, a meeting arranged for us by the authentic Egyptian artist, Mrs. Attiyat Al-Abnoudi, the famous documentary film director, after I expressed to her my testimony of my admiration for Abdullah Al-Naim’s book, which she had read and gotten to know its author before me.. I will never forget an evening that brought me together with Al-Naim and the great Islamic thinker, Professor Tariq Al-Bishri, who is a person like me. Bliss lies in calm and dignity, balance and open-mindedness, despite their radical difference in the field of religious thought, as the Egyptian historian refuses to accept the historicity of the religious text, while the Sudanese jurist insists on it. Their calm, objective, balanced dialogue on this subject was an example - although it is rarely emulated in our miserable Islamic society - in the dialogue of thinkers, even if their trends and opinions differed, united by the sincere desire to reach the truth, and even to what is better to me than the truth itself, which is understanding... It is as if the mouthpiece of the two was uttering the famous saying of Imam Al-Shafi’i: “By God, I have never debated with anyone, so I loved to He makes mistakes, and I have never spoken to anyone and I did not care whether God clarified the truth on my tongue or on his tongue.”
So where are Jaafar Al-Numeiri, Omar Al-Bashir and others like them?!
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How sad it made me feel that my meetings with Naeem were interrupted when he left Egypt for Washington to work as executive director of Africa Watch, an organization concerned with human rights on the African continent. I have no doubt that he is looking forward to the day when he is able to return to Sudan to continue preaching his ideas and the original ideas of the “Republican Brotherhood” movement, whose supporters dispersed and whose activity ceased after the Sudanese authorities banned this activity since January 1985, and for which no new leadership emerged after the execution of its leader... which unfortunately suggests that most of its supporters’ connection with their leader was more emotional than intellectual. I do not think that any of them sought, as Al-Naim did, to establish and formulate the intellectual foundations of the movement. In order for it to become a human heritage, it is not exclusive to Taha’s former students, nor is it limited to Sudan, nor even to Islamic countries. According to Al-Naim, a book like his current one “does not address contemporary Muslims alone. Although the issues of reforming Islamic law, and social and political transformation in the Islamic world, are the concern of the peoples of Islamic countries in the first place, they also fall within the legitimate concerns of all of humanity, because of their impact on human rights and basic human freedoms... This is because humanity can no longer shirk its responsibility for the fate of humans in any part of the world, which we consider an achievement.” Glorious is the modern international movement in favor of human rights. All the peoples of the world are called upon to help Muslims in their distress, and to accept Muslims’ assistance to non-Muslims in their distress. However, we must stress that these efforts for the sake of mutual cooperation must be undertaken in good faith if we want them to be as successful and effective as possible.
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Opinions like those contained in the books of Taha and Al-Naim are, in my opinion, like the salt of fruits. They only take effect after a while! However, I am almost confident that the day will come when these opinions will have a profound and widespread impact on the thought of intellectuals in the Islamic world first, and then on the conscience of its broad masses, and this day will not be as far away as some pessimists imagine. The need of Muslims in our time is intensifying - day after day - to provide appropriate solutions to the exacerbating problems in their countries, inspired by their heritage, religion and traditions, and to confirm their civilizational identity in Facing the dangers that threaten to engulf them... However, their right to self-determination is limited by the right of other individuals and groups to the same thing, which makes it necessary to achieve reconciliation between Islamic law and all universal human rights, and to convince Muslims that the “other person” with whom they must accept the principle of complete equality between them (such as foreign non-Islamic countries, non-Muslim minorities living in their countries, and Muslim women whose rights are detracted from traditional law), includes all other human beings, Regardless of ethnic, religious and sexual accounts.
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In my opinion, this solution lies in the basic ideas put forward by the distinguished Sudanese Islamic thinker, Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, and in this book by his student, the distinguished Sudanese Islamic thinker, Dr. Abdullah Ahmed Al-Naim. It is the book that Al-Naim asked me on March 29, 1993, to write an introduction to, so I excitedly asked him for permission to translate it in its entirety into Arabic.
Hussein Ahmed Amin
Heliopolis on June 19, 1993
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