In the name of Allah, the All-Merciful, the Most Merciful and may Allah bless His slave and messenger Muhammad and his family and companions and grant perfect peace.
The themes of MFAS – The Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies – emerged from four questions we postulated, which even if one does not answer them entirely can serve well in navigating the themes. They are:
Where are we?
How did we get here?
Where do we want to get to?
How do we get there?
The ultimate iteration of deen was revealed after the fatra – the six centuries long gap in which there had been no Prophethood. In that period the two sects of the People of the Book had become defined by their relationship to power and empire.
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”1 ‘The exception’ is the state of emergency. Of course, ‘he who’ is not originally or theoretically sovereign; ‘the people’ are, according to Hobbes and everyone since, and Peter Sloterdijk contends that this originates with the Romans expelling their king, Tarquin, and choosing the republican form. And therein lies the rub. The electoral process, which is thought to elect ‘representatives’ of ‘the people’, throws up those who find the limitations of the people’s sovereignty too constricting: constitutions, assemblies, deliberations, legislation etc. Thus throughout the very short history indeed of people’s sovereignty, the necessary emergencies have always turned up. Today it is the emergency in the US – there isn’t one – requiring the POTUS to take drastic measures. He is a man who chafes at having limits put on him by ‘the people’, a completely abstract thought, but in reality by other elected ‘representatives’ of the people who themselves rarely have the slightest idea of ‘representing’, but rather are concerned for advancing their own sovereignty in whatever limited domain they can.
Interpolation
The purpose of the emergency or the state of exception is quite simple and mundane: a rising middle class who took power, and used that as a means to enrich themselves. The Napoleonic Wars, for example, licensed them to introduce for the first time an income tax on ordinary people rather than wealth taxes on those who could afford them. Moreover, it allowed them to license government debts from usurers and the interest that accrued from them and then to pass on the burden of servicing the debt to mankind at large. Of course monarchs had done that, but they were their own private debts; now they have become national debts to be paid from the income tax and other invented taxes such as VAT, which to their shame Muslim nations have embraced wholesale, and thus all the rigmarole of democracy just to present a facade that it is as if popular opinion wants to be taxed onerously.
The Muwatta’
Malik said, “No one should recite any of the pieces of Qur’an that require a prostration after the prayers of Subh and ‘Asr. This is because the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace, forbade prayer after Subh until after the sun had risen, and after ‘Asr until the sun had set, and prostration is part of the prayer. So no one should recite any piece of Qur’an requiring a prostration during these two periods of time.” (The Muwatta’ of Imam Malik ibn Anas)
“As you are, so you will have put in authority over you.” So when you have taqwa of Allah and fear His punishment, you will have put in authority over you those who fear Him with respect to [their treatment of] you, and vice-versa.
‘Fast’ is an intriguing word in English. Apart from its meaning of abstaining from food and drink for a specific period of time, it has also the sense of speed, as well as to make something secure or to tie or fix it: to make it fast. The morning meal is called ‘breakfast’ i.e. the breaking of the fast. “In Old English, a regular morning meal was called morgenmete, and the word dinner, which originated from Gallo-Romance desjunare (“to break one’s fast”), referred to a meal after fasting.” The French word déjeuner is from dé– +? jeûner (“un-fast (to break fast)”). The story of how Christian fasting moved from a daytime activity to a nighttime one concluded by ‘breakfast’ is an interesting one indeed but not our purpose here.
We might not need anything but the Opening of the Noble Book, the Fatiha, and another sura or two, particularly that on the Divine Unity, the sura called Ihklas – Sincerity.
If we do go further, we start with the first sura of the Qur’an after the Opening, Sura al-Baqara.
We owe to Ezra Pound his coinage of the word ‘usurocracy’ from the Latin usura and –cracy, which latter is from the Greek –kratia ‘power, rule’. Democracy is the rule of the demos – the people, and usurocracy is the rule of usury. Note that there is no agent empowered here but a process. That process elevates some and demotes others, and it does so continually, and thus produces chaos. Usury rules. Chaos rules.
The deeply incautious use of the word ‘tradition’ in the Western context by some people actually points to something appropriated by the Roman Empire, a religion founded by a Pharisaic rabbi from a Hellenic background, and propagated among other Hellenes, a man who never met the Prophet of his time, peace be upon him, and who was rejected by his disciples.
Before passing judgment, one must of all see the phenomenon and see what it is.