Arjomand is certainly dealing with the stagnant, repressed brutal culture as lived now in the present moment and experienced by many Muslims, Arab or non-Arab.

However, Professor Feldman views Muslim Islamic culture from the eyes of the historian who actually understands this brilliant culture from a thirteen-century perspective.

I view the Middle East from a forty-century perspective. When Islam arose during the six hundreds A.D., two great “superpowers,” the Eastern Roman Civilization (ancient Byzantium) and the Sassanian Persian Civilization, had exhausted their economic-financial resources in a devastating, bloody war between each other. This temporary lacuna permitted the opening up of a new Oriental religion based on a fresher perspective. The Middle East retreated from Greek-Latin rationalism back to the pre-Hellenistic era: Authoritarianism, Mystery & Fate! This is the crux of the problem here.

If you view religion as a cohesive social force, Professor Feldman is correct.

If you view religion as mental ignorance, anti-science (or intellectual), and mental enslavement, Dr. Said Amir Arjomand is correct. Personally, my afffections are with Dr. Feldman; however, my intelligence is with Dr. Arjomand. He is an eminent sociologist! He has lived and seen these painful realities he so lucidly discusses in his response to Dr. Feldman.

However, Professor Feldman should not be so cavalierly dismissed. A mastery of Classical Hebrew and Classical Arabic informs his working emotional reason. There is ethical idealism in his trenchant observations. This should not be a bad thing! It offers a direction for the Islamic people that is truthful to their extraordinary and great historical civilization in the Middle East.

I am pleased to highlight some of the powerful sentences in Feldman’s article for the New York Times Magazine (all of which are direct quotations):

1. In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world.

2. One reason for the divergence between Western and Muslim views of Shariah is that we are not all using the word to mean the same thing. Although it is commonplace to use the word “Shariah” and the phrase “Islamic law” interchangeably, this prosaic English translation does not capture the full set of associations that the term “Shariah” conjures for the believer.

3. At its core, Shariah represents the idea that all human beings — and all human governments — are subject to justice under the law.

4. But if Shariah is popular among many Muslims in large part because of its historical association with the rule of law, can it actually do the same work today?

5. In only two important instances do scholars today exercise real power, and in both cases we can see a deviation from their traditional role. The first is Iran… and the second is Saudi Arabia.

6. The answer that developed over the first couple of centuries of Islam was that the Koran could be supplemented by reference to the prophet’s life — his sunna, his path. (The word “sunna” is the source of the designation Sunni — one who follows the prophet’s path.) His actions and words were captured in an oral tradition, beginning presumably with a person who witnessed the action or statement firsthand.

7. Under the constitutional theory that the scholars developed to explain the division of labor in the Islamic state, the caliph had paramount responsibility to fulfill the divine injunction to “command the right and prohibit the wrong.” But this was not a task he could accomplish on his own. It required him to delegate responsibility to scholarly judges, who would apply God’s law as they interpreted it. The caliph could promote or fire them as he wished, but he could not dictate legal results: judicial authority came from the caliph, but the law came from the scholars.

8. Once the law existed in codified form, however, the law itself was able to replace the scholars as the source of authority. Codification took from the scholars their all-important claim to have the final say over the content of the law and transferred that power to the state. To placate the scholars, the government kept the Shariah courts running but restricted them to handling family-law matters.

9. Promulgated in 1876, the Ottoman constitution created a legislature composed of two lawmaking bodies — one elected, one appointed by the sultan. This amounted to the first democratic institution in the Muslim world; had it established itself, it might have popularized the notion that the people represent the ultimate source of legal authority.

10. . With the scholars out of the way and no legislature to replace them, the sultan found himself in the position of near-absolute ruler. This arrangement set the pattern for government in the Muslim world after the Ottoman empire fell. Law became a tool of the ruler, not an authority over him. What followed, perhaps unsurprisingly, was dictatorship and other forms of executive dominance — the state of affairs confronted by the Islamists who seek to restore Shariah.A Democratic Shariah?

11. The Islamists today, partly out of realism, partly because they are rarely scholars themselves, seem to have little interest in restoring the scholars to their old role as the constitutional balance to the executive. The Islamist movement, like other modern ideologies, seeks to capture the existing state and then transform society through the tools of modern government. Its vision for bringing Shariah to bear therefore incorporates two common features of modern government: the legislature and the constitution.

12. Something of the sort may slowly be happening in Turkey. The Islamists there are much more liberal than anywhere else in the Muslim world; they do not even advocate the adoption of Shariah (a position that would get their government closed down by the staunchly secular military). Yet their central focus is the rule of law and the expansion of basic rights against the Turkish tradition of state-centered secularism. The courts are under increasing pressure to go along with that vision.

13. Can Shariah provide the necessary resources for such a rethinking of the judicial role? In its essence, Shariah aspires to be a law that applies equally to every human, great or small, ruler or ruled. No one is above it, and everyone at all times is bound by it. But the history of Shariah also shows that the ideals of the rule of law cannot be implemented in a vacuum.

14. Still, with all its risks and dangers, the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law while coming to terms with contemporary circumstances is bold and noble — and may represent a path to just and legitimate government in much of the Muslim world.

I am pleased to see that a westerner understands all of this, and believe that this understanding would lead to acceptance and appreciation of a different point of view, rather than merely a conflicting view.

Mike Ghouse