The State Exists to Restrain Injustice Not to Achieve Justice

July 23, 2021

In the classical Islamic political imagination, the role of political authority was fundamentally limited: protect the people from external enemies and internal oppression, so that society could pursue justice on its own terms through self-governance, customary law, and the Sharia.

"Pre-modern Muslim rule was limited in that it did not possess the pervasive powers of the modern state. Bureaucracy and state administration were thin, mostly limited to urban sites, and largely confined to matters such as the army of the ruler, his assistants, tax collection and often land tenure. People were not registered at birth, had no citizenship status, and could travel and move to other lands and regions freely." Wael Hallaq

Ibn Khaldun captured this in his Circle of Justice, drawn from the pseudo-Aristotelian Book on Politics: the military protects the state, which requires wealth, which comes from subjects, who are maintained by justice, which requires the shari'ah, which requires royal authority. Justice is the hinge in this circle, but it is justice understood as restraint preventing the ruler from devouring the productive capacity of his subjects not as a positive program of social engineering. The state upholds conditions in which justice can flourish; it does not define or manufacture justice itself.

Hallaq makes the same point from a legal perspective. Communities regulated their own affairs through customary law and the Sharia, both of which were independent of the ruler. The qadi was a community member who resolved disputes with an eye toward preserving social relationships, not an agent of sovereign power enforcing compliance. The mufti was a private scholar answerable to society, not to the government. The entire legal infrastructure was, in Hallaq's terms, a case of self-rule.

This stands in sharp contrast to the modern state, which claims a monopoly on law, defines the boundaries of the permissible, and punishes infractions through an apparatus of surveillance and coercion that pre-modern Muslim rulers could never have imagined. When modern Islamists demand that "the state implement the Sharia," they are unconsciously adopting a modern framework in which law is what the state says it is the very antithesis of how the Sharia historically functioned.

Takeaway: The classical Islamic vision of governance was minimalist by design justice was society's work, not the state's project.