At the end of the Muslim Institute World Seminar on ‘State and Politics in Islam’ (3-6 August, 1983), the seminar approved a Statement of Consensus produced by a Drafting Committee. This was published in Crescent International, September 1-15, 1983, and reprinted in Issues in the Islamic movement, vol. 4, 1983-84 (1403-04), pp. 48-50.
The consensus at the seminar on State and Politics in Islam
Basic concepts
On the basic areas examined by the seminar, there was general agreement that:
1. All authority belongs to Allah and any Muslim State that makes itself subservient to a power or ideology outside Islam is in effect in revolt against the rule of Allah;
2. Deen and politics form an indivisible unity and any formulation of Islam on the basis of the separation of religion and politics is not acceptable to the Ummah;
3. The political roles of Islam and kufr are two opposite trends in history and neither has anything in common with the other;
4. The political party framework as found in western ‘democracies’ is divisive of the society and therefore does not suit the Ummah;
5. Jihad is an essential obligation on every Muslim at all times and should become an essential part of the modern Islamic movement.
Political objectives
The seminar declaration included the following as the political objectives of the Ummah and the global Islamic movement:
1. to eliminate all authority other than Allah and His Prophet;
2. to eliminate nationalism in all its shapes and forms, in particular the nation-States;
3. to unite all Islamic movements into a single global Islamic movement to establish the Islamic State;
4. to reconstruct the world of Islam into a system of Islamic States linked together by such institutions as are necessary to express the unity of the Ummah;
5. to eliminate all political, economic, social, cultural and philosophical Influences of the western civilization that have penetrated the world of Islam;
6. to re-establish a dominant and global Islamic civilization based on the concept of tawheed;
7. to create the necessary institutions for the pursuit of al-amr bil ma’ruf wa al-nahy ’an al-munkar;
8. to establish ’adl (justice) in all human relationships at all levels throughout the world.
Recommendations
The seminar also adopted the following recommendations:
- This seminar (a) recommends the establishment of an independent forum of ulama and Muslim intellectuals to coordinate and guide the struggle of the Islamic movement in all parts of the world; (b) recommends that the Muslim Institute draw up a working paper to implement the first part of this recommendation and to circulate it for discussion; and (c) asks the Muslim Institute to examine the possibility of publishing a journal of Muslim political thought.
- The seminar recommends: (a) that all Islamic groups and movements should establish close relationship with the Islamic State of Iran and benefit from the experiences of the Islamic Revolution; (b) that the Islamic State of Iran should seek active collaboration with all Islamic groups and movements.
- This seminar recommends that Islamic groups and movements should abandon the ‘constitutional reform’ approach, end all contact and collaboration with the regimes in the Muslim world, and work for their elimination and replacement by Islamic States.
- This seminar asks the ulama and scholars of Islam to abandon their apologetic approach and calls upon them to develop a comprehensive system of Muslim political thought from the original sources of Islam.
- This seminar takes the view that the ulama of Islam are the only source of muttaqi leadership of Islamic movements, and calls upon them to lead the Ummah.
- The seminar considers that the problem of Palestine is not limited to the Palestinians or Arabs; instead it is a global Islamic problem for which all the Ummah should be mobilized.
- The seminar praises the jihad 0f the Muslim peoples struggling to free their countries, particularly the jihad of Muslim Afghanistan, and asks Muslims all over the world to support these struggling peoples.
- The seminar recommends that Arabic be made the international Islamic language, and asks all Muslim people to learn it.
Crescent International, September 1-15, 1983