Towards a Western Muslim Political Philosophy
The modus vivendi of two-faced pragmatism can no longer secure Muslim survival in the West. We must properly theorise religious and political freedom.
The dominant mode of political engagement for Muslim communities in the West rests on an arrangement that is never quite stated plainly. It is a modus vivendi: a pragmatic agreement to respect the same political ground rules and obey the law, without believing that these rules represent the principles we would ideally choose to live under. In principle, the implicit thought often goes, we would prefer to live under some kind of Islamic state, or a futurist polity, or a neo-Ottoman millet-based empire; but in the meantime, we can still be good citizens of Western liberal polities for pragmatic reasons. Or we would be, if only the bigots and the racists and the Zionists would get off our backs. This untheorised arrangement informs most of the day-to-day political discourse of Muslim influencers, bloggers, and YouTubers, and it underpins, often without acknowledgement, the institutional architecture of Muslim civic life in Britain and across the West.
It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the entire swathe of Muslim institutions in the West is built on this unstable foundation. It may have worked when Muslims were a small minority who could pass under the radar. Those days are over. Increasingly, many Muslim organisations and politicians appear to understand that the foundation cannot hold. They are unconvinced by the modus vivendi, but they lack an alternative theological framework or any coherent vision for Muslim political life. The next decade will end the charade. The accusations of coercive ‘family voting’ at the recent British by-election (an investigation later found no evidence that coercion actually happened), which saw the defeat of the broadly anti-Muslim populist party Reform UK by a leftist Green Party candidate supported by most local Muslims, neatly illustrate the collapse of the modus vivendi arrangement. For a time, traditional community leaders and biraderi elders could wield considerable influence over the Muslim vote, ignoring the obvious tension between these communal structures and the individualistic behaviour assumed by Western democracy. But anti-Islam forces are no longer turning a blind eye to this tension, and even many erstwhile allies are joining the condemnation.
And because the arrangement was never theorised, never subjected to the kind of rigorous examination that a community with functioning intellectual institutions would have demanded, its collapse will leave no resources from which to construct an alternative. The playbook of the 1990s and 2000s is no longer relevant to our changed circumstances, and yet nothing has replaced it, because the community that relied on it never developed the capacity to produce anything better.
There are, of course, theological reasons to think that a principled commitment to reciprocal political and religious freedom for Muslims and non-Muslims is worth considering on its own merits. Scholars like Mohammed Fadel, Recep Şentürk, and Gözde Hussain are making the intellectual case, and their work deserves sustained attention. But before turning to the question of what a Muslim political philosophy might look like, it is worth understanding precisely why the modus vivendi fails, and why its failure was always predictable.
The Limits of Modus Vivendi
To see why the strategy cannot work, suppose we trace its logic to its conclusion. Imagine a dialogue between a Muslim, call him Mohammed, and a particularly virulent anti-Islam Lahabite, call him Michael. Michael is proposing to ban a Muslim political organisation on the grounds that the group is working peacefully and, so far, legally to institute some kind of Islamic state in the distant future.
Mohammed protests. Your own principles of freedom of speech and religion forbid you from doing this, he says. Why do you continue to contradict your own values? Do you simply hate Muslims?
Michael replies that he does not hate Muslims. His principles call for freedom of speech and religion, but not for those who seek to undermine them. When people try to undermine the freedoms of others, they must be prevented, even if they are not imminently calling for violence. Otherwise, his principles would be contradictory, for there would be nothing to prevent people from gradually undermining them.
Mohammed insists that Michael misunderstands. Muslims support freedom of speech and religion just as much as Michael claims to support theirs. They are not trying to undermine those freedoms.
Michael is unconvinced. Perhaps not immediately, he concedes. But look at the state of these freedoms in most Muslim countries. You demand freedom as a minority, but would you behave the same way as a majority? Your values demand banning Christians from proselytising or punishing Muslims for apostasy. You seek to use the cover of freedom to protect yourselves until you become a majority and are strong enough to destroy freedom. Therefore, I am justified in doing whatever is necessary to prevent you from gaining this strength.
Mohammed has run out of rope. He cannot continue to argue that Michael’s own values forbid oppression, because Michael has correctly shown that those values license a principle that John Rawls, perhaps the most influential liberal political philosopher of the last century, called containment. Containment is the intellectual version of the old refrain that one cannot tolerate the intolerant, and it is not a fringe position; it follows logically from any serious commitment to liberal freedoms as an ideal worth preserving.
Mohammed now has no option but to either concede that he would not respect reciprocal freedoms for non-Muslims were he powerful enough to make the call, or to fudge the issue and deliberately obfuscate. Perhaps he starts pointing out the various ways that the West constantly fails to live up to the values it espouses, while evading the question of whether those values are, in principle, good. It is a catch-22. Whatever he says, he will either directly alienate his audience or appear shiftless and dishonest. Either way, anyone watching who even loosely subscribes to Western liberal values will find their trust in Muslims diminished.
This is not a theoretical worry. Mohammed’s style of discourse is visible almost every time Muslim spokespeople appear in the media. The pattern is consistent: a community representative is invited to explain their position on religious coercion, and the result is a performance that exacerbates fears and creates more hostility. The worries that this generates undergird support for the increasingly coercive measures the political right is aiming at Muslim communities across Europe. In Britain, the current agitation over Nigel Farage’s plan to ban the Muslim Brotherhood is clearly driven by the fear that many Muslims are dubiously loyal resident aliens, waiting for the opportunity to reconfigure the state in line with a fundamentally different set of ideals.
We should acknowledge, of course, that the rise of the anti-Muslim right also bears the stamp of sharp power wielded by dangerous political actors who deploy anti-Muslim sentiment for their own purposes. The Emiratis, for instance, have much to gain in terms of domestic and foreign legitimacy by exaggerating fears of an Islamist takeover and painting innocuous Muslim charities as terrorist-adjacent. But legitimate worries about hostility to basic liberal freedoms help explain why this rhetoric resonates with ordinary people. Without these underlying concerns, it would be very difficult for any actor to create a wholly astroturfed anti-Muslim movement in Britain or elsewhere. The underlying grievance is real, even if those who exploit it are cynical.
Modus vivendi does not work. It necessarily and predictably fails even on its own terms. And it fails because it asks Muslims to borrow the language of a political tradition they have not committed to inhabiting, which means that every appeal to its principles rings hollow the moment it is tested.
After Modus Vivendi
What, then, is to be done? The question is whether there exists, within the Islamic intellectual tradition, a principled basis for affirming reciprocal political and religious freedom for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, not as a pragmatic concession to circumstances but as an ideal worth defending on its own terms. If there is, the modus vivendi becomes unnecessary. If there is not, we are left with consequences that this essay will address shortly.
The work of arriving at an answer has begun, though it remains fragmentary and far from complete. Mohammed Fadel, drawing on extensive historical research and classical fiqh training, has argued that early Muslim jurists often revised specific shariah rulings when they no longer served their purposes. Although theorists of usul al-fiqh often denied the legitimacy of this kind of maqasid-based reasoning, the denial was belied, Fadel contends, by near-ubiquitous legal practice. The jurists reasoned purposively about fiqh, regardless of whether usuli theory licensed this practice. And today, he argues, maqasid-based reasoning leads to the conclusion that the rationes legis for restrictions on religious liberty no longer apply. Recep Şentürk arrives at a similar destination through different means, grounding his argument not in jurisprudential method but in theological anthropology: the dignity of human beings as God’s vicegerents furnishes a metaphysical foundation for affirming equal legal standing for persons of all faiths or none. Gözde Hussain, though not herself making a direct argument for equal religious liberty, has systematically laid out the implications of the various hermeneutic approaches to interpreting the Qur’an and Sunnah for questions of political freedom, mapping the terrain on which any such argument must be constructed.
What these three projects collectively reveal is that the resources for a Muslim commitment to reciprocal freedom are not absent from the tradition but are dispersed across it, accessible through different methodological entry points, and awaiting the kind of sustained, systematic treatment that the tradition’s own institutional crisis has so far prevented. The tools exist, but they have not been assembled.
Let us, for the sake of clarity, give a name to the commitment these scholars are circling. Call it liberalism, if you like. It is a loaded term, but no better one exists, and it need not mean anything more substantive than the thought that an ideal state would have equal legal rights for persons of all religions or none, where everyone would be formally free to proselytise for their belief system and to practise the religion they think best. This is not a neutral system; no serious liberal thinker pretends neutrality all the way down. But it is neutral in the limited, formal sense that the state would not give more legal rights to one religion than to others. It is consistent with a wide range of relationships between religion, personal morality, and the state. A liberal state could promote a particular religion through symbolic endorsement, state education, or financial subsidies, or decline to do so. It could encourage traditional values and virtues, or not. All that is ruled out is coercively preventing people of any faith from changing their religion or expressing their views. Readers with their own definitions of liberalism are welcome to them. A commitment to this minimal liberalism represents a plausible baseline for the compatibility of any interpretation of Islam with Western political life, and doubts about Muslim commitment to it plausibly underpin much of the suspicion directed against Muslims in the West by reasonable people.
New Means to Old Ends
The question of whether such a commitment can be grounded in the Islamic tradition is not, in the end, a question that can be answered by theological abstraction or sweeping claims about the metaphysical underpinnings of various regime types. These thirty-thousand-foot generalisations have no relevance to the predicament at hand, which is essentially a predicament about the capacity of Muslims to be good-faith, loyal citizens of a liberal state. Do we, in principle, want the state to ban people from apostasy or proselytisation, or not?
A more helpful model for how reasoning on these questions might proceed is Fazlur Rahman’s idea of the double movement in scriptural interpretation. The first step is to identify the underlying purpose of the injunctions in the Qur’an and Sunnah by reading them in their original context. The second is to apply that purposive aim in the conditions of the modern world. This second movement will often yield quite different injunctions: new means to old ends. As Abdal Hakim Murad puts it, we should reject the replication of the positions of the ancients and instead seek what they sought.
Consider the example of dhimmi regulations. The purpose of these rules was always to create conditions conducive to the free embrace of Islam by non-Muslims while respecting their dignity. In premodern, hierarchical societies, this purpose was served by creating vertical structures of status inequality between Muslims and other communities, so that non-Muslims had a social and material incentive to investigate the claims of Islam. In modern conditions, this no longer works. The flattening of the world by technology and the democratisation of culture mean that creating different classes of citizens does not confer healthy prestige on Islam but creates resentment among the unfavoured while flattering the egos of the favoured. Unequal citizenship is no longer an effective means to the end of da’wah. The first movement identifies the purpose; the second movement recognises that the original means now frustrate it.
This kind of jurisprudential innovation is not alien to the practice of Muslim polities and jurists. The aborted attempts at liberalisation during the Ottoman Tanzimat, the development of fiqh al-aqalliyyat by more recent scholars (a relatively recent innovation in Islamic jurisprudence, aiming to provide solutions for Muslim minorities living in the West), the long tradition of istihsan and istislah within classical jurisprudence: these stand as evidence that the details of fiqh can and must develop in line with changing circumstances, to better serve the permanent ends of Islam in new and unprecedented conditions. The tradition is not static. It never was. What has been missing is not permission to reason but the institutional capacity to do so with the necessary rigour and independence.
It is instructive, by contrast, to observe what happens when this careful work is not done. Mufti Taqi Uthmani’s Islam and Politics claims that true sovereignty belongs to Allah alone, and that secular democracy presumes the right to rule belongs to the people, as though these two claims were in contradiction. They are not. God’s sovereignty, for any Muslim, consists in the way His nature grounds all moral norms, including the norms of political morality; but the sovereignty exercised by the people in a democracy is something entirely different, not the ultimate ground of moral norms but a functional decision procedure, an institutional mechanism for implementing the moral norms of which, for Muslims, God is the ground. No serious theorist of democracy has ever claimed otherwise. We can debate whether democracy is a good mechanism for implementing divine moral law, and there is a serious debate to be had, but to begin our reasoning with a confusion of sovereignty-as-moral-grounding and sovereignty-as-decision-procedure is to cripple ourselves before we start. The Muslim tradition deserves better than this, and so do the communities whose political futures depend on the quality of the thinking produced in its name.
Towards a New Political Philosophy
It seems to me that there are only two things Western Muslims can do in this situation that will stand a chance of working, and that we can advocate in good faith.
One option is to accept at least some containment, while in the meantime practising da’wah. This would not mean that Muslims should accept the kind of extreme, authoritarian, and blatantly racist proposals to ethnically cleanse Muslim populations being promoted by some corners of the right. But at least some containment will have to be acquiesced in. Migration policies that aim to limit Muslim population growth, proportionate and carefully targeted restrictions on political activity, and similar measures cannot be opposed on the basis of any principle shared by both anti-liberal Muslims and liberal Western governments. Perhaps visa ‘red lists’ of the kind proposed by Reform UK, targeting Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan and Sudan, would have to be acquiesced in. If we cannot offer a principled commitment to reciprocal freedom, we cannot coherently object when others take us at our word and act accordingly. This is not a comfortable conclusion. It is, however, an honest one, and honesty about our situation is the precondition for changing it.
The other option is to consider whether a reciprocal commitment to full religious and political freedom for all is, after all, the ideal. It would be wrong and dishonest to try to reverse-engineer a version of liberalism into fiqh and Islamic ethics simply because doing so would make life practically easier for Muslims in the West. But there is nothing wrong with being motivated to ask the question by the consequences we will predictably endure if liberalism and Islam turn out to be wholly incompatible. A question motivated by practical urgency can still receive a truthful answer.
The second option is far better, and the intellectual work it requires is far more advanced than what currently passes for Muslim political thought. Given the collapse and stagnation of the Muslim intellectual world over the last century, it is not surprising that the work of developing a proper Muslim political philosophy has barely been systematically attempted; what exists is either ressentiment or nostalgia-driven fantasy, or a rote translation of the opinions of medieval fuqaha into unimaginably different circumstances, and neither is adequate to the scale of the challenge. The project of academic political philosophy will not always be glamorous or exciting, but it will require engagement with the tradition that rejects blind imitation of earlier scholars’ conclusions, that draws on the tools of analytic philosophy in order to achieve some desperately needed conceptual clarity and argumentative rigour, and that tests arguments against counterarguments with a precision that the current discourse entirely lacks. Rather than declaiming in sweeping generalisations, we will need to work in the weeds of philosophical detail, distinguishing what the tradition requires from what historical circumstance produced.
The future of Western Islam is not going to be easy or comfortable. We cannot continue acting as if the ideal theory is to be transposed from medieval fiqh manuals, while in reality, it is the pragmatic acceptance of whatever social trends emanate from Western secularism. This arrangement was never stable, never theorised, and it has now, under the pressure of demographic change and political realignment, begun to visibly collapse, leaving behind a community that has spent decades building institutions on a foundation it never examined.
The modus vivendi is over. What replaces it will be determined by whether Muslims in the West can summon the intellectual seriousness to do what every community facing comparable circumstances has eventually had to do: think.
Author: Jacob Williams is a final-year Oxford DPhil candidate in political theory, where he also convenes the Oxford Islam and Justice Programme (OIJP). His commentary has been published in Renovatio, First Things, Law & Liberty, and elsewhere.
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