Islam is a religion that is based on the submission to the will of God as revealed most clearly in the textual tradition of the Quran and Hadith. The will of God is naturally broad, hence given to broad interpretations too.

Within the context of Islam, Muslims have had no problems embracing Islamic interpretations rendered by the four imams or other such Islamic traditions that conform to the Quran and Hadith.

Nevertheless, the hermeneutical theory and practice of Islam is often confined very narrowly to the idea of the lawful and the prohibited, (al Halal wal Haram fil Islam). This is when problems begin to occur as resistance to such strict interpretations of Islam are wrongfully seen as prejudiced opposition to Islam.

Reducing Islam to the 'lawful and prohibited' is an approach systematised by Yusuf Qaradawi, a methodology that has gained in currency, first in the Middle East, then in Southeast Asia, since the 1960s, when the book of the same title was first written.

In Malaysia, Qaradawi's influence has been quite deep, even among the governing Muslim elites. When Anwar Ibrahim was the president of the International Islamic University in Malaysia, he spent considerable time with Qaradawi, even expressing his support for the latter fiqh al awlawiyyat (Islamic law of priorities).

After the dismissal of Anwar, however, the thoughts and practice of al-Qaradawi have not been totally excluded. The Islamic scholars and thinkers in the Institute of Islamic Understanding (Ikim) still look to him for various Islamic interpretations and verdicts, such as on the legality of suicide terrorism. (1)

In PAS, the inspiration of Qaradawi is just as laden in the conceptual blueprint of its Islamic state. If anything, PAS' Islamic state is built on the basis of the permissible and the prohibited.

Shades of gray are therefore subsumed in their entirety. Observe the Islamic state document produced by PAS in 2003, incidentally the first of its kind in the history of the party after much outcry from Malaysians as to what PAS' Islamic state actually represented.

In it, it is clearly stated that PAS will implement the Syariah to achieve the five imperatives of the Maqasid al-Shariah (major goals/objectives of Syariah) - beliefs, life, intellect, dignity, property. That is to protect everyone's beliefs, life, intellect, dignity and property.

Yet, in seeking to fulfill the five imperatives above, the subsequent language of the document read: in implementing the Syariah, all vices and crimes that pertain to the above stated aspects would be controlled. Man-made laws have been proven a failure in securing the security and dignity of the human race. (2)

Judging from this line of reasoning, the punitive logic is not far from the implementation of Syariah either. Thus, despite promising to keep true to maqasid al-Shariah's five objectives, PAS is totally silent on the jurisprudential methodology and tradition that would be employed to fulfill these objectives for the betterment of both Muslims and non-Muslims.

PAS also stated that the reason for the creation of an Islamic state is now a Fardhu Ain (necessary Islamic obligation). To justify the creation of an Islamic state, the Islamic maxim began as 'something becomes obligatory if an obligatory injunction fails to be fulfilled without it'. (3)

To which the PAS Islamic state document immediately added: Hence, since the successful implementation of the obligatory injunction of joining good and forbidding vice, and the entire good governance is dependent on the acquiring of the executive power, the establishment of the Islamic state has become obligatory. (4)

Institutionalised Islam

Going by the above assertion, Islamic law, in the words of MB Hooker, an Islamic law specialist based in Australian National University, is therefore a creature of executive institution, rather than based on Islamic scholasticism where religious scholars debate on each point of law before it is deployed.

It is in this context that Parvez Manzoor, a professor at Stockholm University, has affirmed that the 'Islamic state' is a totalitarian creature rather than one that is in keeping with Islam's holistic or totalistic spirit; the latter being what Islam stands for.

Insofar as Malaysia is concerned, parties that rely on Qaradawi's approach often reproduces the form of Islam that boils down to observing the prescriptions (the dos) and proscriptions (the don'ts) of the Islamic state. When this occurs, Syariah naturally becomes extremely restrictive.(5)

Although Islamists (here I include any Muslims who want to introduce/integrate Islam into public life), inspired by the clarity of Qaradawi's work, often point to the validity of this approach - especially by invoking the parallel Quranic injunction that encourages Muslims to advocate virtue and forbid vice - they failed to note that even the Qaradawi himself openly acknowledged the difficult and unprecedented nature of reducing Islam to a set of positive and negative deeds. (6)

That this warning was not heeded is largely the result of a shallow understanding of what maqasid Syariah or Islam actually stands for.

Thus, in applying the reductionist approach of Qaradawi, the intellectual tension of Islamic state, and Syariah, is intentionally made absent, when in fact it should be problematised to make the Islamic projects even more rigorous, as the introduction of Islam is already controversial enough in a modern and multiracial society like Malaysia.

Still, it has become almost fashionable for Islamists of different stripes - traditionalist, modernist, extremists or fundamentalists - to preach, practice, and propagate Islam based on reductionism of the punitive kind in the country.

Hence, when Islamists propose a legislative agenda, even in Malaysia, they are pre-disposed to an approach that rarely questions the spirit and ethics laden in Syariah to satisfy the five imperatives.

Rather, the approach is based on sanctions and injunctions of the Islamic faith, which in fact is the most simplistic, if not popular rendition, of Islam into contemporary context.

In Malaysia, the prints of reductionism spawned by Qaradawi, are clearly apparent in all forms of Islamic discourses already. The tendency to want to sanction or ban things stand as key examples.


Endnotes

(1) Muhammad Khalid Masud, 'The Scope of Pluralism in Islamic Moral Traditions, in Sohail Hashimi', ed., Islamic Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002, p. 143-144. Note: It was only in March 2003, during the summit of the Organisation of Islamic Conference, that the Malaysian government took a stance that was against al-Qaradawi. While al-Qaradawi accepted suicide terrorism as a legitimate tactic against Israeli occupiers in the Palestine, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, who was then still the prime minister of Malaysia, took a contrary position.

The position of Mahathir was however not accepted by the Palestinian and Iranian delegations. For a more complete treatment of this subject, see Phar Kim Beng, 'Failed to agree on suicide terrorism', Asia Times Online, March 30, 2003.

(2) Islamic state document prepared by PAS Islamic party, pg. 30.

(3) Ibid, PAS Islamic state document, pg.11

(4) Ibid, PAS Islamic state document, pg.11.

(5) Yusuf al-Qaradawi, The Lawful and the Prohibited in Islam (Al-Halal wal Haram fil Islam), Kuala Lumpur, Islamic Book Trust, first published in 1960 in Arabic, later translated into English for the Malaysian students in 1985.

(6) Ibid al-Qaradawi, pp. 2-4.