A Complex Set of Texts: Foundational Documents and Conflict in the Muslim World

It is at least an oversimplification, and more probably simply wrong, to reduce Islam to the Qur’an (“Koran”). There are several texts which are foundational to Islam as a socio-political vision.

Scholar Timothy Furnish describes the textual basis for Islam:

For Muslims two authoritative poles of religious reference exist: the Qur'an, and the Sunnah plus the Hadith (Arabic plural Ahadith). The Sunnah is the customary practice of the Islamic community as derived from the actions and words of the prophet Muhammad.

For the practical purposes of Islam, i.e., sorting out the details of Sharia law, and especially the non-negotiable core of Sharia, which is called Hadd or Hudud, Muslim scholars must rely on the primary texts.

But not all primary texts are viewed with equal trust. It is the task, and the conflict, of Islamic scholars to rank these various texts in terms of their reliability.

Hadiths are narrative accounts of the these same actions and pronouncements, rather like “hearsay” records of what Muhammad did and said. Hadiths are not the word of God in the sense that the Qur'an is, but they are of only slightly lesser importance. They were almost certainly orally transmitted for some time before being redacted in the first few centuries of Islamic history. A specialized field of hadith criticism and analysis developed as a means of sorting the wheat of legitimate traditions - that is, ones that ostensibly truly went back to Muhammad - from the chaff of forgeries.

The opportunity both for ambiguity and for dispute is apparent. Because Islam in practice is more of a socio-political program than a personal meditative spirituality, points of textual interpretation are less about conceptual abstractions regarding the nature of the deity, and more about concrete details of communal living.

More than a millennium’s worth of armed conflict within and between Muslim communities fuels, and is fueled by, the prioritization of one text over another.

The complexities of Islamic politics cannot be explained by the Qur’an alone. Any student of Islam must survey a much broader variety of principle texts which form an underlying basis.

Systems in the Past: Arrangements in Former Times

One prominent textbook is titled World History: Patterns of Interaction, and with two good reasons. First, the actual events of history manifest certain deep structures which recur: archetypes. Second, the human mind and the structure of its consciousness is designed to find patterns.

The study of history will inevitably include the comparison and contrast of one situation to another. Generations of students and teachers alike have labored under the burden of essays written in response to a prompt to “compare and contrast.”

Writing about these patterns, scholar George Will gives several examples, including

Mancur Olson’s seminal The Rise and Decline of Nations, which explains how free societies become sclerotic. Their governments become encrusted with interest groups that preserve, like a fly in amber, an increasingly stultifying status quo. This impedes dynamism by protecting arrangements that have worked well for those powerful enough to put the arrangements in place. This blocks upward mobility for those less wired to power.

One pattern, then, combines the accumulation of ossified bureaucracies with class of individuals who make ambitious careers, not by creating things of value, but rather by skillful navigation of bureaucracy: an essentially parasitic arrangement.

This pattern, in which a small but increasing percentage of society gets a paycheck and social advancements, not by contributing something to the community, but rather by exploiting the system, can be seen in the later phases of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the British Empire.

A second pattern in history emerges when the reader becomes acquainted

with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis — how incentives influence behavior — to government. It shows how elected officials and bureaucrats pursue personal aggrandizement as much as people do in the private sector. In the public sector’s profit motive, profit is measured by power rather than money.

In a nation governed by freely-elected representatives, i.e., a ‘republic’ in the strict sense of the word, there is a consistent temptation for those in power to represent themselves instead of the voters. Societies hope to avoid succumbing to this temptation, in part by hoping for representatives of good character, and in part by imposing mechanisms like term limits and the separation of powers.

This is, of course, a corollary to Lord Acton’s famous principle about how power corrupts.

An example is seen in the etymology of the word ‘administrator,’ which originally meant one who supplied assistance and materials to another. Yet in modern bureaucracies, an administrator often denotes a supervisor rather than an assistant. The origin of the verb to ‘administer’ means to ‘help.’

A third pattern deals with the government’s “ever-deeper penetration into society.” One might justify increasing governmental domination by arguing that it

serves equality. Actually, big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

So, even in those instances in which governmental intervention into society is done with the best and most altruistic of motives, it serves only to create a sort of aristocracy.

Consider governmental anti-poverty measures. Not only do they fail to end poverty, but rather, they end up increasing poverty. Along the way, they also create an elite of bureaucrats and politicians who manage the ineffective anti-poverty measures, and who make entire careers out of doing so.

A fourth pattern emerges in situations in which the government is seen as the dispenser of favors. Instead of competing in the free market to see who can offer good work for a good wage, citizens compete for government benefits.

Citizens form groups which lobby for legislation which favors their profession or their geographical region of the country; demographic segments hope to influence policymakers and enjoy the benefits of government funding or loopholes in regulations.

Instead of working together to contribute to their civilization, citizens are pitted against each other by the notion that the government is a provider:

Of course Americans distrust one another more as more and more factions fight one another for preferential treatment by government. Of course government becomes drained of dignity, and becomes corrosive of social cohesion, as it becomes a bigger dispenser of inequality through benefits to those sufficiently clever and connected to work its levers.

When citizens compete with each other, hoping to nudge the government’s policies into one direction or another - directions, naturally, which favor them - cynicism abounds. Governments and their leaders are no longer trusted, but rather, citizens hope to manipulate governments, even as the citizens are aware that the government is attempting to manipulate them.

Trusting the government less, and competing with each other, the citizens finally trust each other less.

Not only do we “tend to trust our institutions less,” we also “tend to trust each other less.” Of course there are parallel increases in distrust: Government’s dignity diminishes as government grows to serve factions of those sophisticated at manipulating its allocation of preferences. Social solidarity is a casualty of government grown big because it recognizes no limits to its dispensing of favors.

Given the consistent manifestation of the law of unintended consequences, the increase of governmental action yields only harm. Anti-poverty measures increase poverty; anti-crime programs increase crime; peace programs lead to violence; educational programs lead to illiteracy.

The only way forward is to limit or trim government, as George Will notes:

Suppose there were not 16 government agencies “to help businesses, large and small, in all kinds of ways.” Suppose there were none. Such barnacles on big government institutionalize the scramble for government favors; these agencies are a standing incitement to bend public power for private advantage. Hence they increase distrust of government, diminish social solidarity and aggravate the most indefensible inequality — that driven by government dispensations.

These patterns recur on all six inhabited continents, over the last 6,000 years of recorded history, uniformly across different languages, religions, and cultures. These are the ‘patterns of interaction,’ seen in the reign of Gaozu, also known as Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty in China, and in the reign of Wang Mang, who overthrew Gaozu’s descendants several generations later.

These patterns are seen in the Merovingian Dynasty’s ascent, when it unified and energized the Franks in the former Roman colony of Gaul, and in the Merovingian Dynasty’s decline, when it became complacent and allowed Charles “the Hammer” Martel to do the royal work, and therefore gain the royal title.

Santayana’s all-too-often quoted epigram might give rise to yet another variant. Even if one does remember the past, one might still have to repeat it.