The same point would be made centuries later also by Imam Al-Ghazali (d. 1111), the towering theologian of Sunni Islam. The polytheists of Mecca attacked the Prophet saying, “Is it you who say so and so?,” Al-Ghazali noted, because of “his disgracing their gods and abusing their religion.”[xvii]
So, we can say that, in today’s terms, early Islam was guilty of “offensive speech” and “blasphemy,” that Mecca could not tolerate. (And what an irony, we can add, today quite a few Muslims also cannot tolerate “offensive speech” and “blasphemy.”)
What if Mecca was tolerant?
Now, let’s come to the second question about early Islam, which also has not been much pondered, by Muslims or others: What would have happened if Meccans were civilized enough to accept the Qur’an’s sensible call: “To you your religion, and to me mine”?
Only God would know. But it is a fair guess that the mission of the Prophet, and the content of the Qur’an which guided this mission interactively, would be quite different than what we know today. Because if the Meccans tolerated Islam, there would be no hijra to Medina. Prophet Muhammad and his followers would continue to live in Mecca, to practice and preach their faith, without being a “guardian” over others. Probably, the appeal of monotheism, and the moral imperative of the Qur’an, would attract more and more people, and Islam would gradually grow, perhaps to ultimately win over the whole city. But this would be a totally peaceful conquest — just like Christianity’s gradual conquest of Rome. Therefore, there would be no battles between Muslims and Meccan polytheists and the latter’s allies. Not being the founders of any state, Muslims would not have needed much legislation, either.
Surely, history followed a different route. Muslims, fleeing Mecca, established an armed polity in Medina. The polytheist hostility, which included plundering the homes and properties of the Muslims they expelled, initiated a decade of war. There were many “raids” against or battles with the Meccan polytheists and their shifting allies, including the armed (yet largely bloodless) conquest of Mecca in 630. There was even a conflict with forces of the Byzantine Empire. The short version of the long story is that Muslims had founded an armed state, and they kept fighting for its survival, doing whatever was “necessary if the Islamic state was to survive.”[xviii]
The Marriage with the State
Then, after the Prophet’s passing in 632, Muslims elected a “successor,” or caliph, Abu Bakr (d. 634), who continued the armed struggle to suppress revolts and secure the nascent Islamic state. Caliphs who followed him began conquering new lands in historical Syria, Iraq, Egypt and beyond. In a century, Muslims established a huge empire, stretching from Spain to India.
In the meantime, Islam became, in the words of Pakistani intellectual Shabbir Akhtar, “an imperial faith rooted in a tradition of legal coercion.”[xix] It was a legal coercion that flogged Muslims for drinking wine or giving up prayer, executed “apostates” or “blasphemers,” and preached obedience to Muslim rulers who implemented such practices that jurists defined as parts of the Sharia, i.e., Islamic law. The system also tolerated most non-Muslims, but only as subdued communities with lesser rights.
Moreover, many Muslims saw this marriage between religion with state as a divinely preordained destiny, which made Islam blessedly special. “Because religion, kingship and ruling were combined to our Prophet Muhammad, he was the best of all the Prophets,” wrote al-Ghazali. “Sword and kingship were given to none other than him from among the Prophets.”[xx]
But wait… Was the Prophet not only a “warner,” and not a musaytir, a person with power over people? What happened to that civil Qur’anic teaching in Mecca?
That teaching has remained in the Qur’an, and it stills inspires Muslims of the more liberal persuasion — those who believe that religion should be based on liberty, not coercion. But the coercive jurisprudence — interpretation of Sharia — that took shape under the imperial conditions bypassed that Meccan teaching with the doctrine of “abrogation.” Accordingly, later verses of the Qur’an abrogated the earlier verses, if there appeared a contradiction between them. And since the Qur’anic verses about war were all late commandments in Medina, they canceled out most of the peaceful ones from Mecca, or even “early Medina.”
Possibly the most dramatic abrogating verses were two “verses of the sword” in “Repentance,” one of the very last chapters of the Qur’an, which reflected the harsh peak of a prolonged war with the polytheists and other hostile groups among “the People of the Book,” meaning Jews and Christians. The first verse, 9:5, gave Arab polytheists two options: either convert, or be fought.[xxi] The second one, 9:29, gave “People of the Book” three options: either convert, or be fought, or accept Islamic supremacy by paying tribute.[xxii]
Notably, these verses could be taken as limited commandments against those who attacked or betrayed Muslims in the first place. But, instead, they were taken as the basis of Islam’s relationship with all other religions. It is with this doctrine that Muslim empires kept conquering new lands and establishing Islamic supremacy over non-Muslims.
By the standards of that pre-modern age, there was nothing unusual in this Islamic imperialism, because that is what virtually everybody did at the time. Christianity had long been transformed by the “Constantinian revolution” and its “marriage of empire and monotheism,” which similarly employed “state power to promote right belief and purge wrong belief.”[xxiii] The Sasanian Empire of Persia, whose political culture seems to have influenced that of Islam, also saw “kingship and religion” as “twins.”[xxiv] In fact, compared to other Empires, Muslims ones were often more tolerant, as they allowed Jews and Christians to preserve their faith. No wonder Jews at times fled Christendom, including 15th century Catholic Spain, to Islamic lands such as the Ottoman Empire, where they found incomparably more religious freedom.
Yet the world changed dramatically in the past few centuries. The Constantinian Revolution in Christianity was pushed back by the John Locke revolution, which redefined the mission of the state as the protection of natural rights, not the saving of souls — and the suppression of heretics. This liberal philosophy first transformed Christendom — ending its long history of religious wars and persecutions — then the broader world with “universal human rights.” These included values such as that nobody should be compelled to practice a religion, nor should not be punished for being its “infidel.” Or that everybody should be equal before the law, regardless of faith or gender.
Today, the great trouble in the Islamic civilization is that this liberal evolution in the world is categorically rejected by a wide range of strict conservatives and Islamists. They are loyal to the medieval imperial jurisprudence, seeing it as God-given and eternally valid, while also embracing the modern centralized state and its sweeping powers, creating a deadly mix. (The educated among them sometimes borrow from post-modernism, and its cultural relativism, to justify their rejection of “Western liberalism.”) The most strident among them — such as the Taliban — also take up arms, to establish theocratic states where they will impose their view of Islam on everybody, to be musaytirs over them.
From Mecca to Today
The better news is that since the late 19th century there emerged Muslim reformists, broadly called “Islamic modernists,” who have challenged this orthodoxy within. One of them was the Egyptian scholar Abd al-Raziq who wrote a book in 1925 challenging the religious belief in the caliphate. He insisted that Islam is “a religion, not a state; a message, not a government” — only to face heated reactions.[xxv] Since then various Muslim modernists questioned key doctrines of the traditional jurisprudence, such abrogation within the Qur’an, the authenticity of canonized hadiths (reported sayings of the Prophet) which really are the main sources of religious coercion, and the much-downplayed epistemological authority of reason. Some also rightly noted that the modern context, including the nature of the modern state, is remarkably different from the pre-modern context in which Islam developed.
A summary of Islamic modernism would take volumes, but I believe much can be elucidated by going back to the very birth of Islam, and asking a simple question:
What was the first political principle that Islam called for?
The Meccan Qur’an, as I argued above, suggests a significant answer:
The first political principle that Islam called for was liberty — the liberty to preach and practice one’s own beliefs. All the later drama — hijra, raids, battles, conquests, and ultimately empires — came because this liberty was not granted in the first place.
Islam’s marriage with the state, in other words, was not a divinely preordained destiny but a historical contingency.
Therefore, today, in a radically different historical context, where liberty is already established as a universal principle, Muslims should not seek “Islamic” states anymore — which, in fact, always prove to be the tyranny of a particular Muslim group over others, let alone non-Muslims.
What Muslims should rather seek is the global advance of liberty, so what Islam called for in Mecca in the early 7th century can flourish everywhere, for everyone, in the modern world.