In an Increasing Secular World, can Islam unite a Modern Society?
Western secular politics is based on the notion that sovereignty belongs to individuals who select their governors through political consensus arrived at during free and regular elections. Islam believes, in theory at least, that sovereignty belongs only to God and that a legitimate temporal government is so only for as long as it implements God’s will and the Sacred Laws. Whatever the theory asserts, the reality is that governments have to find the equilibrium that produces social prosperity and harmony under the guiding impulses of a strong moral code. The problem is made more complex when the moral code is itself subject to sectarian divisions: between orthodox and heterodox claims to revelation and legitimacy. We have to return to the questions: whose Islam, what Islam, where and when? It is clear that in states which have declared Islam as the ideology of political order, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, there has been little reduction in domestic conflict
