i’ve been asked about my views on institutionalizing religion as part of the state, especially in matters of regulating or punishing behavior, or my views on the theology of having the state. my feelings about it aren’t very subtle. the idea of people being intent on playing god about who gets joy, misery, freedom, pain, life, or death is deeply creepy to me. it either requires certainty in your own infallibility, or not caring about the possible consequences of your fallibility. both of those are things that should disqualify you from any religious authority, or any authority at all.

i don’t even mean a belief in infallibility in the sense of, an innocent man being punished or a guilty one let go, though that’s part of it. i mean the belief that your particular interpretation is the right one, a belief that of all the brilliant and pious minds with differing interpretations of doctrine around the world, that you are more correct whether by luck or character than anyone else, that you are guided by god in a way that others, coming to different conclusions from the same fundamental sources of religious knowledge. of ten thousand scholars throughout history with a devotion to their faith and access to the same scripture who have ever opined on this topic, believing that you must be the most right one is a certainty in your own infallibility that denies your human nature and ascribes something to you that is the sole domain of god.

god is omniscient and all-knowing. no human is. the first step on our relationship with god is understanding that we don’t really know much about it. god is unknowable, god is incomprehensible to humankind; what we know the word of god and the attributes of god. filling in the rest of a vast belief system to this degree of specificity requires plucking a level of certainty from the fourteen-hundred-year history of a faith with a billion adherents across multiple continents that might not be possible without

there are aspects that we know for sure: we know muhammad (pbuh) and we know the quran. beyond that, it’s an exercise of which particular lineage of scholarship you end up having followed down the centuries. and not just any history, either- the material history of islam wasn’t just a matter of interest for the history books, but a cornerstone of the way people practiced their entire faith, and either a potential source of or threat to the legitimacy of the current ruling establishment. control over that history was, and remains, extremely powerful. i am aware of my own fallibility. i don’t know if the history i know is the right history. i don’t know which details might have been shifted by conservative leaders to justify establishment power, or which details may have been added by ideologues in academia. i don’t know which translations of arabic, a famously subtle and complex language with more ambiguity and possibilities of interpretation than any other major world language, back up my positions, or even whether verbal and oral histories would have captured those subtleties in their exact form instead of as the listener heard and understood it. i don’t know which philosophical and judicial scholarship over the centuries was brought into this history, and which were left out, and what selection bias might have shaped my knowledge of islamic history, thought, and practice.

for example, there might have been ideological changes like this:

or more indirect ways of power trying to shape our literal body of knowledge on religion in ways that bolsters their objectives:

all in all, i don’t think any of us can know if we’re the ones that have it right. there are scholars throughout history with at least as much knowledge as, if not more than, anyone else living who have had a thousand different exegeses, muhammad (pbuh) was privy to divine knowledge, and the khulafa ur-rashidun lived alongside muhammad (pbuh) and knew him and his thinking firsthand, knew directly how to interpret all the various details of the quran and quranic law. they could trust that they knew how to apply their state power accordingly. we don’t concretely have that knowledge: we have historical records of them, but no certainty about how true and accurate those records are; we have the quran, but no certainty about the exact interpretations used then.

with that absence of knowledge, it’s an act of near blasphemy to consider yourself to know enough, to think yourself infallible in your knowledge and judgement enough to apply god’s law on earth. in the absence of that knowledge, religious judgement should be left to god in all his justice. all nations need laws and need to apply those laws. it is likely, even, that those laws will be influenced by the religious culture and norms of that nation. this isn’t necessarily an argument against law or even punishment, but one about ascribing the weight of religion to the judgements of man. god will pass judgement on your sins come the afterlife and do so with perfect divine justice. the domain of man is a fully secular legal system built purely to maintain a state and administer to its people, ensure peace and prosperity, and provide for the vulnerable.

here is something we do know, that i think illustrates everything above about the multitude of interpretations, histories, traditions, practices, identities that shift and evolve but, at each point during that evolution, insists that the way things are now is in fact how they always were.. let’s take a zoomed-out view and try to describe the maldives as an observer. confirm this with your own memories: think about dragonfly season from your childhood and try to visualize how you saw faith practiced then. think about old men reading salawat, or about amulets or pieces of paper with written dua that your grandparents told you to keep. dhivehi islamic identity from our first conversion, through to as recently as my childhood, was a form of indigenous-traditional sufi-inspired sunnism. abu barakat al-barbari was a somalian with sufi inspirations. religious leaders’ tombs, zikr, mawlud, barakai kiyevun, all sufism inspired. the idea that it was always wahhabi-inspired sunnism, and the idea that modern political religious figures are upholding our traditional identity is revisionism. half our traditional islam, as practiced by generations and generations before us, would be considered bid’a now.

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who decided that, anyway? how did that happen, and how did i not even notice? why was there no real public interrogation of such a drastic shift in how institutions defined what religion was and how we should practice it? how does a country that literally defines itself by its faith switch completely from one interpretation to the other? i mean, the maldives considers its muslim identity such a crucial part of national identity that it’s a condition for citizenship. a huge change in what constitutes muslim identity is a crucial question. and i think it’s an important one.

note: see also this post.