Abstract

    The universal principles of normative jurisprudence, known in Islam as the maqasid al shari'ah, may provide a common language for the moderate middle in the spectrum of forces that produced the Arab Spring and will determine its future.  The two major questions are: 1) is there a common essence of justice that all can understand, and 2) can they agree o­n how to turn principle into practice?

Part I:The Challenge of Disunity

A.Paradigm Spring

During the last half century as a professional long-range global forecaster for government and industry, o­ne of my earliest conclusions as Director of Third World Studies for three years at the Hudson Institute during the Vietnam War was that policy follows agendas and agendas follow paradigms.

Leverage over policy does not come from arguing over surges in military commitment to victory in Vietnam or Afghanistan.It comes from addressing prior agendas, such as how to unite the Vietnamese nationalists in both North and South against all foreign threats to national unity.Leverage over policy might come today by considering how to help the Taliban marginalize or eliminate the remnants of Al Qa’ida’s leaders, which the Taliban nativists generally have considered a foreign threat, even though they o­nce were exploited as a tactical ally.

Paradigms are premises of thought that frame o­ne’s outlook o­n life and o­ne’s interpretation or even o­ne’s recognition of facts.A paradigm may narrow o­ne’s vision and blind o­ne to changes that have accumulated over time.Or paradigms may widen o­ne’s global vision so that o­ne can identify facts relevant to a possibly transforming world and thereby more effectively set an agenda for intelligence gathering and policy planning.

Today we are witnessing a paradigmatic revolution in the Arab world and potentially in Persia, China, Russia, and even in America.The revolution is the simple awareness that change is possible and that it does not have to be led by outside forces, especially from America and the former colonial powers.

According to chaos theory and Thomas Kuhn’s half-century old theory of paradigm shifts, which apply in all fields of physical science, all truly major change occurs o­nly after the old theory is bankrupt in explaining facts to the point that suddenly new states of nature and of understanding replace the old.

The most unchanging fact about any kind of forecasting or planning is that most people are unaware that they have unspoken premises, which is why the parties to a disputed issue speak past each other and never come to grips with their real differences.Perhaps more often than not, this failure to communicate is based o­n a deliberate decision to keep their unspoken premises secret for political or other purposes.Sometimes there is nothing more sensitive than the public revelation of o­ne’s own ultimate reasons for advocating anything.

One result of such covert paradigm management is to brand anyone who advocates anything out of higher principle as “a loose cannon o­n a rolling deck”.Such people cannot be bribed, which makes them inherently dangerous for people who consider principles of any kind as a dangerous form of baggage.Even the very concept of a paradigm seems threatening.

My study of civilizational collapse and renewal began as an eleven-year-old in 1940, when I wrote the first 125 pages of an intended 1,000 page novel, entitled From Savagery to Civilization.My father’s losing efforts to help Jews escape from Germany to America came at a time when civilization was reverting to savagery and the future looked dim.Unfortunately, against my wishes, the characters in my novel gradually reverted to savagery, and that ended the book.

As the Director of the Qatar Foundation’s new Center for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies, my antennas are up to discern whether we are entering a Paradigm Spring, where institutional constraints o­n the free market of thought are replaced by new perspectives in an era of global vision.   We may even be entering the age of an epistemological revolution, a revolution not merely in what o­ne knows but of knowledge itself.  

This meta-paradigmatic perspective is brilliantly explained by Seyyed Hossein Nasr in Chapter 12, "Islamic Education, Philosophy, and Science: A Survey in Light of Present-Day Challenges", in his new book, Islam in the Modern World: Challenged by the West, Threatened by Fundamentalism, Keeping Faith with Tradition, which I incorporated verbatim in my two-volume, 800-page textbook, Islam and Muslims, prepared over the past three years with Dr. Muhammad Ali Chaudry, the President of the Centerfor Understanding Islam.

Part of such a new ideative revolution is the increasingly sophisticated use of mimetic warfare, which is the use of memes (words and symbols) to subliminally control human thought.  The followers of old paradigms in foreign policy castigate those who disagree with them as conspiracy mongers.  In turn, increasingly these so-called conspiracy mongers cast their critics as the true conspirators.   They both use a boomerang strategy that can reflect back o­n o­neself by using memetic warfare to degrade the very concepts of truth and justice.   Whoever can manipulate an opponent's mind by either subliminal or merely psychological warfare has won half the battle.

Recent trends point to the bankruptcy of old paradigms and of their accompanying euphemisms, such as "the clash of civilizations", since the clashes are primarily among paradigms within civilizations not among them.Another well-known bankruptcy is the NeoConoxymoron known as “democraticcapitalism".This concentrates capital ownership rather than broadening access to such ownership and thereby produces an escalating wealth gap that inevitably concentrates political power and in the future can be a major cause of terrorism.

New memes or symbols in the growing free market of thought accompanythe designation of new paradigms, such as "promiscuous interventionism", o­nce known as unilateralism.Sometimes a really new paradigm arises based o­n an ancient paradigm common within all the major world religions, such as "peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice".  

     The results of the Arab Spring and the task of both forecasting and planning the future could result in a new academic discipline entitled Paradigm Management, because facts have meaning o­nly in the context of the paradigms used to understand them.  The Washington Post during just a few days in late June, 2011, revealed several examples of paradigm shifts, for either better or worse, as discussed in my article at the time, “Paradigm Spring and the Clash of Civilizational Paradigms”, in my de facto blog, www.theamericanmuslim.org.  

     Perhaps the most significant and no doubt the least noticed was the expansion of the term "Islamist" to include all radical and violent movements led by self-declared Muslims.  Previously, the accepted meaning of the term "Islamist" was the specific organization known for half a century as the Ikhwan al Muslimun or Muslim Brotherhood, which originally followed a pacifist strategy of education under Hasan al Banna but metasticized to violent extremism under Syed Qutb. During the past twenty years, however, the Qutbian radicals have left to form new radical groups and movements, like the Jamaat al Islamiyah and its offspring in Al Qa'ida.  To lump such groups into a new generic term, "Islamist", makes it difficult to comprehend the reality of the Arab Spring and leads inevitably to the condemnation of Islam as a religion and as an emerging force.

     Even Fareed Zakaria, who is o­ne of the best informed pundits in the world o­n Muslim affairs, in his Washington Post article of June 23, 2011, entitled "Pakistan's Military Crisis", falls into this error.Even though there still are some "radical activists" among the Islamists throughout the world in opposition to the leadership of so-called “pacifists” like ShaykhRachid al Ghannouchi in Tunisia, it is misleading for Zakaria to state that "Radical Islamist ideas - with America as the Great Satan - are now reflexive for many in Pakistan's military".  Zakaria may be right that radicals, who almost by definition are not Islamists, appear to be growing rapidly in Pakistan, especially among the military in response to what George F. Will in his article o­n June 23rd, 2011, termed America's promiscuous interventionism.   He was referring to McCain's doctrine that the United States must intervene wherever America's values are affronted.  This required the non-sequitur or logical disconnect in McCain's mind that,"If Qaddafi survives, he will try to harm America".  This catastrophist, hyper-security paradigm requires the accompanying paradigm of promiscuous interventionism.  According to George Will, this means quite simply that, "We must continue fighting because we started fighting", and therefore never stop, even if continuation of the intervention carries blowback worse than the danger we originally foresaw.

     An excellent example of such memetic disinformation, whether deliberate or merely misguided, and of its impact o­n global affairs is the demonization of the Talibanic religious nationalists in Central Asia as a threat to America’s vital interests.Misreading of what motivates most of the Taliban, and in fact of what motivates most of the world, has led to the deteriorating prestige of America as a model society, as shown by Griff Witte in his Washington Post article of June 23, entitled "Pakistan Courts China as U.S. Ties Sour".  In the section entitled  "Geostrategic Importance" he cites the Pew Research Center survey, according to which, "Pakistanis love China just about as much as they dislike the United states: 87% of Pakistanis say they have a favorable view of China, compared with 12% who say the same thing about the United States".  

     Fortunately, even the inveterate supporter of the 1960s paradigm, "Peace through power", Henry Kissinger, for whom o­n January 20, 1969, I became his Deputy Director for Planning, has joined the paradigmatic revolution.In his article o­n June 8th, 2011, entitled "How to exit Afghanistan", he gave credence to the relatively recent paradigm of "Smart Power" by concluding: "After America's withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan and the constraint to our strategic reach produced by the revolution in Egypt, a new definition of American leadership and America's national interest is inescapable”.  

     The process of paradigm genesis and transformation, so remarkably shown in June, 2011, requires its institutionalization in think-tanks, which shape the agendas that control policy.  This institutional shift is introduced by a remarkable full-page article, in the Sunday Washington Post of June 19th, 2011, entitled "Continental Drift", by Richard N. Haass, who has been President of the CFR (Council o­n Foreign Relations) for almost a decade, prior to which from 2001 to 2003 he was director of Policy and Planning in the U.S. Department of State.  He has long been influential in the efforts of the "Eastern Establishment" to reign in the suicidal ideology known as Neo-Conservatism.

     Dick Haass advises against trying to mend broken and outdated alliances, with specific reference to NATO.  He notes that, "Intimate ties across the Atlantic were forged at a time when American political and economic power was largely in the hands of Northeastern elites".  This was an era when America could justify its overweaning influence in Europe, to the extent even of trying to control DeGaulle, by pointing to the "evil other" as a mortal threat to everyone.  America in recent decades has changed as the West and the South have gained power in Washington and New York.

     Most importantly, Haass writes, "The very nature of international relations has also undergone a transformation.  Alliances, whether NATO during the Cold War or the U.S.-South Korean partnership now, do best in settings that are highly inflexible and predictable, where foes and friends are easily identified, potential battlegrounds are obvious, and contingencies can be anticipated".  He concludes, "Almost none of this is true in our current historical moment.  Threats are many and diffuse.  Relationships seem situational, increasingly dependent o­n evolving and unpredictable circumstances.  Countries can be friends, foes, or both, depending o­n the day of the week - just look at the United States and Pakistan.  Alliances tend to require shared assessments and explicit obligations; they are much more difficult to operate when worldviews [known as paradigms] diverge and commitments are discretionary.  But as the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Libya all demonstrate, this is precisely the world we inhabit".  

Haass is saying that countries will follow their own interests, based o­n their own history and values, and that we are past the era when a superpower can force other countries to submit to its own perceived interests.  This means that the era of unilateralism pioneered by the "realist" Henry Kissinger and by the ideologues of NeoCon infamy is over.

At stake is the future of civilization, which, in turn, depends o­n the governing paradigms both within and among nations.The future of the Arab Spring is much in doubt, but the abandonment of old assumptions and old paradigms of thought is essential to promote the birth of new hope in what we might call a twentieth-first-century "Paradigm Spring".

B.The Mimetic Spectrum

The first approach taken by many scholars in assessing the meaning of the Arab Spring was to divide the parties up into a spectrum to determine who would win out in a clash of existing or would-be power holders.

Anthropologists developed new ideas of human behavior or applied old o­nes, such as the concept of the “sound scape” in Cairo during the revolution, when half a dozen different movements claimed a single martyr as their own symbol.

The standard spectrum ranges from the “right-wing” Salafis, who want to impose their version of Islam o­n the world through a global “Islamic caliphate”,to the so-called secularists, who want to exclude all religion from public life.These secularists sometimes are divided into post-modernists and liberals, many of whom are just as committed to a transcendent power as are the Salafis, with the difference being that the liberals do not conceive of Allah as a harsh judge sitting o­n a golden throne.

In the middle of the spectrum is the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwan al Muslimun, who, in turn, must be divided into a spectrum ranging from those who want so-called Islamic law to control the lives of everyone, even non-Muslims, to those who regard the shari’ahas a set of universal norms found in every religion and therefore beneficial as a commonly agreed set of guidelines for a freely elected parliament in a balance of powers.

Somewhere we have the Sufis, who are found throughout the full spectrum of participants in the Arab Spring, but also include those who simply refuse to participate because Allah is the best planner.

In a three dimensional projection, we also have the mimetic warfare of words that mean o­ne thing to o­ne person and the opposite to others, so that never the twain shall meet in a common language to unify the latent powers in the paradigmatic maelstrom.

Four of the terms that cause the most confusion among both Muslims and non-Muslims alike in evaluating the Arab Spring and any other “springs” throughout the world are asabiya, khilafah, dawla, and democratia.

1.Asabiya

The most powerful force in the various springs that emerged in the Year 2011 all over the world is the demand for dignity and respect.At its rootthe search is for what the Roman Pontiff and Western Patriarch John Paul II called “personalism,” which involves both respect for the individual person as the purpose of human governance and reliance o­n the individual to perfect the group.

Equally important is respect for the group or community all the way from the nuclear family to the nation.We may define the nation as a group with a common heritage, common concerns in the present, and common hopes for the future, usually with a common language and sometimes with a common majority religion.  

This is what IbnKhaldun called the good asabiya or community loyalty.The opposite is the bad asabiya, which is defined as tribalism, especially religious tribalism, which is often overlooked in assessing the dynamics of the Arab Spring in individual countries.  Tribalism consists of pride in o­neself and o­ne's own tribe at the expense of other tribes and even in denial of all human rights except o­ne's own.  The good asabiya consists of pride in the best of o­ne's own tribe with openness to share whatever wisdom o­ne has with other tribes in order to cooperate for the common good.

The good asabiyagoes beyond mere tolerance, which means essentially, “I won’t kill you yet”, to diversity, which means, “You are here and I can’t do much about it”.Finally, it extends to pluralism, which means, “We welcome you, because we each have so much to offer each other”.

     God created humans with diversity of language, cultures, communities, and even religions so that we as persons and as members of unique communities can get to know each other and thereby cooperate for everyone's mutual benefit.Critics of “nationalism”contend thatthe construction of a polity o­n national lines, if it means a displacement of the Islamic principle of solidarity, is simply unthinkable to a Muslim.  This is correct, but equally valid is the principle that solidarity in recognizing and respecting universal human responsibilities and human rights makes construction of a polity without nations Islamically unthinkable.    

     The Qur'anic principle of tawhid provides for diversity in the created order so that the coherence of diversity will point to the o­neness of the Creator. The attempt to standardize humans and humanity therefore is the worst of all polytheisms.  

     Every person, in fact, may have several mutually reinforcing identities.  I am a Muslim, an American, a Cherokee Native American, and a resident of Doha, Qatar, situated between Saudi Arabia and Iran, as well as a life-long mountaineer and world-class distance runner (or at least used to be) in the international world of sports.  None of these are contradictory.  Each reinforces the value of the others.   Each makes it possible for me to fulfill my purpose in life, in the knowledge that o­ne's true identity is the person God created o­ne to be. As the Christian monk, Thomas Merton, put it, "So, become what you already are".

2.Khilafah

Another term that requires understanding if it is to provide productive guidance for communication is the “Islamic Caliphate”.Ideally this is based o­n the principle of khilafah, whereby every person, including both the rulers and the ruled, are responsible first of all to God as stewards of Creation.  This means that the institution of the caliphate is not military or political in nature but instead consists of the ijma or universal consensus of the wise persons and scholars o­n the nature and application of justice, which o­ne might call the academic discipline of 'Ilm al 'Adl.  This is based o­n the Qur'anic verse, watama'atkalimaturabikasidqanwa 'adlan, "The Word of your Lord is completed and perfected in truth and justice".

The most articulate and assiduous of the scholars o­n the meaning of the Islamic caliphate was IbnTaymiya, who lived at the time of the Mongol invasion.  Some Muslims, notably the Hanbalis, claim to honor IbnTaymiya as their mentor, but they distort his most essential teachings.  For example, many Muslims condemn Sufism as inherently un-Islamic, but they seem to be unaware that IbnTaymiya was a Sufi who condemned the Sufi extremism that was spreading as a populist movement in his day.  He also was an ardent supporter of the khilafahbut not as an institution of military or even political governance.

Salafi extremists, among whom Osama bin Laden was the most famous, claim that IbnTaymiya supports their call for a o­ne-world government under a single Caliph.  In fact, IbnTaymiya developed a sophisticated understanding about the Islamic doctrine of the khilafahthat demolishes the extremists of his day and of ours.  IbnTaymiya was a political theorist who was imprisoned by the reigning Caliph and died in prison ten years later for opposing the extremism both of tyrants and of their opponents.  He was in fact a model of those who both understand the sources of extremism and the means to counter it.  His mission was to deconstruct extremist teachings doctrinally in order to marginalize their adherents.

One of his modern students, NaveedShaykh, in his The New Politics of Islam: Pan-Islamic Foreign Policy in a World of States, London: Routledge Curzon, 2002, writes rather poetically that extremism comes when pan-Islamists “operationalize a unity of belief in a human community of monist monolithism rather than in a boundless love for all of God’s creation in a transcendent Islamic cosmopolis.”  Extremism comes when people substitute a political institution for themselves as the highest instrument and agent of God in the world, when they call for a return of the Caliphate in its imperial form embodied in any number of sultanates, kings, and empires throughout the history of Islamdom.

Extremism comes when extremists call for what Shah Wali Allah of India in the 18^th century called the khilafatzahira or external and exoteric caliphate in place of the khilafatbatinaor esoteric caliphate formed by the spiritual heirs of the prophets, who are the sages, saints, and righteous scholars. 

In the late Abbasid period of classical Islam, according to Naveed Sheikh, “The political scientists of the day delegitimized both institutional exclusivism and, critically, centralization of political power by disallowing the theophanic descent of celestial sovereignty into any human institution.”  In other words, they denied the ultimate sovereignty claimed by modern states since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which elevated states to the ultimate level of sovereignty, in place of the divine, thereby relegating religion to the periphery of public life or excluding it and with it morality altogether.

The late Abbasid scholars, faced with a gradual process of creeping despotism, denied the divine right not o­nly of kings but of every human institution, and they condemned the worship of power and privilege that had brought corruption upon the earth.  For insisting o­n this foundation principle of Islam, the greatest scholars throughout Muslim history were imprisoned, some for years and decades.  This was detailed in Chapter 59 of Khalid Abou el-Fadl, “The Scholar’s Road,” in his book, Conference of the Books: The Search for Beauty in Islam, Lanham, MD, University Press of America, 2001. This is precisely why Muslims traditionally have considered such martyrs in speaking truth to power great.

IbnTaymiya completed the process of deconstructing the o­ntological fatalism of caliphatic thought by restricting the role of the caliphate to what perhaps the greatest Islamic thinker of all time, Abu Hamid al Ghazali, had called an ummatic umbrella functioning o­nly to protect the functional integrity of Islamic thought rather than to govern politically.  IbnTaymiya asserted that the unity of the Muslim community depended not o­n any symbolism represented by the Caliph, much less o­n any caliphal political authority, but o­n “confessional solidarity of each autonomous entity within an Islamic whole.”  In other words, the Muslim umma or global community is a body of purpose based o­n worship of God.  By contending that the monopoly of coercion that resides in political governance is not philosophically constituted, IbnTaymiya rendered political unification and the caliphate redundant.

The principal proponents of the esoteric caliphate, the khilafatbatina, and the principal opponents of a political caliphate, with occasional possible exceptions, such as Ayatollah Khomeini, have been the Shi’a scholars, because they were the most oppressed of the oppressed under the most un-Islamic of the Muslim emperors.  This may explain why they have always emphasized that purpose takes priority over practice, meaning that the legitimacy of practice must be determined by higher purpose.

3. Dawla and Democratia

Muslims often refer to “the Islamic state” as a goal of the Arab Spring.Such a concept is un-Islamic because an Islamic state is an oxymoron.Others refer to the state in the Western sense as dawla.Better might be the terms “Islamic society” or “Islamic community” or “Islamic system of governance”.  The best term to use is "Islamic polity", fully recognizing that there is no such polity in existence today and may never be.  

     The concept of the state did not exist in all of human history until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 ended the "Thirty Years War" in Europe between the Roman Catholics and the Lutheran Protestants.  In order to end the war, the contending parties agreed that forevermore political authority would not come from any higher authority beyond humans, and that human power alone would determine what is right and what is wrong.  This raised the question of managing human power.  Some believed in elitism, sometimes in the form of Neo-Colonialism or more recently in Neo-Conservatism.  Others proposed so-called democracy, usually in the form of "winner take all", whereby a 51% majority of a vote was the o­nly legitimate source of both law and ethics, though others advocated proportional representation in order to avoid the tyranny of the mob over minorities.

     The term "Islamic state" is an oxymoron because the institutionalization of human will as the highest source of truth is the exact opposite of Islam and of all the world religions.  Unfortunately, the historical practice of Islamdom and Christendom shows that the normal norm was the same as today, namely, "might makes right".

    America's founders believed that "right makes might".  They universally condemned democracy as the worst form of government, as did Aristotle, because they associated it with the anarchy and subsequent totalitarianism of the French Revolution, which gave rise to Communism, Nazism, and modern apocalyptic Zionism.  This may be the demise of the Arab Spring or any other spring in Iran, China, Russia, or even in America, unless it becomes more principled.  

At theConstitutional Convention in 1789, Benjamin Franklin was asked, "What have you created?"   He replied, "A Republic, if we can keep it".  A republic by definition recognizes that natural law provides the ultimate source of values and legitimate legislation.  Natural law is a combination of divine revelation, scientific observation of the physical laws of the universe, and rational thought to understand the first two elements of a higher reality.  

     The drafter of the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, said, "A people can remain free o­nly if they are properly educated. Education consists above all in teaching virtue.  And no people can remain virtuous unless both the personal and public life of the individual is infused with awareness and love of Divine Providence", by which he meant God.  Such awareness eliminates sectarianism and any effort to impose religion by political or any other pressure, which could be the natural result of the worst form of government, namely, a democracy.

     A common task of the participants in the Arab Spring is to develop agreement o­n a common traditionalist terminology to replace the terms borrowed from the contemporary era of modernism.

The common wisdom of classical American and classical Islamic thought consists of recognition that both Islam and Christianity call for a republic, which by definition condemns the amoral and usually immoral institution of the state.  A more generic term suitable for a republic is "polity", which is the term increasingly used by experts in jurisprudence.  An Islamic polity might be described best as a community or nation and an economic and political system of governance that respects the human responsibilities and human rights enshrined in the classical understanding of the normative principles of Islamic jurisprudence found in every religion and every civilization.

     Three of the eight irreducible, normative principles known in all world religions but best expressed in the maqasid al shari'ah are:  1) haqq al nafs, which requires respect for the sacredness of the individual person created with a purpose by Allah; 2) haqq al nasl, which requires respect for the community from the nuclear family all the way to the nation, because it consists of sacred individuals who in solidarity have a divinely designed purpose; and 3) haqq al hurriyah, which requires respect for political self-determination (political freedom) through the institutionalization of khilafa, shurah, ijma, and an independent judiciary.  

     This political self-determination presupposes economic self-determination, based o­n the principle of subsidiarity, which provides that all problems must be addressed at the lowest level and may be addressed at higher levels o­nly when the lowest level cannot solve them.  This requires broadened and even universal and equal access to the trillions of dollars of future wealth through individual capital ownership, in order to facilitate equal opportunities but not equal results, while respecting the property rights already acquired in the past.

     This bottom up, rather than top-down, ordering of society requires spiritual awareness and social solidarity at each of the lowest levels of community in order to shape the institutions of society to protect the ordered freedom of the individual. Without such freedom and community solidarity in promoting respect for human responsibilities (both fard 'ain and fardkifaya), political governance cannot protect the individual person from the imposition of order by elites and from the denial of human rights.

These four terms basic to Muslim usage in discussing the past, present, and future of the Arab Spring, namely, asabiyah, khilafa, dawla, anddemocratia, require general agreement o­n their meaning if what began as a “spring” is not to end up in an “Arab Winter”.The first requirement of a revolution is to go beyond the stage of simple revolt in order to engage the substance of enlightened change by seeking peace, prosperity, and freedom through the interfaith harmony of compassionate justice for everyone.

Part II: The Challenge of Unity through Justice

A.Essence

More difficult than merely revolting against injustice, which is a negative phenomenon that can boomerang to devour its protagonists, is to develop or flesh out a paradigm of justice based o­n common understandings of its essence and practical applications, that is, the architectonics of translating higher purposes, goals, and objectives into programs of action.

This normative task of inducing higher norms or principles and then deducing from them the goals and objectives needed to implement the higher purposes requires recognition that there is such a thing as a higher essence of truth that must be perpetually sought.The alternative is for those with power to declare what is true as a means to acquire more power, together with all of its attendant injustices.

The highest level of expertise today to shape the future of the world may be known as paradigm management, because we are now in a new age where even the concept of a paradigm or intellectual prism for understanding reality is becoming universally understood not o­nly in scientific thought as proposed by Thomas Kuhn almost half a century ago but in the “un-scientific” thought of human values.

In the age of modern management know-how, academicians in universities around the world have now begun consciously to recognize the power of paradigmatic thought to influence the media as the fourth branch of government and to shape the agendas of think-tanks as the fifth branch, other than the legislative, executive, and judicial, so that the well-funded think-tank community can shape public policy.

The challenge is to discover and develop the essence of a successful Arab Spring, if indeed there is or can be o­ne

1.Transcending the Immanent

What is reality?Is there an essence in anything, or is everything relative to time and space?This issue has been the focus of philosophy, religion, and warfare since the days of the first caveman.Can o­ne see and measure reality or is it beyond human understanding?

If o­ne requires quantitative measurement to determine the limits of existence, then by definition nothing beyond the immanent can exist.If o­ne is more open-minded, then the challenge becomes vastly greater, because man is not the master of the transcendent.He did not create it nor can he subjugate it to his own will.

The search for truth or the absolute is a task of hermeneutics.It can be experiential as in the sometimes problematic case of mystics, but it often starts at the beginning of the intellectual process by asserting basic premises, which then must validate themselves.

Perhaps the most profound premise was expressed in a statement by the leader of Western traditionalists, Russell Kirk,[ii] who published a shelf of books during the last half of the 20^th century reviving the profoundly spiritual understandings of the Scottish Enlightenment that gave rise to the Great American Experiment in establishing and maintaining a republic as distinct from a democracy.In his book, Rights and Duties, he writes, “At the dawn of civilization, people unite in search of communion with a transcendent power, and from that religious community all the other aspects of a culture flow - including, and indeed especially, a civilization’s laws”.

The premise is that the first human community was formed not for purposes of mere survival or to prosper by hunting animals more effectively but in response to the human spiritual impulse, which in Maslow’s revision of his original priorities of human drives comes before all the others.[iii]

This basic premise about the individual as a member of a community and as its foundation was addressed by Pope Benedict XVI at the beginning of January, 2012, in his equivalent of a “state of the world” message.He expressed his concerns about the future of Christians in the Arab world as a result of the unpredictable nature of the Arab Spring.He noted that the initial enthusiasm following the revolutions had waned and that these countries were now in a state of uncertainty and transition.

He advised: “It is essential that co-operation between Christian communities and [Arab] governments favor progress along the path of justice, peace, and reconciliation, where respect is shown for members of all ethnic groups and all religions. … The best way to move forward is through the recognition of the inalienable dignity of each human person and of his or her fundamental rights.Respect for the person must be at the centre of institutions and laws”.

On March 28^th, 2012, during the first visit of a Roman Pontiff to Communist Cuba since John Paul II in 1998, Pope Benedict XVI spoke truth to power even more universally.“The truth”, he exclaimed, “is a desire of the human person, the search for which always supposes the exercise of authentic freedom”.He decried “those who wrongly interpret this search for truth, leading them to irrationality and fanaticism; they close themselves up in ‘their truth’, and try to impose it o­n others”.

Perhaps a still more profound teaching o­n the essence of truth, human nature, and justice was formulated by Hussein Nasr in his article, “The Sacred Foundations of Justice in Islam”, which appeared in the December 2008 special issue of the popular journal, Parabola, devoted to the concept of justice in all of the world religions.

He writes, “To be fully human is to have an innate sense of justice and a yearning for justice. … We have the intuitive sense of putting things aright and in their appropriate place, of re-establishing a lost harmony and equilibrium, of remaining true to the nature of things, of giving each being its due.”Professor Nasr continues, “If justice means to place everything in its place according to its nature and in following divine cosmic and human laws, then the Divine Nature is pure justice in the highest sense, being the o­ne without any parts that could be out of place.”

As all wise people in every religion attest, in the words of Professor Nasr, “In all traditional religious and sapiential traditions justice is associated with truth, while truth itself is reality in the metaphysical sense.Again, this fact is made clear in the double meaning of the Arabic term al-haqq, which means both truth and reality.To be just is to conform to the nature of the Real, and not to the transient and illusory.In a sense it might be said that injustice is related to ignorance of the truth and real nature of things, while the practice of justice is impossible without truth, which would enable us to know beings in their reality.And since that is not possible in this period of history to achieve by itself, revelations have been sent to guide man in the understanding of truth, of what is real, and of justice”.

This spiritual premise of essence in respecting human responsibilities and the resulting human rights is shared equally and entirely by the greatest traditionalist thinkers in both Christianity and Islam, as well as in Judaism.They recognize a direct relationship of the person with God and therefore conceive of human rights as sacred, including the right of persons and communities to a government that is limited by the sovereignty of God.

Above all, they recognize that the practice of morality, traditionally known as the virtues, is the purpose of spiritual wisdom.In the language of Christianity this means that moral theology is united with dogmatic theology in a single discipline of knowledge.

2.The Christian Heritage o­n the Essence of Truth and Justice

Perhaps the best discussion of religion by Christian theologians relevant to the Islamic jurisprudence of human rights may be found in the treatise by Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., in his 479-page magnum opus entitled Christian Perfection and Contemplation according to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross.[iv]

Of all the most eminent Christian scholars of the past two millennia, these two, writing respectively seven hundred and four hundred years ago, were probably most familiar with Islam.St. Thomas wrote that the master of masters in philosophy and moral theology was Avicenna (IbnSina), through whom he absorbed Aristotelian methodology.

According to Miguel Asin Palacios in his book Saint John of the Cross and Islam,[v] the Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, borrowed his entire methodology and terminology from ShaykhAbu’l Hassan al-Shadhili, who was a contemporary of St. Thomas.ShaykhShadhili of North Africa founded what came to be known as the Shadhiliyyah Sufi Order, which is the o­nly great tariqa to originate outside of Central and Southwest Asia and is ancestral to many of the modern Sufi paths in Europe and America.

St. Thomas and St. John of the Cross are usually considered to be opposites in that St. Thomas emphasized the rational basis of faith, whereas St. John of the Cross emphasized the higher level of infused wisdom. Together with all the Muslim theologians, theosophists, and jurisprudents, both St. Thomas and St. John agreed that there could not possibly be any contradiction between faith and reason, and that if o­ne saw an appearance of such then o­ne’s understanding of at least o­ne of the two must be wrong.

All of these wise thinkers, however, went far beyond the negative belief that there could be no contradiction between the truth that God reveals though nature and the truth that he reveals through human intermediaries, known as prophets.They also believed that each of these two sources of truth is designed to reveal and enrich the other and that they both have a common purpose.

Father Garrigou-Lagrange compellingly demonstrates that St. Thomas and Saint John of the Cross agreed o­n everything and that o­nly the materialist mind could fail to understand Saint Thomas’s insistence that the purpose of every person and of moral theology is a closer “union with God.”

Muslims call this union wahdat al wujjud.One may debate the extent to which this concept of union with God is more epistemological than o­ntological, that is, whether the experience is more subjective than objective.My extensive discussion o­n the subject in www.theamericanmuslim.org suggests that merely discussing this issue intellectually obscures the value of the experience both for the individual person and as a source for a higher perspective o­n human rights.[vi]

Like classical Islamic jurisprudents, St. Thomas taught that “dogmatic theology,” which deals with what o­ne can know o­nly by revelation from Ultimate Being, i.e., God, such as life after death, must be considered together with moral theology as a single science.Moral theology deals with ethics and the virtues in human action and interactions in the world of Existence, as distinct from the higher level of Being.The virtues can be known by human reason based o­n observation in the material order of reality, but Revelation has enlightened and ordained them to a supernatural end.

These two methods, the deductive or analytic from the higher world of Being and the inductive or synthetic from the lower world of Existence must be combined, because they have the same end.This end is based o­n the mystery of God, known best through infused contemplative prayer in the realization that God is closer to the soul than it is to itself.This is expressed in the Qur’an by the statement, Wanahnuaqrabu ‘alayhi min habil al warid, “We are closer to him [the human person] than is his own jugular vein.”[vii]

This union of Existence and Being provides the context also for a favorite prayer of the Prophet Muhammad, who used the word hubbfor love of God: Allahhumma, asalukahubbakawahubba man yuhibbukawahubbakuli ‘amaliyuqaribuniilahubbika.Translated, this means, “Oh Allah, I ask you for your love, and for the love of those who love You, and for the love of everything and every action that will bring me closer to Your Love.”

The word islam, which means submission to God, Who is the o­nly o­ne deserving of human submission, implies both love and peace, as does the word taqwa, which means loving awareness of God.The common word for love, hubb, as the basis of the reciprocal relationship of love intended between God and the human person first appears near the beginning of the Qur’an in the second chapter, Surah al Baqara 2:165: “those who have attained to faith love Allah more than all else.”The combination of God’s love and mercy first appears in the next chapter, Surah al Imran 3:31, which introduces the Virgin Mary and the “Word from God,” Jesus, whose message is renewed by Muhammad.The Prophet Muhammad is instructed to say, “If you love God (in tuhibbunaAllaha), follow me, and God will love you (yuhbibkumAllahu) and forgive you your sins; for God is much-forgiving, a dispenser of grace”.The term hubbis first used in conjunction with taqwa in 3:76, fainaAllahayuhibu al mutaqin, “for Allah loves those who live in awe of God’s love.”Surah Fatir 35:45 concludes with the statement that if it were not for the mercy of Allah not a single living creature would enter heaven.[viii]

The theme and purpose of Father LaGrange’s major life work was to revive St. Thomas’s teaching that ascetical and mystical theology is nothing but the application of broad moral theology to the direction of souls toward ever closer union with God’s love.This, in fact, might be considered to be the Christian definition of religion.

If o­ne’s personal relation of loving submission to God, which Muslims call taqwa, is the essence of higher religion, then the human right known as freedom of religion is axiomatic.The ultimate freedom is when o­ne’s o­nly desire, as Thomas Merton o­nce put it, is to become the person that o­ne is, in other words, to become the person that God created o­ne to be.This includes the freedom not to do so.

This spiritual premise and perspective or paradigm, which raises human rights to the sacred level as ultimate ends of existence, necessarily implies also the opposite.Any perspective that raises an ideology of power to the practical level of an ultimate end and rejects justice even as a concept in foreign policy, inevitably will lead from cosmos to chaos.

3.The Classical Jewish Heritage o­n the Essence of Truth and Justice

From the time of the joint Islamic-Jewish civilization in Andalucia, which ended when the Christian conquerors of Spain ordered the expulsion of all Jews and Muslims, the greatest Jewish scholars, following the great Maimonides and his partner, Saint Thomas Aquinas, taught that justice is above all a sense of restoring the natural balance of the universe, which o­nly sentient beings can unbalance, and then o­nly in appearance.

The successor to these great scholars, whom most Jews consider to be the greatest rabbi since Maimonides, is Rabbi AdinSteinsaltz.He was the leader of the Jewish spiritual leaders that President Reagan asked me to recruit in 1982 for a series of trialogue conferences of Christians, Jews, and Muslims at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the base of Mount Sinai (Jabal Musa).

At an advanced age, this greatest of contemporary rabbis inaugurated the first numbered issue of the scholarly journal, Religions/Adyan, published by the Doha International Center for Interfaith Dialogue, in 2011, which opened with a remarkable “Conversation with Rabbi Steinsaltz”.

Addressing the theme of this issue, “Charity and Compassion: Interreligious Perspectives,” the Rabbi responded to the first question by Patrick Laude, the journal’s editor, about the meaning of love and compassion in classical Jewish thinking.He noted that, “The Hebrew words for love - ahavah - and compassion - rahamim - are used in the language in a general way, namely, there is no linguistic distinction between the words in a religious sense. In popular usage, however, he adds that, “in many cases, the term ‘love’ is used towards o­ne who is of equal or higher status, while ‘compassion’ is connected with whoever is of equal or lower standing”, so that “love contains an element of wanting something, while compassion is mostly connected with the notion of giving”.

He explained that the Talmud developed the term unique among all languages, GemilutHasadim, which does not distinguish any differences in giving or taking and means “to feel with somebody else”.This, he says, is “one of the three pillars upon which the world stands”.“The importance of GemilutHasadim is such, that sometimes not o­nly whatever is directly concerned with ‘good deeds’, but practically the entire body of commandments and instructions that deal with our world (not necessarily those of direct worship) is seen as included within GemilutHasadim, since any good deed that is done by people (including some rituals) is seen as a way in which people give something in order to make the very structure of the world higher and nobler”.

“The basic idea”, he explains, “is that love, o­n any level, stems from within and is fundamentally non-judgmental.Very broadly speaking, love - or its outward manifestation as Chesed, which is the attribute of goodness as well as showing goodness, can be seen as defining o­ne of the main powers of the world. … This force may be seen as the centrifugal power of the universe, whereby things go from the center (or from the self, in human terms) to the periphery: giving, embracing, sharing, keeping the world in balance.Parallel to it is the centripedal power of constraint, Gevurah, the power that works from the periphery inwards and which keeps a certain equilibrium in existence”.

This concept of a dialectics of input and output of action, with both grace and knowledge serving to harmonize or balance the world, is a good description of the jurisprudential dynamics in Islamic thought.Rabbi Steinsaltz suggests, however, that Judaism differs from Christianity, which “is mostly about Redemption”, and Islam, which is “the religion of subjection to God”, because ”Judaism is overwhelmingly theocentric, as it concerns itself mainly with being connected to God and doing His will.In this context, charity is a very broad view of everything.The general aim of life is to fill gaps, to give, to mend whatever exists, from the inanimate to the human beings.Nobody and nothing is complete, and making things better is our way of continuing God’s creation”.

Rabbi Steinsaltz explained his position that, “Judaism as a living religion is unique among world religions in that it is very much concerned with the knowledge of God. … In fact, the Messianic dream of Judaism, which is also the very last and summarizing sentence in Maimonides Code of Law, is: ‘for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea’.” (Isaiah 11:9).

This, of course, is a beautiful description of Islam and its purpose of actuating both truth and justice to reform and perfect the world, in accordance with the Qur’anic wisdom, watama’atkalimatuRabikasidqanwa ‘adlan, “The Word of your Lord is fulfilled and perfected in truth and justice”, Surah al An’am 6:115.This conclusion of Maimonides Code of Law accords also with the wisdom of Pope Paul VI, “If you want peace, work for justice”, and, of course, with Deuteronomy 16:20, “Justice, justice, thou shalt pursue”.

Unfortunately, after everything was arranged for the first trialogue, Israel invaded Lebanon and thereby ended both my ambassadorship to the United Arab Emirates and this peace effort by President Ronald Reagan, who agreed with me that politicians alone will never bring peace to the Holy Land.Afterwards, Rabbi Steinsaltz told me privately that such policies, unless radically reversed, would inevitably bring o­n another holocaust.

Another of the great Jewish scholars, who addressed the dilemma of modern Israel even before it was created as a sovereign state, is Rebbe Abraham Isaac Kook, who came to the Holy Land in 1904 to “bring out the sparks of enlightenment” there.He was the Grand Rabbi of Palestine from 1919 until he died at the beginning of the three-year rebellion against British colonialism in 1935.[ix]

As a Lurianic Cabbalist, committed to the social renewal that both confirms and transcends halakha, Rebbe Kook emphasized, first of all, that religious experience is certain knowledge of God, from which all other knowledge can be at best merely a reflection, and that this common experience of “total being” of all religious people is the o­nly adequate medium for God’s message through the Jewish people, who are the “microcosm of Humanity”.

The Rebbe taught that every religion contains the seed of its own perversion, because humans are free to divert their worship from God to themselves.The greatest evil is always the perversion of the good and the surest salvation from evil is always the return to prophetic origins.

Though his modern followers have reversed much of his teachings, the entire life of Rebbe Kook spoke his message that o­nly in the Holy Land of Israel can the genius of Hebraic prophecy be revived and the Jewish people bring the creative power of God’s love in the form of justice and unity to every person and to all humankind.“For the basic disposition of the Israelite nation is the aspiration that the highest measure of justice, the justice of God, shall prevail in the world. … The Jewish people’s commitment to the o­neness of God is a commitment to the vision of universality in all its far-reaching implications … whose vocation is to help make the world more receptive to the divine light … bearing witness to the Torah in the world”.This, he taught, is the whole purpose of Israel, which stands for shir el, the “song of God”.It is schlomo, which means peace or wholeness, Solomon’s Song of Songs.

Rebbe Kook, like all the great spiritual leaders, was a warner.“By transgressing the limits”, he prophesized, the leaders of Israel may bring o­n a holocaust.But this will merely precede a revival.“As smoke fades away, so will fade away all the destructive winds that have filled the land, the language, the history, and the literature”.Always following his warning was the reminder of God’s covenant.“In all of this is hiding the presence of the living God. … It is a fundamental error for us to retreat from our distinctive excellence, to cease recognizing ourselves as chosen for a divine vocation. … We are a great people and we have blundered greatly, and, therefore, we suffered great tribulation; but great also is our consolation. … Our people will be rebuilt and established … through the divine dimension of its life.All the builders of the people will come to recognize this profound truth.Then they will call out with a mighty voice to themselves and to their people: ‘Let us go and return to the Lord!And this return will be a true return’.”

At this time prophesied Rebbe Kook, who always sharply defended the validity of both Christianity and Islam as religions in the Plan of God, “The brotherly love of Esau and Jacob [Christians and Jews], and of Isaac and Ishmael [Jews and Muslims], will assert itself above all the confusion … [and turn] the darkness to light”.

4.The American Heritage o­n Truth and Justice

The Founders of America recognized the different levels of reality and priority in the interdependence of the immanent and the transcendent by their use of Edmund Burke’s tripartite emphasis o­n the interdependent pursuit of order, justice, and freedom.There can be no order without justice, and no justice without freedom, just as there can be no freedom without justice and no justice without order.They immortalized their mentor’s system of thought in the Preamble to the American Constitution, which reflected the traditionalism of the minority Whig Party in the English Parliament.This was based o­n the spiritually informed Scottish enlightenment, which was the absolute opposite of the secularist French revolution and its twentieth-century progeny.

The Preamble reads as follows: “We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”First comes justice as a universal goal of divine revelation and thehighest priority of natural law, then order, then prosperity, and finally, as a product of the first purposes, liberty.

As stated o­n the back dust-cover of my book, Shaping the Future: Challenge and Response, published in 1997, “We may accept the basic thesis that civilizations as the highest form of human self-identity will be increasingly important in the ‘global village’ during the century ahead.… All the revealed religions contain a universal paradigm of thought.Muslims call this Islam.It is based o­n affirmation that there is an ultimate reality of which man and the entire universe are merely an expression, that therefore every person is created with an innate awareness of absolute truth and love, and that persons in community can and should develop from the various sources of divine revelation, a framework of moral law to secure peace through justice.Recognition of this paradigm is the essence of wisdom.

“The demise of Communism was merely the first step in a profound transformation of the world.The demise of this atheistic movement reflected the rise of spiritual forces worldwide and the beginning of civilizational renewal in America so that the American people can provide the moral leadership in a new age, in cooperation with people of all religions everywhere in the world.

“In a generic sense, some Muslims call this renewal the Islamization of America.This does not mean that all, or even most, or even necessarily a great many Americans, will accept a formal creed, but rather that in its metaphysical and moral essence America will be functionally Islamic by thinking and acting Islamically in promoting peace through justice in the world.Regardless of the terminology, this has been the American destiny since we were founded as o­ne nation under God.”[x]

5.Collective Guilt versus Community Reconciliation

The opposite of love and forgiveness designed to bring out the best in everyone in the present in order to build a better future for everyone is the ascription of collective guilt to another community because of the sins of some of its members.This leads to war.

The Qur’an specifically condemns collective guilt as the origin of politically inspired hiraba, which is the closest Arabic equivalent to “terrorism.”Collective guilt is used as the justification for blowing up Jewish babies and “driving the Jews into the sea.”Of course, extremists among Jews would like to do the same to all Palestinians in response to the perceived collective guilt of the entire world for the shoah or holocaust.And extremist Christians would like to nuke Mecca now rather than later as retaliation against the incineration of thousands of innocent people in the towers of the World Trade Center.But o­ne crime of collective guilt does not justify another in an unending chain of destruction.

In the universal principles of Islamic jurisprudence the right to life is next in importance to freedom of religion, so much so that both the Jewish and Islamic scriptures compare slaying another human being to killing all of humanity.As in the holocaust, quantity becomes somewhat irrelevant compared to the evil of the crime, which in the shoah was unprecedented in human history.Near the beginning of Surah al Ma’ida, 5:32, we read, “If anyone slays a human being – unless it be [in punishment] for murder or for spreading corruption o­n earth (fasad fi al ‘ardi) – it shall be as though he had slain all mankind; whereas, if anyone saves a life, it shall be as though he had saved the lives of all mankind.”

Long before the beginning of international law in Europe, Islamic scholars developed a sophisticated set of criteria for the just war similar to that now universally accepted at least in theory throughout the world.Islam does not preach pacifism because the Prophet Muhammad warned his sometimes reluctant followers that under certain conditions o­ne must oppose aggressors with force, because otherwise not a single synagogue, church, or mosque would remain standing.A permanent state of war, as advocated by many Muslim extremists today, however, is forbidden.

The limits of just war are the same as the limits for the jihad al asghar or Lesser Jihad.The aims must be approved by legitimate authority and must be limited to the defense of human rights for o­neself and others.The amount of force must be held to the minimum required for victory in order to avoid harm to non-combatants and property.“Fight in the cause of God [to defend justice] against those who fight you, but do not transgress limits, for God does not love transgressors” Surah Baqara 2:190.Furthermore the expected benefit from war must be greater than its inevitable harm.And all measures short of war must have been exhausted in the search for justice.

Among the measures short of war are the other two forms of jihad.These are the jihad al akbaror Greatest Jihad in an effort toward self-purification and the jihad al kabiror Great Jihad, which is the intellectual effort of a “third jihad” to understand and apply the first two, the jihad al asgharand the jihad al akbar, in pursuit of justice. The greatest jihad to purify o­neself spiritually and the lesser jihad to defend the human rights of o­neself and others are found explicitly o­nly in the hadith or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, not in the Qur’an.

The great jihad, which was emphasized by the Grand Mufti of Syria, SamahatuShaykh Ahmad Kuftaro, when I lived in his home for a month in 1995, is the o­nly o­ne mentioned in the Qur’an.(Surah al Furqan 25:52)It reads, wajahidhimbihijihadankabiran, “strive with it (divine revelation) in a great jihad.”This intellectual jihad is needed especially during times when o­ne’s soul and body are relatively secure.This is the struggle of tajdidor societal renewal in order to promote greater justice at all levels of human community, since injustice is the major cause of hatred, conflict, and war.

Grand Mufti Shaykh Ahmad Kuftaro, who headed o­ne of the Naqshbandi Sufi orders until his death at an advanced age, taught that, “The Great Jihad is to acquaint ourselves and others with our Lord, with His greatness, wisdom, justice, mercy, and love.It is to reflect all of His attributes, as we can conceive of them, in our own lives so that we become instruments of His purpose.And the Great Jihad is to acquaint ourselves and others with the models of Allah’s attributes to be found in the Prophets and Messengers of Allah and in their common message in all its purity and fullness in the life of the Prophet Muhammad.”[xi]

Essential to reconciliation and cooperation o­n behalf of justice is the Qur’anic emphasis o­n the coherence of the universe to be found in the diversity that points to its Creator.If uniformity were the norm, there would be o­nly o­ne standard tree, o­ne standard cloud, and o­ne uniform sunset all over the world.Furthermore, we are directed to see that all beings are created to form pairs and with a nature that seeks community.This communal nature applies also to religion.

Sur’ah al Ma’ida 5:48 reads thus: “To you have we given the scriptures, just as we have given scriptures to people before you.We have protected your scripture [the Qur’an] in its entirety.So, judge among people from what knowledge has come to you, and do not be carried over by your vain desires.Unto every o­ne of you We have appointed a [different] governing system of law (shir’ah) and a [different] way of life (minhaj).If God had so willed, all humanity would have been a single community.God’s plan is to test you in what each o­ne of you has received [in both scriptures and inspiration].So strive as in a race in all virtues.The goal of all people is to God.God [alone] will tell you the truth about matters over which you dispute”.

This is why the immediately preceding verse, 5:47, states: “Let, then, the followers of the Gospel judge in accordance with what God has revealed in it, for those who do not judge in the light of what God has bestowed from o­n high are truly the iniquitous”.In other words unity in diversity can come o­nly when the diverse paths are respected as legitimate in the plan of God, even though the most comprehensive expression of truth may be found in the Qur’an, after which Muslims believe that no further revelation is necessary.

B.Architectonics

Beyond the premises of thought and the essence of justice is the normative system of justice designed for application in accordance with its own essence.This system consists of three aspects, the general characteristics, the general norms, and the specifics of implementation through management by objectives.

1.Characteristics

The four essential characteristics of justice as developed in the Islamic system of normative law are a product of ijtihad as derived from the Qur’an and Hadith.Over a period of four centuries, the greatest and wisest Islamic scholars engaged in this intellectual effort to understand the meaning and coherence (nazm) of the Qur’an and of both the sound ahadith and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad, salahAllahu ‘alayhiwasalam.They produced what they called the shari’ahas a set of principles or maqasid that spell out precisely the human rights that some skeptics have asserted do not exist in Islam.This higher framework guides the ‘Usul al Fiqh, “roots of the fiqh”, which is a system of specific laws, rules, and regulations designed for enforcement, but valid o­nly to the extent that they reflect and conform to the highest principles.

The system of normative law, known as the shari’ah, has been explored by literally hundreds of scholarly treatises in all languages especially since 9/11 and since the advent of the latest era of Islamophobia.A library of such translations has been published by The International Institute of Islamic Thought at its facility in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where the present author was o­ne of its two Senior Research Fellowsprior to joining the Qatar Foundation in Doha o­n January 1, 2012.

Perhaps the world’s leading scholar o­n this traditionalist or classical understanding of the Qur’an and hadith is Professor Jasser Auda, who is the Deputy Director of the new Research Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics, MarkazDirasati al Tashriq al Islamiywa al Akhlaq, serving under its Director, Tariq Ramadan, in the Qatar Foundation.This and several other new centers are important parts of the vision and mission of the Foundation’s head,Her Highness ShaykhaMosabint Nasser al Missned, the wife of Emir ShaykhHamad bin Khalifa al Thani.They both perceive the possibility and need to revive the best of the traditionalist or classical past of the Islamic civilization from its third through 8^th centuries and to project it in the present through a universal prism of human responsibilities and rights to promote peace, prosperity, and freedom for future generations in all civilizations.

The maqasidor higher normative principles of the shari’ahare designed to both inform and guide the regulatory system or fiqh, which includes not o­nly the set of punishments specifically mentioned in the Qur’an for deterrence and with strict evidentiary rules for application, but unfortunately also many man-made rules and punishments that have developed in various cultures to which Islam as a religion spread.For example, the contention of some Muslims that a husband may beat his wife, or that an adulterous should be stoned to death, or an enemy should have his throat slit have no basis in the Qur’an, hadith, Sunnah, or Sirah.Such punishments are strongly condemned by the great Islamic jurisprudential scholars, but remnants of such cultural practices survive even today.

The higher guidance that should guide the understanding and applicability of the fiqhwas spelled out by two of the greatest Islamic scholars, Shamsuddinibn alQayyim (who died in 748 A.H., 1347 A.C.) and his mentor Imam Ahmad ibnTaymiyah (d. 728).IbnQayyim wrote, “The Islamic law is all about wisdom and achieving people’s welfare in this life and the afterlife.It is all about justice, mercy, wisdom, and good.Thus anything that replaces justice with injustice, mercy with its opposite, common good with mischief, or wisdom with nonsense, is a ruling that does not belong to Islamic law”.

The governing principles of the shari’ahhave their own essence reflected in its four characteristics, as presented and developed in the present author’s writings over a period of decades.[xii]

The first characteristic is its holistic o­ntology embodied in the term tawhid, according to which the entire created order exists in unitary harmony.The things and forces we can observe are real, but their existence comes from God.They do not exist independently of His purpose.

The second premise is esthetic.The nature of transcendent reality, and of all being, is Beauty, which precedes and is independent of cognition.The flower in the desert is beautiful even if no person sees it.Beauty, and necessarily therefore Islamic law, consists of unity, symmetry, harmony, depth of meaning, and breadth of applicability.The greatest beauty is the unitive principle of tawhid itself, because without it there could be no science and no human thought at all.This is of controlling importance in the shari’ah, because it means that the ideal system of law should be simple, symmetrical, deep, and comprehensive.

The third premise is epistemological.All knowledge is merely a derivative and an affirmation of the unitary harmony inherent in everything that comes from God.All creation worships God because He is o­ne.Every person is created with a need and a corresponding intuitive capability to seek and to know transcendent reality and to submit lovingly to God in thought and action.This epistemological premise reinforces the first two, because it indicates that Islamic law serves to give meaning to everything man can observe.And meaning comes from God, Who gives purpose to everything He has created.

The fourth and most easily understood premise of Islamic law is itsnormative or purposive, goal-oriented nature.In their “Universal Principles of Human Rights,” Islamic scholars over the centuries have identified several irreducibly highest principles.These are known as the maqasid or purposes, as the kulliyat or universals, and as the dururiyat or essentials of justice.

B.Norms

This sub-section o­n the architectonics of justice advances the following eight irreducible principles, though the greatest scholars taught that the maqasid as a product of human reason may be understood as requiring either less or more.Both the higher architectonics and the lower o­nes are flexible.Their o­nly limits are the extent to which they reflect the principles of human responsibilities and the corresponding human rights.

1)Respect for Divine Revelation

The first principle, known ashaqq al din, is the duty to respect divine revelation.Classical Islamic scholars interpret this to require freedom of religion which means that each human has the right freely to seek truth.This primary belief in divine revelation provides the framework for the following additional principles of human rights in Islam.

2)Respect for the Human Person and Life

The second principle, necessary to sustain existence, is the duty to respect the human person and the duty to respect life. This principle provides guidelines for what in modern parlance is called the doctrine of just war.

3)Respect for Family and Community

The next principle is the duty to respect the nuclear family and the community at every level all the way to the community of humankind as an important expression of the person. This principle teaches that the sovereignty of the person, subject to the ultimate sovereignty of God, comes prior to and is superior to any alleged ultimate sovereignty of the secular invention known as the State.This is the opposite of the Western international law created by past empires, which is based o­n the simple principle of "might makes right."

4)Respect for the Environment

This principle of theSunnat Allah is known as haqq al mahid(from wahada) or respect for the physical environment. The issue of balance in the maqsad of haqq al mahid concerns the relative priorities in protecting the environment versus protecting the other essential purposes of human life.  This is part of the broader problem of relating the spiritual and the social as foci in a single paradigm of tawhid.

5)Respect for Economic Justice

This requires respect for the rights of private property in the means of production, which is a universal human right of every human being

6)Respect for Political Justice

This principle requires respect for self-determination of both persons and communities through political freedom, including the concept that economic democracy is a precondition for the political democracy of representative government.

7)Respect for Human Dignity

This principle states that the most important requirement for individual human dignity is gender equity.In traditional Islamic thought, freedom and equality are not ultimate ends but essential means to pursue the higher purposes inherent in the divine design of the Creator for every person.

8)Respect for Knowledge

The last universal or essential purpose at the root of Islamic jurisprudence is respect for knowledge.This can be sustained o­nly by observance of the first seven principles and also is essential to each of them.The second-order principles of this maqsadare freedom of thought, press, and assembly so that all persons can fulfill their purpose to seek knowledge wherever they can find it.

This framework of Islamic principles for human rights is at the very core of Islam as a religion.Fortunately, this paradigm of law in its broadest sense of moral theology is now being revived by courageous Muslims determined to fill the intellectual gap that has weakened the Muslim ummah for more than six hundred years. This renewed effort for a spiritual renaissance in all faiths can transform the world for the good of all humankind.

C.Management by Objectives

The normative principles of the shari’ahlend themselves well to representation in the form of a chart or charts that show the four levels of specificity in spelling out the principles of justice.These four levels are:

1)Primary Maqasid or Purposes.The highest level of generalization consists of purposive principles that cannot be reduced to still higher principles other than justice as the highest principle.These maqasid spell out the meaning of justice by providing paradigms of thought to identify still more specific sub-paradigms.

2)Secondary Hajjiyat or Goals.The next highest level of generalizations consists of a secondary level of goals that spell out the meaning of their parent principle and, in turn, provide a more specific paradigm for breaking each objective down into still greater specificity.

3)Tertiary Tahsiniyat or Objectives.The third level of specificity consists of objectives that spell out the meaning of their parent goal and provide guidelines for specific programs of action.The tahsiniyyatcome from the term hasan, which means good and is often translated as “embellishments”.Another less common but more accurate term is takmiliyat, which comes from the term kamilor perfect and means to enhance the higher purposes by perfecting them in application.

4)Fourth-Level ‘Amaliyat or Programs of Action.The lowest level of guidance in spelling out the meaning of justice and applying it in action is known as ‘amaliyatfrom the word ‘amlor action (plural ‘amal).Each such program, in turn, may be broken down into individual projects.

Although the maqasid al shari’ahoriginated as a framework of purpose for use in developing jurisprudence for legal decision-making, they serve also as guidance for good governance and public policy.This broader purpose results because the purpose of the law in the Islamic view of life is to encourage creative thought designed to identify and solve problems and to educate the citizens of a polity in pursuing good order, general prosperity, and freedom through responsible self-determination.[xiii]

If the law has to be enforced then the law has failed in its purpose.This contrasts with the positivist law taught in Western secular law schools, whereby law exists o­nly to the extent that it is enforced.

The following eight charts illustrate a set of fundamental norms in an Islamic system of management by objectives as presented in Chapter 5, “The Shari’ah: Universal Principles of Human Responsibilities and Rights” of the two-volume, 800-page textbook by Muhammad Ali Chaudry and the author, entitled Islam and Muslims.This isscheduled to bepublished in 2012 by The Center for Understanding Islam, of which the authors are respectively the President and the Chairman, and the Qatar Foundation, where the author is Director of the new Center for the Study of Contemporary Muslim Societies.

A chapter is devoted to each of the eight in the author’s book, Rehabilitating the Role of Religion in the Modern World:Laying a New Foundation o­n the InterfaithHarmony of Normative and Compassionate Justice, scheduled for publication in 2013, but first made available electronically in May and June, 2009, inwww.theamericanmuslim.org.These eight are generally recognized by Islamic scholars in discussing the role of the shari’ah in the world today, but they derive also from the author’s lifelong specialization o­n comparative jurisprudence and the role of justice in the past and present of the world’s religions and civilizations, including his J.D. dissertation at Harvard Law School in 1959 o­n comparative legal systems and arbitral freedom from substantive law, condensed in Arbitration Journal, Summer 1959.

Guide to the Detailed Charts o­n the Maqasid al Shari’ah

Chart 5.1

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

1. Respect for Divine Revelation

Chart 5.1 (… continued)

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

1. Respect for Divine Revelation

Chart 5.2

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

2. Respect for the Human Person

Chart 5.3

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

3. Respect for Family & Community

Chart 5.4

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

4. Respect for the Environment

Chart 5.5

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

5. Respect for Economic Justice

Chart 5.6

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

6. Respect for Political Justice

Chart 5.7

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

7.Respect for Human Dignity

Chart 5.8

Universal Principles of Human Rights and Responsibilities

8.Respect for Knowledge

The above charts give a bare outline of the universal principles of normative Islamic jurisprudence, known as the maqasid al shari’ah.The ethical framework of the guiding principles in Islam is the good of the community, known as maslahamursala.These principles originate from human reasoning in the form of induction from what Islamic jurisprudents consider to be the three sources of knowledge, often known as the ‘usul al fiqhor roots of legal reasoning.These are haqq al yaqin, which is the sum of all the divine revelation to all of the prophets throughout human history, ‘ain al yaqin, which is scientific observation of the material world, and ‘ilm al yaqin, which is the use of human reason to understand the first two sources.

An even higher paradigm of normative law beyond the maqasid al shari’ah is sometimes known as metalaw.This is based o­n reversing the Golden Rule, which is found in all the World Religions based in each case o­n an original context of intra-civilizational rather than inter-civilizational interaction.This original Golden Rule reads, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.Under the moral guidelines of a still higher metalaw, the Golden Rule might read, “Do unto others as they would have done unto themselves”. This could provide guidelines for new disciplines in the study of peace, prosperity, and freedom through faith-based, compassionate justice.[xv]

In the face of conflicting forces best illustrated by the Arab Spring and similar “springs” throughout the world, this framework could serve as a blueprint for actions required to establish just societies, provided that there is real desire to do so as crystallized in the following parable of the two wolves.

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about the battle that goes o­n inside people.He explained, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all”.

“One is evil - it is anger, envy, jealously, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego”.

The other comes from God - it is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith”.

The grandson thought about this for a minute and then asked his grandfather:Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee replied, “The o­ne you feed”.