Editorial

Abstract

The feature articles in this issue of MISS constitute a foray into two
different, but related, topics: political authority, as discussed by Tamara
Sonn in “Political Authority in Classical Islamic Thought,” and by Salim
Mansur in “Constitutionalism and Ethnic Conflict: The Case of Pakistan,”
and the interrelationships among God, humanity, and the universe, as
found in Yusuf Waghid‘s “In Search of a Boundless Ocean and New
Skies: Human Creativity is a Matter of A‘mdl, Jihad, and Ijtihad,” and
Masudul Alam Choudhury’s ‘Toward Islamic Political Economy at the
Turn of the Century.”
In her article, Tamara Sonn analyzes the source of political authority
in the ideal Islamic state. Breaking up Islamic political authority between
the executive and the legislative-judicial branches, Sonn reveals how the
legislative-judicial branch, that is, the branch that ensured that the entire
government was functioning according to the laws of God, was dominant
in classical Islamic political theory. Unlike Christianity, where theology
was the source of politics, Islamic legal thought constituted the source of
political ideas, so much so that “the identity of a community as Islamic or
not lies not in the behavior of the leader but in whether or not Islamic law
prevails.” Far from espousing a theocracy, concludes SOM, the ideal
Islamic state is governed as a “nomocracy.”
In a similar vein, Salim Mansur‘s article is a critical examination of the
relationship between constitutionalism and ethnic conflict, with a focus on
Pakistan. Mansur challenges the analytical scheme that identifies developed
societies with mature institutions of legitimate order that provide for
political stability, continuity of political authority, and established rules for
conflict settlement as well as, conversely, identifies developing societies
with the weakness or absence of such institutions. Instead, he argues that
constitutional norms, designs, and processes need not be separated from
issues of institution building and that “the idea of constitutionalism needs
to be integrated into the study of developing societies in order to discover
how it contributes to a conciliatory process of political participation and
pluralism in a society that might be potentially open to fragmentation along
ethnic lines.”
The other two feature articles found in this issue address the complex
question of the relationship among God, humanity, and the universe. Yusuf ...