An Islamic Justification of a Liberal Political Conception

• In Event: Poster Session: Normative Political Theory

Abstract

How does a non-liberal endorsement of a liberal political conception proceed? This paper will ask this question by turning to an Islamic justification for the Indian Constitution. The Indian Constitution has been described as ‘liberal’ because it upholds three major political ideas, that of liberty, pluralism and rights. How did Muslim political thinkers in India accept, justify and endorse these as political principles, especially as members of a minority community within India’s deeply diverse polity, during the making of the Indian Constitution?

This paper will proceed by examining the methods that South Asian Muslim political thinkers employed to develop a political field around them which was consistent with an Islamic understanding of the political. It interrogates how they delinked the idea of the political domain, constructed by liberal imperialism in India, from the necessity of being epistemically secular. In particular, it focusses on how one major Muslim political figure in India, Abul Kalam Azad, used ideas of tawhid (unity of god) and jihad (struggle for good) as primary concepts to justify a plural political domain that did not treat the secular episteme as a necessary evaluative criterion for bringing non-liberal arguments into the public, political domain.

Given this, this paper traces why and how the debate on ‘conflicts’ between non-liberal (predominantly Islamic) and liberal arguments came to be reconstructed as a question of the justifiability of religious ‘reasons’ or convictions in the public sphere in South Asia. It does so by locating this reconstruction in (a) three different forms of justifications of liberal imperialism: (i) its liberal reformist justification, (ii) its ‘culturalist’ stance of non-interference in subject societies and (iii) by emphasizing the representation of the colonized within structures of imperial rule, and in (b) arguments emerging from adherents of Islam for living with non-Muslims justified in three different ways (i) on grounds of residence in a place (which was the subcontinent) (ii) on grounds of self-rule which contested the normative priority given to liberal modernity as a means of organizing a polity (iii) on grounds of members of minority communities achieving the status of free and equal citizens within a polity emerging out of resistance to imperial rule.

Examining the role that different kinds of justifications play in constructing the political domain as ‘liberal’, ‘secular’, ‘non-liberal’, or ‘religious’, this paper concludes with an argument on how the political domain in a diverse democracy like India was conceived through specific practices of justification. In particular, it examines how the concepts at the heart of this political conception were affected by the justifying authority of India’s largest religious minority: adherents of Islam. It demonstrates how Islamic political thinkers employed Islamic arguments to justify but also, in the process, redefine the norms of liberty, pluralism and rights that became central to India’s liberal, post-colonial constitution. In doing so, this paper draws conclusions for the importance of justification, both as a descriptive as well as a normative concept, in theorizing about endorsements of a plural political conception from non-liberal traditions of thought.

Author

• Shaunna Rodrigues