Man-made laws are inevitable

You know, I've talked many times about how the sharia, does not actually cover everything that you need to cover in managing a state. A lot of people, of course, a lot of Muslims don't like to hear that. They think it's blasphemous or something, but that's because of their misunderstanding of what the sharia is and what the sharia is for and what the sharia claims about itself to be and what the Quran claims about itself to be, I e it's a guidance. And when Allah says that he hasn't left anything out of the book, it doesn't mean literally there is nothing at all that has been left out of the book. It means that nothing that is useful to you that you need has been left out of the book.

Nothing has been left out of the book that requires divine legislation. In other words, what you whatever you don't find in the book, in the Quran, in the Sunnah, whatever you don't find, it's fine for you to figure it out for yourself using the guidance that is in the book. You understand? So there are not explicit rules in Islam that cover every single thing that a state has to deal with and it's a problem if you don't understand that. And this also forms the basis for the opposition to quote unquote man made laws that you find among many Muslims who comment on politics.

You know, Islamic groups or Islamist groups, which apparently now to use the word Islamist is a derogatory term, didn't used to be. All of the Islamists that I knew back in the day called themselves Islamist, but whatever. Islamist parties, people who believe in political Islam, whatever, are opposed to officially man made laws and they think that that's like kufr if you have man made laws. But it's inevitable that you will have man made laws. There's no way that you are not going to have man made laws.

And of course, could, you know, the argument could be made that when you legislate something through fiqh, that fiqh itself is a process of deriving man made laws from divine sources. That's what fiqh is. You take the the Wahi, the rules and the guidance that comes from the Wahi and you derive, you extract laws from that using your mind based on evidences that you can find. You you extrapolate from the existing explicit laws other laws that you yourself are coming up with. Those are man made laws.

Those are not divinely revered laws and they use this also as the argument against democracy. Now I'm not necessarily an advocate of democracy, but I'm an advocate of good arguments and the arguments against democracy that you usually find among Muslim speakers are very poorly informed arguments. I just wanna give you an example of why it's so ridiculous because the idea is that the hukkum is only for Allah. Right? This is why they're against democracy because the hukkum is only for Allah, and you're putting human beings in a position of making hukkum.

Okay? That's not allowed. That's kufur. That's haram and so on. Shook.

But what about the fact that like 90% or 95% of what governments do doesn't pertain to the explicit laws that exist in the Sharia. This is just a short list of some of the bills that were debated and presented in the most recent session of the American Congress. So this is an example of what legislators, legislative bodies, what the government actually deals with. You tell me if these are sharia issues or if you can find an ayah or a hadith that gives you an explicit position to take on these issues. American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

This bill provided economic relief to individuals and businesses affected by the COVID nineteen pandemic. It includes direct payments to individuals and extension of unemployment benefits and funding for vaccine distribution and testing. Okay. Go. What's the Sharia ruling?

What does the Sharia have to say about this? You tell me. What did Allah and his messenger have to say about an economic relief to individuals and businesses affected by the COVID nineteen pandemic? Nothing? Okay.

Next, infrastructure investment and jobs act. This bill provided $1,200,000,000,000 in funding for infrastructure projects, including roads, bridges, public transit, broadband Internet, and clean energy. Go. Give me the ayah that talks about the funding for infrastructure projects. And don't don't get tricky.

Don't give me a general hadith about the public welfare and about facilitating ease for for people and making their lives easier and that kind of thing because those are guiding principles. Those are not explicit rules. That's not legislation. We're talking now about legislation. We're talking about laws because supposedly, we're not supposed to have any man made laws.

Everything has to be from directly Allah and Rasulullah everything, all the laws. So there has to be a law that you can find in the Quran or in the Sunnah that talks about funding for roads and bridges. I'll wait. Next, the Build Back Better Act. This bill would have provided $1,750,000,000,000 in funding for social programs including universal pre kindergarten childcare assistance and tax credits for low and middle income families.

It also included funding for climate change measures. Go. Where's the ayah? Where's the hadith? What's the ruling?

Because if it's not dealt within the Quran and Sunnah, then apparently that's not something that the state should deal with. So is is the argument then that the state won't be involved in these things? The only thing that you can give me are general principles in Islam about taking care of children and about the importance of education and the right of people to not be impoverished. You can give me general principles because it's guidance. You can't give me a as an explicit ruling on on an issue like this.

That has to be a man made law guided by the principles in the Quran and Sunnah, the principles of Islam. Next, Endless Frontier Act. This bill would have provided $100,000,000,000 in funding for research and development in science and technology. Again, how is a how is an Islamic state going to determine whether it should and how much it should spend to fund research and development in science and technology? What's the ruling on that?

What's the ayah? What's the hadith? You say that all of the laws and all of the rules are available in Islam that cover every single topic that could ever come up for a state, for an individual, for a society in the world forever. So where is the ayah? Where is the ruling?

Where is the haqqam about providing funding from the state for research and development in science and technology? Okay? And then we have, bipartisan safer communities act. This bill was passed in June 2022 and is the first major gun control legislation in decades. It includes, measures such as expanded background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21, funding for mental health programs, and penalties, for straw purchases of firearms.

What's the Islamic position on gun control? And don't give me an opinion, give me an explicit ruling. Yeah. I didn't think so. So my point here is just to show, to demonstrate that most of what governments have to deal with on a daily basis, on an annual basis has nothing to do with Islamic rulings.

Most of what a government is gonna have to do will always be man made laws. There's no way around that. But what you can say is that these man made laws are guided by Islamic values Islamic principles and Islamic morality. That's as far as you can take that. You cannot say that there are laws in Islam that cover every single thing.

Don't say that. Stop saying that. It's Hidea. It's guidance. There are rules in Islam, but again most of those rules have nothing to do with what states have to do, with what governments have to do.

Like when I first came to Islam, people used to say and there were you know books out at the time talking about how Islam was like a like an instruction manual for being a human being in the world. They told you every step of the way, how to do this, how to do that, what to do, when to do it, and in what way and so on. But it's not true. And there's nothing wrong with it not being true. See, people will get angry when I say something like that because they have bought this line.

And so they think that when I say Islam isn't that, then I'm denigrating Islam. You are misrepresenting what Islam is. You're misrepresenting what the sharia is. And so then when someone tries to correct you on that, you don't get to denigrate them or say that they are denigrating the deen. You're misrepresenting what it is and what it's supposed to be.

You seem to think that when you become a Muslim, all individual capacity for thought and decision making is neutralized, and everyone is just becoming robotic. It doesn't work like that, and it has never worked like that, and it's not supposed to work like that. This is not a cult. We have guidance, we have values, we have principles, and we have certain relatively few explicit laws. Very few explicit laws that pertain to society, management of society, crime and punishment.

And any system that implements those rules or tries to adhere to those rules or aspires to adhere to those rules on paper is Islamic and is acceptable. And you're never going to remove the human element from any of this. You're never gonna remove the human element from legislation. You cannot. It is impossible and it has never been the case and no one ever believed that you had to remove human beings from legislation.

No one ever believed that except maybe the Khawarij. Everybody knows, everyone who's attached to the real world and then understands reality understands that human beings are going to have to figure things out. They can use Islamic guidance, but the actual number of rules that exist in Islam are insufficient for the management of a state, for the management of a government, for the management of the society. It's insufficient, the explicit rules, the values, the guidance, the principles, obviously not insufficient. But you have to use those values, use that that guidance, use those principles to inform the legislation that the people in legislature make.

I'm not sure how I can make it clearer.