Shahid Bolsen on Khilafah

Islamist claim that if you have khalafa, everything will be great. You just reestablish the khalafa, you implement sharia, whatever that means, they never really specify because they can't. They say that if we have those things, we have khalafa, we have sharia, everything's gonna be wonderful, we can dictate our terms to the world, we'll be free, we'll be independent, everything will be just and righteous and so on and so on and so on. Okay. Well, the thing here's the thing.

We had that. We had the Qilafa and it did not prevent colonialism from taking over our lands. It didn't prevent our economic subjugation. It didn't prevent our internal divisions. That didn't help us.

So clearly there are a lot of other problems, a lot of other challenges to establishing government, to establishing a state, to running a state, and to organizing the affairs of the society other than calling your government Shilafa and other than implementing Sharia. Now I know that there's, you know, plenty of brothers and sisters out there who will claim that it is blasphemous to say that it is not enough to organize the society successfully. But this is the truth. There are many many many many other things that you need in order to successfully run the society, in order to successfully run a state. That's simply not enough.

It wasn't enough in the past and this is the thing that the Islamist don't wanna talk about. They don't wanna tell you that. They want you to think that when we had the Khilafa, when we had the Shariah, everything was wonderful. And what they failed to mention is that it wasn't enough. It wasn't enough then, and it isn't enough now, and it won't be enough in the future.

I mean, it's it's always going to come down to a human understanding and implementation. Like I've talked about before in the Ottoman Empire, you had the Sharia and you had Kano because the Sharia does not cover every issue. So they understood correctly that you do have to come up with some other types of legislation in order to run a state. It's tremendously dangerous to make the claim or to make a promise that the problem of corruption in government, the problem of injustice or the problem of oppression in government is that it is not the right form of government. And if we just have a different form of government and we have a a government that we call Khilafa, then therefore all of the problems will be solved.

No. The problem of corruption is always going to be there. The problem of injustice is always going to be there. The problem of oppression is always going to be there. It always was there for the last one thousand four hundred years under what was called Islamic government, under what was called Khilafa, under the Ottoman Empire and before and before and before.

So I mean, like the entirety of our history except for thirty years, we have dealt with oppression, we have dealt with injustice, we have dealt with corruption under what was, according to everyone's, you know, consensus, Islamic government. We have to come to terms with the fact that government can be, according to the legal definition, Islamic and also oppressive. It can be the legal definition of Islamic, and it can also be unjust. It can also be corrupt because that is what we have had. The correct position for for anyone who wants to see the society and the government become more Islamic, become more aligned with Islamic law, Islamic values, and the objectives of the Sharia, then the role of those people is to just be in a continuous struggle to make whatever the government is better.

Islamic is being used as a synonym for perfect. It's like, well, maybe in the Ottoman Empire, they weren't doing it completely or correctly or rightly. In other words, maybe it just wasn't perfect. Well, no. It wasn't perfect.

It was Islamic, but it wasn't perfect because those two things don't mean the same thing. Yes. Maybe they did implement things incompletely. Maybe they didn't implement things imperfectly. Of course, they did.

Anyone will. And anyone who is who is claiming that they can implement it perfectly is a liar. And this is sort of the the the the the fundamental at least implicit claim of the Islamists. Overthrow the current regime, whatever current regime it is. Overthrow that regime and then put us in power, and then we will establish an Islamic government, which by definition must mean that it's a perfect, just, and righteous government.

Well, that's a lie. Anyone who believes that, they're a fool, and they're being manipulated, and they are going down an extremely dangerous path. I'm speaking as someone who ever since I became a Muslim was for a very long time one of the people who believed in the idea of, you know, that it was like worship for us to reestablish the Qilafa without ever actually bothering to look into what that even means. Whether or not in actual legal definition, whether or not the governments that we have are are not Islamic. Because of course Islamist will say, any government that we ourselves and our party is not running is by definition un Islamic.

You know, any government that is imperfect, government that has oppression, any government that has injustice, any government that has corruption is by definition un Islamic. No. That's not true by the legal definition. If that was true, then that would then you would have to concede that we have not had any form of Islamic government since the abdication of Hassan bin Ali because we have always had with rare periods of exception. We have always had corruption.

We have always had injustice. We have always had oppression. I mean, the number of just, fair, righteous rulers that we have had as an ummah for the last one thousand four hundred years are notable precisely because they were so rare. I mean, the history of the Khilafa is a bloodbath. I mean, how can you explain, for example, all of the almost, you know, almost down the list of the most eminent scholars in Islamic history were in prison.

That was under Islamic government. Any government in order for it to be righteous or to be more righteous, to be less unjust, to be less oppressive. That's going to take a continuous struggle and a continuous effort on the part of people as has always been the case in Islamic history. Your real role is not to try to seize power. Your real role is not to try to take down a government.

Your real role is what it has always been, which is to speak truth to power and to try through practical ways within your sphere of influence to make things better, to make things more fair, to make things more just, to make things less corrupt. Because that's what we all really mean when you talk about the Islamic government. It mean what we what we all generally actually mean is we want governments that are better. We want governments that are that are fairer. We want governments that treat their people more decently.

And another key point that that most people mean when they talk about Islamic government, we want independence. We wanna actually have sovereignty. We wanna actually be able to make the decisions for our own society. So if you wanna be useful, then you have to pinpoint the exact things that are, you know, as you see them contradictory to Islam, prove that they are contradictory to Islam, either to the Sharia itself or that they contradict, you know, fundamental Islamic values. Find those the the the things that are undermining those principles and those values and work to change those things.

And whatever your government is, whatever form your government takes, there is no statement from Rasulullah that says that you have to establish the Khilafa. Even when he used the word Khilafa, it was not in reference to a political system that was articulated and organized and defined. When Rasulullah referred to he was referring it was the linguistic meaning of the word, meaning just whatever system of authority, whatever system of government, whatever system of rule came after him. Only later did we start to call, you know, transform the word from its linguistic meaning into a political term because there is no political system in Islam. There are specific rules and any system that either does implement those rules or pired genuinely sincerely aspires to or or articulates its commitment to implement those rules is an Islamic system.

So you have to be adaptable and you have to be realistic and do what the righteous believers have always done throughout all of Islamic history, which is to just struggle to try to make things better.