God and Caesar:
No Distinction

In Islam all secular matters, including political affairs, are subordinate to religious law

By Manuel Guerra Gómez

Mohammad never told his followers, as Jesus did, “Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21). Islam does not distinguish between the realm of God and the realm of Caesar. The City of God and the City of Man are not separated; rather, the secular world—even in its most mundane aspects, seemingly without any religious or ethical implications—is completely subordinated to the demands of the faith.

When a Muslim affirms, “Ana Muslim” (“I am a Muslim”), he is making a personal profession of faith, but that profession has global implications. The believer is proclaiming that he himself embraces Islam, but he is also proclaiming his membership in a worldwide spiritual community. The Ummat al-Nabi, or Community of the Prophet, enfolds all Muslims within a single religious community. But unlike the Christian faith, this religious body cannot readily be distinguished from a secular, civil society. The Umma involves every dimension of the Muslim’s behavior, both as an individual and as a citizen of this community; the Umma has common beliefs not only on religious and moral matters, but on judicial, administrative, and military affairs as well.

A universal religion

Though the religion of Islam was introduced to the world in the 6th century AD, Muslims believe that their faith is much more ancient—that it dates back to Adam, and is common to all men. According to a hadith, or saying traditionally attributed to Mohammad, “All men are born Muslim; it is the parents who make a man Jewish or Christian.”

Islam—the Arabic word indicates “acceptance” of the will of God and “submission” to it—is the name given by Mohammad to the religion that he preached. But Muslims believe that the religion was founded not by the Prophet but by God himself. Thus the term “Islam” can be taken in either a generic or a more particular sense. In the generic sense it refers to the laws set out by God for all of mankind—a law that is inscribed on human nature, and thus common to all men. In the more specific sense, “Islam” is a particular body of religious beliefs, set forth in the Qu’ran. However, because this religion is universal, the obligations that it imposes are common to all times and all men. Thus every human being can be defined in terms of his relationship with Islam.

Since “religion” and “Islam” are thus for all practical purposes synonymous, only the Muslim can be understood as truly religious; only he believes in God and accepts the divine command. Anyone who does not accept Islam—a Jew, Christian, or any other sort of believer—has fallen away from the religion ordained by God. He is an apostate.

In principle an apostate may have all his legal rights revoked—his marriage dissolved, his property seized, his contracts annulled—and he may even be subject to legal execution. In practice, such harsh disciplinary measures are usually imposed rigorously only on those who are formally Muslims, and then convert to another faith. On two different occasions I have asked learned Muslims, “Does a Muslim who converts to Christianity or to some other religion face any punishment?” On each occasion, I promptly received the reply that the punishment would be the death penalty.

According to the Qu’ran, “associators”—that is, polytheists, who “associate” other false gods with the one true God—have only two options: conversion to Islam or death. If they die unrepentant, they will be condemned to hell.

However, for the “people of the Book”—Jews and Christians—Islamic law offers a third option. They may be required to pay a special tax. During the first centuries after the rise of Islam, that tax was indeed collected from Jews and Christians living in Muslim states. With the passage of time, and the experience of Muslims living in societies where they formed a religious minority, Islamic states began to take a more tolerant attitude toward other faiths. But today, a new trend toward fundamentalism within Islam has produced a return to the old rigorous enforcement of the law.

A totalitarian tendency

Although the Islamic faith is private and personal, it does not end with the individual’s profession of belief; it gives that individual a place within a larger political and cultural framework. Today many Muslims give up their religious practices once they are beyond their teenage years. They may neglect certain prescriptions of Islamic law—especially the customs which centuries of tradition have added on to the requirements of the Qu’ran—and they may ignore the traditional standards of Muslim morality. But it is rare for a Muslim to renounce the Umma definitively, by becoming an atheist, an agnostic, or a convert to another religion.

Christians aspire to bring the Gospel to all nations, transforming both individual persons and their social environment. The effort to “baptize” a culture, to place all social institutions within the framework of a Christian outlook, follows logically from the acceptance of the Gospel; such an effort is dictated by the need for philosophical consistency. But even as they work to transform societies, Christians distinguish between two spheres: the secular and the religious. Each sphere has its own proper laws, and functions according to its own principles.

Islam, by contrast, is not content to imbue every family and every social institution with a religious understanding. As the Muslim sees things, every sphere of life must be submitted to the law of the Qu’ran. If a topic is not explicitly covered in the Qu’ran, then that question is governed by the Sunna, or tradition. (Sunna refers to the path that has been set forth; the word provides the name for the Sunni branch of Islam.) The secular world has no autonomy whatsoever; it is a world of creatures, dependent on God for everything and always subject to his will. Thus Islam upholds faith, but denigrates culture. After the Muslim conquests of the 8th century, the societies which were conquered by Islamic powers changed not only their religions but also their cultures; they became, and still remain, Islamic societies.

The Arabic term shari’a, which refers to a “well-traveled path,” was developed over the years to refer to the whole legal canon of Islamic laws, including both the divine commands set forth in the Qu’ran and the later developments ascribed to Islamic tradition. The shari’a is the path that all Muslims must follow—both in their individual behavior and in the conduct of their societies—if they are not to go astray. The shari’a cannot be confined to one territory, or differ from one place to another, because it affects all those who have made the Muslim profession of faith, and binds them no matter where they live.

The faithful Muslim firmly believes that the Qu’ran, complemented by the Sunna (which can resolve issues raised by modern developments which were not known at the time of Mohammad), contains not only basic truths of faith and essential moral norms, but also the essential principles and criteria by which one can judge all of social and political life in all its manifestations. Thus a true theocracy can arise from Islam: a government which believes itself to be acting directly on commandments set forth by divine authority.

There is no room in this faith for distinctions between “the law of the believer” and “the law of the citizen,” or between the organization of a religious community and that of a civil society. For a Muslim it is enough to know that whatever is allowed or forbidden is positively and expressly stated in accordance with the will of God—either directly in the Qu’ran or indirectly through the collected sayings of the Prophet (the hadiths) and the later decisions of orthodox juridical bodies. The first duty of a Muslim in government, therefore, is to organize society so as to facilitate the fulfillment of the shari’a law.

The historical development of the Sunni tradition within Islam shows how in practice the enforcement of the shari’a law can gradually evolve under two different standards. The law is still rigorously enforced in matters that pertain to the truths of the faith, the rituals of worship, the life of the family, and general moral norms. But on matters that involve political and administrative organizations, commercial activities, and judicial systems, the laws of the Qu’ran have been progressively softened and even to some extent secularized.

However, even within the Sunni tradition, Islam has never faced up to the demands of religious freedom. Indeed, Muslims tend to look upon religious freedom, or the tolerance of other faiths on an equal footing, as a sign of weakness. When “tolerance” is discussed within Islam, it is generally in the context of putting up with one evil in the interest of a greater good. The faith of Muslims does allow for freedom of conscience, but purely as a personal matter, and confined exclusively to the believer’s interior life. When Muslims impose the shari’a law, they allow freedom of conscience only insofar as it protects the individual’s inner beliefs; it does not entail any right to act in accordance with those beliefs, must less to announce them in public life. Certainly the freedom of conscience does not extend to a right to build churches, or to engage in acts of worship; these are strictly prohibited.

Finally, in Islamic states there is no sense that all citizens, Muslims or not, should be equal before the law. Devout Muslims—and above all fundamentalists—are convinced that their governments must be confessional states, and any separation of church and state would inevitably precipitate a slide into atheism and immorality.

The comprehensive model

Like the founders of other religions, Mohammad is a model for his followers, and their intercessor before God. But the life of Mohammad is more than a mirror in which believers can see themselves and judge their ways of thinking and acting. The Prophet is a model to be imitated always and everywhere, even in matters that are not specifically religious such as his fashion of dress, his way of greeting people, and his personal hygiene. Hence “fashions,” or modes of dress, have become fixed and even fossilized in the Islamic world. Muslims cling to their ways of dress long after all others have adopted new fashions. This, among other reasons, is why Muslim women still wear the chador, or veil, over most of their face.

The Sunna, or Islamic tradition, developed as a means of allowing for the imitation of Mohammad in modern life. The Sunna provides answers to questions about how the Prophet would have acted in situations which are not explicitly covered by the Qu’ran.

The ultimate objective of Islam is to bring religion and government together under one authority, so the nation-state enforces shari’a law in the political and cultural worlds. This goal was established for Muslims by God; occasional attempts to re-interpret the Qu’ran so as to lessen the force of this command have always eventually been rejected.

Everyone who believes in God belongs to one family; as the Qu’ran teaches, “all believers are brothers.” The strict monotheism of the faith—the belief in a God who is utterly and absolutely indivisible—prompts Muslims to seek unity in all other areas. They are the people of one God (Allah), one prophet (Mohammad), one holy book (the Qu’ran), one leader on earth (the caliph or imam), one father of the human race (Adam), and ultimately one family—the Umma, governed by the one law, the shari’a.

While Islam is also a personal faith, requiring an individual submission to God’s will, the Muslim acquires his understanding of the faith within the context of the Islamic community, the Umma. All of his social actions, and all of his family life, will be rooted in this community. The Muslim believes that when the Umma extends to all mankind, then we will have regained the original unity of the human race.

Proselytism and jihad

In our era proselytism has lost favor; even the word itself is not “politically correct.” But by his very nature, man is driven to communicate to others—especially to his friends—what he thinks is good. As Pope John Paul II taught in Redemptoris Missio (39), it is fanatical proselytism—in which the believer goes beyond communicating his faith, and tries to impose it on others by force—that is wrong.

Proselytism is essential to Islam; it is a basic duty of the Muslim to give testimony to God—to his greatness as his creator and to his fidelity to all those who practice Islam. The Muslim profession of faith, or testimony, follows a set formula: “I testify that there is no God but God, and Mohammad is his Prophet.” Conversely, the Islamic understanding of proselytism obliges the believer to impede—and, if it is within his authority, to prohibit—any form of proselytism by non-Muslims. The most obvious method of fulfilling that obligation is by prescribing the death penalty for those who convert from Islam to Christianity.

The term “jihad,” which is so well known in the Western world today, is actually an Arabic word meaning “struggle.” What is known in other languages as “holy war” is rendered in Arabic as “the struggle on the way to God.” The term “jihad” can have a number of different meanings. The term refers first and foremost to the “greater jihad,” or interior struggle, of every believer. This is the struggle that is carried out by the individual on the moral, ascetical, and mystical plane, against his passions and his concupiscence, against errors and distractions that might lead him away from the path to God. This is the most important struggle or jihad for the believer, since it involves his attempt to achieve the perfection of Islam, the submission to the divine will.
But there is also a “lesser jihad,” or holy war: a military campaign undertaken as a means of making all people Muslims. The first objective of any such campaign is not to kill to infidels, but to extend the laws of God to other peoples, and eventually to the entire world. At times the “lesser jihad” can refer to agricultural work, or even to commercial enterprises; in Senegal, for example, some religious guilds carry out their work in a communal spirit, seeking thereby to fulfill the will of God. And the “Green March” organized by Moroccan Muslims, who occupied the Spanish Sahara unarmed, but holding copies of the Qu’ran, certainly qualified as a “lesser jihad.”

The classical tradition of Islam, carried down to our times principally by the Shi’ite branch, divides the world into two sectors. Those societies which are ruled by Muslims—assuming that they are governed in accordance with the shari’a law—are known as the “dwelling of Islam.” These countries are submissive to the will of God, and it is wrong for Muslims to make war on them. But the non-Muslim countries abide in “the dwelling of war,” and since there cannot be any peace within societies which do not submit to God’s will, it cannot be an offense to wage war on them. Fundamentalist Muslims today would classify many ostensibly Muslim countries as falling in “the dwelling of war,” on the grounds that they have been contaminated by Western materialism.

In the 20th century, at least in Western culture, the term “holy war” has taken on such pejorative connotations that it is difficult even to explain the concept. But among Muslims—except among Sufis, the most mystical adherents of the faith—the term “jihad” is most commonly understood to refer to the “lesser jihad,” the military campaign. The Qu’ran devotes 150 aleyas, or verses, to the military version of jihad, laying out the grounds for both defensive war against aggressors and offensive war against infidels. And the Qu’ran makes it clear that those who die in such a military campaign gain forgiveness of their sins and entrance into paradise. So through the “lesser” struggle, the believer can win victory in the “greater” struggle.

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