Which sovereignty?

In coming to a conclusion, Bahlul takes us to the crux of the problem. He does so by pointing out that “Islamic thinkers can (and many do) admit that there are at least two ways in which the people can be said to exercise power. First, it

¹

The debate between the two intellectuals has also been published in Italian in Habermas and Ratzinger 2005 and in English in Habermas and Ratzinger 2006.

is up to the people to accept or reject the divine message. [...] Second, people exercise power not just by choosing to live under ‘divine law’ at all but also by choosing how to live under such a law. Divine messages are subject to interpretation, and the interpretation is invariably carried out by human agencies, even when people attribute everything they do to divine guidance (providence)” (Bahlul 2000,295).

One option that is open to believers in the matter of sovereignty is to think of divine law as akin to moral laws. For even if moral laws are held to be of divine origin, “there is no reason to think that God’s authorship of the moral laws means that we cannot claim them as our own” (ibid., 296).

Bahlul finally draws a parallel between divine prescriptions and liberal principles: “All the ideas, principles, commands and injunctions that issue from ‘the mouth of God’ will remain inert, and utterly ineffective, so long as they do not dwell in the hearts and minds of people who are willing and able to act on them. The same applies to liberal principles, whose, validity [...] does not derive from popular acceptance” (ibid., 295). Regardless of where our basic principles come from, he points out, they “are not active agents, or forces of nature. Hence they can do nothing until they come to be espoused by living human wills, until they come to ‘inform’ human minds” (ibid., 295-96).

In light of this parallelism, Bahlul can make the argument that the people are sovereign even when the laws, norms, and principles they commit to arc regarded as “objectively right” or “true.” This, according to Bahlul, is true of the principles of liberalism and democracy, as well as of divine law. In short, he concludes, “divine sovereignty, so-called, need not conflict with popular sovereignty” (ibid., 297). This is a conclusion that flows from his central argument, namely, that the formal procedures of democracy are always so framed as to reflect principles recognized as objectively right, whether these are constitutional principles or divine laws.

’[-FZ/iTtw, from an Islamic worldview, “objectively right” applies to divine law, from a liberal-democratic worldview it applies to constitutional principles—the latter worldview being the outcome of a secularization process, the former instead being nonsecular, and antithetical to the Western tradition.

Furthermore, democratic principles can be interpreted in different ways depending on the interplay among the political forces that confront one another over the course of history. Arc divine laws amenable to multiple interpretations? Does Islam allow such plurality?