Obeying the guardian and the sheikhs of the counter-revolution

Two video records circulated in the past days, one of them by Sheikh Ayed Al-Qarni launching an attack by Saudi Arabia against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and he disavowed his previous praise on him, on the pretext that he was fooled by him previously, and admits himself and his colleagues with naivety, and therefore he performs the duty of showing the deceived who are not They are still as before. The second is for Sheikh Salah al-Din Ibrahim from Palestine, in which he justifies his support for the president of the Syrian regime, Bashar al-Assad, considering that his position is the position of God and his Messenger!

Although each video’s “narrative” and its purpose are different from the other, they revolve around one idea that has long sparked controversy, which is “obedience to the rulers.” Ibrahim is fiercely fighting for the duty of obedience to the guardian, which is like the obligation to pray, and Al-Qarni performs the duty of obedience to the guardian, who does not accept bargaining with him, but his guardian is the leader of Muslims. That is, both men comment in its video recording on specific political facts, and mention specific names of political leaders: the president of Turkey, the president of the Syrian regime, the king of Saudi Arabia and his crown prince; yet each of them claims that he is talking only about a religious matter!

And because the political content in the Al-Qarni video is blatant and lacks any religious content, despite being crammed into issues (Circassians, heresies and the ideology of existence) in a political discourse that has nothing to do with neither the science of speech nor the concept of faith, as the stated purpose of the video is to strip a supposed Turkish leadership of the Islamic world for Asserting a supposed Saudi leadership for the Islamic world under the current leadership of King Salman and his son, as well as affirming the characteristic of “Islamism” over Saudi Arabia and removing it from Turkey, because Al-Qarni and those behind him perceive that this can be used as a weapon of religion in a political rivalry between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and some historical facts can also be recovered. To serve the same purpose, hence the video stipulated that the Ottoman Caliphate was an occupation, in an explicit restoration of the facts and atmosphere of the conflict between the Ottomans and the Wahhabis.

As for Abraham - who appears speaking from inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque - he insists on a central argument, which is that power is only for God and His Messenger alone, even if Ibn Taymiyyah himself, and the expression of this authority is the texts of the Qur’an and Hadith (God said and the Messenger of God), There is no room for any opinion here. Rather, the orders themselves are equal to him, so the prophetic command to obey the guardian, such as ordering the pilgrimage and circumambulation and determining the number of rak'ahs for prayers alike, and in all these orders we do not know its meaning and do not ask about it: (Why?), But we only comply and listen and obey, because God commanded that. Accordingly, the Prophet, may God’s prayers and peace be upon him, commanded us to obey our guardianship and did not specify a specific quality for us in the guardian who must be obeyed, nor did they discuss how they came to power. Rather, the requirement that they be “legitimate governors” is of the general expression!

Abraham reveals here a literal vision (not even a textual) in understanding divine commands and prohibitions, and he commits four shorthands: The first: that he is unaware of the relationship between religion and politics, and that his saying and his doing this is a political act par excellence, because by doing this he sided with a system but rather systems (he supports Assad and Muammar Gaddafi); on the pretext of complying with the command of God and His Messenger, although there is no (special text) that talks about what is happening in Libya and Syria, it is based on generalities that bear many interpretations.

The second: It reduces reference in the text alone, and then it excludes a huge historical legacy that has arisen around these texts: documentation, understanding, interpretation, theory and practice, that is, the pure text was not found alone without a human interpretative action that generations have been successive, and merged into history, so no There is a pure text, because the text is immersed in history from the moment it was said to the moment it was transmitted, documented, interpreted, and applied. The text has always remained in contact with the Muslim community on the diversity of its understanding and the accumulation of its methodologies in defining “God’s Almighty” from this text or that.

The third: It reduces the divine intent in the uttering of the matter and the prohibition, so there is no room to talk here about moral values ​​and concepts totally like justice, injustice, prostitution, known evil, and other macro concepts that are at the heart of religion, but rather from the heart of the divine legislative will.

Imams of Islam have recognized throughout history the syntax of command and prohibition, and discussed the amplitude of the legislative divine will of (command and prohibition) in the broad sense, and the formative will of divine action, to solve the problem of the relationship between commission and fate, and that the servant’s act does not contradict God’s fatal will. But it can contradict God’s legislative will when the servant does what God Almighty does not command.

Previous scholars also distinguished in the commands between what is reasonable meaning and what is purely devotional, either that it does not make sense of it or that we did not understand its meaning, just as they realized that the commands are varied and that some of them are absolute, and some of them are bound by a specific person, group or context, so its generalization or Downloading it in a non-contextual way contradicts God Almighty’s intention. Reasonable orders meaning are justified only when their cause is present but the matter was found for them.

Fourth: Abraham assumes that his understanding is the goal of God Almighty, and any violation of what he understood is that it is contrary to the goal of God, meaning that God’s intention only falls on the accord of Murad Ibrahim, although there is a distance between God’s words and His Messenger on the one hand, and the people's understandings and then their applications to orders And the prohibitions on the other hand, there is a general or complete judgment, which is the command of God Almighty and His Messenger is abstract from times and people, and there is a special and partial rule that is in the "provisions of the appointed" which are not limited to the text only but also include the diligence of individuals and opinion as well. When we convert the general or total order to a specific actual application of a specific time and person, we perform a process of interpretation, which is what the jurists call "realization of positions" because there is always a distance between the total judgment on the one hand and its applications on the other.

The total judgment remains total, because it expresses a typical form, or the maximum that must be measured or calibrated. The partial judgment is subject to constraints of context, and the possibilities available to individuals in its application, and the nature of their understanding of it as well, and all of these are relative issues that vary and vary. In conclusion, the moral responsibility is individual and arises - with God Almighty - according to the understanding and practice of each person of the total or general matter, and according to the amount of his knowledge and his vomit, his ability to search for God's will from him in the specific event.

And when Salah al-Din Ibrahim comes and imagines that the command of the Prophet to obey the guardian is an idolatry unreasonable meaning, and that it is an order to obey Bashar al-Assad and Muammar al-Gaddafi on appointment, he performs a purely interpretation process, because the prophetic order is a general matter and has many possibilities: that the matter remains on its general level and that it be Obedience is absolute even if they are ordered to disobey God, and then it will conflict with other orders, including a balance between the command of God and the command of the guardian; so God's command is the source of the command to obey the guardian and the branch cannot cancel the origin on which he was built, including God’s command to establish justice and prevent it from injustice, And the Messenger commanded to enjoin good and forbid evil, and c Change it by hand.

Including also hadiths that oppose the hadeeth of hearing and obedience, such as the hadith narrated by Al-Bukhari and Muslim: “People perish in this neighborhood from Quraysh. They said: What do we command? He said: If people retire from them.” Imam Ahmad bin Hanbal saw that the hadith of retiring from the ruler is contrary to the hadeeth of hearing And obedience, including the hadith narrated by Muslim: "He who strives with them in his hand is a believer, and he who strives for them with his tongue is a believer, and he who strives with their heart is a believer, and there is no faith behind this from a grain of mustard."

That is, the clarity and reliability that Abraham portrays is a naive image, in addition to the fact that the general meaning of all its connotations is presumptive, so the matter of obedience to the guardian is a general matter that helps presumptive connotation according to the rules of the fundamentalist audience, and therefore there is no categorical literal meaning that we have to comply with as Abraham imagines, Hence, the opinion is fraught with the text and understood from the moment it is received and transferred to its documentation, then its interpretation and compliance with it, according to what we understand of it!

The deletion of the entire space of opinion on the pretext of the existence of a pure text and a single literal meaning in which the same interpreter and the speaker are absent, so that only God and His Messenger are speaking in his tongue is: an illusion that does not exist in such a case; just as the argument that Abraham uses to justify divine commands is that it is that It requires compliance simply because it is "issued by God", an argument frequently used by Protestant theologians and used by the general contemporary Salafists, and disturbed by previous problems that we mentioned on the one hand.

It is also disturbed by the fact that the texts expressing God's will are also limited. What should we do in the absence of the text? Rather, even with the presence of the text, the legislative divine will may be hidden, and the texts may differ and contradict so the will of God is closed, and in all these cases we need to use opinion to devise a coherent approach to interpretation that helps us reveal the divine will, which scholars have done throughout history.

Moreover, the term "sedition" which is often used here divergent meanings, but - in its political significance - is intended to split, internal fighting, political turmoil and others, and the hadith has been explained that what is meant by sedition is what arises from the difference in the king's request where the right is not known from the nullified , Without the general and liquid meaning employed by the Grand Mufti of authoritarian regimes.

The revolution in the demand of the Imamate and the difference in the Imam and his policies constituted a basic article of discord and division in the history books, and then joined with that - with the development of the state and the extension of rule - the policies of rulers and the differences of the ruling families and the riots of soldiers and conflict between the states of the caliphate, so that the term "discord" in the late times turns To a fundamental tributary of the idea of ​​political obedience, and that opposing or departing from power is the basis of strife and its principle, not the act of the authority itself, its abuse and injustice, not even in partnership with it!

The central issue that those who convert “obedience to the guardian” into a religious belief is ignored is that going out to the unjust imam was a doctrine of a number of companions and after them from the jurists in the first three Hijri centuries, so Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani came and said: “This is an ancient doctrine of the predecessor, but The matter was settled on leaving that; when they saw it led to more severe than him; in the event of freedom and signed by Ibn Al-Shaath and others sermon to those who managed, "that is, the issue of the exit - and here exclusively concerned with the armed exit to remove the unjust ruler - is a question of meaning and tolerates discussion and interpretations. The fuqaha 'agreed to prohibit fighting with imams of injustice against those who came out against them from the people of the truth, and those who fought with them helped them in every way small and large, which is the truth of the Almighty saying: ( And do not depend on those who did wrong, and the fire will touch you).

And if this is in the armed exit, then the matter differs in the case of self-defense imposed by the developments of the political situation and its complications, as happened in Syria and Libya, away from the misunderstanding that Ibrahim and others expect of what actually happened. Moreover, the concept of obedience does not align with the concept of the national state in which we live; because obedience is part of a classical interconnected system in which there was no “political field”, no elections, parliaments, modern laws, an international system, etc., and all of this requires changes in understanding and the total reduction of Partial; God knows best.