In a compromise agreement with hardliner opposition, the new President of war-torn Somalia, Ahmed Sheikh Sharif, will adopt Islamic Sharia as the law of the land.
But will this help restore order to the country, and what does it really signify in the present context?
While the spectre of Sharia law sets off alarms in the Western world, for the Somalis themselves, reaching political consensus on the issue of Sharia does not necessarily signal a radical shift in the parameters governing their existence.
Islamic norms and ideals have shaped Somalia society for centuries. Most Somali have always lived according to Islamic precepts. Somali’s secular legal code ceased to operate in 1993, and Islamic legal principles have been filling the vacuum ever since.
Islam can be a great source of legitimacy for despotic governments: Syad Barre agreed to a similar proposition at an early point in his rule.
A stratagem for appeasing religious leaders, it was never implemented, as this would have meant ceding temporal and moral authority to opponents of his regime.
Even when the intention is sincere, there is a more critical problem. Declaring Islamic law paramount is one thing — institutionalising the Sharia raises a range of issues.
The problem is not at the source (the Koran and the Hadith, or traditions of the Prophet). The real issues arise farther downstream, so to speak. The gap between ideal and application is unavoidable in any system of secular or religious justice.
The Muslim poet and scholar, Jalaluddin Rumi, used the metaphor of a pure spring located high above the city to address the Sharia problem:
“Consider the water that flows in Turut towards the city. There, where the fountainhead is, see how pure and fine it is!
“But when it enters the city and passes through the various quarters and the houses of the inhabitants, so many people wash their hands and feet and other parts in it, and their clothes and their carpets, and the urine of all the quarters and dung of horses and mules are poured into it and mixed with it.
“Look at it when it passes out of the other side of the city! Though it is still the same water, turning the dust to clay, slaking the thirsty, making the plain verdant, yet it requires no discriminator to discover that the water has not retained its former clarity and that disagreeable things have been mingled with it.”
Rumi observes: “The believer is sagacious, discriminating, understanding, intelligent.” He was, of course, referring to conditions where this public good and its management were already institutionalised.
The Sharia has always governed family law and the domestic affairs of Muslims across the larger region.
The rise of Islamic Courts in southern Somalia represented an essentially incremental expansion of the Sharia to the commercial sector and to criminal cases in circumstances where ethnic factors complicated administration of Somali customary law.
Before colonisation, culumo religious leaders shared power with clan elders, and the Islamic Courts Union formalised the same arrangement.
In practice, the Islamic courts were localised institutions and the Sharia figured as a court of appeal, invoked when the lower elders’ court failed to resolve a case or provided cause for parties to challenge their decision.
Implementation of the Sharia consensus should be straightforward if this simply means the courts will resume operation as arbitrators of the law.
If it involves elevating the Sharia to the paramount national institution defining law and governance, Somalia’s ongoing power struggle will probably intensify.
Questions that immediately come to mind are:
1) Which madhabu, or school of Islamic jurisprudence, will serve as foundation for legal practice?
2) Who will be the authority behind it? and,
3) What will become of the clan leaders, elders councils, other civil actors, and cultural practices providing the critical barrier against societal anomie and chaos?
Most Muslims in East Africa, including the Somali, are Sunni of the Shafi school.
Differences among the four Sunni schools are relatively minor, and the madhabu issue would not have posed a problem in Somalia at independence in 1960 or even as late as 1993. But agents of Wahhabism, have taken centrestage during the interim.
Wahhibism began as a reformist religious movement based on the teachings of Abdul Wahhab. It was installed across the Arabian peninsula by the conquering armies of Ibn Saud during the latter decades of the 19th century.
Based on the literal interpretation of Islamic sources and emblematic of Saudia Arabia’s religious conservatism, Wahhabism has provided a template for even more extremist phenomena like the Deobandi movement’s Taliban in Afghanistan and the anti-Western Salafi militancy of Al Qaeda.
It should also be stated that Wahhabi stress on personal discipline and as a driver of social reform explains its attraction to modern Muslims.
Such qualities recall Weber’s Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic, and account for why Somali Wahhabis are now a dominant force within the private sector at home and across the diaspora.
The Islamic Courts movement emerged at a point in post-state Somalia marking the confluence of reformist religious and economically resilient forces.
The ICU provided a veneer covering significant religious and political differences distinguishing the militant jihadi faction led by the former Al-Ittihad leader, Hassan Dahir Aweis, and the movement’s Muslim Brotherhood-style progressives and civil society professionals.
Although the radical Islamists claimed a central role in developments leading to the rise of the ICU, factual analyses of the events do not support this.
Before the intervention of neighbouring states and those prosecuting George W. Bush’s Long War on Terror, Aweis and his colleagues controlled only three of the city’s 16 courts, and Al Shabaab was a s-––mall militia specialising in murder and assassination.
The events of 2006 transformed internal power relations, first placing Aweis and an expanded Al Shabaab in control of the ICU, which led to its demise following Ethiopian intervention on behalf of Abdullahi Yusuf’s feeble Transitional Federal Government.
The conflict cycle instigated by these events appears to have gone full circle when Ahmed Sheikh Sharif, leader of the moderate Islamist faction, linked up with the ethnically representative but yet to be actualised TFG as its new president.
These political developments and the Sharia law pact have not, however, curbed the hardliner’s military insurgency spearheaded by Al Shabaab.
Political scientist and long term Somalia analyst Ken Menkaus divides developments unfolding in post-state Somalia into several distinct phases: The clan civil war, the spread of lawlessness, and the regionalisation of power under local warlords and other clan-based leaders.
This provides the context for a contributor to the Hiraan Online website, who castigated Ahmed Sheikh Sharif for joining the TFG alliance of recycled clan politicians and warlords.
Somalia, he argues, has undergone a paradigm shift — society has retreated from the clan-based politics and conflict of the past, embracing Islam as its fundamental organisational force in its place.
While many may dismiss this hypothesis out of hand, evolving socio-economic conditions in Somalia lend it a degree of support.
The current stasis, viewed through the prism of Mahmoud Ibrahim’ insightful study, Merchant Capital and Islam, displays a number of intriguing parallels with those in Mecca and Arabia when the Prophet Mohammed introduced Islam.
A minor node in the networks linking Mediterranean powers like Byzantium and Rome, Yemen, and Persia at the onset of the 6th century, Mecca’s commercial star began to rise during the following decades.
This was to have profound consequences for the city’s static social order. Its location along trade routes and the annual pilgrimage to the Kaaba underpinned the growing prosperity of Mecca’s merchant class.
Initially, the accruing capital reinforced Mecca’s rigid traditional society — belief in the deities inhabiting Mecca’s haram, a primary source of its commercial wealth, soared.
Agriculture was limited to the highlands of southern Arabia and isolated pockets.
Products of aromatic plants marketed through long-distance trade generated considerably more value than foodstuffs produced for local markets — and both were controlled by Arabia’s royalty and landed families. This meant Mecca’s prospering merchants could not invest in the means of production.
Capital accumulation normally reinforces the position of an economic elite; in Mecca, the fortunes of the merchant class instead acted to intensify the social order’s internal contradictions.
Prosperity also attracted settlers, altering the internal balance of tribes, widening the gap between rich and poor, and exacerbating other challenges threatening the status quo based on clan solidarities, status and wealth.
Ibrahim meticulously traces the introduction of elements of a new order from written contracts to allegiance to the larger umma, and how elite resistance to Mohammed’s Islamic reforms morphed into civil war.
The social revolution accompanying the triumph of Islam insured the dominance of merchant capital over tribe and clan: The decline of the tribe or clan as a social unit ... was accompanied by a decline in the authority of tribal and clan leaders. Tribal institutions were no longer able to meet the needs of a growing dependent population.
This not only made the gap between the rich and poor more visible, but also narrowed the social base of the wealthy, which exposed them to threats of social violence.
Despite his focus on economic forces and the wider regional social order, Ibrahim acknowledges the religious significance of Mohammed’s message.
Prevailing over the arrogant insularity of Jahliyya Arabian society required the spiritual agency of a prophet.
Those familiar with the congruencies and contradictions of contemporary Somalia, where crisis acted to reinforce the traditional clan-based politics while providing new opportunities for accumulation, should find it easy enough to connect the dots.
For sagacious and discriminating Muslims, the concern is not Sharia law, but the distance separating its more vociferous advocates in the city from its upstream source.
Source: The East African
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