danger it poses to revealed truths and to the survival of the Muslimumma
built upon them. Once reason becomes at once a method and justiWcation for
the completeness of human knowledge, Khomeini contends, human beings
cease to acknowledge the unseen world and the metaphysical truths it em-
bodies, recognizing only knowledge of worldly phenomena as worthwhile
(Khomeini 1981 , 394 ). The result of such rationalist epistemology is not only a
truncated concept of the world, but an explicit justiWcation of the right of
humans to govern without divine intervention.
The challenge of the contemporary world as deWned by Khomeini and
Qutb is thus one of recognition and recuperation: to penetrate the haze of
cultural corruption masquerading as modernity and recapture the ‘‘authen-
tic’’ Islam articulated in the original Muslim community by realizing an
Islamic social system on earth. This requires in theWrst instance a rejection
of human sovereignty in any form: whether labeled democratic, communist,
or liberal, by presuming that human beings may legitimately deWne the moral
and legal rules under which they live, all such states transgress divine author-
ity as expressed in Islamic law (Shari‘a), the collection of prohibitions and
regulations derived from the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet. Qutb
calls this a condition ofjahiliyya, a term taken directly from the Qur’an and
which originally referred to the period of pre-Islamic ignorance in Arabia. As
deployed by Qutb, however, jahiliyyabecomes a condition rather than a
particular historical period, a state of ignorance that obtains whenever
a society ‘‘deviates’’ from the true Islamic path. Whereas ancientjahiliyya
was a function of simple ignorance, modernjahiliyyais a conscious usurp-
ation of God’s authority (Qutb 1991 , 17 ). All contemporary ills are the product
of this foundational transgression of human hubris.
Triumph over this essentially modern pathology, then, requires establish-
ingShari‘aas the sole source of legitimate sovereignty over domains often
divided into ‘‘public’’ and ‘‘private’’ (Khomeini 1981 , 28 – 30 , 55 ). As it is seen as
infallible legislation for almost all aspects of human existence,Shari‘a‘‘covers
every possible human contingency, social and individual, from birth to
death,’’ including matters relating to administration, justice, morality, ritual
washing, dispensation of property, and political treaties (Hodgson 1974 ,I: 74 ;
Schacht 1987 ). Some scholars have argued that the distinction in Islam
between ‘ibadat(duties towards God, for example, observance of religious
obligations) andmu‘amalat(duties towards one’s fellow men and women)
provides a justiWcation for distinguishing between the authority of religion
and that of government (Gibb 1962 , 198 ), much as liberal political theory
304 roxanne l. euben