412 Abdessamad Belhaj
the Caliphate”.^54 What probably lies behind this Sunni concept of
fasād is the belief that public corruption changes the fiṭra, which is
creation’s original state of being disposed to monotheism.^55 In short,
there is a sort of contraction and expansion of Sharia with attention to
corruption; eventually, Sharia concedes certain of its rules to prevent
the spread of corruption in the public order. By the same token, it is
extended to “non-Sharia” areas for the same reason.
3. The Coercive Order Extended
Even more, Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim were worried that the
Muslim rulers continuously took recourse to non-Sharia procedures
and principles of coercion in the public order. Moreover, the rulers cit-
ed the limits of public policy coercion procedures offered by Sharia as
justification for the importation of these legal methods. If rulers decide
to exclude Sharia from public order because of its lack of pragmatism
or to employ a substitute for it as a source of authority, Sharia runs
the risk of vanishing. Ibn al-Qayyim’s pragmatic approach is found
in a central passage of his text where he relates a debate between Ibn
ʿAqīl (d. 513/1119) and an anonymous Shāfiʿī lawyer. In the course of
the debate, the Shāfiʿī defines siyāsa sharʿiyya as “everything that agrees
with sharia”.^56 His Ḥanbalī opponent, by contrast, suggested looking
at Islamic public policy as “an act that leads people closer to righteous-
ness and further away from corruption, even if it has not been decreed
by the Prophet and does not originate from the Koran”.^57 Ibn ʿAqīl
objects to the definition given by the Shāfiʿī asserting
[i]f by “whatever agrees with sharia” you mean that it is not in opposition
to the express instructions of the divine law, then you are right; but if you
meant that there is no other (acceptable) public policy except that which
is revealed in the sharia, that is an error and presupposes that the early
Muslims were mistaken, since it is well known to all those familiar with54 Lambton, Ann K. S.: Changing Concepts of Authority in the Late Ninth/Fif-
teenth and Early Tenth/Sixteenth Centuries, in: Alexander S. Cudsi and ʿAlī
al-Dīn Hilāl (eds.): Islam and Power, Baltimore 1981, p. 49.
55 Griffel, Frank: The Harmony of Natural Law and Shari’a in Islamist Theology,
in: Abbas Amanat and Frank Griffel (eds.): Shari’a. Islamic Law in the Contem-
porary Context, Stanford 2007, p. 46.
56 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, al-Ṭuruq al-ḥukmiyya, p. 29.
57 Ibid.
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