Religion in our societies has never been a matter of belief alone. For much of our history, it was one of the languages through which society understood itself: family, authority, property, obedience, justice. It told people where they stood in relation to others, what was theirs, and what was owed of them.
Nor did religion belong to one political camp. Rulers invoked it, and so did those who rebelled against them. Conservatives appealed to it; reformers did too. Some found in it a duty to obey. Others found a duty to resist injustice. The argument, often, was not between religion and its opposite, but within religion itself. What does justice require? Who deserves obedience? Where does a ruler’s authority end? When does dissent become sedition, and when does silence become a sin?
Religion, then, did not give society a single answer. It also provided the language in which answers were contested.
With the modern state came another source of legitimacy. The individual — with rights, freedoms and interests — became a basis on which law could justify itself without deriving every rule from religion. Equality, for instance, could stand as a principle in its own right.
But this did not enter an empty space. It entered societies with settled ideas about family, guardianship, obedience and duty; about what was permitted and forbidden. The new did not simply replace the old. The two came to operate together. Sometimes they agree. Sometimes they pull in opposite directions. At times they inhabit the same law.
The Sultanate of Oman offers a clear example.
The country’s Basic Law makes justice, equality and equal opportunity pillars of society. It states that the state guarantees equality between women and men, and that citizens are equal in public rights and duties.
Yet Oman’s Personal Status Law approaches marriage from a different premise. It makes the guardian part of the marriage contract. A woman’s guardian concludes the contract on her behalf, whereas an adult man of sound mind needs no guardian.
The tension is clearer when a guardian refuses to allow a woman to marry a man she has chosen. The remedy is not that she becomes her own guardian, as a man effectively is. In circumstances set out by law, guardianship may instead pass to the judiciary. The guardian’s authority can be limited or transferred. The principle itself remains.
This is where the matter becomes interesting.
On one side stands a modern civic principle: men and women are equal before the law. On the other stands a legal structure derived from jurisprudence in which a woman occupies a different position from a man in marriage. When the two meet, one does not always defeat the other. More often there is an accommodation. The religious concept survives; the way it is exercised is reorganised.
The same tension appears in Oman’s relationship with international law. The Sultanate of Oman acceded to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, but entered reservations concerning parts dealing with marriage and the family where it considered them inconsistent with Islamic law.
The point is not simply that the state has violated one principle or upheld another. What matters is that the state itself reveals two sources of legitimacy that do not always coincide: equality on one side, the Sharia on the other.
From this follows the question that interests me most: who has the right to interpret religion when society changes?
This is not merely a dispute over texts. Disagreement within religion is as old as religion itself. The harder question is which interpretation can become law. Which reading may a judge enforce, a legislator entrench, and the state make binding?
Once a matter moves from books of jurisprudence and social custom into statutory law and the courtroom, the state has done more than apply an old religious rule. The location of authority has changed.
What once belonged, in part, to the jurist, the family or the community now belongs, in part, to the judge, the legislature and the institution. The concept may keep its old name. But the person speaking in its name is no longer the same.
That is why the familiar opposition between religion and the state tells us less than we think.
A modern state may preserve a religious concept, reshape it, narrow its effects or enlarge them. Law can entrench an inherited rule, but it can also transform that rule from within. Religion does not stand entirely outside the state. Nor does the state stand entirely outside religion.
Part of the difficulty Arab thought has had with modernity may lie in the assumption that history moves in a straight line: religion recedes as the state advances; inherited forms weaken as the individual gains ground. History is rarely so tidy.
People’s lives may change while an old concept remains. A word may survive while its meaning shifts. Authority once exercised by a father, a guardian or a jurist may pass to the courts and the state, even while the argument used to justify it remains religious.
People’s circumstances also change faster than the concepts through which they understand them. A woman studies, works, owns property and participates in public life on the same footing as a man, then reaches one part of her life where the law approaches her through a different conception of her place. The tension is not between two sealed worlds. It sits inside the same society, sometimes inside the same person.
So the most important question is not whether religion will survive or fade, or whether secularism will defeat it. Such questions reduce religion to a body of belief that expands or contracts. They miss its presence in the language through which societies understand what is permitted and forbidden, right and duty, justice and authority.
The more useful question is this: when people’s lives change, who has the authority to reinterpret the concepts that once ordered those lives — and which interpretation acquires the force of law?
Modernity did not simply remove religion. It placed other sources of legitimacy beside it. The issue now is how a society lives among sources of authority that sometimes agree and sometimes do not — and who, when they diverge, gets the final word.
That, perhaps, is where thought should begin.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
