6 min read
People tend to be very quick to impose their interests and aspirations on others, and people do this no less with God. The feminist will argue for a feminist God, the secularist for a secular God, the theocrat for a political God, the ritualist for a quietest God, and so on. Yet God is not subject to the diverse and banal interests of His creation, fleeting views and ideologies that come and go as fads. Allah is not only Lord of the east and west (73:9) but is the Owner of time and what happens both within it, and beyond it. Rather than assuming He is caught up with our moment, culture, or context, we ought to recognise that He has an elevated perspective over all of time: past, present and future. In this sense I don’t believe it is sensible to accept binary ways of viewing the shari’ah which are predicated on age-related social paradigms such as religious vs secular, religion vs science, and so on. This also suggests that when we ascertain what God wants of us in our moment, we must recognise that His will is not bound by the nature of Muslim or non-Muslim populism, the battle between ideologies (secular or religious), and the politicisation of Islam (both in wider society and amongst Muslims themselves).