Soren
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Sharia law, god-focused as it is, attempts to deals with every aspect of muslim life, public and private, as life was in the 7th century or as life today can be conjured out of the cultural memory of that 7th century life. It invokes god and covers banking, marriage, cleanliness, religious practice, property and personal injury disputes and all the rest of life as it existed a millenium and a half ago..
What sharia is incapable of, and what renders it untenable beyond taliban-like atavistic attempts (doomed to bloody failure), is that it has nothing to say, and never will have, on the mundane. It is unable to deal with the mundane as mundane. It is utterly incapable to separate the divine from the mundane - god and caesar, holy and profane, mosque and state. Sharia iss blind to the mundane, the worldly. For sharia, there is no possible separation.
As a consequence, there is no guidance on how to run a municipality, a school council, a chook raffle, a club or university - except to run them as if. As if the minutea of rubbish collection, road maintenance, sport education or the allocation of research funds were divine matters, as if today's mundane concerns were the same as the worldly concerns of the 7th century.
Sharia codifies life as it was then - whole and small scale in villages and small town - and life as it is now must conform to that memory. But of course it won't and so life, the worldly, the mundane will make its own way. And there is the rub. Life will make its own way and sharia cannot contain it because sharia is stuck in the mundane of the 'back then'. And sharia is not a self-repairing system, so it will be forever stuck, never to catch up. The very definition of an anachronism.
I think this is at least one of the reasons why all jurisdictions purporting to be 'islamic' or sharia based at least, cannot shake off corruption, nepotism, tyranny and plain bastardliness. Sharia or Islamic rules are unfit for the flux of the mundane, the lowly, the daily grind which changes beyond recognition over time. In my view, this is precisekly wwhy it iss embraaced only by tribal societies( and probably tribal-minded individuals0 despitee its preteensions to universality. It iss unable to deal with thee varieety and flux that universality actually means. Islam is conformist first and last, that is its only universality.
Life today, the white noise of mundane change and flux, rubs up against Islamic jurisdictions and they must either ignore it or succumb to it. The former leads to psychosis (denial of reality), the latter to corruption as sharia attempts to mould the mundane to the ideals and strictures of a 1400 year old world - or vica versa.
The big stuff is unchanging but the little stuff is fluid, flowing and never the same. Sharia can only deal with the flux as if it didn't exist, as if flux was static. Sharia deals in contradictions and is therefore inpractical and consequently untenable. Sharia has the grip of a dying man on reality, cramped and creepy. It can capture the imagination only of the deaf.
Discuss.
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