Sayyid Qutb's fiqh al-waqii, or New Realist Science

No reader of al-'Adāla al-ijtimā'īya fi'l-Islām (Social Justice in Islam) can help but remark the pronounced way in which Sayyid Qutb begins his earliest effort at elaborating the conceptual basis for an Islamist resistance to classical liberalism and its heirs with a near total disregard for the complex history of Islamic thought's efforts to grapple with the question of divine immanence.¹ It is true that there are far more recurrences of explicit reference to divinity (uluhīya) in the sixth and last edition, published in 1964, than in the preceding five, whose publication record runs from 1949 to 1958. Nonetheless, those later additions of the term merely make more explicit and emphatic what was already fully in play in the original 1949 edition, which is that uluhīya is immanent in every particular of existence. This attention to divinity is not, however, as a problematic of legitimate knowledge or authentic faith—that is, it is neither a topic of doctrinaire apologetics and systemic elaboration, as it was for 'ilm-ul-kalām (rational theology), nor a constellation of systematic contemplations on the workings of inner faith, as it was for Sufism. Instead, it is an aspect, albeit a key one, of a fundamental comprehensive concern with Islam as a historical system of life. In that concern, divinity is not a mystery commanding contemplation or a question fostering speculation; it is a doctrinal point of departure that enables the articulation of a complex system of thought and praxis. Divinity is the principal institution of the historical Islamic system (nizām). This is why William Shepard discerns in the multiple editions of Social Justice in Islam published after 1949 an increased theocentrism that foregrounds the history of the doctrine of divine sovereignty while disregarding the history of speculation on the concept of divinity itself. Shepard offers this reading in support of a theory of development, by which account Qutb's concept of divine sovereignty becomes increasingly radical in response to textual influence—particularly Sayyid Abul 'Ala Maududi's Al-Mustalahāt al-arba'a fi'l-Islām (The Four Key Terms in Islam)—and as a consequence of Qutb's active involvement with the political movement al-Ikhwān-ul-Muslimūn just before the 1952 Egyptian revolution, which eventually led to his repeated prolonged imprisonment and torture by the Nasser regime and ultimately to his execution in 1966. Adhering to this theory, it is possible through textual analysis of the sequential editions of Social Justice in Islam to expose the way Qutb's concept of theocentrism developed from being merely the point of departure for the elaboration of a theory of social justice in 1949 into a prominent theory of political power by 1964. Despite the care taken with this exposition, however, what Shepard's reading draws attention to—in fact, what it succeeds in describing—is Qutb's increasingly emphatic reiteration of theocentrism as the principal concept of a system of material political power. For example, in the 1949 edition, the second chapter, "Tab'īya al-'adāla al-ijtimā'īya fi'l-Islām" ("The Nature of Social Justice in Islam") states:

One begins the serious research of Islam by clearly understanding its general foundational conception about the totality of the universe, life and humanity before considering its views on government and finance, or the relations between nations and individuals, etc. Certainly, all of these derive from this totality concept and cannot be adequately understood without a profound and correct understanding of it. . . .

Islam comprehends the nature of the relationship between the creator and creation, between humanity, the physical universe, and life, as well as the relationship between humanity and itself, between the individual and the collective and the entirety of human aggregates, and between generations of [humans]. All of this begins with a total concept whose outline is...