Does Islam offer a moral order capable of sustaining the essence of democracy?
In The Impossible State, Professor Wael Hallaq poses these striking questions, arguing that the common question—“Why can’t Islam internalize democracy?”—actually obscures the real issue.
Hallaq reverses the discussion by asserting that “the problem lies not in Islam’s compatibility with democracy, but in the moral structure of the modern state itself.”
According to him, the modern constitutional nation-state—whether democratic or authoritarian—is designed not for justice but for control. It monopolizes legitimate violence, centralizes authority, and turns law into an instrument of power.
The constitution becomes a secular sacred text legitimizing the state; divine or moral accountability is replaced by bureaucratic authority. Elections and parliaments may allow participation, but the logic of sovereignty, surveillance, and coercive law remains unchanged.
For Hallaq, the modern state is “ontologically impossible for Sharia”—not because Islam opposes order, but because the state cannot tolerate morality.
In contrast, classical Islamic governance was built upon a decentralized moral order.
Law belonged to God, not the ruler; its application rested not in a political bureaucracy but in networks of scholars and communities.
Sharia, rather than being a codified state law, was a moral ecology guiding every aspect of life—shaping judges, markets, families, and rulers alike through the principles of justice (ʿadl), consultation (shūrā), and public interest (maṣlaḥa).
Hallaq argues that this structure achieved the ethical aims modern democracies aspire to—accountability, limitation of power, and moral responsibility—without relying on state sovereignty.
Moreover, this system turned law into a living moral consciousness within society. Through institutions such as qadi courts and charitable endowments (waqfs), ordinary people were not merely subjects of law but active participants in its making and application. Law was embedded in daily life, shaped by the moral conscience of local communities. People were not simply governed by law—they co-created it. (Hallaq details how this operated in practice throughout his work.)
The modern state, by contrast, centralizes law and strips society of its moral agency, reducing people to managed objects rather than ethical subjects. Individuals are no longer agents of the law but merely its addressees.
Thus, for Hallaq, the sense of public responsibility and participatory morality that modern democracies seek once existed naturally within Islam’s moral-social order.
In this respect, Hallaq’s critique intersects with certain internal Western critiques of modernity. Jürgen Habermas argued that the modern state, through the market and bureaucracy, has “colonized the lifeworld.” John Rawls, meanwhile, sought to re-ground justice in the “public reason” of rational citizens. Both, however, looked for democracy’s moral foundation within the modern state.
Hallaq questions this very framework: Can the modern state serve as a vessel for moral order—or does it, by its very structure, destroy it? Whereas Habermas and Rawls try to moralize the state, Hallaq places morality above politics. For him, social legitimacy arises not from constitutional institutions but from moral subjects and communities.
Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, living through the turbulent birth of the modern state, had already grasped this essential dilemma. He sought the solution not in institutions but in the moral reconstruction of the human being. For Nursi, the endurance of democracy depended on rebuilding the moral foundations capable of sustaining it.
Ahmet Said Aydil
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