This is a glossary entry that gathers the technical meaning of this term in Shahrur across his various books and connects its multiple uses.
This entry belongs to Shahrur’s glossary. For reading by theme, one may refer to Shahrur’s major themes and shared concepts.
The meaning in Shahrur
Governance: a conception that makes the right to legislate, permit, and prohibit belong to God alone, and confines human authority to ijtihad and regulation within what revelation has not prohibited. In the authorial critical usage found here, it does not mean establishing a human religious authority that speaks in God’s name; rather, it exposes the deviation of this meaning when it is turned into a political slogan that grants coercion and oppressive legitimacy.
Distinctions
- It differs from political rule or state administration, because these belong to the sphere of changing human organization, not to the sphere of fixed divine prohibition
- It differs from religious authority or sacred delegation to human beings, because humans do not possess the right to add prohibitions or impose obedience in God’s name.
- It differs from governance in the sense of despotism or excommunication, because this is an ideological usage that conflates religion and power.
- It differs from divine governance or its historical stages, because what is meant here is the principle of restricting prohibition to revelation, not a theory of direct hegemony.
Passages from his books
- Religion and Power: In this source, governance is a central concept redefined as God’s exclusive prerogative in legislation, permission, and prohibition, not as a direct delegation to human religious authority. Shahrur uses it to distinguish the fixed divine sphere from the changing human sphere, and to deconstruct Islamists’ use of it in building despotism and excommunication
- Draining the Sources of Terrorism: governance in this source is understood as a human authority falsely attributed to God, and it applies only within the bounds of prohibitions, not as an unrestricted authority over people. For this reason, the author attacks it when it is used as a political slogan to produce coercion and oppressive legitimacy.
What is adjacent to it and different from it
- Divine prohibition is limited and human law is a changing regulatory field
- The heritage tradition conflated rule and governance
- Divine governance is a stage of direct hegemony
- Polar governance divides the world into Islam and jāhiliyya
- Governance in Hajj Hamad is a graduated series of stages
- Governance belongs to God means that prohibition is confined to revelation and humans are prevented from adding prohibitions
- Governance belongs to God alone
- Governance is a modern political concept
- The historical conflation of religion and power generated despotism and extremism
- Religion is a sphere of freedom and values, and the civil state and human ijtihad are the alternative to the governance of despotism
- The message, abrogation, and the gradation of governance transfer legislation to human ijtihad
- Rituals are outside political coercion, and freedom is a condition of worship and struggle