This is a lexical entry that gathers the technical meaning of this term in Shahrur across his various books, and connects its multiple usages.
This entry belongs to the Shahrur lexicon. For reading by theme, one may refer to Shahrur’s major themes and shared concepts.
The meaning in Shahrur
Citizenship is a legal and political relationship between the individual and the state, based on equality in rights and duties, and on recourse to law as the regulating reference for public life. Here it is understood not merely as symbolic belonging or an affective bond, but as a civic loyalty that rises above narrow asabiyyas and prevents the relationship among people from turning into sectarian or racist conflict.
Distinctions
- It is not equivalent to mere belonging to a group or a homeland without legal commitment and equality in rights
- It differs from national or religious loyalty when these are made the basis of exclusion or of privileging a particular identity over the rule of law.
Places in his books
- Islam and Human Beings: citizenship in this source is a legal relationship based on respect for the law and equality among citizens, not merely symbolic belonging. It is the highest form of loyalty within the civil state, and it regulates the relationship of the individual to the group so that it does not turn into sectarian or racist conflict
What is adjacent to it and what differs from it
- Human Islam is re-founded Qur’anically as a system of values, freedom, and citizenship that transcends closed identity
- Value-based Islam is translated politically and ethically in freedom, citizenship, and resistance to tyranny
- The distinction between sin, misdeed, and wrongdoing distributes responsibility between forgiveness, reform, and persistence
- Freedom and human values constitute the criterion of Islam and the basis of resistance to tyranny
- The civil state regulates the public sphere by law, not by religious prohibition
- Citizenship is the highest form of loyalty in the civil state
- Citizenship is based on law and equality
- Citizenship is loyalty to the homeland and to the law
- National loyalty preserves identity
- Understanding Islam requires beginning with the Qur’an through a recitational method that establishes the distinctness of terms
- The concepts of loyalty, disbelief, and polytheism are reread on a value-based, not identity-based, foundation