What kind of government do we need?

KARACHI: This is with reference to Tazeen Javed’s “What kind of government do we need?” (July 16).  This article raises several important questions. Not all of them can be answered and not all answers can be agreed upon, but some of the questions can be clarified by shedding light on some of the key words used — I’ll use two terms, theocracy and caliphate, to elucidate.

Theocracy is understood as the government of a state by immediate divine guidance; or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided. In mediaeval Christianity, God was considered the monarch, ruling over all mankind, with the pope as the ecclesiastical lord and the king as the temporal lord. Hence, a theocracy is impossible among Muslims today as no one can lay claim to “immediate divine guidance” with ecclesiastical or temporal powers.

Caliph refers to the successor, or representative.  In the context of this article, the term caliph refers to the political successors of the Holy Prophet (pbuh) and not the representatives of God on earth, as understood in the Christian tradition, and hence, a caliphate differs from a theocracy.

As for the writer’s derision for “hankering for something which never existed”–isn’t it a good thing? A world free of murder – and other evils – has never existed; but I hope we will be allowed to hanker after a world without these evils. As Oscar Wilde said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” And as Ghalib wrote, “I sing by the warmth of the pleasure of imagination/I am the nightingale of the uncreated garden.”

Published in The Express Tribune, July 18^th, 2010.