Zeenat Adam argues that South African Muslim political discourse has become trapped within the assumptions of liberal democracy, and calls for a far more ambitious rethinking of political authority through the principles of Islamic governance.
Ahead of South Africa’s local elections, the political stage is once again crowded with debates, manifesto launches and earnest discussions about service delivery, governance and leadership. Muslim institutions have enthusiastically joined in with election indabas, radio debates, voter education drives and podcasts to encourage voters to the polls. The questioning has appeared rigorous, but the framework of thought remains remarkably confined, unambitious and comfortable within the existing political vocabulary.
We congregate to ask who should govern, without probing how political authority itself should be understood or designed. We have become fluent participants in a discourse imposed on us, rarely examining it. This is the first failure of our political imagination: that we cannot see beyond the system we have inherited. We have accepted the existing democratic arrangement as the ultimate horizon of possibility, without serious consideration of redesign, despite its glaring systemic flaws.
The limits of our political imagination
Great minds of political philosophy ventured much further. Plato viewed the democratic system as one that elevates appetite over reason, allowing the unskilled to rule and ultimately leading to chaos and tyranny. Aristotle catalogued the pathologies of democratic rule as a corrupt form of governance when rule by the many overrides the common good. Even the framers of the American experiment built constitutional constraints because they did not trust democracy in its entirety and deliberately engineered limits around majority rule.
Democracies worldwide have produced astonishing inequality, institutional capture, hidden hands of oligarchy and the manufacture of consent by concentrated media and wealth. South Africa has lived the demonstration: state capture on an astounding scale, and the hard lesson that changing the players does not change the pitch, meaning the outcomes of the game often remain the same. This is where Muslim political discourse has become most disappointing, because it accepts the boundaries without negotiation.
Islam begins from different premises
Islamic political thought begins with entirely different premises. The Qur’an establishes that authority is an amanah — a trust held before Allah, not a prize won in a popularity contest. It must be exercised through shura — deliberation, rather than the mere aggregation of preferences. It is bounded by ‘adl — justice that cannot be traded for expediency. And it is directed towards maslahah — the genuine welfare of society. Rulers are answerable to an authority higher than the ballot box, and hence the standard of accountability is elevated.
These are not decorative values to be appended to an otherwise unchanged system; together, these principles constitute a different philosophy of political authority. Al-Mawardi rooted this in the qualifications, responsibilities and limits of those entrusted with power. Ibn Khaldun looked beneath formal institutions to the deeper dynamics of solidarity, wealth, cohesion and decay: the elements that determine whether any political order survives. The early Muslim community, led by the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, did not ask how revelation could be made compatible with the Quraysh political order it encountered. Revelation itself was the revolutionary basis for challenging that order.
Yet today we do the reverse. We begin with an inherited system, consider the constitution almost sacred and untouchable, and search for Islamic vocabulary to bless it. We rename shura “Islamic democracy” as though the terms are synonymous, and consider ourselves good citizens of the republic while ignoring that shura is a principle of collective deliberation. Trying to mould shura to democracy and conflating it with the modern electoral system does not honour the Islamic tradition. It dissolves it. We may possess a rich political philosophy, but in using it decoratively and in subservience to a flawed system, we abandon our Islamic responsibilities.
Designing something better
If, instead, we begin with the principle that authority is a trust, not a trophy, then we can challenge the notion that selection for office rests on popularity alone. Any serious architectural design of a functional system of rule would incorporate genuine scrutiny of competence, integrity and public commitment. The current system does the opposite: it rewards persuasion, visibility and money, then expresses surprise when officeholders govern as they campaigned — through marketing, corruption or in cahoots with oligarchs.
Second, consultation must be deliberative, not merely aggregative. An election every few years, contested between machines funded by interests the public rarely sees, is not shura; it is a census of manipulated preferences. A more honest design would build standing structures of deliberation: councils drawn not only from political parties but from educators, jurists, economists, community leaders and, critically, those most affected by the decisions. Such bodies would not replace elected representation but serve to discipline it.
Third, accountability must be continuous, not cyclical. The Islamic principle of hisbah found institutional expression in the office of the muhtasib, whose remit included oversight of public conduct and those entrusted with authority. A modern equivalent is not difficult to imagine: genuinely independent accountability institutions, shielded from political appointment and removal, and empowered to sanction officeholders between elections. South Africa has the skeleton of such bodies, but they remain too vulnerable to the very politicians they are meant to restrain. The design flaw is blatantly obvious.
Fourth, justice must be structurally prior to expediency. The rules of the game must be harder to change than the players: judicial independence, fiscal transparency and anti-corruption machinery must be entrenched so that those they police cannot simply weaken or repeal them. We already have the diagnoses of our own pathologies. The Zondo and Madlanga commissions have revealed the decay of state capture, cadre deployment, patronage networks and criminality within governance structures, but too often the resulting constraints remain optional rather than punitive and enforceable, allowing the rot to fester.
The failure of the system is not simply in the politicians or political parties that our media personalities and ulema appear to interrogate in public forums. The failure lies in our imagination and the limits of our intellectual ambition and thought. We have accepted that the current framework is the only one, and we have enlisted even our deepest moral and intellectual traditions in its service, then question why we keep reaping the same results: corruption, failed governance, deteriorating services and crumbling infrastructure.
If revelation once gave a minority community in the midst of Quraysh political dominance the courage to disrupt and challenge the political assumptions of its age, why are we so reluctant to challenge ours? Do we have a collective intellectual deficiency, or has the normative model simply become too comfortable for us? The question we are afraid to ask is not whether or not to vote, or whom to vote for. It is whether the order we vote within is worthy of our consent — and, if it is not, whether we have the imagination to design something better.
Zeenat Adam is a former diplomat and an independent international relations strategist based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
