One of the most contested questions in American Muslim discourse concerns the proper role of Muslims in U.S. politics and the normative limits that should guide Muslim political actors, particularly regarding whether their decision-making must remain bound to the detailed rulings of the sharīʿa. Two major approaches have emerged: one argues that Muslim politicians may rely on jurisprudential tools such as maṣlaḥa (public interest) and ḍarūra (necessity) as flexible mechanisms for advancing communal welfare without strict adherence to legal particulars, while the other maintains that the explicit rulings of the sharīʿa cannot be set aside and must continue to delimit political action. Both perspectives affirm the authority of the sharīʿa[1] but diverge in how the sharīʿa is to be conceptualized and operationalized. There is broad agreement across American Muslim communities regarding the permissibility and desirability of Muslim political participation[2] and contemporary discourse rarely questions whether Muslims may hold office or engage in democratic processes; earlier positions that deemed democracy incompatible with Islam have largely faded.[3] As a result, current debates focus not on the legitimacy of participation but on the proper frameworks for applying Islamic ethical commitments within a democratic political order.
The central tension, therefore, is the extent to which the particulars of sharīʿa should dictate political engagement.[4] This tension is best described not as a problem with political participation itself, but as an American Muslim political dilemma: a dilemma generated by competing frameworks for translating religious commitments into political action. How can Muslim officeholders exercise moral discernment in shaping policy and alliances while remaining faithful to the overarching objectives of the sharīʿa? What frameworks allow them to prioritize and navigate competing moral goods and harms without compromising core Islamic principles? Finally, how might they engage with diverse communities, including those whose values diverge from Islamic ethics, in ways that advance the interests of American Muslims? These unresolved questions reveal that the dilemma lies not primarily in the political landscape itself, but in identifying principled frameworks for translating Islamic ethical commitments into effective and morally coherent political action relevant to America’s social and political realities.
This essay argues that the persistent hesitation surrounding Muslim political engagement stem from an incorrect framing of the relationship between the American Muslim and political position. While the particulars of sharīʿa as well as maslaha serve important juridical functions, their widespread deployment in political discourse has obscured a more practical method. I contend that Muslim participation in American politics is better framed through the Islamic principle of hisbah (commanding the right and forbidding the wrong, al-amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-l-nahy ʿan al-munkar), which offers a morally coherent and normatively grounded approach that neither abandons the sharīʿa nor reduces it to rigid legalism. To advance this argument, the essay first examines how contemporary ʿulamāʾ (Islamic scholars) theorized the relationship between religion and politics. It then argues that these frameworks are not only misaligned with the normative parameters of the sharīʿa but also insufficiently effective as mechanisms for navigating the practical demands of political life. Finally proposes a reframing of Muslim political engagement that situates it within this ethical imperative rather than within exceptionalist logics of necessity and pragmatism. Whereas scholars such as Sherman Jackson[5] and Mohammad Fadel[6] focus on legitimizing Muslim participation in American politics for non-Muslim audiences who presume an inherent incompatibility, this essay concentrates on clarifying the criteria that should guide Muslim political actors themselves. While this essay focuses on the dilemma of Muslim political engagement in the American context, existing scholarship on the American Muslim political engagement remains limited. Nevertheless, despite significant contextual differences, I assume that the arguments and strategies developed by Muslim movements abroad continue to inform and shape the political reasoning of American Muslims.
Over the past century, postcolonial Islamic political thought has largely articulated two dominant models for negotiating the relationship between religion and politics. The first is associated with Islamist movements, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood, which view the modern state as the primary vehicle for the revival of Islam in Muslim societies.[7] For Islamists, political engagement is not merely permissible but constitutive of religious life itself, insofar as the state functions as the institutional mechanism through which the sharīʿa can be implemented and safeguarded.[8] While significant disagreement exists regarding the structure, scope, and democratization of the state, the centrality of political authority remains constant across this intellectual strand. Influential figures such as Rashid Riḍā, Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī, and Sayyid Quṭb, despite notable differences among them, shared the conviction that Islamic revival is inseparable from the consolidation of political power.[9]
The second dominant strand may be described as political quietism, a posture historically associated with Sufi traditions and Salafism. This orientation emphasizes withdrawal from political engagement based on the belief that politics and state institutions are inherently corrupting of religious life and spiritual integrity.[10] For centuries, many members of the ʿulamāʾ promoted this ethic of disengagement, presenting it as the normative framework governing relations between religious authority and political power. Importantly, political quietism did not entail the complete neutrality towards political structures and power. Rather, religious scholars continued to insist that political authority ought to be regulated by Islamic law, even as they largely refrained from direct participation in political processes or institutional governance.[11]
The posture of Salafi political quietism underwent a notable transformation in the context of the Arab Spring uprisings.[12] In several Muslim-majority societies, including Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Yemen, Salafi movements shifted from principled disengagement to active political participation through the formation of political parties and electoral engagement.[13] This shift was frequently justified and explained through the maxims of maslaha and ḍarūra. Salafi scholars and activists argued that political participation had become necessary in order to preserve the Islamic character of the state, prevent the marginalization of the sharīʿa, and counter the influence of explicitly anti-religious or secularist political actors.[14] Sufi traditions similarly rely on these maxims, though they reach markedly different outcomes. For many Sufi scholars, maṣlaḥa is located in the presumed expertise and experiential knowledge of political elites, whose professional competence in governance is seen as superior to that of religious scholars. As a result, political authority is granted broad autonomy in managing societal affairs, while religious actors prioritize moral cultivation over political involvement.[15]
The fundamental problem with these approaches is their conceptual vagueness. While each provides a general attitude, either toward the pursuit of state power or toward withdrawal from it, neither furnishes Muslim political actors with concrete criteria for how the sharīʿa should be operationalized in day-to-day political judgment. In practice, this leaves those attempting to faithfully integrate Islamic norms into political life with little substantive guidance. Consequently, when the Islamist or Salafi movements in Egypt presented their visions for political engagement, their programs consistently lacked specificity and methodological rigor.[16]
To expand upon this, a central concern in grounding Muslim political engagement in maṣlaḥa and ḍarūra lies in the stringent conditions that govern their juristic application. When transposed uncritically into the political realm, these concepts are often invoked in ways that are inconsistent, imprecise, or normatively overstretched. In the case of maṣlaḥa, classical jurists placed clear limits on its scope. One such condition stipulates that any claimed muslaha must be consonant with the maqāṣid of the sharīʿa. As articulated by the Andalusian Mālikī theorist al-Shāṭibī, this maxim requires that the asserted interest neither contradict a foundational principle of Islamic law nor conflict with its established evidences. In practical terms, a valid maṣlaḥa must align with the higher aims of the sharīʿa and the recognized goods it seeks to preserve. The interest must be of the same genus as those protected interests, or at least sufficiently related to them, and not alien to their moral logic, even in the absence of explicit textual validation. Properly understood, he asserts, maṣlaḥa either secures a benefit the sharīʿa intends to realize or prevents a harm it seeks to avert. [17]
When applied to contemporary American Muslim political engagement, this condition complicates claims that actions such as a Muslim candidate’s participation in a gay pride parade, undertaken in pursuit of electoral endorsement or political capital, constitute a valid maṣlaḥa. Political office in and of itself is not an explicit objective of the sharīʿa, nor does its acquisition necessarily ensure the realization of its higher aims. Moreover, such symbolic participation raises the further question of whether a Muslim candidate’s public presence in these contexts undermines core objectives of the sharīʿa, such as the preservation of religion, or implicitly legitimizes ethical positions that Islamic moral reasoning deems impermissible. In this regard, the invocation of maṣlaḥa risks collapsing into a utilitarian calculus divorced from the normative hierarchy of Islamic law.
Similar limitations arise in appeals to ḍarūra. Classical jurisprudence restricts the application of necessity to conditions of actual, present hardship rather than hypothetical or anticipated scenarios. Al-Shāṭibī emphasizes that inductive examination of the law demonstrates that hardship is not established through conjecture; imagined harm carries minimal legal weight, as anticipated outcomes frequently fail to materialize. Legal concessions, therefore, are justified only in response to real and operative hardship, which serves as the effective cause (ʿilla) for exceptional rulings. The absence of such genuine necessity, concessionary reasoning is unwarranted.[18]
Applied to the context of attending a gay pride parade, the invocation of ḍarūra (i.e. it is necessary for political success) fails to meet these criteria. American Muslims cannot plausibly characterize their social or political circumstances as constituting extreme or existential hardship that would necessitate otherwise impermissible actions. Even were such hardship assumed, establishing relationships aimed at electoral success offers no guarantee of attaining political office. Nor does election itself ensure the removal or alleviation of the purported hardship. The speculative nature of these outcomes further undermines claims of necessity, rendering the application of ḍarūra jurisprudentially tenuous.
Conversely, the opposing approach, which frames Muslim political participation around strict adherence to the particulars of the sharīʿa, suffers from a conceptual narrowing of maṣlaḥa itself. Classical scholars did not treat maṣlaḥa as external to the sharīʿa but rather as an integral dimension of its legal and moral reasoning. To omit maṣlaḥa from discussions of politics is therefore to disregard a principle that the sharīʿa itself explicitly affirms. Scholars of siyāsa sharʿiyya (Islamic political thought) have consistently employed maṣlaḥa both as a legislative tool and as a justification for political action. Ibn Taymiyya, the prominent Hanbali scholar, sharply criticizes restrictive interpretations of maslaha, noting: “Some people limit maslaha to the protection of life, property, honor, intellect, and religion. This is incorrect. Maslaha includes both the attainment of benefits and the prevention of harms, while what they [other jurists] mention pertains only to the prevention of harms within those five essentials.” He further asserts that maṣlaḥa affords the jurist a degree of discretionary authority to determine when an action yields a preponderant benefit, emphasizing that nothing in the sharīʿa negates or prohibits such reasoning.[19]
Thus, while maṣlaḥa is unquestionably bounded by the obligations and prohibitions of Islamic law, reducing it to a narrowly defensive tool misrepresents its juristic function. Properly understood, maṣlaḥa operates within a moral grammar of comparative evaluation, of better and worse, rather than within the binary logic of obligatory and prohibited alone. Political relationships, accordingly, should not be assessed solely in terms of guaranteed outcomes or formal legality, but in terms of whether they contribute to more favorable moral and social conditions or prevent more harmful alternatives. This evaluative framework points toward ethical discernment rather than juridical exceptionalism.
It is from this foundation that Ibn Taymiyya departs in his assessment of the moral and ethical responsibilities of a political actor. Unlike his predecessors, who tended to situate politics exclusively within the rational, such as maslaha, or exclusively within the revelational realm, Ibn Taymiyya sought to reconcile these dimensions. In doing so, he developed an unprecedented framework for evaluating and regulating the legitimacy and ethical propriety of political actions and behaviors. To achieve this reconciliation, Ibn Taymiyya identified hisba as the appropriate framework.[20] Through hisba, one can properly optimize the rational process of maṣlaḥa while accommodating the dynamic realities of social and political life, all without undermining the the sharīʿa. It allows the sharīʿa to remain the central source of moral and ethical guidance, while avoiding the rigid constraints of formal legal (fiqh) manuals, and provides a more nuanced method for evaluating political conduct.
The principles of hisba recognize the non-binary nature of diverse communities and political decision-making. Whereas maṣlaḥa requires predetermined sharīʿa approval and a high likelihood of achieving the desired benefit, hisba prioritizes process over guaranteed outcomes. Its evaluative language emphasizes comparative terms, such as better or worse, rather than absolute binaries of permissible or impermissible. Consequently, Ibn Taymiyya,[21] along with the eminent Shāfiʿī jurist al-Ghazālī,[22] approach hisba in terms of increasing the quantity or quality of benefits and mitigating harms. This process-oriented approach allows rational judgment to play a meaningful role in political decision-making while maintaining the authority of the sharīʿa. At the same time, the focus on benefit and harm ensures that the particulars of the sharīʿa are neither overlooked nor compromised.
To clarify this process, Islamic scholars have established conditions for the proper execution of hisba. A key condition is recognition of the moral and ethical hierarchy: not all good is of equal importance, nor are all evils equally detrimental. As al-Ghazālī notes, conducting hisba requires one to “begin with what is more important before what is less important: meaning to prioritize in the call [to goodness] starting with the essential duties and obligations first, then addressing lesser matters if necessary.”[23] Since the sharīʿa does not always pre-determine the relative weight of competing goods and evils, it falls upon the individual, in this context, the American Muslim politician, to exercise rational judgment in conjunction with Islamic maxims such as maṣlaḥa and darura, alongside the overarching objectives of maqasid. Hisba, therefore, provides the Muslim politician with a flexible and principled framework to navigate political realities, including social, legal, and financial constraints, without compromising the authority of the sharīʿa.
Another condition of hisba concerns the consideration of consequences. Al-Ghazālī emphasizes that the act of commanding right and forbidding wrong must avoid causing harm greater than the harm being addressed.[24] Unlike maṣlaḥa, which often presupposes predetermined acceptable outcomes, hisba allows greater flexibility in weighing potential consequences. Within this framework, established legal maxims such as “If two harms conflict, then adopting the lesser of the two is obligatory” (idhā taʿāraḍat mafsadatān fa-al-akhḏu bi-akhaffihimā wājib) and “Preventing harm takes precedence over attaining benefit” (yuqaddamu dafʿu al-mafsadah ʿalā jalbi al-maṣlaḥah) can be applied with nuance. This approach permits reasoned deliberation when actions involve trade-offs between pursuing benefits and avoiding harms, which is standard in politics. As the Shāfiʿī jurist and “Sultan of the Scholars” ʿIzz ibn ʿAbd al-Salām observes, when benefits and harms coincide, the ideal course is to realize the benefits while preventing the harms wherever possible. If, however, it is not possible to achieve both simultaneously, judgment must be based on relative weight: when the harm outweighs the benefit, preventing the harm takes precedence even at the cost of losing the benefit; conversely, when the benefit is greater, it may be pursued despite the accompanying harm.[25] Ibn Taymiyya echoes this principle in a political context, citing the example of Prophet Yusuf, who sought a position of political authority even within a polity that clearly contradicts his theological persuasions, illustrating the practical applicability of hisba to complex political circumstances. Prophet Yusuf’s decision was motivated by his anticipation that he could mitigate an impending harm, namely, the coming drought. In this instance, Ibn Taymiyya interprets Prophet Yusuf’s action as prioritizing the reduction of harm, despite the moral tension inherent in participating within a disbelieving political system.[26]
In addressing the American Muslim political dilemma, the framework of hisba provides a more nuanced and practical approach than the traditional reliance on either the rigid particulars of the sharīʿa or the broad rationales of maṣlaḥa. By emphasizing the process of commanding right and forbidding wrong, rather than pre-determining required outcomes or necessitating near-certainty of success, hisba equips Muslim political actors with a morally coherent and ethically grounded method for navigating the complexities of American politics and society. This framework allows for the careful evaluation of competing interests, harms, and benefits without reducing political engagement to rigid legalism or expedient pragmatism. It situates political action within a continuum of moral responsibility, recognizing that not all good or evil carries equal weight and that prioritization and deliberation are essential to responsible governance, even if such prioritization results in foregoing some good or overlooking certain lesser evils.
The practical implications of applying hisba are particularly evident in contexts that involve morally or socially contested issues, such as relations with the LGBT community. Rather than framing such engagement as an absolute violation or endorsement of un-Islamic morality, hisba allows American Muslims to deliberate strategically on what can realistically be accomplished, what potential harms might be mitigated, and what benefits can be advanced. This deliberative approach relieves Muslim political actors from the dual pressures of rigid fiqh constraints and unrealistic expectations of moral perfection, offering instead a framework that integrates ethical responsibility, social pragmatism, and moral guidance. Ultimately, hisba provides a pathway for American Muslims to participate meaningfully in the political sphere while remaining true to the ethical imperatives of the sharīʿa, demonstrating that principled engagement and practical politics need not be in conflict but can mutually inform one another.
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