The community as a whole must have the right to choose its...

The community as a whole must have the right to choose its leader and the right to remove him. (This means that all Muslim monarchies, whatever their pretensions to religiosity, have been totally unIslamic). On these two fundamentals there is indeed agreement among our political reformers, but on every other aspect of Islamic policy there are differences of substance and of emphasis.

(Militant Islam, New York) The Ikhwan al-Muslimeen (the Muslim Brotherhood) of Egypt, has indicted all military regimes (dictatorships) also as unIslamic. G. H. Jansen The Muslim Brotherhood stressed that no government established by force can be accepted, for consultation is mandatory according to Sura 42 verse 35 of the Koran. Hence military regimes produced by coups are unIslamic.

(Militant Islam, New York) It is, therefore, the consensus of the Sunni scholars of Pakistan and the Sunni spokesmen of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, that monarchy and military regimes both are unIslamic. But it is a latter-day consensus. The Sunni jurists and scholars of the classical times would not have endorsed this view. Their consensus was entirely different from this. They upheld the supremacy of brute force, as noted before. And isn't the term “unIslamic” a euphemism for “pagan”?

If it is, and if according to the Sunni jurists of Pakistan, monarchy is a pagan institution, then what is their verdict on the monarchs themselves. Can the monarchs run an unIslamic establishment, and still be true Muslims? And what is their verdict on the man who first seized the Right-Guided Caliphate in a coup, and then converted it into monarchy, viz., Muawiya bin Abu Sufyan? He often boasted that he was the first of the kings of the Arabs.

The views of the Sunni jurists of Pakistan and the views of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt on the character of monarchy and military regimes, are shared by Muhammad Asad, a modern, European, Sunni scholar.

He writes in his book, State and Government in Islam (1980): “...let us be clear in our minds on one point at least: there has never existed a truly Islamic state after the time of the Prophet and of the Medina Caliphate headed by the Prophet's immediate successors, the four Right-Guided Caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali.” According to the foregoing judgment, the Islamic State ceased to be Islamic as soon as Muawiya seized it.

But Muawiya went beyond changing the Right-Guided Caliphate into an unIslamic, i.e., pagan monarchy.