ABSTRACT
Shūra or consultation is a central concept in contemporary Muslim political thought. In fact, it is seen as the foundation for thinking about governance in an Islamic context. A distinctly Islamic approach to governance is supposed to translate this concept into all aspects of management of Muslim societies. In contemporary debates on how to achieve this, one specific Qur’anic verse (3:159) and its interpretation is central; however, in the pre-modern period the significance of such verses was somewhat marginal. Although the works of some pre-modern scholars, such as Abul Hasan Ali b. Muhammad b. Habib al- Mawardi (d. 450/1058) and Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 505/1111), discuss how a Muslim society may deal with consultation, their descriptions lack the kinds of understanding that commentators in the modern period seem to attach to the concept. Their political context and the systems of governance in place then did not leave much room to broaden the concept of consultation to include the kind of ideas that Muslims today attach to the notion of “consultation”. Today, Muslims, like others, often see democratic systems of governance in which the citizens participate as among the most appropriate, and often want to justify that based on Qur’anic ideas and texts, in particular the verses that deal with the concept of “consultation”. Thus, the new context of the modern period has given the interpretation of the relevant verses much more significance than seems to have existed in the pre-modern period.
