ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the relational path, embodying integral development, personally and communally, organizationally and societally, through grounding and emergence, navigating and effecting development, respectively. The evolution of the idea and structuring of the state, then, is complicated, for the Samatars, and has numerous variations. Political destiny includes significant contradictions and concerns that add up to such political identity and direction. Structurally, a state, for the Samatars, has the following features: monopoly on coercion, specific territorial boundaries, a relatively fixed population, economic and cultural functions, sovereignty, and recognition by other states and their organizations. This supreme public power that is, the state, is "a historical phenomenon" – a creation of human beings in interaction, which, in turn, also acts in profound ways upon individual and collective life. The primal element of the state is the foundational commonwealth. At the heart of a worldly Islamic philosophy, for the Samatars, is the promotion of peace, justice, and equality for all.
