32 Modern Islam in India
and referring with approval to the works of 'all *abd al
Raziq and Barakat Allah on the Khilafat as non-temporal
authority. Speaking of the adoption of the Swiss Code or
the Code Napoleon by Muslim communities, he says : " No
doubt some people may call it impious or anti-Islamic. To
me it is a matter of convenience " 62. But the codes men-
tioned are bourgeois codes, fundamentally interested in the
rights of property. Would he be equally content were a
socialist code introduced ? He did not discuss the Muslims'
states in the new U.S.S.R. His bourgeois interests and
ideology are often in evidence. " Private property is lawful,
and encroachments on it are encroachments on liberty "63.
Injustice and oppression are defined as " preventing the free
use of life and limbs, property, and lawful things "64—clearly
he has never suffered from hunger, unemployment, or the
like. Nor does he write for those who have met injustice
and oppression in such forms; 'freedom' for the middle class
means freedom for, not from, exploitation. " The laws
against usury... have been interpreted narrowly, and in my
opinion wrongly, to bar commercial interest "65«
Such is his practical conception of the law. The theory
behind it is mystical and unrelated to anything very brutal
or real. The following passage was published in India, whose
constitutional and legal system the author in practice reli-
giously upholds : " Austin's analysis of sovereignty as linked
with force—of Law as meaningless unless backed with the
sanction of force—is unacceptable to Islam "6e* He goes on
to outline his conception of law as postulating u something
archetypal and eternal at the base "67, where it is linked with
religion and ethics, with a superstructure adapted to the
circumstances. He admitted that " what are the boundaries
between the immutable principles, and the human provisions
that must always be altered "68 is a matter of dispute, to
which dispute he offers no solution beyond appealing to
ijma* and the instances of the Swiss and Napoleonic codes
already mentioned. The position amounts in the end to the
inevitable bourgeois 4 morality \ of a philosophic dualism
having a religio-ethical ideal in mind, but a purely * practical'