Have you noticed how modern life issues are presented to us? They come with their solutions proffered and our only task is to choose between them.
Are you conservative or progressive? Capitalist or socialist? Traditional or modern? Religious or secular? Left-wing or right-wing?
The debate is framed, the sides are staked out, and we are expected to declare where we belong. What rarely gets questioned is whether the framework itself is sound.
Why must every issue be understood through categories that emerged from someone else’s history, someone else’s philosophy, someone else’s political struggles? Why do we so readily accept that the questions have already been framed for us before we arrive?
Yet this happens constantly. And what is most troubling is not that the answers being offered are sometimes wrong. It is that by the time we enter the conversation, the terms of the conversation have already been decided, and Islam itself has been assumed away.
Perhaps the clearest way to see this is to look at three areas where Muslims are most frequently handed a ready-made binary: how women dress, how we relate to wealth, and how we engage with political life. These are not random examples. They correspond to something Islam has always insisted upon, that it is not a private spiritual practice confined to one corner of human experience, but a dīn: a complete way of life that speaks to the social, the economic and the political alike.
If the binary framework distorts Islam’s approach in all three domains, that is not a coincidence. It is a measure of how comprehensive the distortion is.
Consider the discussion around hijab.
One side presents it as a symbol of patriarchal oppression, a garment imposed upon women by men and by tradition. The other defends it as an expression of personal freedom and individual choice, a woman’s right to dress as she pleases.
Muslims are then invited to decide which explanation they find more persuasive and which to defend.
But both positions, for all their apparent disagreement, begin from the same starting point of personal freedom. The debate is entirely conducted within that assumption. And so when Muslims enter it, we find ourselves either arguing that hijab is not oppressive, or arguing that it is freely chosen, but either way, we are speaking the language of a framework that was never ours to begin with.
Islam begins elsewhere. The primary question is not whether hijab is oppression or self-expression. The primary question is whether Allah has commanded it, and what it means to live in conscious submission to that command. The language of ibādah, of obedience, of a relationship between the servant and the Creator, is almost entirely absent from the public debate, even though it lies at the very centre of the Islamic understanding. When we accept the debate on the terms given, we do not merely concede ground. We concede the foundation.
The same pattern appears when wealth and economics is discussed.
We are typically presented with a choice between capitalism and socialism. One emphasises individual ownership, market freedom and private enterprise. The other emphasises collective ownership, redistribution and state regulation of resources. The debate proceeds, and Muslims are expected to select a side, or at least to identify which one is closer to Islamic values.
But Islam shares certain features with both positions while ultimately conforming to neither.
It affirms private ownership, trade and enterprise. It also prohibits ribā, obligates zakāh, regulates inheritance, and places moral limits on how wealth is acquired and spent. Islam distinguishes between private, public and state property. It is an amānah, a trust from Allah, for which every person will one day be accountable.
This does not fit neatly into either box. And the discomfort of that should perhaps tell us something. When a framework cannot accommodate Islamic thinking without distorting it, the problem is not with Islam. The problem is with the framework.
Consider also the domain of political life.
In Western countries, Muslims are regularly told that their duty is to vote, and that voting means selecting between certain parties, certain candidates, certain visions of society shaped entirely by liberal or conservative traditions that have no roots in Islamic thought. The advice that circulates in Muslim communities before every election is familiar: choose the lesser of two evils. Identify which candidate’s positions overlap most with Islamic values. Hold your nose and vote.
There is a pragmatic logic to this. But consider carefully what this framing does over time. It trains us to think in terms of damage limitation. It makes harm reduction our highest political aspiration. And it never asks the prior question, why have we accepted that these are the only options available, and that our role within the political process is simply to choose between them?
The same problem, in a different form, faces Muslims in Muslim-majority countries. There too, the choices are between secular nationalists and military-backed figures, between authoritarian rulers and their rivals, between factions whose differences are of style and interest rather than principle. Where Islamic parties are present, they have to water down their Islam in order to participate. And Muslims are told be realistic. To work within the system as it exists.
In both contexts, whether Muslims are a minority navigating someone else’s political order, or a majority living under governments that do not govern by Islam, the structure of the problem is the same. The options are pre-selected. The framework is given. And the question of what Islamic political thought actually calls us toward is quietly set aside as impractical, utopian, or simply too complicated to raise.
Yet Islamic political thought is neither vague nor underdeveloped. Rooted in the Qur’an and Sunnah and exemplified across centuries by the Khulafā’, it is a sophisticated and coherent system in its own right. Khilāfah/imamah, bayah, amānah, shūrā, ‘adl, al-amr bil maʿrūf wan-nahy ʿan al-munkar, these are not abstract ideals scattered across a tradition. They are integral to a framework of governance that takes seriously both the rights of human beings and the authority of Allah over all affairs. None of this maps neatly onto the political options typically presented to Muslims, East or West. And that is precisely the point.
When we reduce our entire political engagement to the question of which available candidate causes the least damage, we are not simply making a pragmatic compromise. We are gradually allowing a foreign framework to become our default, and allowing a rich and living tradition of Islamic political thought to atrophy from disuse.
The lesser of two evils, with clear conditions, may be the right tactical choice in a given moment. But it should never become our political theology. It should never be the ceiling of our political imagination.
This is the pattern repeated across social, economic, political life.
The challenge this poses is therefore larger than any single debate. It is a challenge of worldview.
Have we become so accustomed to thinking through categories developed by others that we no longer notice when Islam is offering something genuinely different? If we accept every debate on the terms given, we will spend our lives searching for where Islam fits, asking whether it is conservative or progressive, capitalist or socialist, traditional or modern. But these are often the wrong questions, asked within the wrong frame.
Islam is not merely another position within someone else’s framework. It is itself a framework. It is a criterion. It is, in the Qur’anic term, a furqān, a faculty of distinction, a means of telling things apart.
Allah describes the community of believers:
وَكَذَٰلِكَ جَعَلْنَـٰكُمْ أُمَّةًۭ وَسَطًۭا لِّتَكُونُوا۟ شُهَدَآءَ عَلَى ٱلنَّاسِ
“And thus We have made you a justly balanced nation that you may be witnesses over mankind.” (al-Baqarah 143)
Wasaṭ here does not mean splitting the difference between competing human ideologies, finding a convenient or comfortable middle ground and settling there. The classical commentators understood wasaṭ to carry the sense of justice, excellence and balance. A community possessing those qualities is therefore able to stand as a witness over mankind, evaluating claims according to the guidance Allah has revealed.
This is a different position entirely. It does not mean withdrawing from the world’s debates. It means entering them from a different origin point, beginning with revelation rather than with inherited assumptions, and asking not which of the available options is closest to Islam, but how the world’s frameworks measure up against the criterion Allah has given us.
That shift, from selecting between options to evaluating the options themselves, may be one of the most important intellectual and spiritual tasks facing Muslims today. It is less evident than many of the debates that consume us. But it runs underneath all of them.
