ESOTERICISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM
masih dengan kejadian monas-ahmadiah, kita terus melihat komentar-komentar melihat para badut politik yang tengah terkena sihir palsu humanisme atau hak asasi palsu, mereka para badut-badut demokrasi, humanisme, konstitusi dan badut HAM menjadikan alasan kebebasan beragama dan berkeyakinan untuk membela ahmadiah yang sudah jelas menodai islam. saya turunkan artikel ini untuk melihat kembali apa topeng dibalik atas nama konstitusi dan hak asasi palsu
ESOTERICISM AND CONSTITUTIONALISM
The constitutions have been an essential tool of esotericisation. Constitutions challenged the validity of the religious law, and provided the required political justification to the state. They redefined freedom in terms of political docility. Their new morals, like toleration, peace and security became subsidiary values to the categorical imperatives of the state and the development of capitalism. Constitutions became the essential tools of capitalism.
WHAT IS CONSTITUTIONALISM?
The constitution itself is just the result of the deliberation of a group of people on paper, which itself can be altered or amended from time to time as demanded. The constitution then rests on acquiescence, whether it is established by referendum or by tacit approval or even by force. The object of the constitution, was to limit the arbitrary action of the government, to guarantee rights of the governed, and to define the operation of the sovereign power.
The essence of constitutionalism is the affirmation that religion or religions do not have a law, and even if they have one, man-made laws are better than those originated by the prophet or prophets. Constitutions emerged against a background of customary and religious law and came to replace them. This is why a fundamental hostility to religion or rather organised traditional religion is implicit in constitutionalism. The whole process was summed up by Figgis in the phrase: ‘Political Liberty is the residuary legatee of ecclesiastical animosities.’ Constitutional supporters did of course present the constitution as a defence of religion, in the name of religious freedom. What it in fact protected was a religious diversity that guaranteed absolute validity to none. But if religion is not absolute it is not religion at all, but becomes at most a group of feelings and inclinations of thought with no practical relevance to the main aspects of political and economic life. And this is how constitutions transformed religions under their rule.
To understand constitutionalism it is important to understand the relative worth assigned to its symbolic values. It is interesting that the idea of equality expressed in all the constitutions has emerged in the form of a protest against what were perceived as inequalities. Thus the claim of the constitution was a claim to the abolition of privilege. It was the response of a class, or people pressured or shut off from the enjoyment of their rights, by another class or people.
The men who drew up the Declaration of Independence in the US which laid down as a self-evident truth that all men are equal were slaves-owners. They did not mean to assert an abstract proposition which implied that their slaves were equal to themselves. What they actually meant was that they themselves were as good as King George, and had as much right to govern themselves as their kinsmen in England.
Similarly the Declaration of the Rights of Man passed by the National Assembly in France in 1789 was in reality a counterblast to the supposed assertion of Louis XIV, “L’Etat c’est moi”, and a repudiation of his claim to an absolute control over the life, liberty and happiness of his subjects. It was ‘considering that ignorance, neglect, or contempt of human rights are the sole cause of public misfortunes and corruptions of government’ that the National Assembly resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration the ‘natural, imprescriptible and inalienable’ rights of men and affirmed that ‘men are born, and always continue, free and equal in respect of their rights.’
What these examples demonstrate is that the arrival of constitutionalism was not an abstract quest for abstract perfect values, but a quest for political power against the existing one, which used these values as tools for the obtaining and justifying of their earthly goals by twisting the symbolic meaning of these values to their own convenience. Constitutionalism is part of the process of the devaluation of values which we call nihilism. It is important to assert that constitutional values are tools to justify political aims and institutions. Without the religious validity in the sound words of a Prophet, values are sold to rational speculation. This use of values is clearly observable today in the voice of politicians who endlessly claim justice, peace, order, etc. as being identified with their own political party’s programme.
Banking demanded the taming of religion and the elimination of its normative power. The capitalist logic required undifferentiated range and an expanding number of customers and markets. Thus to be a tax-payer became a stronger identity than religious affiliation. The result is the need to assimilate religious differences. The tool for assimilation to the role of tax-payer is the principle of toleration. Toleration moved gradually from philosophical enquiry to the realm of politics and turned into legislation in the form of constitutions. Away from the romance, what constitutions meant was the elimination of religious identity in favour of the citizen, defined unscrupulously as a tax-payer. We remember what Thomas Paine had to say:
“Whatever the constitution may be in other respects, it has undoubtedly been the most productive machine of taxation that was ever invented.”164
Constitutionalism is too recent a phenomenon to be given the universal validity that it claims. The great surge of constitutionalism did not occur until the second half of the nineteenth century. This movement originated in the unifying movements in Italy and Germany which were, in their turn responsible for the republican constitution promulgated in France after the war of 1870.165 In Islam, Sultan Abdulhamid II, rahimahu’llah, under legal imperative had proclaimed in 1876 the first Ottoman Constitution only to abrogate it the moment he had a chance two years later. It was not until 1908 that the Young Turks could depose Khalif Sultan Abdulhamid and proclaim Turkey a constitutional monarchy. It is important to remember that the whole movement which broke Southern Europe from the Dar al-Islam had adopted political constitutionalism as the principle and means of their ‘emancipation’. This is relevant to understanding the incongruence of the idea of Islamic constitutionalism.
