i ask, b/c it seems to me, with your positivist account of the law, you are just stuck saying we are stubbornly disobedient wretches who do not wish to obey the law of god?

..who do not wish to obey our far-flung impression of the law of God.

One common idea, which needs to be challenged, is the idea that Islam was great and can be great again if we all return to the ways of the Golden Age of Islam. So we read the 7th to 11th century texts, try to figure out what the scholars were saying, aggressive jihad, use of middle ages remedies for health problems instead of western medicine, soap optional bathing with lots of musky oils....etc.

This will all be more compelling when the next Muslim physicist works out the details for a time travel machine and we can all be sahaba. 

Til then, I suggest we move forward in time. Islam has lost nothing. It is the people who have degraded over time. This has nothing to do with Islam and alot to do with other things.

Those other things need to be looked at.

Firstly, I would say its an exaggeration that the majority of Muslims agree with your conception of governance and society. If one were to compare democratic trends as opposed to the trend of Islamization, I would argue that Islamization is becoming the dominant trend and the only thing that is mitigating its dominancy is interference by foreign powers or political actors whose finances, weapons, and training stem from foreign powers. Casess in point: Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt (look at the last elections), Algeria (look at their civil war), Palestine, Turkey (look at the dominant power), Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. So when you say "Muslims disagree with you", which Muslims? American Muslims? The masses? The dictators? The extreme secularists who refuse to let women wear hijab? The  bourgeious intellectuals who don the cloak of "liberation" against the Islamic legal system, but hardly recognize the threat of flagrant neo-colonialism and economic dependency? Pray tell, which Muslims are you referring to? We can site polls arguing both ways, ultimately actions speak louder than words. Imagine if their was no Western involvement in Muslim countries in history. I extremely doubt that a movement that you claim to be the dominant trend amongst Muslims would have prevailed. 

Secondly, perhaps the reason why the majority of Muslims may hold such beliefs is because they know very little of the Islamic sciences. After all, most of the professionals in the Muslim world were educated in Western or Western-influenced institutions, so its not unexpected that they would operate within its intellectual framework. If Muslims adopt Western values on justice, equality, freedom, it is because they've uncritically absorbed such values without questioning the origins of such values (reason, autonomy, progress) and, more importantly, how they relate to Islamic beliefs and law.

I went into quite some detail as to account for why Muslim professionals often are influenced by Western intellectual traditions whether its liberalism, socialism, communism, fascism, etc in my post on the "The "Death" of Progressive Islam"

Colonialism placed a concerted attack on the 'Ulema as an intellectual class by depriving them of authority in the political sphere (which was further eroded by the rise of the nation-state through the process of centralization of state power) and were also undermined in the social sphere due to the rise of public education and mass literacy. The latter lead to the formation of an entirely new intellectual class that were educated in Western traditions.

What is significant about the rise of the professionals that came out of the vocational systems was that it was largely a by-product of the hegemonic relationship between Western colonizers and the Muslim colonized. Thomas Macaulay, the British colonialist, said it best when he said that the goal of the British in India to was create "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste."  

According to Hannah Arendt, the two key characteristics of colonialism are racism and bureacracy. The professional elites were clearly created to support the colonial bureacracy, and is also not surprising that they adopted, in essence, the same disdain for their fellow Muslims (especially the 'Ulema) that the Colonizers had for the Colonized. The professional elites often adopted the same purported "reformism" that was used to justify imperialism in the first place. Just like the "White man" had reached the pinnacle of human evolution and it was his duty to uplift the lesser races from their anthropological shortcomings, so did the professional elites view themselves as the pinnacle of Islamic history and had achieved material success and, thus, it was their duty to uplift the Muslim masses from their decadence. This cannot be manifested more clearly than in the discourse on Islam itself as being a problem not between complex interrelated social, political, and economic forces, but a Manichean struggle between "faith" and "reason"; such concepts that were directly borrowed by Orientalists. Either ignorant of or deliberately ignoring the vehement theological debates over the role of reason of Islam, what the modernists argued was that classical Islam was incompatible with "Reason" with a capital "R". By "Reason", they were referring to the Eurocentric understanding of reason that was imported by the Colonizers. The fact that the Islamic theology was strongly influenced by Aristotelan philosophy and ultimately seeped into jurisprudence through the development of Mantiq by Imam Ghazzali was ignored by the Modernists. For them, it was inconceivable that the classical Islamic traditions could be considered rational, even though for all purposes, they were entirely rational, on par with Western traditions. Their presumption that their was an instrinsic inequality between Islamic and Western traditions reinforced the larger hegemonic discourse that interplayed between Western Colonizers and the Muslim Colonized.

Whether they realized it or not, this class was a competitor to the 'Ulema and, unsurprisingly, often lead to conflict with them. Some of the 'Ulema recognized this and responded by creating learning institutions in order to preserve their traditions, which they deemed were under attack. For example, in India, we see the rise of the Deobandis who inferred that the inevitable effect of this class would be ultimately to support the expansion of British imperialism.

From the perspective of the 'Ulema, the crticisms that Modernists had of classical Islamic jurisprudence was not concerned with a reformulation of the methods of extracting legal rulings (i.e. an usool) for the sincere objective of creating an equitable legal system, but was more focused specifically on particular legal conclusions that were deemed incompatible with modern times. It was not out of coincidence that the legal conclusions that Modernists adopted were the same legal conclusions that were being advanced by the Colonizers. The 'Ulema saw the former as nothing but the puppets of the latter. Thus, the hijab came under attack, not because the Modernists were concerned with a critique of the legal reasoning behind hijab, but because it was deemed to be bulwark to progress by Feminists. In other words, what Modernists failed to see was that their treatment of classical Islam as "the object" failed to take into consideration that the Modernists were "objects" within the Universal Subject as well. Instead of asking whether Hijab was truly an obligation or not that resulted in inequality between the genders, the 'Ulema often wondered why such a question arose in the first place and saw a causal connection between these questions that assumed particular answers that were not coincidentally also being advanced by the Colonizers. Thus, such discourse itself was hegemonic in nature. Modernists failed to apply equal criticisms between Islamic and Western traditions, thus delegitimizing their claim to being concerned with objective truth. In their push for "progress", they failed to properly analyze what progress was or why it was important or how one defined progress or whether progress even existed within human history. For example, in the West, the true cause of female liberation was not because a class of philosopher-kings congregated and concluded that men and women were equal or ought to be equal and then passed legislation to accommodate such philosophical conclusions, but because their was a shortage of male labor that was caused by World War I and World War II. The Modernists often used anthropology as a source of criticism for classical opinions such as by arguing that Islamic jurisprudence treated men and women differently because of the infiltration of patriarchy due to the overwhelming dominance of male scholarship. However, they failed to recognized that such legal conclusions arose from a positive interpretation of Islamic texts (such as direct commands from Allah (subhana wa ta'ala) and, more importantly, didn't apply such a high level of criticism against the values that they presumed to be true. Thus, instead of scrutinizing the history of democracy and the fact that only 5% of Americans supported the Constitution or supporting feminism without examining its relationship with capitalism, Modernists applied criticisms in an unequal manner and focused more on reforming Islam rather than objective issues of social justice. The clear imbalance in focus lead many scholars to conclude that the Modernist discourse had its direct origins and sustenance through Western hegemony.

what?? you too? what are these words you are using.

"muslim advancement"

"modernity"

"coexist."

:slaps self facially and diagonally:

Wow, that was an interesting post. I've never seen anyone utilize Kant to describe how states should act.

I was focusing more on the first formulation of the categorical imperative and assumed Islamic beliefs to be true. In other words, if all rational agents willfully chose to apostate (and we assumed that the punishment in hellfire was a result of this choice), then all rational agents would be in hellfire. Therefore, the Islamic state should not allow people to apostate.