1.1 Risks and inevitability of translation

The term ‘political theology’ has no equivalent in Arabic or any other Islamicate language. Political terms indigenous to the Islamic tradition, such as the caliphate (al-khilāfa, deputyship of the Prophet) or the imamate (al-imāma, leadership of the believing community), inherently join political and religious meanings, as do phrases used in the titles of key political treatises written across Islamic history, such as al-aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya (rulings [in divine law] pertaining to governance) or al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya (politics as ordained by divine law). If imported without care, the term ‘Islamic political theology’ therefore risks subordinating our knowledge of Islam to modern European categories. We need not conclude from this that concern with the Western Christian history of theological reflection is merely a distraction, or worse, distortion, of the study of Islam. The very fact that the Qur’an articulates its theology, viz., its notion of God and God’s relation to the world, in part through critical commentary on Judaism and Christianity, suggests that studying the intertwined Christian and Jewish legacies is an enterprise internal to both Islamic scripture and tradition.

The apparently innocent question of whether early Islamic thought was theological reflection on politics (as Muslims often assume) or political exploitation of theological language (as modern secular scholars are wont to think) is a loaded one. Consider the insightful observation of German scholar Josef van Ess:

[P]olitical thinking is as old as Islam itself. And what is perhaps even more important: political experiences have always been analysed and explained by examples taken from the first generation of the Islamic community. Right from the beginning the Muslims were confronted with political success and political failure, victory as well as discord and schism. This was their primary experience, the ‘Urerlehnis’ to which the Muslim imagilzaire never ceased to be bound. (Van Ess 2001: 164)

Yet, further consider van Ess’s opening comments in the same article: ‘In early Islam [political] ideas were produced in a way slightly different from our own, but the scientific bogus around them was not less annoying than nowadays’ (2001: 151). His suggestion that these were truly political questions, with religion merely providing the rhetoric, the external form, betrays an assumption that true religion pertains to beliefs about the supernatural, while concerns with earthly power befit the City of Man à la Augustine of Hippo. The Qur’an, in contrast, declares that God is concerned with the victory of the righteous and is worshipped in and through earthly struggles: ‘We sent down iron in which there is mighty power and many a benefit for men, and for Allah may know who will aid Him and His messengers, though unseen’ (Q. 57:25) and that ‘Allah has decreed: It is I and My messengers that must prevail’ (Q. 58:21).

Given that the constitutive Islamic belief is monotheism, the preaching and establishment of which in the form of a devout human community was the purpose of Islam’s earthly order (Q. 22:40–41), the political in early Islam can be more appropriately said to be a creature of the theological. The two terms, therefore, are not quite equivalent. While it is hard to imagine politics in Islam without theological underpinnings, and we might therefore conclude that all Islamic politics is theological, the converse is not strictly the case. Not all concern with salvation and God is collective or political: there remains an unmistakably individualist dimension to salvation, insofar as every person shall stand before God alone and be accountable for one’s beliefs as well as works (e.g. Q. 19:95).

One final note of caution about the interpenetration of the political and the theological is in order. Whereas not every theological or religious question is political, any question whatsoever is liable to politicization. The most obvious instance of the mutual entailment of politics and theology in Islam – namely, the third/ninth-century ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn’s (r. 198–218/813–833) inquisition (miḥna) of the Ahl al-Sunna (The Party of Tradition) regarding the createdness of the Qur’an – turned on a theological problem chosen by the caliph specifically for its apolitical nature (Nawas 1996). This means not only that any theological problem can be politicized, but that those questions that appear to be apolitical might be the most apt candidates for politicization. The converse is also true: any political problem can take on theological colours. This suggests that a conceptual separation between the political and the religious or theological, even if imaginable and at times useful, is of limited use.

2.1 Legal sovereignty

The repeated declaration in the Qur’an that in al-ḥukm illā li-llah (Q. 12:40, 67; 6:57) – ‘Judgment belongs to none but God’ – furnished the mantras of early Islamic disputes, the opening lines of classical Islamic legal treatises, and the slogans of intellectual and revivalist movements throughout Muslim history. This theme is repeated in numerous forms and provides, one might say, a political translation of the Islamic testament of faith: ‘There is no god but Allāh’. This principle effectively states that not only does power belong to the Creator and Sustainer in the metaphysical sense, but that authority (ḥukm; amr) in human affairs too is God’s. The Qur’anic discourse therefore functions at and constantly shifts between two planes: a normative (sharʿī) level, which lays out divine law in the moral domain of human freedom and action, and in which humans are asked to strive for what God desires; and a metaphysical or existential (kawnī) level, where God, being omnipotent and omniscient, controls all things and yet allows occurrences that He dislikes for some wise purposes. The Prophet is told that the decision to punish or forgive the unbelievers is not his, but God’s alone (Q. 3:128). God also directly guides the Prophet’s decisions and, in Medina, those who questioned the Prophet’s tactical decisions in battle were told that ‘all amr belongs to God’ (Q. 3:154). A stronger version of the same idea is expressed in Sūrat al-Mā’ida, in verses whose starkness has often generated radical ideas and mitigative commentary in the exegetical tradition,

Whoso judgeth not by that which Allah hath revealed: such are disbelievers. (Q. 5:44)

Disbelief being the highest indictment in the Qur’an, two subsequent verses repeat the charge, but declare the naysayers ‘wrongdoers’ (Q. 5:45) and ‘wicked’ (Q. 5:47).

Just as authority belongs to God exclusively, so too does dīn. While often translated as ‘religion’, dīn could be understood as the ordering principle of a given community, its way of life (Gardet 1965). The believers are told incessantly to purify (akhliṣū, ikhlāṣ) their dīn for God alone (e.g. Q. 39:2, 11; 98:5). In short, just as there is no room for humans to worship another besides God, there is no room for them to take judgments, decisions, or customs issued by anything other than God as authoritative.

2.2 Political sovereignty

Recognizing the Meccan revelations’ world-making aspiration, even prior to the Muslim community’s acquisition of power, makes it necessary to appreciate Islamic political theology. The Meccan sūras challenged the foundations of the political power of the Qurayshite elite and the Arabian order in general. The Qur’an reports its Meccan interlocutors’ recognition of the danger that the Prophet’s message posed to their standing among the Arabs: ‘And they say, “If we were to follow the guidance with you, we would be swept from our land”’ (Q. 28:57). The Qur’an’s threats to the Meccans, should they fail to obey it, are conveyed through stories of earlier prophets in which God inevitably ensures that the believers inherit the earth (Q. 35:39). The struggle against injustice and unbelief, and the ultimate triumph of the prophets and their followers, are common themes. Idle talk that leads to no action is decried (Q. 26:226). The encounter between Moses (Mūsā) and Pharaoh is a central and oft-repeated story in the Qur’an, being developed at length in the Meccan sūras. God gives authority as a test, and rejecters of God’s message are condemned as ingrates neither deserving of authority nor a good life. Power rightly belongs to the righteous believers alone, but they too are tested and are made to lose it when they neglect God, become lax in their prayers, transgress against each other, and follow their egoistic desires (Q. 19:59).

These themes become more emphatic in the Medinan sūras. Rather than any accommodation of the existing rulers, to render unto Caesar his due and God His, the Qur’an insists that all dominion belongs to God. Caesar is to be humbled by dedicated believers, to whom God promises victory (Q. 58:21). A characteristic Medinan verse encourages the believers to persist in jihād (struggle for faith, including armed struggle) alongside the Prophet by invoking the example of many rabbis who fought valiantly alongside past prophets (Q. 3:146). The purpose of political power and its quest is to serve God, as indicated in what is taken by Muslim exegetes to be the first verse permitting military activity:

Those who are being fought are given permission since they have been wronged […] those expelled from their homes for declaring that their lord is Allāh […] those if We give them power in the land [will] establish prayers, give alms, command right, and forbid wrong […]. (Q. 22:39–41)

In the final phase of jihād, on which generally see Rudolph Peters’ translation and compilation of classical and modern treatises (1977), a late Medinan verse demands an Islamic political order based not on coerced personal conversion, but rather by imposing jizya on the People of the Book:

Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low. (Q. 9:29)

2.3 Rational sovereignty

The Divine law conveyed through revelation is discoverable by human reason, and yet reason is no substitute for it. The Qur’an suggests that humans possess a natural proclivity to monotheism, even, in some interpretations of verse 7:172, a kind of mystical, primordial knowledge. While another verse complicates this by denying that humans are born with any knowledge (Q. 16:78), this primordial instinct to worship one God does not necessarily translate into correct moral judgments of the kind supposed by a strong natural law theory, although the Muʿtazila, Islam’s earliest intellectuals and apologists, argued precisely that. Islamic source-texts (the Qur’an and the Hadith materials) walk a fine line between emphasizing the reasonability of Islamic norms, on the one hand, and, on the other, stressing the limits of human knowledge and God’s exclusive authority to give law and declare right and wrong. For the majority of theologians, such Qur’anic declarations as ‘God knows and ye know not’ (Q. 2:216; 3:66) severely temper human claims of ethical knowledge independent of revelation. Humans are, nevertheless, endowed with the capacity to recognize divine guidance once they encounter it. Every human child is born upon fiṭra – the divinely bestowed natural disposition (Q. 30:30), which is seen as tantamount to the true religion of Islam, an idea elaborated in the Prophet’s more explicit statement: ‘Every newborn is born upon fiṭra, and it is his parents that make him a Nazarene or a Jew or a Magian’ (al-Bukhārī, no. 1385). Muslim theologians have long debated the nature and extent of human ethical knowledge (Jackson 2009). How one resolves those debates has significant implications for political theology (Anjum 2012).

2.4 Post-prophetic sovereignty

The Qur’an anticipates a world in which God’s guidance ceases to take the form of direct revelation through a living human agency, and by which means it is then passed on to humans. The Prophet Muḥammad is only human, but just as he must die, so too must God’s religion continue:

Muhammad is but a messenger, messengers (the like of whom) have passed away before him. Will it be that, when he dieth or is slain, ye will turn back on your heels? He who turneth back on his heels doth no hurt to Allah, and Allah will reward the thankful. (Q. 3:144)

Given that the Qur’an also declares Muḥammad to be the last prophet – the ‘Seal of Prophets’, the final link in an unbroken chain of messengers spanning the entirety of human history up until that point – his death is an event of great metaphysical significance. The possibility of a post-prophetic phase in human history raises the most central question in Islamic political theology: who inherits the position once occupied by the prophets? The Qur’an does not name a single successor but does suggest a possible answer in verse 2:143: it is ‘you all’ (jaʿalnākum) – the entire Umma – that has been made as an ummatan wasaṭa – a justly-balanced nation – that must now bear witness to humankind just as the Messenger bore witness to them. No other agency is named in the Qur’an to do God’s work. The only authority discernible in the Qur’an is one that emerges out of the collectivity of the believers, from within the Umma:

O ye who believe, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those of you who are in authority; and if ye have a dispute concerning any matter, refer it to Allah and the Messenger if ye are (in truth) believers in Allah and the Last Day. That is better and more seemly in the end. (Q. 4:59)

Exegetes have identified various individuals as being ‘those of you who are in authority’ (ulū al-amr), the most obvious in the Qur’anic context being the commanders that the Prophet appointed during various expeditions. Among Qur’anic exegetes, two (not necessarily contradictory) opinions are equally popular concerning the phrase’s post-prophetic meaning, namely, that after God and His Messenger, the believers ought to turn to both their rulers (caliphs or their appointed commanders) and those of knowledge and understanding.

2.5 Ummatic exceptionalism

Several key Qur’anic declarations of a covenantal nature address not the Prophet but the believers at large, including ‘Thus We have appointed ye a midmost nation, that ye may be witnesses against mankind, and that the messenger may be a witness against ye’ (Q. 2:143). Another declares, ‘Ye are the best nation, brought forth for humankind, ye command what is right, forbid wrong, and believe in Allah; if the People of the Book were to believe, it would be better for them’ (Q. 3:110). These spell out what might be called Ummatic exceptionalism: the idea that the believers, Muḥammad’s followers, constitute an exceptional community in the course of human history, who bear the duty previously borne by divinely guided prophets. These verses accord the Muslim Umma a favoured status, conditioned on its rectitude and disposal of its duty to carry out the prophetic mission in a post-prophetic world. This exceptionalism is not quite the same as the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction, for the Qur’an ever holds out the possibility of the animosity between the believers and their enemies turning into affection and friendship, presumably through conversion, and encourages fairness and charity toward all non-hostile persons (Q. 60:7), apart from the special permission to maintain social relations with the People of the Book (Q. 5:5).

In sum, the Qur’an engaged the political in at least two ways: by making an authority necessary to implement its laws within its community and by tasking the Umma with carrying on the Prophet’s mission beyond his death so as to make the Word of God supreme.

4.1 Caliphate, rather than kingship

The idea of the cessation of prophethood and the rise of successors (caliphs) further represents a conscious break from the earlier Israelite tradition, which is otherwise invoked frequently in the Qur’an. Abū Bakr’s statement suggests a recognition in early Islam of a categorical difference between Islamic and Israelite attitudes towards government or political power, for Islam’s prophet is the last one and his deputies were neither divinely chosen nor guided in a direct sense (cf. Crone and Hinds 1986). The leading Sunnī canonical collections of al-Bukhārī and Muslim both report that this turning point in human history was prophesied by the Prophet Muhammad himself:

‘The Israelites used to be led by prophets (kānat banū Isrāʾīl tasūsuhum al-anbiyāʾ); whenever a prophet died, another followed him. But after me, there is no prophet, but there will be deputies (khulafāʾ), and they will be many’. ‘What do you command us to do’, they asked. He said, ‘Fulfill the pledge of one and then the next, and fulfill their right, for Allah will ask them of what He trusted to them’. (al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, al-maghāzī, Bāb thahābu jarīr ila al-yaman, no. 4359)

Incidentally, the root s-w-s employed in this report to refer to the Israelite prophets’ shepherding and leadership of their people also provides the Arabic word for politics, siyāsa (Anjum 2012: 59).

The caliphate was not prophethood, nor was it kingship. Since Islam blossomed, almost overnight, into the greatest empire ever witnessed within the Nile-to-Oxus region – the most ancient seat of civilization – it is often forgotten that the political problems of early Islam had been those of a different world, where the idea of any government or higher order was intolerable to the fiercely independent Arab nomads. Although not unfamiliar with kingship in the surrounding regions or within their own history, the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula harboured profound suspicions towards it (Shahin 2009). Islam, too, encouraged this attitude, with the early Muslims associating the idea with arbitrary power, decadence, and servitude. Hadith reports record how this difference was noted and admired by notables from Yemen:

You O Arabs will do well so long as you consult when your chief dies, for when it is taken by the sword, they become kings (mulūk), their wrath is like the wrath of kings and their pleasure is the pleasure of kings. (al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, aḥādīth al-anbiyā’, Bāb mā thukira ʿan banī isrāʾīl, no. 3455)

Securing obedience to even the Prophet himself had been so significant a problem that the Qur’an addresses it not just once, but on more than fifty occasions, with such warnings as the following:

But nay, by thy Lord, they will not believe (in truth) until they make thee judge of what is in dispute between them and find within themselves no dislike of that which thou decides, and submit with full submission. (Q. 4:65)

The Prophet’s detractors balked at the imperative to obey a human spokesman of God (e.g. Q. 11:27; 17:94; 23:34). The Hadith tradition, for example, speaks of a member of the Prophet’s own community challenging his distribution of booty as unjust (al-Bukhārī, Ṣaḥīḥ, aḥādīth al-anbiyā’, Bāb wa-qawl allāh taʿālā wa-ila ʿād no. 3344; al-maghāzī, Bāb baʿthu ʿalī wa khālid ila al-yaman, no. 4351). It is to be entirely expected, then, that the Prophet’s deputies (in his own time, but especially after him) would face even greater challenges to their authority. The Peninsula-wide ridda (backsliding) movement in Abū Bakr’s short reign must have been anticipated, and when it occurred, was met by the Medinan leadership with an iron fist and at a great cost.

4.2 The First Fitna

The first major sign of trouble in the caliphal paradise came when certain leaders in the garrison towns of Iraq and Egypt deployed Qur’anic language to mobilize against the third caliph, ʿUthmān (r. 23–35/644–656), eventually killing him. The reasons for their discontent likely stemmed from both the old world (tribal grievances against the hegemony of the Quraysh) and the new order (the slowing conquests and diminishing stipends against larger numbers of soldiers) (Hinds 1972). This regicide set off the First Fitna (also called First Civil War; fitna, a keyword in the Islamic political imagination, ranges in its meaning from personal temptation to social strife and civil war). The ensuing conflict, marked by three battles against rebels who were fellow Muslims, consumed the tragic five-and-a-half-year reign of the next caliph, ʿAlī (35–40/565–561). The last of the battles was waged against zealots within his own army, a faction which came to be known, infamously, as the Khārijites (the seceders).

5.1 God’s deputies: the contested political theology of the imperial caliphate

Contrary to their intentions, the Khārijites proved the pragmatic necessity of a government that could secure order and avert civil war, even at the expense of the early caliphs’ virtues of justice and piety. Whereas ʿAlī’s loyalists in Iraq emphasized his credentials of piety and knowledge against Muʿāwiya and his clan, the Umayyads underscored their legitimacy on pragmatic grounds. Muʿāwiya’s appointment of his son Yazīd as his successor, justified in the name of maintaining the fragile regional balance, proved to be a fateful mistake by an otherwise masterful politician. It elicited rebellion from Ḥusayn, the Prophet’s grandson and ʿAlī’s son, and ʿAbdallāh, son of the Prophet’s first cousin al-Zubayr. The resulting Second Fitna (60–72 AH/680–692 CE) ended with the Marwānids, a different branch of the Umayyad clan, restoring Umayyad power. The tragic killing of Ḥusayn and his family at Karbala by ʿUbaydullāh, Yazīd’s governor, would later become the centre of a new passional cult built around the family of ʿAlī and the Prophet.

Even with relative competence in domestic governance and expansion at the borders, the Umayyads faced a dire crisis of legitimacy as opposition to their rule gained momentum. The strongest challenge to their authority came from ʿAlid loyalists in Iraq, who led numerous (but largely failed) rebellions through the length of Islamic history – although the transformation of the ʿAlī loyalists (shīʿat ʿAlī) in Iraq into various theological sects followed a long and complex trajectory over the course of the next two centuries. The theological claims made by or on behalf of the ʿAlids, as well as other theologically minded opponents such as the murjiʾa and the qadariyya, likely contributed to the Umayyads upping their own theological claims. Although scholars disagree as to whether the Umayyads were the active initiators of those claims or merely reacting to their opponents (Judd 1999), the core of late Umayyad political theology revolved around the claim that the ruler was the true repository of God’s mission, ‘God’s caliph’, so to speak. In this respect, the Umayyads shared a deeply Imām-centred vision of Islam with their ʿAlid opponents. But while Umayyad claims and fortunes were put to an end by the ʿAbbāsid revolution (132/750), for the Shīʿa, as we shall see presently, diametrically opposed circumstances obtained. To the Shīʿite claim that an imām with the right lineage ought to be ruler, the Umayyads retorted that God had already given his authority to those most fitting. It is likely that this latter tendency inclined them to the doctrine of predestinationism (jabr), which in its political deployment would have meant that opposing the ruler is tantamount to rejecting God’s will. In contrast, their theological opponents, the qadariyya and the murjiʾa, stressed human responsibility. Certain ʿAbbāsids, too, tried in vain to claim a wide range of religious powers, as evident in the political writings of their Persian secretary, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. c. 139/757; Lambton 1981: 53). This conflict between the two visions came to a head in al-Maʾmūn’s inquisition regarding the createdness of the Qur’an (Anjum 2012: 37).

5.2 Shī’ī political theology: sacred lineage, infallible rulers

How the major components of the Imāmī-Shīʿī doctrine of the imāmate evolved – whether it was a political dispute that became theology, as the mainstream account goes, or a theological belief in the cosmic significance of ʿAlī or the Prophet’s family – remains disputed (Gleave 2005). The lack of support for ʿAlid doctrine in the Qur’an encouraged claims among the Shīʿa about its incompleteness, with some claiming that as much as nine-tenths of the Qur’an is hidden (Anthony 2012). The ʿAlid loyalists tended to be fissiparous, one significant division being between the Zaydīs and the Imāmīs, which occurred in 122/740. Zaydī (also known as Fiver) political theology differed from that of the Imāmīs by placing a greater value on the acquired virtues of the imām. The office of imām was therefore earned rather than inherited; any viable candidate had to possess virtue, religious knowledge of jurisprudence and doctrine, and justice and courage demonstrated through standing up to injustice and impiety and launching a successful rebellion.

In contrast, for the Imāmīs, knowledge was passed esoterically via lineage, from and to the right son in each generation, and obedience and mystical devotion was demanded of all followers. The Imāmī credo therefore included the formula shared with other Muslims – ‘There is no deity but God, and Muḥammad is His messenger’ – while adding the declaration ʿAlī walī Allāh (ʿAli is the ally/friend of God). The imām was thereby established as the axis of creation and the gateway to God, with recognition of him being a prerequisite for salvation. There can only be one active imām at any given time, although his successor may be at his side as a silent (ṣāmit) imām. The Imāmīs came to believe that ʿAlī’s appointment as the Prophet’s successor was announced on various occasions, most significantly at Ghadīr Khumm, during the Prophet’s return to Medina from his last pilgrimage. The sources offer differing descriptions of the nature and extent of the imām’s knowledge. According to some accounts, the imām has perfect mastery of the Qur’an and Hadith. Elsewhere, he is also said to be endowed with supernatural knowledge (such as knowledge of the future and of all languages) and an understanding of the esoteric meaning of the Prophet’s teaching. There is general agreement that the imām is divinely protected against error (maʿṣūm) and is thus an infallible guide to Islamic law and doctrine.

Among the Imāmīs, a major split occurred between the Seveners, characterized by both political and doctrinal radicalism, and the Twelvers, the political quietists who today form the main subgroup of the Imāmīs. For the latter, the Twelfth Imām, Muḥammad al-Mahdī – said to be a direct descendant of ʿAlī through his son Ḥusayn – was born around 255/870 and went into concealment, or occultation (ghayba), in 873 or 874. Until his return near the end of time, his incognito existence deprives the faithful of the only figure entitled to legitimate rule (Akhavi 2013: 208).

Historically, genealogical claims have played a significant role in legitimating political power despite early Islam’s egalitarianism and absence of ideas such as primogeniture. Rebels and dynasties frequently claimed descent from the Prophet’s family or from his Companions. In Iran, political legitimation further drew on pre-Islamic Iranian mythology, and the Turco- Mongolian conquests gave rise to new lines of noble ancestry and new forms of political theology that competed with Islamic ones. Rebels often enlisted genealogies to bolster claims ratified less by fact than political success. The Fāṭimids claimed descent from the Prophet’s daughter, Fāṭima, through the Seventh Imām, Ismāʿīl, despite widespread rejection of that claim even among other Seveners. Later in Iran, the Safavids – who originated as leaders of a Sunnī Sufi order in Persian Kurdistan and were Kurds, not Arabs – came to claim descent from ʿAlī and were responsible for the forced conversion of Iran to Twelver Shīʿism. The families of sayyids and sharifs have been accorded enormous prestige in most Muslim societies and have secured preferential treatment, access to patronage in the form of royal stipends and hereditary judgeships, and positions as shrine superintendents and endowment supervisors.

6.1 Key works

Among the earliest works to indicate the political theology of the Sunnī ‘ulamā’ is that attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa’s aforementioned student, Abū Yūsuf, the chief qāḍī of Hārūn al-Rashīd. In Kitāb al-Kharāj, he parts ways with his teacher’s oppositional attitude to power, acknowledging the reality of ʿAbbāsid dominance, but while attempting to discipline it through the religious knowledge that the ‘ulamā’ preserved. Subsequently, Sunnī political theology became fully theorized after the effective decline of ʿAbbāsid power under the Shīʿī Būyids, with the earliest of such treatises being Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī’s (d. 403/1013) al-Tamhīd fi al-radd ʿala al-mulḥida al-muʿaṭṭila wa al-rāfiḍa wa al-khawārij wa al-muʿtazila (A Preliminary in the Refutation of the Heretical Deniers [of God’s attributes], the Rafiḍīs, the Khārijites, and the Muʿtazilites; Ibish 1966). This theological tract was directed, as its very title suggests, against the most prominent competitors of Sunnism. Since these ‘heterodoxies’ were all political in origin, the response took the form of political theology. Around the time the Būyids were expected to lose to the incoming Sunnī Seljuk conquerors from the east, Shāfiʿī chief jurist Abu ‘l-Ḥasan b. al-Ḥabīb al-Māwardī (d. 450/1058) wrote a decisive treatise on the subject of political theology, shifting the discourse from theological polemics to the realm of politics and law. His al-Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya (Ordinances of Government) has since become the authoritative expression of the classical Islamic theory of the caliphate.

Another major step in expanding the Islamic political imagination was taken by another leading Shāfiʿī jurist of Baghdad, Abū al-Maʿālī al-Juwaynī (d. 471/1085) in his Ghiyāth al-umam fī ‘ltiyāth al-ẓulam (Aid to Nations in Times of Darkness). Al-Juwaynī grounds the obligation of establishing a caliphate in the highest authority achievable by any norm, the consensus of the Companions, and proceeded to imagine life in the absence of the caliphate and then, even more boldly, in the absence of scholars qualified to exercise independent reasoning (ijtihād; Anjum 2016a). Al-Juwaynī stands out in this tradition for his attention to power – an attentivity which was soon overturned by his illustrious disciple, Abu Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), who was more inclined towards idealism and the symbolic integrity of the community than political theory. Al-Ghazālī’s political thought, much like his theological and metaphysical thought, both reflected and immortalized the ironies of his age (Anjum 2012: 125). Fundamental contributions to Islamic political and historical consciousness were made in the late middle period, to which we will return presently.

6.2 The obligation of appointing an imām

The main commitments of classical Sunnī political theology, right up until the colonial period, can be distilled into a few tenets shared by all Sunnī legal and theological schools, with only minor variations:

1. Installing an imām is an obligation. Most also held that the basis of this obligation is revelation. In fact, with the exception of a few outliers among the Khārijites and some of the Baghdādī Muʿtazila (Dumayjī 1987: 45; Lambton 1981: 77–78), all theological schools in Islam agreed on the necessity of installing an imām. The chief difference between the Sunnī and the Shīʿa lay in the former’s insistence that the caliph/imām constitute a legal obligation rather than a salvific necessity (that is, not having or knowing an imām falls into the category of sins that do not approach unbelief), and his function is to govern the community by divine law rather than to guarantee the fundamental integrity of religion and salvation.
2. There must be only one imām for the Umma at any given time. Some allowed multiple imāms only if such were separated by a sea or an enemy territory – an obvious concession to the Spanish Umayyads – although al-Juwaynī clarified that this was not a license for multiple imāms, as the separated imām was merely an amīr, not a caliph (Anjum 2016b).
3. Sunnīs insisted, in contradistinction to the Imāmī Shīʿa, that the imām must be present and visible, rather than in occultation; that the imām need not be in possession of perfect or esoteric knowledge, only feasible mastery of the knowledge of the law, which could be complemented by other scholars; and that the imām must be an upright Muslim of adequate piety, but need not be most supreme in piety or status (Lambton 1981: 74; Hallaq 1984: 35). In all these cases, the Sunnīs were motivated by practical concerns, justifying historical or current rulers in order to continue the institution of the caliphate, whereas Shīʿa doctrine was invested in the exact opposite.
4. Most Sunnīs insisted, in contrast to both the Shīʿa on the one hand and the Khārijites on the other, that the imām must be from the Prophet’s tribe of the Quraysh, although some did question even this requirement (Dumayjī 1987: 275).

   One question on which Sunnī theologians differed concerned whether the caliphate must be a political institution, as normally conceived, a position insisted upon by most classical scholars, including al-Bāqillānī, Abū Yaʿlā al-Farra, al-Juwaynī, and Ibn Taymiyya, among others, or whether its function was primarily symbolic and constitutional, such that even a powerless caliph could be tolerated as acceptable, as conceded by a minority, including al-Māwardī and al-Ghazālī (Anjum 2012).

6.3 Appointing the imām

Most authors agree that the imāmate is established by either: (i) election (ikhtiyār) by one or more electors, followed by a pledge (bayʿa), or (ii) testamentary designation by the previous imām (ʿahd). In the early phase of caliphate theory, there existed important disagreement about whether testamentary designation constituted an independent means of appointing an imām. The Muʿtazila, for example, considered it invalid altogether (Dumayjī 1987: 188). The Mālikī scholar Bāqillānī, the Ḥanbalī scholar Abū Yaʿlā, and others considered it valid only if followed by the bayʿa of the electors, thus effectively reducing its value to mere nomination (Anjum 2012: 114). Abū Manṣūr ʿAbd al-Qāhir Ṭāhir al-Baghdādī (d. 429/1037) considered designation legitimate, but without explicitly specifying whether confirmation by electors was necessary. He does state, however, that if the designated person is fit for the imāmate, the community is obligated to accept him – as in the case of Abū Bakr’s designation of ‘Umar – which would mean that the electors’ confirmation is only a ritual if the designated imām is suited for office (Lambton 1981: 82). One may compare this dispute with the contemporary controversy surrounding whether the US vice president has any actual power to ratify the results of a valid election. Al-Māwardī is the first in this tradition to not only claim a consensus on the designation but also to consider designation a method of appointment independent of confirmation by the electors (Anjum 2012: 114). Starting with al-Juwaynī, (iii) brute force (ghalba), also appears as an independent way for an imām to attain power.

The early classical period was interrupted by the cataclysmic Mongol attacks of 1258. In the wake of the devastation of Islam’s eastern lands, Muslim political theology developed in new directions.

8.1 Jewish and Christian political theologies

The Hebrew scripture maintains a deep ambivalence towards kingship, ranging from reverence for figures like Saul, David, and Solomon, who owe their authority to divine selection and enjoy a special relationship and communication with God, to condemnation of kingship as akin to idolatry (for God is the one true king). The Qur’an and Hadith articulate their vision of proper government in conscious conversation with the Hebrew tradition, using the Israelite prophets and their followers as role-models, but also, on the crucial issue of kingship, parting ways in two respects: by embracing human political authority and by reconstituting kingship as a deputyship to the Prophet rather than as a rival to divine authority (section 3). David and Solomon are prophet-kings, to be emulated in their virtue, but their authority cannot be claimed by any non-prophet, nor is kingship permitted in Sharīʿa (Islamic Law). In one Hadith, the Prophet Muḥammad himself chooses to be a slave of God (ʿabd) rather than a king (malik) like Solomon (Dumayjī 1987: 37–39).

Islamic scriptural texts (the Qur’an and Hadith) are largely silent about the later and more secular experience of Jewish monarchy. This silence extends to later Hebrew dynasties (140 BCE–92 CE), which combined ancestral biblical kingship with Hellenistic forms, and which the Qur’an implicitly condemns for rejecting Jesus’s prophethood (Q. 3:55; 4:155). This silence extends also to the Christian imperial experience that followed. Philo of Alexandria, the first Jewish philosopher and adherent of the Abrahamic tradition to reconcile the personal Abrahamic God with the Greek philosophers’ First Cause, likened kings to God only in desired virtue, while infusing regal language with metaphorical descriptions of God as a mighty king (Bardill 2012: 341). Aristotle and Plato, it will be recalled, had recommended the government should be handed to the ‘best man’ who, in his achievements, would be like a god (Bardill 2012: 359). Similar themes can be found in Christian thinkers like Eusebius, the apologist for the Emperor Constantine, who took them a step further, casting Constantine in the image of God, arguing that ‘a good king should attempt to replicate on earth the heavenly rule of the Supreme Deity’ (2012: 354). Although absent in Islamic scriptural texts, these themes become quite common in various Islamicate traditions.

8.2 Hellenistic political theology

​​The Islamic world’s Hellenistic philosophical tradition (termed falsafa) offered the most complete alternative to Qur’anic political theology. This rationalist, top-down, descending, and absolutist tradition, despite its foreign origins, could be harmonized with the ruler-centred political theology of both the late Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid theorists, as well as their Imāmī opponents. Just as, in this tradition, the intellect (ʿaql) was thought of as an eternal and divine essence external to – rather than constitutive of the cognitive or physiological foundation of – the human being, so too was the philosopher-king or lawgiver external to society and yet necessary to direct it. Only the philosophers could constrain and direct the base instincts of the masses who, if left unchecked, would perish just as a body does without a brain (Fakhry 2005: 128; Anjum 2012). This necessitarian system, in which philosophy and religion were inseparable, as were cosmology (being) and epistemology (knowing), was fundamentally at odds with the Abrahamic notion of a God who created freely and gave humans reason as an instrument for survival and recognition of divine signs (Oakley 2005).

9.1 Descending interpretations: al-Ījī

The impact of Mongol rule, falsafa, and Shīʿism can be sensed in the thinking of the influential Ashʿarite-Sunnī theologian, ʿAḍūḍ al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756/1355), whose writings on the caliphate clearly concede some of the premises of his Shīʿī interlocutors. The Shīʿa challenge was: ‘The imamate is God’s and the Prophet’s lieutenancy, and so the validity of the office cannot be established by the decision of others, i.e., the electors (ahl al-bayʿa); if it were so, then the imam would be their caliph, not God’s and the Prophet’s’. Al-Ījī responds by granting the premise rather than arguing for the right of the Umma to elect one of its own as a representative, thus parting with his classical Sunnī forebearers. Instead, he argues that just as a legal analogy (qiyās) only explicates and does not create God’s law, so the bayʿa only brings out someone who is made imām by God (Kerr 1966: 34–35). The Sunnī imām was now chosen directly by God, just as the Shīʿī imām was. The electors merely constitute an instrument of God’s ruling, not the Umma’s will. The Umma is irrelevant, no longer an instrument (or at best approximation) of God’s will; God’s will is done regardless of who the electors choose as caliph/imām. Commenting on this dialogue, Malcolm Kerr observes: ‘This is a decisive rejection of the contract theory; the ahl al-bayʿa are considered mere functionaries, not interested parties’ (1966: 34–35).

9.2 Ascending interpretations: Ibn Taymiyya

Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) attempts to recover the ascending direction of early Sunnī theology already visible in the writings of the Ḥanafī Abū Yūsuf, the Mālikī al-Bāqillānī and the Ḥanbalī Abū Yaʿlā, one in which the imām is the agent (wakīl) of the Umma. In the words of E. I. J. Rosenthal, ‘it is clear from this attitude [of Ibn Taymiyya] that the center of gravity has shifted from the khilāfa and the khalīfa to the community, whose life must be regulated by the divine law. At the same time, he pleads for close co-operation between the imam – the necessary authority – and the community’ (1958: 52).

This subtle yet remarkable shift in political theology was born out of a necessity obvious to anyone with as keen a sense of history as Ibn Taymiyya possessed. Writing after the destruction of Baghdad in 656/1258, and along with it the prestige of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate, Ibn Taymiyya could not, unlike earlier Sunnī theorists, ground the authority of the Islamic order in the continuation of the caliphate, the institution that could boast an unbroken chain of succession to the Prophet. For al-Ghazālī, an Islamic order would necessarily unravel without the caliph’s office; for Ibn Taymiyya, writing after that feared unraveling had taken place, the principle of political legitimacy had to be reconstructed from the bottom up – from the twin facts of the Umma and the divine law, the Sharīʿa, and from the first principles of human nature and revelation. This becomes even more urgent since the military code (yāsā) of Chinggis Khan (d. 1227) had become a rival to the Sharīʿa (Anjum 2012: 26–30, 102–107).

Ibn Taymiyya’s most significant contribution in this regard was his theorizing of Islamic political theology in terms of the first principles of revelation. In an interpretation that was unprecedented yet, once his view of political authority was granted, quite obvious, Ibn Taymiyya grounded all political authority in the Qur’anic arch-obligation to command right and forbid wrong – an obligation that, as noted earlier, the Qur’an declares to be the defining mission of the entire community. Humans are political animals, so any political authority necessarily commands and prohibits, and does so based on some standard of good. Since the Islamic community is constituted by its response to God’s revelation, to follow divine command and prohibition in collective matters becomes a rational as well as revelational requirement.

9.3 The empirical turn: Ibn Khaldūn

A child of the Islamic west and its experience of the Reconquista by Christian powers, Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808/1406), arguably one of the greatest historical thinkers of all time, turned his attention from theology to history. Rejecting both the moralizing polemics and key assumptions of the hyper-idealized Hellenistic heritage found in falsafa, he sought to explain the rise and fall of dynasties and states not by recourse to their theological or philosophical rectitude, but the observable phenomenon of group solidarity. The paradigmatically significant events facing Ibn Khaldūn were the civil wars of the first century of Islam. He sought to explain in a novel way how Islam had empowered the mutually warring Arab tribes to coalesce into a single body of believers. Political power, he argued, is generated by the strength of group solidarity (ʿaṣabiyya), offering a sociological rather than primarily theological explanation for Islam’s triumph.

The intersection of theology with social science so evident in Ibn Khaldūn’s work merely expanded on a theme already evident among Sunnī theorists from early on: devotional piety alone is not the only determinant of the attainment and longevity of political power. Competence, justice, and wise policymaking also all play a role. Sunnī scholars had long held, for instance, that for political offices competence should be prioritized over personal piety, thus presupposing that ‘the world is not so enchanted that the piety of the ruler would in itself ensure prosperity and piety of the ruled’ (Anjum 2016b: 11).

9.4 Eighteenth-century reformism

10.1 Secularizers

A range of intellectuals have advocated secularization since the dawn of European modernity. Late Ottoman intellectuals like Sayyid Bey, for example, each of whom argued within an Islamic reformist framework, were among the earliest to propose abolishing the institution of the caliphate (Guida 2008). They contended that the true caliphate had been enacted in early Islam through consultative election, in a manner best represented during their own time by constitutionalism and democracy. Islamic governance, in their view, had lost its true spirit after the thirty-year rule of the Rightly Guided Caliphs following the Prophet’s passing. Their argument comprised three common moves. First, they sublimated the Rightly Guided Caliphate to an inimitable status. Second, they denigrated the subsequent caliphs and rulers as uniformly flawed. Finally, inspired by what they saw as ultimately superior Western ideas, such as constitutionalism and nationalism, they adopted a progressivist reading of modern history. These ideas were taken further by the Azhar-trained Egyptian scholar and politician, ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq (d. 1966). He theorized a fully secularized Islam built on two further conceptual moves: a thoroughly secular interpretation of early Islamic history, and an assimilation of the Protestant view of religion universalized by the Enlightenment as comprising belief and pious feeling separable from embodiment, community, and sociality. This allowed him to argue that the Prophet’s message had been religious, not political (Rāziq 2012). Even the Rightly Guided Caliphs, starting with the Companions’ jihād against ridda tribes under Abū Bakr, had made political and not religious decisions.

A further step in this direction was taken by the Sudanese communist intellectual, Mahmoud Mohammed Taha (d. 1985), who was executed for apostasy by the Sudanese dictator Jaafar Nimeiri. Taha recognized that ʿAbd al-Rāziq’s proposal was implausible so long as it failed to address the challenge posed by the Prophet’s mission and the corresponding Qur’anic revelation in Medina, which contained unequivocal political and legal injunctions (Taha 1987: 117). Rejecting the Medinan Qur’an as devoid of binding norms, Taha embraced the idea of progress in its most thorough sense: just as human history is a story of evolution from lower to higher forms, ‘Islam, too, can never be concluded; progress in it is eternal’ (2007: 179). The spirit and the terminus of this progress was Marxist: ‘When such absolute equality is achieved through the grace of God, and as a result of abundant production, we shall achieve communism or a sharing of the earth’s wealth by all people’ (Taha 1987: 156; see also Duran 1992: 15).

10.2 Colonial-era Islamizers

The label ‘Islamizers’ helps us avoid charged and controversial labels such as ‘political Islam’ and ‘Islamists’. It also serves as a capacious category inclusive of a wide range of actors who, with possibly conflicting ideas, have sought to preserve Islam in a plausible fashion. Confronted with the epochal rupture in political life introduced by colonialism and, even more so, Western science and technology, Muslims were often pressured to abandon their inherited ways and judge what was essential in their religion from what was non-essential and could be sacrificed.

Among the Ottoman ‘ulamā’, the Islamic resistance to wholesale Westernization was exemplified by Muṣṭafa Ṣabrī (d. 1954), the last Ottoman Shaykh al-Islām. Having once served as a librarian for the last defiant Ottoman sultan, Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909), he had a tumultuous political and intellectual career, being forced multiple times to relocate before finally settling in Egypt. Through his writings and lifelong activism, he argued that the material progress promised by Westernization, synonymous with secularization, was worthless if it contravened Islamic principles, and therefore must be resisted (Şeyhun 2014: 44–45). But what if the decadence of Islam’s late medieval tradition contributed to the inability of Muslims to keep up with the modern West? Such was the view of reformers like Muḥammad ʿAbduh (d. 1905) in Egypt and Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) in India, who both attempted a critique of the received tradition coupled with a thoroughgoing overhaul of Muslim education. For them, the dominion of the West was not just a test from God, but a wakeup call.

The secularizers, as noted earlier, had repurposed the traditional idealizations of the early caliphs and sectarian denigration of subsequent rulers. Against this, South Asian Islamizers could draw on the intellectual project of Shāh Walī Allāh, which had placed political authority at the heart of Islam and inspired action-oriented revivalist movements, including that of his grandson, Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831). Ismāʿīl had rebuked pessimistic histories of perpetual decline, arguing that the Rightly Guided Caliphate is an achievable ideal for future Muslim rule. The prophetic ideal that refracted through the early caliphs, consisting of piety, charisma, eloquence, missionary zeal, and leadership, was not meant to be out of reach of later revivalists and leaders (Tareen 2020: 107–109).

Less than a century later, while confronted with British colonial domination, the erudite anti-colonial Muslim intellectual, journalist, and later nationalist politician and first Indian minister of education, Abul Kalam Azad (d. 1958), led the Khilafat Movement in support of the Ottoman Caliphate. Azad emphasized the caliphate’s centrality to Islam as the root of the Sharīʿa, likening obligatory practices such as praying and fasting to its branches. Arguing in a manner reminiscent of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, he made the normative foundations of the religion contingent on the existence of the caliphate. Whereas not praying or fasting was sinful, he argued, not aiding a Muslim caliph rendered one an outright non-Muslim: ‘Protecting the caliphate is more important than a thousand prayers or a thousand days of fasting. Why? Because disobedience towards the caliph is such a grave sin that a person who disobeyed the caliph, no matter how much he prayed or fasted, his prayers and fasts will not help his salvational prospects’ (Abul Kalam Azad, quoted in Tareen 2023: 124–125).

Azad’s anti-colonial politics were denounced by the Indian scholar and eponym of the Barelwi movement, Ahmad Raza Khan (d. 1921). Seeing Azad as a Hindu- and secularist-cavorting charlatan who undervalued the ritual and communal purity of Muslim life, Khan advanced an alternative, quietist political theology in which the Muslim community would protect its way of life by accepting those in power, i.e. the British. In this political theology, it was the received communalist tradition, with its rituals and hierarchies, that must be preserved. Since the sect, and not any broader affiliation, is the basic building block of the salvific community, the social must be elevated over the political. So long as that is assured, political loyalty may be effectively, but perhaps never fully, transferred from the Muslim caliph or sultan to the non-Muslim colonial overlords.

10.3 Postcolonial Islamizers

Although initial resistance to Western colonialism took an Islamic form, by the time of the Second World War, anticolonial movements had embraced nationalist rhetoric. Accordingly, the elites in most postcolonial nation-states in the Middle East adopted secular nationalist models that signalled secular political theologies. The abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate created a vacuum in political theology that Muslim societies sought to fill using Islamic social movements aimed at recovering Muslim cultural and intellectual independence. Often mistaken as mere reactions to modernity, these movements drew on layers of precolonial and colonial-era Islamic revivalism. One can observe such continuities in the preaching and missionary activity of the charismatic Egyptian schoolteacher, Ḥasan al-Bannā (d. 1949), the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose revivalist project was built on the contentions of conservative Ottoman-era thinkers, as well as reformists like Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā (d. 1935), combined with the populist form of Sufi orders (Mohamed 2023). Similarly, the ideas found in Shāh Walī Allāh and Abul Kalam Azad were developed by Deobandi Islam, as well as within the Jamaat-e-Islami of Sayyid Abul Aʿla Mawdudi (d. 1979). That Mawdudi has been among the most intellectually influential architects of Islamic revivalist thought owes itself not only to his personal acumen and religious synthesis, which resonated with the expanding Muslim middle class, but also to the vibrant heritage of South Asian Islam on which he drew (Tareen 2020; Tareen 2023; Zaman 2020).

Mawdudi shares with Walī Allāh a willingness to critically engage with early Islamic history so as to incorporate it into his horizon of Islamic revival (Ahmad 2017). Instead of Walī Allāh’s Islamized Neoplatonism and mystical cosmology, however, Mawdudi’s framework is empirically grounded in colonial reality, propelled by the task of locating and critiquing Muslim decline. Unlike Walī Allāh’s concern with engaging Shīʿite polemics, Mawdudi therefore sought to explain and reverse decline. He extracts from the early experience of Islamic history the following nine principles: divine sovereignty, justice for all, equality of Muslims, accountable government, consultation (shūrā), obedience to authority in goodness, prohibition of seeking power, the divinely given purpose of the state, and the right and duty of commanding good and forbidding wrong (Mawdudi 2000). His answer is a more studied version of the already familiar sublimation of the Rightly Guided Caliphate followed by a damning censure of the subsequent rule that began with the Umayyads. Furthermore, he judged all subsequent revivals as having failed to restore the true consultative, pious, and just spirit of the early caliphate. The deficiency in past revivals was political, for none quite succeeded in restoring Islam’s early political virtue. But this political theology is not resigned or tragic; rather, it is driven by the freedom to think past the restoration of the precolonial status quo – a freedom often lacking in the thought of Ottoman Islamizers. This optimism enabled Mawdudi to think, as modern progressive reformers were willing to do, beyond inherited forms, but without embracing the ostensible inevitability of secularization.

More consequential than even this daring but hasty historical assessment was Mawdudi’s political theology, built around the idea of the human vicegerency (caliphate) of God based on an (at best) vague allusion in Qur’anic verse 2:30. At the heart of this political theology was not servitude and resignation to God, but human responsibility towards and stewardship of God’s creation by God-given laws (March 2019). This is a subtle shift in emphasis rather than a rejection of tradition, but it allowed Mawdudi to foreground human agency and moral responsibility, and thus explain the West’s rise as a result of a God-given mandate to humanity rather than a breach of God’s omnipotence. The proper worship of God required, Mawdudi contended, embracing God’s sovereignty (ḥākimiyya), and thus rejecting any secular political arrangement, be it non-Muslim or Muslims ruling in the name of a secular ideology.

The Arab lineage of Islamizers received powerful expression in Sayyid Quṭb (d. 1966), who synthesized post-Ottoman anti-colonial and reformist trends with the South Asian reformism he received through Mawdudi. The result was a highly original conceptualization of Islamic Law as inherently liberatory; Quṭb contended that the essential flaw of secular modernity was the servitude of humans to man-made ideologies and institutions, and that liberation could only come from servitude to God through total submission to God’s perfect law, which sat in such complete harmony with human nature (March 2019).

10.4 The new Shīʿī political theology: vilayat-e faqih

Historically, since the beginning of occultation in the third/ninth century, Twelver political strategy had been centred around waiting for the hidden imām’s return while making peace with the illegitimacy of all rulers. Twelvers thus embraced a starker, more doctrinal version of the compromise that many Sunnī ‘ulamā’ had come to embrace only in pragmatic terms. This thousand-year-old attitude changed with the fateful Iranian Revolution of 1979. Drawing on a nineteenth-century precedent, the leading Shīʿī cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1989), developed the doctrine of vilayat-e faqih (in Arabic: wilāyat al-faqīh, guardianship of the jurist). Twelver jurists, having experienced political empowerment under Safavid rule during the tenth/sixteenth century, had begun to theorize that some of the functions of the hidden imām must partially devolve upon them. Indeed, by the nineteenth century, the jurists had taken up certain narrow functions of the imām. In a radical move, Khomeini expanded those functions to include political rule, the hallmark of the infallible, hidden imāms, and further argued that a single jurist (namely, himself) could wield that responsibility. This became the Islamic Republic of Iran’s official doctrine. Khomeini declared that ‘not only did the top jurist have the right to exercise political rule, but he also had the power to suspend some of the secondary ordinances of the faith if he believed that such suspension was essential to rescue “Islam” from destruction’ (Akhavi 2013: 209). The powers of the guardian-jurist, who was also the supreme authority in the Iranian state, therefore included the power to suspend the major pillars of faith, such as the daily prayers and the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Khomeini deployed the logic that many Sunnī autocrats have aspired to but seldom succeeded in exploiting: since the Iranian state was the true protector of Islam, anything that harms it would harm Islam itself, and therefore protecting the state became the highest obligation of faith.

10.5 Islamic political theology in the era of globalization

The Islamic awakening (ṣaḥwa) that followed both the decline of Arab nationalism in the 1970s and anti-Soviet jihādism (sponsored by the US) of the 1980s led to an era of reconciliation between Islamizers and Muslim state elites. This honeymoon ended with the Gulf War in 1990–1991, after which state elites sought to control Islamic symbolism. This era was marked by profound shifts in the Islamic political imaginary, as Muslim reformers sought creative, if not always persuasive, ways to import modern concepts, such as territoriality, freedom, democracy, and constitutionalism. Reformists and conservatives across an increasingly interconnected world battled whether and how to move from classical Islam’s singular ‘Abode of Islam’ to the territorial sovereignties of modern states (Baker 2003; Anjum 2016a; 2016b; Aljunied 2018; Rock-Singer 2019).