The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Princeton University

Copyright © 2013 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13484-0

Contents

Introduction……………………………….viiAlphabetical List of Entries…………………xxiTopical List of Entries……………………..xxvContributors……………………………….xxixMaps………………………………………xxxvEntries A–Z…………………………..1Index……………………………………..607

Introduction

The Islamic World Today in Historical Perspective

In 2012, the year 1433 of the Muslim calendar, the Islamic population throughout the world was estimated at approximately a billion and a half, representing about one-fifth of humanity. In geographical terms, Islam occupies the center of the world, stretching like a big belt across the globe from east to west. From Morocco to Mindanao, it encompasses countries of both the consumer North and the disadvantaged South. It sits at the crossroads of America, Europe, and Russia on one side and Africa, India, and China on the other. Historically, Islam is also at a crossroads, destined to play a world role in politics and to become the most prominent world religion during the 21st century. Islam is thus not contained in any national culture; it is a universal force.

The cultural reach of Islam may be divided into five geographical blocks: West and East Africa, the Arab world (including North Africa), the Turco-Iranian lands (including Central Asia, northwestern China, the Caucasus, the Balkans, and parts of Russia and the Ukraine), South Asia (including Pakistan, Bangladesh, and many regions in India), and Southeast Asia (the Indonesian archipelago; the Malaysian peninsula; Singapore; and minorities in Thailand, the Philippines, and by extension, Australia). Particularly in the past century, Islam has created the core of a sixth block: small but vigorous communities living on both sides of the Atlantic, in Europe (especially in France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Spain), and the Americas (especially in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean, and Argentina).

Islam has grown consistently throughout history, expanding into new neighboring territories without ever retreating (except on the margins, as in Sicily and Spain, where it was expelled by force, and the Balkans, where it is now regaining its foothold). It began in the seventh century as a small community in Mecca and Medina in the Arabian Peninsula led by its messenger, the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632), who was eventually to unite all the Arab tribes under the banner of Islam. Within the first two centuries of its existence, it came into global prominence through its conquests of the Middle East, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the Iranian lands, Central Asia, and the Indus valley. In the process and aftermath of these conquests, Islam inherited the legacy of the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, embraced and transformed the heritage of Hellenistic philosophy and science, assimilated the subtleties of Persian statecraft, incorporated the reasoning of Jewish law and the methods of Christian theology, absorbed cultural patterns of Zoroastrian dualism and Manichean speculation, and acquired wisdom from Mahayana Buddhism and Indian philosophy and science. Its great cosmopolitan centers—Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba, Damascus, and Samarqand—became the furnace in which the energy of these cultural traditions was converted into a new religion and polity. These major cities, as well as provincial capitals of the newly founded Islamic empire, such as Basra, Kufa, Aleppo, Qayrawan, Fez, Rayy (Tehran), Nishapur, and San’a’, merged the legacy of the Arab tribal tradition with newly incorporated cultural trends. By religious conversion, whether fervent, formal, or forced, Islam integrated Christians of Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Latin rites and included large numbers of Jews, Zoroastrians, Gnostics, and Manicheans. By ethnic assimilation, it absorbed a great variety of nations, whether through compacts, clientage and marriage, persuasion, and threat or through religious indifference, social climbing, and the self-interest of newly conquered peoples. It embraced Aramaic-, Persian-, and Berber-speaking peoples; accommodated the disruptive incursions of Turks and the devastating invasion of Mongols into its territories; and sent its emissaries, traders, immigrants, and colonists to the lands beyond the Indus valley, the semiarid plains south of the Sahara, and the distant shores of the Southeast Asian islands.

By transforming the world during the ascendancy of the Abbasid Empire (750–1258), Islam created a splendid cosmopolitan civilization built on the Arabic language; the message of its scripture, tradition, and law (Qur’an, hadith, and shari’a); and the wisdom and science of the cultures newly incorporated during its expansion over three continents. The practice of philosophy, medicine, and the sciences within the Islamic empire was at a level of sophistication unmatched by any other civilization; it secured pride of place in such diverse fields as architecture, philosophy, maritime navigation, and trade and commerce by land and sea and saw the founding of the world’s first universities. Recuperating from two centuries of relative political decentralization, it coalesced around the year 1500 into three great empires: the Ottomans in the west with Istanbul as their center, the Safavids in Iran with Isfahan as their hub, and the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent with Agra and Delhi as their axis.

As the Islamic world witnessed the emergence of these three empires, European powers began to expand their influence over the world during the age of global discoveries—westward across the Atlantic into the Americas and eastward by charting a navigational route around Africa into the Indian Ocean—there entering into fierce competition with regional powers along the long-established network of trade routes between China on the one hand and the Mediterranean and East Africa on the other. The European exploration of the East and growing ability to exploit an existing vast trade network, together with the inadvertent but eventually lucrative “discovery” of the New World, were to result in Europe’s economic and political hegemony over the Islamic world, with which it had rubbed military and mercantile shoulders since the early Muslim conquests. The early modern Islamic world (and much of the rest of the world) fell behind the West economically and politically with the advent of the Enlightenment in the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century.

By about 1800, small European nations (e.g., England, France, and Holland) had established rule over large regions of the Islamic world. Their trading companies and imperial outposts in distant Muslim lands were transformed into colonies of European supremacy that were eager to benefit from Western industrialization. It took until the end of World War II for the global geopolitical map to become reorganized into an array of discrete nation-states on the European model. Muslim nations perceived Islam not only as the way of life led by the majority of the population but also as the source of normative principles for social order.

In the 19th century, two diametrically opposed trends would preoccupy the Muslim intelligentsia in their effort to bring about social and religious renewal. Modernism proposed adapting Islam to Western ideals, while revivalism advocated restoring the vigor of the original dynamics of Islam; neither approach would lead to the utopia of a Pan-Islamic caliphate. Islam was now challenged to express itself within the framework of independent nations, with their focus on ethnicity, territoriality, and culture.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Islamic world witnessed the explosion of Turkish secularism; in its middle period, it sought sovereignty and honor in Arab, Iranian, Pakistani, and Indonesian nationalism; at the end of the 20th century, it became increasingly dominated by militant trends. “Islamism,” a fundamentalist reaction to Western ascendancy, called for an Islamic state rigorously based on Islamic law; its public image was dominated by marginal yet high-profile extremists who advocated the use of terrorist attacks and suicide martyr missions to achieve this end. Both Sunni and Shi’i expressions of Islamism—in Algeria, Sudan, Iran, or Afghanistan—were inspired by their belief that if only Muslims were to return to their religious roots, God would grant them success in this world and bliss in the next. The past glory of the Islamic world would be restored, and the West would again study at its feet.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the world has drawn closer together through the power of advanced technology and the speed of global communication, including ubiquitous access to mobile phones and the Internet. Those advances enabled the annihilation of the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, and other acts of terror that have occurred since that date. Yet they also may be nurturing a different response of Islam to the modern world, as rumblings of freedom, cries for liberation from corrupt regimes, and calls for democratic forms of government echo from Muslim lands through cyberspace. The nonviolent but persistent 2011 demonstrations in Freedom Square in Egypt may be a sign of a transition from organized martyr-murderer movements to coordinated peaceful agitation for political liberty, respect for human rights, and free exercise of religion for the many polities of Islam.

The Evolution of Islamic Political Thought

The development of Islamic political thought tracks the differing positions Islam has occupied during its political expansion over the course of 14 centuries. Just as Islamic history both preserved its tradition and reshaped its internal culture consistently over this period of expansion, so did Islamic political thought maintain certain principal foundations while undergoing successive stages of evolution. The foundations of Islam neither allow for distinctions between spiritual and temporal, ecclesiastical and civil, or religious and secular categories, nor envisage the same duality of authority accepted in Western political thought as standard, such as God and Caesar, church and state, clergy and laity. Over the centuries, Islamic forms of state and government, power and authority, and rule and loyalty have exhibited great diversity. Although they were all based on the premise of a unity of religion and state, it has nonetheless been impossible for Islam to formulate a norm of political thought that would stand above and apart from its various cultural permutations.

In contrast to the West, the respective realms of religion and state are intimately intertwined in Islam and subject to a process of fluid negotiation; the concepts of authority and duty overshadow those of freedom and the rights of the individual. Islamic political thought not only deals with matters of government, politics, and the state but also addresses questions of acceptable behavior and ethics of both the ruler and the ruled before God. Islamic political thought cannot be measured by Western criteria and standards of political theory. It must be understood from within its own tradition, characterized by a vibrant integration of the secular and sacred in obedience to God and His Prophet. In its very nature, Islam is dynamic, not static, both as a way of life and as a way of monotheistic worship. It is a living reality rather than a frozen system.

Rudimentary but enduring foundations for Islamic political thought were laid beginning with the Prophet’s career in Medina. Significant divisions, however, came to the fore under the Umayyad caliphs (658–750), the first Arab dynasty ruling from Damascus. Arabic, the language of Muhammad and his early successors (632–61), was propagated by the conquests of Islam and became established as the language of high Islamic culture and political thought during the caliphate of ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705). On the criterion of its scripture (kitab), Islamic political thought enforced the basic principle of obedience to God and His Prophet. That principle was articulated in the nucleus of its creed, the shahada, and extrapolated in oral tradition by the early practice of the community, modeled after the Prophet, which is known as the sunna.

The Umayyad rulers belonging to the Quraysh, Muhammad’s tribe, claimed to be the rightful caliphs as heirs to the Prophet but saw their leadership challenged by both the Shi’is, who reserved legitimate leadership for Muhammad’s family, and the Kharijis, who advocated that the most meritorious Muslim be the ideal caliph. By the end of the Umayyad caliphate in 750, the stage had been set for Islamic political thought to evolve through five successive periods, the trajectory of which may be summarized as follows.

750–1055. The early medieval formulations of Islamic political thought during the ascendancy of the Abbasid caliphate at Baghdad developed in three directions: those of the clerical class of administrators (kuttab), the schools of legal scholars (‘ulama’, fuqaha‘) and theologians (mutakallimun), and the circles of philosophers (falasifa). Over a period of five centuries, in particular during the caliphates of Harun al-Rashid (r. 781–809) and Ma’mun (r. 813–33), Islamic thinkers integrated the thought patterns of a great variety of peoples, absorbing the intellectual systems brought into its fold by the converted populations of the Iranian empire and the Byzantine provinces. It appropriated the legacy of their learning and the acumen of their political experience with the help of comprehensive translation movements from Greek and Pahlavi into Arabic.

1055–1258. During this stage, Islamic political thought had to address the upheaval caused by Sunni Turkic nomads from Central Asia. Turkic sultans gained effective military control and cut into the economic and administrative strata of an Iran-based society, nominally ruled by the Abbasid caliphs. The Turkic Seljuqs neither intended nor attempted to impose their language, culture, and seminomadic social order on the fabric of the Islamic polity; instead they wholeheartedly adopted Islam as their religion and promoted Persian next to Arabic as a language of higher learning.

1258–1500. After the demise of the attenuated Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad in 1258 during the Mongol invasions, Muslim political thinkers were forced to come to terms with three new political powers in the east: (1) Ilkhanid and then Timurid rule in Iran and Iraq, (2) khanate rule of the Golden Horde from Siberia to the Caucasus and from the Urals to the Danube River, and (3) Delhi-based sultanates in India. Farther to the west, it saw military control pass into the hands of Mamluk Turks and Circassians who, uprooted from their homelands as military slaves, were sold into the households of their patrons and emancipated as converts to Islam to serve as soldiers in the Mamluk armies in Egypt and Syria. Control of the polity was thus usurped by a medley of foreign khanates and slave sultanates, each attempting to claim legitimacy through the manipulation of Islamic symbols of just rule and institutional affiliation with Sufi shaykhs. Faced with this fragmentation, Islamic political thinkers sought to find new paradigms that reflected the effort to overcome the tumultuous breakdown of order. Nonetheless, despite having to endure the devastations of Chingiz Khan (1167–1227) and Tamerlane (1336–1405), the conquered Islamic community managed to integrate the foreign conquerors into its religion and polity.

1500–1800. From about 1500 onward, the division of the Islamic world into sultanates was succeeded by the rise of three separate and flourishing monarchic empires, none of which used Arabic as their official language of discourse and administration. The Turkish-speaking Ottomans, who had conquered Constantinople in 1453 (now named Istanbul as their seat of government), added Syria and Egypt to their empire in 1517 and eventually adopted the title and the legacy of Sunni caliphs. Adopting the Persian idiom, the Safavids established themselves in Iran in 1501 and transformed it into a theocratic Imami Shi’i monarchy. The Mughals, developing a Persian-speaking culture, established their predominantly Sunni rule over India with their victory at Panipat in 1526. In this new threefold constellation, political theory was made to serve the particular vision of rule of each empire rather than that of a universal caliphal culture, and thus Islamic political thought was shaped according to three different modes. Decline set in for all three empires in the 18th century: in the Ottoman lands after Russia gained access to the Black Sea and the Dardanelles in the Treaty of Küçük-Kaynarca (1774) and Napoleon landed in Egypt (1798–1801); in Iran after the murder of Nadir Shah in 1747 and the Qajar accession to power; and in India with a long, agonizing decline after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 that terminated when the last Mughal emperor was deposed by the British in 1858.

From 1800 onward. The multifarious search for rationales of Islamic political thought from 1800 onward struggled with a situation the world of Islam had never encountered before in its history. It was challenged by a Western culture that had entered its ascendancy. For the first time, Islam neither had the power to conquer nor the capacity to absorb the opposing culture. In response to this anxious and often desperate situation, there gradually emerged revival movements and nationalisms in the Islamic world, whose ideologies covered the spectrum from puritanism, reformism, modernism, secularism, nationalism, and socialism to the extremes of fundamentalism, often termed “Islamism.” Its apogees are represented on the one hand by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and on the other hand by the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, on the United States.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought Copyright © 2013 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of Princeton University. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.