[Maydan Book Forum] The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought by Andrew March (Harvard University Press, 2019)

The Problem of Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought

The Caliphate of Man is a study of the development of a particular political theology in modern Islamic thought that grounds a doctrinal commitment to a form of popular sovereignty in the Qurʾānic claim that God has created a “caliph” on earth. My book argues that this vision of popular sovereignty is not merely a superficial apologetic move designed to refute claims that “Islam is not compatible with democracy,” but rather reflects a genuine intellectual revolution in modern Islamic thought. This revolution consists in a move away from a view of politics as just guardianship and pious representation by rulers and scholars to a distinctive vision of democracy whereby a just and pious people governs itself while also representing God’s instructions to humanity. This intellectual revolution involved more than political pragmatism or superficial adoption of democratic language. It consisted in a comprehensive reformulation of Islamic political philosophy, built in particular on a theological claim about mankind’s status as God’s vicegerent—or caliph—on earth. That reformulation involved not only reducing rulers to their proper status as agents of the people but also implicitly raising the people to the ultimate arbiters of God’s law. My claim is that if Islamism as a political theology represents a grand idea, one that is meant to challenge and replace others in the modern Muslim public sphere, it is this. My book seeks to explore this ideal, where it came from, and what were its theoretical conditions of possibility. But in the wake of the authoritarian counter-revolutions after the Arab Spring, I also ask whether this ideal theory of a kind of Islamic democracy is now a matter of history, and intellectual history at that. And, if so, does this not leave Islamists with a kind of intellectual crisis as they seek to define what distinctive approach to political life Islam has to offer?

In the first order, my book seeks to take seriously the aspiration to theorize comprehensively the fusion of divine and popular sovereignty. What does it mean to hold that both God and the people can be said to be “sovereign”? Imperatives of the divine and the popular, the theocratic and the democratic, often speak in different voices. Divine sovereignty is the language of transcendence and alterity. Whatever the place of human nature in knowing God and embracing His law, the Islamic conception of the divine law locates it outside of us—not as written in our hearts, but primarily written in texts and signs. God’s command is addressed to humans, and their initial obligation is entirely passive: to receive, hear, submit, obey. Responsive action is in the first order a matter of trust and faithfulness.

By contrast, much of what is involved in popular sovereignty involves the absence of God. God (for Sunnis) has not designated a ruler and so the people have a collective duty to choose and appoint one. God’s law may in theory be comprehensive, but it is silent or imprecise on countless particular questions, and so the people have to judge and act in the spaces left by that silence. If to speak of divine sovereignty is often to speak of that which is fixed and constraining, popular sovereignty often refers to the indeterminate spaces of judgment and uncertain consequences of action.

But a core thesis of my analysis is that the divine and popular elements in Islamic democratic theory are often derived from the same commitments and materials. Divine command is not just a constraint on human freedom, and human freedom is not just the absence of divine command. Rather, the foundation of Islamic democratic theory is the same as the foundation of Islamic theocratic theory. That foundation is the relationship between divine address and the divine delegation. The political theology of popular sovereignty in Islam is that the umma has been entrusted by God with the realization of His law on Earth. God is the principal agent and actor, and the first response of the people-as-deputy is a passive and receptive one. But the force of God dignifying mankind as His caliph is that He has deputized no one else in between God and man—no kings, no priests, no scholars. Adherence to the covenant of vicegerency is also synonymous with human virtue and perfection. But above all, the idea of the universal caliphate of mankind points beyond the mere fulfillment of the law to the popular creation of the law, the ultimate marker of sovereignty.

But this ideal leaves unresolved certain paradoxes and uncertainties. Which specific aspects or powers of sovereignty are the “people” said to enjoy? Are they fully sovereign powers, or are they constrained? What are the implications for traditional conceptions of the divine law and those agents who claim to represent it? What kind of “people” is imagined to be sovereign; what are the conditions for it to claim this authority; and how is this sovereignty represented and enacted?

In my analysis, the attempt to answer these questions at a theoretical level reaches its apotheosis in the pre-2011 thought of figures like Rāshid al-Ghannūshī. Ghannūshī’s views are complex and I cannot summarize them entirely here (I do so in Chapter 6 of The Caliphate of Man). But on my reading the core aspiration of Islamic democratic theory is to theorize an ideal regime type based on a people that is “sovereign” in its control over political institutions but is at the same time not radically free to legislate for itself but is rather constrained by divine command. This theory culminates, however, in more than a mere political supremacy for the “people” but also in a kind of legislative sovereignty. In this ideal theory, the umma can be seen as “the source of legislation” because, while God is the primary and original source of legislation, the umma participates in divine will through its public practice of mutual consultation. Moreover, for all the binding and constraining quality of God’s eternal law, “the goal of the eternity of this final, sealing law required restricting and limiting the text of revelation to a determination of general principles and a few select particulars for organizing human relations and economics.” The revealed law leaves the “filling out of the details of that framework to the legislative efforts of the umma, developing with time,” a practice that Ghannūshī equates with the idea of universal communal consensus (ijmāʿ) as a source of divine law alongside revelation. This fact induces Ghannūshī to proclaim that when deliberating about political matters, “the umma is guided by God and acquires from His light protection against collective error.”[1]

When Ghannūshī writes that the umma participates in sovereignty and rulership with its legislative authority, this implies a very specific relationship to the sources and outcomes of lawmaking. In this perfectionist scheme “it is not sufficient for a citizen to follow the law because its legality emanates from a legal body, that is, an elected one, or even from the people as a whole, but it must also agree with the divine authority represented by the sharīʿa. Otherwise, the believer must not only refrain from applying it, but he must resist and rebel against it, according to his means. For that reason, Islam does not entrust the supervision of the state’s laws to a particular body—though that too is needed—but rather to the people as a whole, who are the guarantors of God’s law.”[2] What holds together this imagination that divine sovereignty can be realized as popular sovereignty? Divine sovereignty as a pre-political law embodied in Text, constraining political life, only comes to life through a particular kind of collective and individual popular agency. This is an agency built on moral and epistemic commitment to fulfilling the covenant of vicegerency. The theory of popular sovereignty envisioned by the caliphate of man is thus a kind of republic of virtue in that it presupposes a people that is both united morally around a shared conception of truth and committed both epistemically and practically to seeing politics as the realization of the divine trust to be faithful to God and pursue the umma’s legitimate worldly interests.

My hope is that my book will have the effect of making central the theology of the “universal caliphate” to scholarly discussions of modern Islamic political theory. I also hope that my book moves discussions of “Islam and democracy” beyond questions of (in)compatibility toward more detailed considerations of the variety of forms of democratic theory and the conditions of possibility for specific democratic regime types to be realized. In addition, there are a few other themes from the book that I would like to bring separate attention to, especially now that it has become so common for Islamist thinkers to shift their attention from the ideal of a thorough-going Islamic democracy to a more modest ideology of “Muslim democracy.” Is the intellectual tradition of “democratic Islamism,” developed in an ideal form during the decades of exile from power, destined to remain just that—an ideal theory forming an intellectual tradition rather than an actually realizable regime type?

One preliminary observation may be that insofar as the ideal regime type of an “Islamic democracy” is a kind of republicanism, it confronts many of the obstacles faced by all forms of republicanism. The notion that republicanism demands too much of ordinary citizens by way of participation, knowledge, and virtue is precisely the source of the modern view that popular sovereignty can only be expressed through exceptional moments of constituent power, leaving government to elected representatives. Moreover, it places a faith in politics and the state that is simply absent in most modern societies, particularly in most Muslim ones that have high levels of alienation from the state and ruling oligarchies.

But I would like to conclude by raising what I consider the single most important moral factor that makes the specific vision of an Islamic democracy likely to remain at the level of an ideal, what I refer to in the book as “the irreversible moral pluralism of modernity.” Modern Islamist political thought attempts to repurpose classical Islamic legal concepts for a modern structural and institutional context. One first tension between the core assumptions of this project and modern sociological realities in Muslim societies is that Muslim-majority societies are characterized by the same fundamental challenge of pluralism as other modern societies. It may be true that “for the great majority of Muslims today, the Sharīʿa remains a source of religious and moral authority.”[3] But Muslims disagree radically on what this implies and who they want to speak in the name of the sharīʿa. For many (including Hallaq), this kind of pluralism is itself a tragedy that Muslims only have to face because of colonialism. But if it is true that a genuinely “Islamic” popular constituent moment is an impossibility today, that is more likely to be because of the combination of moral pluralism in Muslim societies and the irrelevance or inadequacy of the premodern Islamic legal rulings (not principles) for most social and economic policy areas. In modernity, there is reasonable disagreement about ethics, even for Muslims or those living in Muslim countries. This is a fact that cleaves the idea of an “Islamic” popular constituent power in two: either a given people is free to choose to form whatever government it wishes (in which case Islamic legal theory has nothing to say), or the freedom of the constituent moment is usurped by the prior constraints of fidelity to some pre-political Islamic social contract.

I would submit that this is particularly a problem for modern Islamic political thought precisely because of its aspiration to deep legality. Although much modern commentary has focused on the problem of “Islam and violence,” the more accurate story is that the modern Islamist vision is (though not pacifist) one of consensus as the deep foundation of politics. From Riḍā’s preoccupation with refounding the caliphate on purely consensual grounds to Ghannūshī’s vision of a people that sees itself as God’s caliph enacting a kind of dual social contract between God and it, and then it and its government, modern Islamism shares with certain kinds of liberalism precisely an embarrassment at the violent origins of politics and the violence needed to sustain it. Even the utopianism of Quṭb, arguably responsible for the ease with which some more radical Islamist groups have rationalized violence, structures his reflections around a humanity that might well be conceived of as born free, that is, in its innate condition of monotheism and good (enough) moral disposition. What all of these theories have in common is their beginning by simply positing the existence of an umma, with its essence of piety and moral unity already established. Of course, an Islamist theory of politics could acknowledge that this umma does not exist, but must be formed through education and coercion, as Quṭbist theories do by calling for a vanguard to take power in our present fallen times. But this is simply not in the spirit of so much of modern Islamist thought before and after Quṭb, which not only rejects the violence authorized against jāhiliyya but also tends to imagine jāhiliyya away at the level of ideal theory.

Of course, the option remains for Islamic democrats to imagine an “Islamic democracy to come,” a future sovereign umma that can express its moral unity politically, after the people has “returned” to its natural piety by a combination of removing the alien causes of disunity and gentle education. This is not a contradiction. Every democratic theory, if it hopes for more than managed competition or the minimalization of the evils that government can do, has to rest on a faith in the people becoming fit for self-rule. All that remains to be said is that because this Islamic democratic vision of self-rule involves a very deep kind of consensus about metaphysical truths and the ethical purposes of human life, it does not escape the possibility that such deep moral agreement is no longer likely in the contemporary world, at least without the kinds of coercion and limitation on freedoms of conscience and speech that Islamic democrats claim to reject. What if moral pluralism is here to stay?

This may indeed be a moment when the vision of both democratizing and Islamizing the modern state finally gives way to other horizons and possibilities. When Islamizing law seems less of a panacea or even a minimal condition of legitimacy, living and acting politically in such a moment is less of a challenge, perhaps, than theorizing it. Beyond subtracting Islamist idealism, even utopianism, and accommodating political reality, what are Islamic norms adding to the political?

It is possible that the most important horizon for Islamic political thought today is a post-statist, even post-sovereigntist, one. This is not just an observation imposed by the theoretical structure of my book. Alongside the claims to have moved into “post-Islamism” or “Muslim democracy,” there is a nascent discourse on Islam and the political “after the state.”[4] Although this may require a new generation of thinkers, it may also be a horizon that traditional Islamist thinkers themselves are best equipped to observe. This is not only because they best acquainted with the difficulty of realizing a fully Islamic public sphere, but also because they are some of the greatest witnesses of the brutality and danger of state power. Ghannūshī himself, while observing the inherent authoritarianism of any state (even an Islamic one), when it holds the society and the economy in its grip, holds that the post-statist, post-sovereigntist Islamic vision may be one that focuses on society as a space for expanding the freedom from state tyranny for a variety of ways of life, not only religious ones but also materialist, secular ones. His model for this more normatively laden vision is not only the Constitution of Medina, but ninth-century Baghdad which, in his telling, saw no contradiction in allowing for the flourishing of multiple ways of life and moral-intellectual communities, including those pursuing materialist and nontheist cosmologies.[5]

There is something of a “liberalism of fear” to this insight. Islamists like Ghannūshī have experienced more than their share of the awful and tyrannical power the state is capable of. And so, limiting that power, not only for the sake of the ordinary goods of nonviolence and nondomination, but for the freedom for religious ways of life to be able to flourish, is less a theoretical, doctrinal achievement than one earned by the practical, political experience of opposition to authoritarianism. In my view this potentially heralds an Islamic political thought in a new register, a political Islamic political thought,[6] one that is informed both by the political as its own domain of pluralism and novelty, and also by Islamists’ reflection on their cumulative historical experience of political action. There need be no preset script for this register of thought (liberal, theocratic, or otherwise), but it may take place without the fantasy of sovereignty.

When I read western academics on Islam, my go-to move is to unmask their secular-liberal prejudice. My suspicion stems from centuries of work brimming with racism and unapologetic orientalism. But Andrew March is among the few specialists on Islamic political thought that quiets my intellectual paranoia. What makes March rare is that his most recent book, The Caliphate of Man, is a well-sourced and well-written book on Islamic political thought. His references are thorough, and he extrapolates the most pertinent arguments from the texts he examines. The book is highly commendable due to March’s close reading of Salafi thinkers of the modern period. And since he does not assume any expertise in Islamic Studies on the part of his audience, he provides ample context and historical background for the arguments and thinkers he studies.

March works within the small but growing field of comparative political theory (CPT). Comparative political theory is a topsy-turvy world. It forms a niche within a niche, a wallflower on the littorals of the global western academy. For CPT-ers it is perfectly normal to engage marginalized figures and ideas which fall outside the authorized secular-liberal political canon. As a result, its practitioners openly claim that one of the purposes of their scholarship is to question their own assumptions about the world and invite others to do the same. Sometimes, this leads to white-on-white crime like what befell the celebrated Michael Walzer when March scolded him after the former relapsed into a strange leftist fit of Islamophobia. Such moves have earned March street-credit among his Muslim readers. In the past he has been invited to many Muslim institutions including Zaytuna College, where he shared the stage with Hamza Yusuf and Maria Dakake. These are uncommon investments for a western academic, and it is reflected in his careful reading of Muslim authors.

In The Caliphate of Man March argues that Muslim political theorists have come to defend a religious view of popular sovereignty which reflects “a genuine intellectual revolution in modern Islamic thought”(x). Much like the political revisionism Khomeini brought to Shi’ism in the 1970s, March heralds a similar transformation in Sunnism at the hands of Salafi democrats. Where traditional Sunnism once defended the rule of sacred kings and scholars, now it favors the rule of a just and pious people. This transformation, Salafis argue, is built on a theological claim derived from the Quranic verse (Innī jā‘ilun fi l-arḍ khalīfa 2:30) in which God bestows upon mankind the status of God’s vicegerent, or caliph on earth. The net effect of the book is that in the wake of the Arab uprisings, the book puts western commitments to popular sovereignty in tension with western apprehension of potentially illiberal democrats. Although major Salafi thinkers (namely, Hasan al-Turabi) are notably absent, March chronologically reads key thinkers in this tradition such as Mawdudi, Qutb, and Rida ending with a fifty-page denouement on the Tunisian reformer Rachid al-Ghannouchi (b. 1941).

If The Caliphate of Man was a coming of age film and Salafi Islamism its main protagonist, then as expected, the main character definitely matures into a law-abiding liberal subject. That is indeed strange given that in March’s own account, Islamic democracy was a movement inaugurated under the banner of saving the Caliphate (Chapter 3). However, at the end of the 20th century, Salafi Islamism turns out to be another call for democracy akin to concurrent liberal interpretations of nationalist self-determination. How did we get from anti-colonial politics in favor of sultanic power to post-colonial calls for democracy? Under normal conditions, this plot should set off alarm bells. But given March’s street-cred, it is hard to dismiss. It is also hard to deny. When we look around the region, the politics of Islamic democracy advocated by al-Ghannouchi came to life in Tunisia and Egypt and remain firmly in place in Turkey under the Justice and Development Party (AKP). It looks like Islamists everywhere have become secular liberal democrats with a sprinkle of Islamic values. Like any political movement, Islamists have their own embarrassing compromises, such as their staunch support of the Qatar monarchy, or their sectarian rejection of democratic reform in Bahrain. It is precisely at the juncture of these historical inconsistencies and present tensions that a clearer picture emerges of Islamism as a phenomenon.

Returning to the central research question motivating March’s text: How did we go from a movement that supposedly defended the Caliphate to simply repeating what was argued by the Caliphate’s most vehement critics at the time of its abolition? Contrary to March’s answer, my argument is that the current Salafi position is not new. It is a known position in the centuries-long history of Islamic thought. Where March goes wrong is that he elides Sunnism with Salafi Islamism. On his account it is unclear whether Sunnism transformed itself, or that since the 19th century Salafi thought unabashedly speaks for Sunnism at large. In one sense March agrees with this; his own genealogy of Islamic democracy traces back to the 19th century. Yet, the Salafi role isn’t as exciting as March concedes. It can be easily explained if we contextualize its resurgence in terms of the colonial encounter. My claim is that there was no transformation within Sunnism per se, but rather that a certain strand of Muslims, claiming to be Sunnis, all the while rejecting central positions in the school have come to speak on behalf of Sunnism. I am proposing an alternative explanation for the same events March examines. Adopting this alternative explanation undermines what I take to be March’s central thesis: Sunnism shifted from a political theology of the sultanate to a political theology of popular sovereignty. Sunnism is not an amorphous shapeshifter. It has not engaged in any kind of ijtihādī revisionism on the question of imāma, rather non-Sunnis re-articulated a view which laid dormant in the backwaters of Islamic thought. To explore this line of thinking I will focus March’s reading of Rachid al-Ghannouchi’s seminal text al-Ḥurriyāt al-‘āmma fi l-Dawlah al-Islāmiyya. March’s choice of ending his book with al-Ghannouchi is apropos because the ideas in al-Hurriyat are exemplary of what has become the dominant view among modern Salafi democrats.

When we look at The Caliphate of Man’s index, there are hardly four citations under the name: Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728 H/1328 M). Yet, when it comes to the arc of the work, Ibn Taymiyya animates much of the ideas articulated in the book. Ibn Taymiyya’s political vision is not only known by Sunnis but is clearly rejected by the school. Therefore, it is strange to attribute it to the Sunni position. There is one Taymiyyan theme re-occurring in al-Ghannouchi’s work documented by March in the following passage:

The second sense, in turn, in which the people is sovereign is that the People Who Loose and Bind are not. Of course, Ghannūshī recognizes that classical Islamic legal theory recognized that the umma’s elite representatives could authorize rules in a valid and binding sense, but for him this was the traditional path to authoritarianism. He thus asks “so where is the umma? It is the possessor of the missing power in this conception.” For Ghannūshī, only Ibn Taymiyya stood firm in resisting authoritarianism in claiming that the general bay‘a from the people at large is necessary and decisive for appointing the caliph, with the bay‘a of the People Who Loose and Bind only a form of nomination. Thus, the sovereignty of the umma is first a matter of creating procedures for the will of the people to be genuinely effective in the authorization of political power (176).

This passage explicitly distinguishes the Taymiyyan umma-centric vision from a “classical” Sunni position. For Ibn Taymiyya political authority is an obligation for the entire umma and the state is a representative of that umma. However, it is worth asking: what do Ibn Taymiyya and his modern followers understand by the concept of umma? According to al-Ghannouchi, the umma comprises of the total set of sovereign believers who are each in a divine covenant requiring submission to God’s law. March explains,

But that body is composed of its members, and its members are all those who accept the lordship of God and their own trusteeship. Although (as we shall see) that body is commanded to entrust some of its members with the execution of that authority, it never irrevocably surrenders its own patrimony even when duly constituted powers are in operation. If the umma has a form of derived sovereignty, it never goes to sleep. And because its authority is located in the law and the idea of representing God, any member can attempt to speak for it in moments of dereliction, crisis, and emergency (160-161).

In both quotations what emerges is a vision of a ‘direct-access society’ in which there is a God and his people mediated by God’s will as sharī‘a. This tripartite framework goes against the standard Sunni understanding of what binds the umma to God. For Islamists such as al-Ghannouchi, the umma is bound by submission to God’s will through a primordial covenant prior to the formation of communal identity. The direct-access individuation of each member abstracts the believing self from its own communal identity.

Sunni ethnogenesis is not cosmogonic but resolutely immanent. The missing ingredient in al-Ghannouchi’s account of sovereign community is the world-historical role of the Prophet Muhammad, may peace and blessings be upon him and his family, as charismatic founder. The umma comes to be through its imām (both words syntactically and semantically connected in Arabic). An imām in this sense is not only a nabī, selected for communication with God but also a rasūl, instituting a new law. The law necessitates a urgrund that is both inside and outside of the law. On the Sunni account, what makes an umma into an imagined community is not so much submission to an abstract law but rather the shared submission to the embodied sovereignty in the personhood of the Noble Prophet who is the very basis of law (al-taṣdīq bimā ‘ulima majīʾ al-nabī bihī min al-dīn bi l-ḍarūra, faith is assenting to all what is known of the Prophet’s advent).

The idea that the Prophet sits in between God (outside law) and his creation (subject to law) is all but forgotten by most who study Islamic political theory today. Instead focus remains disproportionately on Divine Command Theory. March argues that both Sunnis and Salafis agree that God is the source of all law. Any Command Theory, divine or otherwise, stipulates that moral maxims obtain the normative force of universal law when the command and its corresponding reward and punishment emanate from the same agent. Hidden in this principle is a rejection of legal theories in which the source of normativity may be objectively grounded in either reason or nature. Norms are always subjective, grounded in a lawgiver’s will-to-power. Horkheimer’s famous line: “To seek to salvage unconditional meaning without God is a futile undertaking,” encapsulates why Muslims resort to supplementing a primitive command theory with God. The story goes something like this. Worldly authorities may issue what appear at first to be universal law, but on closer examination, these commands turn out to be contingent since their respective compensation is bounded by time and space. In a Sunni account, the contingent nature of their compensation reduces their normative force, failing to satisfy the comprehensive demands of justice. Secular commands are intrinsically unable to overcome the unbridgeable gap between the unconditional meanings they evoke and the inadequate compensation they offer. A positivist legal theory which touts contingent maxims as universal commands is a dictionary definition of arbitrary power falsely paraded as impartial law. Therefore, it is no surprise that for most people today justice in this world is always left unrequited, perpetually longing for closure in supreme judgement elsewhere.

Most Muslims agree on some form of Divine Command Theory. It is unclear if Salafis agree with Sunnis on the exact nature of divine command. For example, the Sunni conception accommodates prophecy in a way that Salafis do not. According to the Sunni interpretation, divine command is not restricted to God alone. In fact, it cannot be restricted to God if we are to overcome the enduring dilemma of justice deferred. The entry of God comforts us that there will be a court of final justice, but how does that help to overcome the legitimacy gap? Sunni emphasis on prophecy changes the metaphysics of morals. Prophethood, and only prophethood, makes justice in the here and now possible once again. Even though the Noble Prophet is a thoroughly immanent-human agent, he is not subject to the same deficiencies burdening worldly sovereigns. For Sunnis, he occupies a key position (al-maqām al-maḥmūd) whereby he is granted the right to hand out indulgences (shafā‘a) in the hereafter; electing those who may have been destined to punishment. Obviously, this privilege is not equal to God’s final judgement, yet it ensures his ability to affect the calculus of eternal retribution. Given his exceptional position in the structure of heavenly command, prophetic legislation in this world is qualitatively different than secular power. Prophetic edicts are backed by a will-to-power unrestricted by this world. By participating in God’s final judgment prophetic power, independent in its own right, forms a this-worldly rope (ḥabl) connecting the transcendent unconditional meanings buried in immanent law with their equivalent transcendent retribution. According to Sunni Divine Command Theory, participation in other-worldly adjudication is necessary if one is to rise above the use of arbitrary force and exercise legitimate authority in the world.  And this right is not solely vested in the Noble Prophet; other members of his community such as select scholars, saints and soldiers may enter the heavenly command structure, strengthening its connection to the world albeit in diminishing proportions. This means that if latecomers such as post-prophetic worldly sovereigns want to attain legitimacy, they must insert themselves into the already established heavenly command, cognizant of the fact that many under their charge may well rank above them.

My point is that the Sunni idea of sovereignty is very different from Salafi accounts. For many Salafis, what I described above amounts to shirk, or idolatry because Sunnis believe in participatory norm-creation. However, when these matters are more clearly examined, March reveals that even Salafi democrats have no problem in allowing the umma as a whole to participate in norm-creation alongside God. However, for Sunnis, there is no prima facie investiture in lay individual believers, let alone humanity as a whole. Earthly sovereignty is not directly transmitted to the umma from God but remains, even today, in the hands of a single titleholder, the Noble Prophet. This means post-prophetic investiture of power is inherited by the umma through Prophetic Sovereignty not Divine Sovereignty. The Sunni perspective does not deny God as the ultimate source of power/law, but there is no precedence in imaging individual sovereign believers based on a fiṭri pre-temporal covenant with God prior to the prophetic mission. Even the verse 2:30 is interpreted as pointing to Prophetic Sovereignty rather than individual sovereignty. That is because according to Sunni theology there is a very specific mechanism by which the transcendent will of God is transmitted to the immanent understanding of man.  Revelation is mediated through a singular entity on Earth, the Noble Prophet, which relates to Divine Sovereignty based on his ‘iṣma or infallibility. The claim that the Noble Prophet is the last and only holder of sovereignty on Earth is derived from Sunni prophetology. Salafi commentators run rough shod over these subtle issues. They mute prophetic agency in order to render the Noble Prophet as a simple transmitter of what is ultimately God’s will.

Moreover, on the Sunni account the holder of worldly sovereignty never died. The Noble Prophet and his companions and righteous followers are alive in their graves (ahyā’un wa lākin lā tash’urūn 2:154). Sunni prophetology radically changes the conception of the umma found in March’s book. For Salafis the umma is the subset of individual humans inhabiting the earth today. It is neither trans-historical nor trans-geographical. In the Sunni vision, the umma’s electorate, if we are to use modern language, extends to constituents that are both shāhid, present and ghāʾib, absent. To speak on behalf of the umma requires one to speak for an unimaginably large group of people of which one’s living ancestors are of utmost importance. For Sunnis, Marx’s adage, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” is less a nightmare than an honored Prophetic trust. Therefore, the umma cannot be reduced to simply the portion of humanity inhabiting a trivial patch of earth today. On the Sunni view those who speak in the name of the umma simultaneously speak in the name of the Prophet and his followers and are not confined to any ethnicity or territory.

Another point of contention overlooked by March is that for Sunnis the umma is not a multitude of individuals but rather the umma is first and foremost comprised of its communitarian organs. On this account, each person is not born as an unencumbered self. Individuals are born into pre-political social corporates such as a households, tribes, ethnic communities, guilds, spiritual brotherhoods, or legal schools, each group embodying its own meritocratic values. As a single milla, Sunnis have their own mechanisms of speaking in their own name. The umma organically reproduces itself through designated communal social structures often supported by the awqāf, communal religious foundations. Individuals are thrown into this world, caught in complex hierarchies that were chosen for them and which predetermine their positionality. Meaning, each believer is already represented. The Muslim Sunni Elite are raised, from the bottom-up, through Sunni institutions and earn their position through the meritocratic mechanisms in their respective corporates. Over time they gradually embody the ideals of the community in a system of trickle-down representation. The Muslim Sunni Elite comprises of mutakallimūn, mujtahidūn, awliyā, shuyūkh al–qabāʾil, shuhadā, and others. None of them are elected by vote but rather embody collective limited authority based on their own qualification and merit. Their accountability is not limited to the people around them but stands in for all those who have passed before them.

This vision is epistocratic and perfectionist to the core. It is far from democratic popular sovereignty. For democratic popular sovereignty, the artificial is always superior to the natural. It presumes that the multitude are not naturally given but must be constituted, in a Hobbesian sense, through artificial government. From a Sunni perspective that sounds as absurd as a family voting-in their own father. The Muslim Sunni Elite’s self-fashioning, hardened through communal corporates validates their status as organic elites. The umma, if it speaks at all, can only speak through the Muslim Sunni Elite as the People Who Loose and Bind (ahl al-ḥall wa’l-‘aqd). This is not just a normative theory but a descriptive sociology. Sunnis believe in the ‘iron law of oligarchy.’ Any community is always already represented by their elites. The type of elite is determined by the type of society. A capitalist society is organically represented by its plutocracy. For Sunnis, without epistocrats, the umma can’t speak.

March correctly points out that both Salafis and Sunnis agree that sovereignty, prophetic or divine, eventually moves into the hands of the umma through a process of ijmā’. He writes, “Thus, the aspects of constitutionalism that are more or less subject to agreement in modern Sunni Islamic thought, are that the people is, broadly-speaking, the source or origin of the legitimacy…” (13) Yet, there is a categorical disagreement between Sunnis and Salafis about what ijmā’ means. For al-Ghannouchi it translates to the vague notion of “universal consensus” in the here and now. Yet, in the Sunni imagination a consensus-qua-referendum of members walking on earth today is neither mandatory nor desirable. The first ijmā’ was accomplished as a historical fact by the Successors of the Prophet and then by the continuous intergenerational belief and practice of Sunnis through the ages. The ijmā’ exists and will exist until the end of time. It is not something that falls in and out of being, let alone an electoral procedure waiting to be done.  In turn the umma, a transcendental community of moral exemplars, possesses sovereignty because the umma is nothing other than the khawās, or the select few in the chain of heavenly command or the ‘awwām, the aspirational many who subject themselves to heavenly command. To be a member of the umma means to conduct oneself as though you count among that trans-historical and trans-geographical group. Not much has changed doctrinally for Sunni Muslims in this regard.

Ibn Taymiyya’s life long theological mission was to remove the Muslim Sunni Elite and replace them with another. He saw them as heretical dead weight and an obstacle to pure faith. They create unnecessary layers mediating between God and His people. He vehemently attacked the pre-political sociology which bound people with their organic elites as a cause of Muslim decline. His project failed. His act of destabilization was rejected by Sunnis of his time. However when the Muslim Sunni Elites came under attack by colonial authorities in the 19th century, a comprador class of native collaborators revived the obsolete arguments of Ibn Taymiyya. The Taymiyyan vision is a marriage of convenience for colonial aspirations. This did not happen overnight but was the unfortunate outcome of a long held colonial policy of rendering pre-colonial hegemonic ideologies (read: traditional Sunnism) illegitimate through the phenomenon misunderstood as Orientalism. Not much has changed in colonial capitals today. In the past, the ‘global liberal constitutional moment’ afforded the old comprador a chance to bargain with colonial interests and sell secular liberal promises back home. When newly liberated states in Western Asia and beyond failed to gain the glories promised by their liberators, Salafis stepped in. They prolonged what liberals, leftists and modernists of all stripes began under colonial rule. The arguments of Ibn Taymiyya helped modern Salafis to sell a new vision to the Muslim masses as antiquated colonial projects unraveled. This time they amplified an alternative Islamic vision all the while appeasing the Orientalist agenda of dismantling traditional Sunni power.

Andrew March’s The Caliphate of Man takes the reader on a captivating exploration of the genealogy of popular sovereignty in modern Islamic political thought. More specifically, the book seeks to unfurl “the invention of a distinct ideal regime type within which democracy is not only formally tolerated but also an important moral commitment” (15). For March, this is an “intellectual revolution” that merits careful analysis and historical consideration not because it was the first time that notions of popular sovereignty were theorized in the Muslim world, but because it represents “the Islamist discovery of a commitment to popular sovereignty” despite “their rejection of the sovereignty of nation-states” (40).

The catalyst for this intellectual revolution, according to March, was two-fold: the abolition of the Caliphate by the Turkish National Assembly on March 4th, 1924 and the publication of ʿAlī ʿAbd al-Rāziq’s al-Islām wa uṣūl al-ḥukm in which he argued that the Caliphate has no religious basis. Together, a “crisis of the Caliphate” ensued, pushing scholars such as Rashīd Riḍā to articulate new theories of the Caliphate. March observes that Riḍā’s theory was “still largely focused on pre-modern juridical sources of authority and had not yet fully grappled with the place that mass politics and popular participation might have in an Islamic political order (40).” Next March turns to what he terms a “high utopian Islamism” which was antagonistic to modern Western notions of governance and thus explicitly theorized alternative notions of sovereignty around the divine which asserts “an uncompromising insistence on God’s exclusive legislative and normative sovereignty, or divine sovereignty as norm” (76). Emblematic of this approach are Abū’l Aʿlā al-Mawdūdī (d. 1979) and Sayyid Quṭb (d. 1966). Yet, alongside this insistence on divine sovereignty, March demonstrates the ways in which Mawdūdī articulated “the doctrine of the caliphate of man” which marks the first turn towards an acknowledgement, and indeed a theological theorization of, popular sovereignty. Quṭb, described as the “high point” in high utopian Islamism, builds upon the popular dimensions of Mawdūdī’s thought to recast the Sharīʿa in popular terms as “a law through which humans in fact also govern themselves” (146). In Quṭb’s reimagining of the Sharīʿa, the supremacy of the rulers by virtue of their monopoly of the law is shattered as law is only animated “through its acceptance and enforcement by the divinely deputized Muslim community” (147). While Mawdūdī and Quṭb represent an initial turn towards notions of popular sovereignty, their skepticism regarding Western forms of governance resulted in a rejection of democracy. Thus, high utopian Islamism is described by March as being “radically anti-democratic and radically populist” (152).

In the final step towards contemporary notions of popular sovereignty, the radically anti-democratic element of high utopian Islamism falls by the wayside, allowing for the emergence of what March terms an “Islamic democracy” which “takes the doctrine of the caliphate of man as far as it can go in a democratizing direction without losing a substantive commitment to divine sovereignty” (152). This turn is realized, though not exclusively, in the political theory of Rāshid al-Ghannūshī. Ghannūshī, like political theorists before him, critique the Western notion of popular sovereignty for simply replacing the arbitrary rule of monarchs with the arbitrary rule of law that in terms of legitimacy is entirely self-referential. For Ghannūshī, the reference point within an Islamic state is the divine, and as such, all of the varying institutions and individuals are ultimately unified by a shared commitment to virtue. The legitimacy of the state and its representatives is grounded in the covenant of vicegerency which takes the people as “the only true and legitimate representative of divine sovereignty” (198).

While in the book Ghannūshī marks the end of the genealogy of popular sovereignty in modern Islamic political thought, bookending this account is another story: that of the aspirations and failures of the Arab Spring. The democratic uprisings of 2011 brought to the fore the fundamental questions of what governance under an Islamist party would look like and whether or not the lofty political theories of Islamists could indeed be actualized in reality. Thus, it is no surprise that the final chapter explores the post-revolutionary political context of Tunisia wherein Ghannūshī’s political party, the Ennahdha Party, received almost 40% of the votes, bringing the opportunity for actualizing his political vision within reach. However, as March notes, the Tunisian democratic transition did not mark the realization of his vision; the process of political bargaining resulted in a constitution that in all substantive ways was devoid of his visionary politics. This moment of failed aspirations represents “an important theoretical and ideological crisis.” This new crisis, different than the “crisis of the Caliphate” March alludes to in earlier chapters, is defined as, “a certain real-world crisis of democratically inclined political Islamic in which it is either brutally suppressed (in Egypt, the Gulf, Syria, and elsewhere), or has participated in a somewhat successful form of democratic transition that has resulted in a new political order that bears no resemblance to the ideal theory of an ‘Islamic democracy’ discussed in the previous chapter” (207). In this new context of crisis, he asks whether the Islamic alternative to authoritarianism and secular democracy is even viable.  To the extent that this alternative is still clinging to the “fantasy of sovereignty,” March remains skeptical. Instead, he signals toward a “post-statist, even post-sovereigntist” political thought.

It is this second contemplation that I would like to engage with in the parameters of this roundtable, fully recognizing that it is not the main story of March’s book, but is arguably the more consequential one. One could, if they wanted, tell the history of Islamic political thought through these moments of “crisis,” perceived or actual, in which the theoretical ideals of Islamic political thought were abandoned. In my own work, I explore the political thought of the famed 11th century jurist and theologian, Abū Maʿālī al-Juwaynī (d. 1085) who responds to what he perceives to be a crisis in the Abbasid Caliphate. In his work of political theory, Ghiyāth al-umam, he abandons all of the mainstay requirements for political leadership articulated by scholars before him, recognizing that the ideal imām who fulfills all required conditions is often not possible. He also goes as far as theorizing the full absence of the imām and Caliphate altogether, leaving individuals under the guardianship first of the scholars, and then of their own knowledge of the Sharīʿa. This is similar to the notion of self-governing individuals on the basis of the Sharīʿa that in March’s reading of Quṭb is the cornerstone of his notion of popular sovereignty. A later account of crisis, closer to the period under investigation by March, is by Shāh Muḥammad Ismāʿīl (d. 1831), grandson of the illustrious Shah Walliullah (d. 1762). His political thought, recently excavated by SherAli Tareen, responds to the intertwined crisis of the loss of Mughal political sovereignty and the entrenchment of British colonial rule. In response to these challenges, Shāh Ismāʿīl articulates a theory of salvational politics that understands that the ultimate aim of the political is the moral, and more specifically, the moral reform of individuals. Thus, as Shāh Ismāʿīl discusses the various regime types, he is willing to countenance varying degrees of despotism as long as the capacity of the community to pursue their moral cultivation is safeguarded. In these two political theologies, articulated centuries apart, mass politics and popular participation are not at the fore but the moral community is. This focus on the moral community has also been highlighted by Ovamir Anjum, a participant in this roundtable, in his book on Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). The moral community thus appears as the most resilient element of Islamic political thought and is a central factor, as March astutely demonstrates, in the high utopian Islamism of Mawdūdī and Quṭb, as well as the Islamic democracy of Ghannūshī.

While these moments of political crisis are indeed generative of new political thought, as the work of March and others have demonstrated, what is most interesting is not the consistent willingness to reimagine political forms but the insistence on what the substantive goal of the political should be. On this reading, what is most remarkable about the post-2011 political thought of Ghannūshī is his shift towards a “secular” approach to the purpose of politics (213). This is particularly important to note as March himself states that the core vision of Ghannūshī’s political thought was the sacralization of politics, not its secularization. March gives a number of reasons for Ghannūshī’s intellectual and political concessions, but the most important in this context is what he calls “the irreversible moral pluralism of modernity.” By this, March not only intends general religious and moral pluralism, but specifically moral pluralism within the Muslim community where there is reasonable disagreement over a plethora of issues. Here March rightfully acknowledges that the “very deep kind of consensus about metaphysical truths and the ethical purposes of human life” that was the assumed bedrock of prior political theorizing, simply may be an impossibility. So how can we understand this challenge alongside all of the other challenges of contemporary Islamic political thought? March, and other notable scholars such as Wael Hallaq, have recognized the “inescapability of the modern state” and its mechanisms of multitudinal violence as perhaps the greatest impediment for contemporary Islamic governance. It is thus unsurprising that March indicates that the next horizon of political thought may need to be a post-statist and post-sovereigntist one. However, if indeed Muslim political theorists were willing to consistently compromise on specific political forms in moments of crisis, then the challenge of a post-statist and post-sovereigntist political thought is a domineering, but surmountable hurdle. On the other hand, if Muslim political theorists always assumed some moral consensus and collective moral will, then the moral plurality of modernity poses a far greater challenge. In fact, to the extent that the political concessions made by Ghannūshī are justified as being necessary due to plurality–religious, moral or otherwise–he echoes proponents of secularism who justify its application on the basis that the state and public sphere must remain neutral grounds for free exchange. However, as Talal Asad and others have demonstrated, this notion of secularism as a neutral tool of mediation in highly pluralistic contexts is a ruse. On this reading, popular sovereignty leaves the door open for secularization—an insight forwarded by Salman Sayyid as well. So, is there a future Islamic political thought that can resolve this challenge? It is possible, however it requires grappling not with what a post-sovereignist and post-statist political thought would be, but what a ‘post-moral community’ political thought would be that takes into account the range of Muslim and non-Muslim subjectivities while maintaining a notion of the ethical.