Andrew F.

March
Genealogies of
Sovereignty in Islamic
Political Theology

Behold, thy Lord said to the angels: I will create a vice-

gerent [khalifa (caliph)] on earth. They said: Wilt Thou
place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed
blood?whilst we do celebrate Thy praises and glorify Thy
holy (name)? He said: I know what ye know not.
Quran 2:30

t h e d i s c o u r s e k n o w n i n c o n t e m p o ra r y w e s t e r n
scholarship by the moniker political theology is largely an exercise
in revelation. As a claim, political theology is the assertion that
certain concepts, gaps, and aspirations immanent in Western political
theory are transferred from theology either in the form of presence
or of absence.1 We take certain concepts to be archetypically secular
and this-worldly but we can discern their origins in the theological
imagination. Or, perhaps, we suffer from an anxiety about our abil-
ity to account for certain goodsultimate foundations, the telos of
history, moral motivationthat is readily explained as a trauma from
the loss of things we imagine ourselves to have had in some previous,
theologically infused, era. We are aware they are missing and we miss
them. As a field of inquiry, political theology is a call to explore
the symbolic dimension of politics, the crypto-theological origins of
political concepts and practices, or the ways in which certain political

social research Vol. 80 : No. 1 : Spring 2013 293

practicesviolent ones in particularcome to have meaning for us
and other ones do not.
The most obvious condition of possibility for this discourse is the
presumption that we live in a secular world. Political theology is revela-
tory in this mundane senseit seeks to reveal aspects of our contem-
porary, pseudo-secular condition that are opaque to us. In this sense, it
is something of a misnomer, which itself is perhaps another symptom
of the kind of forgetting that it seeks to undo. For there is often little
logos in political theology, indeed, very little theos. Political theology
traffics in analogies, symbols, and imputations of meaning. It does not
traffic very much in formal theology. This makes sense, since political
theology as a claim and field of inquiry is a critical practice. If modern
political theory and practice itself expounded at length on its own theo-
logical origins and assumptions, there would be nothing critical about
political theology. By contrast, the analogous critical move in explic-
itly theistic political cultures is to uncover the secular, the mundane,
and the human underneath what explicitly travels as the sacred or the
theological.
Political theology is an intrinsically comparative practice, but
this basic feature of its practice in the West needs to be borne in mind.
In other contexts, the Islamic world in particular, the relation of the
manifest and the concealed is reversed. The age of secularism as a
call and a discourse of legitimation is (long) over. The temptation is
reversedpraetorian dictatorships adopt constitutions that declare
Islam to be the state religion and sharia to be a/the source of law. The
critical move, albeit not a very challenging one, is to impute secu-
larity to what travels as the sacred. So, for example, since all divine
law needs to be articulated, interpreted, and organized by humans, it
has been claimed that there is no such thing as divine sovereignty or
the rule of Gods law. Moreover, since the temptation to present what
is human as divine is so overwhelming, and the dangers when this
temptation is present so singular, Muslims ought to simply embrace
secular constitutionalism and save the sacred from politics (An-Naim
2010).

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 That is not the direction I intend to take this essay, although I do
want to bring the theological back into political theology. Instead, I will
discuss some of the main paths that have been opened up in modern
Islamic political thought toward that most prized object for all politi-
cal theologies in the Abrahamic tradition: sovereignty. This inquiry is
not only urgent, but also newly exciting, in light of the past few years
in the Middle East. The events that hastily came to be called the Arab
Spring have done much to reopen the question of what it means for
a Muslim society to be ruled legitimately and to challenge Islamist
parties to account for their visions of sovereignty and legitimacy in the
public sphere. In this sense, the Arab Spring has brought the politi-
cal back into political Islam and brought Islamic political thought back
into history.

Legacies
The principle rallying cry of the Sunni Islamist movement during
the middle of the twentieth century was the proclamation of Gods
exclusive sovereignty (hakimiyya) over the world, including human
political action. What we might call high utopian Islamism rejects
any form of comparison or similarity with modern Western ideals of
governance. The common Abrahamic belief in Gods cosmic, creative
sovereigntywhat we might call divine sovereignty as factleads
to an uncompromising insistence on Gods exclusive legislative and
normative sovereignty. The statements of Sayyid Qutb on the rigorous
demands of a commitment to divine sovereignty remain among the
most influential:

If we look at the sources and foundations of modern modes

of living, it becomes clear that the whole world is steeped
in jahiliyya [pagan ignorance] . . . based on rebellion against
the sovereignty of God on earth. It attempts to transfer to
man one of the greatest attributes of God, namely sover-
eignty, by making some men lords over others . . . in the
more subtle form of claiming that the right to create values,

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 295

 to legislate rules of collective behavior, and to choose a
way of life rests with men, without regard to what God has
prescribed (Qutb 1964, 8).

As is widely appreciated, Qutbs view was a nostalgic one, harkening

back not to the recent past before the collapse of Muslim independence
but all the way back to the first generations of Islam. And yet even this
belies the fact that the meaning and institutionalization of Gods sover-
eignty on earth was no less a problem for the earliest Muslims than it
was for later ones.
The earliest Muslims were afflicted not only with violent strug-
gles for political power as part of the birth pangs of empire but also with
conflict over what it means to submit to Gods sovereignty. Consider
the slaying of the fourth caliph, Ali, at the hands of some of his own
partisans four decades after the founding of the Muslim community
as a political entity in Medina. As is well known even to nonexperts,
Ali agreed to an arbitration with his opponent in the first civil war
(656661), Muawiyyathe kinsman of the assassinated third caliph
Uthman and himself the founder of the Umayyad dynasty (661750).
A group of Alis own partisans, later known as the Kharijites (those
who go out), found this submission to human authority abominable.
Rather, following the Quran, they held that there is no rule but Gods
(la hukma ila lillah), and even Alis own authority as the rightful Imam of
the Muslim community could not supersede it. Thus, while the Sunni
Shiite split that we are familiar with today did not originate contempo-
raneously with the assassinations of Uthman and Ali and the first civil
war (fitna), Ali was indeed killed for an idea.
Ali was perhaps the last semi-charismatic Imam of Guidance2
who had a chance to preserve both Muslim political and moral unity.
Alis assassination was thus a kind of trauma that marks the true begin-
ning of Islamic political history: unlike the partisans of Muawiyya,
who fought for their kinship rights or for a very basic idea of Uthmans
constitutional legitimacy, the Kharijites unleashed a politico-moral
problem on the Muslim community. What is divine sovereignty?

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What does it mean for God alone to rule? How can the sacral commu-
nity uphold both the obligation to obey the Imam of Guidance even
unto death and the obligation to obey only God through His Law? If
the community must have, not only for political but also for salvific
purposes, the right Imam of Guidance, but that man is bound by the
law, who then decides what the law is and when it has been violated?
Answering these questions, it is little exaggeration to say, was the prob-
lem of the early Islamic public sphere.
This is not the place to examine the full range of attempts in
premodern Islamic political theology to recover from this early loss of
unity and simplicity by accounting for the meaning of divine sover-
eignty and the acceptable modes of entrusting that sovereignty to
fallible human actors. Suffice it to say here that modern Muslims are
bequeathed a collection of concepts related to sovereignty rather than
a single model fit for emulation or recovery. The first concept is the
idea of political authority as a kind of contract between the commu-
nity and the ruler. Even the career of the Prophet Muhammad suggests
two sources of political authority: designation by God, as revealed in
the Quran, of Muhammad as one to be obeyed as Gods messenger,
and the voluntary agreement of his followers to obey him through a
contract known as the baya. For the earliest Muslims, the source of
a rulers political sovereignty was his election by a council represent-
ing the people as a whole. God was sovereign on earth insofar as his
community had validly selected a leader to guide them in accordance
with his revealed message.3
The second major concept is the idea of Gods will as embodied
not in the person of the imam or caliph but in the corpus of the divine
law. Eventually, even the fiction of election by the peoples representa-
tives was to succumb to political reality. Rulers came to power through
conquest, and thus their own will and capacity were factual sources
of political sovereignty. Yet while neither the idea of divine designa-
tion nor Hobbesian realism was entirely absent from Islamic political
theology, nor did they fully displace legalism. Divine sovereignty came
to be a function not of a particular rulers right to command but of the

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 297

extent to which he applied Gods law. But this opens up new sources
of sovereignty. The class of scholars (ulama, or jurists: fuqaha) came
to represent both God and the people, insofar as Gods law was only
known through texts that required expert knowledge to master, and
the popular will of the umma (community) could only be to be ruled
by Gods law. A remarkable statement by a fourteenth-century scholar
encapsulates this view:

Properly speaking the rulers are obeyed [only to the extent]

that their commands are consistent with the religious
sciences. Hence, the duty to obey them derives from the
duty to obey the jurists. Obedience is due only in what is
good and what is required by the religious sciences. Since
the duty to obey the jurists is derived from the duty to obey
the Prophet, then the duty to obey the rulers is derived
from the duty to obey the jurists. Furthermore, since Islam
is protected and upheld by the rulers and the jurists alike,
this means that the laity must follow these two (Ibn Qayyim
al-Jawziyya 1973, 1: 10; Abou El Fadl 2012, 49).

This quotation suggests that the scholars themselves, as the custodians

of the law, are the true sources of sovereignty and the ones entitled
to transform a usurping warlords possession of coercive capacity into
legitimate authority. But it also points to a third major concept, namely,
the division of authority into a sphere for secular rulers and one for the
scholars.
Mature Islamic political theory, especially after the Mongol
destruction of even the symbolic fiction of the Abbasid caliphate
(1258), accommodated the personal and arbitrary nature of political
sovereignty in an important way. Briefly, many jurists after the thir-
teenth century were eager to keep political life within a sharia-based
normative framework. The jurists strategy was twofold: first to try to
induce de facto rulers to comport with the sharia and thus acquire a
dimension of legitimacy beyond mere Hobbesian right but also, more

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interestingly, to carve out large spheres of discretionary authority for
rulers, governors, ministers, generals, and other executive officers that
were not regulated by detailed prescriptive norms formulated by the
jurists but were still within the larger canopy of sharia because of their
conformity with the looser standards of public welfare (salus populi).
This genre of writing about God, sovereignty, and politics, known
as siyasa shariyya (roughly: religiously legitimate governance), stipu-
lated a sort of condominium of authority whereby scholars apply their
understanding of Gods law in the civil realm fully independently from
the secular rulers, and the secular rulers in turn enjoy a certain space to
exercise temporally bound powers of command beyond the strict letter
of the law (Johansen 2008). Key figures here include the Syrian Taqi
al-Din Ibn Taymiyya (12631328 CE/661728 AH) (Ibn Taymiyya 1967;
1983; 2000)4 and his student, the above-quoted Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya
(Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya 1973; 1991). Their doctrines have, if anything,
been even more influential in the twentieth century than they were in
their own time, as we will see below.
What is important to note here before turning to the modern
context is that for centuries legitimate Islamic rule accommodated
multiple sources of law, both the religious law of the jurists (fiqh)
derived from the textual sources of revelation and the secular law
of the rulers, often referred to as siyasa or qanun. Nonetheless, if the
broader idea of divine law is defined in such a way as to include both
the extra-political, textually derived doctrines of the jurists (what most
think of as sharia) and the realm of discretion and judgment in politics
as long as it is constrained by religious goals and departs from religious
morality in the least possible amount, then the rule of Gods law can
effectively be said to always be in force under just Muslim rulers.

Divine Sovereignty in Islamic Modernity

In this section, I introduce three visions of sovereignty representing
attempts by modern Muslims to reconcile the ideals of divine and popu-
lar sovereignty. Two of these are embodied in actual states and their
official discourses of sovereignty, while the third is a purely intellectual

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 299

attempt to theorize the relationship between divine sovereignty and
democratic authority.

Saudi Arabia: Gods Sovereignty in Condominium

It has been argued that the late medieval Islamic model of rule briefly
introduced above, the siyasa shariyya model, whereby scholars apply
their understanding of Gods law in the civil realm fully independently
from the secular rulers and the secular rulers in turn enjoy a certain
space to exercise temporarily bound powers of command, is most
closely represented in the modern world by the kingdom of Saudi
Arabia (Vogel 2000). As is well known, power in Saudi Arabia is divided
between a class of religious scholars and the Al Saud family. The class
of scholars in this case are bound by a particularly rigorous understand-
ing of Islamic creed and legal doctrine, based on a strict form of reli-
ance on revelation (the Quran and the Prophetic sunna), resuscitated
in the eighteenth century by religious reformer Muhammad Ibn Abd
al-Wahhab. This school (Wahhabism to outsiders, Salafism internally)
is characterized by its obsessive preoccupation with expurgating any
conceivable departure from the strictest monotheism in Muslim belief
and practice, such as venerating the graves of revered ancestors (includ-
ing that of the Prophet Muhammad himself ) or looking to any sources
of moral and epistemic authority outside of revelation. Like many
Christian Protestant-reformist movements, it insists on forming creedal
and legal doctrines based to the greatest possible extent on revelatory
texts, followed by the recorded original understanding of revelation by
the first generation of Muslims (the salaf) and then a narrower geneal-
ogy of righteous forbearers, most notably Ahmad ibn Hanbal (780855
CE/164241 AH) and Ibn Taymiyya.
As such, an insistence on the strictest possible acknowledgement
of the sovereignty of God in worldly affairs characterizes Salafi political
theology. The Saudi Basic Law of 1992, a political compromise weighted
in favor of the king, declares that the Kingdoms constitution [dustur]
is the Book of God and the Sunna of His Prophet, (Art. 1) and that
government [al-hukm] derives its authority [sulta] from the Book of God

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and the Sunna of His Prophet, the two of which are sovereign [haki-
man] over this law [nizam] and all other state laws.5 The Basic Law is
thus replete with references to its own limited authority and the exis-
tence of a prior, pre-political body of law (not just abstract, constitutive
authority). The very function of the executive is defined as applying the
sharia (Arts. 23, 55) and the application of property and labor rights (Art.
17), human rights (Art. 26), criminal punishments (Art. 38) and, indeed,
all public policy (siyasa amma) is to be carried out in accordance with
the Islamic sharia. This amounts to wide authority for the religious
scholars. In their judicial capacity, these scholars are declared to be an
independent authority [sulta] not subject to any authority [sultan] other
than the authority of the Islamic sharia (Art. 46). Legislative authority
belongs formally to the king, but it is limited in scopejudicial author-
ity is, in fact, the authority to legislate widely and to represent Gods
sovereignty.
There is an institutionalization of the traditional contractual
component of the temporal rule (through the rendering of the baya),
but the notion of popular participation in divine sovereignty is mini-
mized. Executive power is, of course, hereditary (Art. 5) and any popu-
lar ratification of a new monarch occurs after the fact (Art. 6) and is
perfunctory.6 The kings authority is limited by the sharia, and while
this means the religious scholars, all the official bodies of religious
authority are appointed and dissolved by the king. Nowhere does
the document mention the Muslim people as a source of sovereignty
or political authority, as does, for example, the constitution of the
Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, similarly a hereditary monarchy styling
itself after Islamic tradition: The Nation is the source of all powers
(Article 24.(i)).
In political practice, it would first appear that the king is the
bearer of sovereignty in a Schmittian-realist sense, not to mention a
Weberian one. The Basic Law refers three times to the kings emer-
gency powers and right to suspend the law (Arts. 61, 62, and 82), and
the king appoints to their judicial positions those scholars who ideally
represent the prepolitical legislative sovereignty of God. However, it is

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 301

clear that as a normative matter at the very least, and a practical one to
an indeterminate extent, the Saudi monarch can in no way be regarded
a sovereign in the tradition of Bodin, Hobbes, and Schmitt. Article 82
tries (although Schmitt reminds us of its futility)7 to limit by law the
extent to which the law itself can be suspended: No provision of this
Law whatsoever may be suspended except on a temporary basis, such
as in wartime or during the declaration of a state of emergency. Such a
suspension shall be in accordance with the terms of the Law and may
not violate Article 7, which reads: Government in the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia derives its authority from the Book of God and the Sunna
of the Prophet (PBUH), which are the ultimate sources of reference for
this Law and the other laws of the State.
There is no doubt that the authority of this regime is, in its own
account, not a function of its own will or divine designation but of its
fidelity to whatever is interpreted as Gods law. More important, what-
ever public and private licenses the rulers of that kingdom habitually
take, they have made no effort to claim that their edicts represent the
sharia. As a matter of historical and sociological fact, it is also clear
that any such efforts on the kings part to claim the right to pronounce
on matters of divine law (fiqh) would certainly fail, and would likely
provoke a crisis of legitimacy. It is hardly overly apologetic to claim
that the Saudi model represents as close as possible an instantiation of
the premodern siyasa shariyya ideal: a bifurcation of the representation
and execution of Gods sovereignty into extensive social power held by
the scholars and political-coercive power held by the rulers. Indeed, the
confidence of the scholars in their own independent representation of
divine sovereignty extends to the point that, despite the right of the
king to formulate policies under the siyasa shariyya doctrine, the sharia
courts of the kingdom refuse to enforce the [kings] nizams. When
confronted with a case arising under a nizam, the sharia court judge will
do as he himself thinks right (Vogel 2000, 175).
One final issue: the Basic Law declares that Saudi Arabia is a
hereditary monarchy; yet what about the sovereignty of God through
sharia authorizes these particular rulers? What is the source of this

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familys derivative political sovereignty? As noted above, many premod-
ern Islamic political theologians assumed (as did, inter alia, Hobbes)
that power would simply be seized or usurped. Short of an ideal found-
ing election by the people who loose and bind, power would have to
be transformed into legitimate authority through a new dynastys self-
binding by Islamic law. This characterizes the attitude of many Wahhabi
scholars toward their various alliances with the Al Saud family since
1745: the identity of the ruler is not particularly important since, as Ibn
Abd al-Wahhab is reported to have declared, whoever gains power by
force over a city or country has the legal status of the imam in all things
(Vogel 2000, 210).
However, there appears to be a slight further twist in the Saudi-
Wahhabi saga. While it is clear that legitimacy in the practical, socio-
logical sense is a function of the royal familys ongoing sponsorship
of right religion and deference to the judgment of the scholars, the
myth of an originating pact (baya) between Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and Ibn
Saud remains part of the overall apparatus of legitimation within the
realm. Vogel writes that as part of his eighteenth revival movement,
Ibn Abd al-Wahhab asked Ibn Saud to mount holy war for Islamic
reform and offered him in return suzerainty over its conquests and that
this compact, drawn up in 1158/1745 is still the basis for Saudi Arabian
legitimacy (Vogel 2000, 207; emphasis added). The relative importance
of the procedural element in justifying political sovereignty should not
be exaggerated; but even the myth of this founding contract reveals the
element within Islamic political theology of the class of scholars them-
selves as a source of sovereignty, primarily as the permanent custodians
of sharia but also as people who loose and bind and may authorize a
worldly ruler.
The key to the traditional siyasa shariyya model, as exemplified by
the modern Saudi arrangement, is that upholding a rigid ideal of divine
sovereignty, or rule by Gods law, requires a restriction on the applica-
tion of that sovereignty. A buffer is maintained between the jurisdiction
claimed by the religious law and the more discretionary acts taken by the
secular authorities. The scholars do not have to execute actual coercive

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 303

authority or to enact policy on transitory temporal matters. Those discre-
tionary policies and laws may be in an indirect sense authorized by the
divine law, and thus belong in a broad sense to the sharia if they remain
within the boundaries set by the revelatory texts, but no single act or
policy of the political realm asserts the kinds of claims to truth, textual
authority, or timelessness that the rulings, doctrines, and judgments of
the religious law do. Thus, the temporal world can function under the
broad canopy of religious legitimacy without any tainting or compromis-
ing of the sacred law. This gap, or buffer, serves as an alibi for the sacred
law against the failures, corruptions, and hypocrisies of the political
realm and so plays a crucial role in guaranteeing its continuous prestige.

Iran: The Sovereign Jurist

A similar attitude of haughty distance from and indifference to the exer-
cise of executive authority also characterized Shiite jurists during the
Safavid and Qajar dynasties, despite certain theological problems not
faced by Sunni scholars.8 However, the secularizing will of the Pahlavi
shahs meant that by the mid-twentieth century there was even less of
a remnant of Islamic law in the Iranian legal system than there was in
most of the modernizing, semi-secular Arab regimes. Combined with
the greater, more formalized, and more centralized authority held by
the Shiite scholars in comparison with their Sunni counterparts, this
meant that the Islamist rejection of the Pahlavi state would be total and
would be lead by the scholars as a social group (Arjomand 1988).
In the theory of governance developed by the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini in the years before the revolution, there was an identical
emphasis on the God as the sole source of sovereignty and the law
as the sole embodiment or representation of Gods sovereignty. In
Islamic Government, Khomeini wrote, the legislative power and
competence to establish laws belongs exclusively to God Almighty. The
Sacred Legislator of Islam is the sole legislative power (Khomeini 1981,
55). In Islam it is law alone that rules over society (56). How, though,
does this lead to Khomeinis purely innovative doctrine of the gover-
nance of the jurist (vilayet-i faqih)?

304 social research

 Khomeini gives two primary arguments for the direct, unmedi-
ated right of the supreme religious authority to claim supreme politi-
cal authority. The first source of the practical, political sovereignty of
the jurist is an argument from reason: Since Islamic government is a
government of law, knowledge of the law is necessary for the ruler.
Classical Sunni jurists also preferred that the ruler have extensive reli-
gious knowledge. However, Khomeni derives a further conclusion from
the shared premise that Islamic rule is the rule of divine law: The ruler
must surpass all others in knowledge. . . . Knowledge of the law and
justice, then, constitute fundamental qualifications. Other matters have
no importance or relevance in this connection. . . . Reason also dictates
[this], because Islamic government is a government of law. Since
the ruler must submit to the jurist, asking him about the laws and
ordinances of Islam in order to implement them, then the true rulers
are the jurists themselves (5960; emphasis added). Khomeini takes
the nomocratic and epistocratic assumptions of Sunni siyasa shariyya
doctrines and cuts out the middleman between the scholars and the
people. Of course, in doing so, he not only claims political authority
for the scholars but also collapses the distinction insisted upon by the
Sunni scholars between different kinds of knowledge. In his final twist,
Khomeini fuses what for Sunnis would only be dispersed, collectively
held knowledge into a single figure: What if one of us becomes the
foremost jurist of his age and is able to enforce his authority? Can there
be any difference in the authority of the Most Noble Messenger, that of
Ali and that of the jurist? (63)
In addition to this argument from reason, however, Khomeini
also gives a historical genealogy, amounting to an argument from
revelation. The details are too obscure for present purposes, so briefly:
Khomeini cites a series of hadith-reports attributed to both the Prophet
Muhammad and various Shiite Imams that the scholars are the succes-
sors (caliphs) of the prophet and the imams after the Occultation.
A statement attributed to the seventh Shiite imam, the jurists are
the fortresses of Islam, is interpreted by Khomeini to ascribe to the
jurists the duty of being guardians of the beliefs, ordinances, and insti-

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 305

tutions of Islam (73), which includes the penal codes, defense, social
justice and taxation, without which the walls of the fortress crumble
(74). The preservation of Islam [that is, creating a state] is even more
important than prayer (76) and all of the tasks entrusted to the proph-
ets must also be fulfilled by the just jurists as a matter of duty (78).
Indeed, it is precisely because the just jurists have not had executive
power . . . that Islam has declined (80). In essence, Khomeini takes
traditional statements about the importance of the scholars as guard-
ians of Islamic knowledge and piety to amount to a sort of Donation of
Constantine whereby public authority belongs to the scholars as right.
Thus, Khomeinis prerevolutionary doctrine excludes the people
as a source of sovereignty and political authority even more than
the Sunni siyasa shariyya model and its modern Saudi embodiment.
Khomeinis idea of Islamic government is purely constitutional but
not constitutional in the current sense of the word, i.e., based on the
approval of laws in accordance with the opinion of the majority (56;
emphasis added). Popular consent as a precondition of legitimacy is not
absent, though. Rather, it is immanent: The body of Islamic laws that
exist in the Quran and the Sunna has been accepted by the Muslims and
recognized by them as worthy of obedience. This consent and accep-
tance facilitates the task of government and makes it truly belong to
the people (56; emphasis added).
In the actual 1979 constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran,
things get slightly more complicated. The constitution largely follows
Khomeinis conceptions of divine sovereignty and the direct succession
of the jurist(s) to political authority. The constitution declares that the
Islamic Republic is based on belief in the One God, His exclusive sover-
eignty and the right to legislate, and the necessity of submission to His
commands (Art. 2), and that absolute sovereignty over the world and
man belongs to God, and it is He who has made man master of his own
social destiny (Art. 56). The concentration of actual power in the hands
of the class of jurists is well known: all judges must be clergy, all applied
laws must be derived from or compatible with sharia, a Guardian
Council (composed mostly of clergy) has a veto over legislation passed

306 social research

by the parliament and, of course, bestriding the entire system is the
sovereign-like figure of the Supreme Leader with the ultimate right to
decide on all legislation, policy, and, paradigmatically, to decide on
the exception. Importantly, the constitution declares that during the
Occultation of the Lord of the Time [the imam], the guardianship and
leadership of the umma devolve upon the just and pious jurist (Art. 5;
emphasis added). The people is not declared to be the actual source of
the regimes legitimacy; rather, the regime itself was only endorsed by
the people of Iran on the basis of their long-standing belief in the sover-
eignty of truth and Quranic justice (Art. 1; emphasis added).
However, the people does not entirely vanish, neither as an agent
of political decision-making nor as a source of legitimate authority.
While the Supreme Leader is elected by a Council of Experts (similar
to the Vaticans College of Cardinals), the constitution seems to prefer
that such a religious figure already be recognized and accepted by the
majority of the people (Preamble; Art. 5; Art. 107). Moreover, in prac-
tice, the people is given substantial input into the creation of those
bodies that represent both the people and Gods sovereignty (hakimiyet).
Not only does the people elect a parliament (the Islamic Consultative
Assembly), it also elects the president and the Council of Experts itself.
This kernel of popular sovereignty enshrined in the constitution is, of
course, one fount of the chronic legitimacy crisis faced by the Islamic
Republic, most manifestly during the 200910 protests.
But perhaps a greater source of this legitimacy crisis is precisely
the fusion of all authority into one figure and the sacralization of the
political. In fusing all kinds of social and political lawmaking into the
same kind of sacred nomos, the political is not so much reclaimed for
the sacred as the sacred is reduced to the political. It is a short step from
the prerevolutionary ideological claim that the state must be run by
the sacred law to the position that whatever the state requires for its
defense, preservation and welfare is what the sacred law is. There is a
revolution in this shift from the claim that the political is authorized
by the religious and the worldly rulers must be obeyed as a religious
obligation, to the claim that obedience to the [state] law is like the

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 307

daily prayer and fasting, and disobeying it is like disobeying the Islamic
Sacred Law (Arjomand 1988, 182), or Khomeinis notorious edict that
Islamic government takes precedence over all else, even prayer, fast-
ing and the pilgrimage to Mecca (that is, the most basic personal reli-
gious obligations). The Hobbesian effect of secularizing religious law
by sacralizing the political was clearly not the intention of those revo-
lutionaries who sought to restore divine sovereignty where it had been
usurped. However, given his scheme, Khomeini could only present the
Guardian-Jurist as having no limits. Since he speaks for both the state
and the sharia (unlike the Saudi King), the Supreme Leaders exceptions
and innovations cannot be localized and characterized as mere public
policy.
Thus, given that Islam traditionally lacks a true Caesaropapist
conception of divine sovereignty (especially Shiites in the absence of
the imam) and the prerevolutionary promise was not the rule of jurists
but the rule of the law they merely knew, it is noteworthy that Irans
present legitimation crisis is at least partially a function of the elimina-
tion of the traditional buffer created by siyasa shariyya models between
religious authority and the vicissitudes and risks of political gover-
nance. This speaks to a certain cunning in the siyasa shariyya model
and helps explain its widespread popularity within modern Islamic
political theology. However, in recent years the notion of sovereignty
underpinning the (Sunni) siyasa shariyya doctrine has been subject to a
kind of democratizing revolution. I turn to this third modern Islamic
conception of sovereignty by way of conclusion.

Islamic Democracy: The Caliphate of Man

Since the 1970s, many thinkers in the orbit of the Muslim Brotherhood
and ideologically similar organizations have refined Islamist thought
on the relationship between divine and human authority. In this final
section, I single out Tunisian Islamist leader Rashid al-Ghannushi as
a theorist of a complex ideal that seeks to reconcile both divine and
popular ideals of sovereignty.
Ghannushis thought (shared with many modern Islamic politi-
cal thinkers) is built on the doctrine of a divine covenant of vicege-

308 social research

rency with mankind-at-large. Pointing to Quranic verses in which
God refers to mankind as a whole as his deputy or vicegerent (khalifa:
caliph), particularly Q. 2:30, Ghannushi begins his treatment of free-
dom, responsibility, and sovereignty directly with the people rather
than with the obligation of Muslims to obey Gods competent represen-
tatives: the scholars and rulers. He writes that the Islamic conception of
politics is based on a metaphysical account of the totality of existence,
premised on the beliefs that God is the creator and master of all exis-
tence, more knowledgeable than His creatures and the highest legisla-
tor and commander, and that man has been distinguished from the rest
of Gods creatures by his designation as Gods deputy (istikhlaf), through
which with he has been entrusted with reason, will, freedom, responsi-
bility and the divinely ordered path for his life (Ghannushi 1994, 37).
Ghannushi distinguishes Islamic approaches to freedom, human
rights, public justification, and the state from Western concep-
tions, which he tends to see in a reductive way as all based on a kind
of arbitrary, foundationless human will and purposeless philosophical
anthropology. But Ghannushis project is not just a reassertion of the
traditional right of the scholars, as custodians of the law, to represent
the people and constrain the rulers. He promises an incorporation of
democratic institutions and practices into Islamic political thought
(88). Predictably, he finds precedent for democratic institutions in
Quranic and early Islamic practices of consultation (shura), popular
ratification of rulers (baya), communal consensus about religious prac-
tices and points of law (ijma), and the collective scope of the injunction
to command the right and forbid the wrong.
But the more radical aspect of his theory is the universaliza-
tion and popularization of political sovereignty through the doctrine
of mans vicegerency of God (istikhlaf). Ghannushi identifies the cove-
nant of vicegerency (aqd al-istikhlaf) as the central idea of Islamic
civilization and the basic principle of Islamic political philosophy.
Contiguous with, but not quite identical to, the idea of a primordial
covenant of belief and submission to God, mans vicegerency is the
precondition for individual agency as well as for collective political
life. Gods master legislation for mankind presupposes a human agent

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 309

who can receive this law as a moral charge, has the moral capacity
to either fulfill it or neglect it, and can accept collective responsibil-
ity for its enactment. Sovereign authority is thus held by mankind at
large as a collective trust bestowed by God: If original sovereignty in
the Islamic state is only Gods will, represented by the sharia, then the
authority of the Muslim society is as agent or representative of God,
and God is the one who bestowed this sovereignty and authority on
the umma, within the framework of His sharia, and made the umma
his deputy [astakhlafaha fil-ard] (165).
An appropriate place to begin is with Ghannushis story about
the founding of the state and the source of its legitimacy. Ghannushi
explicitly rejects the realism of late medieval Islamic political thought,
encountered above in Ibn Abd al-Wahhabs statement that whoever
gains power by force over a city or country has the legal status of
the imam in all things. However, while he sees the Islamic state in
contractual terms, he also rejects the Western social contract account
of the states legitimacy as originating in the free act of self-binding by
persons in a state of nature.
Ghannushis account depends on a distinction between the
origins of governance as such (hukm: rule) and the origins of a regime
or ruler (hakim). Governance as suchthe state, including its consti-
tutional frameworkpreexists all human capacities to make worldly
contracts, because it is both natural and divinely ordained. The
contract is what establishes the state in Rousseau. However, in Islam,
the contract of baya does not found the state, because the Text already
has, and Muslims are not free as long as they remain Muslims to apply
the rules of sharia or to invalidate them. . . . The state is an original
need in human society, not an exceptional or emergency manifesta-
tion (146). While the idea of divine sovereignty might strike the
critical secular reader as vague or nonsensical, here we see one clear
implication of the belief in it: that the state is always already justified,
requiring no further philosophical or theological grounding, and that
the umma has no moral option of doing away with it.
But if human freedom and will do not extend all the way down
to the authority to originate civil society, the authorization of all actual

310 social research

political power within it flows entirely from the people. Ghannushi
declares unambiguously that the contract established by the people
is the source of any rulers or imams authority: the authority of the
caliph is derived from the umma (140). In contrast with the perfunc-
tory, ex post facto ritual of the baya as described in the Saudi Basic
Law, Ghannushi argues that the early caliphs both made extraordinary
efforts to collect the baya from the umma-at-large and declared their
own authority to be contingent on their fiduciary obligation to rule
within the limits of Gods law. What can be concluded from this is that
the umma is the source of all authorities and powers and has supreme
sovereignty, all within the framework of the constitution (the sharia)
(141). The ruler (including the entire executive apparatus) is thus an
agent (wakil) or employee (ajir) of the umma, contracted with the sole
purpose of helping the umma discharge its own covenantal obligation
to obey Gods law.
Again, this is not a theological justification for de facto abso-
lutism along the lines of Hobbess account of the popular origins of
absolute monarchy. Ghannushi rejects the mere ex post facto ratifica-
tion of appointed rulers and the restriction of suffrage to a small elec-
toral college of elites. Even if select, elite bodies of representatives are
formed and exercise a mediating fiduciary role (as with the scholars in
the traditional siyasa shariyya conception), their own limited represen-
tative authority is derived exclusively from popular ratification and not
their own epistemic claims. This also includes the right to remove an
errant ruler who violates the terms of the contract:

The basic rule is that the one who possesses the right to
appoint also possesses the right to remove, so if it is the
people who loose and bind who appointed him, then they
are called upon to remove their confidence from him,
announce this and appoint another. But if the people
who loose and bind only have the authority to nominate
candidate(s) to be directly elected by the umma, then it
is upon the people to declare its lack of confidence and
appoint new candidates for the imamate (185).

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 311

 The people is also given substantial legislative authority.
Ghannushi refers to the umma as the source of legislation [masdar
al-tashri] and notes that while God is the primary and original source
of legislation, the umma participates in divine will through its public
practice of mutual consultation (shura). Moreover, for all the binding
and constraining quality of Gods eternal law, the goal of the eternity of
this final, sealing law required restricting and limiting the text of reve-
lation to a determination of general principles and a few select particu-
lars 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 Ghannushi
equates with the idea of universal communal consensus (ijma) as a
source of divine law alongside revelation. This fact induces Ghannushi
to proclaim that when deliberating about political matters the umma
is guided by God and acquires from His light protection against collec-
tive error (119).
Nonetheless, the constrained nature of popular sovereignty in
Ghannushis political theology should not be dismissed. Just as the
covenant of vicegerency is not merely a theological story that results in
authoritarian guardianship, neither is the insistence on the primacy of
Gods sovereignty in an Islamic democracy rhetorical cover for a kind of
Lockean vision of popular sovereignty endowed with Gods imprimatur
and hedged in only by a loose conception of natural right. Man is not
the possessor of original right over himself or others but is only a deputy
or agent. [He] is not the possessor of supreme sovereignty but is only
the possessor of a right to an ordained authority by the supreme legis-
lative authority emanating from God. His only choices are to worship
God in accordance with the covenant of vicegerency or to reject it and
be ranked amongst the unjust, corrupt infidels (99).
Indeed, Ghannushi asserts starkly the ontological priority and
normative supremacy of sharia to any human political authority,
whether autocratic or democratic:

If the justification for the existence of an Islamic govern-

ment is the implementation of sharia, putting God into

312 social research

 the context of history, uniting the divine with the human,
coloring life with Gods hue, then it does not deserve the
obedience of its citizens to its commands except to the
extent that they flow from submission and adherence to
sharia and are in accord with the Legislator, or at least
not in conflict with him. The Islamic state has no right,
whether it is conceived as a political community that has
bound itself in a covenant of loyalty and obedience to God
or as the collection of executive, legislative and judicial
authorities, to depart from the sharia, because the sharia,
in the language of constitutional authority, is the original,
foundational authority for the community and the govern-
ment (105).

Is the people then the author in any way of the law that precedes the
political and constrains its will? Ghannushi regards the divine constraint
on the exercise of popular will as a self-limitation after this umma has
approved of and consented to God as its Lord and Islam as its religion,
voluntarily and freely (169; emphasis added). The people, then, freely
adopts divine sovereignty through the sharia in an implied senseit is
the only will the people can have consonant with its awareness of its
primordial covenant of vicegerency with God. This bears some compar-
ison to the idea found in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran
that the people has already implicitly consented to the entire system
of rule by jurists. Apart from the fact that Ghannushi does not autho-
rize any single clerical ruler, or a class thereof, to claim any kind of
donation of authority, is there an important difference between his
attempt to reconcile the rhetoric of divine and popular sovereignty
and the anti-democratic conceptions of sovereignty encountered in the
previous two cases?
If there is a deep difference, and a genuinely radical shift in the
direction of popular sovereignty, it lies less in the insistence on popular
control over rulers than in popular participation in the determination
of what in the sharia is timeless, fixed, and specific and what is a matter
of general ethical principles open to reinterpretation and application in

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 313

time. In all political worlds that posit a rule of law that precedes and
constrains political outcomes, sovereignty is not only a matter of who
decides when the law is suspended in the name of law but also of who
decides on the original boundary between ethics and politics. This is the
abiding tension in hybrid theories of sovereignty like Ghannushis, and
I do not intend to pronounce on its resolution. But it is quite clear that
theories like this lay the groundwork for the people collectively not only
to exercise an extensive guardian function over its human guardians but
also to be the decider of how Gods sovereignty is brought into the world.
In his extensive and forceful defense of the Text as the first
pillar of Islamic political order and the originating and supreme author-
ity within it, Ghannushi writes that the reference to Text and sharia
as supreme authority and source of all other powers is not a reference
to positive jurisprudence [fiqh] and expert reasoning as to the details
[of the law]. Rather, perfectionwhich is a description of the sharia
is not in the particulars but only in the generalities (101). The entire
dilemma, and essential ambiguity, in Ghannushis hybrid conception
of sovereignty is expressed a few pages later at the end of his core expo-
sition of the meaning of divine sovereignty:

The foundations of this [just, divine] law are not posited

by a majority of society, or a dominant class, or even a
people preoccupied with its own partial interest, but only
by God, the Lord of all. It is enforced, explained and applied
to new realities through new specific acts of legislation
by a human body chosen and supervised by the people.
The people thus has sovereignty over this body, involving
appointment, supervision and removal. This is the author-
ity of the people [sultat al-umma], or consultation (106).

The ambiguous promise of Ghannushis doctrine of vicegerencyhis

caliphate of manis that the sovereign decision to bind oneself and
others, to speak in Gods name, to authorize agents both to enact ones
own will and discharge ones obligations has devolved upon the people
collectively. But there is something crucial to note here.

314 social research

 For while Ghannushi draws heavily from siyasa shariyya theo-
rists and points carefully to distinctions between the status enjoyed by
rules expertly extracted from revelatory texts and commands issued
in the civil ream of statecraft, his theory does not exactly observe the
traditional boundary between the prepolitical realm of religious law
(fiqh) and the political realm of discretionary, temporally binding public
policy (siyasa). In defining the living sharia as that which the people
enforces, explains and applies to new realities through new specific
acts of legislation, the people is not only authorized to act politically
in the world, but its political acts are seen to represent the sharia. The
peoples political action is not observing or abiding by the boundary
between religious law and political action but creating it.
Insofar as Ghannushi stresses the idea of the universal caliphate
and the description of politics as the ummas discharging of its half
of the contract of vicegerency, there appears again a kind of sacral-
ization of politics. Yet it will be remembered that I argued that this
is precisely one source of the legitimation crisis in postrevolutionary
Iranthe dissolving the prepolitical rule of sharia into the regime-
protecting will of the Jurist. We see that Ghannushis assignment to
the umma of the sovereign right not only to control secular rulers but
also to determine what it means to apply the sharia, what is timeless
and binding in Gods law, and what is always a matter of collective judg-
ment and discretion suggests the possibility of a popularization of the
Khomeinist model.
The gambit, though, is to avoid the legitimation crisis that the
unification of religious law and political action creates in a regime like
Iran. For if it is the people unifying these spheres and sacralizing the
political in this way, the ideal of the rule of Gods law is not sacrificed at
the altar of regime self-preservation. Rather, in appropriating sharia for
its own political action, the people vanquishes the specter of an alterna-
tive, more legitimate law haunting politics and challenging its legitimacy.

conclusion
While the preceding analysis suggests a democratizing or even liber-
alizing form of the sacralization of politics, it is important to resist

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 315

the temptation to see Islamist political thinkers and actors as either
democrats or theocrats, as either liberal Islamists who find an Islamic
language for post-1948 human rights schemes or radical Islamists
who speak instrumentally about moderation until they are in power.
Approaching the questions of law, politics, and revelation through the
problem of sovereignty allows us not only to make finer distinctions
between various Islamic political theologies but also to appreciate
that the tension between visions of divine and popular sovereignty is
authentic. For Ghannushi, the doctrine of mans universal vicegerency
(istikhlaf) is primarily a move internal to Islamism that is certainly in a
democratizing direction but not with European parliamentary democ-
racy as its unambivalent aim.
I will conclude, however, with one nod to current events, since
this is where I began. At the time of writing, Tunisia is awaiting the
proposals of semi-public constituent assemblies for new postrevolu-
tionary constitutions. Inevitably, this process is fraught with tension
and the possibility of extensive violence is far from foreclosed. Are
the tensions between Islamist and secular parties only a sign of the
superficial or insincere nature of Islamist parties rhetorical support for
democracy and the civil state? Would the preceding analysis of the
people as the bearer of effective sovereignty predict a more enthusi-
astic commitment to the widest possible popular basis for postrevolu-
tionary constitutive politics?
The move from thinking about the theological bases of political
sovereignty to thinking about coalitions and commitments in specific,
bounded countries is not a direct one. The doctrine of the universal
caliphatethe caliphate of manis ambiguous with regard to its
universalism both globally and locally. It is mankind, the children of
Adam, referred to in Q. 2:30: I will create a vicegerent on earth. Yet
mankind assumes the benefits and burdens of this covenant upon
acknowledgment of the truth of Islam and the authority of sharia. Thus,
the sovereign community in this scheme is not the people as such
any people that might find itself contracting or founding a new polis
but rather the umma. Are secular co-citizens of countries like Tunisia
and Egyptin the sense of co-citizens who do not begin with the cove-

316 social research

nant of vicegerency and the obligation to execute the sharia (however
this is understood) as the source of all political meaningparticipants
in this universal caliphate? It is easy to become alarmist over statements
on the part of Islamist actors to the effect that the sovereign, constitu-
ent community is limited to those who accept the sovereignty of God
and the authority of the sharia, but it nonetheless appears true that the
gap between democratic Islamists acceptance of the institutions and
practices of constitutional, parliamentary democracy and the agoniz-
ing challenges of radical moral pluralism in bounded communities is
not bridged by the political theology of the universal caliphate alone.

notes
1. In Schmitt, political theology is not only a practice, a way in which
one can choose to think about politics, but also a claim about the
world.

All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state

are secularized theological concepts not only because of
their historical developmentin which they were trans-
ferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby,
for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent
lawgiverbut also because of their systematic structure,
the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological
consideration of these concepts (Schmitt 2006, 36).

2. Early Muslims viewed the imam not only as a political leader but as a
comprehensive, all-purpose Imam of Guidance (Imam al-huda) who
gave them their legal existence and led them in both worldly and
spiritual matters (Crone 2004, 2123).
3. The most famous work of premodern Islamic constitutional law is Abu
al-Hasan Mawardis, al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya (The Rules of Governance).
Mawardis dates are 9741058 CE (364450 AH). Other major figures
included al-Baqillani (d. 403/1013), al-Baghdadi (d. 429/1037), Abu Yala
Ibn al-Farra (d. 458/1065), al-Juwayni (d. 478/1085) and al-Ghazali (d.
505/1111). Selections of these and other important premodern works

Genealogies of Sovereignty in Islamic Political Theology 317

 on constitutional theory are collected in Ibish and Kusuji (2000).
4. Note Ibn Taymiyyas gloss on the central Quranic verse on politi-
cal authority (4:59: Obey God, the Messenger of God and those in
authority.): Those in authority are of two types: the scholars and the
rulers (Ibn Taymiyya 1983, 116).
5. Note that, in keeping with the medieval siyasa shariyya framework,
any positive law enacted by the worldly power, including the Basic
Law itself, is referred to as a nizam (pl.: anzima; literally order), in
order to distinguish it, to its detriment, from laws derived from the
sharia.
6. Article 6 simply states that the citizens give allegiance to the king
on the basis of the Quran and the Sunna. The Arabic uses the present
tense (as translated above), while the official English language trans-
lation of the Basic Law uses the future tense: citizens shall give the
pledge of allegiance (See Podeh 2012).
7. The exception, which is not codified in the existing legal order,
can at best be characterized as a case of extreme peril, a danger
to the existence to the state, or the like. But it cannot be circum-
scribed factually and made to conform to a preformed law (Schmitt
2006, 6).
8. Briefly: the entire sphere of worldly authority in the absence of the
true, infallible imamwhose return Shiites awaitis problem-
atic for Twelver Shiism. Twelver is, of course, a reference to the
twelfth infallible Imam in an unbroken line through Muhammad
and Ali who vanished into occultation in the tenth century. In his
absence, any kind of worldly authority is theologically problem-
atic, which is not to say that the Shiite clergy did not arrive at prag-
matic accommodations with worldly power along lines similar to
the Sunni siyasa shariyya model (see Mottahedeh 1985 and Lambton
1981).
9. And lo! Thy Sustainer said unto the angels: Behold, I am
about to establish upon earth one who shall inherit it [khal-
ifa]. They said: Wilt Thou place on it such as will spread
corruption thereon and shed blood whereas it is we who
extol Thy limitless glory, and praise Thee, and hallow Thy

318 social research

 name? [God] answered: Verily, I know that which you do
not know.

This is Muhammad Asads translation. Asads commentary is instruc-

tive, and very much consonant with Ghannushis views: The term
khalifahderived from the verb khalafa, he succeeded [another]is
used in this allegory to denote mans rightful supremacy on earth,
which is most suitably rendered by the expression he shall inherit
the earth (in the sense of being given possession of it). The other
verses are 6:165, 27:62 and 35:39. A fifth verse, 38:26, refers to David
as Gods deputy.

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