CHAPTER 7

Polity

1. INTRODUCTION

After treating society, warfare, and the implications of divine jealousy, we now come to the polity. Here modern values have some very definite implications for the state and its citizens. They prescribe that the form of the state should be republican, democratic, and constitutional; if monarchy is to survive at all in this context, it should be a vestigial arrangement with no real impact on the way the political system functions, a monarchical republic.1 At the same time modern values require that the citizens of the state enjoy liberty, equality, and some measure of fraternity—to go no further than the familiar trio associated with revolutionary France.² These six terms may not add up to a sophisticated analysis of modern political values, but apart from nationalism they are pretty much all we need for our purposes. How, then, do they relate to the three pre-modern religious traditions with which we are concerned?

2. ISLAM

A key feature of the Islamic heritage is that its idea of a legitimate polity is very much its own. One obvious aspect of this is terminological. Whereas the title “king” in European usage was applied to rulers—and used by them—irrespective of their religious affiliations, the title “caliph” (khalīfa) could not be employed in this indiscriminate way. Taken on its own the word was indeed generic, meaning either “deputy” or “successor,” and in these senses the word could, of course, be used freely in non-Muslim contexts. But in the context that concerns us, the application of the term was not generic: if it meant “deputy,” then it identified the ruler of the Islamic polity as the deputy of God (khalīfat Allāh), and if it meant “successor,” then he was the successor of the Prophet (khalīfat rasūl Allāh). This latter view was the one that prevailed among the scholars.3 Either way, the concept of the caliphate was unique: there could be no question of seeing rulers across the globe as deputies of God, let alone as successors of the Muslim prophet.⁴ Similar points can be made about two further terms that are often interchangeable with “caliph,” namely “imam” and “Commander of the Faithful.” Thus, already at the level of terminology, there is a tight relationship between the conception of rulership and the religious community. This is, of course, an aspect of the fusion of religion and politics that characterized Muḥammad’s venture in prophetic state formation.

A second unusual feature of the caliphate is that the caliph is conceived as the single ruler of the entire Muslim community, not to mention the numerous unbelievers who have submitted to Muslim rule and been permitted to persist in their unbelief. This is how it was in the decades following the death of the Prophet, and it was also how the religious tradition liked to see things down the centuries. In historical fact, of course, the initial political unity of the Muslim community came to be unsustainable, and by the tenth century the caliphate had definitively given way to the coexistence of a plurality of Muslim states that were frequently at war with each other.⁵ These states could hardly be seen as embodiments of the Islamic polity, but they were Islamic in the rather minimal sense that Muslims ruled them.⁶ The religious tradition was able to come to terms with this situation by adopting a variety of shifts, thereby accommodating the plurality of Muslim states, rather than either rejecting it outright or endorsing it as inherently right and proper.⁷ What the scholars remained reluctant to do was to abandon the original unitary conception altogether.

A third feature of the caliphate, and again one inherited from the state established by the Prophet, was that it combined political and religious authority. It was not that Muslims had any trouble imagining an alternative arrangement in which these two forms of authority were legitimately decoupled. Thus Māturīdī (d. ca. 944), after noting that the imamate includes both religious and political authority (al-imāma maʿa amr al-dīn fīhā amr al-mulk waʾl-siyāsa), contrasts this to a situation in which political and prophetic authority are vested in different people, as was at one stage the case among the ancient Israelites: “political authority was in the hands of kings, and religious authority in the hands of prophets” (kāna amr al-siyāsa fī aydī ʾl-mulūk, waʾl-diyāna fī aydī ʾl-anbiyāʾ).8 He quotes Q2:246, from a passage on the institution of the Israelite monarchy. But the polity in which the Muslims themselves lived was not, in their view, supposed to be of this dual kind—for all that, in historical fact, it soon came to be so, with the scholars standing in for the prophets.

The religious tradition saw the historical changes affecting the early caliphate as part of a process of deep moral decay. As the Moroccan scholar Yūsī (d. 1691) put it, after the first four model caliphs were no more, men came to rule through greed and violence, the caliphate came to an end, and in its place came “biting kingship,” as the Prophet had foretold.⁹ In the same vein the Prophet had predicted that the caliphate would last a mere thirty years, after which its place would be taken by kingship (mulk)¹⁰—mere kingship, we might say. Baranī contrasts the one generation of righteous rule in the time of the Prophet and his immediate successors with the subsequent period in which rulership had ceased to be possible without “the majesty and pomp of monarchs” and the other iniquitous Persian practices that go with them.¹¹ Only in the backlands of the Islamic world, in the mountains and deserts, did the political style of the early caliphate occasionally survive in sectarian environments.¹²

All this made for a temporally very asymmetric image of the political history of the Islamic world. On the one hand there was the initial period when a single Islamic polity was ruled by a single legitimate caliph following in the footsteps of the Prophet. And on the other hand there were the long centuries in which, whatever the pretenses adopted to save the appearances, the polity had fragmented and the actual rulers were something very different. Just when the transition was thought to have taken place was in fact by no means clear-cut. What the religious tradition rejoiced in, as opposed to merely accommodating, was limited to the first decades of Islamic history, and yet an event as late as the Mongol destruction of the residual ʿAbbāsid Caliphate in 1258 was widely experienced as traumatic.13 In any case, as we have just seen, the transition meant that caliphs gave way to kings; and though the word “king” (malik) is just one of a number of terms applied to these latter-day Muslim rulers, we can aptly call the long interval between early Islamic and modern times the age of Muslim kingship (republics barely existed and were ignored by the normative tradition).¹⁴ Two sayings, one a commonplace and the other a paradox, may serve to set the scene for this period. The commonplace affirms that “kingship and religion are twins.”¹⁵ In other words they are very close, but they are not identical: with political power in the hands of kings and religious authority in the hands of scholars, the fusion of religion and politics central to Muḥammad’s original polity has come apart, producing a duality that is in fact much more typical of complex societies in pre-modern times and more compatible with their needs.¹⁶ The paradox goes further still: “Kingship endures with unbelief, but not with oppression.”¹⁷ That is to say, even a ruler who does not adhere to the true religion may deliver the security without which society cannot survive, while even one who believes in it may fail to deliver.

Yet it was unusual in pre-modern times for things to come to this pass. The rulers, after all, were still in general Muslims, even if not particularly good ones, and as Muslim rulers they tended to accomplish two desirable things. One was to maintain the ascendancy of Islam over domestic and—where possible—foreign unbelievers, thereby implementing the principle that “Islam is exalted, and nothing is exalted above it.”18 The other was to show some respect for the division of labor between rulers and scholars that came to mark the twinship of kingship and religion in medieval Muslim societies. As the scholars saw it, it was for them to act as exponents of the Sharīʿa and for rulers to defer to their learning and integrity; we even encounter the distinctly self-seeking view that “the kings have authority over the people whereas scholars have authority over the kings.”¹⁹ To the extent that things worked like this, we can see the scholars as a bridle restraining the tendency of rulers to the arbitrary exercise of power.²⁰ In exchange the ruler could expect them to use their religious resources to confer on him a measure of political legitimacy²¹—though never, of course, to take this to the lengths of deifying him.

The actual political culture of Muslim states in this period was not, however, by any means limited to the mainstream religious tradition.²² There were a number of other idioms in which political conflicts, matters of state, and issues of legitimacy could be articulated. Thus under the Umayyads factional loyalties grounded in Arabian tribalism were a remarkably salient feature of the political scene.²³ More lasting at the level of high politics were idioms deriving from pre-Islamic Iran and the pagan nomads of the Eurasian steppes. The more outspoken scholars might deplore such influences; thus Yūsī lamented that after the caliphate had given way to kingship, Muḥammad’s way of ruling (sīra) was displaced by Chosroism (kisrawiyya) and Caesarism (qayṣariyya)—Chosroes and Caesar being the generic rulers of the pre-Islamic Persian and Byzantine empires respectively.24 But despite such pietist disapproval, idioms of this kind still counted with contemporaries and left a literary deposit in such genres as historiography and mirrors for princes.

One aspect of this is the legitimation that rulers sought to derive from symbols and ceremonies. Here the mainstream Islamic tradition is remarkably restrained. It provides a rather austere set of ritual occasions on which the ruler or his representative officiates: “the Friday prayer, the two Festivals, and the Pilgrimage are with the ruler (sulṭān),” as one succinct formulation has it.²⁵ The key moment is the sermon (khuṭba) of the Friday prayer, in which the general practice is to mention the name of the ruler; but even this was more than the jurists prescribed.²⁶ In practice, as might be expected, Muslim rulers built up much more elaborate symbolic and ceremonial repertoires.²⁷ Some of the themes they drew on were manifestly Islamic, like the rich collections of relics amassed by major Muslim dynasties such as the ʿAbbāsids and Ottomans.²⁸ Some were not Islamic but not necessarily offensive to Islamic values; cases in point might be the archers deployed at the ʿAbbāsid palace to shoot down overflying crows²⁹ or the West African practice of throwing dust on oneself when spoken to by the ruler.³⁰ Some elements were downright un-Islamic: there was a widespread practice of reinforcing the authority of the ruler with music,³¹ a clear though commonplace violation of Islamic norms. This does not, of course, mean that all such norms could be disregarded for the greater glory of kingship. Thus, there was no question of allowing the public display of statues and other images of the ruler that was so salient a feature of the political culture of the pagan Roman Empire and lasted far into Byzantine times;32 indeed after the monetary reform of the late seventh century, Muslim rulers could not even follow the standard practice of Eurasian monarchs west of China by putting their images on their coins. But despite these limitations the symbolic and ceremonial resources of Muslim kingship were considerable.

A regional example may help to reinforce the point. Conceptions of legitimacy in Central Asia in later centuries had a way of harking back to the Mongols, even when blended with Islamic and other elements.³³ Thus, in 1756 the powerful tribal chieftain who effectively ruled the Khānate of Bukhara decided to claim the throne for himself, and an elaborate ceremony was staged to legitimize his accession.³⁴ A chronicler’s account of the proceedings combines elements of striking heterogeneity.³⁵ There are references to the descendants of Chingiz Khān (ruled 1206–1227) and their traditions, one of which provided the central moment of the ceremony: the notables gathered round the new ruler, took hold of the edges of the felt carpet on which he was sitting, and elevated him.³⁶ There is mention of such famous rulers of pre-Islamic Iran as the legendary Jamshīd, Darius I (ruled 522–486 BC), and Khusraw I (ruled 531–579).³⁷ The astrologers likewise appear, their indispensable role being to select an auspicious time for the event.³⁸ Last but not least there are several Islamic themes: references to the Koran, the Sharīʿa, the mention of the ruler’s name in the Friday prayer, the caliphate, and a treatise on the imamate written specially for the occasion.³⁹ It is characteristic of the melange that seven religious dignitaries were among those who elevated the ruler on his felt carpet.40

Another such aspect of Muslim kingship is the range of idioms in which matters of state were discussed. Here an Ottoman illustration without flagrantly un-Islamic overtones should give some idea of what was involved. In the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire there was a reformist idiom that sought a remedy for the ills of imperial decline through a return to the golden age of Süleymān “the Lawgiver (Qānūnī)” (ruled 1520–1566).⁴¹ Despite perfunctory acknowledgment of Islamic law, the central feature of this persuasion was an appeal for adherence to “the laws (qavānīn) of the sultans of the past,” which are “the guide to action (destūr ül-ʿamel) in every matter.”⁴² In other words, what we have here is a way of thinking about the Ottoman state that invokes specifically Ottoman norms as enshrined in a specifically Ottoman past. This particularistic trend, however, had its critics, who outflanked it by arguing in much more general terms.⁴³ A state, according to this view, has its life cycle just as an individual has; like individuals, states may vary as to just when decline sets in, and it may be possible to treat it symptomatically when it does. But it is futile to attempt to restore things as they were before the decline began; that would be like a graybeard dyeing his beard black and trying to prevent its going gray again. Here we see a very different way of thinking, and indeed it derived from a source outside the Ottoman Empire: the theory of the dynastic life cycle propounded by Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406).⁴⁴ In contrast to the reformist way of thinking, this approach reduced the Ottoman Empire to a particular instance of a general rule. But however different in approach these diagnosticians of Ottoman distemper might be, they had one thing in common: the polity ruled long ago by Muḥammad and his successors was effectively irrelevant to their concerns.

In the face of the proliferation of Muslim kingship, the scholars did not simply let go of the caliphate. Instead, they continued to transmit their centuries-old theory of the institution. Admittedly they did not set out the theory very often,⁴⁵ and when they did so it tended to be somewhat threadbare, but it nonetheless retained its place in the religious tradition.

Thus, according to Yūsī, writing in Morocco, the Muslims have the duty of appointing an imam who would possess a general authority in religious and worldly matters in succession to the prophethood of Muḥammad (khilāfatan ʿani ʾl-nubuwwa).46 It would be his task to revive religion, secure the conditions under which people can make a living, command right and forbid wrong, render justice to the oppressed against the oppressor, and the like. To be eligible for the office, a person had to satisfy various conditions, as for example to be adult, sane, male, free, Muslim, respectable, courageous, and possessed of sound judgment. A further condition was genealogical: he had to belong to the tribe of Quraysh, that is to say, the tribe into which Muḥammad had been born. But even this was perhaps negotiable: it is said, Yūsī tells us, that if there is no member of Quraysh who combines all the requisite qualities, then a member of Kināna will do—Kināna being a wider genealogical unit of which Quraysh was a part. Or failing that one might appoint a descendant of Ishmael—the ancestor of the northern Arabs as a whole—or even a non-Arab. The thread connecting us to the early polity has plainly worn very thin here. There is a similar looseness about the procedure of appointment. The imamate takes effect either through designation by the previous imam or through the conclusion of an agreement (bayʿa) with those among the Muslims who have the rather elusive power of “loosing and binding.” However, if someone who satisfies all the conditions simply goes ahead, forcing people to obey him, then the imamate comes into effect for him too. If he does not satisfy the conditions, he is an oppressor but is nevertheless to be obeyed if resisting him would lead to a greater evil. All this is scholasticism, not a call to action, but such diluted formulations did at least ensure that the caliphate retained its place on the normative map.

From the other end of the Muslim world, we could quote a similarly scholastic account by Shāh Walī Allāh. For numerous reasons, he explains, there has to be a caliph in the Muslim community.⁴⁷ Some of these reasons are matters of governance, like repelling invading armies and resolving lawsuits; others relate to religion and involve the maintenance of the Muslim ascendancy. He gives a list of the conditions to be satisfied that is similar to Yūsī’s, but divided into two categories: conditions that any human population would require of its ruler and conditions specific to the Muslim community.48 As might be expected, one of the latter is to belong to Quraysh. Here Shāh Walī Allāh provides no escape clauses and adds a rationale that is likely to be his own contribution to the tradition: Muḥammad’s revelation was in the language of Quraysh and in conformity with their customs (fī ʿādātihim), and it was these customs that prepared the way for many of the laws of Islam.⁴⁹ So his scholasticism is by no means as dry as dust. His account of how a caliph is appointed, or emerges, is similar to Yūsī’s, though fuller in its discussion of the circumstances under which one should resist a caliph who has seized power without satisfying all the conditions.⁵⁰

What neither Yūsī nor Shāh Walī Allāh stopped to explain was how this scholastic ghost of the early polity related to the realities of their own day, and they might not have welcomed the question. Was there no caliph in their time? Was one particular Muslim ruler the caliph? Were all Muslim rulers in some sense caliphs?⁵¹ A sixteenth-century Ottoman composed a brief treatise arguing that the Ottoman sultan Süleymān was the caliph of the day, firmly sidelining the awkward fact that he did not belong to the tribe of Quraysh, but this author was a retired statesman, not a professional scholar.⁵² At one point he quoted an anonymous scholar of the fifteenth or sixteenth century who took the view that it is not appropriate to call latter-day sultans imams or caliphs.⁵³ The claim of the Ottoman sultans to the caliphate nevertheless achieved a measure of recognition, enough for the abolition of the institution by the Kemalists in 1924 to cause widespread distress in the Muslim world.⁵⁴ Even more awkward might have been the question how a single caliph could ever come to rule the entire Muslim world from North Africa to Southeast Asia. The view that the facts of geography might require the existence of more than one caliph had been proposed but did not prevail.55 One fifteenth-century Moroccan scholar could be read as taking tacit account of the problem of distance when he set out a framework for what one might call Muslim interstate relations in response to questions from a ruler on the other side of the Sahara.⁵⁶ He proceeded by distinguishing lands of three kinds. First, there is the ungoverned land whose people have no ruler (amīr); he told his questioner that he should, if necessary, compel such people to accept him as their ruler since it is not lawful for any group of Muslims to remain without one. Second, there is the land with a ruler who looks after the wordly and religious interests of his subjects as far as can be done in this age; no one may seek to displace such a ruler since he has a better right to his subjects than anyone else. Third, there is the land with an evil ruler. Here military intervention—jihad—to set up a good ruler in his place is appropriate if the prospective benefits outweigh the prospective costs; indeed, such intervention may take precedence over jihad against actual infidels who pose no threat to Muslims. This is a prescription for a Muslim commonwealth from which the caliphate is conspicuously absent.

There is, however, much more to the early caliphate than we have yet touched on. While the institution itself was neither republican, nor democratic, nor constitutional, it was embedded in a political culture that had some significant affinities with these values. Three features of this political culture call for our attention.

First, the ethos of the early caliphate is strongly antithetical to patrimonialism—to the kind of political culture in which the king regards his kingdom as his property and lives off the fat of the land. One respect in which this is manifest is the initial absence of hereditary succession, the standard dynastic practice whereby kings pass on their kingdoms to members of their own families. This practice did, of course, appear in the Islamic world and indeed prevailed for most of its history, but it did not take root for several decades after the death of the Prophet. Another way in which antipatrimonial attitudes are articulated is by emphasizing scrupulousness with regard to the use of public resources. An anecdote describing how the first caliph, Abū Bakr (ruled 632–634), came by his allowance is a nice example of this. The day after he became caliph, Abū Bakr, being a merchant, set out to market with a pile of clothes which he planned to sell in order to feed his family; it was suggested to him that he could better attend to his public duties if, instead of going to market, he applied to the treasurer for an allowance. He did so, and the treasurer duly awarded him the allowance appropriate for one of the Prophet’s Meccan Companions—not that of the best of them, nor that of the least of them—together with clothes for winter and summer. “If you wear something out,” the treasurer added, “you bring it back and you get another instead.”57 Here as elsewhere the accuracy of the details of these accounts is not our concern; it is the pride with which the early sources remember them in this way that matters.⁵⁸ What we see in such anecdotes is not republicanism, but there is an analogous insistence on political power as something to be used exclusively for the public good.

The second feature is the rejection of despotism. One manifestation of this is a conspicuously reciprocal conception of the act that gives rise to political allegiance (bayʿa).⁵⁹ An agreement is made between the future caliph and the future subject whereby each party is to have specified rights and duties; the transaction has to be uncoerced, and it is concluded with a simple handshake. The model, significantly, is transparently commercial—the deal between two parties to buy and sell something. Another relevant theme is consultation (shūrā)—the duty of the caliph to consult with others before making his decision.⁶⁰ But what if he nevertheless acts wrongfully? Here again Abū Bakr supplies the answer, this time in the form of his accession speech. He announces to his subjects that he is now in authority over them, though he is not the best of them, and that they should help him if he does right but correct him if he does wrong; to this he adds that they have no duty to obey him should he disobey God and his Prophet.⁶¹ The point here is not just that the ruler ought not to act despotically; it is that his subjects are to judge for themselves whether he has done so and to react accordingly. In another such anecdote ʿUmar, the second caliph (ruled 634–644), asks that anyone who sees any crookedness in him should tell him; a distinguished Companion of the Prophet responds that in that event “we will straighten you out with our swords,” a sentiment to which ʿUmar responds with strong approval.⁶² This anecdote depicts a political culture in which it is not just conceded that subjects are entitled, and perhaps obligated, to act in such ways; they are portrayed as ready to do so at the drop of a hat. It fits with this that we are assured that there were no prisons in the time of the Prophet or his immediate successors, the first to establish them being Muʿāwiya (ruled 661–680).63 None of this is democracy, but it articulates attitudes that make for some kind of limited rule and gives to subjects a significant participatory role.

The third feature is a strong commitment to the rule of law, typically identified with the Book of God and the practice (Sunna) of his Prophet—in other words, the Sharīʿa. It is their knowledge of this law that enables the believers at large to judge the rectitude of the caliph and take action where necessary. Again, the ethos of the early caliphate is one in which subjects will not hesitate to do this. What we see here is not constitutionalism, but as described it delivers one of the chief goods that a modern society expects from a constitution.

If there are values associated with the early caliphate that resonate with republicanism, democracy, and constitutionalism, what of liberty, equality, and fraternity?

Liberty in the sense of political freedom is not a value enshrined in the Islamic religious tradition, though the other half of the metaphor—the equation of subjection to despotic or tyrannical rule with political slavery—is occasionally found in Muslim sources.⁶⁴ Thus two of the Arab envoys to Rustam speak of delivering people “from being servants of men to being servants of God”—or, as we could just as well render it, “from being slaves of men to being slaves of God.”⁶⁵ Likewise the sectarian rebel Abū Ḥamza, denouncing the Umayyads in the later 740s, puts into their mouths the claim: “The land is our land, the property is our property, and the people are our slaves.”⁶⁶ But this metaphor, however eloquent, is by no means widespread, and in particular it is not taken up in formal works of Islamic political thought.

Egalitarianism bulks much larger in the Islamic tradition. We have already discussed it in the social context,⁶⁷ and what was said there applies equally to the political domain. A further example is worth adding for its specifically political relevance. One of the clauses of the early document known as the “Constitution of Medina” states that the lowliest member of the community may grant (to an outsider) a protection that is binding on all members (yujīru ʿalayhim adnāhum).68 This formulation does not deny the existence of social stratification, but it accords to all, high and low, the same politically potent right.

Finally, fraternity is unambiguously a central Islamic value, as we saw in our discussion of identity.⁶⁹ Like equality, this solidarity goes well with the quasi-republican character of the early polity,⁷⁰ though uneasily with the individualism of the liberal mainstream of Western thought.

There are, then, some significant affinities between the values of the early Islamic polity and those of modern times. But the relevant features of the early polity as they appear in our sources are not to be taken as signs of a precocious modernity. There is a very different historical context that makes sense of them.

One part of this context is the polity established by Muḥammad, of which the early caliphate was a continuation. Like Moses, but unlike the Buddha or Jesus, he brought a state into existence. According to our sources, this led contemporaries to ask whether he was a prophet or a king.⁷¹ Thus, there is a story that the Christian ʿAdī ibn Ḥātim, a north Arabian tribal chief, came to visit Muḥammad in Medina with this issue in mind.⁷² The Muslims had captured a female relative of his, and Muḥammad had later released her and sent her home. Since she was a woman of good judgment, ʿAdī asked her advice on how best to deal with Muḥammad. She replied that irrespective of whether he was a prophet or a king, it was in ʿAdī’s interest to join him forthwith.⁷³ ʿAdī therefore went to Medina, where Muḥammad invited him to his home for a private conversation. In the course of this visit, ʿAdī noticed three things about Muḥammad that convinced him that he must in fact be a prophet rather than a king; two of them concern us here.74 First, on the way to Muḥammad’s home they were delayed by a frail old woman who accosted Muḥammad about some problem of hers. He spent a long time talking to her, and from this behavior ʿAdī drew the inference that he could not be a king. Second, when they finally reached Muḥammad’s home, he threw ʿAdī a cushion—apparently the only one in sight—and told him to sit on it; after polite protestations ʿAdī sat on the cushion while Muḥammad sat on the ground. ʿAdī again remarked to himself that this was not the conduct of a king. In other words, what struck him was the absence of what Baranī called “the majesty and pomp of monarchs.”⁷⁵ We see here the same ambience that characterizes the early caliphate. It can just as easily be illustrated by the openness of access to Muḥammad.⁷⁶ Under normal circumstances the place to find him was the mosque he constructed soon after arriving in Medina. There was no guard at the gate, and once inside the mosque a visitor who did not know Muḥammad by sight had no way to pick him out from among his followers. Once he had successfully identified him, he would sit down in front of him and transact his business with minimal formalities. In short, the early caliphs were continuing a political tradition established by Muḥammad himself.

The other part of the context—and the background to both Muḥammad’s polity and its continuation by his successors—is pre-Islamic Arab society.⁷⁷ It is this background that suggests that we should not dismiss the accounts of the early polity found in our sources as purely hagiographic. Thanks to its aridity, Arabia was mostly a wilderness. This meant that its population was thin, dispersed, and poor in resources; it accordingly tended to be rather flat in its social structure, strongly tribal in its organization, and generally stateless.⁷⁸ In such a society the tendency is for every adult male to be a politician in his own right; hence the level of political participation was undoubtedly higher than we are accustomed to in modern democracies, let alone in pre-modern states based on taxing peasant agriculture. Some would call this primitive democracy. The affinity it suggests between the political values of Arab society and those of modern times may be fortuitous, but it is none the less real.

We can conclude, then, that in the domain of politics the Islamic tradition should have considerable resources to offer Muslims today if they wish to construct their political ideology out of their religious tradition. However profoundly the Buddha and Jesus may have engaged the spiritual energies of their followers, only Muḥammad was well placed to seize the political imagination of posterity. Does the modern record then bear out this expectation?

The first thing to observe is that the whole complex of phenomena referred to above as Muslim kingship has largely fallen away.79 It did not do so immediately, and the Ottoman state in its last decades showed little inhibition about enriching its repertoire by adopting European conventions for publicizing the prestige of royalty—such as the display of portraits of the ruler in public places and the commissioning of an Ottoman coat of arms.⁸⁰ But for the most part the monarchic tradition of the Muslim world is now history. In those countries where an unusual degree of political continuity has made possible the survival of monarchic regimes from the past, as in Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the smaller states of the Persian Gulf, they continue to matter for regional politics. But there is a presumption that, like monarchies the world over, they are unlikely to be restored if once overthrown;⁸¹ nobody expects to see the current problems of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Turkey, or Iran addressed through a restoration of the monarchies by which these countries were still ruled at various times in the twentieth century. In other words, the political values of Muslim monarchies, whether extant or extinct, do not grip the political imaginations of Muslims today. For example, the idea that the Ottoman Empire had enjoyed a form of constitutional government prior to the centralizing reforms of the nineteenth century, though favored by the Young Ottoman intellectual Nāmıq Kemāl,⁸² is of no ideological significance in the contemporary Islamic world. Except perhaps in Morocco, the disappearance of Muslim kingship would be unlikely to generate any widespread nostalgia.

By contrast, the restoration of the caliphate is a political ideal for many Islamists—and for some a political project. In the immediate aftermath of the abolition of the caliphate in 1924, the Ottoman model still held sway: if an Ottoman sultan was no longer to hold the title, the presumption was that it would be assumed by some other ruler of the day.83 But where the idea of a caliphal restoration stirs the hopes of subsequent Islamists, their inspiration is not the Ottoman caliphate but rather that of the immediate successors of the Prophet. Thus Mawdūdī wishes above all to see the reestablishment of an Islamic state that he sometimes refers to as the “Kingdom of God”;⁸⁴ but in properly Islamic terminology, he describes it as a “Caliphate after the pattern of Prophethood,”⁸⁵ in other words, a state on the model of that ruled by Muḥammad and his successors. As we saw in considering the interaction of Muslim identity with geopolitics, such a restoration is likewise the central ambition of the pan-Islamist Ḥizb al-Taḥrīr, and it was endorsed by Ḥasan al-Bannā and Saʿīd Ḥawwā.⁸⁶ More recently, as we noted in our discussion of warfare, it forms an essential part of the grand strategy of jihadism laid out by Ẓawāhirī;⁸⁷ what he has in mind is again the restoration of the caliphate on the Prophetic model.⁸⁸ Bin Laden, too, wanted to see the unification of the Muslims and the establishment of the rightly guided caliphate;⁸⁹ he went so far as to recognize the Ṭālibān leader Mullā ʿUmar as Commander of the Faithful.⁹⁰ The creed of al-Qāʿida accordingly proclaims the goal of establishing “a rightly-guided caliphate on the prophetic model.”⁹¹ The idea of restoring the caliphate, of course, fits well with the wide horizons of global jihadis, but even jihadis whose concerns lie within the borders of their own countries may subscribe to it. Thus Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Salām Faraj (d. 1982), the assassin of President Sādāt, emphasized the duty of restoring the caliphate.92 At the same time, polls in several Muslim countries show majorities supporting the idea of a caliphal restoration or at least of uniting all Muslim countries into a single Islamic state.⁹³

The sources of the appeal of such a restoration are not far to seek. The caliphate is a uniquely Islamic conception; it provides an emotionally powerful antidote to the sense of geopolitical deprivation arising from the current distribution of global power; it furthers a sense of Muslim unity across the globe; and it invokes a component of the religious tradition that is associated with a glorious past. And if the idea of creating a giant state out of nothing seems overly ambitious, the fact is that the Prophet and his successors did just that in the seventh century.

The aspiration does, of course, have its limits. Not every Islamist supports the project—one Moroccan Islamist “would be happy if the idea of an Islamic state were to fade.”⁹⁴ And not everyone who supports it does so as a matter of urgency; Ḥasan al-Bannā’s approach is unhurried,⁹⁵ as is that of Sayyid Imām, who counsels that restoring the caliphate is not yet within the power of this generation of Muslims.⁹⁶ Such prudence is no doubt linked to the obvious fact that in geopolitical terms the aspiration is not realistic and that consequently there can be no tight relationship between political activism in the here and now and this distant objective. There is also the problem that if the only proper form of the eventual Islamic state is a caliphate, that leaves it unclear what shape Islamists should give to such polities as they come to control in the meantime. The jihadis’ response has been to establish “emirates”; this has the merit of sounding vaguely Islamic,⁹⁷ and the fact that an emirate is ruled by a single man fits the pattern of the caliphate better than a republic would. In this context it is perhaps significant that the state that most insistently identifies itself as the Islamic Republic should be located in Iran, where the prevailing Shīʿite creed, unlike that of the Sunnīs, makes the caliphate irrelevant pending the return of the twelfth imam. More fundamentally, as already noted, the fusion of religion and politics that characterized Muḥammad’s polity does not fit well with the needs of any complex society,98 let alone a modern one; and surprisingly enough, the Koran itself can be found to provide a certain legitimation for the separation of religious and political authority.⁹⁹ Yet, whatever the problems associated with it, the idea of restoring the caliphate is very much alive.

There is, however, much more to Islamist politics than the restoration of the caliphate. This is where the affinities between the values associated with the early polity and those of modern times come into their own: they make it possible to imagine an Islamic state, and more broadly Islamic politics, in a manner that does not turn on the tenuous prospect of restoring the caliphate. How, then, have Islamists exploited these affinities to construct an image of Islamic politics that is relevant under modern conditions? As in previous discussions of Islamist appeals to the religious tradition, I shall give pride of place to the views of Mawdūdī and Quṭb.

Let us begin with what modern values demand of a polity. Here we find that the antipatrimonial and antidespotic themes associated with the early caliphate are highly attractive to Islamists. Thus Mawdūdī cites Abū Bakr’s accession speech to underline the limits of the authority claimed by the early caliphs. He emphasizes that the early Muslims regarded the caliphate as elective and not hereditary; he declares monarchy to be the antithesis of Islam and refers disparagingly to the systems of Chosroes and Caesar. He dwells on the scrupulousness of early Muslims with regard to public funds, using the story of Abū Bakr’s allowance as a prime example.¹⁰⁰ He lauds the unrestricted access people had to their caliph and rejoices in the complete freedom they enjoyed in expressing their opinions. He speaks in similar terms when discussing the Islamic state in a contemporary context. The ruler is to avoid pomp, pretension, grandiosity, and luxurious living; he has the same status under the law as his subjects; he can be taken to court by any of them; and he is owed obedience only if he complies with the laws of God and his Prophet.101 In the same vein Quṭb quotes the accession speech of Abū Bakr, insists on the parity of legal status of ruler and subjects, and emphasizes the conditional nature of the obedience due to him. By contrast, he condemns the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid rulers—he calls them kings, not caliphs—for treating public funds as private property. He grounds all this in a doctrine to which we will return in the context of freedom: that sovereignty belongs only to God, so that men are not entitled to exercise lordship over each other.¹⁰² The early caliphate, in other words, was characterized by republican virtues—a point anticipated by Nāmıq Kemāl, who considered that at its inception the Islamic state was “a kind of Republic.”¹⁰³

Mawdūdī and Quṭb are far from alone in such views. Thus Ḥasan al-Bannā quotes the accession speech of Abū Bakr as showing the right of the Islamic community to oversee the conduct of its ruler.¹⁰⁴ Similarly Ḥawwā points out that obedience is not absolute,¹⁰⁵ and says that under the Islamic dispensation ordinary people learned that they had the right to monitor the conduct of their rulers and the duty not to give in to oppression and humiliation, just as their rulers learned that they had no rights over and above those of their subjects¹⁰⁶—a dramatic change from the days when the pre-Islamic Persians deified their rulers and saw them as above the law.¹⁰⁷ Qaraḍāwī quotes Abū Bakr’s accession speech and ʿUmar’s exchange with a Companion about crookedness to show that the ruler is accountable to the community.¹⁰⁸ Bin Laden naturally evokes the antidespotic force of the early Islamic model in a more inflammatory style. Obedience is conditional,¹⁰⁹ leadership is a covenant between the leader and his subjects in which both parties have rights and duties,¹¹⁰ and the current rulers of Saudi Arabia should restore to the people their trusteeship and let them choose a Muslim ruler111—failing which they will suffer the fate of the Shah of Iran.¹¹² Some more interesting statements are to be found in a long message from Bin Laden to the Muslims of the world, part of which was broadcast early in 2004.¹¹³ Rulers are accountable for their actions, and the lack of a proper understanding of Islam’s way of holding them accountable (muḥāsabat al-ḥukkām) is a major problem for the Muslim world.¹¹⁴ In this connection Bin Laden draws a surprising comparison: “Spain is an infidel country, but its economy is stronger than ours because the ruler there is accountable (li-anna hunāka ḥisāban wa-ʿiqāban lil-ḥākim). In our countries, there is no accountability or punishment, but only obedience to the rulers.”¹¹⁵ Despite this appeal to a Spanish rather than a caliphal model, his reference to Islam’s way of holding rulers accountable suggests such texts as Abū Bakr’s accession speech. More recently, Muḥammad Mursī, in a victory speech broadcast on June 24, 2012, after his election as president of Egypt, echoed Abū Bakr in telling Egyptians that he had been given authority over them although he was not the best of them and that they should help him as long as he ruled justly and obeyed God, but that if he did not do so they had no duty to obey him.¹¹⁶

At the same time, Islamists are powerfully attracted to the endorsement of the rule of law that they find in their heritage. As Mawdūdī tells us, so great was respect for the rule of law in early Islamic times that even a Christian taken to court by the caliph could win his case.¹¹⁷ This is the positive side of the otherwise inconvenient divine monopoly of legislation:¹¹⁸ by locating the power to legislate outside the political system, it denies to rulers the ability to make law to suit their fancies. It is thus a significant point about the Sharīʿa that, whether we like to think of it as God’s law or the scholars’ law, it is in principle the antithesis of the legislative autocracy of a traditional patrimonial state or a modern dictatorship.119 As Nāmıq Kemāl once put it, since the Sharīʿa is under God’s protection, “even the greatest of tyrants cannot alter it.”¹²⁰ The practical question, of course, is how to make this divine protection operational in the implementation of the law by mere humans; characteristically neither Mawdūdī nor Quṭb considers what concrete institutional arrangements might be needed here. There is always the idea of giving the scholars a role in some kind of legislative process, though the experience of this device in the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran may not be encouraging.¹²¹ But whatever the practical problems, the principle of the rule of law sits well with the heritage.

There is, however, a major point of discomfort in the interaction of early Islamic and modern values: the question of democracy. On the one hand democracy is a very powerful value across the world today and for reasons that go well beyond the prestige of Western political culture; it is thus a value that no political movement seeking a mass following can simply ignore.¹²² But on the other hand democracy proclaims the sovereignty of the people, whereas Islam proclaims the sovereignty of God. Since God does not exercise His sovereignty directly in the running of the polity, it follows that those who know his will must exercise a disproportionate share of the power to control or constrain the political process.¹²³ The key question is then who has this knowledge, and Islamists typically see themselves as possessing it in larger measure than the population at large. The outcome of this tension has been a wide range of Islamist views.

At one end of the spectrum we have the outright rejection of democracy. Quṭb was against it,124 and the jihadis, as might be expected, followed suit. Thus Ẓawāhirī rails against democracy as “a new religion that deifies the masses,” a matter of “the whims and fancies of man.”¹²⁵ Similarly negative views are expressed by the Egyptian Jamāʿa Islāmiyya,¹²⁶ Sayyid Imām,¹²⁷ and Abū Muḥammad al-Maqdisī; the latter considers democracy and monotheism to be incompatible.¹²⁸ The creed of al-Qāʿida denounces democracy as “the tribulation of this age” and declares anyone who believes in it or supports it to be an apostate.¹²⁹ In northern Nigeria the movement known as Boko Haram is on record as saying that it “will never accept any system of government apart from the one stipulated by Islam” and that accordingly it will “keep on fighting against democracy, capitalism, socialism and whatever.”¹³⁰

At the other end of the spectrum are Islamists who more or less endorse democracy.¹³¹ Mawdūdī, who rejoiced in the “democratic spirit” of the early polity,¹³² is a significant example of this trend. Other things being equal, he regards democracy as a good thing.¹³³ He is therefore happy to call the political system of Islam “as perfect a form of democracy as there can be,” although he does, of course, distinguish “Islamic democracy” from “Western democracy.”¹³⁴ In fact, he is not consistently in favor of any kind of democracy: in a talk of 1940 he argued that if the masses had not fully assimilated Islamic values, democracy would mean the election of the wrong people.135 But he did provide a theoretical underpinning for democracy in an Islamic context through his innovative doctrine of the caliphate of all believers.¹³⁶ It comes close to being a theocratic doctrine of popular sovereignty. Each believer is a “Caliph of God” (khalīfa min Allāh) in his own right, and it is only because all Muslims delegate their caliphate to the ruler for administrative purposes that he has authority over them; the Islamic state is thus ruled by “the whole community of Muslims including the rank and file.”¹³⁷ A milieu similarly open to democracy is that of the Muslim Brothers in Syria.¹³⁸ Their arguments in its favor seem to oscillate between asserting that it is already present in Islam (so that there is no need to adopt democracy from the West) and affirming that Islam is flexible and does not ordain a specific form of government (so that there is no reason not to adopt democracy from the West).¹³⁹ Their main reservation, as might be expected, concerns the threat posed by democracy to the divine monopoly of legislation.¹⁴⁰ Decisions do, of course, have to be taken about how best to apply God’s law to contemporary conditions; but in the hands of a depraved people, a doctrine of popular sovereignty could lead to the abrogation of the Sharīʿa in place of its application. The generally positive attitude of the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brothers to democracy is shared by the movement at large.¹⁴¹

Other views fall somewhere in between. Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī at one point takes a categorically negative stand: “Islam is not democracy and democracy is not Islam, and I do not approve of Islam being seen in terms of any other principle or system.” But he then goes on to concede that “the tools and guarantees developed by democracy are as close as can be to the realisation of the political principles and fundamentals brought by Islam to curb the wilfulness of rulers.”¹⁴² We could also include Ḥawwā in this group143 and a number of contemporary Turkish Islamist intellectuals.¹⁴⁴ Quṭb might have belonged to it had he been more willing to talk about what an Islamic state could look like in our time—instead he insisted that such questions will only arise once we are again living in a Muslim society.¹⁴⁵ A case could also be made for placing some jihadis here, for despite their strong denunciations of democracy we sometimes find them leaving the back door slightly ajar for it. Thus, in a letter to Abū Muṣʿab al-Zarqāwī written in 2005, Ẓawāhirī criticizes him for failing to bring the people of Iraq into his movement.¹⁴⁶ You have to work at involving the people from the start, he tells him,¹⁴⁷ and once the state is established, you will have to work with their elected representatives in a consultative council.¹⁴⁸ Here he cites the warning example of the fall of the Ṭālibān in 2001. Because they had restricted participation in governance to the students and the people of Qandahār, denying any representation to the Afghan people at large, they had no solid political base, and the mass of the population was alienated; the result was that in the face of the American attack the emirate collapsed in a matter of days—a mistake he would naturally prefer not to see repeated in Iraq.¹⁴⁹ In such a context, it seems, a consultative council of elected representatives would not amount to a new religion. Bin Laden in the public statement in which he discusses accountability expresses himself in a more Islamic fashion, but the drift is to an extent analogous. By way of response to the current ills, he proceeds to offer a practical remedy: the appropriate people—scholars, leaders who are obeyed by their followings, dignitaries, notables, merchants—should get together in a safe place away from the shadow of these oppressive regimes and form a council qualified to appoint a ruler (majlisan li-ahl al-ḥall waʾl-ʿaqd).150 For it is the community (umma) that has the right to appoint an imam, just as it has the right to make him correct his course if he deviates and to remove him for apostasy or treason.¹⁵¹ Sayyid Imām, too, combines rejection of democracy with a proposal for quasi-democratic institutions,¹⁵² and al-Jamāʿa al-Islāmiyya is now willing to accept the parliamentary system, though without enthusiasm.¹⁵³

Let us turn now to liberty, equality, and fraternity. With regard to political freedom, there is, as we have seen, only a very limited basis for finding this value in the heritage,¹⁵⁴ but Islamists have used what there is as best they can. For Mawdūdī, God is “the true Sovereign,” and “the root-cause of all evil and mischief in the world is the domination of man over man.” The mission of the prophets was accordingly to put an end to man’s supremacy over man in order that “man should be neither the slave (ʿabd) nor the master (maʿbūd) of his fellowbeings”; instead all should be the servants or slaves (ʿibād) of God—language reminiscent of that employed by the Arab envoys to Rustam. After quoting several Koranic verses that affirm monotheism but make no mention of freedom, Mawdūdī goes on to supply the missing word: “This was the proclamation that released the human soul from its fetters and set man’s intellectual and material powers free from the bonds of slavery (ghulāmī) that held them in subjection. … It gave them a real charter of liberty and freedom (āzādī).”¹⁵⁵ In the same way Quṭb appropriates the term “freedom” and often speaks of “liberation” (taḥrīr) in the context of the elimination of the dominion (sulṭān) of men over men.156 It is perhaps relevant that he considered Magna Carta and the French Revolution to have been deeply influenced by Islam.¹⁵⁷ By contrast the jihadis, to whom such details of European history do not mean much, differ from Mawdūdī and Quṭb in saying little or nothing about freedom¹⁵⁸—a fact that helps to account for their political irrelevance during the Arab Spring of 2011, in the course of which freedom ranked high among the demands of the demonstrators.

With regard to equality, the Islamists are on firmer ground, and as we saw in an earlier chapter they have made full use of this fact.¹⁵⁹ Without question, this is one of the most powerful intersections of Islamic and Western values.

With regard to fraternity, the Islamists have in principle no problem other than the tension between their collective values and Western individualism. There may, of course, be numerous divisions among Muslims in practice, and by definition non-Muslims are excluded from the fraternity, but these points do not concern us here.

All in all, we can conclude that the Islamic heritage offers several features that are potentially attractive under modern political conditions, and the record shows that Islamists have indeed seen this potential and used it. This does not, of course, prevent other Muslims from taking other courses. On the one hand, pietists may reject political engagement altogether, as many Salafīs do,¹⁶⁰ or insist that the purification of doctrines and practices must take priority.¹⁶¹ And on the other hand, those of a more secular turn of mind may adopt the political styles that prevail outside the Islamic world: there can be Muslim democrats, as arguably in Turkey today; there can be Muslim fascists, as in Egypt in the 1930s; and there can be Muslim leftists, a phenomenon that was widespread in the twentieth century, particularly during the Cold War. But Muslim fascists and leftists have been abandoned by the march of history, and the pull of Islamism means that both Muslim democrats and apolitical pietists are currently on a slippery slope—just how slippery remains to be seen.

3. HINDUISM

In terms of the values enshrined in the Hindu heritage, there is nothing problematic about the idea of a space for Hindu politics. What occupies that space is Hindu kingship. There were indeed republics in ancient (though not medieval) India, and these are referred to in Hindu sources; but they are given little attention and lie outside the normative tradition of Hindu thought.162 Kingship, by contrast, is elaborately and positively described in ancient and medieval Hindu texts and extensively attested in the records of Indian history. There is no sense that it lies outside the core values of Hinduism, or is in deep conflict with them, or represents a secondary accretion without foundation in the oldest strata of the tradition. In short, its seamless integration into the Hindu worldview provides no basis for questioning the cultural authenticity of the institution or substituting any other for it.

The duties of kings (rājadharma) are accordingly seen as the root or quintessence of all duties.¹⁶³ They are regularly covered in the legal literature.¹⁶⁴ Here a king gets very practical consideration: “a king on his noble throne” benefits from “instant purification” since he is seated there to protect his subjects.¹⁶⁵ He also gets respect: a Vedic scholar should not intentionally tread on his shadow,¹⁶⁶ he should refrain from speaking harshly about him, even Brahmins should honor him, one should never belittle him, a man should disown his own father if he assassinates him, and Vedic recitation is suspended for a day and a night on his death.¹⁶⁷ More than this, elaborate rituals detailed in the religious tradition accompany the inception of the king’s rule and continue to fortify him thereafter.168 At the same time kingship is commonly—though not invariably—seen as an institution of divine origin.¹⁶⁹ Indeed the king himself has claims to divinity: Manu tells us that even a boy king is not to be treated disrespectfully with the thought that he is just a human being, “for this is a great deity standing there in the form of a man.”¹⁷⁰ As all this suggests, the relationship between the king and the Brahmins is a close, not to say cosy one. The king and the learned Brahmin are the two in the world who uphold the proper way of life, and the well-being of men and animals depends on them.¹⁷¹ A key figure in this relationship is the king’s personal priest: “When a Brahmin has been appointed as the kings’s personal priest, the kingdom prospers.”¹⁷²

There are, of course, some qualifications to this rosy picture of religious support for Hindu kingship. The tradition does contain negative comments on kings—not just bad ones, but kings in general: the king eats his people, devouring everything he can lay hands on; he is on a par with a butcher who keeps a hundred thousand slaughterhouses; he is a calamity comparable to flood and fire.¹⁷³ But the mainstream view is that kings are the solution, not the problem—the problem being anarchy, or “fish-logic” (mātsyanyāya), in which big fish eat up little fish in the absence of any authority to restrain them.¹⁷⁴ Yet the very fact that kingship is instituted in response to this predicament does have a negative implication: our current need for kingship arises from the degeneracy of the age in which we find ourselves, whereas an earlier and better age happily did without it.¹⁷⁵ It was also possible to read the fact that we live in evil times in a manner more directly subversive of contemporary kingship, thereby decoupling it from the support of Hindu rituals and values. There had always been at least a strong presumption that the king should be a Kṣatriya, though this was not usually taken so far as to deny the legitimacy of kings belonging to other classes, even Śūdra kings.176 At the same time, there were prophecies in the Purāṇas denying that Kṣatriyas would exist in the present Kali age, despite the testimony of older and more authoritative texts to the contrary. This gave an opening to some medieval and later scholars to denounce the Kṣatriyas of their day as in reality mere Śūdras.¹⁷⁷ But this view, though of some political importance in the time of Śivājī (ruled 1674–1680),¹⁷⁸ was that of a minority. All in all, the relationship of the religious tradition to Hindu kingship was a robustly supportive one and continued to be so into modern times to the extent that the institution survived the Muslim and British invasions.

Hindu kingship does nevertheless suffer from some serious limitations as a resource for modern politics.

A minor point is that, despite the thoroughly autochthonous character of the resources of Hindu kingship,¹⁷⁹ the tradition does not consider kingship as such to be an intrinsically Hindu institution. That is to say, it applies its standard term for “king” (rājā) to Hindu and non-Hindu rulers alike.¹⁸⁰ What is distinctive about Hindu kingship is simply that the kings are Hindus who support, and are supported by, Hindu institutions and values.

A major point is that the tradition has no commitment to the idea that all Hindus should be brought under the rule of a single Hindu monarch. It takes it for granted that under normal circumstances there will be a plurality of Hindu kings competing among themselves and that war will be an inevitable and unobjectionable feature of relations among them. As Manu says: “Kings who try to kill one another in battle and fight to their utmost ability, never averting their faces, go to heaven.”¹⁸¹ He later sets out the classical Indian analysis of interstate relations: the king should regard a neighboring king as his enemy, the immediate neighbor of his enemy as his ally, and so forth.182 Hindu norms seek only to restrain the excesses of this violent competition, not to shape it for some higher Hindu purpose, let alone eliminate it. Thus for someone who wants to perpetuate the substantive values of traditional Hindu society, the preservation of Hindu kingship in modern times could have its appeal; but for someone seeking rather to articulate a Hindu political identity for nationalist purposes, the tolerance of the tradition for military and political conflict among Hindus is unlikely to prove attractive. All this refers to normal conditions. But the system is, of course, inherently unstable, owing to the fact that a king naturally wishes to expand his domain through conquest. This indeed is his duty: a just king “should try to take possession of countries that he has not yet possessed.”¹⁸³ If successful, he becomes some kind of emperor, ruling a territory that may range from a circle of kingdoms to the whole earth;¹⁸⁴ an intermediate possibility is that he comes to rule the whole of Bhāratavarṣa.¹⁸⁵ Of course, no Hindu king has ever done this. But what is significant is the way the tradition presents this outcome: it sees in it the practical success of one among a number of competing kings, not the achievement of a pan-Hindu polity conceived as a religious ideal. We may contrast this with the communal, not individual, aspiration to establish a Sikh state: “The Khālsā will rule” (rāj karegā Khālsā).¹⁸⁶

The other major point that needs to be made is that it would be hard to find any significant resonance between Hindu kingship and the modern political values identified at the beginning of this chapter.

In the first place, there is nothing about Hindu kingship that offers an effective precedent for republicanism. Kings do, of course, exist for the public good. As we have seen, they are the antidote to anarchy;¹⁸⁷ and their first duty is to protect their subjects.188 It is even said that no one in the king’s realm should suffer from hunger.¹⁸⁹ But in general the tradition does not conceive of kingship in the leanly functional idiom that would encourage one to think in terms of a monarchical republic. With regard to democracy, the most promising feature of the tradition is the association of early rulers with assemblies.¹⁹⁰ But the record leaves the nature and powers of these assemblies unclear,¹⁹¹ and they are not taken up in the normative tradition of political thought. Thus, Manu says that it is for the king to appoint seven or eight advisers and that after getting the opinion of each of them, he should make his own decision.¹⁹² Even the minority account in which kingship is a human, not a divine, remedy for anarchy fails to suggest any continuing governmental role for the people who chose the first king.¹⁹³ So Hindu kingship is, unsurprisingly, neither republican nor democratic.

Could it nevertheless be seen as a form of constitutional monarchy?¹⁹⁴ Obviously, as in any monarchy, there were “checks and limitations” on royal power.¹⁹⁵ Some will have been in the domain of practical politics, others in the domain of values. What emerges most clearly from the religious tradition is the salience of the role assigned to the Brahmins in this connection. In fact, one conspicuous aspect of this role, as it is spelled out in the normative literature, is the enormous partiality displayed by the Brahmins in devising the rules to suit themselves. Examples are legion: the king rules over everyone except the Brahmins;¹⁹⁶ he has precedence on the road except when he meets a Brahmin;¹⁹⁷ a treasure trove is the king’s except when found by an upright Brahmin;¹⁹⁸ Vedic scholars are exempt from taxes199—indeed even a king whose very survival is at stake should not have the temerity to tax one.²⁰⁰ As might be expected, great store is set by the response of kings to the advice proffered by Brahmins: obedience to them is one of the main ways in which a king secures happiness.²⁰¹ But the Brahmin role could also be seen, less cynically, as the expression of a commitment to the rule of law, even if the law is very much Brahmins’ law. Thus it is for the Brahmin to proclaim the duties of the other three classes and for the king to govern them accordingly.²⁰² This implies that, as we have seen above, the king’s authority to legislate is very limited:²⁰³ the predominant view is that he is there to execute the law, not to make it.²⁰⁴ We have, then, an explicit notion of a monarchy limited by the rule of law, though the limitations do not relate power and values within an institutional framework that could be called a constitution—not, at least, without unduly diluting the concept.²⁰⁵ This is as strong a resonance with modern Western political values as we can hope to find in the Hindu case.

Turning to liberty, equality, and fraternity, we have encountered nothing in our discussion of the Hindu polity that answers to them. Political freedom is not a traditional Hindu value. At the same time the intimate connection between Hindu kingship and the traditional structure of Hindu society precludes any relationship of equality and fraternity extending to the king’s subjects as a whole. He is, after all, to watch over the social classes in accordance with their respective rules, and if some of their members should stray, he is to guide them back to their respective duties.²⁰⁶

In sum, considered as a set of norms to be applied in the real world, Hindu kingship does not have much plausibility as a solution to modern problems. To this we may add the fact that the Hindu princes lacked the will or the way to make themselves a focus of nationalist loyalty against the British. Sultan Muḥammad V of Morocco (ruled 1927–1961) was in a position to represent his country in the struggle against the French: he was not just a local ruler, and he became a living martyr for the cause of Moroccan independence thanks to his timely deposition by the French in 1953.207 But in India this role was played by an ascetic politician, not by a king. All that the Hindu princes thus amounted to at independence was a threat to national unity. We would not, then, expect to find within the spectrum of modern Indian politics any significant movement calling for the restoration of Hindu kingship, and this expectation is fully borne out by the historical record.

Most obviously, Hindu kingship has played little part in the values and concerns of the Hindu nationalists. There are aspects of the Indian constitution with which they take issue, but the fact that India is a republic is not one of them. They set considerable store by some of the Hindu kings of the past, notably the legendary Rām and the historical Śivājī. They particularly revere Śivājī for his military resistance to Muslim rule and his revival of Hindu tradition.²⁰⁸ But they do not infer from this that the rulers of India today should be monarchs consecrated in the manner of such heroes of the Hindu past; while an early Hindu nationalist festival celebrated the coronation of Śivājī, the European figure to whom Sāvarkar compared him was Garibaldi (d. 1882), not Victor Emmanuel (ruled 1849–1878).²⁰⁹ Thus, the Hindu nationalists did little or nothing to resist the abolition of the Hindu principalities following independence. It is true that some members of former Hindu royal families threw their support to the Hindu nationalists,²¹⁰ and one in particular, the Rājmātā of Gwalior, became an energetic participant in the movement.²¹¹ But this was not a move aimed at securing the restoration of their principalities; at most their hope was that by joining forces with the Hindu nationalists they could impede the erosion of their residual privileges. The one context in which the Hindu nationalists have shown some partiality for Hindu kingship is in their attitude to the politics of a neighboring country, Nepal.212 They were undoubtedly saddened by the fall of the Nepalese monarchy in 2008, but the sense of loss may have had as much to do with the fact that Nepal ceased at that point to be a Hindu state as it did with the demise of the last Hindu monarchy.²¹³ With no commitment to the traditional Hindu polity, the Hindu nationalists could assimilate whatever form of modern politics seemed best suited to the environment in which they found themselves. Initially they were arguably Hindu fascists, later they were more like Hindu leftists, and mostly they have been Hindu democrats; at heart, of course, they have always been Hindu nationalists.

If there was any part of the political spectrum where we might expect to find an aspiration to restore Hindu kingship, it would be the Rām Rājya Pariṣad—precisely the milieu in which concern to preserve traditional Hindu society was strongest. This party, too, attracted support from princes,²¹⁴ and the fact that it named itself after “the kingdom of Rām” would have made it a suitable vehicle for monarchist sentiments. From its election manifesto of 1951 we learn that the party planned to replace the existing Indian constitution, which it described as “only a patchwork of the constitutions of the Western countries,” with one in keeping with Indian “ideals and political traditions”;²¹⁵ it certainly saw these ideals and traditions as monarchic, since a section of the manifesto setting out the qualities of the ideal ruler makes it clear that we are talking about a single man.²¹⁶ But there is no explicit statement as to whether the new constitution was to be republican or monarchic; and the issues in which the party, in fact, invested its political energies were the integrity of Hindu law and the protection of cows.²¹⁷

4. LATIN AMERICAN CATHOLICISM

If Hindu kingship bulks large in the history and thought of pre-modern India, we could surely say the same of Christian kingship in Europe. And indeed, for a long time and over large areas, it was more or less taken for granted that the polity would be both Christian and monarchic and that these two features would be suitably intertwined. The result, for many who lived in Christian kingdoms, may well have appeared as seamless as Hindu kingship. But at a deeper level there were fissures, and in the right historical context they could break through to the surface.

At the time when the New Testament was being composed, all significant monarchies were pagan. At that point the notion of a Christian kingdom had meaning only in connection with the apocalyptic future, when it would be announced in heaven that “the kingdom of this world is become the kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ; and he shall reign for ever and ever” (Rev. 11:15). There was, of course, a monotheist kingship enshrined in the Biblical record of Israelite history—and what is more, one established by divine agency. But even this was in conception originally a pagan institution, for God was responding to the demand of the Israelites for “a king to judge us like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5); and while God moved to accommodate this demand, he also registered his strong disapproval of it (1 Samuel 8:7–9).218 Moreover, in both cases the Bible uses the same vocabulary to refer to kingship, irrespective of whether it is pagan or monotheist.²¹⁹

From the fourth century onwards the political environment changed drastically for Christians, as the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, followed sooner or later by numerous non-Roman kings. Predictably, Christians quickly warmed to this, and ecclesiastics took the opportunity to stake out a role in the polity comparable to those of the Muslim scholars and the Brahmins.²²⁰ Eusebius of Caesaria (d. ca. 340), writing in praise of Constantine, stressed the symmetry of monarchy and monotheism: “A monarchy is superior to all other forms of government … there is but one God, not two, or three, or more … and one king (basileus), one royal word and law.”221 The link was also made to the Israelite monarchy: in Byzantium emperors were hailed as new Davids and new Solomons,²²² while in Carolingian Europe the Israelite practice of anointing kings was extensively revived by the clergy—boosting their own authority in the process.²²³ But in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the Israelite adoption of kingship, all this represented a Christianization of originally pagan institutions, royal or imperial. It goes with this that the idea of a single ruler over the whole of Christendom has little purchase on the Christian political imagination. Altogether, the emergence of the Christian kingdoms of this world was very much a historically contingent phenomenon: there was nothing in the fundamentals of Christianity that required it.

This fact about the past had a significant implication for the distant future. If there was Christianity before there were Christian kingdoms, there could be Christianity after they had gone. In other words, it would not require much violence to the tradition for its followers to disengage it from kingship. In commanding obedience to the imperial authorities of the day, St. Paul had said nothing about monarchy; instead he referred in a vague and general fashion to “the higher powers,” stating that “the powers that be are ordained of God” and that to resist “the power” was to resist “the ordinance of God” (Romans 13:1–2).²²⁴ This said much about obedience to government but nothing about the form government might take. We could certainly expect to find among conservative Christians in the aftermath of the French revolutionary upheaval a deep reluctance to part with Christian kingship and a disposition to restore it where the tide of republicanism ebbed sufficiently to provide an opportunity. But such attachment to monarchy was likely to be largely a product of general conservatism, combined with antipathy toward the often aggressively secular orientation of revolutionary republicanism. Despite Eusebius, there was nothing intrinsically Christian about monarchy as such, just as there was nothing intrinsically anti-Christian about republican government. Christians who now found themselves ruled by nonmonarchic governments would have to get used to them, but in doing so they would not need to ignore values deeply embedded in their tradition, as Hindus did.

To give more substance to these remarks, let us glance at some relevant aspects of the history of republican and monarchic polities in Europe. Our starting point is the fact that republican government was a major feature of the history of pre-Christian Rome. This meant that it was entrenched in a prestigious, though pagan, component of the European literary heritage. Just as important, medieval Europe saw a revival of republican government. This, too, left its mark on the European literary tradition, with defenders of the city republics of northern Italy going on record with the affirmation that a republic is the best form of government. Thus, the Florentine Brunetto Latini (d. 1294) distinguished three kinds of government, those of kings, aristocracies, and peoples, and pronounced the third to be “far better than the others.”225 Though in this there were strong echoes of ancient republicanism,²²⁶ the result was not usually anti-Christian.²²⁷ Likewise, those who wrote to champion the republics of their day faced various obstacles, but the idea that republican government was incompatible with Christianity was not one of them.²²⁸ In the same way the popes of the later twelfth century and the first half of the thirteenth had no problem allying with the republics against the German emperors.²²⁹ And only when the pope in turn became a greater threat to the independence of the republics than the emperor did the defenders of the republics respond by attacking the pretensions of the Church to political power;²³⁰ in this they were doing pretty much what supporters of royal authority did, and they did not wax anti-Christian any more than the royalists did. That threshold was not to be crossed in medieval Italy, or even in seventeenth-century England or eighteenth-century America, but rather in revolutionary France—and even there only in 1793–1794, four years into the revolution of 1789 and a year after the monarchy had given way to a republic.231 Nor was it a foregone conclusion that republics downwind of the French revolution would be anti-Christian. In Italy we find that Napoleon, while engaged in establishing satellite republics during the French occupation of the 1790s, was at some pains to avoid any such impression, claiming that “the French Republic protects religion and its ministers.”²³² Moreover a good many local ecclesiastics responded to this overture. “Catholic democrats” appeared among the clergy. No less a personage than Cardinal Chiaramonti, the future Pope Pius VII (in office 1800–1823), explained in his Christmas sermon of 1797 that the Christian duty to obey the powers that be is not limited to one particular form of polity, and he urged his audience not to believe that “the Catholic religion is against democracy.”²³³ If Christian monarchies were a historically contingent phenomenon, so too were anti-Christian republics.

There was, of course, the countervailing doctrine of the divine right of kings. It had old roots, and though far from uncontested, it became prominent in early modern Europe.²³⁴ Thus an English preacher in 1588 declared that a prince is “in earth a certain image of the divine power” and “by office representeth God”; more arrestingly, “he is a God himselfe.”²³⁵ Sir Thomas Craig (d. 1608), a Scottish jurist close to the future James I of England (ruled 1603–1625), declared monarchy to be “the Best of all Governments,” instituted by God in accordance with the law of nature, and held that God “abhors and detests” the exercise of collective sovereignty, whether in the form of “Aristocracy or Democracy.”236 As an Anglican formulation of 1640 had it: “The most high and sacred order of kings is of divine right, being the ordinance of God himself, founded in the prime laws of nature, and clearly established by express texts both of the Old and New Testaments.”²³⁷ In post-revolutionary Europe this persuasion still had adherents who stood for an unreconstructed union of throne and altar. One leading theorist of this tendency was the Vicomte de Bonald (d. 1840), who believed in a combination of absolute monarchy and intolerant Catholicism (he saw the Edict of Nantes as a fundamental error).²³⁸ But it is hard to find post-revolutionary monarchs of such ideological purity—too many of them were men of their times, and needed to be to survive. In France Louis XVIII (ruled 1814–1824) still saw his authority as derived from God, not the people, and in his Charter declared Catholicism the state religion; but his preferred alignment was with the moderate royalists, who were comfortable with limited monarchy, and he conceded freedom of worship—a concession to error that Pope Pius VII had hoped to see avoided.²³⁹ Charles X (ruled 1824–1830) was of a different stamp: a devout Catholic who did his best to restore the power and standing of the clergy, his constituency lay among the royalist ultras. But even he, in the course of a resolutely traditional coronation at Rheims, departed from precedent by omitting to swear to extirpate heresy.²⁴⁰ Perhaps only in Spain, where the French invasion had provoked strong popular support for the union of throne and altar, was there anything even approaching a full restoration under Ferdinand VII (ruled 1814–1833); this extended to the revival of the Inquisition, the traditional guarantee of the purity of the Catholic faith.²⁴¹ And perhaps only in Spain has a reactionary tradition of this kind survived into the twenty-first century, thanks to the Carlists, the supporters of the descendants of a pretender who lost out in the civil war of the 1830s—though even they have adapted significantly to contemporary conditions.242 Meanwhile such monarchies as continue to exist in Europe have done so by becoming monarchic republics. All this left plenty of room for Catholic conservatism, but for the most part it was no longer tied to prerevolutionary notions of Christian kingship. In Spain in the early 1930s many conservative Catholics were monarchists,²⁴³ but the political organization established to bring conservative Catholics together aimed at “a corporative and conservative Catholic Republic.”²⁴⁴ The traditionalist Catholic Marcel Lefebvre (d. 1991) was born of a French Catholic monarchist father, but while he did not repudiate his father’s monarchism, neither did he endorse it.²⁴⁵ He certainly believed that the state should be strongly committed to Catholicism²⁴⁶ and that “all authority comes from God.”²⁴⁷ But he recognized without strain that states would vary in the manner in which this authority was institutionalized, for the Catholic Church “does not indicate any preference for this or that form of government.”²⁴⁸ Thus one possible form was democracy. This did not, of course, mean anything like French democracy—“irremediably liberal, masonic, and anti-Catholic” in its origins and constitution.²⁴⁹ But a democracy that was “openly Christian and Catholic” was another matter.250 In short, while his devotion to the traditional teachings of the Church was boundless, he did not see monarchism as one of them.

So far we have spoken only of Europe, but what was true of Europe was just as true of Latin America, if not more so. In Brazil, where the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in 1808 as refugees from the French invasion gave monarchy a local continuity not found elsewhere, the empire that emerged from the break with Portugal in 1822 and lasted till 1889 soon settled down as a constitutional monarchy, rather than a union of throne and altar. Dom Pedro I (ruled 1822–1831), despite his autocratic habits, fancied himself as a liberal;²⁵¹ in his coronation oath he described himself as emperor of Brazil “by the grace of God and the unanimous vote of the people,” and he promulgated a somewhat liberal constitution.²⁵² His son Dom Pedro II (ruled 1831–1889) was the very model of a constitutional monarch.²⁵³ Meanwhile the Church in Brazil was full of liberals, not to mention republicans.²⁵⁴ In the former Spanish possessions there was some monarchist sentiment in the immediate aftermath of the rupture with the mother country,²⁵⁵ but only in Mexico did it have a significant impact. Here the break with Spain was accomplished by Agustín de Iturbide, who stood for independence without revolution and briefly reigned as Emperor of Mexico in 1822–1823.²⁵⁶ His program, set out in the Plan of Iguala of 1821, proposed a monarchy tempered by a constitution but was soundly conservative on the religious front: the religion of the country was to be Catholicism, with no toleration of other faiths, and the clergy would retain their exemptions and privileges.257 Appropriately he was hailed as “our Catholic Liberator, the Second Constantine,” the “frightener of the impious.”²⁵⁸ The other monarchic episode in the modern history of Mexico came in the 1860s, when a French occupation brought the country a new emperor, the Archduke Maximilian of Austria (ruled 1864–1867).²⁵⁹ There was clearly a constituency for this restoration of monarchy among Catholic conservatives, but Maximilian himself was too liberal to play the part successfully, failing to decree the immediate reversal of the anticlerical reforms of Benito Juárez.²⁶⁰ Neither in Brazil nor in Mexico did monarchism survive as a political force in the twentieth century. Catholic conservatism was indeed a significant component of Mexican politics, but neither the Cristeros nor the Sinarquists were interested in monarchy.

There is a wider point here. It is not just that Christianity can be disengaged from kingship but that it lacks a conception of an intrinsically Christian state short of the second coming of Christ. The early Christian community was not a polity, and whatever abortive hopes there may have been that Jesus would “restore again the kingdom to Israel,” he himself declared firmly that his kingdom was “not of this world.”²⁶¹ This made a difference. For example, anyone familiar with early Islamic history who reads about the maraudings of Christian sectarians and zealots in late antiquity feels at home with the pervasive religious violence but is struck by the absence of any project of state formation.²⁶² Here, however, our concern is with the implications of the absence of an idea of an intrinsically Christian state in the context of Latin American politics in the twentieth century.

If twentieth-century Latin American Christians wished to engage in political activity that took inspiration from their religion—and most of them did not—they had three main options, three forms of modern politics they could seek to reflag.

One option was Christian democracy. Christian democratic parties first arose in Europe, where they were formed in reaction to the liberal attack on the Church in the later nineteenth century.263 In principle their emergence made it possible for European Catholics to participate in electoral politics in the hope of rendering political systems more friendly to their Christian values—though in practice these parties tended to drift away from their original religious orientation,²⁶⁴ thus contrasting with the zeal of the Christian Right in the United States in its attempts to use the political process to impose its religious values on its fellow citizens. The Christian democratic parties of twentieth-century Latin America followed a trajectory similar to that of their European models. Their rewards were somewhat limited by the absence from the Latin American scene of the democratic stability that could generally be expected in Western Europe: it was never axiomatic in Latin America that the only way to attain political power was to get oneself elected, for democracy, even if here today, might be gone tomorrow. Instead, the history of the region has abounded in military regimes (as in Chile in 1924–1931 and 1973–1990), prolonged civil wars (as in Colombia for the last half century and more), and armed insurrections (issuing in leftist regimes in Cuba and Nicaragua). The only large Latin American country that enjoyed (or suffered) prolonged stability in the twentieth century was Mexico under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional—an authoritarian regime that did not encourage political competition. Yet when democracy prevailed, the rewards of participation could be considerable. Thus in Chile the Christian Democrats won presidential or congressional elections in 1964, 1965, 1989, and 1993.²⁶⁵ Likewise in El Salvador, despite conditions of civil war, the Christian Democrats could contest and even win parliamentary elections, as they did in 1985, the founder of the party having been elected president the previous year.²⁶⁶ In fact, no fewer than seven Christian democratic parties in Latin America were electorally successful enough to win the presidency at least once.²⁶⁷ These parties have nevertheless experienced a drift away from religious commitment similar to that of their European counterparts,268 and of late they have not been politically prominent.²⁶⁹

Another option was to look to fascism for a suitable political project. As we have seen, there were several examples in Latin America, though this option lost its appeal with the catastrophic defeat of fascism in the Second World War.²⁷⁰ Since then, no form of rightist religious politics has emerged in Latin America on any scale.²⁷¹

The third option, which came into its own in the second half of the twentieth century, was to look to leftism, specifically Marxism, as the Liberationists did. This option is, of course, the one that most concerns us.

That Marxism should have appealed to the political imagination of Latin American Catholics with radical tendencies is no surprise. Whatever its nineteenth-century past, in the twentieth century it became an ideology offering a powerful anti-imperialist and socially radical articulation of the discontents of the Third World. The key event was, of course, the Russian revolution of 1917, and this already had some impact on Latin America in the period between the two World Wars. But it was an event closer to home that really caught the political imagination of Latin American youth: the Cuban revolution of 1959, once it had manifested its hallmark combination of Marxist radicalism and defiance of the United States.²⁷² Marxism was now the movement of choice in Latin America for “the palpitating and heroic idealism of strong and impatient youths.”²⁷³ An ideology with this kind of appeal to intellectuals and students was obviously likely to exercise a pull on young Latin Americans destined for careers in the Catholic church, not to mention foreign clergy.

It thus makes sense to see Liberation Theology as a Catholic emulation of Marxism. Such emulation was not entirely new: in Chile in 1940 or earlier, priests belonging to Acción Católica Chilena were engaged in unionizing in the countryside and justified this “defense of the poor” on the ground that if they did not do it, the Marxists would.274 But it was the Liberationists who took this tendency farthest. “For us,” as a young Uruguayan put it, “Jesus Christ is Ché Guevara.”²⁷⁵ There was the same talk of imperialism, neocolonialism, and dependence; on one side were those who control the world economy, on the other the world’s oppressed and dominated peoples.²⁷⁶ Such talk was eminently compatible with Latin American dislike of the United States. Meanwhile, on the domestic front there were the same concepts of class struggle and revolution; here the national oligarchies were the enemy.²⁷⁷ In a more syncretistic vein, social revolution—alias the Kingdom—was held out as the eschatological hope.²⁷⁸ “The Exodus is the long march towards the promised land.”²⁷⁹ There was also a qualified openness to violence in a good cause—the qualification being doubtless of Christian rather than Marxist origin.²⁸⁰ The basic recipe for this Christianization of Marxism was simple enough: both belief systems link the glorious future to those currently at the bottom of the pile. All one had to do was to appropriate the Marxist dream of revolution and to substitute the Biblical cult of the poor for the Marxist identification of the agent of the coming redemption—be it the proletariat or the peasantry. Thus in commenting on Matthew’s Gospel, a Mexican Jesuit priest observes that “the good news given to the poor is that God identifies with the future of those who suffer” and goes on to say that “God has identified himself with the poor, assuming as his own their cause and destiny.”²⁸¹ As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) put it in 1984, Liberation Theology was characterized by “a disastrous confusion between the poor of Scripture and the proletariat of Marx.”²⁸² Or as one devotee preferred to put it: “As a Marxist Christian, I believe in the socialist revolution. As a Christian Marxist, I believe in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.”283 Whether we should describe such ideas as disastrous confusion or auspicious fusion is a question we can leave to the theologians. Historically speaking, the need to emulate Marxist radicalism in the context of middle-class youth culture explains very well the character of Liberation Theology. Just how central this emulation was to the persuasion is indicated by the timing of the eventual downturn in the fortunes of Liberation Theology: it lost traction precisely in the 1990s,²⁸⁴ in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union and the global collapse of faith in Marxism.

There were, of course, limits to the emulation. Although Gutiérrez did not take issue with Marxist materialism and atheism and initially made no firm statement as to where the Liberationists parted company with the Marxists,²⁸⁵ even he indicated that radical ideas in the Marxist tradition were not to be adopted without question.²⁸⁶ Moreover, in his later writings he had second thoughts about his enthusiasm for Marxism, though he was at pains to minimize their secondary character. In an article of 1984 on theology and the social sciences, written in response to Cardinal Ratzinger’s criticisms of Liberation Theology, he did much to disengage from too close an embrace of Marxism.²⁸⁷ Here, for example, we do find him spelling out a parting of the ways.²⁸⁸ Likewise he rewrote the section on class struggle for the revised edition of his treatise on Liberation Theology, published in 1988: in response to the complaints from Rome, the term “class struggle” disappeared from the title of the section, and although he continued to assert the fact of class struggle, he no longer urged the duty of participation in it, at least not in so many words.²⁸⁹ These grudging concessions represented the price he had to pay to remain in communion with the Church—and hence a real constraint on his thought. This price in turn is likely to have inhibited any adoption by the Liberationists of Marxist ideas on the shape of the political future: while they echoed their scripture by speaking vaguely of the “Kingdom of God,” they developed no operational concept of the dictatorship of the poor. They were not entirely silent on politics at the level of the state: the Brazilian Leonardo Boff judiciously informs us that we do not have to deny the value of political power as a legitimate way of securing more justice for the marginalized.290 But the Liberationists had no vision of the polity.

It fits with this that in political terms they had relatively little success. Admittedly their social activity had a widespread impact in Latin America over a period of more than twenty years, an achievement that in itself puts them well ahead of the Cristeros; many educated people in the First World have heard of Liberation Theology, whereas few have heard tell of the Cristiada. Yet the Liberationists in the end played only a marginal role in the political history of late twentieth-century Latin America. In no major Latin American country did they become political actors of real consequence, though they did somewhat better in the smaller states of Central America and the Caribbean. Thus, in El Salvador they figured in the political equation during the civil war of 1980–1992. But as a Catholic political force they were not in the same league as the Christian Democrats, and as rebels they had no place in the leadership of the FMLN, a secular organization of which the largest component was Marxist²⁹¹—though they counted for something in the background of many of the rank and file.²⁹² They did not even predominate within the Salvadorian church.²⁹³ Archbishop Romero went a long way toward joining them and died a martyr for their cause; but several of his bishops felt so little sympathy for him that they did not see fit to attend his funeral.²⁹⁴ In Nicaragua, where the revolution of 1979 ended the Somoza dictatorship that had ruled the country since 1937, the Liberationists had previously been no more than an element in a broad revolutionary coalition. At one point we hear fleetingly of a separate Christian Revolutionary Movement,295 but in practice the only way for Liberationists like the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal to make a difference was to join the Sandinistas.²⁹⁶ After the revolution they played a more conspicuous role in the Sandinista regime of 1979–1990, providing four cabinet ministers, of whom one served as foreign minister for a decade.²⁹⁷ But these Liberationists were by no means the core of the regime. The only Latin American country ever ruled by a Liberationist is Haiti,²⁹⁸ where in 1990 Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected to the presidency with close to 70 percent of the vote on the strength of his fiery—and courageous—preaching.²⁹⁹ His presidency was, of course, a signal failure, and that no doubt reflected the combined failings of the man, his organization, and his doctrine. The problems of Haiti were unlikely to be solved by the assurance that “God will descend and put down the mighty and send them away, and He will raise up the lowly and place them on high.”³⁰⁰ But one might also ask why, if nothing else has ever worked for Haiti, Liberation Theology should have done any better.

5. CONCLUSION

As we have seen in this chapter, each of our three traditions is associated with a well-developed pattern of kingship, and these patterns have much in common. Thus, in each case kingship acquires a repertoire of symbols and ceremonies to which the religious tradition contributes more or less generously. All three take for granted a plurality of rulers within the religious community. In each case the kings are partnered with a formal or informal religious leadership that places some limit on their power: the scholars in the Muslim case, the religiously active Brahmins in the Hindu case, the ecclesiastics in the Christian case.301 And in each case the religious tradition has at least some reservations about kingship. Of course, the three patterns also differ from each other in nontrivial ways. Thus, there is significant variation in the extent to which the religious tradition considers warfare between its kings to be problematic, the level of such concern being lowest in the Hindu case and highest in the Muslim case. Queasiness regarding kingship as such is perhaps least in the Hindu case and certainly greatest in the Muslim case. In terms of the resources on which it draws, Hindu kingship is the most indigenous of the three, whereas Muslim kingship makes considerable use of resources from outside the Islamic tradition, and Christian kingship represents the Christianization of a preexisting pagan institution. There are also major differences in the extent to which kingship is seen as being in competition with nonmonarchic forms of polity: republics are virtually unknown to the Islamic tradition, recollected but accorded no respect in the Hindu tradition, recognized and accredited in the Christian tradition.

All this is interesting enough, but what is so striking is how little any of it matters for the outcomes that concern us. Muslim, Hindu, and Christian kingship are all equally irrelevant to modern politics except insofar as they are represented by local survivals. We might, for example, have expected it to make a considerable difference that republicanism and related modern political values are historically indigenous to Europe and so by extension to Latin America, whereas they are alien to the Hindu tradition of India with its purely monarchic values. But in fact the modern politics of the two regions show a great deal of convergence: identity politics are about nationalism, forms of government are republican, and basic political styles have been fascistic, leftist, or liberal. To an extent, though only to an extent, the politics of the Muslim world have followed the same model. In place of the pattern of kingship that prevailed on the eve of modernity, we now have a predominance of republics and a political scene that includes or has included nationalists, fascists, leftists, and liberals. Altogether, the Muslim world, like the world at large, has been strongly shaped by these modern values.

But in the Muslim world we also have another kind of politics, namely Islamism. It, too, has been strongly affected by modern political values, but it has been at pains to discover these values, or their counterparts, in its own heritage. As we have seen, the existence of this option has to do with the content of the tradition. At first sight the Islamic heritage resembles that of Hinduism in its commitment to a monarchic perspective in which republican values have no standing. But it also bears some resemblance to the tradition of Christian Europe inasmuch as it possesses an alternative model to kingship, namely the early caliphate and the values associated with it. One difference, of course, is that the caliphate comes from within the Islamic tradition, whereas republicanism (like kingship) comes from outside the Christian tradition; a republic can thus be a secular institution, whereas the caliphate cannot be. It is not a modern institution, nor does it have much geopolitical plausibility, but it gives powerful articulation to the idea of a specifically Muslim polity. Meanwhile the political culture associated with it, despite originating in a context that is again very distant from modernity, resonates powerfully with some key modern values.

One way to point up the distinctiveness of Islamist politics is to consider what the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the collapse of faith in leftism meant in each of our three cases. For the Liberationists the outcome of the Soviet collapse was disastrous, with the demise of Marxism reflected in a sharp decline in their fortunes.302 This linkage is not surprising. The point of the doctrine, one might say, was to provide a way of being leftist within Catholicism, and once leftism had lost its allure there was little else about Liberationism that was likely to recruit a following. The most dynamic representatives of Catholicism were now not the Liberationists but the Charismatics. For the Hindu nationalists the leftist débacle posed no threat to core convictions and tended to make politics easier. Thus, it did something to weaken the leftist competition they faced on the domestic political scene, and it left them free to discard an economic orientation borrowed from the left in favor of one more appropriate to the right. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s the Hindu nationalist mainstream had taken its cue from the socialist tendencies of Congress, with the leading champion of a market economy being expelled from the party in 1973;303 but in the 1990s it was the proponents of the free market who set the tone, and those loyal to a more leftist orientation were left to obstruct and oppose.³⁰⁴ Finally, for the Sunnī Islamists the result was pure gain. Marxist regimes no longer ruled South Yemen, Albania, Bosnia, Afghanistan, or the Muslim lands of the former Soviet Union, and none of the idiosyncratic countries in which Marxists succeeded in holding onto power despite the general collapse were located in the Islamic world; at the same time Arab socialist regimes no longer enjoyed Soviet patronage. Above all, Islamism saw an ideological competitor eliminated without any cost to its own plausibility.³⁰⁵ That a political radicalism of the late twentieth century should depend so little on the plausibility of Marxism is telling.

___________

¹ This term has been applied in the context of early modern England in the sense of “a form of government that, although monarchical in form, is nevertheless republican in character” (the wording is that of Skinner, “Monarchical republic enthroned,” 237).

² Fraternity is the poor relation in this trio: for its absence from key revolutionary documents before 1848, see Antoine, Liberté égalité fraternité, 134.

³ Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought, 18, 128–29.

⁴ Muslim authors may nevertheless see the papacy as a Christian analogue of the caliphate. For example, one thirteenth-century author explains that the pope is considered to be the khalīfa of Christ (B. Lewis, Muslim discovery, 178, and cf. 209); another source states that the Franks consider the pope to be the deputy (nāʾib) of the Messiah and compares him to the Commander of the Faithful among the Muslims (Yāqūt, Muʿjam al-buldān, 1: 323a.29, in the entry “Bāshghird”).

⁵ See 26.

⁶ Cf. 22–23.

⁷ Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought, 273–75.

⁸ Nasafī, Tabṣirat al-adilla, 829.14 (I owe my knowledge of this passage to Sönmez Kutlu).

⁹ Mdaghrī, al-Faqīh Abū ʿAlī al-Yūsī, 328.20 (read al-mulk al-ʿaḍūḍ); for an example of a tradition in which the Prophet foretells such kingship, see Bayhaqī, Shuʿab al-īmān, 5: 16–17 no. 5616.

¹⁰ Tirmidhī, al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ, 4: 503 no. 2226 (fitan 48).

¹¹ M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 294. See also above, 17–18.

¹² Ibid., 298–99.

¹³ Hassan, “Loss of caliphate,” chap. 1.

¹⁴ For fleeting instances of nonmonarchic rule on a small scale, see Stern, “Constitution,” 33–36. For an illuminating study of the North African Tripoli—a place that could easily have been a city state if it had had a mind to—see Brett, “City-state,” especially 93. For a more stable case, located in a strongly sectarian environment in northeast Arabia, see EI², art. “Ḳarmaṭī” (W. Madelung), 664; a key eleventh-century account of this polity (translated in B. Lewis, Islam from Muhammad, 2: 65–68) describes the collective rule of six kings and six viziers (66). The ancient heritage of the early medieval Muslims did not include the concept of a republic (Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought, 279).

¹⁵ Ṣaghānī, Mawḍūʿāt, 36 no. 29 (al-mulk waʾl-dīn tawʾamān, as a tradition falsely ascribed to the Prophet); Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 102.7 (al-mulk waʾl-dīn akhawān tawʾamān, ascribed to the Persian king Ardashīr (ruled 224–240)); and cf. Lambton, State and government, 45; Gutas, Greek thought, 80–81.

¹⁶ Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought, 10–16, especially 15.

¹⁷ See, for example, Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyar al-mulūk, 15.8 = Nizam al-Mulk, Book of government, 12 (as a saying of the religious authorities, buzurgān-i dīn); Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, al-Tafsīr al-kabīr, 18: 76.13 (to Q11:117). For many more references, see Sadan, “Community,” 108–11, and for the same idea expressed in other words, see Alam, Languages of political Islam, 72–73 (both drawn to my attention by Luke Yarbrough).

¹⁸ Friedmann, Tolerance and coercion, 34–38. I follow Friedmann’s translation of the tradition; a less elegant but more literal rendering might be “Islam is on top, and nothing overtops it.”

¹⁹ Landau-Tasseron, Religious foundations, 11a.

²⁰ For the view that this amounts to a constitution, see Feldman, Fall and rise, 6.

²¹ Usually but not always. For an eighteenth-century Egyptian scholar who places the predatory rulers of Egypt in the same category as those who make war on God and his Prophet, see Peters, Islam and colonialism, 183n80. More generally, there was a sense that the best scholars were those who had least to do with rulers.

²² Much relevant material may be found in Al-Azmeh, Muslim kingship.

²³ See Crone, “Qays and Yemen,” especially 42–43. For the long survival of this factional opposition in Syrian society, see Goldziher, Muslim studies, 1: 78–79.

²⁴ M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 295. It was the traditions of the pre-Islamic Persian kings that Baranī urged rulers to adopt in the same way as a starving man eats carrion (294, and above, 17–18).

²⁵ Ibn Abī Yaʿlā, Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila, 1: 26.17.

²⁶ EI², art. “Khuṭba” (A. J. Wensinck); Calder, “Friday prayer,” 36 (citing a view that the practice is not recommended). Historically the mention of the ruler’s name in the khuṭba came to be paired with its inscription on the coinage.

²⁷ EI², arts. “Marāsim” (P. Sanders et al.) and “Mawākib” (P. Sanders et al.).

²⁸ Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ, Rusūm Dār al-Khilāfah, 65, 73; Necipoğlu, Architecture, ceremonial, and power, 150–52.

²⁹ Hilāl al-Ṣābiʾ, Rusūm Dār al-Khilāfah, 74, and cf. 66.

³⁰ Ibn Battúta, Travels in Asia and Africa, 327.

³¹ EI², arts. “Mehter” (W. Feldman), “Naḳḳāra-Khāna” (A.K.S. Lambton), and “Ṭabl-Khāna” (H. G. Farmer).

³² Hopkins, Conquerors and slaves, 220–26; Dvornik, Christian and Byzantine political philosophy, 648, 653–56, 686–87.

³³ See Sela, Tamerlane, 15–16 (a chronicle of 1525), 92–98 (an eighteenth-century account of how Tīmūr came to reign; note the ancillary roles played by a prominent Ṣūfī and the Prophet himself, 93–94, 97).

³⁴ Sela, Ritual and authority, 2–4.

³⁵ See the translation ibid., 5–19, followed by his commentary, especially 20–25; for the original Persian text, see 59–68.

³⁶ Ibid., 12; for the elevation, see 13–14. One of the new ruler’s problems was that he was not of Chingizid descent (22, 24), the Chingizids being, as one fifteenth-century chronicler put it, the Quraysh of the Turks (34; cf. below, 317–18).

³⁷ Ibid., 9, 12, 19 (for further mentions of Khusraw, see 64.13, 66.1 of the original Persian); and note the reference to the royal farr or glory, an Iranian conception of venerable antiquity (16). Alexander the Great (ruled 336–323 BC) also figures (18), as do Solomon (18) and—directly or by allusion—some rulers of Islamic times (8, 12, 17).

³⁸ Ibid., 11.

³⁹ See ibid., 5, 7, 8, 10, 14 (Koranic quotations); 6, 10 (the Sharīʿa); 6, 10, 19 (the khuṭba); 5, 12 (the caliphate; see also 63.18); 15 (the treatise on the imamate). It is implied but not stated that the new ruler is a caliph.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 13. Compare an accession of 1583 in which the felt carpet is supplied by a leading religious dignitary, having previously been washed in holy water in Mecca (42; McChesney, “Zamzam water,” 66–67).

⁴¹ B. Lewis, “Ottoman observers,” 213–16.

⁴² Qochı Beg, Risāle, 9.5.

⁴³ Kātib Chelebī, Destūr ül-ʿamel li-iṣlāḥ il-khalel, 122.8, 130.12, 136.8.

⁴⁴ B. Lewis, “Ibn Khaldūn,” 234.

⁴⁵ It is noteworthy that the subject is not given a place within the standard compass of the Sunnī law book.

⁴⁶ Yūsī, Qānūn, 191.6.

⁴⁷ Walī Allāh, Ḥujja, 2: 735.8.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 2: 737.2. In a manner reminiscent of Ibn Khaldūn, Shāh Walī Allāh put considerable intellectual effort into elaborating a general understanding of human social, economic, and political development; he distinguished four cultural levels (irtifāqs) (Baljon, Religion and thought, 193–96).

⁴⁹ There is a hint of relativism here: how, we might ask, would the laws of Islam have been affected had the revelation taken place in Ireland or Japan? For modern use of this opening to relativism, see Zaman, “South Asian Islam,” 60.

⁵⁰ Walī Allāh, Ḥujja, 2: 738.19.

⁵¹ Cf., for example, the claims of the petty rulers of Malaya to the caliphate (Milner, “Islam and Malay kingship,” 52).

⁵² Gibb, “Luṭfī Paşa.”

⁵³ Ibid., 292.

⁵⁴ Hassan, “Loss of caliphate,” chap. 2.

⁵⁵ Crone, Medieval Islamic political thought, 273–74.

⁵⁶ Hunwick, Sharīʿa in Songhay, 27.9 = 81–82, and see 25.15 = 79.

⁵⁷ Suyūṭī, Taʾrīkh al-khulafāʾ, 59.22, and see M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 292.

⁵⁸ Cf. the comments in Kennedy, Great Arab conquests, 111, 114.

⁵⁹ See Landau-Tasseron, Religious foundations, 1, 24, 27.

⁶⁰ See EI², art. “Mashwara” (B. Lewis).

⁶¹ Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 3–4: 661.6 = 687; M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 292.

⁶² Tatāʾī, Tanwīr al-maqāla, 1: 370.4; Manūfī, Kifāyat al-ṭālib, 1: 99.24.

⁶³ Ibn Ḥabīb, Kitāb al-Taʾrīkh, 119 no. 343 (but cf. 111.3 no. 317).

⁶⁴ M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 284–85.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 289–90; see above, 170.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 293.

⁶⁷ See 169–70.

⁶⁸ Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 1–2: 502.20 = 232; Lecker, Constitution of Medina, 114–17. For an episode in which Muḥammad’s daughter Zaynab grants such protection and announces it in the mosque in Medina, see Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 1–2: 657.19 = 316–17. It is, incidentally, worth noting that the fact that a woman exercised this right, and then announced in public that she had done so, does not seem to have been in any way problematic.

⁶⁹ See 20–21.

⁷⁰ As a historian of the United States remarks in explaining American attitudes in 1776: “Republicanism put a premium on the homogeneity and cohesiveness of its society” (Wood, “Monarchism and republicanism,” 233).

⁷¹ The Jewish rabbis of Medina devised a test to determine the answer (Ibn Hishām, Sīra, 1–2: 564.10 = 266–67).

⁷² Ibid., 3–4: 578-81 = 637–9.

⁷³ Ibid., 3–4: 580.6 = 638.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 3–4: 580.11 = 638–39.

⁷⁵ See 311.

⁷⁶ M. Cook, “Did the prophet Muḥammad keep court?,” 23–26.

⁷⁷ Cf. M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 290–92.

⁷⁸ Cf. the strong Koranic approval of those who respond to being wronged by helping themselves (intaṣarū, yantaṣirūna, Q26:227, Q42:39, Q42:41).

⁷⁹ Cf. 312.

⁸⁰ Deringil, Well-protected domains, 22, 26–27, 29. With regard to portraits ʿAbdülḥamīd II (ruled 1876–1909) was an exception, no doubt in deference to Islamic sensibilities.

⁸¹ The exception is the Kuwaiti monarchy in 1990–1991.

⁸² B. Lewis, Emergence of modern Turkey, 141 (noting a possible European source of the idea); Mardin, Young Ottoman thought, 310. The question whether in historical terms there is merit in this idea is taken up in Tezcan, Second Ottoman Empire, making the argument that the politics of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire can be analyzed in terms of “the political divide between the absolutist and constitutionalist positions” (11).

⁸³ Hassan, Loss of caliphate, chap. 4.

⁸⁴ Maududi, Short history, 24; Maududi, Political theory of Islam, 24 = Mawdūdī, Naẓariyya, 26.11 (al-mamlaka al-ilāhiyya); Maudūdī, “Political concepts,” 165; and see Maududi, Fundamentals of Islam, 259.

⁸⁵ Maududi, Short history, 37; Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 20 (giving as the Arabic equivalent the canonical phrase Khilāfah ʿalā Minhāj al-Nubūwah).

⁸⁶ See 48–50. For Ḥasan al-Bannā’s view that the Islamic political system was most fully realized in the decades when the community was ruled by the Prophet’s successors in Medina, see his Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 363.10. For Saʿīd Ḥawwā’s views, see further Weismann, “Democratic fundamentalism,” 10, 11. For some South Asian examples, see Zaman, “South Asian Islam,” 57–58, 74–77.

⁸⁷ See 233.

⁸⁸ Mansfield, His own words, 255, 257, 266, and cf. 252 (dawlat al-khilāfa ʿalā minhāj al-nubuwwa and similar phrases).

⁸⁹ Lawrence, Messages, 194–95, and cf. 121, 202.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 98, 101.

⁹¹ Haykel, “Salafi thought and action,” 55 no. 35.

⁹² See Jansen, Neglected duty, 162 §7, 165–66 §17. For other such jihadis in Egypt, see Gerges, Far enemy, 33, 45; Meijer, “Commanding right,” 204, 205–6.

⁹³ Kull, Feeling betrayed, 118. Turkey is an exception.

⁹⁴ Aḥmad Raysūnī quoted in Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco, 191–92. Raysūnī is strongly in favor of democracy (190–91).

⁹⁵ Bannā, Majmūʿat rasāʾil, 285.2; see also Mitchell, Society of Muslim Brothers, 269.

⁹⁶ Rashwan, Spectrum of Islamist movements, 434; Fuchs, Proper signposts, 125, and cf. 59n40, 126.

⁹⁷ Cf. the passage from Bin Laden quoted in Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi state, 115.

⁹⁸ See 312.

⁹⁹ For the Koranic passage, see 311; for its use in this sense by a major Indian scholar, see Zaman, Ashraf ʿAlī Thanawi, 52–56.

¹⁰⁰ See 319–20. He also cites the modest allowance of Abū Bakr’s successor ʿUmar, see Mawdūdī, al-Ḥukūma al-Islāmiyya, 213.11 (for this work, see perhaps Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 36 no. 59, first published in 1962).

¹⁰¹ For all these views of Mawdūdī’s, see M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 301–2. See also Zaman, “South Asian Islam,” 68, 71.

¹⁰² For these views of Quṭb’s, see M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 304; and see below, 334–35.

¹⁰³ Mardin, Young Ottoman thought, 296–97.

¹⁰⁴ M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 304n109.

¹⁰⁵ Ḥawwā, Islām, 2: 163.1.

¹⁰⁶ Ḥawwā, Rasūl, 2: 175.7.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 2: 170.2. However, the antipatrimonial potential of the early caliphate does not really engage Ḥawwā’s political imagination, though he discusses the payment of a salary to the ruler (Ḥawwā, Islām, 2: 163.17).

¹⁰⁸ Euben and Zaman, Readings in Islamist thought, 236; for these anecdotes, see above, 320–21.

¹⁰⁹ Lawrence, Messages, 249, and cf. 260–61.

¹¹⁰ Ibid., 272.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 273, and cf. 274. This is linked to the wider view that the current rulers of the Muslim world are apostate infidels against whom jihad must be waged (Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 122).

¹¹² Lawrence, Messages, 273.

¹¹³ The relevant passage is ibid., 227–30. For the date of broadcasting and the addressees, see ibid., 212, 214; for the Arabic text of the passage, see ʿAlī, Tanẓīm al-Qāʿida, 393–97.

¹¹⁴ Lawrence, Messages, 229; for the original, see ʿAlī, Tanẓīm al-Qāʿida, 396.1.

¹¹⁵ Lawrence, Messages, 227; for the original, see ʿAlī, Tanẓīm al-Qāʿida, 394.3.

¹¹⁶ “Mursī fī khiṭāb al-fawz”; cf. above, 320.

¹¹⁷ Mawdūdī, al-Ḥukūma al-Islāmiyya, 215.23.

¹¹⁸ Cf. 279.

¹¹⁹ Cf. Feldman’s point that the attraction of the idea of restoring the Sharīʿa for Muslim populations is in large part that it promises the rule of law in place of unbridled executive power (Fall and rise, 9–10, 21, 79, 112–13). This is not, however, entirely supported by the polling data on Turks, Iranians, and Egyptians reported by Gallup in 2008: of those who thought the Sharīʿa should be a source of legislation, majorities—overwhelming in the Egyptian case—believed it to protect human rights and promote a fair judicial system, but less than half—just under half in the Egyptian case—believed it to limit the power of rulers (Rheault and Mogahed, “Turks, Iranians,” 2).

¹²⁰ Mardin, Young Ottoman thought, 315.

¹²¹ Feldman, Fall and rise, 127, 137. For a such an idea in a Sunnī context, that of the Syrian Muslim Brothers, see Weismann, “Democratic fundamentalism,” 9, 13 (reflecting the close relations between this group and the scholars, see 3). The idea finds considerable support in polls of Muslim populations (Kull, Feeling betrayed, 160–61).

¹²² As one political theorist puts it, “It has become ever clearer that, whatever its limitations, there is something irresistibly potent about democracy as a political rallying cry, and that any hope of halting it permanently in its tracks is utterly forlorn” (Dunn, Democracy, 17).

¹²³ Compare the view of an authoritarian New Confucian: “The benevolent government is founded on the dictatorship of Confucian scholars (Shi) because only Confucian scholars know the will of heaven” (Chen, “Modernity and Confucian political philosophy,” 127). The wording is a paraphrase, but compare this direct quotation: “When Confucianism replaces Marxist-Leninism as state ideology and Confucian scholars replace communist cadres, the process of creating a benevolent government is complete” (Dallmayr, “Introduction,” 7–8).

¹²⁴ Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 5.14 = 1, 266.17 = 354; and see Shepard, Sayyid Qutb, xlii, 108; Sivan, Radical Islam, 73.

¹²⁵ Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 130, 133 (quoting Q45:18 with its denunciation of the “caprices (ahwāʾ) of those who do not know”).

¹²⁶ Meijer, “Commanding right,” 206–7.

¹²⁷ See Rashwan, Spectrum of Islamist movements, 414–15; Fuchs, Proper signposts, 67; Lahoud, Jihadis’ path to self-destruction, 133.

¹²⁸ Lahoud, Jihadis’ path to self-destruction, 138, 171–72.

¹²⁹ Haykel, “Salafi thought and action,” 53 no. 21, and cf. 54 no. 28; see also D. Cook, Understanding jihad, 191.

¹³⁰ From a statement of 2011 quoted in Williams and Guttschuss, Spiraling violence, 30.

¹³¹ For a brief survey, see Krämer, “Islamist notions of democracy,” especially 75, 79.

¹³² Mawdūdī, al-Ḥukūma al-Islāmiyya, 217.22.

¹³³ See, for example, Maudūdī, “Islamic law in Pakistan,” 108 (a translation of a speech of 1948, see 97, and Ahmad and Ansari, Mawlānā Mawdūdī, 36 no. 58); Maudūdī, “Political concepts,” 197; Maudūdī, “First principles,” 235; Maudūdī, “Fundamentals of Islamic constitution,” 278.

¹³⁴ Mawdūdī, Human rights in Islam, 10 (in a talk of 1948, see 9n1).

¹³⁵ Mawdūdī, Minhāj al-inqilāb al-Islāmī, 39.7.

¹³⁶ Cf. 184.

¹³⁷ See M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 302–3.

¹³⁸ Weismann, “Democratic fundamentalism,” 4, 6, 12.

¹³⁹ Ibid., 8–12. But for statements that appear to reject democracy, see 8, 10.

¹⁴⁰ Ibid., 9–10. Compare Qaraḍāwī’s view (Euben and Zaman, Readings in Islamist thought, 241).

¹⁴¹ M. Lynch, “Islam divided,” 170–71.

¹⁴² Qaraḍāwī, Awlawiyyāt al-ḥaraka al-Islāmiyya, 155.1 = Qaradawi, Priorities of the Islamic movement, 209. Rather like the Syrian Muslim Brothers, he also says that what is called democracy “has always existed in a complete sense for us in Islam” (Lahoud, Jihadis’ path to self-destruction, 153–54), while at the same time maintaining that it is appropriate to borrow from others the standard democratic procedures (Euben and Zaman, Readings in Islamist thought, 237). This latter passage forms part of an extended discussion of democracy that in general strongly endorses it (230–45), but note the qualifications of the editors in their introduction to the text (228–29).

¹⁴³ Weismann, “Democratic fundamentalism,” 10–11; for a statement of his that is distinctly favorable to democracy, see Lahoud, Jihadis’ path to self-destruction, 154.

¹⁴⁴ Karasipahi, Muslims in modern Turkey, 72–76, and cf. 108 (for biographical details on the intellectuals in question see 53–55), and cf. 187–88 on an earlier figure.

¹⁴⁵ Carré, Mysticism and politics, 180–81, and cf. 317–18. Soon after telling us that the basis of the practice of Islamic governance is that rulers should be just, subjects should obey, and consultation should take place between them (Quṭb, ʿAdāla, 94.9 = 112), he remarks that Islam lays down only the general principle of consultation, leaving scope for the use of numerous different methods (97.4 = 116–17; similarly Quṭb, Maʿraka, 92.6, and Quṭb, Naḥw mujtamaʿ Islāmī, 141.3; and see Carré, Mysticism and politics, 180). This could be read as an opening to democratic practices of Western origin, but it does not seem to be intended as such (179–81).

¹⁴⁶ For this letter, see 361.

¹⁴⁷ Mansfield, His own words, 261–62, and see 263.

¹⁴⁸ Ibid., 260. The key phrase in the Arabic original (for which see below, 361n1) is yantakhibuhum ahl al-bilād li-tamthīlihim (6.20). Contrast his condemnation of such institutions as contradicting Islam in his propagandistic attack on democracy (Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 136).

¹⁴⁹ Mansfield, His own words, 262. Contrast Ẓawāhirī’s claim in an interview of the same year that the failure of the Americans to capture Mullā ʿUmar was due to the fact that “the Muslim masses” had opened their hearts and homes to the jihadists and given them refuge (Ibrahim, Al Qaeda reader, 182, and cf. 228), and Bin Laden’s statement in 2003, again in a propagandistic context, that the Ṭālibān were simply effecting a tactical withdrawal in the best traditions of Afghan guerrilla warfare (Lawrence, Messages, 203).

¹⁵⁰ Lawrence, Messages, 229; for the original, see ʿAlī, Tanẓīm al-Qāʿida, 396.16.

¹⁵¹ Lawrence, Messages, 229–30; for the original, see ʿAlī, Tanẓīm al-Qāʿida, 396.19.

¹⁵² Fuchs, Proper signposts, 130–31.

¹⁵³ Meijer, “Commanding right,” 214.

¹⁵⁴ See 321.

¹⁵⁵ M. Cook, “Political freedom,” 303.

¹⁵⁶ Ibid., 305. For the phrase “jihad for the sake of liberation” (al-jihād al-taḥrīrī), see Quṭb, Maʿālim, 68.23 = 65.

¹⁵⁷ Quṭb, Hādhā ʾl-dīn, 67.13 = 69.

¹⁵⁸ In a statement of October 2004 addressed to the people of America, Bin Laden describes the members of al-Qāʿida as “free men” (Lawrence, Messages, 238, and cf. 240), but characteristically this is a rhetorical response to an earlier reference by President Bush to “a war against people who hate freedom” (see 238n3). The passage was drawn to my attention by Bernard Haykel.

¹⁵⁹ See 184–86.

¹⁶⁰ Lacroix, “Between revolution and apoliticism,” 74–75, 76–77, 78; Hroub, “Salafi formations,” 232; Bonnefoy, “Salafism in Yemen,” 324, 326, but cf. 337; Adraoui, “Salafism in France,” 371.

¹⁶¹ Salomon, “Salafi critique of Islamism,” 150–51; and cf. N. Hasan, “Ambivalent doctrines,” 172–73.

¹⁶² See J. P. Sharma, Republics in ancient India, 239. The Buddhist tradition is more sympathetic to republics.

¹⁶³ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 3.

¹⁶⁴ Witness the citations of the dharmasūtras and the Laws of Manu that follow.

¹⁶⁵ Manu, Laws, 109 (5.94), and cf. 110 (5.97); also Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 103 (14.44–45), 302 (19.47–48).

¹⁶⁶ Manu, Laws, 86 (4.130).

¹⁶⁷ Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 41 (31.5), 96 (11.8), 98 (11.32), 113 (20.1), 163 (21.4).

¹⁶⁸ For the royal consecration (rājasūya), sprinkling of water (abhiṣeka), rejuvenation (vājapeya), and horse sacrifice (aśvamedha), see Basham, Wonder that was India, 81–82; Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 2: 1206–12, 1214–23, 1228–39, 3: 72–83 (the sprinkling of water is often referred to, conveniently but loosely, as the coronation). For the significant Vedic component of such rituals, see Witzel, “Coronation rituals of Nepal,” 3–4, 8–11, 20.

¹⁶⁹ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 33–35; Basham, Wonder that was India, 82–83, 86; Manu, Laws, 128 (7.3).

¹⁷⁰ Manu, Laws, 128 (7.8).

¹⁷¹ Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 90 (8.1–3).

¹⁷² Ibid., 299 (19.4). For the role of the purohita, see Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 117–20.

¹⁷³ See Heesterman, “Conundrum of the king’s authority,” 109; for the comparison with the butcher, see Manu, Laws, 81 (4.86).

¹⁷⁴ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 20–21, 30.

¹⁷⁵ Ibid., 3: 4.

¹⁷⁶ See ibid., 3: 37–40 for views on this issue.

¹⁷⁷ Ibid., 2: 380–82, 3: 40, 873–74.

¹⁷⁸ S. Bayly, Caste, society and politics, 59.

¹⁷⁹ The borrowings from Islamic kingship that appear in the later practice of Hindu kingship, like the title “sultan” (see 56), have no place in the normative religious texts.

¹⁸⁰ For an instance, see Thapar, “Image of the barbarian,” 264n60; cf. also 245, 247, 249, 254, 256, and Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 86, 97; 5: 563. Aśoka uses the term rājā with respect to Greek kings ruling outside India (Thapar, Aśoka, 251, 256; for the original, see U. Schneider, Grossen Felsen-Edikte Aśokas, 25 A, 76 Q, and see 104–5, 118–19).

¹⁸¹ Manu, Laws, 137 (7.89).

¹⁸² Ibid., 144 (7.158); and see Basham, Wonder that was India, 127, and Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 217–22. This is part of the wider Indian tradition of analysis of realpolitik (for the tension between dharmaśāstra—the science of being virtuous—and arthaśāstra—the science of getting what you want—see Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 8–13).

¹⁸³ Manu, Laws, 225 (9.251); cf. 138 (7.99, 101), 139 (7.109), 249 (10.119), where justice is not mentioned.

¹⁸⁴ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 64–8. Various terms are used in the sources for such rulers, including sārvabhauma and cakravartin.

¹⁸⁵ Ibid., 3: 67, and cf. 66–67, 67–68. For Bhāratavarṣa, see above, 68.

¹⁸⁶ See McLeod, Who is a Sikh?, 50; McLeod, Textual sources, 78 §11, and cf. 12. It was through a process of state formation that the Sikhs became more than just another politically irrelevant Hindu sect (cf. above, 107–8, 237).

¹⁸⁷ See 337.

¹⁸⁸ Manu, Laws, 142 (7.144); cf. Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 94 (10.7), 159 (18.1), 253 (2.17), and Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 56–57. In this vein kings may even be described as servants of the people (3: 27, and cf. 28).

¹⁸⁹ Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 69 (25.11).

¹⁹⁰ Basham, Wonder that was India, 33. The terms used for these assemblies are sabhā and samiti.

¹⁹¹ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 92–93 (a sober account stressing how little we know about these assemblies). Kane has no use for the “frantic efforts” of some modern Indian scholars to prove that ancient India had elective assemblies.

¹⁹² Manu, Laws, 134 (7.54, 57).

¹⁹³ Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 21; and cf. Basham, Wonder that was India, 83.

¹⁹⁴ Kane notes that some modern Indian writers “vehemently assert” that government in ancient India “was always some form of limited monarchy” (History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 15).

¹⁹⁵ Ibid., 3: 96.

¹⁹⁶ Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 96 (11.1).

¹⁹⁷ Ibid., 54 (11.5–6); cf. 89 (6.24–25), 284 (13.59).

¹⁹⁸ Ibid., 95 (10.43–44); cf. 256–57 (3.13–14).

¹⁹⁹ Ibid., 70 (26.9–10); cf. 90 (8.12–13).

²⁰⁰ Manu, Laws, 142 (7.133).

²⁰¹ Ibid., 137 (7.88); cf. 131 (7.37), 134–35 (7.58).

²⁰² Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 251 (1.40–41).

²⁰³ See 284.

²⁰⁴ See the materials from Medhātithi’s commentary on Manu and elsewhere cited in Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 98–101. This was not, however, the only view (see Basham, Wonder that was India, 87).

²⁰⁵ As noted by Kane (History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 98).

²⁰⁶ Olivelle, Dharmasūtras, 96 (11.9–10); cf. 299–300 (19.7–8), and Kane, History of Dharmaśāstra, 3: 56–57.

²⁰⁷ EI², art. “Muḥammad b. Yūsuf (Muḥammad V)” (R. Santucci).

²⁰⁸ What goes for the Hindu nationalists would also hold true of Shiv Sena’s invocation of Śivājī.

²⁰⁹ Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalist movement, 26, 39.

²¹⁰ See, for example, ibid., 215–17, 220, 246, 248. Jaffrelot notes that some princes became deeply devoted to Hindu nationalist ideology (324, 405), but that many were opportunistic in their support (249–50, 293). Princes also supported Congress (215–16, 249–50, 293, 321), the conservative but secular Swatantra Party (218, 220, 223, 246; Brass, Politics of India, 83–84), and, as will be seen, the Rām Rājya Pariṣad (see 343).

²¹¹ For her remarkable political career, see Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalist movement, 111–12, 216, 218, 247, 293, 316, 319, 351, 372, 420, 456–57, 499. It was she who discovered Umā Bhārtī (388).

²¹² One Hindu nationalist leader writes in his memoirs that it had been his party’s consistent stand that “the framework of constitutional monarchy should be preserved, since it is a symbol of Nepal’s identity and sovereignty” (Advani, My country, 739).

²¹³ According to a newspaper article, the BJP had decried Nepal’s giving up “the Hindu kingdom tag,” but a member of the party and former minister stated that the party did not shed copious tears when the monarchy came to an end (Vyas and Joshua, “Congress, BJP”).

²¹⁴ Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalist movement, 111, 216; Baxter, Jana Sangh, 78.

²¹⁵ Rām Rājya Pariṣad, Election manifesto, 16.

²¹⁶ Ibid., 7–8. The final sentence of the section states that in these days of “universal Democracy” the same qualities “are essential for the president of a republic,” but it is not made clear how far we should take this as approving republican government; elsewhere the document disparages “Western notions of democracy” (16).

²¹⁷ For its opposition to legal reform, see 286.

²¹⁸ More generally, the Hebrew Bible does not identify any one form of government as, in Walzer’s words, “the authentic biblical regime” (In God’s shadow, 205).

²¹⁹ The Greek noun used in the phrase “the kingdom of this world” in Rev. 11:15 is basileia, just as the verb used for “reign” is basileuō; likewise Christ is described in this apocalyptic context as “King of kings” (basileus basileōn, Rev. 17:14, 19:16). The term for “king” used in the account of the origins of the Israelite monarchy is melekh.

²²⁰ There were, of course, differences: for example, Christian ecclesiastics were better organized than their Muslim and Hindu counterparts but had less basis for denying the ruler the right to make law.

²²¹ Dvornik, Christian and Byzantine political philosophy, 616 (translation slightly adapted).

²²² Ibid., 645.

²²³ W. Ullmann, Carolingian Renaissance, 71–101.

²²⁴ The word rendered “power” here is exousia. When the next verse speaks of “rulers,” the Greek term is archontes, a word often used more generally for governing officials and individuals in distinguished positions (see Balz and Schneider, Exegetical dictionary, 1: 167–68, s.v. “archōn”).

²²⁵ Skinner, Modern political thought, 1: 41–42. Ptolemy of Lucca (d. 1327) is of the same opinion (54), and Bartolus of Saxoferrato (d. 1357) comes close to it (53); for later examples, see 158–59.

²²⁶ See, for example, Skinner, Modern political thought, 1: 54–55. Guicciardini (d. 1540) disparages those who “cite the Romans at every turn,” but in this he was untypical (169).

²²⁷ The main exception is Machiavelli (d. 1527). However, the incompatibility he saw between Christianity and republicanism was not a matter of Christian political doctrines but rather one of Christian moral values: by glorifying “humble and contemplative men,” Christianity undermines the qualities needed for a republic to thrive (Skinner, Modern political thought, 1: 167).

²²⁸ Cf. ibid., 1: 182.

²²⁹ Ibid., 1: 12–13.

²³⁰ Ibid., 1: 15–17, and cf. 18–22 on Marsiglio of Padua (d. 1342).

²³¹ For the unsteady course of events from September 1793 to May 1794, see Aulard, Christianity, chap. 3.

²³² Chadwick, Popes and European revolution, 452, and cf. 454, 484, 491. Chadwick describes Napoleon’s claim to protect religion as “from the first a necessary part of his effort to persuade Italians of French goodwill” (453).

²³³ Ibid., 454–56, and see 465.

²³⁴ Skinner, Modern political thought, 2: 301. For the extent of the contestation, note Skinner’s observation that “all the most influential works of systematic political theory which were produced in Catholic Europe in the course of the sixteenth century were fundamentally of a constitutionalist character” (114). For example, such authors reject patrimonialism (121, and cf. 117), affirm that political authority not merely derives from the body of the people but continues to inhere in it (119–20), and maintain that the natural condition of men is freedom, equality, and independence (155–56).

²³⁵ Quoted in McLaren, “Challenging the monarchical republic,” 166–67. Such talk of the king as a god is not isolated: Charles Du Moulain (d. 1566) says that the proper way to envisage the king’s majesty is to see him as “a kind of corporeal God within his kingdom” (Skinner, Modern political thought, 2: 265–66).

²³⁶ McLaren, “Challenging the monarchical republic,” 171.

²³⁷ Cardwell, Synodalia, 389, quoted in Figgis, Divine right of kings, 142. The quotation is the first sentence of a set of “explanations of the regal power” that was to be read out in churches four times a year.

²³⁸ See Reardon, Liberalism and tradition, 45, 49–51.

²³⁹ Price, Perilous crown, 53–54, 93–94. For the attitude of the pope, see O’Dwyer, Papacy, 164.

²⁴⁰ Price, Perilous crown, 11–12, 116–19. For the ideology of the ultras, see 91–92.

²⁴¹ Chadwick, Popes and European revolution, 527–28, 532–33, 541–43; Esdaile, Spain in the liberal age, 42–43.

²⁴² The Carlists are to be distinguished from the Alfonsists, more moderate royalists whose aim was to restore the monarchy overthrown in 1931; it was mainly to humor the Alfonsists, who were prominent in the army, that Franco paid lip service to the idea of a monarchic restoration, and it was a member of the Alfonsine line who became king on his death in 1975. The Carlists, in Franco’s view, had their hearts in the right place but were terribly old-fashioned (Payne, Fascism in Spain, 288, and cf. 263). Of the two Carlist groups active at the present day, the Comunión Tradicionalista retains its Catholic allegiance but is against absolutism (see the manifesto “¿Qué es el Carlismo?” on the group’s website), while the Partido Carlista has gone so far as to take on board a range of values like socialism, self-determination, and environmentalism (see the manifesto “Quiénes somos” on the group’s website); both groups are sympathetic to Basque particularism. The rejection of absolutism goes back to the nineteenth century (see MacClancy, Decline of Carlism, 9, 10). I am much indebted to José Ramón Urquijo Goitia for information on the later history of Carlism and to Maribel Fierro for putting me in touch with him.

²⁴³ Payne, Fascism in Spain, 44.

²⁴⁴ Ibid., 45, noting Portuguese and Austrian parallels.

²⁴⁵ Hanu, Vatican encounter, 21–23.

²⁴⁶ Lefebvre, Bishop speaks, 62, 63, 77, and cf. 227.

²⁴⁷ Lefebvre, They have uncrowned him, 52, quoted in Al-Azm, “Islamic fundamentalism reconsidered, Part I,” 110a. This applies even in a democracy.

²⁴⁸ Lefebvre, They have uncrowned him, 53–54; and see Lefebvre, Bishop speaks, 56. Lefebrvre quotes Pope Leo XIII to the same effect (54, and cf. 52–53) ; for Leo’s teaching that the Church is indifferent to the form of government and can thus accept a democratic polity, see Witte and Alexander, Modern Roman Catholicism, 63–66, 90–93.

²⁴⁹ Lefebvre, They have uncrowned him, 51.

²⁵⁰ Ibid., 55; compare Mawdūdī’s distinction between Islamic and Western democracy, but note the absence of any counterpart of the caliphate in Lefebvre’s thinking (above, 331–32). As an example of the right kind of democracy, Lefebvre adduced the rule of Gabriel García Moreno (d. 1875) in Ecuador (54). Not everyone would find this reassuring; thus one academic historian associates García Moreno with “theocratic authoritarianism,” “extreme clericalism,” and a tendency to execute his opponents (Deas, “Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador,” 515, 527–28, 535). Contrast the much more welcoming attitude of the Catholic intellectual Jacques Maritain (d. 1973) to democracy, which he saw as inspired by and dependent on the message of the Gospels (see his Christianisme et démocratie, 33, 43, 67, 70, 73). For his influence on the Christian democratic parties of Latin America, see Sigmund, Liberation theology, 21.

²⁵¹ Haring, Empire in Brazil, 14, 19, 43.

²⁵² Macaulay, Dom Pedro, 132, 162; for the constitution of 1824, see also Haring, Empire in Brazil, 28–29.

²⁵³ His daughter and heir, Isabel, was a committed Catholic with proclerical and perhaps absolutist tendencies, but she did not come to the throne (Haring, Empire in Brazil, 145–46).

²⁵⁴ Ibid., 113, 117.

²⁵⁵ Ibid., 1–2 (mentioning Peru, Chile, and especially Argentina).

²⁵⁶ For a convenient summary of the events, see M. C. Meyer et al., Course of Mexican history, 227–29, 231–37.

²⁵⁷ Anna, Mexican empire of Iturbide, 4–5. The Reglamento Político of 1822 more or less delivered on these undertakings (141–44).

²⁵⁸ Ibid., 33–34.

²⁵⁹ For an outline of the events, see M. C. Meyer et al., Course of Mexican history, 290–98.

²⁶⁰ Ibid., 291, 292, 294.

²⁶¹ For the hopes, see Acts 1:6; for Jesus’ own statement, see John 18:36 (in both verses the word rendered “kingdom” is again basileia).

²⁶² For vivid examples of the violence, see Gaddis, No crime, 127–28, 177, 187–88, 188–89, and cf. 258. For the case of Axido and Fasir, the “Commanders of the Saints” (sanctorum duces) in the Numidian hinterland in the 340s, see Shaw, Sacred violence, 168–69.

²⁶³ Kalyvas, Rise of Christian democracy, 171–72.

²⁶⁴ Ibid., 222, 232, 245, 256.

²⁶⁵ Skidmore and Smith, Modern Latin America, 123–24, 135.

²⁶⁶ Sigmund, Liberation theology, 116.

²⁶⁷ Mainwaring and Scully, “Diversity of Christian democracy,” 32–34.

²⁶⁸ Mainwaring, “Transformation and decline,” 364, 365–71.

²⁶⁹ Ibid., 365, 373–74.

²⁷⁰ See 148–54.

²⁷¹ Cf. 202.

²⁷² Cuba was the ideal place for such a revolutionary icon: a Caribbean island on the edge of the Latin American world. By contrast, the geopolitical tremors from a Marxist revolution in Brazil would have greatly complicated any iconic role it might have played.

²⁷³ The phrase was used by Alceu Amoroso Lima, a leading Brazilian lay Catholic, in endorsing the appeal of Integralism in 1935 (Todaro Williams, “Integralism,” 441). In later years he became a prominent spokesman for progessive Catholicism (see Mainwaring, Catholic Church and politics, 30–31, 267n21).

²⁷⁴ Gill, Rendering unto Caesar, 128.

²⁷⁵ Míguez Bonino, Revolutionary theology, 2. This author is a Protestant, and the speaker probably was too.

²⁷⁶ Gutiérrez, “Notes,” 203, 208; Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 17, 54, 64.

²⁷⁷ Gutiérrez, “Notes,” 203, 206.

²⁷⁸ Ibid., 206, 208, 211; Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 54, 97.

²⁷⁹ Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 89.

²⁸⁰ See 246.

²⁸¹ Bravo Gallardo, “Matthew,” 192.

²⁸² Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction on certain aspects,” 406 no. 10. The Congregation is the watchdog of Catholic orthodoxy and was headed from 1982 by Cardinal Ratzinger, no friend of Liberation Theology (Sigmund, Liberation theology, 155–56).

²⁸³ Míguez Bonino, Revolutionary theology, 130, quoting a friend. Compare the “unshakable faith in the power of the oppressed to transform society” espoused by a well-known Brazilian Liberationist (Boff, Faith on the edge, 127).

²⁸⁴ For the case of Brazil, see Ottmann, Lost for words?, 2, 14 (this author is nevertheless concerned to recover the future for Liberation Theology). For Latin America and beyond, cf. also Nagle, Claiming the Virgin, 161.

²⁸⁵ Regarding the embarrassments of international Communism, he has a stray reference to Poland as a problem (Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 157) and a more veiled one to Czechoslovakia (21).

²⁸⁶ Ibid., 21.

²⁸⁷ Gutiérrez, “Theology and the social sciences.” For the background to the piece, see 156–57.

²⁸⁸ Ibid., 216–17.

²⁸⁹ For the revised edition, see Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 156–61 (and see the footnote to 156, and 175–76n5). For the original version, see Gutiérrez, Theology of liberation, 1973, 272–79 (for participation in the class stuggle, see 274, 276, and compare 159 of the revised edition). For the objections of Cardinal Ratzinger to the use of the term “class struggle” by the Liberationists, see Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Instruction on certain aspects,” 402 no. 8, 405 no. 7, 411 no. 11.

²⁹⁰ Boff, Faith on the edge, 137.

²⁹¹ McClintock, Revolutionary movements, 56–59.

²⁹² Ibid., 267–71.

²⁹³ Berryman says of the clergy of Central America that those for whom “liberation was a primary ideal” were “always a minority, albeit an important minority” (Stubborn hope, 14).

²⁹⁴ Ibid., 73. For a passage in which Romero places his own prospective martyrdom in the context of a Liberationist faith, see Jiménez Limón, “Suffering, death, cross,” 715.

²⁹⁵ Sigmund, Liberation theology, 122.

²⁹⁶ Ibid., 121.

²⁹⁷ Ibid., 126; Berryman, Stubborn hope, 23. One wonders whether Father Miguel D’Escoto may not have owed his tenure of the foreign ministry more to his useful connections with American Catholics than to any domestic constituency: he was a prominent Maryknoll priest and had been in charge of the order’s publishing house (E. A. Lynch, Religion and politics, 100).

²⁹⁸ I owe this point, and my knowledge of the Haitian case, to Jacob Mikanowski.

²⁹⁹ Fatton, Haiti’s predatory republic, 77; for the Liberationist background, see 59, 68–69. That a Liberationist should have come to power through an election was ironic; Aristide himself believed firmly in revolutions, not elections (66, 77). Just as ironic was the fact that, alone among Liberationists, he had the backing of the government of the United States.

³⁰⁰ Ibid., 79; cf. Luke 1:52–53.

³⁰¹ That this structure was widespread in pre-modern kingdoms should not lead us to think of it as inevitable: except perhaps in the heyday of Chinese Buddhism, imperial China was different.

³⁰² As we have seen, there were also other and in a way deeper reasons for this failure (see 205–11), but its timing can hardly be a coincidence (see 355).

³⁰³ Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalist movement, 230–31, 233–34, and cf. 177.

³⁰⁴ Ibid., 491–93 (but cf. 536–39); Jaffrelot, Hindu nationalism, 342–44, and the samples that follow; R. Guha, India after Gandhi, 701.

³⁰⁵ For Shīʿite Islamism, too, the result was probably a net gain: the international loss of standing of leftism helped to degrade what had been the most determined domestic rival of the revolutionary regime, though it must also have done something to undermine the plausibility of Khomeini’s adoption of the trappings of Shīʿite liberation theology.