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The political thought of the three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—contains an unexpected variety of ideas. All three claim descent from Abraham and his covenant with God. Christianity claims to be building on the foundations of the Old Testament, and Islam recognizes Moses and Jesus as prophets. But it is all too easy to exaggerate the extent to which they are in reality similar. The very notion of God underwent enormous changes, depending not least on what each proclaimed that the deity had done or was expected to do. When we speak of these as ‘monotheistic religions’, we should not imply identical or easily comparable notions of the deity. Their visions of the community of believers differed perhaps even more profoundly. These differences are perhaps most pronounced in the area of political thought. Some of these differences developed over time, but contrasting views of politics and the state often have—and still do—coexist at the same time within the same religion.
The three Abrahamic religions held widely differing views of the relationship between religion and politics, between the religious community and the state. Here too there were enormous differences within each. The Jewish people have undergone several political transformations. The ancient Hebrew tribes established a monarchy. The original Hebrew project was at heart political: Yahweh would make the Israelites a sovereign nation, in fact the sovereign nation with a position of (at least) moral supremacy over all the rest. This was extinguished by the Babylonians’ conquest of Judah (587 bce). This constituted an utter defeat for the political project of ancient Israel. During the Exile in Babylon (587–538 bce), however, the Jews developed a new identity based on their religious law, on the Jewish people as a collective entity, and on their sacred history. These were now seen as the focal points of the covenant with Yahweh. Besides, a messiah would come, an ideal king who would restore the Jewish state. This would become a beacon for all peoples.
After the return to Jerusalem, Judaea became a province with religious and cultural autonomy within the Persian, and later the Seleucid, empires. From 167 bce the monarchy of the Maccabees fought to regain political independence. Then in 63 bce Judaea was conquered by Rome. There were two revolts aimed at re-establishing an independent Jewish state, in 66–73 and 132–5 ce. The failure of these induced the Jews to accept communal self-sufficiency within whatever heathen states there were, based on the observance of their religious law in their separate communities. This continued under Christian rule from the fourth century onwards, and under Islamic rule from the seventh century. Finally, in the late nineteenth century, there was a revival of the aspiration for an independent Jewish state. This drew inspiration both from the Hebrew Bible and from contemporary European nationalism. It led to the foundation of the state of Israel (1948); but ‘Zionism’ was not accepted by all Jews.
Christianity was, in theory at least, quite different. The application of the message of Jesus of Nazareth and his followers to politics and the state varied among Christians yet more dramatically. Christianity began as a religious movement with no interest in temporal power; the first Christians believed that Christ the Messiah would return very quickly and establish his new kind of kingdom, in which there would be no domination of humans by humans. So far as actual states were concerned, the first Christians became divided between some who saw the Roman Empire as intrinsically evil, and others who were willing to cooperate with the state authorities in the interests of public order and decency. When Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, most Christians, especially the bishops, supported the Christian emperors as the representatives of God on earth. Such imperial Christianity continued in the eastern (Byzantine) empire until 1453, and then in Russia until 1917. In the West, where the Germanic kingdoms adopted Christianity, their kings also acquired a quasi-sacred status.
In one respect, nevertheless, Christianity remained different. Christians established a new kind of religious community, the church (ekklesia), different from most preceding religious organizations in that it saw itself as in principle separate from and independent of political power and the state. The church was to concern itself only with the spiritual affairs of its members and with preaching the gospel to non-believers. Under both Catholicism and Protestantism, this remained a permanent alternative to the state, whether as partner or antagonist.
In Western Europe, however, the papacy developed into what was in effect a spiritual monarchy for religious affairs and the church. There were repeated conflicts between the church, led by the papacy, and various kings. This led to the development of ideas about political society and the state as an autonomous domain separate from that of the church (Black 2008). In modern times, Christian doctrine has been used to support ideas across almost the entire political spectrum, from sacred monarchy to democracy, from liberalism to socialism, from non-violence to violent revolution.
Early Islam was at once a theological and a political project. It taught strict monotheism and the subjection of all peoples throughout the world to Muslim rule. The Muslim community itself was to be ruled by a caliph (deputy of the prophet Muhammad) or imam (leader).1 After the death of Muhammad (632), the first controversies within Islam were not about theology but about politics. Who was entitled to lead the Muslim community? Some (proto-Sunnis, as it were) argued that the caliph must be elected from within Muhammad’s tribe by tribal and religious leaders. Others, who may be seen as proto-Shiʿites, argued that Muhammad himself had designated his own successor, namely his son-in-law ʿAli, and that the true caliphs were those whom ʿAli and his successors designated.
After rebellions and civil wars, the Abbasids (750–1258) were accepted by the majority Sunnis as a de facto hereditary caliphal dynasty. To placate the Shiʿites, they also claimed kinship with the prophet. The Shiʿites, however, supported their own separate line of caliphs. The Twelver or Imami Shiʿites held that the Twelfth Imam had gone into hiding in the late ninth century but would one day return to restore a just Islamic state. Until then, one should refrain from political activity. This stance was reversed under the Twelver Safavid dynasty in Iran (1501–1722). A new school of Shiʿites now advocated active involvement in state affairs. Khomeini’s revolution of 1979 took this a stage further by installing religious leaders as overseers of the state. By no means all Shiʿites, however, accept this approach.
The Ismāʿili (or Sevener) Shiʿites believed that the line had ended with the Seventh Imam in the late eighth century. They advocated the immediate, revolutionary implementation of an Islamic society. This was undertaken by a number of leaders claiming the status of Mahdī (expected one), alleged to be the precursor of the true leader. An Ismāʿili dynasty, the Fatimids, ruled Egypt from 969 till 1171. The later Ismāʿilis became non-violent, as they still are today. These disputes, reminiscent in their complexity of early Christian disputes about the Trinity, simply underscore the political underpinnings of Islam.
For the Sunni majority under the Abbasids, religious life and government became to a considerable extent separate. The one exception was Holy War (jihad): the drive towards extending the boundaries of Islam continued unabated. The ʿulamā (religious teachers, interpreters of the religious Law (sharīʿa)) functioned in alliance with, but structurally separate from, the political and military leadership of the various regional sultans. They endorsed the legitimacy of rulers and dynasties in exchange for patronage, such as the funding of religious colleges (madrasas). Sometimes they brought pressure on rulers to do more to enforce correct behaviour: this ‘commanding the good and forbidding the bad’ (Cook 2000) is the mantra of the Taliban (amongst others) today. When a dynasty’s credibility declined, for example due to military failure (as in the case of the later Ottomans), Muslim rulers tended to fall back on their role as champions of orthodoxy, and here they needed the ʿulamā’s recognition. The enforcement of the sharīʿah in public life is the driving force behind Islamism today, and it is anything but new.
A new school of political thought developed in the nineteenth century in response to European conquests of countries previously under Muslim rule, such as Egypt and India. Some Muslim thinkers now advocated the acceptance of European ideas about constitutional democracy and the rule of law. These, it was argued, were actually based on the principles of original Islam. Political reform along these lines was seen as the only way to revive Islam as a world power.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Muslim political thought has become more diverse than ever. ‘Modernists’ accept much of liberal democracy as practised in the West, including a significant degree of separation of religious from political life. ‘Islamists’ or ‘fundamentalists’, on the other hand, have renewed the call for a return to original Islam, claiming that Islam contains within itself a complete political and economic programme, superior to anything the West has to offer. What is involved in such a programme varies considerably from one group to another. Shīʿism, meanwhile, which had long advocated political quietism in anticipation of the return of the Twelfth Imam, has produced its own version of Islamism in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The basic idea behind all the Abrahamic religions is that certain people have entered into a special relationship with the deity which gives them special privileges. The prototype was God’s covenant with Abraham, and subsequently Moses, that he would protect and favour the Israelites provided they recognized him as the only god, and kept his law (Torah). Islam, similarly, means submission to God and ‘entry into a covenant of peace’ (Crone and Cook 1977: 20).
This involved, first and foremost, land: Abraham was promised ‘all the land that you can see’ (Gen. 13: 15). God would enable them to acquire this land by ousting the existing inhabitants through conquest. This is a potent force behind Zionism today. Islam universalized the territorial claim: God decreed that the whole world was to be ruled by Muslims, and if people would not submit, they must be subdued by force. This was the basis for military jihad.
None of this appears in the ‘new covenant’ inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth. Christians made no territorial claims. One of the most outstanding teachings of the New Testament was non-violence. The first Christians refused to serve in the Roman army. The Muslim martyr is someone who is killed while fighting for the true faith; the Christian martyr is someone who is prepared to die rather than to resist force with force. Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) brought back non-violence to the forefront of Christian teaching. He corresponded with Mahatma Gandhi.
Early Christian non-violence may be seen in the context of the belief that Jesus the Messiah was about to return and establish his righteous kingdom by divine intervention: there was, therefore, no practical need for believers to fight. Some Twelver Shiʿites adopted a similar strategy in anticipation of the Return of the Twelfth Imam.
Christian views, however, underwent a metamorphosis as soon as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Now it was seen as legitimate to defend the true faith against infidels and also heretics, by holy war if necessary. The Crusades were a mirror-image of Muslim jihad. In recent times, some Christians have used Old Testament texts to justify killing unbelievers occupying land which they believed God had promised to Christians just as he had promised Canaan to the Israelites, for example in North America and Australasia. The mainstream Christian view, however, has been that war is justified only in self-defence or for a just cause, such as the prevention of crimes against humanity (Russell 1975).
Yahweh, having promised to make Abraham ‘very fruitful’, gave the land to Abraham and his descendants in perpetuity (Gen. 13: 16; 17: 2–9). The Hebrews occupied Canaan on the grounds of their Abrahamic lineage. There is a carry-over of this into Islam. Some Arabs claimed descent from Ishmail (either ʾIsmāʿīl’ or ‘Ishmael’), the son of Abraham by Hagar, the slave-girl of his wife Sarah; he is mentioned in the Quran after Abraham and before Isaac, as a prophet and recipient of revelation (Q. 2: 125, 133; 4: 163; 19: 54). Kinship of tribe and family have remained important in Muslim society and politics; lineage plays a significant role in establishing political legitimacy. Traditionally, a caliph had to be either from Muhammad’s tribe (the Sunni view) or from his immediate family (the Shiʿite view), Kharijite meritocratic ideas notwithstanding. The Ottomans claimed descent from Uthman, the third rightly guided caliph. Even today, the kings of Morocco and Jordan claim descent from the prophet. Muslims, however, categorically reject any racial basis for membership of the community of believers. This was based solely on belief and behaviour.
Once again, the only trace of lineage in Christianity is the claim that Joseph, Jesus’ nominal father, was descended from the house of David. Jesus had no actual father. He rejected any claim to privilege based on kinship to himself, and insisted that his followers be prepared to reject their own families. He ridiculed the Jews’ claim to special status based on their descent from Abraham: ‘God can make children to Abraham out of these stones here’ (Matt. 3: 9).
Yahweh dictated to Moses a law governing every detail of social and personal conduct, from morals to ritual to etiquette. Allah dictated a similarly all-embracing law to Muhammad. The sharīʿah covered ‘marriage, divorce, inheritance, slavery and manumission, commerce, torts, crimes, war, booty, taxation and more’ (Crone 2004: 8–9). Once again, Christianity stands apart. The first Christians decided, after some debate, that observance of the Mosaic code was irrelevant to salvation. This eventually led to a distinction between the moral law, which was regarded as binding for Christians and indeed everybody, and other less important rules about social conduct and etiquette which were left for each society to interpret in its own way (‘human’ or ‘positive’ law).
At the root of Judaism lies the idea that Yahweh chose the Jewish people in his covenant with Abraham. This was renewed with Moses but it stands as a covenant between God and his chosen people. Judaism emphasized the importance of each individual’s commitment by decreeing that every seven years the Mosaic Law should be proclaimed to ‘the people, men, women and dependants…aliens…(and) children too’ (Deut. 31: 11–13; Neh. 8: 2–3).
Christianity was based on the individual’s conversion, faith, and baptism. The result, nonetheless, was a community of believers, ‘those called out’, the church (ekklesia). In Islam, the community of believers (umma) was based, once again, on each individual’s submission to God. Belief and prayer are individual acts but they find corporate expression in the Pilgrimage (ḥajj) and in Holy War (jihad).
In each case, the religious community was defined by its members’ relationship with the deity. In relation to God everyone is equal. This had enormous consequences for the social thought of all three Abrahamic religions. The Mosaic code tried to eliminate social stratification by forbidding interest on loans and the sale of land outside the family. Islam, at least in theory, put all male Muslims on an equal footing; there was to be no priesthood.
Yet for long periods Christian and Muslim societies recognized class distinctions. In medieval Christendom they were justified by St Paul’s comparison of the church to the human body: the performance of different functions by different individuals is essential to the well-being of the whole. Medieval Muslims adopted the four status groups of Indo-Iranian culture (commonly defined as men of religious learning, warriors, merchants, farmers). In theory these were equal but hardly in practice.
One momentous result of these faith-based associations was that, for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the most important social group is the people covenanted with God. Humanity at large hardly features in their social thought or moral teaching. Rather, they emphasize the exclusion of everyone else from the privilege of divine favour. In each religion, outsiders in principle have (with few exceptions) no status, no rights. The ancient Israelites were permitted to slaughter them as necessary. Islam decreed the same for those who refused to accept Islam, except for adherents of other monotheistic revelations.
Christianity was, once again, different but only to start with. For early Christians there was no question of using violence against those who refused to believe, however evil they might be. Yet there was a tension between believers’ forbearance and the divine vengeance which would be visited upon unbelievers, and indeed heretics, at the Day of Judgement. In the light of this, Christians could perhaps afford to be tolerant. And this led Christians, once they were in control of society, to take all kinds of punitive measures against non-believers, including denial of property rights, expulsion, and, in the case of heretics (who should know better), execution. From the eleventh century onwards, Christian Europe became a persecuting society (Moore 1987). Islam was somewhat more tolerant. Adherents of other monotheistic faiths were allowed to practise their religion provided they paid a swingeing land-tax. They were strictly forbidden to proselytize.
Between 63 bce and 1948, Jews, with very few exceptions, had no political power; non-Jews were just regarded as inferior (Shahak 1994). The more influence Orthodox Jews acquire in the state of Israel, the more this is reflected in state policy. While the chosen people of Judaism is a race, with the result that other ethnicities are regarded as of inferior status, Islam subsumed all differences of race and nation in the one umma, the only human organization that matters. The tribe still remained important in many Muslim societies, kinship in all of them. Christians, on the other hand, partly because the universal church is not a political unit, have often turned to membership of a territorial state, such as a medieval kingdom, or, in modern times, a nation, as the source of social identity and political legitimacy. Some Christians enthusiastically embraced an identity between state and nation, for example in Russia. Many Islamists, on the other hand, see the nation-state and national identity as expressions of paganism.
Throughout their history, the Jews have believed that sovereignty belongs to Yahweh alone. The Torah is ambivalent about human kingship: it may be necessary but it is not altogether desirable, and wholly subordinate to the Torah (Melamed 7–9). It was with the people as a whole that Yahweh made the covenant. This set Hebrew political thought apart from that of all the other peoples of the ancient Near East, who regarded the monarch as the means by which divine beneficence was conveyed to humans, themselves in particular (Black 2009). Especially after the Exile, the Jewish monarch stood in the same utterly dependent relationship to God and the law as every other Jew. In Judaea after the Exile, certain political functions came to be ascribed to the people and the elders. The people—sometimes the elders and people—were seen as corporate political actors, either accepting or criticizing what kings were up to. They could play a role in deciding the succession. During the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers continued to debate the desirability of kingship according to Jewish law, as well as emphasizing the subordination of any king to the law.
For early Christians, political authority of whatever kind was of secondary importance. Any ruler who upheld law and order and public decency was acceptable to God. After Roman emperors adopted Christianity, on the other hand, Christians endorsed the absolutism of the emperor as God’s representative on earth. After about the eleventh century, Christian views about the status and duties of government came to differ sharply between East and West. In the East sacred absolutist monarchy became almost part of religious orthodoxy, in Russia down to the twentieth century.
In the West, by contrast, Christian leaders and theorists endorsed a wide variety of forms of government, ranging from feudal monarchy to republican city-states, and, later, representative democracy. It seems that the absence of any specific theory of government in the New Testament permitted a wide variety of alternatives. Feudal monarchy, in which power might be divided between king, nobles, and commoners, was seen as a manifestation of the organic complexity of the Body of Christ. Besides, Jesus had taught that a ruler should be a servant (minister). The notion that a king could be held to account if he blatantly broke the law may have derived from Germanic custom. This referred not only to divine law (moral or canon), but to the civil, man-made law of the state. A king who was flagrantly immoral or otherwise unsatisfactory could be brought to trial—either by the church (possibly the pope) or by his barons (here regarded as his equals: pares)—and even deposed. In modern times, it has been argued that constitutional democracy and the rule of law follow from principles of natural justice inherent in Christianity. But none of these developments took place in eastern Christendom.
The Jewish suspicion of any form of kingship was carried straight over into Islam.2 Nonetheless, Muslims ascribed to the caliph—and other rulers (sultans), provided these could be shown to be, formally at least, the caliph’s delegates—many of the absolutist features of Iranian monarchy. But all rulers were, in theory at least, obliged to adhere to the sharīʿah, and to fulfil specific religious functions not of their own devising. On the other hand, there was no formal process by which a ruler could be held to account for failing to do so.3
Muslims, western Christians, and Jews at various times adopted political ideas from non-Abrahamic sources. At the very beginning of the Abbasid caliphate, Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (c.720–756?) tried to graft political ideas and customs from pre-Islamic Iran onto the caliphate. Caliphs adopted some of the ideas, language, and mannerisms of the Sasanian monarchy (c.224–651). A certain Realpolitik, partly associated with pre-Islamic autocracy, proved popular in bureaucratic and diplomatic circles: a ruler should be prepared to jettison the normal ethical rules when this is necessary to maintain his power and to promote Islam. Advices to Kings expressing these ideas became an accepted, widely disseminated, genre in the Muslim-ruled world right down to late Ottoman times.4 When Machiavelli proposed a similar approach in the West, he was attacked for being immoral and irreligious.
The political ideas of ancient Greece and Rome entered the Abrahamic thought-world when, from the late eighth century, the works of Plato and Aristotle were examined and discussed by Muslim philosophers. No such discussion took place in the Christian East. This remained intellectually conservative until Peter the Great of Russia’s opening to the West (c.1700). Al-Fārābī (c.870–950), Ibn Sīnā (980–1037), Ibn Rushd (1126–98), and others took up Plato’s and Aristotle’s doctrine that intellect and virtue are what matter in political life. They developed a strong affinity for Plato’s idea of the philosopher-king, demonstrating that this was perfectly exemplified in the ideal of the caliphate. (The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20/15 bce–45/50 ce) had seen Moses as not only a prophet and lawgiver but also a Platonic philosopher-king (Melamed 2003: 23).) Plato’s philosopher-ruler was none other than the genuine imam who lays down the laws by which people are to live (‘the idea of Imam, Philosopher and Legislator is a single idea’: al-Fārābī, Happiness in Lerner and Mahdi 1963: 78). His task is to educate people, whether by philosophy (for those capable of it), rhetoric (for everyone else), or force (jihad) (for those who refuse to accept the truth).
Al-Fārābī’s originality, within the Muslim world, lay not so much in his idealism as in his conviction that all this could be discovered by means of the intellect alone. He insisted that what philosophy discovered by reason was nothing other than the order revealed by God to Muhammad. However, only a few unusually gifted individuals can arrive at this by reason alone; for everyone else, revelation remains necessary. He identified the characteristics of the various ‘imperfect’ states, such as tyranny and democracy, in terms of the beliefs held by their citizens. He derived most of this from Plato’s Republic. Ibn Rushd cited the early caliphate and the rulers of Muslim Spain in his own day as examples of the transition from rule by the virtuous few to rule by the honour-seeking few, as envisaged by Plato. He described the contemporary city-states of Seville and Cordova as examples of self-seeking ‘democracy’.
Jewish thinkers from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries were also attracted by Platonic idealism. Moses was identified as ‘the prototype of the Platonic philosopher-king’ (Melamed 2003: 23), partly due to Muslim influence; for some, David and Solomon also made the grade. The future king-messiah would possess all the virtues of Plato’s philosopher-king. Maimonides (1135–1204) supported the contentious view that monarchy is obligatory. Muslim and Jewish philosophers alike ignored the fact that Plato, in the Republic at least, had in mind a committee or class of philosopher-rulers, rather than a monarch.
Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) held out the promise of a new development in social and political thought, by applying the method of analysis which Aristotle had used for the Greek city-state (polis) to the whole of ‘human civilization’. He applied Aristotle’s combination of empirical research and conceptual analysis to a wide sweep of historical phenomena, especially the Berber culture of his native North Africa (today’s Tunisia). Historical events, such as the decline of the early caliphate, can only be understood by isolating the patterns which underlie all social change. Agricultural and pastoral societies (badawa) give rise to communities with a powerful collective identity (ʻaṣabīya), which, especially when combined with religious conviction as in the case of early Islam, enables them to conquer urban civilization (hadara). The new rulers establish a new regime; however, after some three generations, this in turn becomes softened and corrupted. People lose their sense of commitment to the community as a whole. They then fall prey to a new invasion from the ‘wilderness’. One can see elements of this throughout Eurasia, for example in the rise of the Mongols.
But Muslim philosophy withered away. Ibn Khaldūn’s innovative enterprise lay largely forgotten until European scholars unearthed it in the nineteenth century. Philosophy in the Muslim world had always been a minority movement. It was distrusted by the increasingly influential and powerful religious leaders (‘ulamā), and driven underground. It left no lasting legacy in Muslim political thought. What shaped pre-modern Muslim political thought were legalistic interpretations of the Quran and ḥadīth (reports of what Muhammad had said or done). This trend had begun with Ibn Ḥanbal’s attack on philosophy in its ninth-century heyday. Religious jurisprudence was deeply conservative and repetitious. Its practitioners made little attempt to render traditional ideas relevant to changed circumstances. It produced no new ideas.
Philosophers and theologians in the Christian West became acquainted with ancient Greek thought, in particular Aristotle, a good deal later, in the twelfth century. They adopted a different approach. They worked out a distinction between what could be known by reason alone, such as the existence of God and the basic moral code (which they called ‘natural law’), and what could only be known by revelation, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation of God as man in the person of Jesus Christ, and self-sacrificing love as taught by Jesus. This difference between the Muslim and Christian approaches to revelation and reason may owe something to the more complex content of what Christians claimed to be revelation. The explanation of the Trinity and the Incarnation in the fourth century already required the use of Greek philosophical concepts. The subsequent revival of philosophical enquiry in the West was spurred on by disputes about the nature of the Eucharist (how could bread become Christ’s flesh?) The attempt by some theologians to reject philosophy altogether, which had succeeded in Islamdom, failed in the western Christendom.
The use of political arguments based on reason alone was further facilitated by the ever present distinction between church and state. The church was clearly the product of revelation. On the other hand, the New Testament had little to say about the state. This, therefore, was an area which could be discussed by of means of philosophy.
Even before the twelfth century, ancient Roman ideas about power and justice, of which Muslims remained unaware, had become part of western political discourse. The notion of a republic in which citizens are free to make their own political decisions was embedded in the writings of Cicero; these had been in circulation since at least the ninth century. The rediscovery of the ancient Roman civil law in the eleventh century gave the West a wealth of legal and political ideas which formed the basis for due process and the rule of law.
Starting with Thomas Aquinas (c.1225–1274), western thinkers applied Aristotelian categories to contemporary institutions. And they used Aristotle to throw light on the outstanding contemporary problem in political theory, namely the relationship between church and state. It was an attempt to refute the papacy’s claim to superiority over ordinary rulers which inspired the first comprehensive theory of the state in Marsilius of Padua (1275/80–1342/3).
One reason for this was surely that Christianity itself was, as we have observed, blessedly poor in political thought. The non-Abrahamic ancients were used to fill the gap; there was no contending revealed blueprint to compete with them. The fact that Italy and other parts of Europe were teeming with city-states—the subject matter of Aristotle’s Politics—no doubt helped. Muslims, on the other hand, had no experience of the city-state; nor did they possess Politics.
Out of all this there developed in western Christendom an idea of human society and political authority as necessary for human life and well-being, simply because of the way we are. This was derived in part from non-Abrahamic antiquity, from the Roman idea of the public sphere (res publica), and from the Greek and especially Aristotelian idea of the polis (city-state/citizen-state) as the only community in which humans can learn to be good, and without which they cannot be good. European thinkers latched onto this partly because the medieval papacy claimed that only the (Abrahamic) community of the church, meaning in particular the clergy, could direct humans to virtue: therefore kings are obliged to do whatever is required of them by the clergy. To avoid the subordination implied in such ‘papalism’, rulers found refuge in a theory of the state. The distinction between ‘ecclesiastical’ and ‘secular’ power, between church and state, became more and more embedded in western culture. With it went the modern notion of the state. Muslims, on the other hand, could recognize only one community which leads to virtue, the umma presided over by the divinely established caliph or imam.
Modern (‘western’) political theory, and liberal democracy itself, have become widely accepted in many parts of the world. But how much of this is actually of Abrahamic, that is to say (in this case) Christian, origin? From at least the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment onwards, political and social ideas inspired by Christianity have become inextricably intertwined with ideas of Roman and Greek origin and, furthermore, with innovative programmes and ideals devised by European thinkers and movements themselves. Some of these were Christian, many were not. It is important to note that all sorts of dissident, non-Christian, at times anti-Christian ideas could be expressed in Europe, for example by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, without their authors being murdered, judicially or otherwise, as tended to occur in the Muslim-ruled world.
The idea of human rights, of what we owe to other human beings simply in virtue of their humanity, had been put forward by Greek and Roman thinkers, notably the Stoics (Thorsteinsson 2010). Liberty, in the sense both of freedom of thought and expression, and political self-determination, derived from both Athens and Rome (not, however, from Plato). Democracy, broadly speaking, came from Athens.
But, despite these antecedents, there was something new about European thought. This was the insistence that such benefits ought to be extended to every human being, and that this is a matter of urgency. The idea of human rights as non-negotiable derives some of its force from the intransigency of New Testament teaching. Jesus insisted time and again that his ‘new commandment’ about how people should treat one another cannot be confined to members of any class or race, and that to act on it here and now is a precondition of salvation. Thus one may say that human rights were formulated by the Stoics but implemented by Christians, or under Christian influence: for example, the abolition of slavery. Justice, the rights of the deprived to sustenance and a minimum living standard, have often been articulated on philosophical grounds, but frequently derive their immediate urgency from a Christian emphasis (which may, of course, be adopted by non-Christians as well).
It was similar with democracy. In ancient Athens, ‘the people (demos)’ meant males whose parents were citizens—an elite, in other words. Republicanism—the doctrine that positions of power must be shared by many and must rotate by means of elections—was inspired in the first instance by Cicero and ancient Rome. It was also a natural development of the limits placed on royal authority by laws and parliaments, and of the constitutions of European cities and corporate bodies. It is possible, however, that the view that a republic is the only legitimate form of government, as opposed to one of several legitimate forms (including monarchy), was inspired by a rabbinic interpretation of an Old Testament criticism of the Israelite monarchy (1 Sam. 8; Nelson 2010). The Levellers deduced a right to universal suffrage from the intrinsic worth of every individual expressed in the New Testament.
Historical Islam had plenty to say about the rights of Muslims, but not about the rights of human beings as such. It advocated liberty, but only for right-thinking Muslims. Even today, only a tiny handful of Muslim thinkers are prepared to grant liberty and toleration to non-Muslims. Hardly any Muslim-majority state actually does so.
Muslims, with the exception of the most extreme Islamists, support democracy. But what they mean by this is universal suffrage for Muslims, including women maybe. It is difficult for devout Muslims to accept the election of a government intending to reduce the role of the sharīʿah in public life; none but the most moderate of Islamists would do so. Again, historical Islam knows nothing of the republican idea of rotation of those in power and constitutional limits on their powers. One reason why these were not conceived in traditional Muslim political thought was quite simply that there is no mention of them in the Quran or the ḥadīth. Some Islamists ridicule constitutional rules as ‘mere technicalities’ (Black 2011: 329).
Toleration of those who think differently from oneself is generally regarded as a core element of political morality. The Abrahamic religions have on the whole been less tolerant than other religious or philosophical systems. The Chinese empire and the ancient Roman Empire tolerated a wide variety of religious and philosophical opinions, though not political dissent. Jews have seldom been in a position to restrict others’ beliefs. Having been subject to persecution, they have often been at the forefront of liberal reforms. Jews tend to tolerate non-Jews provided they do not hinder the Jewish project. This proviso is what makes the modern state of Israel increasingly intolerant of other faiths.
Muslims traditionally tolerated non-Muslim monotheists, though only as second-class citizens. Any Muslim who decided to change his or her religion incurred the death penalty. Today, many Islamists have become even less tolerant, persecuting anyone who is not a Muslim, or indeed the same kind of Muslim as themselves. Indeed, this idea of ‘takfir’ (namely considering even other Muslims to be non-Muslims and to target them) is almost as old as Islam itself; it began with the Kharijites in the mid-seventh century.
In pre-modern times, Christian states tolerated Jews but only on an ad hoc basis; they could be expelled at any time, and frequently were. Heretics and unbelievers were persecuted and could be executed. From the seventeenth century, however, some Christians argued in favour of toleration of different Christian sects and even of non-Christians. Milton and Locke were among the pioneers of the modern theory of toleration. But it was only with the American and French revolutions, both of them deeply influenced by the secularizing Enlightenment, that toleration of different beliefs or no beliefs became a norm.
All three Abrahamic faiths hold that divine revelation (to someone) is essential to our knowledge of truth and goodness. Within this paradigm, the ‘Enlightenment’ appeal to reason, science or (as in Rousseau) human feeling as a means to knowledge can only be taken so far. Some followers of each of the three religions in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have reacted against Enlightenment approaches by arguing that everything that is worth knowing has been revealed by God (Euben 1997)—‘fundamentalism’ or, perhaps better, revelationism.
This has had an especially marked effect on Muslim political thought. Indeed it is a step that, as we have seen, had been taken once before in Muslim history. The result was that pre-modern Muslim political thought remained, like that of eastern Christendom, thoroughly conservative. Even Muslim modernists proceed on the assumption that a political programme or form of government can only acquire legitimacy if it can be deduced, by arguments, however contorted, from the Quran. Modern ideas have to be justified by reference to the revealed sources. But the Quran in itself does not point towards constitutionalism or liberty. It seems that modern Muslim political thought, when it has taken on board aspects of liberal democracy—or the whole of it—has invariably been reacting to outside developments.
On land, lineage, and law, Judaism and Islam have much more in common with each other than either has with Christianity. On membership of the community of believers, Christianity and Islam are more similar. Moreover, the differences between western and eastern Christianity seem, until very recently, at least as great as those between Christianity and reformed Judaism or liberal Islam.
Christianity stands out as the only Abrahamic religion which—at least in its western version—has endorsed non-Abrahamic political thought. Modern political philosophy developed within the context of western Christianity, and Christian thinkers have been at the forefront of its development. The category ‘Abrahamic’ sometimes obscures as much as it reveals.
1 Some late seventh- and early eighth-century caliphs tried to assume the title ‘Deputy of God’: Crone and Hinds 1986: 120.
2 One may compare this with ancient Rome.
3 ‘No medieval Muslim ruler…is on record as having gone to trial for having killed, tortured, jailed, or robbed innocent Muslims’ (Crone 2004: 283).
4 Some commentators refer to these as ‘Mirrors for Princes’, but this suggests a misleading comparison with medieval Europe.