The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

monarchy

Although independent local dynasties appeared on the periphery of the Abbasid caliphal body politic in Iran and Egypt in the latter part of the ninth century, the critical period for the recovery of the Persian idea of kingship and its development was the early tenth century, with the consolidation of a Persianate polity in Khurasan and Transoxiana (mā warā’a l-nahr) under the Samanids (819–1005). The Buyids (945–1062), who ruled independently in Iran later in that century, assumed the pre-Islamic Persian title of shah (king) and even the imperial shāhānshāh (king of kings). The development of the Persianate concept of monarchy continued under the Ghaznavids (977–1086) in the 11th century. The father of Persian epic, Abu al-Qasim Firdawsi (d. 1020), summed up the emerging idea of monarchy in a famous verse, “Kingship and prophecy are two jewels on the same ring,” alongside many other statecraft maxims such as “The king is the shadow of God on Earth.” His Shahnama (Epic of Kings) made royal charisma (farr-i izādī), confirmed by the justice of the ruler, the basis of monarchy.

Meanwhile, Greek political science had been introduced to the Muslim world with the translations of works of Greek science and philosophy and was made central to the philosophical movement by one of its founding fathers, Abu Nasr al-Farabi (d. 950). Among the Iranian philosophers who sought to synthesize Greek political science and Persian statecraft in this period, Abu al-Hasan al-‘Amiri (d. 991) is of particular interest. He modified Farabi’s teachings to allow for a more harmonious reconciliation of Islam and philosophy by considering prophecy and kingship the two institutions vital for the preservation of the world. The Ghaznavid secretary and historian, Abu al-Fadl al-Bayhaqi (d. 1077), offers a concise statement on what he calls the two powers: “Know that God Most High has given one power to the prophets and another power to the kings; and He has made it incumbent on the people of the Earth to follow these two powers and thus to know God’s straight path.”

The Turkish Seljuqs, who replaced the Buyids in Baghdad in 1055 and defeated the Byzantine emperor, creating a vast empire from the Oxus to the Mediterranean, assumed the titles both of shāhānshāh and sultan, an abstract term meaning authority in the Qur’an, which was now assumed by the person of the ruler. Local rulers in Iran used the title shah, and those in the Arab countries used the equivalent title malik (king). The theory of prophecy and kingship as the two divinely ordained powers was reaffirmed in an important statement erroneously attributed to the great Sunni thinker Muhammad al-Ghazali in the 12th century: “Know and understand that God Most High chose two categories of mankind, placing them above others: the prophets and the kings. He sent the prophets to His creatures to lead them to Him. As for the kings, He chose them to protect men from one another and made the prosperity of human life dependent on them.” The Turkic conception of kingship as a divine gift to the founder of the state also linked it to the establishment of the law (törü), but as the Seljuqs adopted the Persian conception of kingship and championed the Sunni restoration under the caliphate, the impact of the Turkic conception of the law had to wait for the Mongol invasion two centuries later. Meanwhile, a new idea emerged in the Seljuq period and subsequently gained greater currency: that of the “king of Islam,” in such allocutions as pādshāh-i islām, malik-i islām, and sulṭān-i islām. This term was significant in dispensing altogether with the idea of the caliphate as the representative of Islam.

Monarchy thus developed under the Abbasid dynasty, but the relation between the two institutions was never free from tension. When the caliphate and the sultanate coexisted in Baghdad under the Buyids and the Seljuqs in the 11th and early 12th centuries, the Islamic jurists such as Mawardi and Ghazali developed a mode of subordination of monarchy to the caliphate as successor of prophecy and protector of the Islamic ethico-legal order anchored in the shari‘ia. The juristic theory of the caliphate, however, did not find expression in the books of ethics and thus had limited currency, being confined to the circles of religious learning.

During the medieval and early modern period, Turkish slave generals established a Muslim monarchy in northern India early in the 13th century, with Delhi as its capital. The Delhi Sultanate lasted for some three centuries, until the conquest of India by the Timurid prince Zahir al-Din Babur (d. 1530) and the establishment of the Mughal Empire in 1526. After the overthrow of the Abbasids by the Mongols in 1258, the rulers of Muslim lands typically called themselves sultan and caliph, except in Mamluk Egypt (1250–1517), where a shadow Abbasid caliph was maintained until the Ottomans conquered Egypt. In addition to shāhānshāh, the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughal rulers of India used pādshāh as an imperial title.

Monarchy (salṭana, pādshāh, mulk) was legitimated independently of the caliphate and its juristic theory and primarily on the basis of justice. The function of monarchy was to maintain order and rule with justice. As such, monarchy was compared to prophecy, the function of which was the salvation of humankind. Kings were thus necessary for cosmic order, just as were the prophets. A distinct literary genre on political ethic and statecraft grew and absorbed the philosophical strand, grounding the legitimacy of monarchy in its justice. A major synthesis of these ideas, Akhlaq-i Nasiri (The Nasirian ethics), was written in the 13th century by the Shi‘i philosopher and statesman Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. It had many imitators and became the standard work on political ethics and statecraft in the three early modern Muslim empires: the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal.

The idea of monarchy as sultanate spread eastward in the 15th century and survives in the 21st century in the federal states of Malaysia and in Brunei. With the spread of Islam into sub-Saharan Africa, some of the Muslim rulers assumed the title of sultan, and in 1841, the sultan of Oman transferred his court to Zanzibar across the Indian Ocean. The idea of constitutional monarchy was introduced into the Islamic world in the process of political modernization, with the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 and the Iranian constitution of 1906. The Ottoman sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the Iranian monarchy overthrown with the Islamic Revolution of 1979. A number of Muslim constitutional monarchies survive, however, notably in Morocco and Jordan.