The theme of sovereignty (ḥākimiyya) featured prominently in modern Islamic political thought during the mid-to-late 20th century in the context of emerging debates on the moral basis of legitimate political authority in the postcolonial era. Theoreticians of political Islam, seeking to construct an authentic Muslim identity in the face of growing Westernization and secularization policies, seized upon the theme of sovereignty to anchor their concept of an “Islamic state” and to contrast it philosophically with Western capitalist and Eastern socialist political systems. In the view of these Muslim thinkers, the critical difference with other political systems was that sovereignty in a Muslim polity belonged exclusively to God and not to the people. The objective of political life was not to fulfill the whims of human beings, they argued, but to discover God’s will as guided by the Qur’an, the traditions (sunna) of the Prophet Muhammad, and the provisions of Islamic law.
The internal logic of this God-as-sovereign approach to politics was rooted in a traditional understanding of Islam. According to the Qur’an, “Governance belongs to God” (Q. 12:40), and those “who do not rule in accordance with what God has revealed are unbelievers” (Q. 5:47). The Qur’an uses the following adjectives to describe God: “the arbitrator” (al-ḥakam), “the eternal possessor of sovereignty” (mālik al-mulk), and “the bringer of judgment” (al-ḥasīb). Moreover, as a monotheistic religion, Islam holds the doctrine of the oneness of God (tawḥīd) as foremost in the profession of faith, integrating all domains of human existence, including the religious and the political. This approach to politics has posed a huge challenge for modernist Muslims seeking to reconcile Islam and democracy where popular sovereignty, according to international norms, is supreme.
The first major debate of the 20th century on sovereignty occurred during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11. The idea of a constitutional monarchy raised two pressing questions: (1) do democracy and a secular constitution have any legitimacy in a Muslim society, and (2) where does political sovereignty lie? A major public debate ensued wherein some senior clerics supported the revolution, arguing that a democratic constitution was compatible with Islamic norms because of the limits it placed on political tyranny. Others argued the opposite view, focusing on the supremacy of shari‘a over constitutional law.
Ayatullah Khomeini’s theory of the rule of Islamic jurist (wilāyat al-faqīh) draws upon this idea of the supremacy of the sovereignty of God. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran that emerged after the 1979 Iranian Revolution tried to reconcile clerical sovereignty with popular sovereignty, but it clearly gave supremacy and veto power to the former in case of a clash between the two.
While Sunni Islamists reject a special role for the clergy in their vision of an Islamic state, they fully agree with the elevation of the sovereignty of God over popular sovereignty. The two most influential Sunni theoreticians of this concept are Sayyid Qutb (1906–66) and Mawdudi (1903–79). In his influential treatise Milestones, Qutb maintained that only a group of enlightened and committed thinkers and activists could lead the Muslim world out of the state of pagan materialism (jāhiliyya) toward a just society under the sovereignty of God.
Mawdudi developed a more detailed political theory than Qutb. He sought to reconcile the supremacy of divine sovereignty with the modern reality of popular sovereignty. He observed that Islam is the very antithesis of secular Western democracy and coined the term “theo-democracy,” which he described as “divine democratic government, because under it the Muslims have been given a limited popular sovereignty under the suzerainty of God.” In this theoretical model, which became widely popular among Sunni Islamists during the late 20th century, the entire Muslim population is involved in politics, but within the framework of the Qur’an and the sunna, while the executive is constituted by the general will of the Muslims, who have the right to depose it within the framework of Islamic law.
As the foregoing suggests, both mainstream Sunni and Shi‘i Islamists share a particular skepticism toward full popular sovereignty. In the various political models proposed by both groups, there has been a call for the creation of a council of religious experts to ensure that the legislation that emerges from democratically elected parliaments does not violate Islamic norms. The most explicit and robust manifestation of this is in the Iranian Council of Guardians (Shura-i Nigahban), an appointed oversight body dominated by clerics that has veto power over parliamentary deliberations. Similarly, the 2007 draft platform of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, while less intrusive, called for an elected body of senior religious scholars to advise the president and parliament. This provision led to considerable controversy within Egypt, and it was dropped in the 2011 updated version of this document.
The development of Islamic political thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries on the question of democracy has led to greater theorizing on the tension between popular and divine sovereignty. In the context of reformist Shi‘i Islam, Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush sought to reconcile the two by affirming that, in essence, “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
Developing this theme further, Abdelwahab El-Affendi criticized the Islamist obsession with the sovereignty of God, noting that it has created a false obsession among Muslims while ignoring that which is central in political life: the question of human agency, the horizontal relationships between people, and the question of who should exercise authority here and now. Responding to the Islamist fear that full popular sovereignty could lead to the erosion of Islamic values, and hence the need for a religious oversight council, El-Affendi noted that in a Muslim society, most people will want to rule themselves according to values that reflect their indigenous traditions. It is up to the community to determine what these values should be and not merely one segment of the community.
Further Reading
Khaled Abou El Fadl, Islam and the Challenge of Democracy, edited by Joshua Cohen and Deborah Chasman, 2004; Abdelwahab El-Affendi, “Democracy and Its (Muslim) Critics: An Islamic Alternative to Democracy?” in Islamic Democratic Discourse: Theory, Debates, and Philosophical Perspectives, edited by M. A. Muqtedar Khan, 2006; Sharough Akhavi, The Middle East: The Politics of the Sacred and the Secular, 2009; Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought, 1982; Roxanne Euben and Muhammad Qasim Zaman, eds., Princeton Readings in Islamist Thought: Texts and Contexts from al-Banna to Bin Laden, 2009; Nader Hashemi, “Religious Disputation and Democratic Constitutionalism: The Enduring Legacy of the Constitutional Revolution on the Struggle for Democracy in Iran,” Constellations 17, no. 1 (2010).
NADER HASHEMI