The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

traditional political thought

In terms of political thought, as in so many other respects, Muslims today could be said to be bilingual. On the one hand, they speak the global political language of Western derivation marked by key concepts such as democracy, freedom, human rights, and gender equality; on the other hand, they still have their traditional political idiom, formed over 1,400 years of Islamic history and marked by concepts such as prophecy, imamate, and commanding right and forbidding wrong. The Islamic tradition is alien to most Western readers. What follows is an attempt to familiarize them with it to make it easier for them to follow the other entries in this volume.

The single most important difference between contemporary Western political thinking and the Islamic tradition is that contemporary thought focuses on freedom and rights whereas the Islamic tradition focuses on authority and duties. This separates contemporary political thought from that of all premodern societies, not just that of the Islamic world. Premodern political thought centered on authority and duties because government, law and order, and the agreeable forms of life that they make possible were precious goods that could not be taken for granted. How to maintain political unity, social stability, and collective welfare were more urgent problems than protecting the interests of minorities and individuals.

Islamic political thought is based on the assumption that humans are fundamentally antisocial animals constrained by their own needs to live in societies. By nature, it was said, human beings are given to the ruthless pursuit of their own interests at the cost of everyone else; without government the strong would eat the weak, and the social bonds required for reproduction and coexistence would unravel. In the European tradition this view is represented by Thomas Hobbes (d. 1679), who, writing at the time of the English Civil War, famously said that life in a state of nature would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Yet man was also a social (or political) animal, the Muslims said, using Aristotle’s no less famous phrase. What they meant was that humans had to come together and collaborate so that they could engage in division of labor and satisfy their many diverse needs. Even to produce a loaf of bread required cooperation; nobody could satisfy all his or her needs on his or her own, and without communal life, nobody would be free to pursue higher aims. How then was it possible for political society to be established? According to Hobbes, the creation of political society required an agreement whereby people surrendered their sovereignty to a single individual, the king. This was also the Muslim view. But whereas Hobbes envisaged people as signing away their freedom to a human king, the Muslims held them to sign it away to God, the king of the universe. In other words, God solved the problem by sending a prophet bearing a divine law; those who accepted this law would form a community together, ruled by God as represented by the Prophet and his successors. God, an infinitely superior and impartial party, defined the rules of communal life. Vis-à-vis God humans had no freedom at all, but by following God’s law, they were freed from the tyranny of other human beings.

Prophets

To the Muslims, the answer to the question of how authority was to be created thus lay in divine revelation. Religion was the key to the creation of political society, not in the sense that it should legitimate an existing power structure but rather in the sense that it could supply such a structure. This reflected their own historical experience, for the Muslim community had in fact been created by a prophet, Muhammad, who had preached to the Arabs and freed them from tribal anarchy by uniting them in allegiance to God and His law. It also reflected an ancient tradition in the Near East, well known to Westerners from the case of Moses, who led his people out of Egypt at the command of God and founded the polity that was eventually to become the Davidic monarchy that lies at the heart of the Jewish political tradition.

More than anything else, it is probably this fusion of the religious and the political that makes Islamic political thought a closed book to modern Westerners, accustomed as they are to thinking of religion and politics as belonging in separate compartments. Their thinking also has long historical roots. Christianity grew up inside the Roman Empire as a religion that transcended ethnic, social, and political divisions. The Christians abandoned the Jewish political tradition, remembering Jesus as having said that His kingdom was not of this world; and as subjects of the Roman Empire they left government to Caesar. Later they converted Caesar to Christianity, took over the empire, and Christianized it: this was the closest they could get to fusing religion and politics. But the empire was still a structure originating outside Christianity, with a history stretching back into pagan times, and however entangled their jurisdictions became, state and church always remained distinct. This is what allowed for their gradual separation in modern times, and it is thanks to this separation that modern Westerners find it difficult to envisage politics as intrinsically religious: they always react by trying to separate the two, wondering whether this or that is really religious or really political or seeing the religious element as mere wrapping for secular aims. But Islam shares with secular belief systems such as nationalism or communism the feature that it can define political aims, not just legitimate them (though of course it can do that, too).

Religion serves to create authority because people defer to the divine. They throw themselves to the ground in fear and awe in encounters with God or angels; they go down on their knees and kiss the hands or feet of religious leaders such as the Pope or ayatollahs. A man of God can gather people around him without any need for armies and police; people come to him of their own accord, attracted by his sanctity, and directed by him, they can take political action. The reader who still finds it hard to envisage a prophet as a political leader could do worse than read Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of Gebelawi, an allegorical novel about human history from the expulsion of paradise to the modern age set in the slums of Cairo. It brilliantly captures the prophets as political activists in the portraits of Moses and Muhammad, both very vivid, whereas that of Jesus is flat and lifeless: he was only a spiritual leader. Needless to say, the Muslims saw the prophets as spiritual figures, too; Muhammad, the object of immense devotion, was eventually to be elevated to a quasi-divine position in Sufism. But this was not meant as a denial of his political role. In the period after the Mongol invasions, holy men and leaders of Sufi orders also came to found states in the Middle East and North Africa; it is thanks to the leader of a Sufi order that Iran is a Shi‘i country today. Holy men led the resistance to Western colonialism in several parts of the Muslim world as well.

Like everyone else, medieval Muslims took their own historical experience to be paradigmatic and so assumed that polities were normally founded by prophets bringing revealed law. (There had also been prophets of other kinds, but we can ignore them here.) When Plato and Aristotle were translated into Arabic, their Muslim readers understood their accounts of Greek lawgivers as descriptions of prophets. They thereby inaugurated a philosophical tradition of political thought that became highly influential in the Middle East among Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike and also came to play a role in medieval Europe via Jewish intermediaries. Muslim philosophers subscribed to the idea that all polities rested on religious law brought by a prophet. In the 14th century, two thinkers (Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun) noted that they were wrong: it was perfectly possible to base a polity on man-made rather than revealed law, and many people had in fact done so, they observed. Eventually, this was to become all too well known, for the peoples in question included the Europeans, and it was when they rose to world dominance that the idea of a purely man-made law and political order had to be taken seriously. From a traditional Muslim point of view, it looked like a recipe for anarchy and oppression.

Caliphs and Imams

Having created authority by recourse to the concept of prophets, the Muslims faced the problem of how to maintain it when Muhammad died in Medina in 632. They reacted by establishing the caliphate or imamate. A caliph was a “deputy of God” (khalīfat Allāh), another direct representative of God on Earth; just as God and his subordinates, the angels, rule the created world, so the deputy and his subordinates, his governors, rule the part of humanity that has submitted to God. An imam is somebody whose example is to be followed in religious and moral matters; a prayer leader is an imam, for instance. Applied to the head of state, the term stressed his presumed moral perfection, the quality that caused others to follow him and entitled him to high office; in principle he was the most meritorious Muslim of his time (al-afḍal). Most Muslims held that the first caliphs in Medina had been such paragons of virtue. Having embarked on conquests, however, the caliphs came to preside over a huge empire that rapidly gave them political interests and personal tastes at variance with those of their subjects, and they were soon deemed undeserving of their office. The problems posed by morally flawed and increasingly tyrannical occupants of the caliphal office generated three civil wars between 656 and 750 and led to the emergence of the three main groups into which the Muslims are still divided: the Kharijis (now an insignificant minority represented only by the Ibadis); the Shi‘is (Zaydis, Imamis, Isma‘ilis and others, perhaps 10 percent of Muslims today); and the Sunnis (around 90 percent of Muslims today), a residual category formed around the scholars who called themselves ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamā‘a and whom Western scholars usually call Traditionalists.

The First Civil War (656–61) was won by the Umayyads, who moved the capital from Medina to Syria. Both the Kharijis and the Shi‘is regarded the Umayyads as usurpers, but they fully accepted that the legitimate head of the community would be a caliph in the sense of deputy of God and imam, a moral exemplar endowed with overriding religious authority. They differed radically about everything else about him. According to the Kharijis, moral perfection was assessed by the community. Any free Muslim man might be deemed to possess it and so qualify for the highest office, but he had to be deposed if he lost his superior merit. It obviously would not be possible to run an empire on this basis. The Shi‘is, on the other hand, took the view that moral perfection was to be found only in the Prophet’s family, and the Imami Shi‘is limited the pool of candidates to one particular line in which the imamate passed from father to son so that the identity of the true leader of the community was always known. This man was the true caliph in the here and now, endowed with overriding, indeed infallible, authority in matters of law and doctrine. He was never put to the test of actually having to govern, however, and in 874 the 12th of the line was deemed to have gone into hiding, from which he would not emerge until the end of times. To the Imami Shi‘is, the imams had become more important as religious than as political figures. The imams kept their political role in Zaydi Shi‘ism, but here as in Kharijism, they did so in a form incompatible with stable government. It was only on the tribal fringes that the Kharijis and the Zaydis enjoyed a measure of political success.

In effect, then, both the Kharijis and the Shi‘is retained the ideal of morally perfect government by divorcing it from political reality. By contrast, the Traditionalists, eventually followed by the vast majority of Muslim thinkers, accepted that the head of state could not be morally perfect and that one had to look elsewhere for imams in the sense of paragons of virtue. Their solution was to redefine the nature of the caliphal office so as to detach religious guidance from it. God was still the ultimate source of all authority, but He had no direct representatives on Earth any more, they said; Muhammad was the last, and all authority now came from him, not directly from above. In their opinion the caliphal title stood for “successor of the messenger of God” (khalīfat rasūl Allāh), and this, they said, was the form in which the first caliph had adopted it. (In practice, the only caliphs to have used this version seem to be the early Abbasids, who adopted it along with the title of imams, not instead of it.) When Muhammad died, his political position had passed to the caliphs and his religious leadership to his Companions, the Traditionalists said; the latter had passed on their knowledge of what Muhammad had said and done to the religious scholars (‘ulama’).

A religious scholar was a person who had acquired knowledge (‘ilm) of the Qur’an and the hadith, in other words, the reports of what Muhammad said or did on particular occasions. These were the primary sources of Islamic law and doctrine. The law (shari‘a) on which the Muslim community was based was divine, not only in the sense of being in accordance with God’s will but also in the sense of being actually given by Him. God had revealed His will in the Qur’an, His own words. But the Qur’an needed both interpretation and supplementation, and the question was who was authorized to provide it. The early caliphs apparently thought that they were, but they were overruled by the scholars, who held the key supplement to the Qur’an to be the hadith as expounded by themselves. With the victory of the scholars, Islamic law came to be a law elaborated by private scholars rather than the government, like Jewish law. The shari‘a seeks to establish what is obligatory, allowed, and forbidden in the eyes of God and also what is morally preferable or disapproved within the category of the allowed. This is an endeavor full of uncertainty and disagreement, for although God’s will is eternal and unchanging, every scholar is just a fallible human being, and scholarly interpretations differ. Some scholars are more learned and authoritative than others, but nobody can settle controversial questions on behalf of all. Every juristic decision is uncertain and provisional until it has been accepted by so many for so long that it counts as validated by consensus. Consensus is the ultimate authority, for although every scholar is individually fallible, collectively they cannot go wrong: “My community will never agree on an error,” as the Prophet is believed to have said.

Where the Imami Shi‘is concentrated religious authority in the imam, the Sunnis thus dispersed it in the community. When the Twelfth Imam went into hiding, much the same pattern came to prevail in Imami Shi‘ism. The caliph was only the executor of the law; his legitimacy no longer rested on moral superiority but rather on his ability to cooperate with the scholars. Though he was to be replaced by rulers of other types and new religious leaders were to appear in the form of Sufis, this was essentially the division of labor that prevailed in the Sunni world until modern times.

Islamic history is punctuated by the periodic appearance of religious leaders who tried to concentrate religious authority in their persons again in order to introduce radical religiopolitical change. Most commonly, they would claim to be the Mahdi, the savior expected to appear at the end of times, but they might also cast themselves as the “renewer” (mujaddid) expected to appear in every century or claim a special relationship with God as Sufis; some even claimed prophetic status or divinity, though this put them beyond the pale. There were also attempts by political rulers to organize the religious scholars within their realm on a hierarchical basis, notably in the Ottoman Empire. Something in the nature of a hierarchy also developed in Shi‘i Iran. But the dispersed pattern was the default mode, and in the Sunni world it still prevails.

Amirs, Kings, and Sultans

In 750 the Umayyad caliphs were replaced by the Abbasids, who were members of the Prophet’s family (though not ‘Alids) and who moved the capital from Syria to Iraq, where their dynasty survived until 1258. In practice, their power began to disintegrate already in the ninth century, when autonomous rulers took over the provinces and they themselves were reduced to mere puppets at the center. The new rulers used secular titles such as king, amir (governor), or sultan (power, authority), and since there were no provisions in the religious law for wielders of power other than the caliph and his delegates, most of the new rulers tried to legitimate their position by seeking a letter of appointment from the caliph, acknowledging that all legitimate power came from him. In 1258, however, the Mongols conquered Baghdad and put the caliph to death without setting up another in his place. The succession of men who were both relatives of the Prophet and rulers of the community (umma) that the Prophet had founded thus came to an end. The Muslim world had long ceased to be a single political unit by then, but now it did not even have a single figurehead any more. For all that, the Muslims continued to feel that they lived in a single Muslim society.

In fact, a caliphate of sorts did survive, for the sultans of Mamluk Egypt (1250–1517) enthroned an Abbasid as caliph in Cairo, but this caliphate was both politically impotent and devoid of general recognition. Its significance lies mainly in the fact that when the Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517, they claimed the caliphal title for themselves. By then the title was devalued currency, for many others had claimed it, too, often without fulfilling the legal requirement that the caliph must be a member of Muhammad’s tribe (Quraysh). But though the Ottomans did not fulfill this requirement either, they came close to reuniting the Muslim world, and this, as well as their control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, made their claim to caliphal status meaningful. It came as a shock to many when Atatürk abolished the Ottoman caliphate in 1924. All rulers of the Islamic world today are either kings, amirs, sultans, or presidents, with the partial exception of Iran; there the head of state, ranking above the president, is simply called leader (rahbar), popularly “supreme leader,” a new title coined in the Iranian Revolution of 1979. There are, however, still Muslims who dream of reestablishing the caliphate, associated as it is with the heyday of Islamic power.

Political Freedom

The early Muslims had a strong sense that Islam had arrived to free mankind not only from tribal anarchy but also from kings, meaning those who ruled in accordance with their own whims rather than God’s dictates. (“King” was a term of abuse when contrasted with caliph or imam, though not otherwise.) When the conquests endowed the caliphs with imperial power, the Muslims accused them of “turning the caliphate into kingship” and vigorously resisted what they perceived as despotic rule. But three civil wars over less than a hundred years deprived most of them of their taste for activism. All rulers turned into kings, as some observed; fighting to replace one with another was too costly in terms of lives, general security, and Muslim solidarity to be worth it. What then were the alternatives? A rebel in eastern Iran in the 730s experimented with ideas of setting up an institution to control the local governor, a few thinkers around 800 held that it might be possible to do without a ruler altogether, and the Mu‘tazili theologian Nazzam (d. ca. 845) thought that it might be best to replace the caliph with a federation of locally elected rulers. But nothing came of these ideas.

The Traditionalists around whom the Sunnis were formed held that it was best simply to tolerate tyranny while at the same time withdrawing as much of communal life as possible from the caliph’s control. In their view even a morally flawed and oppressive ruler had to be obeyed as long it did not entail a violation of God’s command. The ruler’s moral status did not affect the law, they said (in disagreement with the Shi‘is). Even a sinful ruler could lead the prayer or conduct holy war, and participation carried the same divine rewards as when they were led by a righteous imam. One was not to rebel, since the rightly guided nature of the community did not depend on the head of state, and keeping the community together was all important. The only remedies against oppressive rulers were hellfire sermons and books of advice designed to inculcate virtue. A great many of such were produced, but needless to say their effectiveness was limited.

The jurists writing in the 11th and 12th centuries did hold that a wrongful caliph could be deposed. There were even some who held that it was a religious duty to do so. But they did not specify who should determine when or on what grounds a caliph merited deposition or how his removal was to be effected. Those who had chosen him should remove him, they said, but this simply delegated the task to whoever wielded power and influence at the center at any given time. It was never suggested that the courts should play a role in the proceedings, and there were no other formal institutions, such as a privy council or parliament, to which the task could be assigned. When the caliph lost his power to upstart rulers, even the principle that the head of state could be deposed was abandoned. God raised them up, it was said, and God would raise up others in their stead if they sinned. There is nonetheless an interesting example of a local ruler by the name of Ahmad Khan being taken to court, deposed, and executed in Samarqand (now Uzbekistan) in 1095. The charge was a heresy so grave that it amounted to apostasy. Of this he was probably innocent, but he had been a terrible oppressor, and a conviction of apostasy was an effective way of securing his removal. Why the military leaders who formed part of the coalition against him did not simply assassinate him, the normal solution, is not clear, but it did not set a precedent.

Tyranny was bearable because large parts of life were not affected by the state at all. The main way in which the government made its presence felt was through taxation, here as elsewhere a heavy burden on the peasantry. It was also a constant bone of contention between rulers and scholars, for the scholars had elaborated the fiscal law of the shari‘a in such a way that did not allow enough resources for the state in such a way that rulers were forced to impose additional taxes, which the scholars denounced as uncanonical (maks). The taxes went to finance the state apparatus, war, building projects, and cultural life, especially at the court. But schooling, educational training, funding, loans, health care, and the running of local affairs—all these and many other things now taken over or supervised by the state—were then in the hands of family, neighbors, friends, religious scholars, and local notables, with only intermittent attention by the government at best and often none at all. The closer one came to the center of power, the more dangerous life became (while at the same time becoming vastly much more rewarding in material terms); a great many of those who rose to powerful positions came to a violent end. But though others certainly suffered from time to time, the main problem posed by government was not usually that it was oppressive but rather that it was arbitrary and inefficient. General insecurity and local oppressors were probably more of a problem to most than the tyranny of kings, though these factors are not easily separated.

The modern state brought higher levels of security, but it also assumed a far greater role in people’s lives than was formerly the case, and in combination with modern means of communication and surveillance, this transformed the old-style tyrants into dictators of a new and more totalitarian kind.

Religious Freedom

In a society based on religious law, there evidently cannot be religious freedom in the modern sense that anybody is free to choose whatever religion (if any) that he or she prefers. What Muhammad had founded was a community of believers, not a territorial state, and a community of believers it remained, even though it was eventually divided into many states. There was no room in it for unbelievers.

It is nonetheless possible to speak of religious freedom in the Islamic world. The Muslims themselves never used the expression “religious freedom” until they learned it from the West; indeed, it has an offensive ring to it from a traditional point of view, suggesting as it does that people have no obligations to their creator. But there were in fact mechanisms whereby adherents of divergent beliefs, whether infidel or just heretical, could be accommodated. As regards the former, unbelievers could be accepted as protected peoples (dhimmīs), at least if they were Jews, Christians, or Zoroastrians; even pagans qualified according to some legal schools. Dhimmīs were entitled to practice their ancestral religion and manage their own internal affairs under Muslim sovereignty, though they were subject to certain conditions, including payment of a special tax that was meant as a mark of humiliation. This was a right granted to communities, not to individuals, and individuals retained it only as long as they retained their ancestral faith. If they wished to convert, they could in principle do so only to Islam. Entrance into the Muslim community was open to all, but the exit was closed, so that once people had become Muslims, they were not allowed to convert to another religion at all. Apostasy was a betrayal of the community and punishable by death. A Muslim who converted to another religion would be safe only if he left the Islamic world for a country professing the religion for which he had betrayed his own.

Regarding fellow Muslims, the schisms between Kharijis, Shi‘is, and the majority Muslims were deeply regretted by all involved, but the majority rarely tried to impose their own views on the minorities, except in the sense that the latter risked harassment when they ventured out of their own quarters (adherents of different beliefs tended to segregate physically). Local fighting between Sunni and Shi‘i quarters was common at times, but the government took military action against dissident communities only when the latter took to arms themselves. Virulent though their polemics were, the three branches of Islam in effect accepted one another as legitimate in the sense that nobody had the right to eradicate the others by force. The habit of toleration inculcated by the recognition of non-Muslim communities may have made it easier to accept the presence of sectarian communities as well. It was only when religious leaders set out to seize political power and reform the world that the pattern of toleration was broken, usually because all normal political and social relations were thrown into turmoil, not because the leaders saw themselves as called upon to eliminate other religious groups. The only major exception is the Safavids (1501–1732), who imposed Shi‘ism on Iran and engaged in the forcible conversion of Christians and Jews as well.

The fundamental schisms apart, Muslims tolerated divergent beliefs by distinguishing between external observance and inner conviction and insisting on the former alone for purposes of membership. All Muslims were expected to observe the rules relating to food, marriage, divorce, inheritance, purity, and ritual, meaning the five daily prayers (which can be performed anywhere), the weekly Friday prayer (a public ritual that men must perform in a jāmi‘ or “cathedral mosque”; whether women can or must is disputed), the annual fast (observed by all healthy adults), the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime for those who had the means to undertake it, and the annual payment of alms. These rituals served visibly to mark out the community from others. Their neglect might be tolerated as long as it was intermittent rather than systematic, but principled denial of their validity amounted to apostasy.

Most Muslims, however, soon came to supplement this “external” religion, as some called it, with religion of a more personal kind, such as philosophy, mysticism, or esotericism, which established a direct relationship between the individual and God. (Philosophy was not a secular pursuit directed against religion but rather a rival form of it.) Only the Traditionalists did their best to live by the Qur’an and hadith, and even they were gradually sucked into Sufism, all dominant in the post-Mongol world. Since the new forms of religion were pursued by individuals in search of their own private salvation, they often brought their adherents into conflict with the law. All downplayed the importance of the law one way or the other by holding salvation to lie in spirituality or human reason or in the mixture of the two known as theosophy. The law was deemed to be no more than a first step on the ladder to the truth, or just a metaphorical version of the absolute truth for those unable to understand higher things. In some cases, the law was not even deemed a metaphorical version of the truth but simply a utilitarian institution required for social life or even chains and fetters that had to be cast off by those in search of salvation. There were also those who accepted the law as a genuine but temporary form of religion that would be swept away when the Mahdi came to transfigure the world, so that all would be able to experience the truth directly and worship God of their own accord without the need for all the paraphernalia of institutionalized religion. Such views were widely perceived as attacks on the very foundations of Muslim society, but most of them could be tolerated as long as the “external” religion was respected and the private convictions were handled with discretion.

Freethinkers could discuss their views with like-minded individuals in private salons, in learned gatherings at the court, and to some extent in books and even more so in poetry, where things could be put ambivalently. One could also debate radical propositions as if for the sake of argument alone or voice them as part of mujūn. Mujūn was playful behavior or writing that violated the normal rules of propriety, an accepted part of the high culture which allowed people to say things that bordered on the blasphemous, the scurrilous, or the pornographic as long as they did so with literary elegance and wit and had a good sense of where to stop. There was no institutionalized confession of sins, no inquisition, and no prying into people’s hearts. The authorities were responsible for the maintenance of the society in which Muslim law was practiced and without which there could be no salvation, but they were not responsible for the salvation of individuals, and what people concealed in their innermost consciences was between them and God.

In short, freedom lay essentially in privacy. The public sphere was where public norms had to be maintained, where there might be censors or private persons fulfilling the duty of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” who would break musical instruments, pour out wine, and separate couples who were neither married nor closely related. But their right to intrude into private homes was strictly limited. Here the veils came off. What went on privately was not meant to become public knowledge, and those who knew one’s private life should not reveal it. Casting a veil over other people’s faults was as virtuous as covering one’s own; one certainly should not wash dirty linen in public. A sin that was kept secret only harmed the person who had committed it, as it was said, whereas once it was revealed, it had to be denounced lest everyone be harmed by it (in that it would weaken public norms). For the same reason, it was wrong to give clear accounts of heretical views. All these attitudes were deeply ingrained in the Near East and by no means limited to Muslims.

Again, the modern state ruined the traditional pattern. It imposes its law directly on all inhabitants of a particular territory regardless of faith and awards citizenship on the basis of criteria of secular origin, in principle awarding all citizens the same rights and duties, so that Muslims, non-Muslims, Sunnis, and Shi‘is were brought out of their separate communities as members of the same national state. The national and the religious principle now coexist uneasily in the Muslim world. At the same time nationalism highlighted ethnic cleavages hitherto masked by religious fellowship. Tensions formerly defused by segregation and hierarchical ordering (with the Muslims on top) thus became difficult to contain. In addition, the home ceased to be a castle shielding the family from external intrusion. The faces and voices of the outside world, including the government, came to be seen and heard on radio, television, cassettes, and so on, and the old respect for boundaries was eroded. After the Iranian Revolution, the religious police would routinely raid private homes. Thanks to the modern economy, even the family itself is changing, as women are entering the work force and rebelling against their traditional subordination, while a growing number of the young are escaping parental supervision in cyberspace, which offers instant access to both peers and the rest of the world. All this is inevitably affecting political thought.

Outsiders

Like many other peoples, the premodern Muslims conceived of the world in which their own norms prevailed as a haven of peace and safety surrounded by threatening outsiders lacking in civilized standards; they called the former “the abode of Islam” and the latter “the abode of war.” Again like many, they saw themselves as called upon to expand their haven of peace and moral rectitude so that others, too, could enjoy its benefits. Unlike the Greeks, Romans, Chinese, French, British, and others who have entertained comparable ideas but like the Spanish, the Muslims saw themselves as bringing not only benefits in this world but also salvation in the next, obedience to God being the key to both. Expanding the sovereignty of God was the aim of jihad, the Muslim form of holy war. Once brought under Muslim law, non-Muslim populations could retain their religion as dhimmīs, but it was hoped that they would convert, and many invariably did with the passing of time. The jurists identified jihad primarily as missionary warfare.

To the Christians, jihad has always been a stumbling block. Jesus did not use force to establish, or even to defend, himself but rather died as the victim of coercive power; the early Christians also preferred martyrdom to the use of arms. By contrast, Muhammad waged war to establish his message and died as the leader of a polity, whereupon his followers set out to conquer the world. This contrast has figured in Christian polemics against Islam for over a thousand years, often in a manner suggesting that holy war is the opposite of no war, whereas in fact it is merely the opposite of secular war (i.e., war lying outside the religious domain). The Muslims elevated one type of war to religious status, whereas their Christian counterparts assigned all war along with politics to a compartment separate from that of religion. But this does not mean that the Christians stopped fighting wars of expansion or even that they refrained from doing so in the name of religion.

The Muslim jurists identified jihad as a duty imposed on the community rather than the individual, except when it was conducted for the defense of Islam rather than its expansion, and it was typically discharged by the ruler and his troops. Volunteering was highly meritorious, however, and jihad was lawful even without official direction or authorization. Self-help was also authorized against other Muslims when they were deemed to be apostates. If a religious scholar declared a certain person to be an infidel, any Muslim could kill him with impunity. (A person found guilty of unbelief by a court would normally be executed by the authorities.) Muslims frequently declared one another to be infidels, often, it would seem, without anything happening, presumably because the declarations were confined to books. If they were widely publicized, however, the alleged infidel might be no better off than the outlaw in medieval European society. Self-help was likewise authorized in the maintenance of public morality. Any Muslim could, indeed should, command right and forbid wrong by counseling people if he saw them acting contrary to what he knew to be the law or even by using force, though this was a contentious issue.

The early jurists who divided the world into an abode of Islam and an abode of war took it for granted that a Muslim could not live permanently outside the Islamic abode. To be a Muslim was to live under the sovereignty of God as represented by a Muslim ruler upholding Islamic law. In practice, however, Muslims soon came to live as (usually commercial) minorities in other countries, while conversely parts of the Muslim world eventually came to be ruled by non-Muslims in the form of Crusaders, Mongols, and Europeans, so the abode of Islam came to be understood as anywhere that Islam could be openly practiced; political sovereignty was not required. Today a full third of all Muslims live as minorities under non-Muslim sovereignty.

These developments have put an end to jihad of the traditional type. In the later 19th century, the Muslims of British India began to reinterpret the duty as purely defensive, and this has become the prevalent view today; many Muslims even deny that it has ever meant expansionist war, dismissing the traditional concept of jihad as an Orientalist invention. Instead, a new type of global jihad has appeared. That, too, is cast as defensive and thus defined as as an individual duty, not simply a communal one that can be discharged by some on behalf of all. Conducted by way of self-help without government direction, it is distinguished by systematic disregard of traditional boundaries. The same is true of self-help against apostates. When the Shi‘i Ayatollah Khomeini declared the novelist Salman Rushdie to be as an apostate, many tried to kill him, even though Rushdie lived in England rather than a Muslim state (and had never been Shi‘i). Similarly, offensive Westerners such as the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh or the Danish cartoonists who drew mocking images of Muhammad were treated as if they were dhimmīs under Muslim rule. All these cases are exceptional, but they illustrate the flux into which traditional concepts have been thrown by modern changes.

Overview

Religion in the broad sense of appeals to the supernatural has played a major role in all political thought wherever it is found, but there is no denying that it is particularly prominent in Islam. In line with this, Muslim thinkers display strong awareness of the degree to which reality is shaped by constructions put on it and of the power to be derived from working people’s minds. In that sense they could be said to be the true heirs of the Christians, who succeeded in taking over the Roman Empire armed with nothing but the power of their convictions. Islamic political thought is also unusual in the degree to which it endorses self-help, as opposed to reliance on political or ecclesiastical authorities, and not just in matters involving the use of force. The standard example is the lunar calendar. Even illiterates can handle it because the beginning and end of each month is established on the basis of a sighting of the new moon rather than astronomical calculation (though scientists liked to engage in that, too). The religion is institutionally lightweight; indeed, there is a vision in some juristic writings of every Muslim as personally responsible for the maintenance of Muslim norms for himself and his neighbors—a view often in a state of tension with authoritarian respect for social and political hierarchies.

The historical roots of this vision lie partly in the tribal heritage of Arab conquerors who founded Muslim society in the Middle East and partly in the colonial past of the provinces in which they established their first capitals. As tribesmen from a stateless society, the Arabs were used to managing their own affairs without recourse to political and ecclesiastic hierarchies, and having been ruled by Greeks and Persians for close to a thousand years, the inhabitants of Syria and Iraq, as well as Egypt, had a long tradition of living communal lives separate from those of their imperial masters without renouncing obedience to them. When the Muslims discovered that their own caliphs kept turning into kings, most of them in effect opted for the same solution: what mattered was communal life, not the state, which they saw as a mere protective envelope; certainly, this envelope had to be maintained, but in terms of the morally significant domains of life, the believers took charge of themselves. This gave Islamic political thought a very different character from that of Western Christendom, where an immense amount of attention was devoted to a hierarchical institution, the church.