Modern Islamic Political Thought

In reality, the Caliphate was something of a misnomer for the institution which stood at the summit of the Ottoman political hierarchy. There was the unconfirmed story that Sulṭān Salīm I had arranged in the sixteenth century for the Caliphate to be transferred to him by the last ‘Abbāsid Caliph Mutawakkil.1 But whatever the truth of the matter, Sunnī jurists refused to recognise the title Caliph for the Sulṭān either on the grounds that real Caliphate existed only under the Rightly-Guided (Rāshidūn), which was the view of the Ḥanafī jurists whose school was under the protection of the Sulṭāns, or because descent from the Arabian tribe of Quraysh was held by others to be an essential qualification of the Caliphs. Hence the title Caliph was not officially used for the Sulṭāns until the eighteenth century, when, for reasons of state, the Ottoman put all doctrinal and legal niceties aside and declared their Sulṭān a Caliph. The definitive instrument registering this innovation was the Treaty of Kuchuk Kainarja concluded in 1774 between the Ottoman Turks and Russia, in which the Sulṭān undertook to recognise the complete independence of the Tartars of the Crimea and Kuchan, which had hitherto formed part of the Ottoman Empire. Since the Empress of Russia, so Arnold tells us, claimed to be the patroness of the Christians of the Orthodox church dwelling in the Ottoman territory, the Ottoman plenipotentiaries called the Sulṭān – among other things – the ‘sovereign Caliph of the Mahometan religion’ in order to equip him with a commensurate spiritual authority over Muslims.² In the course of time, religious doctors provided ample arguments to defend this piece of Realpolitik, their case being strengthened later by the necessity of maintaining Muslim unity in the face of Western expansionism.

The circumstances leading to the abolition of the Caliphate arose from the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, and the efforts of Mustapha Kemal (Atatürk) – the founder of modern Turkey – to establish a secular state. He was helped in his designs by the disrepute brought upon the Sulṭānate-Caliphate as a result of its association with the foreign invaders of Turkey, as well as with internal reactionary forces. Here we are more concerned with the impact of that development on religio-political thought.

The abolition of the Caliphate took place in two stages. First, in November 1922, the Grand National Assembly decided to separate the Sulṭānate from the Caliphate, and then to replace the Sulṭānate with a republican regime. This was inevitable in view of the Constitution accepted by the Assembly in January 1921, which had declared that ‘sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the people. The administration derives from the principle that the people control their destiny in person and in fact.’³ The Sulṭānate being a hereditary institution had no place in this system. Thereupon, Sulṭān Vahideddin was deposed, and his cousin, Abdulmecid, was elected by the Assembly as the Caliph of all Muslims. This was an even more anomalous situation, which could not be tolerated for long. It was a return to the days of the Buyids and the Saljūqs, when a shadowy Caliphate existed in Baghdad, but the real power lay in the hands of potentates in Rayy and Iṣfahān. The new Ottoman Caliph was similarly ‘shorn of all real authority or concern in the political and administrative affairs of the country; he was invested with the mantle of the Prophet, just as his ancestors had been, but he was deprived of the power of the sword.’⁴ At this stage, Mustapha Kemal was still trying to meet his Muslim critics on their own ground, substantiating his retort to them by examples from Islamic history. Soon the contradictions inherent in the new arrangement started to rankle in his mind. Not the least of these was the fact the Caliph was supposed to be entitled to the obedience of Muslims throughout the world, but in practice only enjoyed the allegiance of the Turks. Mustapha Kemal must have expressed the feelings of many modernised Muslims when he declared just before the abolition of the Caliphate:

Our Prophet has instructed his disciples to convert the nations of the world to Islam; he has not ordered them to provide for the government of these nations. Never did such an idea pass through his mind. Caliphate means government and administration. A Caliph who really wants to play his role, to govern and administer all Muslim nations [finds himself at a loss] how to manage this. I must confess that in these conditions, if they appointed me as the Caliph, I would immediately have resigned.

But let us return to history, and consider the facts. The Arabs founded a Caliphate in Baghdad, but they also established another one in Cordova. Neither the Persians, nor the Afghans, nor the Muslims of Africa ever recognised the Caliph of Constantinople. The notion of a single Caliph, exercising supreme religious authority over all the Muslim people, is one which has come out of books, not reality. The Caliph has never exercised over the Muslims a power similar to that held by the Pope over the Catholics. Our religion has neither the same requirements, nor the same discipline as Christianity. The criticisms provoked by our recent reform [separating the Caliphate from the Sultanate] are inspired by an abstract, unreal idea: the idea of Pan-Islamism. Such an idea has never been translated into reality. We have held the Caliphate in high esteem according to an ancient and venerable tradition. We honour the Caliph; we attend to his needs, and those of his family. I add that in the whole of the Muslim world, the Turks are the only nation which effectively ensures the Caliph’s livelihood. Those who advocate a universal Caliph have so far refused to make any contribution. What, then, do they expect? That the Turks alone should carry the burden of this institution, and that they alone should respect the sovereign authority of the Caliph? This would be expecting too much [of us].⁵

Mustapha Kemal’s annoyance with what he thus held to be the hypocritical attitude of non-Turkish Muslims towards the Caliphate must have partly incited him to proceed to the second stage of its abolition. In November 1923, the text of the appeal by two distinguished Indian Muslims leaders, the Shī‘ī Amīr ‘Alī and the Ismā‘īlī leader Āghā Khān, to which we referred in the previous chapter, was published in Istanbul. This pointed out that the separation of the Caliphate from the Sulṭānate had increased the significance of the former for Muslims in general, and called upon the Turkish Government to place the Caliphate ‘on a basis which would command the confidence and esteem of the Muslim nations, and thus impart to the Turkish state unique strength and dignity’. According to Bernard Lewis, it was the crisis touched off by such protests that ended with the abolition of the Caliphate, because they all served to stress the links of the Caliphate with the past and with Islam, and this tightened Mustapha Kemal’s resolve to remove it.⁶ W. C. Smith alludes to a more emotional factor – the anger felt by some Turks at the protest of such ‘unorthodox’ figures over their action: ‘It really was rather ludicrous to have a Shī‘ī . . . and a Khojah (religiously ultra-heretical) telling the Turkish Muslims how to behave.’⁷ But as Nallino has noted, more fundamental reasons could have also contributed to the dénouement. These arose, to put it briefly, from the incompatibility between Turkish nationalism and Pan-Islamism: the conflict between the concept of a modern Westernised state, based on the will of the people, and the notion of a supra-national Muslim state, resting on the bonds of the religious community; the contradiction between the nature of a modern state requiring the equality of all its citizens, irrespective of their beliefs, and that of an Islamic state presupposing the superiority of believers to non-believers; and, finally, the absurdity of a Caliphate deprived of temporal authority.⁸ Some of these problems were not unprecedented in recent Islamic history: we shall see in chapter 5 how the issues arising from the conflict between the Sharī‘ah and man-made law had been faced before by the Shī‘ī leaders of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution in 1906. But most other issues, particularly the conflict between a universal Islamic state and a modern national state, and the relevance of the Caliphate to the political requirements of the age, presented a new challenge to Sunnī political thought.

Some religious thinking preceded the decision of the National Assembly. This is attested by a document which it subsequently published, giving its main reasons for the abolition. Some of the essential arguments of the document have been given elsewhere,⁹ but here we will refer to one or two points that need our special attention. The most significant aspect of the document is its attempt to reconcile secular and religious theses on the nature and functions of a state. We do not know who its actual authors were, but as it stands its content gives cause to presume that a constructive discussion must have taken place prior to its redaction between some religionists and secularisers – an occurrence with rare parallels in the history of the modern Middle East, which has often been marked, especially in times of crisis, by complete rupture, if not bitter confrontation, between the two camps. The only other important exception which comes to one’s mind is the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906, following which groups of the ‘Ulamā’ and Westernised intellectuals co-operated in drawing up the first Constitution of the country. Neither in the Turkish nor Iranian case, however, did this co-operation survive the strain of subsequent political vicissitudes. In both, the secularisers emerged victorious – although in the Iranian case this proved to be temporary.

The text of the Turkish document has therefore an intriguingly hybrid character, drawing alternately on classical works of Sunnī jurisprudence and modern concepts of national sovereignty, social contract and general will. While most influential writings by Westernised intellectuals on democracy and representative rule in Turkey, Egypt and Iran roughly from the twenties onwards reveal – or affect – ignorance of Islamic history and culture, the authors of the Turkish document have made abundant use of the technical terms and formulae of Islamic public and private law in an obvious attempt to disarm their orthodox critics.

The document is also significant because of its pioneering value in modern discussions on the Caliphate: nearly all the outstanding critics and supporters of the Caliphate after its abolition seem to have done no more than develop its broad propositions. Particularly the critics, as we shall soon see, have almost repeated its main points: that the Caliphate, far from being divinely ordained, was simply a utilitarian institution, designed for the most judicious administration of the Muslim community; that the ‘real Caliphate’ lasted only for thirty years after the death of the Prophet; that what prevailed for the best part of Islamic history was a ‘fictitious’ Caliphate sustained by sheer force; and that with the Caliphate having outlived its purpose, the Muslims were now free to choose whatever form of government was suitable to their present needs and conditions. Thus, although the immediate issue before the Turks was the separation of the Caliphate from the Sulṭānate, the Assembly realised that such a decision could not be rationally explained without venturing into a reappraisal of the Caliphate itself, exploding in the process a number of myths about the sanctity of traditional political institutions, and the absolute duty of the faithful to obey rulers. The document is, therefore, equally noteworthy as a critique of classical Sunnī political theory. While the pathfinders of modernism, Asad-ābādī (Afghānī) and ‘Abduh, in their effort to release the Muslim mind from the fetters of ‘imitation’, contented themselves with general strictures on the political submissiveness of the masses, the Turkish authors felt that the moment had arrived to openly challenge some of the specific doctrines responsible for this quietism; hence their refutation of the ideas of such authorities as at-Taftāzanī and Ibn Himām on the legitimacy of the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate. They also displayed a keen historical sense by imputing the pro-Caliphate opinions of classical theorists to their unawareness of other forms and mechanisms of government, which are known only to the peoples of our time. A point made both implicitly and explicitly throughout the document is that the Assembly, embodying the Islamic principle of consultation (shūrā), was fully authorised to make any decision ensuring the proper conduct of the nation’s affairs, and that withdrawing the political functions of the Caliph was one such decision. But whether in disproving conventional beliefs, or suggesting novel ideas, the authors were careful to rely persistently on the resources of the Sharī‘ah, repeatedly quoting the ḥadīths and canonical maxims prescribing justice, expediency, common sense and the simplicity of good religion.¹⁰

Next the effect of the crisis on the Islamic thought outside Turkey has to be considered. Leaving the Westernisers aside, the abolition of the Caliphate came to one distinct group as the fulfilment of an old, though not always consciously cherished, desire: the Arab nationalists. As the representatives of one of the subject nations of the Ottoman Empire, they had, ever since the end of the nineteenth century, held the Ottoman Caliphate to be a mere subterfuge for perpetuating the Turanian hegemony, as well as the travesty of an office which by right belonged to the Arabs. This opinion was all the more interesting because it was expressed by both the Muslim and Christian Arabs. The Syrian ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān al-Kawākibī (d. 1902), well-known for his authorship of a pithy tract against (Turkish) despotism in 1900, enumerated the virtues of the Arab rulership in Islamic history, and used this as a justification of his scheme for installing a Qurayshī Arab as Caliph in Mecca. Nationalist reasoning ranked as high as religious considerations in his scheme: the Arabs, he said, were the founders of the Islamic society, and this, combined with their innate qualities such as pride, group solidarity, steadfastness and resilience in the face of physical hardships, should pre-empt the Caliphate for them.¹¹ But in the utopian state that he delineated, the Caliphate has purely spiritual authority, since he wanted it to be preoccupied solely with religious affairs;¹² but this did not tally with his strong views in the same tract, and in another well-known treatise on the ‘Nature of Despotism’ (Ṭabā’i‘al-istibdād), which all imparted his conviction in the indissoluble link between religion and politics in Islam.

The Christian Najīb ‘Āzūrī (d. 1916) who, like many Arab nationalists at the turn of the century, had close connections with the French designs on the Ottoman Empire, similarly visualised an Arab Caliphate with spiritual authority over all Muslims, but ruling a territory composed of only Ḥijāz and Medina:¹³ such an Islamic counterpart to the States of the Church was his suggested solution to the thorny problem of the separation of the temporal and spiritual powers in Islam. If there was ever any chance of such innocent projects coming to fruition through Arab–Turkish understanding, it was destroyed by the growing hostility between the two nations, culminating in the Arab Revolt of 1916. By that time, Arab nationalists had lost interest in the Caliphate, and had become concerned either with the grandiose ideal of Arab unity, or with the machinations for establishing separate Arab states after the First World War. For this reason, reaction to the abolition of the Caliphate seems to have come mostly from non-Arab Muslims. Only a handful of ‘committed’ religious writers like Rashīd Riḍā and some of the Azharites (whose views will be subsequently examined) felt strongly enough to comment on the event.

In the eyes of the secularists, the end of the Caliphate was a logical sequel to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and the result of an anachronism maintained by force. But for the religionists, the matter was more complex, and had to be explained within the legal categories of orthodox Islam. This was not the first time in history that the Sunnī theorists had to face the ordeal of resorting to casuistry to prescribe the attitude of the faithful towards the collapse of religio-political authority. Eight centuries earlier, the overthrow of the ‘Abbāsid Caliphate in Baghdad, in 656/1258, had placed them in an almost similar quandary. To the jurists with a flair for historical reminiscence, that precedent cautioned against hastily concluding that the fate of the institution itself had been sealed. After the Mongol invasion, in the words of Suyūṭi (d. 911/1533), ‘the world went through three and a half years without a Caliph’.¹⁴ But at the end of that interregnum, a cousin of the last Caliph was reinstated in Cairo as the new occupant of the office, which, however shadowy its reality, acted as the legitimising authority of the Mamlūk rulers of Egypt for the next three and a half centuries.¹⁵ So in the present crisis too, in 1924, there were some Sunrī jurists who argued that the decision of the Turkish authorities had changed nothing in the situation, and that the Muslims were still bound in allegiance to the Caliph Abdulmecid.

The Indian Muslims, numbering about seventy million, and forming numerically the most important part of the Muslim world at the time, had long taken a strong interest in the Ottoman Caliphate. In the nineteenth century, although the Ottoman Empire was progressively weakened by loss of more territories inhabited by the Muslims to non-Muslim powers, the Sulṭān’s claim was consolidated because of the growing strength of religious movements of solidarity against Western domination. India and Russia, with large Muslim minorities, were among the most active centres of pro-Ottoman campaigns. Later on, during the mutiny of 1857 in India, the British further boosted the Ottoman Sulṭān by obtaining a proclamation from him urging the Indian Muslims to remain loyal to the British. And again during the Crimean War ‘the British themselves had magnified Turkey in the Indian eyes. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Sulṭān ‘Abdul ‘Azīz’s claim to be the universal Khalīfa of Islam was generally accepted by the Indo-Muslim middleclass intelligentsia. It can be safely assumed that he was the first Ottoman sultan in whose name the khuṭba was read in Indian mosques.’¹⁶ The momentum of the pro-Ottoman movement was kept up by the rise of the nationalist fervour in the second half of the nineteenth century. By that time, an intellectual dimension was added to the movement by the Muslim middle classes, who gradually overcame their dependence on the imperial system, and began to express their discontent against the British in sophisticated ideological and literary forms. It was from among them that the Muslim leaders of India’s struggle for independence arose: Abu’l-Kalām Āzād, Muḥammad ‘Alī and his brother Shawkat ‘Alī. When the First World War broke out, pro-Ottoman feeling had ironically become a robust anti-British vehicle. Britain was soon to be condemned not only for such imperialist brutalities as the Amritsar massacre, but also for its complicity in the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the weakening of its Caliphate.¹⁷

In 1919, all-India ‘Khilāfat (Caliphate) Conferences’ were organised, and aroused Muslims’ emotions in favour of the Ottoman Caliph. These were soon followed by the formation of the Khilāfat Committee which, under the vigorous leadership of Muḥammad ‘Alī and others, mobilised the whole theological weight of Indian Islam in an anti-British campaign. This established an organic link between Indian nationalism and ‘Khilāfatism’, which ensured Muslim–Hindu co-operation in the struggle for India’s independence until the years immediately before the Second World War. But the Khilāfatists were soon to face bitter frustrations. Already many of the nations of the Empire had achieved their independence from the Sublime Porte. This had not deflected the determination of the Khilāfatists, who strove sanguinely to re-establish the Ottoman suzerainty over the lost territories.¹⁸ But then came the decision of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey to replace the Sulṭānate with republicanism, and maintain the Caliphate only as a spiritual office. We saw that the Indian Muslims’ expression of concern over this development only helped to expedite the abolition of the Caliphate, and secularisation of Turkey. From then onwards, the appeal of the movement started to decline, and the majority of educated Indian Muslims concentrated their efforts on internal problems. In 1925, the Khilāfat movement announced that ‘it had turned its attention to the communal welfare of the Indian Moslems’, and even turned down the invitation to attend the 1926 conference in Cairo to discuss the future of the Caliphate.¹⁹

This waning of enthusiasm, however, did not affect the dogmatic position of the hard core of the movement. Its most articulate representative, Abu’l-Kalām Āzād, was distinguished from others not only because of his belief in the necessity of the ‘reconstruction’ of Islam, but also by his mastery of Islamic theology. His views agreed with those of Mustapha Kemal so far as he too considered the Ottoman Caliphate to be different from the Papacy. But Āzād’s reasoning was his own: in Islam, ‘spiritual leadership is the due of God and his Prophet alone’. So obedience to the Caliphate was binding on all Muslims, though not in the same degree as submission to God and his Prophet’.²⁰ In all this he was reproducing, with only occasional alterations Māwardī’s theory. It is, therefore, difficult to imagine that men like him simply changed their mind overnight to swim with the tide of secularism, and supported the abolition of the Caliphate. On the other hand, we could not find conclusive evidence to judge with certainty the response of the Indian Muslim thinkers – as distinct from the masses – to the abolition. The only substantial evidence is provided by the work of Muḥammad Iqbāl, the most sophisticated of Islamic modernists in India, who gave a clear judgement in favour of the Turkish move. But then Iqbāl was deeply influenced by the Western modes of thought, and in any case could not be regarded as the representative of the ‘orthodox’ trend.

Iqbāl also approved of the abolition of the Caliphate primarily on the same grounds as those we just quoted from Mustapha Kemal: the Ottoman Caliphate, he said, had long become ‘a mere symbol of a power which departed long ago’, because the Iranians always stood aloof from the Turks in view of their doctrinal differences; Morocco ‘always looked askance at them, and Arabia has cherished private ambition’.²¹ The idea of a universal Caliphate was a workable idea when the empire of Islam was intact, but it had now become an obstacle in the way of a reunion of independent Muslim states. But how could the abolition of the Caliphate be justified in terms of the Sunnī political theory?

Iqbāl’s basic answer to this question was that the Turks had merely practised ijtihād by taking the view that the Caliphate could be vested sometimes in a body of persons, or an elected assembly. Although ‘the religious doctors of Egypt and India had not yet expressed themselves on the point’, he personally found the Turkish view to be ‘perfectly sound’: ‘the republican form of government is not only thoroughly consistent with the spirit of Islam, but has also become a necessity in view of the new forces that are set free in the world of Islam’.²² He further cited two examples of earlier Sunnī adaptation of the Caliphate to political realities: first was the abolition of the condition of Qarashiyat (descent from the tribe of Quraysh) by Qāḍī Abū Bakr Bāqillānī (d. 403/1013), for the candidates of the Caliphate, in deference to the ‘facts of experience’, namely the political fall of the Quraysh and their consequent inability to rule the world of Islam. The second was Ibn Khaldūn’s suggestion, four centuries later, that since the power of the Quraysh had vanished, there was ‘no alternative but to accept the most powerful man as Imām or Caliph in the country where he happens to be powerful’. Iqbāl concluded from all this that there was no difference between the position of Ibn Khaldūn, who had realised ‘the hard logic of facts’, and the attitude of modern Turks, who were equally ‘inspired . . . by the realities of experience, and not by the scholastic reasonings of jurists who lived and thought under different conditions of life’.²³

These were brave words at the time, expressive of an enlightened spirit impatient with the backwardness of the Muslims and the obscurantism of their religious leaders. But if they were meant to persuade those leaders to change their attitude, and come to terms with the modern world, they proved to be self-defeating. This was partly because they were based on the sanguine assumption that the abolition of the Caliphate did not necessarily mean the severance of Turkey’s links with Islam as the state religion, and their persuasiveness was therefore soon sapped by events. But the more important reason was Iqbāl’s constant resort to arguments resting on ‘facts of experience’, ‘realities of experience’, and ‘hard logic of facts’. Now it is quite possible to find the equivalents of these notions in the Sunnī legal devices of istiḥsān, evading a fixed code in the interests of ‘what is better’, and istiṣlāḥ, doing the same ‘for the sake of general benefit to the community’. But even these genuine dispensations for occasional departures from established norms, let alone Iqbāl’s philosophical escapades, must have shocked the orthodoxy, when the point at issue was not the infraction of minor rules of the Islamic commercial or penal law but the fate of the highest institution in the political structure of Sunnī Islam. Iqbāl’s appeal for the revitalisation of political thought in Islam was further weakened by his attack on the ‘Ulamā’ as scholastic jurists bent on perpetuating legal anachronisms. However, if his appeal was to have had any chance of success beyond the tiny circle of Westernised Muslims, it would have been thanks to the blessing of the same ‘Ulamā’, and their readiness to convey it to a wider audience. He was undoubtedly aware of his need for the traditionalists’ support. This is clear from his attempt to seek legitimacy for his modernism in the views of two figures from the past – Bāqillānī and Ibn Khaldūn. These precedents were of dubious value to his case. Bāqillānī’s opinion did carry some weight with the conservatives; but it could not go very far in silencing their criticisms of the Turks, because suggesting the elimination of only one prerequisite of the Caliphate was different from endorsing its total demise. Ibn Khaldūn was even less effective, since, however eminent his position as a founder of sociology, he occupies no place in the pantheon of Sunnī theology or jurisprudence.

Outside India, the only authoritative religious response to the abolition came from Egypt – from a group of religious scholars, who held a session to discuss the matter, under the chairmanship of the Rector of al-Azhar, Shaykh Muḥammad Abu’l-Faḍl al-Jīzāwī, and the President of the High Religious Court, Muḥammad Muṣṭafā al-Marāghī, and attended by the representatives of the principal legal schools of Sunnīsm. The gathering of such figures, particularly at a time when the revivalist legacy of Muḥammad ‘Abduh stood at a very low ebb among the Azharites, could hardly be suspect of harbouring any modernistic, let alone secularist, intentions. Nevertheless, the resolution of the scholarly gathering shows that even in this body, despite its orthodox pronouncements, there was a willingness to come to terms with the new development. This is apparent, first, from its refusal to be drawn into the dispute over the theoretical justification of the Caliphate. Whereas the traditional exponents of the Caliphate have mostly insisted on its canonical obligatoriness (wujūb shar‘ī), the resolution merely defined the Caliph or Imām as ‘the representative of the Prophet in guarding the religion, and implementing its precepts, and administering the affairs of the people in accord with the religious law’ – a standard definition, but one which made no claim about the Caliphate being necessitated by the divine revelation. This could be conducive to a more flexible framework to deliberate on its future. Second, the resolution criticised those Muslims who still felt themselves bound by the oath of allegiance to the deposed Caliph and regarded obedience to him as a religious duty. It is interesting that although its authors belonged to Arab culture, the resolution did not base its criticism of such Muslims on the belief that the Turks were wrong in arrogating the Caliphate to themselves. Instead, it merely argued that the oath of allegiance had been illegal in the first place, because it had been taken to a Caliph who did not deserve this title in so far as he lacked temporal power. Third, the resolution accepted the abolition of the Caliphate as a fait accompli, and although noting the consternation and anxiety that it had caused among Muslims, thought that it was now time to hold a congress to decide the future of the Caliphate ‘on a basis which would not only conform to Islamic tenets, but would also fit the Islamic arrangements to which the Muslims had consented for their government’ – a clear reference to the modern political systems adopted by various Muslim nations in recent times. The authors also conceded that this could be done only after recovering ‘[our] composure, after deliberation and awareness of different viewpoints’.²⁴

In view of such evident clues to the readiness for accommodation with non-traditionalists, the rest of the story of the debate over the Caliphate in Egypt – and in Sunnī Islam – is a frustrating tale of deadlocked polemics. Because, although the name of the next critic of the Caliphate, ‘Alī ‘Abd ar-Rāziq (d. 1966), marked the highest point in the debate, it also marked a vociferous orthodox reaction which quashed all hopes for the debate being brought to a conclusion, or to a synthesis of opposing views. ‘Abd ar-Rāziq was certainly the most controversial theorist thrown up by the crisis. He took advantage of the abolition of the Caliphate to launch a forceful attack on the entire traditional school of Islamic political thought. On this point, he contested the views of not only the orthodox ‘Ulamā’, but also modernists like Rashīd Riḍā, who, despite differences, shared his anti-dogmatic feelings. All this was somewhat paradoxical, because he had a deeper immersion in traditional education: he had completed all his studies at al-Azhar, and acted for some time as a judge of the Religious Court. Having attended, at the new Egyptian University, lectures by Nallino on literature, and those by Santillana on philosophy, and having spent some time in Oxford pursuing studies in law and economy (which he had to leave unfinished because of the outbreak of the First World War), he was also familiar with Western culture. But contrary to those of Iqbāl, his writings did not indicate much absorption of Western thought – this, in fact, was his strong point in so far as his ideas were meant to influence moderate religious opinion. In his principal work Al-Islām wa uṣūl al-ḥukm (‘Islam and the Fundamentals of Government’) he also made greater use of the legal and historical antecedents of the Sunnī political theory. So in presenting his ideas ‘Abd ar-Raziq enjoyed a vantage-point to contribute to a new Sunnī consensus on the relationship between Islam and the modern state.²⁵ His central argument was that the Caliphate had no basis either in the Qur’ān, or the Tradition, or the consensus. To prove each part of this argument, he dealt in some detail with the major pieces of evidence which are normally drawn from these three sources in establishing the ‘obligatoriness’ of the Caliphate. He rightly said that the Qur’ān nowhere makes any mention of the Caliphate in the specific sense of the political institution we know in history. As he says, this is all the more puzzling in view of what God has said in it: ‘We have neglected nothing in the Book’ (6:38). All the verses which are commonly supposed to sanction the Caliphate do in fact nothing of the sort: they merely enjoin the Muslims to obey God, the Prophet and the ‘Holders of Authority’. It is the term ‘Holders of Authority’ (ulu’l-amr) which is alleged by some Sunnī writers to mean the Caliphs. But the great commentators of the Qur’ān have expressed a different opinion: according to Bayḍāwī it means the Muslim contemporaries of the Prophet, and according to Zamakhsharī, the ‘Ulamā’.²⁶ Nor can any convincing proof be extracted from the sayings attributed to the Prophet: ‘The Imāms [should be] from the Quraysh’ or ‘He who dies and has no obligation of allegiance [to the Imām] dies the death of ignorance’: ‘even when’, says ‘Abd ar-Rāziq, ‘one assumes these ḥadīths to be authentic, they do not prove that the Caliphate is a religious doctrine, and one of the articles of faith’. Christ has said: ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto Christ what is Christ’s’; but this cannot be taken to mean that Christ has regarded Caesar’s regime to be necessary for his followers. Similarly, Islam has called upon the Muslims to respect and help the poor, or emancipate slaves, but this does not signify the obligatoriness of poverty and slavery.²⁷

To dispose of consensus as the last, conceivable sanction, ‘Abd ar-Rāziq argued that, judging from concrete historical instances, consensus, whether in the sense of the agreement of the Prophet’s Companions and their followers, or that of the ‘Ulamā’ or the entire Muslim community, has never played any role in installing the Caliphs – except in the case of the first four. The Caliphate has always been established by force, and maintained by oppression: it is for this reason that political science has always been a barren discipline, and political writings have been so scant among the Muslims. If there has been any consensus serving as the legitimiser of the Caliphate in history, it has been of the kind that the Muslim jurists refer to as ‘the consensus of silence’ (ijmā‘sukūtī). Being himself an expert on Islamic jurisprudence,²⁸ ‘Abd ar-Rāziq felt confident enough to declare that consensus in this sense can never be used to deduce ‘religious proof and canonical rule’. To underline the perils of ‘consensus of silence’ he mentioned the example of the enthronement of Fayṣal, the son of Sharīf Ḥusayn, as the King of Iraq, after the First World War, which was justified by the British claim that ‘the people who loose and bind’ (ahl al-ḥall wa’l ‘aqd), namely the religious and political leaders, had consented to it. From a strictly legal point of view, he said, the British were right: there had indeed been an election of sorts, in the form of consultation with the tribal chiefs and the ‘Ulamā’ – but this was as valid a form of consensus as the one arranged by the Umayyad ruler, Mu ‘āwiyah, to receive the oath of allegiance to his son Yazīd: in the year 55/674 he summoned all the representatives of Muslims to an assembly in which he obtained their agreement to Yazīd’s succession at the point of the sword.²⁹

Thus far, ‘Abd ar-Rāziq’s reasonings could be excused by many a traditionalist as a legitimate expression of an unconventional opinion on the Caliphate – especially at a time when that institution was completely discredited. But he then doomed his book to orthodox damnation by introducing an issue which, although being related to the question of the Caliphate, was tangential to his immediate concern. This was the question whether Islam, as a system of religious doctrines, necessitated the creation of government at all. No sincere Muslim can answer this question in the negative without exposing himself to serious inconsistency. ‘Abd ar-Rāziq accordingly admitted that contrary to the Caliphate, the creation of government has in fact been envisaged in the Qur’ān as an essential instrument to administer the affairs of Muslims, and protect their interests: when God says that he has elevated certain individuals above others (43:32), or when He orders the Prophet to adjudicate among people according to the Book, and not to follow individual vagaries (5:48), He is indeed proclaiming the necessity of government. But this again does not mean that government is a fundamental principle of religion. True the Prophet, during his period of messengership, also performed some political acts, such as conducting wars, appointing officials, collecting alms-tax and distributing spoils of war, but none of these acts was directly related to his Prophetic mission. Even jihād cannot be considered as a function of prophecy, because according to ‘Abd ar-Rāziq’s reading of the Qur’ān, God has instructed the Muslims to propagate their religion only through peaceful persuasion and preaching. Whenever the Prophet resorted to acts of war, it was not for the sake of disseminating the religious call, but ‘for the sake of state [or kingdom, mulk], and towards consolidating the Islamic polity. And there is no state which is not based on the sword, and sustained by virtue of violence and subjugation’.³⁰ This should mean that all the other verses in the Qur’ān enjoining, for instance, the Muslims to strike the infidels wherever they find them, should be interpreted in the same vein – although ‘Abd ar-Rāziq does not explicitly say so. What is significant is that he thus draws a distinct line between the Prophet’s position as a responsible statesman, and his position as a religious or spiritual teacher. Hence, all the Prophet’s political acts should be explained in terms of the requirements of maintaining an emerging state, but any attempt at relating them to the essence of his divine mission is totally unjustified. Ironically, a crucial reason mentioned by the author in support of this argument is the principle of individual responsibility in Islam – that is, one of the main points used by modern, radical writers to encourage the Muslims to take a more active part in the political life of their societies: had God wanted the Prophet to undertake the political as well as religious leadership of the Muslims, He would not have warned the Prophet repeatedly against acting as the ‘agent’ (wakīl), ‘guardian’ (ḥafīẓ), or ‘holder of absolute authority (musayṭir) over the Muslims, while reminding him that his sole function is to communicate (al-balāgh) the divine message through wise words, sermon and dialectics.³¹

The conclusion of all this debate was the most subtle part of ‘Abd ar-Rāziq’s arguments – and one which has been most misunderstood by many of his critics and expositors alike, with damaging results for the overall impression that his work made on religious thinking. This conclusion can be stated in two propositions: first, political authority and government, however indispensable for implementing Islamic ideals, do not belong to the essence of Islam and specifically do not constitute any of its cardinal principles.³² Second, Islam, if properly understood, leaves the Muslims free to choose whatever form of government they find suitable to ensure their welfare. The opposite belief that in Islam, religion and politics form a unified whole, is wrong so far as it associates politics primarily with the Caliphate, and then with the despotic regimes that have ruled the Muslims throughout history. ‘ Abd ar-Rāziq considers the currency of this belief to be the result of both the observations of well-meaning, ‘ realistic’ historians like Ibn Khaldūn who have erected an existing state of affairs into a dogmatic axiom, and the cynical insinuation of the despots themselves who wanted to give an appearance of sanctity to their rule.³³ The final remark of the book summed up the author’s urge to see his conclusions turned to the service of political activism among Muslims today: ‘There is nothing in the religion which prevents Muslims from competing with other nations in the field of social and political sciences, and from demolishing that antiquated order which has subjugated and humiliated them, and to build up rules of their state and the organisation of their government on the basis of the most modern achievements of human reason, and on the most solid experiences of nations as to the best principles of government’.³⁴

It is possible that if the essential ideas of the book had not been dressed in such a provocative language, they would have been received differently by the orthodox establishment – at a time when it was reeling under the blows of the Turkish secularisers. It is an indication of the tendentious spirit in which the book was treated by the orthodox ‘Ulamā’ that, in their most authoritative statement denouncing its contents, they singled out a neutral reference to Bolshevism by the author as evidence of his Communistic beliefs. ‘Abd ar-Rāziq’s actual remark had been that if the Muslims jurists, in establishing the necessity of the Caliphate, merely wanted to demonstrate the necessity of government in general, then what they said was true: ‘Promoting the religious symbols’, he said, ‘and ensuring the people’s welfare do indeed depend on the Caliphate, in the sense of government – in whatever form and kind the government may be, absolutist or conditional, personal or republican, despotic constitutional or consultative, democratic, socialist or bolshevist.’³⁵ Apparently seizing on this sentence, the Special Court of al-Azhar, set up to pass judgement on the author, declared: ‘In addition to negating the religious foundation of the Islamic (state), and revolting against the repeated cases of the Muslims’ consensus with regard to their form of government, he takes the position of licensing the Muslims to instal a Bolshevic state.’³⁶ The more draconian measure was taken by another court, composed of twenty-five prominent scholars of al-Azhar, which, invoking a law enacted in 1911 binding the institution to prosecute the offenders against the prestige of the ‘Ulamā’, deprived ‘Abd ar-Rāziq of both his Azharite diploma and judicial appointment.

All this was understandable in the emotionally-charged atmosphere prevailing in the Sunnī world in 1925. But the regrettable fact was that when passions subsided, instead of such anathemisations giving way to a more sober judgement, the work itself fell into oblivion, except in the studies of a few Western scholars – until recent times. The orthodox ‘Ulamā’ were not, of course, short of arguments against the work, so far as they ignored ‘Abd ar-Rāziq’s distinction between Caliphate and government, and presumed that if they could prove the legitimacy of both on the basis of Muslim historical practices, that should be enough to prove the ‘obligatoriness’ of both too. The Special Court of al-Azhar peremptorily dismissed the work in these terms: ‘It is evident that the bases of government, and the sources of legislation with the Muslims are the Book of God, the Prophetic Tradition, and the consensus of the Muslims. For Muslims, there can be nothing better than these. Shaykh ‘Alī [’Abd ar-Rāziq] wants Muslims to demolish what is based on these foundations.’ Another religious scholar, Shaykh Muḥammad Bakhīt, in a voluminous rebuttal, overlooked all the nuances in the author’s case by reducing it to a simple claim that ‘the system on which the government of Abū Bakr, and three other Rightly-Guided [Rāshidūn] Caliphs was based is ineffective and antiquated because of its disconnection with the social and political sciences, and that the achievements of human intellect are sounder and better than it.’ He further simplified the debate by saying that ‘this amounts to the author’s negation of the principles of Islamic government, and of what was set up by the Emissary of God . . . compared with which nothing can be better and sounder, emanating as it does from the light of God.’³⁷

The tenor of recent criticisms of ‘Abd ar-Rāziq is different. Echoing the growing modernist urge for the integration of religious fervour with political action, these assail him less for his challenge to an institution long revered by the Sunnī Muslims than for his denial of the inseparability of religion and politics in Islam.³⁸ This line of criticism is justified to the extent that its aim is to prove that Islamic ideals cannot be realised only through persuasion and moral example. But it still does not disprove ‘Abd ar-Rāziq’s central contention that neither the Caliphate nor government constitutes an article of the Muslim faith. More significantly, what both the traditional and modern critics fail to appreciate is that the main lesson which he tries to convey to his readers through the more explicit of his conclusions is less concerned with the depoliticisation of Islam than with showing the main cause of the poverty of political thought and the atrophying of the critical faculties among Muslims. He holds this cause to be the sacrosanct character that the Muslims have historically attributed to their regimes, and their resultant belief that any revolt against rulers is tantamount to a revolt against the fundamental principles of Islam. This view is certainly not invalidated by the occasional dispensations that the jurisconsults have made for legitimate rebellion against unjust rulers, since in practice the ultimate authority for ascertaining the legitimacy of any rebellion is itself beholden to the rulers.

E. I. J. Rosenthal has raised a different objection that might be similarly levelled against ‘Abd ar-Rāziq from an orthodox standpoint, which is inherent in any conception of Islam as an all-inclusive system of temporal and spiritual precepts. This is the relationship between state and law in Islam. The Imāmate or Caliphate, he avers, ‘is incomprehensible and meaningless without recognising the place and function of law in it. The student of Islam from the time of the Caliphate to the modern age is aware that the question of a religious or a lay state depends on the place of the Sharī‘ah in a state created by and for the Muslims. The source (divine or human) and the extent of the law of such a state determine its character. The law in force makes it a religious or a lay state. . . . By definition, then, a state whose criminal and private law is not based on the Sharī‘ah is not an Islamic state, even where Islam is the state religion and the personal status law is the Sharī‘ah-law, be it entirely traditional or modernised in varying degree, and whether this personal status law is administered by judges under religious or state authority.’³⁹ It is true that any real or presumed discretionary power vouchsafed by God and the Prophet to the Muslims in shaping their political institutions is limited by the imperative necessity of enforcing the provisions of the Sharī‘ah in the penal and private domains. But one must not forget that despite the Sharī‘ah’s grasp of nearly all aspects of individual and social life, there is no such thing as a unified Islamic legal system, enshrined in integrated codes, and accepted and acknowledged unquestionably by all Muslims. There are confessional and sectarian divergencies over a wide spectrum of issues, ranging from the forbidden varieties of wine to the rules of the holy war. Added to this is the possibility of personal interpretation of the law, a possibility which, so far as Sunnī Islam is concerned, has been enhanced ever since the birth of modernism in the teachings of ‘Abduh. And finally, when it comes to the application of the law, the willingness and readiness of the state is a determining factor, and this in turn is a function of its ideological and political underpinnings. This is particularly borne out by the emergence of a number of states in the twentieth century which have aimed at making Islam the sole, or the predominant, basis of their social, economic and political orientation. Saudi Arabia, Libya, Pakistan, and the Islamic Republic of Iran have all equally valid claims to be considered as Islamic states. But this has by no means resulted in their adoption of a uniform system of penal or private law. This is illustrated by the divergent ways in which they have treated the seemingly straightforward Qur’ānic punishment of amputation of hands for theft. The differences in legal systems can be at least partly put down to the specific nature of a ruling sect (Wahhābism in Saudi Arabia), a certain synthesis of Islam and socialism (Libya), the need of a military regime for legitimacy (Pakistan), and the wide scope allowed to the individual judgement of religious leaders under Shī‘īsm (Iran). In none of these cases is there a direct correlation between the commitment to Islam and the nature of the regime as embodied in its legal system. To the extent that any doctrinal or ideological element has been instrumental in moulding the political and juridical institutions in each country, it has stemmed directly from what its leaders perceive to be genuine Islam – a perception which is determined by a host of psychological, social and historical factors.

But if the installing of the state, far from being a religious duty of Muslims, is merely a contingent act of political wisdom, how can the attainment of Islamic ideals be guaranteed? ‘Abd ar-Rāziq’s reply to this question is implicit in his repeated descriptions of Muḥammad’s messengership as a spiritual, rather than political, leadership: the simplicity of the Prophet’s political arrangements for conducting the affairs of the Islamic state, and his refusal to leave behind any set of detailed administrative directives for the future Muslim generations, testify to his wish not to see his ministry associated too closely with the arts of statecraft. As Rosenthal has noted, he thus asserted ‘the purely and exclusively religious character of Islam’.⁴⁰ If it had been allowed to develop in a free and honest debate, it would have eventually involved an overdue analysis of an area of Islamic culture which has always been vulnerable particularly to Western criticism – the question of the self-subsistence of moral values. The crux of any exaltation of the Prophet’s spiritual, as opposed to his political or military leadership is that it is also an exaltation of individual conscience versus forcible, collective conformism. This is not a vision alien to Islam – witness all those Qur’ānic verses absolving the Prophet from responsibility for the salvation of individual Muslims, something which is essentially the fruit of their own actions. The systematised form of this vision is a moral philosophy which values good deeds only in so far as they are anchored in the fulfilled conscience of their agents, and not in the fear of any external sanctions, immediate or eschatological.

‘Abd ar-Rāziq did not have the opportunity to develop his views into such explosive conclusions. Even if he wanted to do so, violent orthodox reaction made sure that he would not.

Such was the inconclusive end of the first, and perhaps the most important, controversy in twentieth-century Sunnī political thought. The abolition of the Caliphate was outwardly a great victory for the modernists – Muslim ‘revisionists’ no less than secularisers – since it removed the last visible symbol of an outworn power structure. But the real victor at the end of the day was the orthodoxy which had effectively prevented a momentous change in the political reality from leading to a corresponding adjustment in the conventional notions of political legitimacy. Its success was facilitated to a large extent by the over-confident, intemperate mood of some of the modernists, which made them insensitive to whatever potential for reform existed inside the religious community. Instead of developing this potential by adopting a more discriminating approach, the modernists launched an offensive which, simultaneous as it was with the secularisation of Turkey, lent plausibility to the traditionalists’ charge that what the modernists sought was not a simple modification of religious attitudes, but the very eradication of Islam as an all-inclusive system of moral, social and political guidelines. The ideological conflict between the two groups was later compounded by a cultural gap: while in the twenties the Turkish or Egyptian opponents of the Caliphate still expressed themselves in the conventional terms and concepts of the orthodox theory, the later generations of modernists increasingly tended to use terms and concepts borrowed from Western schools of political thought.

2 The crisis over the Caliphate