Key concepts
1.1 Umma, ulu al-amr, siyasa
A common starting point to discuss the notion of ‘Islamic state’, or, more precisely, ‘Islamic governance’ in the pre-modern period is the assertion that Islamic sources say precious little about norms of governance and the state.
It has been suggested that concepts in the Qur’an are only ‘quasi-political’. This perception of a lacuna may simply be a result of the conceptual imperialism of the modern nation-state on our reception of the Islamic past. In fact, if by ‘political’ is meant the concern for, management and redistribution of resources within a well-defined community, the Qur’an, not to mention hadith literature, is replete with political concepts, including even those that are distinctive to Islam, such as rejection initially of honorifics commonly used to refer to kings for centuries in the Near East, such as malik or sultan, and the unprecedented use instead of amir and khalifa.1 More importantly, the notion of a community (umma), well defined by the end of the Medinan period, complete with imperatives and measures for the ongoing coherence and unity of the community, with intra-communal rights (e.g. Sura 49) defined distinctly from those pertaining to the outsiders (e.g. Sura 5). This self-understanding is reflected in the so-called ‘Constitution of Medina’, whose import is aptly summed up in Michael Lecker’s meticulous book-length study of the document, which concludes:The Kitab is a unified document rather than a series of documents. It is made of two clearly defined parts, one including the treaty of the Mu’minun, or the Muhajirun and the Ansar, and another including a non-belligerency treaty with the Jews. The Arabs of Medina who were still idol worshippers were not part of it, and the same is true of the majority of the Jews of Medina, including the main Jewish tribes Nadir, Qurayza and Qaynuqa'...
The tribal system remained in place; as long as there were tribes there were also agreements, formal and informal, guaranteeing common responsibility and cooperation between their members.2In sum, the overall teachings of the Qur’an contextualized against the backdrop of the Prophet’s mission construct the umma as a ‘super-tribe’3 and tacitly approve the prevailing Arab custom with significant and gradual modifications, and as such, a ‘state’ of sorts is constructed, as normative in its import as any other legal institution in the Qur’an. By the end of the Medinan period, the prevailing tribal system was supplanted by a mitigated form of clan-based but centrally governed society which tolerated a large measure of flexibility and self-government (but not, strictly speaking, autonomy, as norms eventually were all based in the logic of the divine authority). It is evident in the Qur’anic imperatives pertaining to criminal (2:178, 5:38; 17:33), commercial (e.g. verses prohibiting usury), marital, testamentary and inheritance laws (Sura 4). This was a ‘system’ inasmuch as its various parts cohered with and complemented each other, and worked toward to the singular goal of the realization of ‘the best community raised for humankind’ (3:110).
Perhaps the most important, and certainly most discussed, among the Qur’anic political imperatives was the authority of the ulu al-amr — those in possession of amr (4:59, 4:83). The political upheavals of the first century seem to have led to a gradual depoliticization of Qur’anic interpretation. The exegetical history of verse 4:59 that commands obeying ‘those in authority from among you’ is revealing in this regard. According to reports in the exegesis of al-Tabari attributed to 'Abdullah b. 'Abbas (d. ca. 68/688 or 70/690), this phrase usually indicates the leaders of missions and delegations. Six reports indicate that ulu al-amr refers to leaders or rulers (umara') and another 12 reports indicate that it refers to scholars.
Tabari goes on to conclude that ulu al-amr must indicate rulers on the strength of three general hadith reports that require obeying the ruler.4 From a historical perspective, the latter interpretation could not have been intended at the time of revelation, as no recognizable class of scholars (ahl al-fiqh, ahl al-'ilm or 'ulama ') existed in the Prophet’s life apart from the leaders of missions and expeditions; only when the Prophet was not available to judge would obedience to ‘those in authority’ make contextual sense. The verse, therefore, is best seen as establishing the principle of deputization of the Prophet’s authority in his absence. The same principle could be extended temporally, that is, after the demise of the Prophet. The conduct of the Prophet’s Companions, reflected in Abu Bakr’s succession as a leader of the umma but not a prophet, and his war against the backsliders (ahl al-ridda), therefore, is most plausibly seen as being in step with the Quranic political vision.In hindsight, this ‘political system’ hit its first snag in the succession of the Prophet, for which, according to the mainstream Sunni account, there was no specific guidance except if the general command to consult, shura, is extended to cover this situation. There is no denying that when compared to, say, the meticulously elaborated distribution of inheritance, the Qur'an is silent on the issue.
Whether the Medinan community can be termed ‘state’ depends on which definition one chooses, that of intellectual historians or political scientists. European intellectual historians generally agree that it emerged in Europe between 1300 and 1600 due to a number of specific developments. What set it apart from any prior form of rule is the confluence of a number of conceptions that constructed the state as a ‘an omnipotent yet impersonal power’:
1) the state as a separate legal and constitutional order that governs, abstracted and distinct from the monarch or the officials who hold office;
2) being the sole source of law, exclusive of God, the Church or the Holy Roman Empire, within its own territory; and
3) the sole appropriate object of its citizens’ allegiance.5
Territoriality, abstraction (i.e.
impersonality) and sovereignty, are thus held to be the necessary ingredients of the modern state. Unless the state ideology is identified as a national religion, secularity should also be added to the list of the modern state’s attributes. This maximalist definition employed by European historians is to be contrasted with the more widely employed minimalist definitions, such as one offered by Charles Tilly, that sees ‘state’ as ‘coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some respects over all other organizations within substantial territories’.6 There is no doubt that the Medinan order represented such a ‘state’ by the time the Prophet passed away, one that was even further consolidated by the time Abu Bakr was finished with the wars of apostasy. Employing a minimalist definition, while convenient, may blind us to the enormous differences to our modern states that are better attended to by the maximalist definition. Students of Islamic law, even when disregarding the historians’ caution, must remember that the difference between a pre-modern state and the ‘modern state’ is not merely one of quantity (more power, more technology, etc.), but of quality.To sum up, the early Muslim community imagined itself as a single and singular community (umma) that has inherited the prophetic mission, whose affairs are managed by authorities from within it (ulu al-amr), who must govern through consultation (shura) — well-known, militarized differences ensued, concerning whether the right to give consultation was shared equally by the believing community or limited to the Prophet’s tribe, Quraysh, or his immediate clan, Banu Hashim. This sense of limited self-government represents a conscious break from the Israelite tradition in the sense that God’s spokesmen now no longer ruled directly. This break is remarkable, for, in most ways, continuity with the Israelite tradition remained the rule.
The Qur'an referred to the Israelites frequently as an earlier community of Muslims from whose examples, both good and bad, Muslims were to learn. Yet, there is evidence in early Islam of the recognition of a categorical difference between Islamic and Israelite attitudes toward government or political power, for Islam’s prophet is the last one and his successors were neither divinely chosen nor guided in a direct sense. This break is expressed in the following hadith report: ‘The Israelites used to be led by prophets (kdnat Banu Isrd'tl tasusuhum al-anbiyd'); whenever a prophet died, another followed him. But after me, there is no prophet, but there will be many deputies (khulafa ’)’.7 The root s-w-s employed in this report to refer to the Israelite prophets’ shepherding and leadership of their people also provides the modern Arabic word for politics, siydsa.1.2 Governance fhukm, hukuma)
Even though the modern notion of state as an entity apart from the rulers cannot be said to have existed, sophisticated abstractions and distinctions concerning power and governance did exist. Abu Hilal al-Askari (d. ca. 1005/395 AH), an Arabic literary critic and rhetorician of Persian extraction, distinguishes between authority in abstract (mulk) and the group of individuals who come to possess it: ‘The difference between mulk (dominion, authority) and dawla is that mulk means power, the ability to coerce the majority of people, whereas dawla connotes the transfer of fortune from one group of people to another’.8 A few centuries later, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) shifted the focus of legitimacy on the substance of government (i.e. its ultimate mandate to uphold the divine law) rather than the person of the ruler in judging legitimacy and nature of rule. Whereas the earlier Sunni theorists had imagined political legitimacy in terms of the inherited authority of the successors of the Prophet, continued when necessary through formalistic rituals, the Mongol destruction of the Baghdadi caliphate forced Ibn Taymiyya to articulate legitimacy in terms of the norms and mechanisms by which a ruler actually wields the power (al-shawka) necessary to uphold the law.
Through a creative deployment of well-known verses and hadiths, he conceived of the people (i.e. Muslims) as a caravan obliged to appoint one of them as its leaders. Thus, to recall Walter Ulmann’s conceptualization of political transformation in early modern Europe, Ibn Taymiyya can be said to have articulated an ascending rather than a descending notion of legitimate Islamic politics.9One element that decisively sets this evolved political vision apart from the modern concept of state is the latter’s territoriality and the secular sovereignty that is built into it.10 A missionizing super-tribe, ‘raised for humankind’, could accept territorial markers only as a contingency, as a second-order reality. A necessary feature of the modern state being its ability and sole prerogative to define the rights of its citizens in contradistinction to those of all others, there never developed, as far as I am aware, in Islamic law concepts and institutions by which the rights of Muslims of one region can be discriminated from those of others.
For the reasons alluded to above, often the attempt to find equivalents of political terms of recent European origin in Islamicate languages without regard to the conceptual framework has led to the omission of crucial facts. The family of words that attended political discourse in Islamic history included terms such as siyasa (politics, policy), sulta or sultan (authority; ruler), khilafa (successorship or deputyship), mulk (dominion, kingship) and dawla (dynasty, reign), and last but not least, al-amr (ulu al-amr, amir, imdra, imra). This last is the most difficult to accurately translate, for amr could mean any matter, affair or command, but its linguistic generality has often confused unscrupulous readers. For, as Muhammad 'Imara (2009) has shown, it was the most frequently used term that was employed to refer to the ‘collective matter’, ‘political rule’ or ‘government’.
As for government, the contemporary word for it in contemporary Arabic and other Is- lamicate languages is hukdma. The root h-k-m in Arabic has the original meaning ‘to restrain or prevent someone from acting in an evil or foolish manner’ or ‘rein in [a horse]’. Since pre-Islamic times, hukm (another infinitive noun from the same root) has been used to refer to judgment, arbitration, passing sentence, decision making, and, in later Islamic history, political authority or government. In the Qur’an, the derivatives of the root h-k-m that are relevant to governance and arbitration are hukm, hikma and hukkdm. Hukm connotes the act or power ofjudgment, which in the ultimate sense is said to belong to God alone. Indeed, it is attributed only to God in the Qur'an with a few exception where al-hukm refers to the divine wisdom (or set of divine judgments) given to prophets (Q. 6:89, 19:12, 45:16). Since the Seljuq period (fifth/11th century), the term hukuma denoted the office or function of governorship, usually provincial or local, and this usage continues into the Ottoman period. By the end of the 18th century the word seems to have acquired the more abstract sense of rule, the exercise of political authority, or the institutions of government.
In what follows, Islamic history is periodized with respect to the development of political and legal institutions into four eras (early caliphate, imperial caliphate, sultunates and gunpowder empires), which are then outlined, followed by legal developments pertaining to governance in each period.
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