Sunni political theology and the problem of political ordering

Muslims, along with non-Muslim scholars, are in general agreement that the Prophet Mu­hammad, after emigrating to Medina, took on the functions of a secular ruler in addition to that of his prophetic office.³ But how would the nascent political order that he established first in Medina and then the entirety of the Arabian Peninsula that he subsequently brought under its rule during his lifetime be governed after his death, on the assumption that it was to survive his death? Muslim chronicles report that the Prophet’s contemporaries disagreed sharply on even the fundamental question of whether the Prophet’s state would continue after his death, much less how its governance should be organized if the state continued in existence.

The first was committed to a kind of post-Prophetic charismatic rule centred broadly around notions of fidelity to the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants through the marriage of his daughter Fatima and his cousin and son-in-law 'Ali b. Abi Talib, and their two sons, Hasan b. 'Ali b. Abi Talib and Husayn b. 'Ali b. Abi Talib, the Prophet Muhammad’s only grandsons. This sentiment eventually crystallized into the Shi'a branch of Islam, whose solution to post-Prophetic governance of the Muslim community was that a member of his household should serve as his successor, known as the Imam. The legitimacy of the Muslim community was guaranteed by the Imam who, being protected by God from error (masdm), ensured that the Muslim community continued to be faithful to divine command.

The second option was committed to a radical egalitarian conception of political legiti­macy combined with Puritan-like zeal in adherence to divine law.

The third option was pursued by the majority of the Muslim community, and later came to be known as the Sunnis. For this group, the community could govern itself through its own choice (ikhtiydr) of a ruler. In contrast to the Shi'a, they rejected the notion that lead­ership of the community was limited to the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants, or that the leader should have special charismatic qualities that would guard against error. Against both the Shi'a and the Khawarij, they rejected the doctrine that only the most virtuous member of the community could serve as the community’s leader, holding instead that the commu­nity was free to select any adult male who possessed the minimum combination of moral integrity (‘addla), knowledge of the law (‘ilm) and competence (kifdya). While the Sunni theory of succession imposed some important restrictions on who was eligible to lead, it did not impose superhuman requirements. The Sunnis had confidence in the ordinary person’s ability to act morally in accordance with the norms of divinely revealed law, without need either for the assistance of a charismatic Imam who is protected from sin, or a ruler of heroic moral virtue that never sins. The integrity of the community for the Sunnis was assured not by the special qualities of the ruler, but rather by the ability of the community to know, and adhere to, divine law.

Sunni political theology, by denying the notion that any person had a personal right (istihqdq) to lead the community, whether by virtue of charismatic descent, as the Shi'a claimed, or by virtue of superior virtue, as the Khawarij claimed, faced a peculiar moral quandary when it came to justifying political power: because all Muslims were substantially equal with re­spect to their potential to capacity to serve as leader, their potential for moral virtue, and their potential to know the law, on what basis could any of them claim a right to command the obedience of others who were their substantial equals? Indeed, as the Mamluk-era Shafi'i jurist Ibn 'Abd al-Salam pointed out, no human being was naturally more deserving of the right to command the obedience of others than anyone else. Moreover, obeying another hu­man being, in certain circumstances, could be a potentially blasphemous act, if the obedience was motivated by the false belief that another human being was the effective cause of actual benefit or harm, rather than the recognition that God is the only real benefactor. Obedience to another human being was therefore contrary to the fundamental principle of human inde­pendence and the theological principle that humans should serve only God, not one another.

The duty of obedience, therefore, could only be justified by explicit permission from God Himself. God, according to Ibn 'Abd al-Salam, permitted people to obey only legitimate rulers, but not ignorant kings and military rulers who were distinguished from others only by virtue of their possession of superior temporal power.

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