This wide-ranging study sets out to answer an unassumingly tricky question: What is politics in Islam? Paul L. Heck’s answer takes the form of a close analysis of sovereignty across Islamic history, approaching this concept from the perspective of political theology. As he illustrates, the history of politics in Islam is best understood as an ongoing struggle for a moral order between those who occupy positions of rulership and religious voices that communicate the ethics of Islam and educate the public in their religious and moral devotions. In this sense, sovereignty in Islam is split between ruling powers and pious communities, whose interactions range from close cooperation to outright competition. In Political Theology and Islam, Heck shows that it is precisely through these interactions that Islamic conceptions of sovereignty are constructed and negotiated.
This book is about a big question: What is politics in Islam? We have endless studies on politics across diverse contexts where Muslims have lived and rule has been established in the name of Islam. We also have endless studies on the many political treatises that Muslims have composed over the centuries. Digesting all these studies only leaves one with the impression that politics in Islam takes endless form. In some contexts, Muslims embrace democracy as a modern version of the principle of consultation (shūrā), which has deep roots in Islam as a communal decision-making process. In other contexts, Muslims claim that they can only be ruled by what God has revealed. By this view, human decision-making is a kind of political idolatry whereby one ends up “worshipping” by a rule other than God’s. In still other contexts, Muslims pledge allegiance to kings who claim to be successors to the Prophet Muhammad. Here, disobedience to the ruler is tantamount to infidelity. In the end, what can be said of politics in Islam? To be sure, communities disagree on fundamental matters, but it seems naïve to hope that the study of the history of Islam might offer a coherent picture of politics in Islam.
Such apparent incoherency features in the language that—it is commonly assumed— establishes the categories of politics in Islam. For example, the caliphate, a basic concept in that respect, eludes definition. Indeed, a survey of “caliphate” shows that a simple examination of politically relevant terms from the history of Islam will not disclose the meaning of politics in Islam. The idea of being a caliph, which was not unknown in pre-Islamic Arabia, is used in a particular way by the Qur’an, which connects it with the biblical idea of the righteous inheriting the land (e.g. Q 21.106). In that sense, caliphs are those who succeed the peoples of past nations (e.g. Q 24.55), now no more because of their failure to heed the message of God. Thus, according to the Qur’an, caliphs are not rulers but those whom God has ordained to prosper in “the land” because they live righteously, while the unrighteous are doomed to disappear.
However, recent studies show that Muslims have taken the qur’anic narrative on caliphs in multiple and sometimes apparently contradictory directions. For example, the caliphate of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, was fashioned as a globalizing power where modern states and international boundaries are religiously inconsequential and even constitute a roadblock to the supremacy of Islam over the world. It was also fashioned as a doctrinally pure society where those deemed insufficiently monotheistic, including Muslims who recognize creeds and authorities other than those of ISIS, are to be eliminated. In contrast, other Muslims see the caliphate as a kind of democracy. They build off the qur’anic discourse that speaks of Adam, humanity’s father, as caliph. In this view, then, all humans are caliphs, all the progeny of Adam and not only Muslims. As a result, no one has a privileged right to rule, and those who do rule are accountable to their fellow citizens, who, being offspring of Adam, are also caliphs. In sum, we seem to have two very different views of the caliphate in this current moment. One, as promoted by ISIS, signals a kind of authoritarianism under shari‘a rule, while the other, echoes 14 of which featured, for example, during the Arab Spring, signals a democratic society where all are political equals and shari‘a is cast as a set of human values. The point is not that one of these two modern interpretations of caliphate is more consistent with the qur’anic narrative, only to suggest the disparate ways in which Muslims “hear” the term today.