Today, we share an excerpt from a video discussion moderated by Jacob Kildoo (full interview here). Jacob had the opportunity to sit down with Paul L. Heck to discuss Heck’s book, Political Theology and Islam: From the Birth of Empire to the Modern State.
JK: So your book sets out to study “politics” in Islam. What kind of phenomenon is this that you’re picking out? What exactly does “politics” mean in the context of historical Islamic societies?
PH: Thanks, Jake, for that question. One thing I want to highlight in this book is that politics is never simply a struggle for control of power, a society’s resources, policies, or even opinions, but it is also a struggle for moral order, and that’s true throughout the history of Islam as well. In other word, we scholars, when we study politics in a tradition, we have to look to goodness no less than to power. If we say that politics is what gives moral coherency to a society, then politics is not only about the people in power—it’s also about communities educated in traditions of ethics. For example, in the American context, politics is not just the woman and man in Washington. It’s also the grandmothers who help out when a family in the neighborhood is in crisis. It’s also the parents who make sure the local soccer league is running and the local library is well stocked.
The same is true in Islam. The question of righteousness is front and center in the message of Islam, but the history of Islam has commonly been studied through the lens of power—not only caliphates and sultanates, but also Sharia power. With this study—with this book—I’m suggesting that there’s something more to this story. We need to take into account the ethics of Islam, how that has shaped communities and made them look to divine guidance as the sovereign shaping their lives alongside, or even beyond, governmental power.
JK: It seems to me that one of the distinct contributions of your monograph is the decision to focus on politics through the lens of theology, and more specifically political theology. How does this way of framing the issue help us to better understand Islamic political history?
PH: Yeah, theology is central to this book. First, there’s a lot of confusion when it comes to political theology today. In this book, I take it not just as a descriptor of religious politics, but as a distinct approach to all politics. All politics includes transcendent claims. Here in Washington D.C., you need only take a walk down to the monuments to see that the nation is founded on a sense of its own transcendent character. In other words, power makes sense of itself by presenting itself in terms of the nation’s devotions. In America, those devotions include a devotion to freedom; in France, to non-religion; in Pakistan, to the Prophet. However, the transcendent claims of the ruling power, whether a dynasty or a democracy, are never the only transcendent claims on the block. People also live in pious communities of some kind, with their own understandings of transcendence. In other words, politics also includes a set of transcendent claims, and to study them, we need theology. And without it, we will always be blind to a key aspect of politics.
This is no less true in the study of politics in Islam. Theology helps us see how the political devotions of Muslims are diversely oriented to transcendent claims, whether those of the governmental authority or those of divine guidance, that is the ethics of Islam as they are learned in pious communities.