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I was educated in the Western canon of political philosophy. At the same time, I was learning Qu’ran and Muslim philosophy from Fazlur Rahman. I did not immediately realize how profoundly this shaped (and corrected) my understanding of critical political concepts. I studied Rousseau’s general will mindful of ijma and the umma. I read accounts of sovereignty corrected not only by the all-too-rare radical democrats in the Western tradition but also by the stringent anti-monarchism of Fazlur Rahman, Ruhollah Khomeini, and other Muslim theorists. This post is therefore, first and foremost, the acknowledgment of a debt.

Time, space, and politics – the modern, the traditional, the presence of the past – are never neatly aligned with the spaces to which they ostensibly belong. Europe is not as European, the West not as Western as we pretend. The West has never been wholly Western. Rather it is bound up – in politics, in trade, in taste, and above all intellectually – with worlds beyond the West: with the East, with the South, with the Dar al-Islam and later, with the Antipodes and the Abendland. The East has been taken in with every sip of tea and bite of curry, with what the West wore, played, and read. The idea of Europe is far later, more hesitant and more fragile, formed largely in the 20th century.

The Ottoman caliphate, conversely, was not wholly free of Western influences, or elements that accorded with Enlightenment notions of sovereignty. It was and was not a European empire in its own right, ruling much of what is now remembered as Europe, the caliphal capital marking a once-center, once-boundary of that space.

The declaration of the Turkish Republic contained within it an acceptance and endorsement of a Eurocentric model of the national state: the ethno-national state. The Ottoman caliphate, however, was not itself free of Eurocentric and anti-Islamic elements. In its development away from election, toward hereditary succession, away from consultation and toward autocracy, the Ottoman caliphate moved toward a monarchical model that is all too familiar to European thinking. Conversely, the end of Osmanli caliphal rule opened not simply to a Eurocentric modernity, but onto an era of recovery and renewal for Muslim thought. Here one finds thinking on sovereignty that escapes and exceeds – transcends – the state.

This brief piece is entitled “Islam and sovereignty” rather than “Islamic sovereignty” because the Muslim understandings of sovereignty discussed here should be known to all people, in and beyond the boundaries (if there are boundaries) of the umma. These understanding of sovereignty depart radically from the dominant understandings of sovereignty in the Western (but not only the Western) canon. Too much of Western thought models sovereign on monarchical authority. Islamic political thought avoids much of the monarchical debris that impedes, directs, and damages politics. The sovereign is not a monarch, not a man, not even an imitation of an incarnate deity. The word may deceive – as the French droit and the German recht conceal the distinction between right and law – but the concept should be clear. The resistance to monarchy – and hence to all authoritarianism – central to Muslim thought is a notable departure from theories of state sovereignty. This speaks powerfully against not only the decisionism of Carl Schmitt, but against all understandings of sovereignty as vested in a single person.

The umma, which is at the heart of Muslim conceptions of sovereignty, presents a radical alternative to the nation-state. It is a political form that includes people of all races, tribes, and nations. Unlike the model of the nation-state that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and continues to trouble us today, it does not regard common ethnicity as the privileged ground for the foundation of political orders. It is not bounded by language or culture. It does not merely tolerate or accommodate difference. Difference is at once ordinary and valued in the umma. Perhaps the umma is unbounded in its ethical and political imperatives.

The institution of the caliphate offered one answer to the question “Who acts for the divine sovereign when the prophet is gone?” Al Farabi offered a set of answers that included the sunna and the possibility of plural rule. His aphorisms address the absence of one close to the divine who “may govern as he thinks and wishes”. These aphorisms (especially 11, 32, 57) are often read as imagining a triumvirate, a council, or other numerically limited arrangement, perhaps most generously, a consensus of the learned, but the aphorism is far more capacious. Al Farabi opens the possibility not only of the rule of a few, but the rule of the many. Read al Farabi mindful of the hadith “My people will not be agreed upon an error.” and the passage opens the way to the democratic. In this reading, the people should succeed their prophet, follow the way the prophet showed, secure it perhaps by law, certainly in practice. It is their right, and their duty, to keep the faith and maintain the umma. They are the successors to the prophet. Monarchical rule, however virtuous, is a divagation.

Monarchy, and its modernist variants – autocracy, authoritarianism, dictatorship – are worse than divagations. They are blasphemous and idolatrous for they put a man in the place of the divine. They are sinful. Secularism gives us no vocabulary adequate to the condemnation of these forms of domination.

The few theorists who refused monarchical and authoritarian rule have fallen too easily to the idea of The People. In this understanding, common in both Western and Muslim political philosophy, The People (or the umma) was sovereign only in its unity. It could be active only as a united, uniform, and undifferentiated whole. It was – it is – in short, an imitation of the monarchical model. That is an error.

Al Farabi’s aphorism does not require that the many be one, or that those who rule be united in their uniformity. On the contrary, his descriptions of the democratic in “The Political Regime” point to the democratic as distinguished by its radical diversity and find in this its beauty and promise. Mindful of this, I have come to see that we ought not to speak of The People as sovereign but of people as sovereign. Sovereignty so conceived is not an abstract idea of a single unified and uniform will. Nor is it a consensus of whatever educated or elite opinion may prevail. Rather it is embodied in the ordinary people of the umma. Democratic sovereignty, the only legitimate sovereignty, is not singular, united, and uniform. Rather it is attractive and disseminate “The nations emigrate to it and reside there”. The sovereign people carry their message and exercise their authority throughout the world “and it grows beyond measure.” The presence of difference among the people makes spreading their message easier to be sure but it is not merely utilitarian. Rather it reflects the creative principle of the divine, who made humanity peoples and tribes that they might learn from one another. I believe Maududi caught sight of this when he wrote of the sovereign people as viceregal. Like most readers, however, Maududi turned away, fearing the people in whom the Prophet, peace be upon him, had had faith. He put his faith in law and constitutions. This was a great error.

The rule of law has its virtues. It tends to secure order and predictability. At its best it protects rights, secures the safety and prosperity that all people should enjoy, and advances if it does not secure equality. Yet law is not a good in itself. At its worst it licenses torture and genocide, unjust wars unjustly decided upon and unjustly prosecuted. It targets the vulnerable and privileges the wealthy. People should judge not the presence or absence of law, but the content of the law. In this Locke, one of the preeminent Western modern theorists of sovereignty, was right: “the people shall judge.”

Perhaps the umma is the community of the faithful. But who would doubt that it is the duty of all people to enjoin the right and forbid the wrong? Whatever its boundaries (there are many questions to be asked of those frontiers) this concept of sovereignty is embodied, disseminate, and partial. Iqbal writes that God has no hands on earth but ours. This conviction recognizes people as the partial, imperfect, agents of the divine on earth. It underlines the command to enjoin the right and forbid the wrong. It recognizes the presence of the sovereign in people – not The People – but people in the streets, going about their work, commanding respect for their authority, and care for the fragile humanity that can carry something of the divine.