Mirror for the Muslim Prince: Islam and the Theory of Statecraft

4. Perso-Islamicate Political Ethic in Relation to the Sources of Islamic Law

82 4 Perso-Islamicate Political Ethic in Relation to the Sources of Islamic Law S a ï d A m i r A r j o m a n d There is an alarming tendency in the conventional wisdom to identify what is “Islamic” in the Persianate, and more generally the Islamicate,1 culture and civilization by deriving it from Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh). This practice is true for what is usually called Islamic political thought but should more accurately be considered Perso-Islamicate political ethic and public law. For centuries, the readings for moral education in Iran began with Kalilah wa Demnah and the Golestan of Sa‘di, and this continued to be the case after the educational reforms and the establishment of the modern national schools under Reza Shah in the 1920s. Excerpts from these books were accordingly included in literature textbooks for the new high schools, as were selections from the Four Essays (Chahar maqalah) of the Seljuq secretary, Nizami Arudi Samarqandi . Anyone who read the fiqh books in Arabic would not have expected to find a section on Islamic government for his or her moral education; even if they had intentionally sought such a section, they would not have found one. I began my academic career by rejecting a thesis on the allegedly inescapable illegitimacy of the state in Twelver Shi‘ism as elaborated by A. K. S. Lambton and Hamid Algar and affirmed by Nikki Keddie (Arjomand 1. I use these terms as conceptualized by Hodgson 1974. Perso-Islamicate Political Ethic • 83 1979). It did not occur to me at the time that some Orientalists also came close to considering all historical and actual states “un-Islamic” and virtually illegitimate in Sunni Islam as well. The Abbasid accusation against the Umayyads that they had degenerated the caliphate into kingship (mulk) was implicitly or explicitly taken to have essentialist, transhistorical reality, ignoring not only the ruler’s regular titles (malik, sultan, shah) but also the lavish overlay of such imperial titles as padshah, shahanshah, khaqan, and finally khalifah. Only the idealized picture of the caliphate was considered “Islamic” and therefore truly legitimate. The implication of this view is that not only the subjects of the Safavids but also those of the Mughals and the Ottomans—and just about any Muslim government in the preceding half-millennium—considered them illegitimate! Such flight from history and sociology was made possible by the Orientalist privileging of a narrow genre of “Islamic” juristic writing that was completely marginal to the fiqh corpus itself, not to mention the literature on ethics, evident most notably in H. A. R. Gibb’s 1955 essay on “constitutional organization,” and following him, A. K. S. Lambton (1981). More recently, Patricia Crone (2004a), the erstwhile Orientalist enfant terrible, decided to mark her return to the fold by introducing an element of diversity into Islamic political theory of “God’s government.” She has done so by extending Gibb’s privileged body of texts, which she considers Sunni “constitutional law,” by adding “sectarian ” doctrines of the imamate as their presumed counterparts, that is, as statements of theories of government. The result has been a completely distorted and ahistorical picture of the political ethic and public law of the Muslim world in this new thesis of the inescapably un-Islamic character of all Muslim governments. The situation is exacerbated by the discovery of the same marginal genre, namely the al-Ahkam al-sultaniyah and a small number of works on al-Siyasah al-shar‘iyah2 by the contemporary Islamists who consider secular governments illegitimate.3 2. This genre developed in certain western Muslim lands but not much in the eastern lands. 3. Aziz Al-Azmeh 1997 has done much to inject a dose of historical reality into the conventional wisdom with his Muslim Kingship, but much more remains to be done. 84 • Saïd Amir Arjomand I have tried to show in my own work of the last few years on this subject that the idea and normative principles of monarchy were elaborated on in the literature of ethics and statecraft—called advice literature in Louise Marlow’s chapter in the present volume—and they were fully integrated into Islam by the time of the development of the ethicolegal order based on the shari‘a around the tenth century CE. Of the two normative systems, monarchy and the ethicolegal order, monarchy developed faster by absorbing the Persian political tradition...