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13. God’s Caravan: Topoi and Schemata in the History of Muslim Political Thought
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326 13 God’s Caravan Topoi and Schemata in the History of Muslim Political Thought A z i z A l -A z m e h It is little surprising that conceptions of power and political thought elaborated in the course of Muslim histories, in modern times no less than in the classical and medieval periods, are fields of study that have continued to attract attention in recent years in this field of scholarship, which had rarely entertained the idea of a world disenchanted.1 Yet these conceptions have not been generally well served by scholarship except within the rather narrow constraints of political history and of the dogmatic history of Muslim sects and insofar as a small number of individual thinkers have been the objects of particular interest. Basic research and monographic studies in this field have generally been rather sparse and, partly as a consequence, systematic and synthetic studies—as opposed to summary statements—have been few and far between. Such studies as are available have, moreover, generally been incomplete, often appearing An earlier version of part of this chapter appeared in my collection of essays The Times of History: Universal Topics in Islamic Historiography, published in 2007 by Central European University Press, and reprinted here with permission. 1. I am most grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who have read and commented upon an earlier version of this chapter: Saïd Arjomand, Nadia al-Bagdadi, János Bak, Yehuda Elkana, Garth Fowden, Wael Hallaq, Almut Hoefert, Janet Nelson, David Powers, Walid Saleh, and Hayden White. God’s Caravan • 327 to drift toward formulations and inflections that tend to reconfirm unreflected and untested general assumptions and presumptions held by the general public about the course of Islamic history. It is therefore to be welcomed that two general and systematic studies in English, by Anthony Black and Patricia Crone, have appeared in print.2 They provide the opportunity to consider and assess the state of the field in the study of the history of Islamic political conceptions and to consider what progress might have been made since the appearance almost forty years ago of a book also intended as a teaching manual, by the veteran scholar William Montgomery Watt (2003), and what avenues of research might be thereby opened or foreclosed. Correlatively, the discussion to follow will attempt to clarify issues, attempt to set and reset research questions, and help to define or redefine the field of Islamic political thought. It will describe, first of all, some generative historiographic parameters—narrative, conceptual, institutional, and public—that act as a grid for the study of Islamic political thought. These parameters yield thematic elements that are regarded to be of central relevance, and exclude others, thereby orienting the perspectives adopted in the two books, which are taken here as describing the state of the field. One assumes that a field of research gains a specific consistency and coherence when set in general treatments and works meant as textbooks . This assumption does not deny that the field has not been otherwise approached; but general statements of the kind treated in this chapter represent a different degree and manner of diffusion and accessibility. The pages that follow will then go on to examine substantive historical and conceptual themes that arise from the frames of reference discussed . It will doubtless be noted that this article will be constrained by the structure and thematic content of the two books discussed here, and that an alternative approach cannot be adequately articulated. Finally, the 2. The following works will be discussed in the course of this chapter: Anthony Black, The History of Islamic Political Thought from the Prophet to the Present (2001); and Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2004a). A U.S. edition of the Crone book was published as God’s Rule: Government and Islam (2004b). [52.91.0.68] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:19 GMT) 328 • Aziz Al-Azmeh thematic and conceptual dimensions of an object of study, which we might term “Islamic political thought” and necessitating clear definitions of the field of the political and how such might be delimited as “Islamic” (with the kinds of sources that would be appropriate for its study), are matters that will be taken up at a variety of points. This treatment is an important issue. Civilizations preceding the periods of modernity, including classical and medieval Arabic and Islamic civilization, produced discourses on matters that in early modern and modern times came to...