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

1. Introduction

1 1 Introduction M e h r z a d B o r o u j e r d i The string of popular uprisings, commonly referred to as “the Arab Spring,” that jolted the Arab and Muslim worlds in 2010 and 2011 came as a shock to most political observers. The toppling of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (r. 1987–2011), Hosni Mubarak (r. 1981–2011), Ali Abdullah Saleh (r. 1978–2011), and Muammar al-Qadhafi (r. 1969–2011), who collectively had ruled for more than a century, called into question many shibboleths about Arabs and Muslims such as their fatalism and aversion to democratic politics. The Arab Spring has also forced the Middle Eastern scholarly community to reexamine a host of its assumptions and theories.1 The future of these countries is unknown at this conjuncture. Some may be heading toward a more democratic future, while others may head toward resurrected dictatorships or other uncertain outcomes. Yet one can say with a certain degree of confidence that these societies will inevitably draw on the collective wisdom of their populations. Having seen the debris of the atavistic solutions offered by nativism,2 and the pitfall of unbridled cosmopolitanism, one hopes that the intellectual elite in these societies will try to reanimate their communities by careful deconstruction and reconstruction of their intellectual traditions. The (re)reading of the Islamic traditions is a part of the responsibility of intellectuals who wish to help future generations of Muslims contemplate a more humane style of 1. For one such example, see Bellin 2012. 2. For a critical discussion of nativism, see Boroujerdi 1996. 2 • Mehrzad Boroujerdi statecraft. Contemporary Muslim intellectuals such as Muhammad Abed al-Jabri (1999) have insisted on the need for a “critique of Arab reason,” whereas the Moroccan sociologist Abd al-Kabir al-Khatibi has argued that contemporary Arab knowledge that is stamped by the ideology of Islam “should be subjected to deconstruction in order to show that its concepts are historical products that have taken their particular structures in relation to a specific way of thinking and specific events in time and space.”3 In this volume, a group of distinguished scholars tries to reinterpret concepts and canons of Islamic thought in Arab, Persian, South Asian, and Turkish traditions and to demonstrate that there is no unitary “Islamic” position on important issues of statecraft and governance. They recognize that Islam is a discursive site marked by silences, agreements, and animated controversies (not to mention denunciation and persecutions). There is no shortage of disagreements among Islam’s clerical literati and their lay counterparts about the authenticity of hadiths and the partisanship of historiographies. Rigorous debates and profound disagreements among Muslim theologians, philosophers, and literati (and their Western interlocutors) have taken place over such questions as: What is an Islamic state? Was the state ever viewed as an independent political institution in the Islamic tradition of political thought? Is it possible that a religion that places an inordinate emphasis upon the importance of good deeds does not indeed have a vigorous notion of “public interest” or a systematic theory of government (à la Hobbes, Mills, or Rawls)? Does Islam provide an edifice, a common idiom, and an ideological mooring for premodern and modern Muslim rulers alike? Are Islam and democracy compatible? The volume begins both thematically and historically with Asma Afsaruddin ’s chapter concentrating on the explicit and implicit invocations of the concept of maslahah (translated as “public interest,” “utility,” or “expediency ”) in Islamic history. She maintains that even though it was not termed as such, maslahah as a political concept existed from almost the onset of Islam. Grounding her argument on hadith sources and historical/political treaties, Afsaruddin argues that the sociopolitical principle of maslahah 3. Cited in Boullata 1990, 115. Introduction • 3 has been utilized in both Sunni and Shi‘i exegetical works.4 She points to Ayatollah Khomeini’s theory of wilayat-i faqih (the guardianship of the jurist) as one of the latest works in which maslahah serves as the cardinal principle of legislation.5 The concept of maslahah has profound implications for modern Islamic political thought and for the type of political systems Muslim societies may wish to embrace. Considerations of “public interest” by religious scholars can enhance the effectiveness of democratic discourse and the compromises that are invariably required in any modern state. But what if the theologians were to insist that they were...