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Reviewed by:
  • Islam, the State, and Political Authority
  • Joshua Parens
Islam, the State, and Political Authority ed. Asma Afsaruddin, 2011. (Middle East Today, ed. Mohammed Ayood & Fawaz A. Gerges.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ix + 248 pp., £55, $85. ISBN: 978-0-2301-1655-9 (hbk). [JE]

This edited volume is a model collection. Its title identifies clearly its subject matter, political authority in the Islamic world. The chapters focus in varied and useful ways on that obviously pressing subject matter. The editor's thesis (shared by all, or nearly all, of the contributors) is that political authority has often not been, and need not in the future, be bound up with religion in the Islamic context. I wish that I had been able to use this book in a survey course on the history of Islamic political philosophy this past semester. It would have served to provoke dialogue about the future of politics in the Islamic world in a way that reading some of the more renowned Islamist figures of the last century could not. (On those figures, the reader should see M. A. Muqtedar Khan's chapter in this volume on the so-called political philosophy of the Islamists.) Those figures only lend credence to Huntington's clash of civilizations thesis, which is challenged more than once in this volume (131, n.1; 174). Teachers of such courses should hope that Palgrave Macmillan will offer this book at a price that not only libraries but also students could afford at some time in the future. That it could be useful in a class should not be understood to imply that it does not proceed at a high scholarly level, however. Scholars will also benefit greatly from this collection.

One of the most striking arguments in support of the thesis in Islam, the State, and Political Authority (henceforth Political Authority) is that politics and political authority in Muslim polities should be guided by reason. Although Political Authority is organized chronologically into a [End Page 333] medieval section and a modern section, this striking claim cuts across that periodization. In her own chapter on Mawdudi, arguably the profoundest of the Islamists given mention, the editor Asma Afsaruddin challenges Mawdudi's 'extrapolation' of God's 'political sovereignty' from God's 'sovereignty in the theological sense' (133). She argues with great historical aplomb that most of Mawdudi's key concepts (al-hakimiyyah, divine sovereignty; khalifah, God's successor, as opposed to human stewardship, khilafah; and shariah), which seem to necessitate that extrapolation from the theological to the political, are distortions of concepts in the Qur'an and especially of the understanding of those or related concepts by the Rightly Guided Caliphs. One might quibble with some of the details of her argument, but her main point is clear and persuasive: political sovereignty is a human affair. As such, it is a matter for human reason, not for dependence upon pretenders to the honourific khalifat Allah (God's deputy) such as Mawdudi (145-46). Although only three of the twelve chapters in the volume are devoted explicitly to Shi'ism (Chapters 4, 5, and 11), the editor reveals here a crucial connection between the entire volume and Shi'ism. Islamism in general argues for precisely such an extrapolation from the theological to the political. By doing so, it reveals a penchant among Islamists to attribute to themselves a form of infallibility. Eventually, we will touch on the powerful argument of Mohsen Kadivar in Chapter 11 against absolute wilayat al-faqih. Kadivar and Afsaruddin evince the same dubiousness regarding Islamist claims to infallibility.

How then does this line of argument, that extrapolating from theological sovereignty or authority to political authority is tantamount to reliance on religion rather than reason in politics, connect to the medieval section of this collection? The paradigm case of extrapolating from the theological to the political could be thought to be al-Farabi, at least if we are to trust Massimo Campanini in Chapter 2. Following the early-twentieth century political theologian, Carl Schmitt, Campanini argues that al-Farabi's thought is a political theology that seeks the 'theological legitimization of a political order' (36, Campanini's emphasis). Charles E. Butterworth...

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