Download PDF | (New Edinburgh Islamic Surveys) Patricia Crone - Medieval Islamic Political Thought-Edinburgh University Press (2006).
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PREFACE
Political thought may be broadly identified as thought about power formulated in a prescriptive rather than a descriptive vein: how should power be distributed, to what uses should it be put? Of power there are innumerable types, but political thought is primarily concerned with just one: that exercised by the governmental agency above the level of family, village, and tribe that we know as the state. It is however difficult to think about the state without attention to the social order on which it rests, and it is quite impossible to do so without considering its relationship with other organizations coordinating human activities above the domestic and local levels. Of such organizations there are many today, some nationwide and others international or global, but in a medieval context they were few and far between. Most associations in those days were local, and usually kin-based. Coordinating people’s activities above the level of village or kin was difficult due to slow means of communication, poverty, local diversity, and lack of trust. It could be done by force: this was the typical manner in which the state established itself. But it could also be done, or assisted, by religion, which offered a common idiom, shared ideals and trust, and which was accordingly the main source of organization transcending locality and kin apart from the state. In the Islamic world it was originally the source of the state itself.
In part for this reason, the political thought of medieval Islam is difficult to understand for a modern Western reader. One might fondly have assumed political thought to be a subject open to discussion at a high level of generality, for what could be more universal than power and the problems it begets? But as everyone knows, it is in fact highly context-bound, and that of the Muslims seems to a novice to be based on a particularly odd set of premises. It also appears to come in a particularly heavy encrustation of strange-sounding names. The aim of this book is to make it intelligible to those who cannot get their minds around it, and to advance the understanding of those who already know what it is about. It is addressed to Western students of Islamic history, historians of adjacent periods and places (notably the classical world and medieval Europe), and, optimistically, the general public; and wherever possible, it asks questions of the type that preoccupy Western readers, in order to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar. It is devoted to political thought in the broad sense, not just theory, and tries to bring out the tacit assumptions and unspoken premises without which one cannot understand the edifice of explicit theory on top. Some very general knowledge of classical and European history is presumed (for example, I do not take it upon myself to explain who Alexander the Great or Louis XVI were), but no knowledge of Islamic history is required, though it would certainly be an advantage. All concepts have been glossed, and all persons, events, and historical developments have been identified or summarized (or so at least I hope) on first encounter and/or in the index, which doubles as a glossary. I do take the liberty of addressing specialists in the footnotes, but non-specialist readers are free to skip them. Though readers with some background knowledge will find the book much easier than those with none, it should be accessible to all.
Some conventions may be noted here. First, where double dates are given in the form 290/902f., the first figure refers to the Muslim calendar and the second to the Christian. Muslim years usually begin in one Christian year and continue into the next: continuation is indicated by ‘f.’, for example, 902f. stands for the relevant parts of 902 and 903. When only one date is given, it refers to the Christian calendar unless the contrary is specified. Secondly, I have opted for the term ‘medieval’, which some readers may dislike, because it can be used of both the Muslim world and the Latin West and because ‘the formative period’ does not yield an adjective. The centuries covered in this book were not of course in the middle of anything, but the same is true of their counterparts in the West: in both cases, the ‘middle ages’ are really the beginning. Thirdly, when I translate passages, referring the reader to both the original text and a translation, my own English version is not necessarily that of the translation, though it is often a modified version of it. I only follow other translators faithfully where no reference to the original text is given. Finally, though this is not a matter of conventions, I feel I must apologize for the inordinate number of references to publications of my own. Originally, the book was meant to be a short textbook codifying existing knowledge. There proved to be insufficient knowledge for that purpose, however, and as the book turned into a project of research, it inevitably came to build on earlier work of mine. I also wrote a fair number of articles on the way with the express purpose of being able to refer to them instead of cluttering the book with details. This may not mollify the reader, but all I can say is that I sympathize.
I should like to thank Maroun Aouad for much help and encouragement when I ventured into the alien field of falsafa, and also for making me look at the rhetorical works, more often than not supplying xeroxes along with the references and patiently answering questions of every kind. To Mohsen Ashtiany I am indebted for help with Persian matters (along with my share of his delectable wit). I am also grateful to him, Tamima Bayhom-Daou, Anthony Black, Bernard Haykel, Carole Hillenbrand, Stephen Menn, and Lennart Sundelin for comments on the book, or parts of it, in various stages of completion, to Firuza Abdullaeva for finding the illustration on the cover, and to Michael Cook for characteristically helpful and incisive comments on what was meant to be the final draft. I must also extend further thanks to Carole Hillenbrand, who put the idea of writing this book into my head and graciously waited the many years it took me to complete it.
Patricia Crone
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
I have used the opportunity to remove some misprints, correct some errors, and add some further information, mostly in the list of addenda and corrigenda below, but also, when there was room, in the text itself. I should like to thank Everett Rowson for numerous corrections and queries of such interest that I would have needed a new edition to take proper account of them.
THE ORIGINS OF GOVERNMENT
How did medieval Muslims think that humans had come to live under government? Differently put, how did they explain the origin of the state? The short answer is that they did not normally see government as having developed at all, but rather as having existed from the start. It is worth examining this answer in greater detail, however, for it brings out some of the most basic assumptions behind their political thought. It is to such fundamental concepts and ideas that this chapter is devoted.
Terminology
The word ‘state’ in modern parlance refers sometimes to a set of governmental institutions which constitute the supreme political authority within a given territory (as when we grumble about the state and wish that it would wither away) and sometimes to a society endowed with such institutions, that is a politically organized society or polity (as in the expression ‘nation state’). In the question of how the state originated, the emphasis is on the agency, but the two meanings are closely related. Medieval Muslims had no word for states in either sense, however. They saw themselves as governed by persons rather than institutions and would speak of a ruler, such as a caliph (khalifa) or king (malik), where we speak of the state in the first sense of the word; and they would identify the society of which the ruler was in charge as a nation (umma) or a religious community (milla), where we speak of states in the second sense of the word. (The term khildfa, caliphate, only referred to the caliph’s office, not to his polity, though modern scholars freely use the word in both senses.) The Muslims did pick up from their Greek forebears the habit of describing apolitically organized society as a city (Greek polis). They did not know that Greek cities had once been states themselves and that this was how the habit had originated. They simply continued it by using the word madina in the same way that their counterparts in Europe would use civitas, as a term for polities of any kind, in a close approximation to the modern word ‘state’ in the second sense. But madina in the sense of polity was a fairly arcane usage in the Muslim world, confined to the philosophers and the few who read them. To everyone else, it just meant a city in the plain sense of the word.
The concept of the state as an impersonal institution emerged in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards and eventually passed to the Middle East. In the nineteenth century the Muslims gave it the Arabic name of dawla (Persian dowlat, Turkish devlet), and this is now the standard word in the Middle East for a state in both senses of the word. In pre-modern usage, however, dawla meant a turn of fortune (and of the stars in their spheres) and thus the era in which a particular dynasty held sway rather than the governmental institutions or the polity of which it was in charge.! But though the pre-modern Muslims lacked the concept of the state, they certainly had governmental institutions which conform roughly (if rarely precisely) to the modern definition of states in the first sense of the word and which held sway in units that we would identify as states in the second sense. How then did they explain their origin?
Adam and Eve
When medieval Muslims pondered the question why government exists, they formulated their answer in functional terms: rulers performed such and such roles for which there was a need thanks to the nature of human beings (see below ch. 17). They rarely addressed the historical question how rulers had developed or when they had first appeared, but it is clear from their creation myth that they did not share the medieval Western view of government as a secondary development of human history rooted in the Fall. They tacitly assumed government had existed even before the creation of mankind.
The relevant part of their creation myth may be summarized as follows. When God had created heaven, earth, the angels, and the jinn (i.e. spirits), He created Iblis (the future devil), who was the first to receive power (mulk).? God made him ruler and governor of lower heaven and earth, as well as keeper of Paradise, or, according to another version, He made him judge among the jinn, who were the first inhabitants of earth and who had kings, prophets, religious faith, long life, and blessings in abundance. The jinn grew wicked and caused corruption on earth, whereupon Iblis sent an army against them and defeated them, which made him haughty; others say that Iblis was a captive taken by an army of angels sent against them by God and that he became haughty because he grew up among the angels as a result of his capture; or, according to another version, Iblis was so successful a judge among the jinn that he grew haughty and started fighting them. In any case, God knew that Iblis was growing haughty and created Adam to bring out his true colours. Iblis duly refused to bow down to Adam, whereupon he was cast into the lowest Hell. God then created Eve, but she was subverted by Iblis in the form of a snake and both she and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, whereupon they were expelled from Paradise. Eve was punished with menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, and stupidity; Adam accidentally brushed his head against heaven when he fell to earth (they do not simply walk out of Paradise in the Muslim version), and so he became bald; both suffered the indignity of having to defecate: Adam wept when he smelt the stench. But above all, they lost their freedom from work: they and their descendants now had to do all the “irksome ploughing, planting, irrigating, reaping, threshing, milling, kneading, spinning, weaving and washing” which they had been spared in Paradise.* This was the crucial way in which the Fall affected the human condition. There was no forfeiture of immortality. Humans did not become more sinful than they had been from the start either, and human history did not turn into a story of Paradise lost and regained. In fact, many scholars denied that the Paradise from which Adam and Eve were expelled was identical with that in which God’s righteous servants would eventually find themselves.*
Their fall notwithstanding, Adam and Eve continued to live a subParadisical existence. Adam was God’s deputy (khalifa) on earth (cf. Q. 2:30), where he had been given power and authority (mulk wa-sultan). Both he and his son Seth were also prophets through whom God revealed His law. When Adam died, he passed the leadership (riydsa) to Seth, and thereafter each leader passed his deathbed instructions (wasiyya) to his successor along with “the political governance and management of the subjects under his control” (siyasat al-mulk wa-tadbir man tabta yadayhi min ra‘iyyatibi).> They lived a life of religious purity and piety, spending their time in worship of God without any impure thoughts or feelings of envy, hatred, or greed.°
But when Cain killed Abel, he left the sub-Paradisical mountain on which Adam had settled to live somewhere else, where his descendants became ‘despots and Pharaohs’ (jababira wa-fara‘ina), that is, godless tyrants.’ They invented musical instruments and took to entertaining themselves with music, wine-drinking, and sexual promiscuity. This caused an ever-growing number of Seth’s descendants to leave the sacred mountain in order to join the fun. Enoch, alias Idris, and his son Methuselah both fought holy war against the Cainites and enslaved some of them, but to no avail: hardly any of Seth’s descendants were left on the mountain by Noah’s time, so God sent the Flood and wiped out the entire sinful lot. After the Flood, Noah’s sons dispersed to become the ancestors of mankind as we know it.
The fundamental assumption behind these accounts is that all the power in the universe and all the physical and moral laws by which it is regulated reflect the same ultimate reality, God. God rules in the most literal sense of the word, appointing rulers, governors, judges, and deputies and ordering armies to be sent against insubordinate subjects. Divine government has always been and always will be, and it must necessarily manifest itself as government on earth. Adam represents the fullness of God’s power on earth, and both the Sethians and the Cainites are envisaged as living in politically organized societies, as are the jinn who preceded them. Contrary to what medieval Christians said, coercive government did not develop among humans as a result of the Fall. All God’s created beings were subject to His government, directly or through intermediaries, whether they sinned or not, and divine government was certainly coercive. Of course God would not need to use violence against His subjects if they would obey, but all have a tendency to rebel, for reasons which the myth leaves unexplained; there is nothing special about humans in this respect: God sent armies against unruly jinn long before humans had been created. Disobedience, ma‘siya, is the Muslim word for what the Christians call sin, and the archetypal act of disobedience is Iblis’ refusal to bow down to Adam, not Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit, which only plays a limited role in the Muslim explanation of the human condition and none at all in the Muslim account of the origin of states.
Right and wrong government (imama and mulk)
Government was an inescapable feature of the universe. But not all government was right, and sin certainly played a role in its corruption. The key event here is Cain’s murder of Abel. Having killed his brother, Cain left Adam’s community to found one of his own, in which his descendants came to be ruled by godless tyrants. As we have seen, the creation myth calls them jababira wa-fard@ina, despots and Pharaohs. Another word for such rulers was mulitk (sing. malik), kings. Either way, they were rulers who seized power for their own aggrandizement rather than the execution of God’s will, turning God’s slaves (that is, human beings) into slaves of their own and using their power for the satisfaction of private interests rather than the fulfilment of collective needs.
To call a man a king was not necessarily to denounce him. A malik was simply somebody who lorded it over others, especially one who did so sitting on a throne and wearing a crown. You could describe a ruler as a king in neutral or flattering terms, but in the first centuries of Islam you could only do so as long as you were speaking in a secular vein. As far as religious language was concerned, the only being to whom you could legitimately apply the awesome titles of king (malik) and despot (jabbar) was God. One could not question the overweening power of ultimate reality, but it was both presumptuous and rebellious for humans to claim such power for themselves, and those who did so merely branded themselves as kings in the sense of impious tyrants. Yet claim it they often did: the despots of the Cainites were wiped out in the Flood, but they reappeared in Pharaonic Egypt, to be followed by Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Indian, and many other kings. The vast majority of humans had been, and continued to be, governed by wrongful rulers of this kind.
There was also another form of corruption, though it does not appear in the creation myth. After the Flood some people stopped having government altogether, as the Muslims knew from their own history: Islam had originated in a stateless society. The Muslims took no pride in this aspect of their past, at least not when they were religious scholars,® for in their view the absence of government in pre-Islamic Arabia reflected the failure of the pagan Arabs to acknowledge God. As pagans, the Arabs had lived in jahiliyya, ignorance and barbarism, not in a state of aboriginal freedom and equality such as that which the Greeks and their Western epigones were apt to impute to tribal peoples. Without recognition of God’s sole government there could be no proper relations among people, only tyranny or anarchy, with all the bloodshed, arbitrariness, and immorality that both implied.
Adam embodied the alternative to tyranny and anarchy alike. His leadership had been imama, religious and political leadership in accordance with God’s will. As khalifat allah fi ‘l-ard, God’s deputy on earth, he had dispensed God’s law among his offspring as they multiplied. This was what government should be and what it had remained among the Sethians down to the Flood. Thereafter right government had existed only sporadically, but it had been restored to the world by Muhammad, the prophet who founded the Muslim polity, and it had been maintained (according to most Muslims) by his immediate successors, the first caliphs in Medina. It was their time which constituted the golden age. As always, proper government was coercive. Like Adam’s successors, Muhammad and the first caliphs had used institutionalized violence: they imposed penalties, suppressed revolts, and conducted campaigns against infidels. But they always did so in accordance with God’s law; their coercive power was wielded only against evil-doers. This was the essence of good government, and it was such government, not a pre-political stage of alleged freedom and equality, that the most Muslims hankered for and hoped to restore.
The law (shar‘, sharia)
As the ruler of the universe, God issued laws. Adam had received a set of them; so had later prophets, most recently Muhammad, whose version was final. Living in accordance with God’s law was the essence of religion. In the early centuries it was practically all there was to religion. There soon came to be so much more to it that some would have liked to jettison the law altogether, much as the early Christians had done; but it remained the heart of Islam in all its forms.’ The word shar‘ was often used to mean revealed religion in general.
What medieval Muslims regarded as law included much that modern students have trouble recognizing as such. A traditional handbook of Islamic law will start with the ‘ibadat, ‘acts of service/worship’,” that is to say the five daily prayers, the month of fasting, the annual alms tax, and the pilgrimage to Mecca once (or more) in a lifetime for those who were capable of making it. Dietary law (rules about permissible and prohibited food and drink) also formed part of the ‘ibadat, though its positioning in the lawbooks was unstable. None of this is law to a modern Westerner.
Next, the manuals moved on to the mu‘ a4malat, ‘mutual dealings’, meaning people’s relations with one another. Here they regulated marriage, divorce,
9. Cf. below, ch. 15.
to. In the ancient Near East it was by labour services that humans did the will of the gods, who had created them as their slaves in order to save themselves the trouble of procuring their own food and housing. (From the dawn of history in Mesopotamia, it was unremitting hard work that people saw as the distinguishing feature of human, or at least civilized, life.) This is the ultimate root of the Christian concept of worship as ‘liturgy’ (from leitourgia, public service or works) and the Muslims concept of it as ‘ibadat.
inheritance, slavery and manumission, commerce, torts, crimes, war, taxation, and more besides, all of which the modern Westerner instantly recognizes as law on the grounds that rules of this type are enforced by the authorities. But the ‘ibddat might also be enforced by the authorities (attending Friday prayer or fasting in Ramadan was not a matter of choice). Conversely numerous rules counted as law even though they lacked this feature, for the law extended into areas such as filial piety, the proprieties of clothing, behaviour at funerals, how to greet non-Muslims, and other matters that a modern Westerner would treat as purely moral, or as mere etiquette (and which in fact were not usually covered in the legal manuals, but rather in separate works). What distinguished a law from other rules was not that it could be enforced by the authorities, but rather that it defined the moral status of an act in the eyes of God. The key question to which the law provided answers was how far doing something would assist or impede the journey to salvation, not whether it was allowed or forbidden in the here and now. Assessing the moral status of human acts was the work of the jurists (fuqaha’). They classified human acts as either forbidden or permitted, and, within the latter category, as disapproved, indifferent, commendable or obligatory, trying to work out God’s view of them on the basis of the Qur?an and statements by the Prophet, plus some subsidiary sources. It was permitted to repudiate a wife, provided that the rules were followed, but it was not commendable; it was commendable to free a Muslim slave, but it was not obligatory; it was normally indifferent whether one wore this type of clothing or that, provided that the rules of modesty were satisfied and no silk was worn by men, and so on. The jurists did take an interest in how far the moral assessments should be backed by coercive power, but it was to God and His Prophet as represented in the here and now by the jurists that the law owed its authority, not to the rulers.
Prophethood (nubuwwa)
God revealed His laws to mankind by means of prophets. Adam, the first man on earth, was not just an imam but also a prophet, and the same was true of Muhammad. Prophets play a key role in Islamic political thought.
A prophet (nab7) was a human being through whom God communicated with mankind, or more commonly with some subdivision of it (usually a people). He was not primarily someone who could predict the future, though he might be able to do that too; rather, he was a transmitter of God’s wishes.!!
Such mouthpieces were required because humans no longer knew God directly, as they had done in Paradise, and as the angels still did. Cut off from God, humans would corrupt His religion and government until nothing remained of either, but in His mercy God would respond by sending them a prophet to inform or remind them of the true way. Every time God selected a person for prophethood (mubuwwa), a window onto the unseen was opened up and a glimpse of ultimate reality was transmitted to the earth. After Muhammad’s death the window was shut and so it would remain until the end of times, but it had been opened many times before him, maybe as many as 124,000 times.” Most of the 124,000 prophets before Muhammad were merely sent to warn particular communities against their evil ways, but some brought a new version of God’s law, and thus a new religion. The latter, numbering 315 at the most,'> were prophets of the type called messengers (sing. rasil). Messengers would found polities, for a law requires government for its realization. This is why they were of great political importance.
Some 1,400 years ago God in His mercy sent a messenger to the Arabs. He chose Muhammad, a trader who was born in Mecca in c. 570 and who began to preach when he was about forty in response to periodic revelations brought by Gabriel. (Unlike Moses he did not speak to God directly, and he also differed from Moses in receiving his revelation in instalments rather than all in one.) Some people converted, but most Meccans reacted with sneers, ridicule, and eventually persecution of Muhammad and his followers, many of whom were people in a weak position, such as slaves and freedmen who had no kinsmen to defend them. When things became intolerable in Mecca, Muhammad and his followers emigrated to Medina. His emigration (hijra) took place in 622, which later came to serve as the starting point of the Muslim calendar. When he arrived in his abode of emigration (dar al-hijra), he set about forming a community (umma) there with himself as leader, and took to consolidating his position with caravan-raiding, military expeditions, and battles with the Meccans, whose city he conquered in 630. He died in Medina in 632, whereupon his followers began the conquest of the Middle East. This, in a nutshell, is the story of how the Muslim community was founded.
Religion and politics
Westerners do not normally have any problems with the first part of this story, which follows a familiar model: Muhammad was a prophet who preached to the meek and who was persecuted for his faith. But they usually react with bewilderment to the second half, in which he goes off to found a polity in Medina instead of suffering martyrdom. Since modern Christians (and exChristians) typically think of religion as something transcending politics and other mundane pursuits, Muhammad comes across to them as having abused religion to make a success of himself. This is why Western scholars have in all seriousness debated the absurd question whether he was sincere or not."
Medieval Muslims did not generally see religion as above politics and other worldly affairs, but on the contrary as a prescription for their regulation. They granted that it could be abused, of course, and held numerous ‘false prophets’ to be guilty on that score. But they took the abuse to lie in the falsehood of the claims advanced by such prophets, not in the worldly use to which the claims were put, except in the sense that they resented the benefit that such prophets derived from them; for religion was actually meant to put things right for people in this world no less than the next, and it stood to reason that the bearer of the true religion had to acquire political power in order to bring this about. The more power you have, the more good you can do. Some prophets were assisted by worldly rulers, but others, such as Moses, David, Solomon, and Muhammad, acquired worldly power themselves. In Mecca, Muhammad had been constrained by the pagan power of Quraysh, but in Medina he had gained the power to execute God’s law and to embark on warfare.'° God had allowed Muhammad to unite prophethood and kingship (in the flattering sense of great political power) so that he could accomplish his mission, see to the execution of the law, and overcome the infidels, as al-Tha&libi (d. 429/1038) put it.!” It is not that Muhammad was desirous of this world, the tenth-century Ismaili philosophers known as the Brethren of Sincerity explained, but God wanted Muhammad’s community to have religion and this world together; and when the Jews and Christians found this hard to understand, God sent down the story of David and Solomon, in whom kingship and prophethood had similarly been united without their prophethood being degraded thereby, so that the Muslims could argue their case with reference to them.'
All this is religious polemics, of course, here concerned with the moral status of power in the service of the truth. In terms of historical explanation — why and how things happen, whatever one’s moral evaluation of them — the fact that Muhammad was a political prophet is clearly related to the stateless environment in which he was active. The Buddha and Jesus had both lived in societies in which political authority already existed so that it was possible, prudent, or positively liberating to leave politics alone. Both preached messages which were largely about how to transcend politics along with everything else in this world: the Buddha is said to have been a prince who renounced his kingdom; Jesus was a carpenter who declared his kingdom to be not of this world. But Muhammad was active among warring tribes and had to take political and military action if he was to accomplish his mission. The religion could not survive without communal embodiment, and the community could not survive without defence. Hence it had to have political organization.
To put this point at greater length, in tribal Arabia all free males protected themselves and their dependents in cooperation with their kinsmen by threatening to avenge any injury inflicted on them: there were no other ways of insuring oneself against murder, assault, robbery, theft, and the like. It is true that some Arabs had been incorporated in the Byzantine and Sasanid empires, in which there were armies and police, and that imperial subsidies had enabled others to develop petty kingdoms of their own, but most Arabs lived under conditions of self-help. Chiefs should not be envisaged as petty kings. Their role was to keep their tribes together by engaging in dispute settlement, helping the needy, and presiding over discussions of public issues in which all or most male adult tribesmen would participate and in which the chief would formulate the consensus as he saw it emerge. Chiefs might or might not be military leaders too, but they could neither coerce nor protect their fellowtribesmen after the fashion of kings. Every tribesman defended himself and his dependents.
The sources say that when Muhammad and his followers adopted their new religion, they severely tested the loyalty of their fellow-tribesmen and (in the case of slaves and freedmen) their masters and protectors, so that it was clear that the latter’s cooperation would eventually be withdrawn. That would have left the Muslims in the position of outlaws, and as such they probably would not have survived for long. But Muhammad hoped that another tribe could be persuaded to adopt them, and those of Yathrib (the later Medina) did eventually agree to afford them protection, apparently because statelessness in their case manifested itself in the form of endless feuds: they wanted peace and hoped that a man of God could provide it. They did not offer him protection as a host to a guest, but rather joined Muhammad’s followers to form a new community in Medina in which all members defended one another as if they were kinsmen. It could be said that Muhammad created a new tribe, a supertribe of believers; but it was led by a prophet with powers unknown to tribal chiefs. “Whenever you disagree about something, the matter should be referred to God and Muhammad,” as Muhammad laid down in the document generally known as the Constitution of Medina.’ Muhammad was the ultimate decision-maker. His community was a politically organized society, if only in a minimal sense. By claiming divine authority he had created an embryonic state.
Thanks to the environment in which it originated, Islam was thus embodied in a political organization almost from the start: the umma was a congregation and a state rolled together. Christians originated with dual membership. As believers they belonged to the church and were administered by the clergy; as citizens they belonged to the Roman empire and were ruled by Caesar. Islam originated without this bifurcation. As believers and as citizens they were members of the umma and ruled by the Prophet, thereafter by his successors.
Thanks to Muhammad’s career, Muslims came to think of prophets as the paradigmatic founders of states. Far from being assumed normally to transcend political organization, messengers of God were assumed normally to create it. The well-known fact that pagans also had polities was not normally perceived as a problem in this connection. The tenth-century Ismaili philosopher Aba Ya‘qub al-Sijistani observes that kingdoms are to be found all over the world whereas prophethood has only flourished in a small part of it, but he nonetheless insists that kingship arises by usurpation of leadership established by a prophet. This was indeed how kingship arose in the Islamic world, but it is hard to see how it could account for the kingdoms of the Indians, Chinese, Turks, Slavs, Africans and other peoples, to whom no prophets had been sent according to his own explicit statement.”° It took the fourteenth-century Ibn Khaldin to point out, in polemics against the philosophers, that in purely historical terms it was kings rather than prophets who were the paradigmatic founders of states: most of the world’s inhabitants had rulers even though they had not received any prophets; and contrary to what the philosophers said, authority could be established without religious law, for people in power could and did devise injunctions of their own.! In short, the philosophers had been wrong to generalize on the basis of the Muslim experience. But Ibn Khaldtin’s ability to see the formation of his own polity as an exception to the norm was highly unusual.
Restating the question
We are now ina position to restate the question with which we began. How did medieval Muslims imagine the state to have originated? Clearly, the question is misformulated. As medieval Muslims saw it, government was the inseparable companion of monotheism, and since humans had originated in a monotheist polity, the problem was not how they had come to live in states but rather why government had so often been corrupted thereafter, or disappeared altogether. The answer was that human disobedience repeatedly caused things to go wrong so that God had to send messengers to set things right again. But why had God implanted this propensity for disobedience in human beings, or indeed all his creatures? And why did He send messengers to some people and not to others? Such questions seem to have been regarded as beyond human understanding. The problematic fact that some people had government even though they had not received prophets was normally left as a loose end.
The unusual nature of the paradigm
But Ibn Khaldiin was right: most polities in history have indeed been founded by men who accumulated power from below rather than by prophets who received it from above. Consequently, most polities in history have also been characterized by a distinction between the political and religious spheres rather than by their fusion. There was no fusion of the religious and the political spheres in the complex societies of the Middle East that the Muslims were to conquer, nor had there been as far back as people could remember. It is true that Hellenistic kings and, following them, the Byzantine and the Persian emperors were credited with power over all things material and spiritual, but the fusion was limited to the ruler; it did not obtain in the society beneath him. Thus the subjects of Hellenistic kings were not expected to worship the same gods or to follow the same laws, except in the area pertaining to the shared government; and though both the Byzantines and the Persians did expect religious uniformity, they had to cope with an ecclesiastical organization distinct from their governmental agency beneath them. In Sasanid Iran, the two agencies were held to be twins; in the Byzantine case, they were unrelated partners. Either way, they were separate, despite the monarch’s fullness of power. What is so striking about early Muslim society is precisely that it started out without such a separation. The monarch’s fullness of power here reflected a complete fusion of the religious and the political all the way through: there was no religious community separate from the politically organized society, and no ecclesiastical hierarchy separate from the political agency. One has to go all the way back to the ancient Near East to find a situation comparable to that of early Islam. The Sumerians may have started their history with temple communities ruled by priests alone. But that was thousands of years ago by Muhammad’s time, nobody in the Middle East remembered it, and modern scholars usually deny it. 77
The fusion (as opposed to blurring) of political and religious communities has not in fact been common in the history of complex societies at all, be it in the Middle East or elsewhere. Complex societies are usually much too differentiated in social, economic, intellectual, and cultural terms to tolerate the incorporation of all their interests in a single structure; and their rulers are usually much too coercive and rapacious for their subjects to have any desire to entrust them with the ultimate meaning of their lives. The Muslims were soon to find this out for themselves. The simplicity of Muhammad’s all-purpose community matched the undifferentiated nature of the tribal society in which he was active. Like everyone else in the Middle East, the Arabs were affected by the Hellenistic concept of kings as endowed with a fullness of power. (‘Hellenistic’? here is a shorthand for a mixture of ancient Near Eastern, Persian, and Greek ideas.) It shows in their conception of the caliph.” But there is only one real precedent for their all-purpose community in Middle Eastern history, and that is the federation of Israelites that Moses took out of Egypt for the conquest of Palestine (which he, like Muhammad, did not live to see). Moses was a prophet and statesman like Muhammad, and he is also the paradigmatic prophet in the Qur'an.
Wittingly or unwittingly, Muhammad was a new Moses. Like him, he united scattered tribes in the name of God and led them on to conquest (though for one reason or another the conquest continued far beyond Palestine this time round). Moses was an inspiration to many people, but his admirers were not usually able to imitate him in any literal way since they lived under such utterly different conditions. This was where Muhammad differed. He could and did re-enact Moses’ career. Thanks to the astonishing military success of the people he united, an antique model of prophetic state formation developed by a minor tribal people of the ancient Near East thus acquired paradigmatic status in the complex society of the medieval Middle East in which Islamic civilization took shape.
It is this starting point which gives Muslim political thought so different a character from that of its counterpart in the West. The Christians, as noted already, started with the conviction that truth (cognitive and moral) and political power belonged to separate spheres. Ultimately, of course, both originated with God, but they had appeared at different points in history, they regulated different aspects of life, and though they had to be coordinated for the common good, they could not be fully identified. The Muslims started with the opposite conviction: truth and power appeared at the same times in history and regulated the same aspects of life, more precisely all of them. It was a conviction that the post-conquest developments were soon to make untenable, but which was nonetheless difficult to give up. The result was an intense debate along utterly new lines dictated by the unusual starting point. In medieval Europe, where religious authority and political power were embodied in different institutions, the disagreement over their relationship took the form of a protracted controversy over the relationship between church and state. But in the medieval Middle East, religious authority and political power were embodied in a single multi-purpose institution, Muhammad’s umma. Here, then, the disagreement took the form of a protracted controversy over the nature and function of the leadership of the umma, that is the imamate.
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