Download PDF | (Columbia Studies in International and Global History) Hayrettin Yücesoy - Disenchanting the Caliphate_ The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought-Columbia University Press (2023).
393 Pages
Preface
Disenchanting the Caliphate: The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought is about opening a space of contemplation on the value of secular political languages in the histories of Muslim peoples. Taking a critical stance toward the modern scholarly and public over-religionization of the Muslim subject, it focuses on a remarkable discourse of good governance and political temporality in a foundational period in their histories. A common wisdom in Western public discourse today is that the histories and cultures of the Muslim peoples have been defined in religious terms in a way that European and North American societies have not.
Seemingly innocuous statements such as “Islam is a way of life” and “Islam does not distinguish between state and religion,” or questions of the same order (“Why are Muslim countries unable to modernize and democratize?” “How can one reform and modernize Islam?”) have regularly underscored the idea that Muslim peoples are different. This assertion (which essentializes Islam and what “it” does) is accompanied by an astonishing supposition that the ulema, more than any other social body, have represented Muslims and held the authority to speak for the tradition. How does this mythology still sound authoritative and convincing? Regretfully, even the post- and decolonial scholarship’s deconstructive efforts aiming at provincializing Europe and its knowledge forms have been leveraged to embolden authoritarian, nativist, and chauvinistic political discourses in the global south, including Muslim societies, in the name of cultural authenticity only to circle back to the initial rhetoric of Otherness. What has also been encouraging this form of treatment and representation is the recent spectacular implosion of Islamist movements in countries where they have been able to form a governing body.
This development has made speaking about Islam and Muslims harder without invoking images of theocratic violence and oppression, incompatibility with modern life, and the lack of civic and political culture to guide Muslims in the contemporary world. In brief, this shared peculiarizing and over-religionizing language has come to define the terms of the contemporary debate about Islam and Muslims. One way to develop a critical decolonial language is to operate with a new “problematic” and pursue a different agenda. My argument in this book is that political thought traditions prevalent in the caliphal world in the middle decades of the long eighth century diverged in two dialogic regimes of rationality: the religious governance of the ulema elaborated in what I call “imamate discourse” and the secular politics of lay bureaucrat literati expressed in the discursive tradition of siyasa. Initially emerging in the crucibles of imperial bureaucracy and separate from “scholastic” knowledge connected with mosques and ulema, siyasa discourse exposed the distinction between the ulema-centric idea of the caliphate (khilāfa) and royal authority (mulk). The dialogic engagement between the two shaped the contours of not only the Abbasid caliphate but also world-historical thought traditions from the mid-eighth century onward. As an intervention that changed the discursive landscape, the idea of siyasa disenchanted politics.1 The proponents of siyasa intervened from two directions. First, they foregrounded the idea of good governance as an endeavor distinct from the practice of religious piety. Second, they opened a new field of deliberation in which temporal political moralities (philosophical, ethical, realist) were expressed and elaborated. By making a non-ulema-centric sense of political reality in an epoch in which religious scholars imagined only a community of faith and its governing body, the proponents of siyasa conceptualized governance as a craft of building satisfaction through the rational and practical calculation of the contingency in consideration of the outcome. In other words, in presenting the idea of good governance in the adab-siyasa political thought tradition, I hope to point out how the discourses of the lay bureaucrat literati helped steer the caliphate away from the practices of a “confessional state” championing a particular creed in governance toward a new path.2 While these professionals defended religious faith as sacred meaning of life and a moral foundation of orderly society, they also argued against its representation as the regulator of political practice.
Viewed from the vantage point of doing rather than describing, their discursive practice worked not as an additional “more of the same” opinion in a static space or as a conviction of certain individuals but as a disruptive argument about the art of government. Just as urban planning generates a new consciousness of the topography in the imagination of the affected inhabitants by linking various parts of the terrain in a new way, the pioneering lay bureaucrats of the Abbasid caliphate produced a discourse that interjected, in an already occupied intellectual space, a new mode of sociopolitical practice, which I call the worldly ethos of adab-siyasa. In fact, one may characterize their intervention as an attempt of deliberative empire building commonly associated with the European early modernity. Some may object that the terms of the discussion themselves are European and thus incongruent in other contexts, and that engaging the subjects of politics and secularity in this way only enhances Eurocentrism. First, I am aware that in elaborating my argument through the juxtaposition of secular versus religious languages of politics, I cannot escape engaging our present-day hegemonic discourse about either secularism/religion or Islam/Muslims. It will be clear to the reader, however, that the proper analytical site for the discourse of “Islamic political thought” is not the histories of “Islam” and the “Muslim peoples” (any more than the label the “Dark Ages” is for the “Christian peoples”) but the terms and the framing of this conversation in contemporary debate. Second, while I understand the “intent” of such an argument, I cannot help but see the orientalizing subtext of construing a notion of European exceptionalism from the back door. When this view is voiced in the global South, it risks erasing or concealing global forms of secularity by holding too tight to the notion of “European exception.” By asking not to problematize the non-European global historical archive from the vantage point of democratic humanistic sensibilities, the argument stifles historically informed conversations on global participatory political values and further corners intellectuals into defending and reinventing authoritarian aspirations in the name of tradition and resistance.
This argument also exposes a patronizing posture in prejudging not only what non-Europeans can and cannot say but whether they are entitled today to aspire to participatory and consensual politics. Why should this endeavor be any different from how one studies gender, slavery, labor, and power in world history? One can discuss the connections (and the distinctions) between politics and religious faith without mirroring European modernity’s truth claims. And finally, I hope the reader will see that I am using the idiom secular/secularity as a metaphor, Wittgenstein’s ladder so to speak, to reach beyond the immediate and highly polluted semantics of the terminology in contemporary discourse. What I am looking for is not an alternative “master narrative” but rather a space of new possibilities created by disruptions that I think better characterize the history of political reflection. I should also add a comment here about linguistic discourses to clarify how I differ from scholars who examine political thought from the perspective of a “picture theory of meaning” whereby language functions as a tool to describe an external reality and access meaning that exists outside the actual expression.3 I focus instead on what language “does” and what it is “used for.”
This entails that I read primary-source texts not with the hermeneutic aim of understanding authorial intentions or uncovering the authors’ beliefs but with the purpose of analyzing statements as interventions. Inasmuch as statements function in an already socially and discursively occupied field, they cannot be merely ideas and beliefs thrown into a vacuum or added to the catalog of existing ideas. Statements produce specific effects and are dialogic (contextual, connected, and interactive). They challenge and reinterpret other verbal utterances and are challenged and reinterpreted by others. Assessed from this standpoint, the statements of the thinkers I study comprise more than verbalization of their thoughts and beliefs. Taken as “discursive practices,” they are, rather, interventions into the political debates of their time, to support and promote positions and resist others. In this attempt, I find useful the analytical position taken by the Cambridge school of political thought, represented by people such as John G. A. Pocock4 and Quentin Skinner.5 As it will also be evident, I draw on the work of literary theorists and scholars in the humanistic disciplines who emphasize that speech acts constitute the world rather than merely describe it.
John Austin’s intervention on language as performance, namely, in pondering how expression does more than postulate or describe, but also performs, mobilizes relations, and enables capacities, resonates with what I am trying to accomplish in this study.6 To mitigate the social disconnect apparent in such a position on language, however, I rely on Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism that “verbal discourse is a social phenomenon”7 and Michel Foucault’s observation that statements are embodied in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns of general behavior, in forms of transmission and diffusion, and in pedagogical forms that at once impose and maintain them.8 In this regard, I am convinced by Pierre Bourdieu’s “social” critique of Austin that the illocutionary force of an utterance is irreducible to discourse. Rather, it is tied to the social position of the speaker, who derives his or her authority from the accumulated symbolic capital of the group, “which makes all the difference.”9 In invoking the connection between verbal utterances and the social web, I thus notice the way verbal expressions and specific practices of knowledge constitute their referents from a socially defined position. To flesh out my main points, I focus on the early Abbasid period, whose intellectual vibrancy shaped politics and political thought for many centuries afterward.
I have organized the book with an introduction and eight chapters, which explicate my main argument through five themes (chapters 3 to 8). The introduction discusses the conceptual and methodological bases of the study. Therein, I assess the historiography of the field to substantiate my claims about critical decolonization of political thought and lay the groundwork for my arguments about good governance. Chapter 1 focuses on the empire-building efforts of the Umayyads and the Abbasids in order to trace the developments that underpinned the competing memories and representations of the caliphate in the mid-eighth century. The chapter considers the dialectic of two major developments which led to political reflection on the caliphate. One was related to the militarization and imperialization of the faith community that entangled faith with imperial politics and led to substantial theological divisions that tore the faith community apart. The other was the formation of the empire, with its complex structures and practices, that prompted interest in political reflection dedicated to improving administrative efficiency and political control. Chapter 2 analyzes the early texts of the imamate in the eighth century to clarify key aspects of its language. It argues that the discourse on imamate emerged from the late seventh century onward as the political language of the ulema, who defined and guided the caliphate as “pastoral authority” and imagined social organization to be a religious affair coterminous with the religious community.
The chapter then looks ahead to two early juristic texts of the late eighth century in the context of the emerging siyasa to capture the change of mood and style in the imamate’s language. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the Arabic political prose’s emergence in the mideighth century at the intersection of developments that brought together the Umayyad administration and the new class of bureaucrats. By reviewing the biographies and writings of key figures, these two chapters capture the critical sociocultural underpinnings and the strategic aspects of their discursive practice, which set siyasa on a separate path from the imamate. Chapter 3 examines the rise of political prose in the “Sālim School of Siyasa” to illustrate how the late Umayyad bureaucrat literati tapped into the longuedurée imperial practices in the region to develop a new frame of deliberation echoing the hybridity of their vision of governance and the precarity of their social standing. Chapter 4 spotlights Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s (d. ca. between 755 and 757) life and political writings, in particular the “Epistle on the Caliph’s Privy,” as a disruptive and pioneering archetype of siyasa text. It elaborates on Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s writing as a remarkable example of government rationality and a new foundation of thinking incompatible with that of the ulema. It argues that by the mere form of its articulation in writing—let alone its content—the “Epistle” signified an unusual conceptual voice that exposed, for the first time in the history of the caliphate, a vision of empire that made sense of the political reality beyond its meaning as an affair of the religious community.
It is the contention of this chapter that the worldly tenor of siyasa cannot be appreciated without regarding the adab tradition and its worldly and cosmopolitan character. In chapters 5 to 8, I read Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s “Epistle” contrapuntally to expose its larger dialogic context and as a launching pad to discuss several key themes. Chapter 5 addresses the distinction between the caliph of the imamate and the sovereign of siyasa to shed light on the key aspects of sovereignty in political discourse. It observes how siyasa was envisioned as a craft of bringing the sovereign under the law through a regime of moral cultivation, adab, which included disciplining the ruler in right conduct, inculcating the codes of propriety and ethics, and encouraging him to acquire the practical skills necessary to be an effective ruler. It also explicates how siyasa was seen as the art of practicing governance through alleviating problems by normalized and agreeable means and aspiring to foster a climate of satisfaction among the subjects to keep a sustainable social order.
The chapter then probes the question of divine providence and political virtue. Chapter 6 considers the intersection of law and political authority. It contends that the notion of “law for the empire” potentiated a new legal practice to compete against the idea of “empire for the sacred law,” as advocated by the ulema. As a way to translate brute force into legitimate power, a modality to normalize control, this new understanding of law reshaped existing relations by channeling loyalty in public matters from the sacred law of the ulema to the sovereign. The chapter argues that this legal deconstructive effort was meant to rationalize the process of legislation to make neither the ulema nor even the sovereign, but the “procedure” itself, the axis of legislation. Chapter 7 explains the reinvention of imperial topography as an administrable territorialized landscape, otherwise imagined in the idioms of faith and of the religious community. It shows how, in siyasa discourse, the empire was not simply a bequest of the believers or merely an aggregation of cities, villages, roads, and peoples inherited from the Umayyads and now happened to be ruled by the Abbasids. It was imagined, rather, as an organization with its own structures and relations and an association that is constituted rather than received. Chapter 8 accounts for the governmentalization of people in the realm as imperial subjects, which distinguished them from the faith-subject of the imamate. It clarifies how, in siyasa discourse, the Abbasid realm was reimagined as a constituted sociopolitical order under the supreme authority of the ruler, comprising the army, elite, and common folk as major imperial estates.
This classificatory intentionality did not merely shape the elites’ and the common folks’ role in the empire but in fact transformed the anonymity of discrete imperial functionaries and subjects into an identifiable or named collectivity (ruling class and common folk) under the sovereign’s rule. The conclusion to the book provides an overview of the main points of the study. I hope my book helps challenge the monopoly of the ulema-centric public and academic arguments about the character of political thought in the histories of the Muslim peoples.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق