Historically informed and theoretically rich, The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought provides an accessible and sophisticated comparative study of modern (almost exclusively Sunni) Islamist political thought. In seven chapters, author Andrew F. March problematizes the “invention” and the “ideological innovations” of the idea of popular sovereignty, and the Quranic notion of “mankind’s status as God’s vicegerent – or caliph – on earth.” He also examines the idea of a “dual sovereignty, “which suggests there is a harmonious and representative relationship between divine and popular sovereignty, in Islamist political thought (x, xi, xix).
The book carefully examines the notion of the caliphate in the thought of the Pakistani Islamist thinker Abu’l-Ala Mawdudi, whose idea of “theo-democracy” inserted “the principle of divine sovereignty into the form of the modern state” (98). March acknowledges that in Mawdudi’s interpretation, questions of “the people’s status in relation to the divine” and how people “can be seen as the true custodians of ultimate authority” are forced “to the surface” (112).
Inspired by Mawdudi, Sayyid Qutb’s Islamist political thought represents the high point of “high utopian Islamism” (75, 147). Qutb understood a rejection of divine sovereignty as a new paganism, or “jahili’ya,” and advocated the idea of “Islamic society as realistic utopia” (114, 120). Nonetheless, some degree of the idea of popular sovereignty seems to have been incorporated into Qutb’s radical Islamist thought (xx-xxi).
The book extensively examines the discourse and politics of the leader of Tunisia’s al-Nahda Party, Rashid al-Ghannoushi. Unlike “the high utopian Islamism” of Mawdudi and Qutb, which is both “radically anti-democratic and radically populist” (151-52), Ghannoushi’s concepts of civil state and a post-Islamist ideology of Muslim democracy democratize the doctrine of the caliphate of man without losing a “commitment to divine sovereignty” (152).
For al-Ghannoushi, Islam respects the citizenship rights of non-Muslims because in the multiple religious communities of Medina under the Prophet Muslims and non-Muslims were citizens; “citizenship was based on shared possession of a territory, and not shared creed.” Islamic governance was founded under conditions of “radical pluralism” and the first Muslim state was a “pluralist state” (212-213). In other words, “the question of pluralism is an ontological question. That is, God willed it, even in matters of religion, and even to the point of denying God” (218). Muslims are “morally and epistemically required to accept” pluralism (220). Hence, in Ghannoushi’s civil state, “legitimacy does not depend on anything but the people” (214), and “anything that guarantees the welfare and rights of people is part of Islam even if there is no textual grounding for it in revelation” (215).
Nonetheless, Ghannoushi’s theory seems to reveal “the limits of a political theory that is fully Islamic and fully democratic” (154). Although “the people” are “the source of all authority” (183), his perfectionist vision of “a republic of virtue” implies that the living shari’a remains the “constituent authority for the society, state and the civilization” (187, 194). Moreover, the “ambiguity” in his concept of people suggests that “the sovereign community” is not “the people” but the “umma, the believing people” (200).
The Caliphate of Man, in sum, seems to suggest that besides the problem of oligarchic politics in Muslim contexts, there are contradictions between the theory of Islamic Democracy and the structure of modern Muslim societies. Materializing Islamic/Muslim democracy entails a moral consensus about religion, which cannot be assumed in modernity. In other words, “the language and imaginary of sovereignty (whether divine or popular) can no longer structure an Islamic approach to political life. The future of Islamic political thought may need be, in a deep sense, post-sovereigntist and post-statist” (xxii).
The Caliphate of Man’s central argument is profound. I would like, however, to raise two points. First, on occasions, two concepts of “Islamic” and “Islamist” are interchangeably used. The book carefully examines ideas of the most authoritative Islamist (Mawdudi and Qutb) and “post-Islamist” (Ghannoushi) thinkers. But “Muslim” political thought contains more than the “Islamist” theories, and adding a chapter or two about the idea of popular sovereignty in the thoughts of “modern Muslim reformists” would have enriched this excellent book. This may well be a topic for another superb work by the author, but limiting myself to only the book under review, it seems that March passes too quickly over the ideas of Indian-Pakistani philosopher Mohammad Iqbal. He is mentioned in chapter 4, but a more thorough examination of his idea of “spiritual democracy” would have enriched the argument. Similarly, an introduction to the ideas of the Sudanese Muslim reformist Mahmoud Mohammed Taha—particularly on democracy, justice, and socialism in his Second Message of Islam (Syracuse University Press, 1996) —would have broadened the scope of this outstanding study.
The same applies to the work of one of Taha’s students, the legal scholar Abdullhai Ahmed An-Na’im, whose Islam and the Secular State (Harvard University Press, 2008) provides an Islamic critique of the Islamist polity, and a Muslim vision of a democratic secular state. Khaled Abou el-Fadl, Ali Abd al-Raziq, Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid, Mohammed Arkoun, and Mohammed Abed al-Jabri in Sunni Muslim thought, and Ali Shariati, Abdul Karim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, Mohsen Mojtahed Shabestari and Hassan Yousefi-Eshkevari in the Shia Muslim thought, demonstrated diverse “reformist” interpretations of the compatibility of a Muslim and democratic theory/polity.
Second, The Caliphate of Man makes two outstanding points: Muslims need to strive for “post-statist” models of democracy distinct from the “classical Islamic authority” and “the modern sovereign nation-state.” Second, there is a need for a societal/social approach to achieving radical pluralism and the recognition of “multiple ways of life” (227-228). Nonetheless, Muslims can still achieve democracy within the limited modern state-centric system, as the great majority of ordinary Muslims (not the Islamist leaders) have shown their commitment to democracy in multiple social movements. While the idea of the equal citizenship/popular sovereignty does not coexist with an orthodox “legal” (but not ethical) interpretation of sharia, the answer to this problem is not to accept “Islamist” ideals of state and society, nor is it to merely imagine a Muslim democracy as an ideal post-statist world system. The solution is, in part, to empower the democratic reformist voices of Islam while striving to achieve a global political structure beyond the limits of the present Westphalian modals of nation-state and citizenship. Humanity, Muslims included, deserves a post-neoliberal structure of global equal citizenship regardless of religion, race, class, gender, and nationality.
The Caliphate of Man, in sum, raises urgent and profound questions. This is an excellent addition to current critical scholarship in modern Islamic political thought, comparative political theory, and democratic theories.
Mojtaba Mahdavi is a professor of political science and the ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Mojtaba Mahdavi
Date Of Review:
December 9, 2022
