Andrew F. March - The Caliphate of Man

On February 18, 2011, one week after popular protests forced the downfall of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, an estimated 2 million Egyptians assembled in Cairos Tahrir Square for a Day of Victory celebration. This was a Friday, the Muslim day of communal prayer. Leading the prayer and delivering the sermon that day was 84-year-old Egyptian scholar Ysuf al-Qaraw, who had lived in exile in Qatar since 1961 and was probably the single best-known global intellectual figure associated with the Islamist movement.

Qaraws ecumenical sermon is a window into a certain political theology. Although a sermon is not a political treatise, Qaraw could not avoid invoking a vision of dual popular and theocratic sovereignty over political life. This Friday was a commemoration of the victory of the people, and Qaraw duly honors the Egyptian spirit, the spirit that encompasses all. I hope from the people of Egypt that it sticks to this unity. Moreover, he warns the as-yet-untoppled Arab dictators that the Arab world has changed from the inside. So, do not stand against the people. It is not possible that the people shall remain silent. Dialogue with them in a real dialogue, not to patch things up, but with constructive actions that put things in their places, respect the minds of people [al-ns] and respect the minds of the people [al-shab]!

But what is the essence of this people, and what is the source of its power? For Qaraw, the victorious multitude is a believing people: This is the unity of a line of people praying. Let there be no fanaticism! We are all believers. We have to believe in God and deepen our faith. We are all Egyptians. We are all rising up against falseness. We are all angry on behalf of the Truth! And it is a believing people that has the power to move even the divine will: It was inevitable that Egypt be liberated, because these youth willed it, and when the youth will, their will participates in the will of God. Nobody will be able to fight the divine decrees, nor to delay the day when it rises. This world has changed and the world has evolved. Without entering into practical questions of law and sovereignty over a new legal order, Qaraw expresses a political theology whereby the world is moved by a harmony of popular and divine will, a dual sovereignty according to which the peoples supremacy over its governors is absolute. That popular sovereignty is constrained by a higher, divine sovereignty. But this is not only a relationship of hierarchy and restraint. It is a relationship of harmony and representation. The people not only realizes its own essence through obedience to God; it in some way represents and advances divine purposes.

This book argues that this vision of popular sovereignty is not merely demagogic flattery in homiletic form, but rather reflects a genuine intellectual revolution in modern Islamic thought, from a view of politics as just guardianship and pious representation by rulers and scholars to a distinctive vision of democracy whereby a just and pious people governs itself while also representing Gods instructions to humanity. This intellectual revolution involved more than political pragmatism or superficial adoption of democratic language. It consisted in a comprehensive reformulation of Islamic political philosophy, built in particular on a theological claim about mankinds status as Gods vicegerentor caliphon earth. That reformulation involved not only reducing rulers to their proper status as agents of the people but also implicitly raising the people to the ultimate arbiters of Gods law. If Islamism as a political theology represents a grand idea, one that is meant to challenge and replace others in the modern Muslim public sphere, it is this. The 2011 Arab revolutions were both a unique opportunity for this grand idea to be tested politically and, perhaps, the historical event that consigned this idea to the realm of the ideal. What was the ideal, where did it come from, and what were its theoretical conditions of possibility? If it is now a matter of history, and intellectual history at that, does this not leave Islamists with a kind of intellectual crisis as they seek to define what distinctive approach to political life Islam has to offer?