The Myth of
the Islamic State - The History
of a Political Idea
Mohammed Ayoob
Foreign
Affairs Sunday, April 3, 2016
MOHAMMED
AYOOB is University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of International Relations
and Founding Director (2006–2012) of the Muslim Studies Program, Michigan State
University, and author of The Many Faces of Political Islam.
ISIS’
declaration of an Islamic State [1] begs a fundamental question: When and how did that concept become a part
of the political vocabulary [2]of Muslim societies? After all, the idea hasn’t been
around forever, and its popularity has waxed and waned over time. In fact, its
emergence and popularity are tied to the specific conditions of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Muslim societies responded to
European colonial rule.
As long as
Muslim rulers ruled over Muslim lands, no matter how arbitrarily, the notion of
an Islamic state was dormant, if not nonexistent. Although the concept of
sharia existed in Muslim political vocabulary, sharia law was normally confined
to personal matters such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The corpus of
criminal and civil law was viewed as rightfully created and administered by
states. One of the greatest Ottoman sultans, Suleiman the Magnificent, was even
given the title Qanuni (law-giver) as testament to the fact that much of
the legal sphere naturally fell outside the purview of sharia.
The normal
order of things broke down once non-Muslim powers came to rule over most Muslim
societies in the age of colonialism. European governments set out to define
hardened colonial boundaries where frontiers had previously been fluid, and
they attached legal sanctity to the lines drawn on maps. In the premodern
states, legitimacy had been based on conquest and ability to defend territory.
The states were also minimalist in terms of their intrusion into the lives of
their subjects. By contrast, the colonial state’s legitimacy rested not only on
conquest and holding territory but also on its capacity, modeled on European
nation-states, to weld diverse subjects into a homogenous mass through a common
language, a common legal system, and the provision of basic services, in return
for taxes and other resources.
Iraqi
security forces arrest suspected militants of the Islamic State (ISIS) during a
raid and weapons search operation in Hawija, April 24, 2014.
The arrival
of colonial rule kicked off the search in Muslim lands for the answer to what
went wrong, that is, how the natural order of things—namely, Muslim rule over
Muslim lands—was overturned. One of the most popular answers, and also the most
simplistic, was that the natural order was crumbling because Muslims were no
longer faithful to the fundamentals of Islam. The only way to remedy this
situation, the thinking went, was to return to the pristine age of Islam, the
period of the salaf-al-salih (righteous ancestors), covering the first
four decades from the founding of the Muslim polity in 622, when the Prophet
Muhammad and his immediate successors exercised power. This longing for a
return to pristine Islam included the re-creation of that imagined golden age’s
political system. These ideas were grafted onto the increasingly dominant
European style nation-state, creating the hybrid notion of Islamic state, or
rather the Islamic nation-state.
The urge to
create an Islamic state gained further momentum in the second half of the
twentieth century, as secular post-independence regimes in the Muslim
world—politically authoritarian, economically inefficient, and morally
bankrupt—failed to deliver power, wealth, or dignity to their peoples. The
slogan “Islam is the solution” gained currency precisely because every other
model of governance seemed to have failed. And so “golden age” and “caliphate”
crept into the Muslim world’s political discourse.
STATE OF
CONTRADICTION
In the
process of building modern Islamic states, however, the idea’s proponents
tended to gloss over the concept’s inherent problems and internal
contradictions. The most important of these was, of course, the fact that the
Islamic state is an idea borrowed from the experiences of the West and,
therefore, had no basis in the historical experiences of the Muslim world.
Further, they ignored the problem that the imagined golden age was
fundamentally un-replicable because all revelation ended with the death of the
prophet and so divine guidance in political and social affairs was no longer
possible.
Perhaps even
more troubling, the golden age wasn’t even particularly golden. Three of the
first four caliphs (the Rashidun, or “rightly guided”) were assassinated,
itself an index of high political instability. Political and social fissures
between the natives of Medina and migrants from Mecca, and, more important,
disputes among the Meccan elite—especially between the Banu Umayya and the Banu
Hashim, the two powerful clans of the Qureish, the Prophet’s tribe—plagued the
period, and civil wars soon became the order of the day. Eventually these
conflicts ended up creating the theological divide between Sunni and Shia [3].
Meanwhile,
rapid expansion of the Arab-Muslim empire created its own divisions and
frailties, especially as the “Arab” empire under the Umayyads became the
“Muslim” empire under the Abbasids with the induction of Persian and Turkic notables
into the political and military elite. By the mid-tenth century, the caliph
reigned only in name with local warlords, predominantly Turkic, holding most of
the power.
To be sure,
the concept of the caliphate, which became important as a way to hold the
community together after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, remained important at
least in theory. But there is little to suggest that it was ever integral to
the practice of Islam. Beyond being hard to justify as a Koranic concept, it
has an extremely checkered history. Succession after the prophet’s death was a
far more complicated affair than the popular hagiographic accounts indicate.
There were at least three parties contesting for power in those days: the
leaders of the Ansar (the tribes of Medina); leaders of the Meccan refugees,
especially from the tribe of Qureish, from which Muhammad had hailed; and a
splinter group of Meccans who, with support from some of the Medinites, argued
that succession should remain within the family of the prophet and that Ali ibn
Abi Talib, the prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, was the rightful heir.
This enmity
became intertwined with a pre-Islamic rivalry between the Banu Hashim, the
specific clan of the prophet, to which Ali belonged, and the Banu Umayya, who
had held much of the power in pagan Mecca before being ousted by the victorious
Muslims returning from Medina. Most leaders of the Banu Umayya converted to
Islam after the Muslims’ conquest of Mecca, many possibly to save their skin.
The politically astute Banu Umayya eventually got their way. Their power
increased as they coopted other Muslim factions, largely through the use of
state power and patronage. This coalition later emerged as the majority faction
in Islam known as the Sunnis.
The
institution of the caliphate, now arrogated to themselves by the Umayyads, was
thus transformed into arbitrary hereditary rule. It would have possibly lost
legitimacy in the eyes of the believers had it not been for the proposition
propagated by the ulema, the religious scholars, that Umayyad rule was
legitimate. The ulema’s aim in doing so was to prevent chaos in the yet
fledgling Arab Muslim community. They used the Koranic verse “O you who have
believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you”
to justify even the most arbitrary and unjust rule. Justice, in other words,
was sacrificed to preserve order, a proposition that became the hallmark of
Sunni religio-political thought for a long time to come.
The Abbasid
hereditary caliphate followed Umayyad rule. Its main contribution was that it
saw the beginnings of a rational bureaucratic state, thanks to the influence of
the newly inducted Persian elite; it was manned substantially by Persian
dignitaries. However, it also introduced the Persian idea of kingship (zille-ilahi,
the shadow of God on earth) thus further augmenting the arbitrary and
authoritarian character of the state.
The
institution of the caliphate, now based on the twin principles of force and
heredity, was further degraded from the middle of the tenth century with the
rise of Turko-Persian military fiefdoms. The fiction of the caliphate was
maintained but real power lay with the predominantly Turkic sultans who ruled
openly on the basis of the principle that might makes right, with the caliph
investing in them post-facto with the right to rule over territory they already
controlled by force.
It was only
when Ottoman power waned [4] in the second half of the nineteenth century (which
coincided with the major European powers starting to divide up Ottoman
territories) that Sultan Abdul Hamid II began to emphasize the role of the
Ottoman sultan as the caliph of Islam. He used his role as the caliph to
bolster his legitimacy among his Muslim subjects and to instigate rebellion
among the Muslim subjects of the European powers that threatened the Ottoman
Empire. In the end, the Ottomans were defeated in World War I, and Turkey’s new
government, led by Mustafa Kemal, abolished the institution of caliph in 1924.
The
sentiments that Abdul Hamid had helped unleash, though, endured. Anti-colonial
movements, some of them described as jihads, raged in Algeria
[5], Egypt
[6], northwest India
[7], Indonesia
[8], Sudan
[9], Somalia
[10], and elsewhere. These movements
focused above all on challenging European rule and attaining independence
within the distinct proto-states formed by colonial boundaries. However, they
also borrowed heavily from Islamic terminology to mobilize their populations
against European rule. This set the stage for the emergence of more explicitly
Islamist movements bent on turning their societies into Islamic societies and
their polities into Islamic states.
Several
major political movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
[11] and the Jamaat-e-Islami in Pakistan [12](originally India), specifically seeking to Islamize
their societies and polities, emerged during the colonial period and continued
to be active in the post-independence era in opposition to the relatively
secular elites that took power after the departure of the colonial rulers.
However, their notion of the Islamic state was largely circumscribed by the boundaries
of the nation-state that had emerged following the end of colonial rule. The
era of multiple Islamic states had now arrived, with the logic of the sovereign
nation-state subsuming its Islamic content.
IN CONTEXT
Today,
around the world, each purported model of the Islamic state is distinctive and
is a product of specific contexts—and each advocates the implementation of an
Islamic polity within discrete national borders. This has given short shrift to
the idea of a universal and uniform Islamic state. No two states are as unlike
each other as Saudi Arabia and Iran, the two leading self-proclaimed Islamic
states. Saudi Arabia is based on the model of a hereditary monarchy that is
well served by a subservient religious elite that is given free rein in the
cultural and social spheres as a quid pro quo for preaching political docility
and obedience to the House of Saud.
The Islamic
Republic of Iran finds the idea of hereditary monarchy anathema and
fundamentally un-Islamic. It prefers to govern through a pseudo-Islamic version
of Plato’s philosopher-king dressed up as the vilayet-i-faqih (rule by
the supreme jurist), which, according to many senior Shia theologians, violates
the basic tenets of Shia theology. The Iranian system’s arbitrariness is alleviated
somewhat by representative institutions such as the Majlis and an elected
presidency. However, this hybridity creates its own problems and opens the
system to criticism from both traditionalists and modernists—the former finding
it too Western and the latter too antediluvian.
What these
historical and contemporary examples demonstrate is that there is no consensus
over what an ideal Islamic state ought to look like, nor is there any
convincing evidence that the “righteous ancestors” ever formulated such a
vision. Rather, Islam was and is used and abused by rulers in order to shore up
their legitimacy. Wherever and whenever a state calls itself Islamic, it is
temporal power, not religion, that is in the driver’s seat. The lesson one
draws from all this is that Islam needs to be saved from the state, not that
the state should become the vehicle for the imposition of Islamic norms.
Whenever and
wherever the state becomes the solitary repository of Islamic wisdom, as in
Saudi Arabia and Iran, Islam becomes the handmaiden of the rulers, which
threatens its essential role as the fount of societal morality and a constraint
on temporal power. Historical evidence and contemporary experience thus
demonstrate that the term “Islamic State” is an oxymoron that should be
expunged from the political vocabulary of Muslim societies—something that ISIS’
latest incarnation of the Islamic State makes abundantly clear.
