Read in paperback.
Quotes
Mostly on or around the topic on God as King.
On the general tendency of absolute monarchy in agrarian societies
It had been found, after centuries of experience, that an absolute monarchy was the only effective way of governing a pre-modern empire with a agrarian-based economy, and that it was far more satisfactory than a military oligarchy, where commanders usually competed with one answer for power. The idea of making one man so privileged that rich and poor alike are vulnerable before him is abhorrent to us in our democratic era, but we must realize that democracy is made possible by an industrialized society which has the technology to replicate its resources indefinitely: this was not an option before the advent of Western modernity. In the pre-modern world, a monarch who was so powerful that he had no rivals, did not need to fight his own battles, could settle the quarrels of the great, and had no reason to ignore the entreaties of those who pleaded for the poor. So strong was this preference for monarchy that, as we shall see, even when real power was wielded by local rulers in a large empire, they still paid lip service to the king and claimed to be acting as his vassals. The Umayyad caliphs [from 661 CE] governed a vast empire which continued to expand under their rule [until ~750 CE]. They would also find that in order to preserve the peace they would have to become absolute monarchs too, but how would this cohere with Arab traditions, on the one hand, and with the radical egalitarianism of the Quran on the other? [p. 35-6]
The author here calls absolute monarchy a “preference” due to the solutions it provides to the fundamental problems of agrarian society. They will continue to make generalised statements about such societies. It strikes me as oversimplified and will need to be corroborated with kingship experts, such as in for example The Routledge History of Monarchy.
However, it is a seductive if easy answer to the question of why kingship was formed, a kind of inevitability to solve the woes of the farmer.
Does Against the Grain by James C. Scott agree with this? Scott focuses on ‘the state’ rather than kings per se, but their telling at least doesn’t disagree fundamentally. Scott argues that Agriculture predates the state (and so kings) and we can surmise therefore that, from Scotts points of view, rather than there being a preference for farmers in a state, there existed an opportunity for domination of the farmers. This analysis would seem in line with the historical record of the conquering Arab armies of Islam — themselves raiders and merchants, not farmers — who replaced the ruling caste of the empires they took over.
Continuing directly from the previous quote:
The first Umayyad caliphs were not absolute monarchs. Muawiyyah still ruled like an Arab chief, as primus inter pares [first among equals, as democratic presidents are theoretically today]. The Arabs had always distrusted kingship, which was not feasible in a region where numerous small groups had to compete for the same inadequate resources. They had no system of dynastic rule, since they always needed the best man available as their chief. [p. 36]
Later, absolute monarchy was imposed towards the end of the Umayyad dynastic era:
Hisham [the first, 724-43 CE] was a strong and effective caliph, who was able to put the empire back on a more sound economic basis, but he achieved this by making the state more rigidly centralized and his own rule more autocratic. He was becoming more like a conventional absolute monarch, and the empire benefited from this politically. The problem was that this type of autocracy was abhorrent to the devout, and fundamentally un-Islamic. Was it, after all, impossible to run a state on Quaranic norms? [p. 44]
This empire was from Spain (including modern-day Portugal), across the southern coast of the Mediterranean, through Egypt, the entire Arab peninsula, Persia and to the Indus river.
Quranic society
What were the Quaranic norms? For the author, the primary norm seem to be a classless egalitarianism, since they so often call out the opulence of the ruling Muslim class and the relative inequality with the poor.
We see this explicitly (but too briefly) later in Chapter 4, Islam Triumphant, section Imperial Islam (1500–1700):
However pious an absolute monarch might seem to be, such autocracy was fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Quran. Most of the people still lived in poverty, and suffered the injustices that were endemic to agrarian society. [p. 98]
The author later states more plainly that the Shariah is fundamentally anti-monarchic. Shariah is explained as the sacred laws derived from the Quran and the other important texts of the sunnah (habits and practice of the Prophet Muhammad) and the ahadith (documented traditions of early Islam):
The Shariah had begun as a protest movement, and much of its dynamism derived from its oppositional stance. Under the Ottoman system [who applied Shariah for the first time as the law of the land], this was inevitably lost. …the qadis [legal experts] derived their authority from the sultan [Suleiman the Magnificent at the time, 1520-66], the guardian of the Shariah, and were therefore bound to apply the law according to his directives. Thus the Shariah was made to endorse the system of absolute monarchy (now more powerful than ever before) which it had been originally designed to oppose. [p. 113]
The inevitable decline of all agrarian empires
Any pre-modern empire had a limited lifespan; based as it was on an agrarian surplus, there would inevitably come a time when a large, expanding state would outrun its resources. [p. 44]
Again, the breezy certainty of these general statements gives me pause.
Comparative religion
Especially regarding Christianity.
It must also be recalled that beliefs and doctrines are not as important in Islam as they are in Christianity. Like Judaism, Islam is a religion that requires people to live in a certain way, rather than to accept certain credal propositions. It stresses orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy. [p. 56]
The final sentence is very well put.
Salvation [in Islam] did not mean redemption from sin, but the creation of a just society in which the individual could more easily make that existential surrender of his or her whole being that would bring them fulfilment. [p. 134]
Recall that Islam means ‘surrender’.
The Problem of Elite Knowledge
[Abu Nasr] Al-Farabi [d. 950] believed that Shii Islam, with its cult of the Imam as the guide of the community, could prepare ordinary Muslims to live in a society ruled by a philosopher-king on rational principles. Plato had argued that a well-ordered society needed doctrines which the masses believed to be divinely inspired. Muhammad had brought a law, backed by such divine sanctions as hell, which would persuade the ignorant in a way that more logical arguments could not. Religion was thus a branch of political science, and should be studied and observed by a good Faylasauf [philosopher], even though he would see further to the kernel of the faith than the average Muslim. [p. 62]
Al-Farabi was a philosopher. Without having read any of his works or about him beyond this book, I am left wondering if the linkage with Plato’s philosopher-kings (from The Republic) and elite knowledge is the author’s own analysis or if it existed explicitly in the thought of Al-Farabi. Something to check.
The idea of a philosopher-king comes up again when discussing the Indian Moghul empire and one of the—if not the—most revered leader:
His biographer, the Sufi historian Abdulfazl Allami [1551-1602], saw Akbar [1542-1605] as the ideal philosopher-king. He also believed that he was the Perfect Man, whom Sufis thought to exist in each generation to give divine guidance to the ummah [religious community]. Akbar was establishing a civilization, which, Allami argued, would help people to cultivate a spirit of such generosity that conflict would become impossible. [p. 107]
We also read:
There were, [Al-Ghazzali, d. 1111] believed, three sorts of people: those who accept the truths of religion without questioning them; those who try to find justification for their beliefs in the rational discipline of kalam [arguments of theology]; and the Sufis [mystics], who have a direct experience of religious truth. [p. 76]
Equality of sinners, or The King’s Anarchists
One of the early fundamentalist ideologues was Mawudui, the founder of the Jamaat-i Islami in Pakistan. … The Western threat had made Muslims defensive for the first time. Mawdudi defied the whole secularist ethos: he was proposing an Islamic liberation theology. Because God alone was sovereign, nobody was obliged to take orders from any other human being. Revolution against the [British] colonial powers was not just a right but a duty. Mawdudi called for a universal jihad. [p. 143]
(See below for more on “universal jihad”, as this topic section has a different focus.)
This is not an uncommon strategy for arguing for the dismantling of the social order from a religious perspective, while attempting to retain ideas of divine sovereignty.
Veiling by modern Muslim women
When [Islamic dress] is forced upon people against their will (as by the Taliban) it is coercive and as likely to create a backlash as the aggressive technique of Reza Shah Pahlavi [of Iran, an aggressive secularizer]. But many Muslim women feel that veiling is a symbolic return to the pre-colonial period, before their society was disrupted and deflected from its true course. [p. 146.]
Note to read about this aspect more in It’s Not About the Burqa by Mariam Khan which I’ve been meaning to read for some time.
Commentary on modern terrorism
Islam is a realistic and practical faith, which does not normally encourage the spirit of martyrdom or the taking of pointless risks. [p. 48]
This is set up in clear contrast with Christianity, for which the martyr is sacred and saintly, highest of all people, as well as modern-day so-called jihadist terror actions.
This originated with Mawdudi, mentioned above, and his “universal jihad”
The Quran condemns all aggressive warfare and teaches that the only just war is a war of self-defense. [p. 159]
Modern fundamentalism
Note that the author discusses fundamentalism as the struggle of any religious tradition with modernity, not only Islam, which should be obvious, and frequently draws generalised parallels with Christian fundamentalism, especially of the North American variety.
…a fundamentalist movement does not arise immediately, as a knee-jerk response to the advent of Western modernity, but only takes shape when the modernization process is quite far advanced. At first religious people try to reform their traditions and effect a marriage between them and modern culture… But when these moderate measures are found to be of no avail, some people resort to more extreme methods, and a fundamentalist movement is born. [p. 140]
Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied is convinced that the secular establishment is determined to wipe religion out. This is not always a paranoid reaction. We have seen that secularism has often been imposed very aggressively in the Muslim world. [p. 141]
The key example of such aggressive oppressive and violent secular imposition is Iran before the Iranian Revolution, 1979.
Fundamentalists have been successful in so far as they have pushed religion from the sidelines and back to centre stage… But fundamentalism is not simply a way of ‘using’ religion for a political end. These are essentially rebellions against the secularist exclusion of the divine from public life, and a frequently desperate attempt to make spiritual values prevail in the modern world. But the desperation and feat that fuel fundamentalists also tend to distort the religious tradition, and accentuate its more aggressive aspects at the expense of those that preach toleration and reconciliation. [p. 142]
Nothing groundbreaking here that many reasonable people would not already take position on, but worth drawing out these explicit statements of the author’s own account.
God as King fragments
The Mutazilah had been so fearful of anthropomorphic notions of God that they denied that the divine had any ‘human’ attributes at all. How could we say that God ‘spoke’ or ‘sat on a throne’, as the Quran averred? How could we talk of Gods ‘knowledge’ or ‘power’? [p. 54]
Other smaller claims and ideas
Religious ideas and practices take root not because they are promoted by forceful theologians, nor because they can be shown to have a sound historical or rational basis, but because they are found in practice to give the faithful a sense of sacred transcendence. [p. 51]
But, despite the convictions of many of the faithful in any tradition, who are convinced that religion never changes and that their beliefs and practices are identical with those of the founders of their faith, religion must change in order to survive. [p. 64]
We could say this for all kind of founder-based ideologies, including the Constitutionalism of the USA. Or perhaps it is better called Founderism. I believe this is discussed also in Accidental Gods by Amma Della Subin (not yet read, return to confirm after reading).
By the late seventeenth century most Iranians were solidly Shii, and have remained so to the present day. [p. 101]
[Muhammad Baqir] Majlisi [d. 1700] introduced into Iranian Shiism a distrust of mysticism and philosophy that is still prevalent today. [p. 102]
Note that the Sufi mystical tradition is squarely Sunni.