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Political Metaphors and Concepts in the Writings of an Eleventh-Century Sunni Scholar, Abū al-Ma‛ālī al-Juwaynī (419 – 478/1028 – 1085)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

OVAMIR ANJUM
OVAMIR ANJUM*
Affiliation:
University of Toledo. [email protected]
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Abstract

This article investigates political vocabulary and metaphor in the writings of al-Juwayni (d. 1085) to bring out the commitments and presuppositions of premodern Islamic political tradition and raises the question of their compatibility with those of the modern nation-state.

Type
Part I: Pre-Mongol Period
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 26 , Issue 1-2 , January 2016 , pp. 7 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2016 

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References

1 Gibb, H. A. R., Studies on the Civilization of Islam (Boston, 1962), pp. 44–45 Google Scholar.

2 Watt, W. M., Islamic Political Thought (Edinburgh, 1987)Google Scholar; Lambton, A. K. S., State and Government in Medieval Islam. An Introduction to the Study of Islamic Political Theory: The Jurists (Oxford, 1981)Google Scholar; Crone, Patricia, God's Rule: Six Centuries of Medieval Islamic Political Thought (New York, 2004)Google Scholar. Some important works on Juwaynī are: Hallaq, Wael, “Caliphs, jurists and the saljuqs in the political thought of Juwaynī”, Muslim World 74.1 (1984), pp. 26–41 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nagel, Tilman, Die Festung des Glaubens: Triumph und Scheitern des islamischen Rationalismus im 11. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1988)Google Scholar. I have discussed these works elsewhere; see Anjum, Ovamir, Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge, 2012 CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Among recent works that have recognised the unique significance of al-Juwaynī’s work are: Ahmad, A. A., The Fatigue of the Sharia (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sohaira Siddiqui, ‘The Dialectic Law: Certainty, Continuity and Society in al-Juwaynī’ (PhD. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2014).

3 Perhaps the most seminal work in this regard is Asad, Talal, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993)Google Scholar, in particular chapter 1. See also Agrama, Hussein A., Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dubuisson, Daniel, The Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology, translated William Sayers (Baltimore, 2007)Google Scholar. An influential recent polemic that argues against the compatibility of Islamic tradition with modern politics and the modern state is Hallaq, Wael, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity's Moral Predicament (New York, 2012)Google Scholar.

4 For an excellent recent history of the notion of territory, see Elden, Stuart, The Birth of Territory (Chicago, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where he argues that the notion of territory as now understood is modern, attributable to the jurists of late medieval Europe, not to the Greek polis that meant community rather than strictly territory. If so, the Greek model lies somewhere between the Islamic and Hebraic models. The distinction Elden makes is absent in Foucault, on whose account I draw in what follows. See Foucault, Michel, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, tr. Graham Burchell (New York, 2009), pp. 122–123 Google Scholar.

5 See, for instance, Lapidus, Ira, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge, 2002), p. 81 Google Scholar; Lapidus “The separation of state and religion in the development of early Islamic society”, International Journal of Middle East Studies VI,4 (1975), pp. 363–385.

6 Lewis, Bernard, The Language of Political Islam (Chicago and London, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Foucault, Security.

8 Thus, Foucault: “Of all civilisations, the Christian West has undoubtedly been, at the same time, the most creative, the most conquering, the most arrogant, and doubtless the most bloody. At any rate, it has certainly been one of the civilisations that has deployed the greatest violence. But, at the same time, and this is the paradox I would like to stress, over millennia Western man has learned to see himself as a sheep in a flock, something that assuredly no Greek would have been prepared to accept. Over millennia he has learned to ask for his salvation from a shepherd (pasteur) who sacrifices himself for him. . .This form of power so typical of the West, and unique, I think, in the entire history of civilisations, was born, or at least took its model from the fold, from politics seen as a matter of the sheep-fold” (Security, p. 130).

9 The in-text numbers represent page numbers in Abū al-Ma‛ālī al-Juwaynī, Ghiyāth al-umam fī iltiyāth al-ẓulam, (ed.) ‛Abd al-‛Aẓīm al-Dīb (Qatar, 1401).

10 Hallaq, Impossible State, p. 48; Anjum, Politics, p. 1.

11 Lewis, Language, p. 31.

12 Ibid ., pp. 35–37, 39.

13 Skinner, Quentin, “The state”, in Ball, Terrence et al. (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 90–131 Google Scholar.

14 Hallaq, “Caliphs”, p. 34.

15 Juwaynī would not deny the theme captured in the Qur’ān as well as ḥadīth traditions that piety and repentance lead to prosperity and sins to worldly destruction. But just as reliance upon God does not relieve one of attending to worldly causes, piety itself does not relieve one of competent governance. Such tension, I suggest, has always marked Islam and cannot be meaningfully characterised as secularism.

16 Foucault, Security, p. 146.

17 Lewis, Language, p. 30.

18 Foucault, Security, p. 144.

19 Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition (London, 1991)Google Scholar.