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Political theology and sovereignty: Sayyid Qutb in our times

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Abstract

This article explores the political-theological nature of Sayyid Qutb’s theoretical design, specifically its relation to non-Western understandings of sovereignty, and its principal anomalies arising from the struggle of reconciling the notions of the modern state with undefined territorial imaginings of a religious community. Repudiating reformist variants of modernist Islam, Qutb’s writings afford an alternate reading of modern sovereignty as it is reconfigured in the language of hakimiyyah (God’s sovereignty). A political reading of sovereignty in Qutb complicates the assumed separation between political and non-political spheres. The argument recognizes a basic distinction between the idea of sovereignty in a theological sense and its political counterpart. In Qutb’s design, however, the absence of determinate lines between the theological and the political leaves few autonomous social spheres outside God’s law. While Qutb’s vision does not exhaust political Islam—a fairly heterodox field of diverse perspectives and commitments—the appeal of his writings remains forceful, especially under conditions of Islam’s perceived defensiveness in the face of secularist global modernity and its institutionalized forms. The article situates Qutb within the expanding repertoire of non-Western understandings of the political logic of International Relations.

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Notes

  1. These zones are generally “Muslim-majority areas informed by transnational subjectivities loosely connecting varied Islamic societies around symbolic commonality, memory and historical experience. The term stressed the plurality of Islamic cultural experience, albeit distinguished by recognizable semiotic markers, without essentializing Islamic identity” (Pasha 2017, p. xiii).

  2. According to Qutb, “Authority belongs to the exalted God exclusively by virtue of His divinity. For sovereignty (al-hakimiyya) is among the characteristic features of divinity. Whoever lays a claim to sovereignty—whether its is an individual, a class, a party, an institution, a community or humanity at large in the form of an international organization—disputes the primary characteristic of His Divinity. And whoever does so is guilty of disbelief in the most blatant manner….Laying claim to this right [to sovereignty] does not necessarily take a particular form, which alone might be deemed to remove the claimant from the fold of ‘the true faith’ (al-din al-qayyim [Q 12.40]….Rather, one lays claim to it…simply by…deriving laws from a source other than [God]….In the Islamic system, it is the community that chooses the ruler, thereby giving him the legal right to exercise authority according to God’s law. But [this community] is not the source of sovereignty which gives the law its legality. God alone is the source of sovereignty. Many people, including Muslim scholars, tend to confuse the exercise of power and the source of power. Even the aggregate of humanity does not have the right to sovereignty, which God alone possesses. People only [have the right to] implement what God has laid down with His authority. As for what He has not laid down, it is neither authority nor legality.” Fi Zilal al-Quran, 6 vols. (Beirut 1974), iv, p. 1990 (commentary on Q 12.40) cited in Zaman (2015, pp. 393–394).

  3. March (2015, p. 104) offers a capacious understanding of ‘Political Islam’: “Political Islam should be understood in the broadest sense possible as the range of modern political movements, ideological trends, and state-directed policies concerned with giving Islam as authoritative status in political life…Islamist trends range from left-leaning populist protest movements…to ultraconservative movements devoted more to social control over morality than to economic redistribution.”

  4. I am thankful to one of the anonymous reviewers for this important point.

  5. As Qutb states in Ma’ alim: “The fundamentals upon which the components of life and its systems are based indicate that the world today is living in jahiliyyah. It is the jahiliyya which could not be reduced by anything of this huge material facility, or by this magnificent material development. This jahiliyyah is based on transgression. It transgresses the authority of Allah on the Earth. It transgresses the rights of hakimiyyah (Sovereignty), the most specific characteristics of uluhiyyah (divinity). It depends on the hakimiyyah (Sovereignty) of people and makes a number of them lords to the others. This is not in the naïve fashion known to the first jahiliyyah, but in the form of the claim that they have the right to design conceptions, and values, laws and system separable from the program of life sanctioned by Allah” (cited in Khatab 2006, p. 168).

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the Editors of the journal, two anonymous reviewers, and especially Vassilis Paipais, for extremely constructive feedback on an earlier iteration of this article. All errors are strictly mine.

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Correspondence to Mustapha Kamal Pasha.

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Pasha, M.K. Political theology and sovereignty: Sayyid Qutb in our times. J Int Relat Dev 22, 346–363 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-018-0151-3

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