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Divine Sovereignty, Morality and the State: Maududi and His Influence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2021

HUMEIRA IQTIDAR  and
OLIVER SCHARBRODT
HUMEIRA IQTIDAR
Affiliation:
humeira.iqtidar@kcl.ac.uk
OLIVER SCHARBRODT
Affiliation:
o.scharbrodt@bham.ac.uk July 2021
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Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 32 , Special Issue 2: Divine Sovereignty, Morality and the State: Maududi and His Influence , April 2022 , pp. 277 - 293
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Asiatic Society

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References

1 Zaman, M. Q., ‘The Sovereignty of God in Modern Islamic Thought’, JRAS XXV (2015), pp. 389–418CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The special edition includes papers presented at a workshop jointly organised by King's College London and the University of Birmingham on 5 September 2019. The workshop was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 724557).

2 Zaman, ‘Sovereignty of God’, p. 405; E. Moosa, ‘Shari‘at Governance in Colonial and Postcolonial India’, in Islam in South Asia in Practice, (ed.) B. Metcalf (Princeton, 2009), pp. 317–325.

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17 See P. Crone and M. Hinds, God's Caliph (Cambridge, 1986). For a different reading, see M. Q. Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early Abbasids: The Emergence of the Proto-Sunni Elite (Leiden, 1997). See also O. Anjum, Politics, Law and the Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment, (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 42–48.

18 Anjum, Politics, Law and the Community, pp. 79–81.

19 Hallaq, The Impossible State, p. 51.

20 Ibid., p.63

21 J. P. Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600-1800 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 124–129.

22 M. Q. Zaman, ‘The Caliphs, the ʿUlamāʾ, and the Law: Defining the Role and Function of the Caliph in the Early ʿAbbāsid Period’, Islamic Law and Society IV (1997), pp. 3–4.

23 March, Caliphate of Man, p. 20.

24 Hallaq, The Impossible State, pp. 63–67.

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30 See, for example, W. Madelung, ‘A Treatise of the Sharif Al-Murtada on the Legality of Working for the Government (Mas'ala fi ‘amal ma‘a al-sultan)’, BSOAS XLIII (1980), pp. 18–31.

31 Although his influence has varied over time, the current salience of his ideas for contemporary Islamists has to be read against the relative obscurity and marginality with which they were treated for most of the intervening centuries. See Y. Rapaport and S. Ahmed (eds.), Ibn Taymiyya and His Times (Oxford, 2010). See in particular contributions by K. El-Rouayheb and M. Hassan.

32 Anjum, Politics, Law and the Community, p. 269.

33 Ibid.

34 Hallaq, The Impossible State, p. 52.

35 J. Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the Halveti Order, 1350-1650 (Edinburgh, 2010).

36 On efforts to place Sufi orders under state control in the 19th century see Silverstein, B., ‘Sufism and Governmentality in the Late Ottoman Empire’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East XXIX (2009), pp. 171–185CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40 See Moin, The Millennial Sovereign.

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44 M. Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800 (Chicago, 2004), pp. 74–75.

45 A contrast with England during the same period is instructive here. While the economic, political and economic elite of the Mughal empire included many non-Muslims, the English elite was being homogenised to exclude even Catholics. See R. Kinra, ‘Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of Mughal Ṣulḥ-i kull’, Medieval History Journal XIV (2013), pp. 251–295.

46 B. Metcalfe, Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband 1860-1900 (Oxford, 2002); F. Robinson, Farangi Mahal and Islamic Culture in South Asia (Lahore, 2002).

47 Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, pp. 170–210.

48 K. Stilt, Islamic Law in Action: Authority, Discretion, and Everyday Experiences in Mamluk Egypt (Oxford, 2011), pp. 38–72.

49 Anjum, Politics, Law and the Community, pp. 108–109.

50 S. Ahmed, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016), pp. 120–129.

51 T. Bauer, Die Kultur der Ambiguität: Eine andere Geschichte des Islams (Berlin, 2011), pp. 317–322.

52 L. Darling, ‘Do Justice, Do Justice, For That is Paradise: Middle Eastern Advice for Indian Muslim Rulers’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East, XXII (2002), pp. 1–19; L. Rosen, The Justice of Islam (New York and Oxford, 2000).

53 Khomeini famously stated that the government can even suspend the basic ritual pillars of Islam such as fasting or the pilgrimage to Mecca if it is in the interest of the state. See R. Namazi, ‘Ayatollah Khomeini: From Islamic Government to Sovereign State’, Iranian Studies LII (2019), pp. 121–122.

54 Iqtidar, Theorising Sovereignty.

55 The coming together of Greek ideas and Islamic thought has received much attention. For Aristotle's influence in Islamic thought see, W. Hallaq, 1993, Ibn Taymiyya against the Greek Logicians (Oxford, 1993), pp. xi-xx. For the inclusion of Greek thought more generally see P. Adamson, Philosophy in the Islamic World (Oxford, 2016), pp. 19–26.

56 Talal Asad's scholarship has been immensely influential in opening up these lines of inquiry. See his Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, 2003) and most recently T. Asad, ‘Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein’, Critical Times III (2020), pp. 403–442.

57 R. Bourke, ‘Introduction’, in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, (eds.) R. Bourke and Q. Skinner, (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 1–14.

58 R. Nichols, ‘Context, Violence and Methodological Drift in the Study of Empire’, in Critical Exchange: Empire and Its Afterlives. Contemporary Political Theory, XIX (2020), pp. 274–305.

59 S. Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought: A Study in the Modernization of Turkish Political Ideas (Princeton, 1962), pp. 283–336.

60 N. Kemal, ‘And Seek Their Counsel in the Matter [Qur'an, Sura 3, Verse 159]’, in Modernist Islam, 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, (ed.) C. Kurzman (Oxford and New York, 2002), p. 145.

61 ‘A. al-Kawākibī, Ṭabā’i‘ al-Istibdād wa-Maṣāri‘ al-Isti‘bād (Cairo, 2011 [1902]), p. 15.

62 M. ‘Abduh, ‘Fī al-shūrā’, in al-A‘māl al-Kāmila li–l-Imām al-Shaykh Muḥammad ‘Abduh, vol. 1, (ed.) Muḥammad ‘Imāra (Beirut, 1993), p. 385.

63 Hallaq, The Impossible State, pp. 37–72.

64 See, for example, M. H. Kerr, The Political and Legal Theories of Muḥammad ‘Abduh and Rashīd Riḍā (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966).

65 A. Chaudhry, ‘Islamic Legal Studies: A Critical Historiography’, in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, (eds.) A. M. Emon and R. Ahmed (Oxford, 2017), pp. 5–43. For a critique of the solutions proposed by Chaudhry while sharing the concerns raised by her see Siddiqui, S., ‘Good Scholarship/Bad Scholarship: Consequences of the Heuristic of Intersectional Islamic Studies’, JAAR LXXXVIII (2020), pp. 142–174Google Scholar.

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70 Roxanne Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, 1999).

71 See, for example, S. Khatab, The Power of Sovereignty: The Political and Ideological Philosophy of Sayyid Qutb (London, 2005). Although Khatab lists several works by Maududi in the bibliography, his book does not contain a single reference to him.

72 Carré, Mysticism and Politics.

73 Shepard, ‘The Development of the Thought of Sayyid Quṭb’, pp. 204–205; p. 220.

74 Calvert, Sayyid Qutb, pp. 157–158. See also G. Krämer, Gottes Staat als Republik: Reflexionen zeitgenössischer Muslime zu Islam, Menschenrechten und Demokratie (Baden-Baden, 1999), pp. 218–219.

75 Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, pp. 55, 75, 189.

76 Zaman, ‘Sovereignty of God’, p. 417.

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