The special collection appearing in this issue of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society makes a valuable contribution to lively ongoing discussions centred on explorations of the concept of the sovereignty of God within contemporary Islamic traditions. As its Guest Editors Humeira Iqtidar and Oliver Scharbrodt highlight in their introductory essay, the concept of divine sovereignty has come to occupy a key place in Islamist thinking, with the writings of Abul A‘la Maududi playing a hugely significant role in its twentieth- and twenty-first century articulations. Comprising articles based on papers first presented in September 2019 at an ERC-funded workshop organised jointly by King's College London and the University of Birmingham, it offers cutting-edge scholarly reflections on how Maududi's articulation of ḥākimiyyat-i ilāhiyya has been received in a multiplicity of Muslim contexts and communities. Hence, their authors—Humeira Iqtidar, Oliver Scharbrodt, Usaama Al-Azmi, and Simon Wolfgang Fuchs—grapple with how far Maududi's thinking can be understood as a response to perceived challenges of ‘modernity’, as well as to the ways in which ideas linked to this notion connect with debates going back much further in time.

Abul A‘la Maududi explicitly built on Islamic ideas of equality to critique nationalism and modern racism. How then could he reject the idea of social equality between men and women? This is particularly puzzling given his noticeable employment of a Marxist critique of the marketisation of society and liberal conceptions of freedom in his controversial 1939 book Pardah. Parsing out the structure of his argument in Pardah in some detail and emphasising the hitherto understudied engagement with Marxist ideas in his thought, this article shows that Maududi rejected a specific vision of social equality, where equality amounts to exchangeability. His use of Marxist ideas to non-Marxist ends was in large part a result of his assessment of Marx as a capable historian but a flawed philosopher, and more fundamentally a very different conception of society to the Marxist one. Maududi relied on his by then well-developed concept of divine sovereignty to carry much of the conceptual burden regarding his critique of, as well as alternatives to, social equality.

Divine sovereignty (ḥākimiyya)—as conceived by Abū al-A‘lā Mawdūdī (1903–79) and popularised by Sayyid Quṭb (1906–66) - has been a central component of Islamist thought. This article investigates the reception of the concept within Shi‘i Islam. As case studies, the article choses two prominent actors in the formative period of Shi‘i Islamism in Iraq: Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr (1935–80) and Muḥammad Taqī al-Mudarrisī (b. 1945). By discussing their reflections on the nature of an Islamic state, the article pursues three objectives: first, it overcomes a trend in academic scholarship that disregards Sunni influences on the development of Shi‘i Islamism. Second, the article highlights the role that the Iraqi Shi‘i intellectual milieu played in incorporating key Islamist concepts into Shi‘i political thought. Finally, the article demonstrates the different receptions of ḥākimiyya. Bāqir al-Ṣadr uses the ideological repertoire of Islamism to explore in pragmatic terms the parameters that define the state as Islamically legitimate. In contrast, Taqī al-Mudarrisī uses ḥākimiyya to redefine the sovereignty of the state in Islamic terms. He operationalises the concept in a Shi‘i context by arguing that the state must be led by a just jurisconsult (al-faqīh al-‘ādil) who becomes the sole agent of divine sovereignty in the state.

This article explores the engagement of the Pakistani Jamaʿat-i Islami (JI) with the Iranian Revolution. I argue that the Islamist JI was drawn to the events because it reflected a core concern and signature idea of Abu ’l-Aʿla Maududi, namely to establish the sovereignty of God (hakimiyya) on earth. My analysis of various travelogues and JI publications from the 1980s demonstrates that JI observers were deeply familiar with internal revolutionary dynamics and Iran's Shiʿi identity. The prospect of seeing a proper Islamic system in action, with potentially global consequences for their cause, initially crowded out any sectarian concerns for the JI. At the same time, certain JI leaders began to voice criticism of what they perceived as rash revolutionary policies that differed from Maududi's careful, irenic understanding of a proper Islamic revolution. They also took note of sectarian messages that damaged Iran's ecumenical outreach. It was, however, the more general geopolitical climate in the Middle East and South Asia which forced the JI to publicly downplay its ties with Iran. By the late 1980s, being accused of harbouring affinities for the ‘deviant Islam’ of Shiʿism was a charge that had to be avoided at all costs in Pakistan and beyond.

The concept of ḥākimiyya (sovereignty), as understood by its leading proponents, refers to the notion that it is God, rather than humans, Who possesses the prerogative to make laws. A concomitant of this is that Muslims with political power and authority must recognise the supremacy of Islamic law. This notion, perhaps most notably articulated in modern times by Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī, may be viewed as the rearticulation of ideas latent in the premodern Islamic juristic tradition, but whose modern incarnation as ḥākimiyya emerged in response to the legislative norms of the liberal colonial state. Despite its modern articulation, and against the views of several scholars, I argue that ḥākimiyya qua sovereignty finds its antecedents quite clearly in the Islamic scholarly tradition. Such an understanding leads into a discussion of how Islamic conceptions of sovereignty can help us reassess influential Western articulations of the concept. I also show that Mawdūdī's influential younger contemporary, the Islamist alim Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī, upholds ḥākimiyya despite his critique of Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb's conceptions of it. I conclude with a brief reflection on how our understanding of ḥākimiyya as sovereignty can help us provincialise Europe in global historical studies.

I offer some reflections here on the set of articles gathered in this special issue on divine sovereignty and further develop some thoughts first adumbrated in a piece published in JRAS 25/3 (2015).

The main scheme of creation in Zoroastrian Pahlavi literature is adopted from the Young Avesta. In this scheme Ohrmazd creates the world in the manner of a skillful craftsman who conceives of the form of his product and then fashions it in matter. The number of the constituents of the world and the sequence in which they are created are already fixed in the Avesta. Pahlavi authors draw on Greek philosophical tradition to rationalise their account of the creation of the world. The article also explores some of the complications that their philosophical elaboration of the Avestan scheme occasions.

This article establishes that the tümens which took part in Jebe and Sübedei's Raid to Europe were not merely conducting a reconnaissance mission, as it is usually described. The campaign was part of Chinggis Khan's conquering strategy aimed at the complete subjugation of the Kipchak and the conquest of the steppe territories not only in Asia but also in Europe. The task of implementing this strategic plan was given to Prince Jochi as the ruler of the western ulus of the Mongol Empire. Jochi was to bring his main military force to Europe while Sübedei, together with Jebe, advanced with their corps to defeat the Kipchak. The Grand Prince of Kiev and other princes of Southern Rus’, being allies and relatives of the Kipchak rulers, gave them military support. Therefore, the Mongols retaliated against the Rus’. After defeating the allied Rus’ and Kipchak forces at the Kalka River, the Mongols succeeded in crossing the Dnieper and went as far as Kiev. However, the refusal of Jochi to bring his main forces to assist the Mongol vanguard forces nullified the achievements and victories of Jebe and Sübedei. Jochi's reluctance to participate in the Western Campaign of 1221–23 was related to his conflicts with his younger brothers and Chinggis Khan himself, which, in its turn, brought about Jochi's loss of his former status in the empire, a severe illness and untimely death. As a result, Chinggis Khan had to reconsider his general conquest strategy; the conquest of Kipchak and Rus’ was postponed for one and a half decades.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the process of community-centric awakening was producing the politics of religious identity, mobilisations, and mutual cultural contests between different communities. Punjab being a province that was inhabited mostly by Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs witnessed an identity based triangular contest between these religious communities where the political leadership of each community picked up cultural symbols to mobilise, organise, and consolidate their respective constituencies. While presenting an account of the symbolic manoeuvrings around jhatka and tobacco in the politics of Sikh identity during the colonial and post-colonial contexts respectively, this article examines the role of symbols in community-centric discourses wherein cultural differences are transformed into cultural discord or antagonism. Here, it is argued that the meanings communicated and deciphered through such symbols need to be comprehended by locating their articulations in the field of inter-community power relations.

This article re-examines the theology of Egyptian ʿalim Muhammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) through the writing of Late Ottoman sheikh ül-Islam Mustafa Sabri (1869–1954) and his radical critique of the Muslim reform (tajdīd) movement. One of Mustafa Kemal's most implacable foes, Sabri was alarmed to find Egyptian ʿulamaʾ and intellectuals advancing the positivist-materialist agenda he had challenged in Istanbul before fleeing in 1922 from Ankara's victorious nationalist forces. Debating the leading lights of the modernist movement in Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s, Sabri came to see its reform theology as little more than a calque on Enlightenment notions of religion; his ideas became influential through his close relationship with Hasan al-Banna and other figures from the Muslim Brotherhood. Examining Sabri's work in Istanbul and Cairo, ʿAbduh's early and later writing, and texts such as ʿAbduh's famous debate with Farah Antun, the islāmiyyāt literature of Egypt's liberal age, and material by Sayyid Qutb, I argue that Sabri was instrumental in formulating the hostile discourse that came to dominate Muslim views of ʿAbduh in the later twentieth century once the ideologies of Salafism and Brotherhood Islamism had eclipsed that of the reformers.