This chapter discusses an ijāza (a qualificatory ‘license’) given in 1215/1800 by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Jalālī to a pupil named ʿAbd al-Qādir b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Rāshidī al-Muʿaskarī. The granter of the license was a major scholar in late 18th century Algiers, who had been appointed by Muḥammad b. ʿUthmān, the Bey of Algiers (r. 1766-1791), as director of the newly founded Madrasa Muḥammadiyya. The ijāza translated in this chapter illustrates many of the common features of an ijāza document. Aside from the usual prayers and salutations (to God, the Prophet, his family and the Companions), there is an extended exposition of the superiority of religious knowledge and the position of the ʿulamāʾ in Muslim society, as well as a brief introduction to the skills and qualities of the ijāza recipient. The author notes that the awardee had attended his classes, and emphasises that the awardee’s learned qualities had impressed him. The genealogies of both the ijāza donor, and the ijāza recipient are also clearly important, as they are noted with care.

This chapter focuses on two passages from a historical novel in Malayalam, titled Sulttānvīṭu by P. A. Muhammad Koya (d. 1990), set in a Muslim matrilineal household in Calicut on the Malabar coast of southwest India. The first passage deals with a dispute between two groups on the appointment of a judge (qāḍī) and the right to carry out the Friday congregational prayer (in the early 20th century), while the second one involves two public debates in the wake of Wahhābism’s arrival in the region. Broadly speaking, the novel explores the gradual disintegration of the matrilineal tradition among Malabar Muslims in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at the peak of colonialism, reformism and modernism.

John Milton argues that liberty of conscience requires the freedom to express one’s innermost commitments to others, specifically in speech and writing. Hypocritical conformity robs individuals of crucial opportunities to foster political capacities of citizenship, specifically the skill of independent judgment. Milton hints at an intuition that other early modern figures will later foreground – that hypocritical conformity to the state religion hardens dissenters and makes them incapable of being judicious political citizens. If individuals live in a political society that does not afford them liberty of conscience, they will slowly lose the capability to exercise their conscience over time. This freedom requires a robust view of freedom and agency in the public sphere, since it implies far more than an inward freedom of conviction. Conscience must be cultivated independently of political and ecclesiastical authorities and requires confrontation with other individuals in the public sphere, implying the open exchange of ideas and the freedom to express one’s ideas publicly in writing or speech. Milton insists that the circulation of ideas in print allows for an extended opportunity for individuals to exercise their conscience, as the written word persists over time longer than speech, which dissipates in the immediate moment, only to be recounted by witnesses. Liberty of conscience is so crucial to Milton’s understanding of freedom that he describes it as the highest liberty above all liberties, even justifying other political freedoms.

The Introduction sets the framework for the analysis and introduces the central research question of The Politics of Religious Party Change: when and why do religious parties become less anti-system? This chapter explains the significance of the question, discussing the rising prominence of religious parties globally and the need to better understand the dynamics of change in these parties. Likewise, the Introduction details the methodology used in this book and the six empirical cases: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Tunisian Ennahdha, Turkish AKP, German Center Party, Italian PPI, and Belgian Catholic Party.

What do the religious institutional structures look like in Catholicism and Sunni Islam? In order to trace how religious institutional structures may shape the early evolutions of religious parties, this chapter explores the historical development of structures of religious authority and how they looked when religious parties arose. The focus of the analysis for each religion varies to reflect the historical trajectories of their religious institutions and what such different trajectories mean for the analytical narrative of this book. The analysis proceeds in chronological order and begins with Catholicism to be followed by Sunni Islam. In the case of Catholicism, the focus is less on the evolution of religious institutions and more on how divergence from orthodoxy and orthopraxy are handled within the Catholic Church. As the religious authority in Catholicism, the Church’s handling of divergences is key to understanding how it dealt with the rise of Catholic parties. In the case of Sunni Islam, the focus remains on the historical evolution of religious authority, paying close attention to the parameters of major shifts in the eleventh and early twentieth centuries.

The Politics of Religious Party Change addresses the timely question of ideological change and secularization of religious political parties and asks, when and why do religious parties become less anti-system? In a comparative analysis, this book traces the striking similarities in the historical origins of Islamist and Catholic parties in the Middle East and Western Europe, chronicles their conflicts with existing religious authorities, and analyzes the subsequently divergent trajectories of Islamist and Catholic parties. Religious parties are embedded in distinct religious institutional structures that shape their actions as they chart their paths in electoral politics. Counterintuitively, the book finds that centralized and hierarchical religious authority structures – such as the Vatican – incentivize religious parties to move in a more pro-system, secular, and democratic direction. By contrast, less centralized religious authority structures such as in Sunni Islam create a more permissive environment for religious parties to operate as anti-system parties hostile to democracy and secularism.

The Enlightenment represents the first time since Democritus that philosophers began to systematically question religious explanations for material phenomenon, instead looking for strictly materialistic explanations that were consistent with our understanding of the temporal plane. In particular, this is when science began to challenge the power of the Western religious authorities, which also challenged the principle of rule by divine right. In addition to the appearance of religious skepticism and scientific explanations, this is the period when revolutions against inherited rule challenged the kings and queens of Europe. This period is also associated with a dramatic increase in literacy in Western countries, which makes an interesting contrast with, for example, China, where the complexity of the written language served as an obstacle to higher rates of literacy for several centuries. In general, high rates of literacy are inversely correlated with institutional power and correlated with personal liberty in citizens. The worldwide spread of democracy over the last 200 years is a direct result of intellectual changes associated with the Enlightenment, but the chapter also reviews why the transition to democracy has not been universal.

For the last 5,000 years humans have been steadily transitioning to state/kingdom power structures. This chapter explains the demographic and political causes of the transition to institutional power, most frequently vested in lineages, and the ways in which institutional religions have supported institutional power in states and kingdoms. Personal and institutional power are inversely related in states and kingdoms, and this chapter explorea some examples of authoritarian and libertarian regimes, as well as the conflict within our own (US) society on these questions. Following on the idea of structural power, it reviews various aspects of institutional coercion (laws, taxes, conscription, slavery), as well as the ways institutions regulate the flow of information to control populations (the execution of William Tyndale, Spanish burning of Mayan texts, Nazi book burning, etc.). It finishes by discussing the expansion of empires and the resistance some populations show to externally imposed institutional authority.

This chapter explores the expansion of the Caliphate of Ḥamdallāhi in the Niger Bend in the 1820s. Aḥmad Lobbo exercised his control over these areas by a combination of coercion, the appointment of local representatives, and the installation of functionaries sent from the capital; but also by seeking, with varying degrees of success, the cooperation of the powerful Kunta scholarly clan of the Niger Bend and Azawād. However, while the Kunta had accepted the rule of Ḥamdallāhi, their support for Aḥmad Lobbo was only partial and limited to political domain. The Kunta never gave up their role as the ultimate religious authority of the region, and tension flared at times between them and Ḥamdallāhi, as in the case of the never-resolved tobacco dispute and that of the Kunta’s mediation with the leaders of rebellions against the caliphate.