Over the course of July and August 2013 Egyptian security forces killed an estimated 1,150 people at five locations around Cairo. These locations included camps where protesters had gathered to oppose the ousting of President Muhammad Mursi (b. 1951) in the 3 July 2013 military coup led by the former head of the Egyptian Armed Forces ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi (b. 1954). According to evidence presented by Human Rights Watch, these massacres were the result of coordinated efforts by snipers, bulldozers, and armoured personnel carriers, rather than an unavoidable consequence of preserving public order.Footnote 1 The most well known of them occurred at the square by the Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya Mosque on 14 August 2013.
Among the most prominent supporters of the coup and its bloody aftermath was ʿAli Jumʿa (b. 1952). Jumʿa was the grand mufti of Egypt from 2003 until February 2013, and he has remained a prominent public figure since leaving this post.Footnote 2 In the aftermath of the coup Jumʿa was a common sight on Egyptian television, and his arguments supporting it were littered with concepts drawn from the Islamic jurisprudential (fiqh) tradition. He legitimated the coup by drawing on a premodern principle whereby the legitimacy to rule was rooted first and foremost in the capacity to govern effectively (taghallub). The underlying assumption of taghallub is that usurpers’ ability to overthrow a ruler demonstrates their de facto ability to ensure stable rule, and therefore their legitimacy. After the coup, Jumʿa also gave lectures to the army. In these lectures, Jumʿa called the anticoup protesters “rebels” (khawārij) and the “dogs of hell” (kilāb al-nār).Footnote 3 These terms, originating in Prophetic hadith and the history of early Islam, appeared to suggest that Jumʿa was legitimating the army's killing of the protestors on the grounds that they had engaged in illegitimate rebellion and were no longer Muslims.Footnote 4
The aim of this article is to contribute to an emerging scholarly debate over Jumʿa's support for the 3 July 2013 coup.Footnote 5 In general, current research has contextualized this support in relation to either quietist precedents in late medieval Islamic political thought or Jumʿa's Sufi background.Footnote 6 I am particularly interested in engaging with Mohammad Fadel. Fadel suggests that the divide between the ʿulamaʾ over the coup, epitomized by the opposing positions of Yusuf al-Qaradawi (b.1926) and Jumʿa, has its roots in the division between two subtraditions, which he terms “republican” and “traditionalist” Islam. For Fadel, the republican Islam subtradition is best represented by the ʿulamaʾ who opposed the coup, notably al-Qaradawi, and was catalyzed by 19th-century reformers such as Rifaʿa al-Tahtawi (d. 1873), Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi (d. 1890), and Rashid Rida (d. 1935). These reformers advocated for a more pluralistic public sphere in comparison to their ʿulamaʾ predecessors who, despite internal differences, maintained the need for unity around Islamic norms in public. Significantly, they also considered ordinary Muslim citizens to have the capacity for self-governance and the potential to make ethical decisions independent of scholarly authority.Footnote 7 By contrast, Fadel suggests that the traditionalist Islam subtradition is best represented by Jumʿa and is linked to contemporary Sufism's emphasis on the necessity of a hierarchical relationship between teacher and student for the cultivation of pious Muslim subjects. For Fadel, this emphasis renders Sufism more sympathetic to authoritarianism.Footnote 8
The late medieval ʿulamaʾ considered the hierarchical relationship between teacher and student to be a microcosm of the relationship between the ʿulamaʾ and the public in a virtuous and well-ordered society. Fadel does not argue that Jumʿa and the ʿulamaʾ of traditionalist Islam support authoritarian regimes “as a direct result of their adherence to the political philosophy articulated by medieval theologians” such as al-Ghazali (d. 1111). Nevertheless, he does contend that the ʿulamaʾ who supported the coup did so because they “share a certain political aesthetic” with the late medieval ʿulamaʾ.Footnote 9 In using the term “political aesthetic” Fadel is referring to al-Ghazali's idealized political order. This vision assumed that social harmony was best maintained when the scholarly authority of the ʿulamaʾ establishment was united with the coercive force of the military elites in a shared purpose of preserving public order. Though al-Ghazali considered this hierarchical “cosmic moral order”Footnote 10 to be underpinned by God it nevertheless needed to be overseen by a pious autocrat. By al-Ghazali's time the Muslim community (umma) had been sidelined from even theoretical considerations of political legitimacy and,Footnote 11 as a result, the ʿulamaʾ of the late medieval period preferred to invest their energies in attempting to influence how a ruler exercised power, rather than contest a ruler's legitimacy.Footnote 12 Fadel argues that following the marked pluralization of the Egyptian public sphere after the 2011 uprising, where all kinds of claims about Islam were voiced and heard, the tensions between the traditionalist and republican subtraditions came to a head:
While advocates of republican Islam such as al-Qaradawi do not seem to be overly fearful of the spread of heterodoxy in the wake of democratization, traditionalist theologians such as Jumʿa have clearly decided that protection of religious orthodoxy is more important than establishing a representative government. In making this choice, they are clearly vindicating a well-established line of reasoning in Islamic political thought. The Muslim religious establishment of Egypt believes that in al-Sisi it has found the pious autocrat idealized by premodern theologians such as al-Ghazali, and from their perspective, a religious autocrat who can control religious debate is preferable to a religious president [i.e., Mursi] presiding over a political system in which religious teachings become a subject of public contestation.Footnote 13
For Fadel, then, the Azhari ʿulamaʾ of traditionalist Islam were unable to accept the radically democratized nature of the post-2011 public sphere, which had seen their authority as the voices of Islam markedly eroded. Fadel argues that, following the coup, Jumʿa and his like-minded colleagues saw an opportunity to reassert al-Azhar's authority, and limit the proliferation of alternative actors who were competing with them as voices of Islam in the public sphere.Footnote 14
In this article, I present an alternative interpretation of Jumʿa's support for the coup. I argue that the concepts of nationhood and the nation-state are highly significant for understanding Jumʿa's Islamic legal arguments in favor of the coup and the subsequent crushing of anticoup demonstrations. Nationhood shifted the ʿulamaʾ’s conceptual universe, and transformed their notion of time. During the 19th century the premodern order represented by al-Ghazali, which had existed temporally in a perpetual present underpinned by cosmic justice, was supplanted by a worldview that prioritized the future, or the futurity, of the nation.Footnote 15 This emphasis on the future at the expense of the present excuses inhuman behavior in the present as necessary to bring about a better world. As a result, I disagree with Fadel's suggestion that it is only the republican Islam of al-Qaradawi that is indebted to 19th-century reformers such as al-Tahtawi, while the authoritarian sympathies of Jumʿa and traditionalist Islam are rooted in Sufism and premodern Islamic thought. Instead, I consider Jumʿa's procoup arguments to be rooted just as much in the legacy of the 19th-century reformers as the anticoup arguments of al-Qaradawi. Moreover, in contrast to Fadel, I consider the 19th-century reformers’ political imaginary also to be thoroughly indebted to the premodern imaginary epitomized by al-Ghazali.Footnote 16 However, this genealogy does not mean that I attribute the authoritarian streak in the thought of 19th-century reformers such as al-Tahtawi (and present in Jumʿa's arguments) to this premodern influence. Instead I emphasize the protonationalist twist that al-Tahtawi added to the Islamic political imaginary and the appearance of the modern nation-state.
This argument has implications for our conceptualization of the Islamic tradition. Samira Haj has argued that the Islamic tradition should be understood as a set of discourses. These discourses extend through time and serve as a contemporary framework for inquiry into the right course of action concerning a particular issue. As Haj puts it,
It is these collective discourses, incorporating a variety of positions, roles, and tasks that form the corpus of Islamic knowledge from which a Muslim scholar argues for and refers to previous judgements of others, and from which an unlettered parent teaches a child. It is from within this tradition of reasoning that claims are made and evaluated and are either accepted or rejected as Islamic.Footnote 17
Haj's emphasis on the continuity of the Islamic tradition of reasoning across the transformations wrought upon the Muslim world during the colonial period has particular relevance here. Building on her argument, I would add that during the 19th century, the nation, particularly a concern for the nation's futurity, became a key part of the tradition's framework. This addition shifted the ʿulamaʾ’s worldview and politics and redefined them in terms of progress and its horizon of expectations (erwartungshorizont). This latter term, conceptualized by the literary critic Hans Jauss (d. 1997), refers to a generation of readers’ shared assumptions that they bring to their interpretation of texts.Footnote 18 The term usefully expresses how, since the 19th century, nationhood and its attendant concepts has shifted the assumptions that the ʿulamaʾ bring to their engagement with the Islamic tradition.
Jumʿa credits al-Tahtawi as the first to call for renewing the Islamic jurisprudential tradition (tajdīd al-fiqh) in modern times, and he clearly considers himself to be building upon al-Tahtawi's reformist project.Footnote 19 Therefore, I will use the writings of al-Tahtawi to argue that Jumʿa's authoritarian sympathies represent the other side of a 19th-century protonationalist coin, as it were, rather than a different subtradition altogether.Footnote 20 Though al-Tahtawi is often hailed as the “father of Egyptian democracy,”Footnote 21 I read his work as representing the first link in a chain of Egyptian nationalist ʿulamaʾ with authoritarian sympathies, of which Jumʿa is also a part. While highlighting the tension between al-Tahtawi's democratic and authoritarian sympathies is not new, I disagree with many scholars’ attribution of it to his “difficulty in reconciling the workings of the secular political system with his basic Islamic outlook”Footnote 22 or his “late-Ottoman mindset.”Footnote 23 Instead, his authoritarian sympathies are rooted in the discourse of the emerging nation-state and its futurity. While al-Tahtawi argued that the progress of the Egyptian nation necessitated the cultivation of an engaged citizenry within a new body politic, his concept of nationhood was also very supportive of the absolutism of Muhammad ʿAli (d. 1849) and his successors. Fadel notes that the concept of nationhood makes conceivable the transfer of sovereignty from a ruler to a citizenry. However, appeals to national progress also make possible all kinds of horrors including, I suggest, the liquidation of recalcitrant citizens at Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya. Significantly, when Jumʿa uses concepts such as taghallub and khawārij, he is not speaking to Muslim subjects who see themselves as part of a cosmic moral order sustained by God, as was the case in the political order of the late medieval ʿulamaʾ. Here I do not wish to overemphasize the extent of the transformations wrought by the appearance of the nation-state in the Arab World, and establish an absolute dichotomy between the pre- and post-19th century worldviews of the ʿulamaʾ.Footnote 24 Nevertheless, Jumʿa's emphasis on the future challenges Haj's argument that there exist shared assumptions between the worldviews of the modern and premodern ʿulamaʾ. This challenge arises because Jumʿa and his audience have a distinct worldview that is underpinned by their shared concern for the future of the Egyptian nation, and he justifies the Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya massacre for the sake of that nation. Similarly, I suggest that Jumʿa's accusation of kharijism against the anticoup protesters is best understood as an accusation of treason and expulsion from the Egyptian nation rather than takfīr, or excommunication from the Muslim community.Footnote 25
This article is divided into five parts. In the first part I analyze al-Tahtawi's concept of nationhood and argue that his authoritarian sympathies are rooted in the emergence of the nation-state and a concern for its futurity. In the second part I give a biographical introduction to Jumʿa. In the third part I analyze Jumʿa's Islamic legal arguments in the wake of the coup, focusing on his usage of the concepts taghallub and khawārij. In the fourth part I argue for the importance of understanding Jumʿa's arguments as part of a discourse of the nation-state and emanating from the state bureaucracy. In the fifth part I suggest that Jumʿa's arguments in favor of greater state regulation of Egyptian religious life is best understood as part of a modern dynamic that Hussein Agrama calls the state's “questioning power.”
THE FATHER OF EGYPTIAN NATIONALISM: RIFAʿA AL-TAHTAWI
In this section I will suggest that al-Tahtawi's authoritarian sympathies come primarily from his protonationalism and his concern for the future of the nation. While he is also thoroughly indebted to premodern political thought, this does not fully explain his authoritarian leanings. Al-Tahtawi came from an elite family in Upper Egypt and enrolled at al-Azhar in 1817, becoming a teacher of the Islamic sciences there in 1822. The most significant event in al-Tahtawi's intellectual development came in 1826 when he accompanied a contingent of Egyptian military officers to study in Paris. During his five years in Paris, al-Tahtawi immersed himself in the work of Enlightenment authors such as Montesquieu.Footnote 26 On his return to Egypt, he published his famous Takhlis al-Ibriz fi Talkhis Baris (The Extraction of Gold in the Distillation of Paris, 1834). The book provided a description of his journey to Paris and his studies there alongside detailed observations of French society. Al-Tahtawi was a prolific author and translator throughout his life. Moreover, he played a key role in the development of the Egyptian nation-state bureaucracy.Footnote 27
Historians of al-Tahtawi tend to overemphasize his indebtedness to French Enlightenment thought, and attribute what they perceive as his failure to reproduce French concepts in Islamic terms to his al-Azhar training. While al-Tahtawi was certainly informed by his reading of French Enlightenment authors, Ellen McLarney has shown that his political imaginary was thoroughly rooted in the Islamic tradition, and drew heavily on al-Ghazali.Footnote 28 If al-Tahtawi's protonationalism, though distinct, was deeply indebted to al-Ghazali's political imaginary, this supports my point that Jumʿa's own references to a seemingly premodern and hierarchical political order are indebted to both al-Tahtawi and al-Ghazali, rather than just to al-Ghazali as Fadel suggests.
Though I consider al-Tahtawi to be indebted to al-Ghazali, this does not mean that I attribute his authoritarian sympathies to his “late Ottoman mindset” or “basic Islamic outlook,” as two historians have put it.Footnote 29 Instead, I suggest it is the protonationalist twist that al-Tahtawi added to the Islamic political imaginary that provides a genealogical context for Jumʿa's support of the coup. In short, this protonationalist addition was that the citizen serves the nation, the nation legitimizes the state, and the progress of the nation is a moral good in itself. I make this argument not only because al-Tahtawi's protonationalist writings contain authoritarian sympathies, but also because he was writing at a time when the Egyptian nation was just emerging as a discourse. Most importantly here, the concept of nationhood and the concern for its well-being were intertwined with a temporal transformation. To al-Tahtawi and his contemporaries, civilization (tamaddun) became a verb that described a process and signalled a faith in the forward drive of progress (taqaddum) through time toward a future of open possibilities. Thus, the future of the nation was a key concern in al-Tahtawi's writings and tamaddun, then, referred to the material and moral civilizing of the Egyptian nation that was to be carried out by all its citizens. For al-Tahtawi, to be an Egyptian and a patriot (ḥubb al-waṭan) was not simply to have a national identity, but to share in the imagining of Egypt's future civilization.Footnote 30
I argue that it is the inauguration of this new context that positions al-Tahtawi as the first link in a chain connecting him to Jumʿa's authoritarian sympathies, since they both justify their arguments out of a concern for the future of the Egyptian nation and on behalf of the national will. The connection between nationalism as a discourse and the nation-state is an important part of my argument. Though states are, of course, not solely discursive constructs, they produce nations through discourse to legitimate their existence and their power over their citizens. Due to this discourse, citizens recognize themselves in the nation-state and become willing to sacrifice their lives for it.Footnote 31 This discourse shifts the horizon of expectations within which the arguments of a particular author (such as al-Tahtawi or Jumʿa) are produced and received. As such, though “patriotic speeches, ethno-‘national’ literature, public festivals and much else” existed prior to the appearance of the nation-state, these kinds of writings come to acquire new meanings and produce different effects because citizens in a nation-state no longer exist within a cosmic moral order underpinned by God, but instead have been integrated into a “metaphysics of the state and its nation.”Footnote 32 This point is important because, in addition to al-Tahtawi's protonationalist additions to the Islamic political imaginary, the very fact that his vision was articulated within the novel context of the nation-state endowed his arguments with new meanings and effects, even though his vision was reminiscent of al-Ghazali's own harmonious political order.
Al-Tahtawi drew upon his reading of Montesquieu to conceptualize the modern nation (umma, or occasionally milla). Montesquieu wrote that nations have spirits, customs, and manners.Footnote 33 Moreover, Montesquieu's nation could deliberate, and was connected to a specific territory (patrie) that al-Tahtawi drew upon to express his concept of homeland (waṭan). He legitimized this move by repurposing the Prophetic hadith “love of the waṭan is a part of faith” (ḥubb al-waṭan min al-īmān) to endow ḥubb al-waṭan with a new patriotic meaning.Footnote 34 While the nation was an active concept with a collective will, the homeland was passive and needed to be loved and saved by its citizens, who must be willing to die for it. Al-Tahtawi's political imaginary was grounded in the Islamic ethical tradition of adab and his point of departure was the harmonious system articulated by his predecessors, notably al-Ghazali.Footnote 35 However, al-Tahtawi made a protonationalist addition that placed the progress of the nation at the center of his imaginary and signalled a shift in the horizon of expectations among both his contemporary and subsequent readership. As such, rather than attribute al-Tahtawi's absolutist leanings to his “basic Islamic outlook,”Footnote 36 I consider them a result of his place in the emerging discourse of the Egyptian nation-state.Footnote 37
In al-Tahtawi's theoretical writings on obedience to the ruler, he emerges as a protonationalist monarchist.Footnote 38 There would be chaos without kings, al-Tahtawi wrote. While al-Tahtawi thought that government should be divided into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, he also argued that these branches existed under the single authority of the monarch. There was to be no constitutional restriction on the ruler's power, and al-Tahtawi did not consider the nation to be sovereign.Footnote 39 Al-Tahtawi wrote that the ruler's subjects owed him their “complete obedience” (al-ṭāʿa al-kāmila) in a manner analogous to the obedience owed to God and the Prophet.Footnote 40 “If [the ruler] oppresses them,” he added, “then [the people] are to persevere until God opens a door to guide him toward the good.” Subjects had no right to rebel against an unjust ruler, and it was only the mercy of God that could “guide [the ruler's] state toward justice.”Footnote 41 At first, then, al-Tahtawi's position on obedience to an unjust ruler resembled the writings of a late medieval ʿālim such as al-Ghazali. In this vein, Gilbert Delanoue describes al-Tahtawi's argument as “very traditional.”Footnote 42 To be sure, al-Tahtawi echoed the late medieval image of the virtuous society as a body, where every organ knew its place and function. He wrote, “The king is like the soul and [his] subjects are like the body. The body has no strength other than through its soul.”Footnote 43 However, al-Tahtawi considered the relationship between ruler and ruled that he was proposing to be novel, rather than simply a repetition of the late medieval political imaginary. In a passage from Manahij al-Albab al-Misriyya fi Mabahij al-Abab al-ʿAsriyya (Methods for Hearts and Minds in the Pleasures of Modern Literatures, 1869), he wrote that in many realms kings had formerly been chosen by the authoritative consensus of the community (ijmāʿ al-umma) and elected by the masses (intikhābiyyan bi-l-sawād al-ʿaẓam). He contrasts this with his own time in which, because elections were the cause of “corruption, civil strife, war and disagreement,” monarchies have become hereditary to ensure the “perfection of the monarchical system.”Footnote 44 Al-Tahtawi had been in France during a time when a nationalistic cult had been developing around the memory of Napoleon Bonaparte, who had become revered as the “martyr and messiah” of the French Revolution and an “emblem of national unity.” Al-Tahtawi was influenced by this cult of veneration, and constructed a similar “Napoleon-like myth” around Muhammad ʿAli.Footnote 45
Al-Tahtawi did not consider the power of the ruler to be entirely absolute, however, and in the absence of constitutional checks he emphasized the importance of public opinion (al-raʾī al-ʿumūmī). This latter check was a “vanquishing power” (sulṭān qāhir) in the heart of the king.Footnote 46 Yet it was also subordinate to protonationalist concerns. While al-Tahtawi wrote that a “free nation” should be consulted by the ruler, the benefit of this consultation was in his view that subjects could help the ruler “please their waṭan” and ensure his “moral domination of the souls and lives of his subjects” (al-tasalṭun al-maʿnawī ʿalā al-nufūs wa-l-arwāḥ).Footnote 47 Significantly for my argument, in the paragraph following his description of public opinion as a vanquishing power, al-Tahtawi emphasizes the importance of a particular segment of the public: the historian. The opinion of the historian was particularly important for al-Tahtawi, and it demonstrates his concern for the nation's future, which is a quintessential aspect of the modern nation-state project. In al-Tahtawi's view, presumably, the ruler would be concerned for the opinion of future historians, who would judge him on how best he had served the homeland and aided its progress, and this concern would be another important check on how the ruler exercised his power.
In this section I have emphasized that al-Tahtawi's Islamic legal writings contained authoritarian sympathies. This point is not new.Footnote 48 However, while other scholars attribute these sympathies to al-Tahtawi's inability to reconcile his reading of French Enlightenment thought with his study at al-Azhar, I have argued that his authoritarian sympathies are predicated on protonationalism. This protonationalism was a product of the nation-state discourse that emerged with the Enlightenment.Footnote 49 As such, while al-Tahtawi is indebted to the harmonious political order articulated by al-Ghazali and his peers, those figures understood themselves as part of a cosmic moral order that was stable, unchanging, and underpinned by God. By contrast, al-Tahtawi's worldview was underpinned by a concern for the good of the nation and the nation's future. I will now show that it is al-Tahtawi's quintessentially modern political assumptions about national progress and the good of the nation that is at the root of Jumʿa's own authoritarian sympathies and support for the coup.
ʿALI JUMʿA'S IMAGE BEFORE THE COUP: LIBERAL, DEMOCRATIC, PROGRESSIVE
For the remainder of this article I will focus on Jumʿa's Islamic legal arguments justifying the coup and its bloody aftermath. The anti-Brotherhood coalition that coalesced against the Mursi government in 2013 included diverse actors such as liberal elites, Salafists, and army officers, but was bound together by nationalism.Footnote 50 Jumʿa and many of the Azhari ʿulamaʾ’s decision to join this coalition is indebted in no small part to the nationalist chain that al-Tahtawi instigated. This is because, like al-Tahtawi and the nationalist ʿulamaʾ who came after him, Jumʿa's arguments can be understood as part of a nation-state discourse, with Jumʿa justifying his position through a modern concern for the future of the nation.
Jumʿa began his higher education in 1973 at Ain Shams University, where he earned a BA in commerce. He then enrolled at al-Azhar and received a BA in Islamic studies in 1979, before completing a PhD in Islamic jurisprudence. In 1988 he joined al-Azhar's teaching faculty. Jumʿa developed a reputation as a gifted scholar and, by combining an engaging preaching style with mild criticism of the Mubarak regime, amassed a wide following among Egypt's pious middle class.Footnote 51 During the 1990s Jumʿa was also Director of the International Institute of Islamic Thought's Cairo office,Footnote 52 which at that time served as a hub for “New Islamist” scholars including al-Qaradawi.Footnote 53 Though Jumʿa clearly did not share al-Qaradawi's sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, his understanding of the kind of reform necessary to renew the Islamic jurisprudential tradition shares many similarities with the New Islamists who lay claim to the legacy of 19th-century reformers such as al-Tahtawi. For example, Jumʿa writes sympathetically about Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1996) and al-Qaradawi's controversial efforts in hadith criticism,Footnote 54 and both Jumʿa and al-Qaradawi were signatories of the Amman Message in 2006.Footnote 55 This similarity in perspective renders Jumʿa and al-Qaradawi's later public disagreement over the 2013 coup particularly surprising.
It was following Jumʿa's appointment to the office of grand mufti in 2003 that his popularity became international. He wrote regular op-eds in The Washington Post and articulated progressive positions on issues such as democracy,Footnote 56 female genital mutilation, and female political participation.Footnote 57 Jumʿa never became quite as well known as, say, the popular preacher ʿAmr Khalid (b. 1967)Footnote 58 or al-Qaradawi, partly because he built his support on different bases. Rather than cultivating an image as a relatable everyman (like Khalid) or a scholar-activist (like al-Qaradawi), Jumʿa cultivated a Sufi mystique through a teaching style that made “centuries-old texts exciting and timely, tying them to the burning issues of the moment.” In Jumʿa's study circles he encouraged his students, both male and female, to engage with the great classical texts of the Islamic tradition, saying, “You must stand where they stood and think and reflect.”Footnote 59 Due to his progressiveness on key issues, democratic sympathies, and mystical leanings, Jumʿa also became particularly popular with Muslim student-travelers from Europe and North America. Prior to the 2013 coup, these student-travelers would come to Cairo in search of an authentic scholarly tradition that, to them, Jumʿa's mystique represented.Footnote 60
Jumʿa's arguments favoring the coup and the clearing of the protest camps were never published in a single location.Footnote 61 Rather, he articulated them in interviews, lectures, and speeches via the media. The most detailed sources are an interview broadcast on CBC Egypt on 23 August 2013 and a lecture to the army that appears to have been recorded and delivered during Ramadan (between 9 July and 7 August 2013).Footnote 62 As such, the lecture was likely produced before the Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya massacre on 14 August 2013, which implies Jumʿa was inflaming the tension over the protest camps before the killings rather than providing an ex post facto legitimization of what occurred. The lecture also appears to have been intended specifically for distribution among the army, given that among the topics Jumʿa discussed is the issue of desertion and militancy in the Sinai region. By focusing on these sources it becomes possible to ascertain Jumʿa's Islamic legal justifications for the coup and its aftermath.
THE CONCEPTS TAGHALLUB AND KHAWĀRIJ IN JUMʿA'S ARGUMENT
In the 23 August 2013 CBC interview (after the Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya massacre) Jumʿa justifies the coup by drawing on the concept of taghallub.Footnote 63 In premodern jurisprudence, some ʿulamaʾ used taghallub to rationalize their acquiescence to a ruler seizing power by force. The justification for this seizure was that to rule effectively and ensure stability a ruler must have the allegiance of the military. It was considered better to lend legitimacy to a usurper able to seize power quickly and successfully than to support a ruler who could be easily deposed. Moreover, a deposed ruler clearly did not enjoy the support of the military and so, as the ʿulamaʾ’s reasoning went, continuing to support him would only lead to a protracted civil war. As such, most ʿulamaʾ since the late medieval period felt it was better to focus on influencing how the usurper exercised power once he had seized it than on the issue of whether power had been seized legitimately.Footnote 64
Yet, Jumʿa's use of taghallub to legitimize the coup presents several novelties, not least because he is ties it to the modern concept of Egyptian national will. At first, Jumʿa's argument looks familiar to earlier justifications of seizing power by force. He states, for example, that, “If an Iman [i.e., a ruler] who had assumed power legitimately is arrested by those under his own authority he loses his legitimacy.”Footnote 65 For Jumʿa, Mursi was not a ruler with the capacity to rule effectively and ensure stability, or else the army would not have been willing or able to arrest him. Thus, Mursi is no longer a legitimate ruler. Jumʿa refers to the arrest of Mursi not as a coup (inqilāb), but rather as a legitimate assuming of power due to the greater strength and capacity to govern possessed by Mursi's opponents.Footnote 66 The novelty of Jumʿa's reasoning comes when he says “We have become the ones with legitimacy to rule through our capacity to govern effectively” (aṣbaḥnā al-mutaghallibīn), while justifying this seizure of power via the concept of the sovereignty of the nation and the national will. Jumʿa begins by explaining, “What happened in the revolution of 30 June [referring to the anti-Mursi demonstrations prior to the coup] is that people came out in protest.”Footnote 67 Referring to the sovereignty (siyāda) of the people, Jumʿa then argues that the army intervened only in response to the undivided voice of “all the Egyptian people” (jamīʿan), and that al-Sisi was acting in accordance with the will of the people (bināʾan ʿalā al-shaʿb).Footnote 68 In Jumʿa's view, it was only the voice of the people that initially gave the army permission to intervene in a manner that could be justified ex post facto according to the terms of taghallub.Footnote 69 In the lecture he produced for the army during Ramadan, Jumʿa claimed that the crowds of protesters had numbered thirty million.Footnote 70 As such, even though Jumʿa referred to the concept of taghallub in order to legitimate the coup in a manner that resembled a premodern rationale, his reasoning was underpinned by the modern assumption that it was the will of the nation that justified Mursi's ousting.
One of the most striking aspects of Jumʿa's argument favoring the coup and its aftermath is his referral to the anticoup demonstrators as khawārij.Footnote 71 Jumʿa often referred to a hadith that called the khawārij the “the dogs of hell” (kilāb al-nār). He also referred to another hadith, commonly understood as referring to the khawārij, which reads, “He who comes to you when you are united and wants to divide you, kill him.”Footnote 72 The term khawārij has a long history in Islamic thought, dating back to the time of the Caliph ʿAli.Footnote 73 At first, Jumʿa's statements would appear to invoke this history, and could be construed as an excommunication of the Brotherhood and their supporters from the Muslim community to legitimate their killing. Understanding contemporary accusations of kharijism by the Sunni ʿulamaʾ in Egypt in premodern terms, however, overlooks the extent to which the Egyptian nation-state has transformed the concept since the 19th century. In this new context, the accusation of kharijism refers to treason and terrorism, and is predicated upon the good of the Egyptian nation. As Jeffrey T. Kenney has shown, during the 20th century the contestation over the concept of kharijism in Egypt was no longer a question of who was a member of the Muslim community and who was not. Rather, what was at stake was membership in the Egyptian nation.Footnote 74
Kenney argues that over the centuries the Sunni ʿulamaʾ establishment has shifted the term khawārij away from the original rebels against ʿAli and molded the term into an ahistorical symbol representing illegitimate rebellion against a legitimate ruler.Footnote 75 As Kenney puts it,
Kharijism has an unequivocal legacy in the Islamic tradition . . . the image of the Kharijites is that they never rise up to defend a just cause or to denounce an unjust ruler. They always separate themselves from both leaders and fellow Muslims who are worthy of respect, and they always kill those who truly deserve better. Most important, despite wearing their faith on their sleeves, they never really represent the principles of Islam for which they claim to fight.Footnote 76
In postcolonial Egypt, however, the meaning and purpose of the kharijite accusation has been altered by a nation-state discourse that transforms the population within its territory into compliant citizens. Consequently, “a good Muslim [became] nothing more than a good citizen of the state, someone who obeys the law and remains loyal. Kharijite and traitor to the modern state [became] the same.”Footnote 77 In this vein, the accusation of kharijism formed part of the attempt to delegitimize the Muslim Brotherhood, particularly in 1948 and 1954. ʿAbd al-Nasir's nationalization of al-Azhar's endowments in 1952 “brought the charge of kharijism into the orbit of government policy” and the accusation of kharijism that the ʿulamaʾ establishment directed toward the Brotherhood became a part of state propaganda.Footnote 78
Similarly, Jumʿa uses the khawārij accusation to explain why the anticoup protests were happening, and this accusation is also part of a more recent history of contestation between the ʿulamaʾ establishment and the Brotherhood. Jumʿa's predecessors in the al-Azhar establishment often accused the Brotherhood of kharijism. Like Jumʿa, they littered their arguments with the same hadith that referred to the khawārij (i.e., the Brotherhood) as the “dogs of hell.” My point is that the postcolonial history of the ʿulamaʾ establishment's usage of the kharijite accusation against the Brotherhood is not a question of sin and unbelief, but stems from the nation-state's concern to prevent disorder while delegitimizing the Brotherhood as a voice of Islam.Footnote 79 The accusation of kharijism has come to play the same role as the accusation of terrorism. As Richard Falk notes,
The resonance of the word terrorist [and here I would add, kharijite,] makes it an often valuable tool in political conflict. If the tactics and organizational entity of rival political forces can be described as terrorist and that label can be made to stick, two consequences follow: no pressure for concessions on political grievances and acceptability of the use of ruthless means and suspension of normal constitutional limits to inflict pain and death.Footnote 80
Jumʿa follows these modern iterations of the accusation of kharijism, using it in a manner analogous to terrorism and treason. He reaffirms the nation-state's legitimacy to use force, while attempting to re-establish the Azhari ʿulamaʾ’s monopoly on speaking in the name of Islam.
JUMʿA'S ARGUMENTS AS PART OF A NATION-STATE DISCOURSE: THE NECESSITY OF QUIET DEATH
Jumʿa's description of the anticoup protesters as khawārij is not an accusation of unbelief, putting the anticoup protesters outside the bounds of the Muslim community. It is better understood as an accusation of betraying the nation. I consider expelling a group beyond the boundaries of the premodern Muslim community markedly different from putting a group outside the bounds of the modern nation-state. While the premodern community considered itself to be bound by moral laws outside its control and part of a moral cosmology sustained by God and the shariʿa, the nation-state promulgates the law to serve its own advancement and control its citizens.Footnote 81 Foucault used the concept of biopower to describe the difference between the power of the premodern sovereign over his subjects and the power of the state over its citizens. While a premodern sovereign had power over the deaths of his subjects, the state controls the life of the nation and its citizens. Consequently, modern wars and massacres are undertaken not for the sake of causing death, but rather to preserve the life of the nation.Footnote 82 I consider Jumʿa's arguments legitimating the army's killing of the protesters at Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya to be rooted in this same assumption.
In his lecture to the army, Jumʿa emphasizes that the anticoup protesters “do not love the homeland” and, as a result, “do not deserve our Egyptianess” (lā yastaḥiqqūnā miṣriyyatanā). To Jumʿa, they are traitors who have no claim to membership in the Egyptian nation. Jumʿa also describes the political situation in the aftermath of the coup as one of increasing anarchy in the country and, consequently, the protesters’ deaths as necessary to preserving the nation. However, and in line with Foucault's argument, as Jumʿa encourages the army to “respond with full force against those who do not love this homeland” he does not describe the army as an agent of destruction, but rather as a preserver of life. In contrast to the protestors, who do not want “Egypt to rise because of their own economic, social, and dogmatic interests,” Jumʿa praises the army for developing the homeland by, for example, building roads and protecting the nation.Footnote 83 Similarly, while the Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya massacre was widely reported in the media, it was not perpetrated as a public spectacle. Thus, bulldozers were immediately on hand to clear away the wreckage. The bodies of the deceased were quietly removed and only released to their relatives much later, if at all. These kinds of killings are an intrinsic manifestation of biopower. As Foucault put it, “That death is so carefully evaded is linked less to a new anxiety which makes death unbearable for our societies than to the fact that the procedures of power” have changed.Footnote 84 Perpetrating mass death quietly in the name of preserving life is central to state power. By making the Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya massacre appear necessary to protect the nation, Jumʿa played an important role in upholding this power.
When Jumʿa spoke to the army he argued that the anticoup protesters were a threat to the nation, even though they were unarmed. The threat the protesters posed, he claimed, was through their words. Jumʿa suggested that the protesters, just like the khawārij, were “using words they do not believe in,” such as legitimacy (sharʿiyya) and democracy. As such, Jumʿa accused the protesters of incitement (taḥrīḍ), and “this incitement is, in its essence, incitement to civil strife [fitna].” Moreover, incitement is “like the strike of a sword” and “words are like weapons.” Jumʿa said that those who incite, that is the protesters, were killing people figuratively (maʿnawiyyan), but God would judge them as though they had actually killed people. To explain what he meant, Jumʿa used the example of a protest on 8 July 2013 outside the military barracks where Mursi was being held. Jumʿa said that this protest, and others like it, caused terror among the people, and destroyed property, closed roads, and obstructed prayer. The protestors spread false rumors, “which in our modern language we call terrorism.”Footnote 85 That day, fifty-one people were killed outside the barracks as the army fired into the crowd “like pouring rain,” as one witness put it.Footnote 86 However, Jumʿa explained that this response, firing into a crowd, was self-defense. “When I am attacked,” Jumʿa said, “I am not just defending myself, but defending life and security.” The army had no choice “but to kill those who spread lies” and those people “have to be killed to save others.” The army was noble in character and soldiers killed as a last resort, because “when the enemy is strong, you have no option but to shoot him from a distance.” Jumʿa even went so far as to suggest that the protestors were “committing suicide” because, “If I play with a gun,” Jumʿa said, meaning that if the protesters incited the army through their presence in the streets, “and shoot myself in the face, am I then to say that it was someone else who killed me?”Footnote 87
Jumʿa's argument that the army's killing of unarmed protesters was necessary to defend the nation, I contend, is rooted in a bureaucratic logic that facilitates impersonal mass killings. According to Jumʿa, even though the protesters were not armed, they were a threat to the social order. As Zygmunt Bauman argued, in times of social dislocation the impersonal nature of bureaucratic logic leads state bureaucracies to conclude that massacres are necessary for the good of the nation.Footnote 88 Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, al-Azhar was integrated into the bureaucracy of the Egyptian nation-state, and Jumʿa,Footnote 89 though by August 2013 no longer officially grand mufti, was still part of Egypt's bureaucratic discourse.
THE STATE AND THE MIXING OF RELIGION AND POLITICS
At first glance, Jumʿa's legitimation of the coup would seem to be a prime example of an ʿālim’s intervention into politics. However, the notion that religion and politics are two distinct realms is not self-evidently true; it is the result of a historical process that began in 17th-century Europe and then spread unevenly across the world through colonialism.Footnote 90 The modern ʿulamaʾ have, of course, been affected by this process. As such, while they may disagree with the ideological notion that religion and politics are not to be mixed, they have nevertheless accepted that the concepts of religion and politics refer to distinct phenomena. With that point in mind, Agrama has argued that the discourse of modern states is characterized by states’ ever-increasing capacity to regulate religious life.Footnote 91 I will now argue that Jumʿa's interventions in 2013 are part of this dynamic of expansion.
In his reading of Jumʿa's arguments Fadel writes that, in supporting the coup, “Traditionalist theologians such as Jumʿa have clearly decided that protection of religious orthodoxy is more important than establishing a representative government. In making this choice, they are clearly vindicating a well-established line of reasoning in Islamic political thought.”Footnote 92 Fadel argues that the Azharite ʿulamaʾ were unable to tolerate the markedly increased diversity of competing voices in the post-2011 Islamic public sphere, and saw in al-Sisi “a religious autocrat who can control religious debate.”Footnote 93 While this interpretation is fruitful, I consider Agrama's concept of the secular state's questioning power to be an equally useful means to understand Jumʿa's reasoning.
In Questioning Secularism Agrama argues that the essence of secular power is its indeterminacy. For Agrama, secular power is a questioning power that works by continually causing anxieties among the population about where the divide between religion and politics really lies, rather than the power of the state to establish the boundaries that divide religion and politics, as is commonly presumed. It is through this mistaken assumption that secular power is produced because the state does not divide these realms at all but rather “hopelessly blurs them.” Nevertheless, citizens accept the argument that the state needs more power to resolve the religious–political divide (that it produces in the first place), and they subsequently permit the expansion of the state's sovereign capacity over social life.Footnote 94
As such, I argue that in addition to understanding Jumʿa's support for the military as part of a desire to restrict new voices entering the Islamic public sphere, his intervention is also part of the dynamic Agrama has described. Jumʿa's arguments help create the anxiety that the Brotherhood and their supporters are mixing religion and politics because, just as ʿAli used to say about the khawārij, while they might “speak a word of the truth, they mean to deceive” (yaqūl kalimat al-haqq yurīd bi-hā bāṭil).Footnote 95 At the same time, Jumʿa is a former grand mufti who is now speaking to the public as a private citizen, further compounding the discursive mingling of religion and politics. In line with Agrama's argument, the solution that Jumʿa proposes is greater state control to police the religion–politics divide.
In interviews with the Egyptian press Jumʿa argues that the state must be given the capacity to regulate religious life further by granting licenses to issue fatwas, and having more control of mosques and sermons. For example, in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram in February 2013, just before Jumʿa left office, the interviewer asked Jumʿa to describe the greatest challenges facing his successor, Shawki ʿAllam (b. 1961). In response, Jumʿa expressed his concern about the “chaos in religious discourse” (fawḍa fī al-khiṭāb al-dīnī), as he called it.Footnote 96 Jumʿa explained that the Egyptian public sphere was awash with an overwhelming diversity of religious opinions ranging from the extreme, to the licentious, to the moderate, to the political, and so on. The problem was that the Egyptian public did not know whom to trust. Furthermore, the people who issued these fatwas were only “expressing their personal views, not [the views of] the religious establishment.”Footnote 97 Fadel considers Jumʿa's concerns to represent a nostalgia for the ideal political order articulated by the late medieval ʿulamaʾ. Al-Ghazali considered the ideal political order to be strictly hierarchical, with the ʿulamaʾ and the ruling establishment at the top speaking with one voice on matters of religion and governance while the public listened obediently. Based on this distinction, Fadel argues that Jumʿa's desire to support the coup was rooted in the historically well-established view that public order can only be preserved when there is a single, authoritative voice speaking on behalf of Islam. Fadel emphasizes that, for Jumʿa, tolerating a pluralistic Islamic public sphere means tolerating chaos, which is unacceptable.Footnote 98
In contrast to Fadel's argument, I suggest first of all that Jumʿa's concerns about an overly pluralistic public sphere are better contextualized in historical terms by the nationalism that began with al-Tahtawi, rather than the ideal political order of al-Ghazali.Footnote 99 Second of all, I consider Jumʿa's arguments favoring greater state regulation of religion to be part of Agrama's dynamic whereby citizens accept that greater state control is necessary as a result of the state's questioning power. While al-Tahtawi did display a certain tolerance for a diversity of publicly expressed ideas, he always added that this tolerance was not to be at the expense of “national unity.” Moreover, al-Tahtawi emphasized that internal disorder (al-ikhtilāl al-dākhilī) and civil strife (fitna) were to be avoided to ensure that the nation would remain strong enough to defend the homeland.Footnote 100 Al-Tahtawi initiated these tropes, which were mobilized by later nationalist authoritarians such as ʿAbd al-Nasir,Footnote 101 and they played a key role in Jumʿa's arguments as well. Jumʿa referred to the Egyptian public as the “children of the homeland” (abnāʾ al-waṭan). Like al-Tahtawi, he described his own role as the homeland's servant. Referring to his impending departure from his post, Jumʿa said,
I am going to continue to serve my religion, my homeland, and my brothers . . . I ask almighty God that He help the new [Grand] Mufti to complete the journey of making the Dar al-Ifta an example that all state institutions will follow, in order to revive this beloved homeland, and return Egypt to its former era of preeminence, advancement and progress.Footnote 102
I also consider Jumʿa's understanding of freedom to have its origins in al-Tahtawi's protonationalism. Jumʿa said, “Freedom means adhering to [proper] authority and legitimacy, not escaping [from them] and following capricious whims or desires.”Footnote 103 Al-Tahtawi and the ʿulamaʾ who came after him also understood freedom first and foremost as the freedom to obey the law, and the freedom to love the homeland.Footnote 104 Jumʿa's arguments, like those of al-Tahtawi, are underpinned by his concern for the future of the Egyptian nation and its progress.
Jumʿa's solution to the perceived problem of chaos in religious discourse is increased state control over religious life, and he is therefore an important actor facilitating the state's increasing capacities of control. Jumʿa advocated for a law granting the Dar al-Ifta the exclusive right to issue licenses to regulate the promulgation of fatwas.Footnote 105 He made this argument in unison with the Egyptian minister of awqaf, who at the time was also attempting to assert control of all Egypt's mosques. The minister made this attempt by stripping thousands of imams of their licenses to preach, and attempted to close all small mosques less than 860 square feet in size. These moves were justified by Jumʿa and the ministry because of a need to disentangle religion and politics, or counteract the “merchants of religion” (tujjār al-dīn, i.e., the Brotherhood), as they put it.Footnote 106 Jumʿa argued that “it is necessary that this matter [of issuing fatwas] should be restricted to specialized scholars, and that scholars who wish to assume this role [must] be trained thoroughly.” At the time, the Ministry of Awqaf was planning to send Azhari trained imams throughout the country.Footnote 107 As such, on the one hand Jumʿa's arguments for greater state support for al-Azhar and the Dar al-Ifta can be read as part of the ʿulamaʾ’s conscious decisions to reassert their power in the public sphere over the Brotherhood and other groups, as Fadel points out.Footnote 108 On the other hand, at the level of state discourse, I contend that Jumʿa's arguments can be read as an illustration of a dynamic that facilitates the state's greater capacity to regulate religious life.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that Jumʿa's Islamic legal arguments supporting the 2013 coup and its aftermath can be productively understood as nationalist, and as part of a discourse of the nation-state. As such, rather than comparing Jumʿa's authoritarian sympathies to the hierarchical relationships found between Sufi shaykhs and their murīds, or to well-established, premodern lines of reasoning, I have contended that Jumʿa's arguments are more thoroughly rooted in a nationalist trend instigated by al-Tahtawi. Like Jumʿa, al-Tahtawi was writing as part of a discourse that produces a new political subject. This subject is the citizen who recognizes themself in the nation and is concerned with that nation's future. Rather than viewing al-Tahtawi as instigating a new republican subtradition that is distinct from the subtradition Fadel calls traditionalist Islam, I have emphasized that al-Tahtawi's political thought is very much indebted to the premodern political imaginary. In particular, I have argued for the salience of protonationalism in al-Tahtawi's political thought.
A state cannot justify its existence without a nation. The discursive creation of the nation by the state pulled the premodern Muslim out of a cosmic moral order underpinned by God and into a new order defined by the state.Footnote 109 This shift was intertwined with a new understanding of time as progress, specifically the progress of the nation. With these points in mind, I demonstrated that Jumʿa's arguments were rooted in an appeal to national progress, and out of a concern to protect the homeland. I also emphasized Jumʿa's usage of the concept of taghallub. Although taghallub is originally a premodern legal concept, I showed that Jumʿa's usage of it is novel inasmuch as it is connected to the concept of popular sovereignty and the national will, which legitimated the army's intervention. As such, Jumʿa's arguments represent a new phenomenon whereby lines of reasoning, which had their origins in premodern Islamic political thought, are redeployed in the modern context with new justifications and for new purposes.
The aftermath of the coup was dominated by the massacre at Rabiʿa al-ʿAdawiyya. The most striking aspect of Jumʿa's legitimization of the massacre was his referral to the protesters as khawārij. While this might appear to be a reiteration of a premodern concept that served to excommunicate the anticoup protesters from the Muslim community and legitimate their killing, I argued instead that the term khawārij has played an important role in postcolonial Egyptian politics. Not only is it intended to serve as an explanation for a rebellion and convey the meaning of illegitimate rebellion against a legitimate ruler, it also carries the meaning of terrorism and treason against the nation. Kharijism has been a common feature of anti-Brotherhood diatribes since at least 1948. The accusation of kharijism, then, which Jumʿa levels at the anticoup protesters, puts them not outside the Muslim community, but outside the bounds of the nation.
Expulsion from a premodern Muslim community is different from expulsion from the modern nation. While the premodern sovereign enjoyed power over the deaths of his subjects, the modern state enjoys dominance over the life of the nation and its citizens. Similarly, the assumptions that Jumʿa drew on to legitimate the massacres were rooted in the preservation of life, rather than power over death. He argued that the protesters had to be killed to save the nation. This rationale was quintessentially modern, and does not have its origins in the political order idealized by the premodern ʿulamaʾ. Appeals to the future progress of the nation make all kinds of horrors possible in the present.
In the months prior to the 2013 coup, Jumʿa spoke of his deep concern about the multiplicity of voices speaking in the name of Islam in the Egyptian public sphere. He referred to this phenomenon as the “chaos of religious discourse.” Fadel argued that this concern was a key factor in Jumʿa's support for the coup, and was drawn from the historical vision of a hierarchical society promulgated by late medieval ʿulamaʾ such as al-Ghazali. By contrast, I have emphasized that Jumʿa's real concern was for the future of the nation, which originates with al-Tahtawi. I have also argued that the solution Jumʿa proposed, increased state control, was symptomatic of a discourse that creates two separate concepts of religion and politics, inextricably blurs them together, and then validates the state's existence as the only force able to disentangle them. Agrama termed this dynamic the questioning power of secularism.
Academics who study contemporary Islam and politics in the Arab world have primarily concerned themselves with the Muslim Brotherhood and the activist ʿulamaʾ close to that movement, such as al-Qaradawi who promulgated a “jurisprudence of revolution” (fiqh al-thawra) in support of the 2011 Arab Spring.Footnote 110 However, since the Egyptian coup in 2013 academic attention has begun to shift toward a fiqh of counter-revolution advanced by the ʿulamaʾ establishment. This article is an effort to contribute to this emerging conversation. Alongside Fadel's emphasis on late medieval thought and contemporary Sufism, I have demonstrated that Jumʿa's fiqh of counter-revolution can be usefully understood as rooted in nationalism and a concern to protect the Egyptian nation.
Finally, with the work of Haj in mind, I suggest that since the 18th and 19th centuries the ʿulamaʾ no longer conceptualize human history as “a continuum of renewal, revival, and reform,” as she puts it, but instead have come to view history as an endless forward drive that views the progress of the nation (a creation of the state) as an end in itself. This kind of change is not without precedent. The architecture of the Islamic tradition's framework for inquiry has often received additions, such as al-Ghazali's own introduction of “Aristotelian methods of reasoning into the Islamic idiom and semantics.”Footnote 111 Al-Tahtawi's introduction of nationalism can be viewed as part of a similar shift in the ʿulamaʾ’s worldview and horizon of expectations. To be sure, the contemporary Islamic tradition is a framework of inquiry that is constantly changing. Nevertheless, nationhood, national progress, and their attendant concepts represent key additions to the framework, which continue to impinge upon the direction of the Islamic tradition's evolution.
