Andrew March’s latest monograph, The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, speaks at once to scholars of comparative politics concerned with democracy formation in Muslim-majority states, scholars of international relations concerned with the limits of the world system, and scholars of political theory concerned with popular sovereignty. It also offers valuable insights for historians of the modern Middle East, intellectual historians of utopia, and students of Islamic and constitutional law.
On a certain register, The Caliphate of Man is political theory as obituary. March reconstructs the history of an idea, “Islamic democracy,” whose demise began with the onset of the Arab uprisings of 2010–11. Where secular imaginaries might read death as an irretrievable passing, and thus indicative of our limited claim to sovereign control, nonsecular imaginaries less enamored by these pretensions find new life in death. An obituary can signal not only a passing but also a passage—loss and birth at once. On this score, March’s book elaborates ideas first explored in his article, “Taking People as They Are: Islam as a ‘Realistic Utopia’ in the Political Theory of Sayyid Qutb” (American Political Science Review, 104 (1), 2010), interpreting Islamic democracy as ideal theory. With the rise of nation-states in the Middle East after World War I, modern Muslim thinkers developed the idea of Islamic democracy in earnest to contend with secular notions of sovereignty. National sovereignty won the ideological battle, but it may have lost the geopolitical war in the long run. That is, The Caliphate of Man introduces readers to an intellectual tradition situated to think beyond politics as they are, after the prospective collapse of sovereignty.
An Archimedean point animates March’s interpretation. The text opens and closes with Tunisian philosopher Rachid Ghannūshī’s articulation of the “caliphate of man”: the viceregency of the umma, the Muslim community, as God’s deputy. Ghannūshī repurposes the exalted position reserved for human beings in Islam—endowed with a will to choose between right and wrong, the capacity to construct worlds, and an obligation to pursue God’s charge—to explain popular sovereignty as an Islamic construct. Looking backward, Ghannūshī represents the culminating point in an historical line woven throughout modern Islamist thought since the 1920s. In reconstructing that line, March brings to the fore unexpected points of convergence between expressions of divine and popular sovereignty in the “high utopian Islamism” of Abū’l A‘lā Mawdūdī and Qutb. Looking forward, the caliphate of man informs Ghannūshī’s turn to moral pluralism after the Tunisian uprising. In either case, Islam promises to offer more robust solutions to existing problems: a more democratic democracy, a more pluralist pluralism.
That promise goes unfulfilled. In lieu of offering solutions in the wake of its failure to materialize, The Caliphate of Man concludes with an aporia, asking whether sovereignty is anathema to Islamism. Are divine and popular sovereignty irreconcilable? Islamism presumes “a pre-political law…binding on Muslims and constraining of political life.” We are left to choose between, on the one hand, consensus through moral pluralism (undercutting claims to divine sovereignty) and, on the other hand, relinquishing the modern state altogether (undercutting claims to popular sovereignty; p. 227).
If Ghannūshī represents the apex of “high utopian Islamism,” the aporia March delineates haunts all Islamist encounters with the paradox of popular sovereignty. In Rousseau’s account, a yet-to-be virtuous citizenry must ascribe to itself a law evincing the attainment of virtue and citizenship before a political order predicated on that law can cultivate virtue and citizenship in those who fall under its purview. Rousseau resolves the paradox through the Lawgiver—a fictional foreigner, an idol-like demigod able to compel transformation with a noble lie. Contemporary political theorists call this decisionism, pointing to the undemocratic underbelly of popular sovereignty. Modern Islamist thinkers tackle an iteration of the paradox specific to a theological imaginary, seemingly sidestepping decisionism. Islamism addresses a political community that only exists through self-identification with divine law. The law the umma gives itself precedes particular manifestations of the people, thereby precluding the need for a Lawgiver. But the umma cannot choose to reject Islam and still be the umma, revealing a different kind of undemocratic conceit. Divine sovereignty stands in for natural and human rights as constraints on constituent power. The Caliphate of Man meticulously reconstructs this paradox, where most turn away in deference to clichéd tropes about political violence. March’s work is valuable precisely because it is not apologia or revisionism but a sustained and uncompromising engagement with Muslim thinkers as thinkers, warts and all.
The book raises two unaddressed questions. The first concerns judgment. Who is to judge when the umma acts in accordance with divine law? If we answer that experts should make this assessment, then Muslim thinkers offer no theory of popular sovereignty. For Ghannūshī, experts only wield authority through the umma, which in turn bears a timeless capacity for disobedience. Readers would be correct to recall John Locke and his assumption of a pre-political capacity to judge rights. Judgment is determined by contingent real-world experiences. According to March, modern Islamism—Ghannūshī’s concept of “dispersed sovereignty” especially—relies on a capacity for judgment when faced with the features of historical experience left out of Islam’s founding doctrine. In its most expansive sense, this pragmatism accounts for the possibility that anything can happen. But The Caliphate of Man does not explore that possibility fully, perhaps because of March’s commitments to Rousseau and Rawls. “Taking the people as they are” puts a limit on indeterminate judgment. It certainly does not entertain the prospect that anything can happen beyond the confines of this world. In this regard, March’s remarkable ability to demonstrate overlaps between modern Islamism and a Rawlsian notion of liberalism also reflects the very limit confronting Muslim ontology in the modern era. Can the Muslim exist on terms illegible to “us”?
The second question concerns revolution. March wrote The Caliphate of Man in the shadow of the Arab uprisings, when Islamists felt threatened by the appearance of indeterminate popular sovereignty. Constrained by their commitment to divine sovereignty, these Islamists could not imagine their project in the face of unthinkable social change. But there are other definitions of the state; for instance, Weber’s monopoly of violence or Foucault’s governmentality. What if modern Islamism fails to cohere with the modern state precisely because it attempts to cohere with popular sovereignty? Is modern Islamism actually a counterrevolutionary force consistent with these other definitions of the state?
Another version of modern Islamic thought is possible. Contra Islamist fears of popular sovereignty, Michel Foucault read Iran’s 1979 revolution to suggest indeterminacy and spirituality at once. If, like Foucault, we listen to lived revolutionary experience (and not post-revolutionary power struggles), we may notice convergences between divine and popular sovereignty unthinkable when we “take the people as they are.” In this sense, modern Islamic thought may not be as dormant as presumed. As recently as a decade ago, the prospect of revolution in Arab states seemed a dead letter. Today, uprisings and the specter of state collapse make headlines. Reports of the death of Islamic democracy may be greatly exaggerated. Islamic popular sovereignty may still exist—albeit, like other iterations of the phenomenon, as an extraordinary constituent moment, perhaps as a revolution against any effort to fuse Islam and the modern state.
No single monograph can address every question. The Caliphate of Man addresses many important ones. It is a path-breaking book that should shape debates in numerous fields for years to come, because it is thoroughly grounded in primary and secondary Arabic-language sources, lucidly written in a style accessible to readers without prior expertise, and replete with insights responsive to the immediate context shaping the intellectual formations it reconstructs and the contours of debate more conventionally associated with theories of popular sovereignty. March has written an indispensable text for comparative scholars of political thought and beyond.
