This paper is a comparative study of the concept of “sovereignty” in the thought of the tenth-century Muslim jurist and theologian Abu Bakr al-Baqillani and the sixteenth-century French jurist and political philosopher Jean Bodin. For Bodin, sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth. If such a power is not perpetual, then the ‘sovereign’ is not sovereign, he is merely a trustee. Bodin distinguishes the perpetual ownership of power, true sovereignty, from power defined by Roman civil law as a mere loan for a limited term. Bodin inaugurates the modern conception of sovereignty by defining the exclusive and perpetual possession of power as its central ‘mark’. The problem of the possession of power is equally central to Ash’ari jurist-theologians like Baqillani, who formulated an early theory of the Imamate. However, the Muslim ‘sovereign’ is conceived as a mere custodian over that which God, in his exclusive and all-encompassing sovereignty (mulk, qudra), possesses. God’s absolute sovereignty is not ‘expressed’ in an absolutist theory of the state but rather results in a clear demarcation of political rule from divine possession and sovereignty. This paper explores the political implications of Baqillani’s “metaphysics of impermanence.” It delves into the problem of mulk (sovereignty and possession) in Islamic natural and political philosophy (in kalām and siyāsa sharʿīya) in relation to Bodin’s “marks of sovereignty.”