This presentation examines the convergence and divergence of competing notions of Islamic community and polity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. For many Muslims, the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 1258 created a socio-cultural and legal dilemma, embodied in the disappearance of an Abbasid caliphate with universalistic claims to the allegiances of a global religious community. Yet the diversity of responses, from South Asia to North Africa, to this dramatic eradication of caliphal authority in Baghdad reveals the creative ways in which the very essence of the institution was represented and reimagined.

Sunni political thought and the Caliphate discourse consolidated during the early medieval (or classical) period at the hands of Ash`ari theologians such as Baqillani, Mawardi, and Ghazali. The choices that classical theorists made were influenced by the new intellectual challenges posed by the Hellenistic philosophical and Persian socio-political traditions. The consequent intellectual posture was marked by elitism and cynicism towards commonsense and practical reason. The common believer’s encounter with scripture produced no worthwhile action or knowledge: the theologian knew God’s nature, the jurist God’s will, and the mystic God’s secrets. The ruler could often claim God’s shadow. The Community (umma) was left out in the sun. Ibn Taymiyya challenged the classical tradition in both intellectual and political domains. His central critique of classical political thought was that he rejected not the obligation of the Caliphate, as often thought, but the elitist epistemology that underpinned classical thought. As an alternative to both theological speculation (nazar) and mystical (kashf), he offered fitra (divinely endowed human nature) as a way of knowing the divine nature as well as ethical truths. Natural human reason, he contended, had far more potential for recognizing truth and justice than classical Sunni theology had conceded. To this end, he transformed the theological centrality of the Community that Sunni Islam had been based on into a socio-political tenet, cautiously bolstering the epistemic authority of the common believers’ (including the law rulers’) interpretation of scriptures vis-à-vis that of the Ulama and the political authority of the subjects (including the Ulama) vis-à-vis that of the rulers. I examine his contentions in his discourse on rebellion, the issue of ijtihad and taqlid, and the role and qualifications of the Muslim ruler to illustrate how his subversion of intellectual and political elitism was calculated to try and revive the political life of the Community.

To speak of notions of community is to inevitably run up against questions of leadership. In Islamic studies, these questions have been predominantly framed in terms of the religio-political leadership exercised by the ruling class in their various manifestations, both historical and ideal. As a result, studies of the nature of the communal leadership exerted by elite classes often occupy secondary status. In an attempt to redress this imbalance, this paper analyses the role played by the ‘ulama in cultivating certain ethical sensibilities among their constituencies. While some attention will be paid to the particular moral values the ‘ulama sought to foster within the body politic, the focus of the paper will be on the discursive mechanisms through which this particular aspect of their leadership role was imagined, theorized, and enacted, and the meta commitments under which that discursivity operated. Seminal contributions from the likes of Makdisi, Chamberlain, Berkey and Zaman have taught us much about the intellectual structures and networks that facilitated the literary output of the ‘ulama in various locales. More recent work in the social history and anthropology of Muslim societies – the dominant examples here are the contributions of Peirce and Rosen – have made clear that a subsection of the ‘ulama, the q?d?s, found intricate ways of weaving moral considerations into the judicial process in order to uphold, arbitrate, redirect and create shared communal norms. This paper examines the intersection of these two sets of literature by recovering moral commitments embedded in genres usually thought of as strictly legal – fiqh manuals, fatwas, treatises of usul al-fiqh. In particular, I argue that the Aristotelian commitment to conscientious ethical cultivation and habituation, recently examined in a modern Muslim context by Saba Mahmood, found expression in the legal concept of i?r?r. I?r?r, or persistent behaviour, was thought to transform discrete acts into a moral trait, a habitus deeply entrenched in the soul, echoing Aristotle’s observation that “ethical virtue is acquired through habit.” This conception found its way into legal maxims, court judgements and even the fundamental five-fold categorization of legal norms, indicating its deep penetration into ways of thinking about the law. This was a communal task, whose natural agents were thought to be the ‘ulama, once again in line with Aristotle’s vision that the “legislators, by habituating people of the city to do good, make them good.” This paper seeks to explore how seriously they took that role.

The question of orthodoxy and religious authority in the study of Islam has produced an array of results and perspectives which have not always been in accord with one another. In an attempt to dismiss the question altogether, many have claimed that Islam is simply best understood as a religion of orthopraxy—a tradition concerned with proper practice rather than proper belief (orthodoxy). Indeed, advocates of this perspective point to the large amount of intellectual activity in the Islamic tradition that has been concerned with the formulation of proper interpretations and applications of Islamic law, shariah. Observers of the first centuries of Islam, however, have pointed to the vibrant theological debates that took place alongside the development of jurisprudence. However, these two approaches, which focus on the scholarly discourse of theologians and jurists fail capture the social and political dimensions of orthodoxy, power, and authority in Islam. Another approach has been to study the formation of Sunni Islam as discrete communitarian sensibility. From this perspective—Sunnism as orthodoxy—the question of religious authority fully enters the realm of imperial politics as opposed to remaining in the more insular, but not apolitical, arena of clerical discourse (theology and jurisprudence). However, while most historians of Islam can attest to the fact that a distinctly Sunni set of legal and theological practices did not come into existence until, at the earliest, the period between the late-ninth and early-tenth century, few can describe the way in which this protracted development of community identity unfolded. This paper addresses the old problem of orthodoxy and authority in the Islamic tradition through an analysis of the concept of al-jam?‘a as a discourse of collective identity. It argues that theological, jurisprudential, and Sunni sectarian discourses rely upon a pervasive, yet opaque, foundational myth regarding the solidary nature of the early Muslim community. This myth ultimately provides the basis for the articulation of the idealized political community and allows for the demarcation of heresy and heterodoxy. By analyzing the discourse of al-jam?‘a and its ancillaries al-??‘ and al-sam‘ in the political rhetoric of Umayyad caliphs, in the scholarly milieu of the ahl al-hadith, and then finally in various Sunni creedal statements in the 10th century, it becomes clear that the articulation of religious authority in Islam is best understood not in terms of jurisprudence or theology but rather through the paired discourses of historical imagination and community identity.