Aziz al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship: Power and the Sacred in Muslim, Christian and Pagan Polities (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001), pp. xvi, 219, notes to 265, bibliography to 283, index to 296. Paper $14.95.

I have to confess that I find it difficult to read Aziz al-Azmeh, or at least to start reading him. It’s a bit of a strain to navigate sentences containing more than one complete thought (not to mention the occasional incomplete thought tossed in to enrich the mixture), and words whose root meanings I know but whose suffixes make me uneasy as to whether I really know as much as I think I do. But after the first several pages I become immersed in his arguments and insights. I accept that I am reading for the whole and stop worrying about the parts, which by then seem to be arranging themselves coherently anyway. I become so absorbed in the thick descriptions of ideas and their geo-temporal entanglements that I feel as though I’ve entered new worlds that, of course I am bound to find a bit strange. And then there are those amazing moments when I encounter something I had suspected but never actually worked out, and Al-Azmeh works it out in a way I never would have thought of. That’s why his books are worth the effort it takes for a non-philosopher to begin. They offer eyes looking out from someone else’s head that enable the reader not only to see amazing things but to see them through a different consciousness. Whether you accept entirely the world you see from those eyes is another matter, but just getting to see it that way is a gift.

The relationship of political leaders to gods is one I’ve been working on for more than twenty years and Muslim Kingship offers interlinked, parallel, historical analyses of these relationships in differently deitized and institutionalized polities. For example, the Christian imperium, something most westerners take for granted, is laid out together with the pagan locality it suppressed, and linked to Eusebius and his "synchronisation of imperial and religious beginnings in the profound metaphysical sense of acts of archetypal foundation" (44). I envision imperial Christianity as a sacralized reflection of imperial Rome, that is, as a relationship whose origins arose from repression of the historical sectarian locality of early Christian communities. Al-Azmeh notes this but without my own arguably anachronistic (Whiggish?) sense that ego-grounding, especially among elites, would have provided a platform for reflection and resistance. Indeed, he reorganizes entirely the process of representation of the emperor from a sequential political absorption or conquest into a simultaneous manifestation of two archetypes, Augustus and Christ. The empire is conceived as embodying both rather than being only the political complement to a heavenly imperium, the picture one gets from Kantorowicz in The King’s Two Bodies. Al-Azmeh’s interpretation offers reasons for the thick residue of awe with which many, if not all, modern citizens/subjects regard leaders who are not kings and presumably not projections of gods, either. It also reminded me of that amazing story Eugenia Ginzberg tells in her autobiography about a woman sitting behind her at a film who exclaimed to her friend during a scene showing a Mass, "Oh that was from the time before Stalin, when people still believed in God."

Belief that kings and patriarchs were earthly manifestations of gods which, Al-Azmeh argues, was similar though far from standard across antiquity, was revolutionized by the eleventh-century split in the Christian imperium. Popes in Rome "adulterated and disaggregated" notions of the relative positions of kings and God whereby "the papacy [became] an institution of anti-kings. . .to which kings counterposed postures of themselves as virtual anti-popes"(49). The separation mediated the importation of the symbols and practices of each into the other—Al-Azmeh offers as one example the papally directed Crusade—that made both institutions simultaneously militant and authoritative and institutionalized the conflict between church and state that runs through the history of Europe. I would argue as well that it instantiated a normative separation that tarnished the respective claims of both popes and kings to divinity such that secularism became normatively and conceptually possible. As a result, in the Latin west, church and state, though conceptually and socially interpenetrated, "could not develop into a theocracy. . . .[Their] isomorphy. . .remained ever emergent, and never seems to have developed into a complete correspondence of the one with the other" (50). This is "Caesaro-Papism," church and state as parallel antagonists.

Such a twinning of church and state was not the case in the Byzantine east. There, where temporal rule was clothed in mysticism, Church and state legitimated one another as interconnected realms of spiritual authority and temporal force. The Patriarch crowned the emperor, divinely elected through the medium of the army, while the emperor enthroned the Patriarch and transferred to him the insignia of office. The "election" of both was divinely inspired. This interdependence of patriarchy and imperium was so complete that after the Ottomans took Constantinople "it was the Sultan who enthroned the monk Gennadius" (53). Unlike the competitive authorities of church and state in the west, emperor and patriarch both were sacred in complementary ways such that here "the paradigm of despotism is. . .complete" (53).

Muslim polities grew out of the multiple traditions—Judaic, Roman, Hellenistic, Byzantine, Iranian—available to the rulers of the new and rapidly expanding "Muslim oecumene." Their basic paradigm was institutionalized by the Abbasids who suppressed the consultative institution of the Arab tribal diwan in favor of monarchy, one that Al-Azmeh argues favored the Byzantine rather than the Roman paradigm. Al-Azmeh emphasizes how long this process took and how much it diverged from the Whiggish history produced and reproduced in classical works and modern textbooks on Islam (very much like the Whiggish "history" of Christianity revealed by the Jesus Seminar and, as we are discovering from the archeological record, of Judaism as well). Thus, Muslim philosophy is conceived "as a perennial philosophy running alongside and intertwined with this history of prophecy" (88). Al-Azmeh also shows the syncretism of the process, seen in the incorporation of "the political sagacity of the Persians. . .the philosophical wisdom of the Greeks, the poeticalness of the Arabs, or indeed the personalities of Alexander, Homer, Socrates, Imru ’al-Qays and others. . . .The same procedure underlies the formation of the notion of prophetic sunna, which attributed to the Prophet authoritative statements of social practice and belief. . .the Prophet is a topos wherein are mingled historical and ahistorical—indeed, anachronistic—attributes as the fount of social, dogmatic and intellectual authority" (88). From this base, filtered through conceptions of power dominated by an ‘ulama’ growing in power and authority, "the notion of the Prophet’s sunna came to replace the charismatic notion of the caliphate" as the successor to Mohammad (104).

The intellectual construction of power by the ‘ulama’ was equally syncretic. Al-Azmeh sees it originating not in a theory of kingship or the state but rather in a literature modeled on Fürstenspiegel, handbooks of proper behavior for rulers. Rather than theory, Fürstenspiegel are collections of topics and illustrative examples, in essence, anthologies of wisdom literature. With the exception of the works of Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Rushd, the foundational literary productions describing and justifying kingship are shaped around two sets of topics: technical aspects of ruler behavior (such "Miss Manners" concerns as how to relate to courtiers and the necessity of secrecy), and ethics, both personal and as matters of state. Here Al-Azmeh classifies the works of Ghazali, Turtushi and, several steps below in terms of intellectual rigor, Ibn Zafar. Through these "works of advice for kings. . . .perennial political wisdom. . .is renamed and recast as prophetic or Koranic and inserted in a distinctive genealogy that is specifically Muslim. . . .This is how the Muslim character of public institutions was brought about" (98-99).

Among the thought-provoking arguments here is how the development of conceptions of kingship and the caliphate emerged coextensively with the emergence of the ‘ulama’ as a corporate group along with the Hanbali and Shi’i imamist schools of Muslim jurisprudence. Sunnism as the generator of "an omnivorous totalising central discourse. . . .[based on a] definitive repertoire of salutary precedent" can be seen in part as a strategy for "the correlative displacement, with varying degrees of severity, of other genealogical charters for the present" (101). Sunni clerics were credited with miraculous deeds, justifying a hierarchy of power exhorting "kings [to] stand to the ‘ulama’ as they would to the Prophet since the ‘ulama’ have inherited the mantle of prophecy" (103). This oblique challenge to kingly authority came at the same time that the caliphate was going into eclipse. Also, the Sunni doctrine of "priestly primacy in the public sphere" incorporated more than a soupçon of the infallibility that defined the Shi’i imam, and gave the ‘ulama’ the authority to legitimate kingship imagined as a form of piety. This is the foundation of what today are "standard Sunni creeds. . .[such as] that obedience to the power in place is imperative. . . .[and that] religion and the state [are] correlative" (104). Most interestingly, Al-Azmeh finds that this highly political development of the parameters of power conflicts between rulers and clerics has been absorbed unreflectively by "both the ‘ulama’ and orientalist scholars, in each case equally defiant of the logic of history. . .[such that both assert] that Islam was integrally and definitely constituted at an early stage in its existence, after which it could do none other than deteriorate" (104).

This developmental trajectory was based on "a pessimistic anthropology" which conceived of human beings as incapable of an orderly collective existence without "unrelenting maintenance on the part of a vigilant ruler" (115). Prophethood was consequently interpreted both as a project of salvation evoked by the "sheer command of God" and as an instrument of worldly governance (116). The image of humanity in the Muslim state of nature inscribed in the term "jahiliyya" reflects the imperative to contain diversity, a description of Muslim kingship also offered by Fatima Mernissi in Islam and Democracy. Such containment comes about through the maintenance of hierarchical order and the judicious manipulation of carrots and sticks in an almost homeostatic vision of the state in which the ruler is a kind of pituitary regulator. Indeed, Al-Azmeh finds body organ imagery embedded in many literary descriptions of society as complex, functionally interdependent, and properly hierarchical. Over it sits the king, the one ruler of one society and a mirror image of God ruling over the totality of His creation. This relationship is repeated verbally and in various instrumental domains to produce a hegemonic pattern which links the "unicity of God and that of the king, along lines reminiscent of Eusebius. Power can only be exercised uniquely, and command is unilateral and indivisible," the foundation of absolutism rooted so firmly in the divine order that its "dilution. . .[becomes] the primary cause for the decline of the state" (121). Thus subjects become objects, inscrutability becomes imperative to the exercise of command, and royal hubris is the natural outcome such that "pleasure derived from the corrective exercise of power is likened in one text to the pleasure a lover derives from inflicting pain on his beloved" (127).

Caliphal kingship is a special case of this "sublime and holy authoritarianism" (162) which was articulated historically in counterpoint to Shi’i constructions of the imam. Perhaps this is how it acquires problems of legitimacy, resolved in part by the nature of legitimacy as a legal rather than a religious category but, as I shall argue, one undermined by this separation. The jurists emphasized rules governing succession. As the geographic and cultural spread of Islam led to multiple polities, they mediated the dissociation of the office of caliph from "the imperative of political oecumenism" in part through the generation of clerical critiques of hadith which attribute to the Prophet the injunction that sovereigns should come from the Quraysh tribe (167). Juristic discourse on the caliphate centered on three elements: that its "establishment is a religious duty, the legal means and conditions of designating a caliph, and the functions that a caliph must discharge personally or delegate to others" (171). In this way, the theory of the caliphate, which Al-Azmeh says never was idealistic, took shape as a legal theory that "systematised past practice in juristic form" (173). Unlike Shi’i prescriptions for imams, which required them to be the best of men, caliphs could get by if they fulfilled the legal requirements, including an enlarged conception of descent which placed the Quraysh in the center of "concentric circles of wider social amplitude" which theoretically could even embrace the choice of a non-Arab (168). Meanwhile, Shi’i jurisprudence continued to emphasize the mystical attributes of imams and the "direct inheritance of prophecy in preserving the order of the world" (182).

This divergence underlay a parallel shift in the locus of charisma in Sunnism, from the caliph to the ‘ulama’, and is marked in the "movement within the regime. . .whereby competence was divided into the normative or shar’ist, and the executive, with the latter making possible the maintenance of the former" (182). As "an imperfect figure of the imam," the ‘ulama’ cannot entirely capture the authority, indeed, the "unicity" of the imam and the Prophet (192). But despite Al-Azmeh’s contention that this separation was never intended or interpreted as undermining caliphal authority, which continued to be envisioned as lying entirely within the realm of God’s will, it seems to me to resonate with the division of authority in the Roman tradition between temporal (executive, caliphal) and spiritual (normative/shar’ist, clerical) realms. Thus, like that Roman foundation of eventual secularism invisible until the Reformation, this perhaps less theoretically developed division of authority appears to be the rock, however small and friable, on which contemporary Islamist critiques of corrupt rulers and corrupt clerics is erected. With all the mythologies and rituals of Sunnism, unlike Shi’ism it is pierced to its center by a channel through which the ear of the mind can hear faint tones of discord undermining, however imperceptibly, the redundant production in diverse instrumental domains of a hegemony of equivalent strength.

We live in an age of competitive religious and secularist absolutisms, each one emanating from assertions of the infallibility and transparency of sacred texts. Perhaps this is why so many students of pre-literate cultures bemoan what they see as a loss of flexibility in the transition from orality to literacy. Yet my reading of Muslim Kingship persuades me that texts are not the intellectual prisons embodied in this vision. I brought to it an ensemble of beliefs and questions that both coincided and clashed with the beliefs and answers offered by Aziz al-Azmeh. The richness of his writing style, all the nooks and crannies produced by those thought-packed sentences, provided multiple occasions for dialogue and disputation. This book is intellectually engaging and reading it was enlightening, another testimony to the productivity of ijtihad as a pathway toward understanding.

Mary Ann Tétreault teaches at Trinity University, USA