The Recurring Muslim Revolution

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ

In the name of ALLAH, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

The Recurring Muslim Revolution By Firas Al-Khateeb

Every age remakes its own Caliphate

A key element of studying the past is understanding how the context of past societies differs from our own. It’s one thing to know that Tariq ibn Ziyad entered Iberia in 711, that al-Ghazali wrote about philosophy, and that Constantinople was conquered in 1453. Those are all historical facts. They’re data.

The study of history should move beyond cataloguing facts to explaining them. We want to know why al-Ghazali wrote as he did and what effect those writings had on the twelfth-century intellectual world, not merely that he wrote. Without that nuance, history becomes a flat inventory of events rather than an inquiry into changing contexts and causes.

In order to understand how and why the past differs from our current world, it’s instructive to look at rupture points in history: moments where conditions changed so quickly and so thoroughly that we can easily identify a “before” and “after”. One example during our own lifetimes has been the advent of the internet age. The world and how we interacted with it was fundamentally different in the 1980s in comparison to the 2020s. It would thus be a mistake to judge the 80s by the standards of the present. Asking something such as “Why didn’t Walter Mondale harness social media to reach young people in the ‘84 election?” is self-evidently silly and needs no further elaboration.

We must, however, apply the same distinctions to political theory and its history as we do to technological history. Just as technology changes and evolves over time, so too does thought on rulership and governance. The political world of the 8th century was fundamentally different from that of the 16th which is fundamentally different from the 21st. This may seem obvious on some level, but Muslims in particular very often tend to look towards the past as a specific and exact blueprint for the present. This betrays a basic misunderstanding of social, political, and intellectual conditions and more importantly, the rupture points where these conditions fundamentally changed forever.

In the grand scheme of Muslim political history, we may identify three major rupture points. Of course we can identify many more than this, but these three serve as moments where the very basis of Muslim political theory changed irrevocably. The first came with the end of the Rightly Guided Caliphate and the rise of dynastic rule under the Umayyads and Abbasids in the 7th and 8th centuries; the second, with the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258; and the third, with the onset of Western modernity in the early 20th century. Each of these points exhibits a divergence away from previous notions of legitimacy, authority, and power and the inauguration of a new intellectual, social, and political context. At each of these moments, Muslims had to adapt to a changing world or risk becoming obsolete. These rupture points, taken together, form a recurring rhythm in Muslim history: the revolution of form without the abandonment of principle.

Upon the assassination of Ali in the year 661 by the Khawarij, and the abdication of his son al-Hasan, rulership of the Muslim world passed to another companion of the Prophet, Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan. This point is usually marked as the end of the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphate and the beginning of the Umayyad Dynasty. Mu’awiya, despite also being a Companion, altered the manner in which rulership manifested during his two decades as caliph of the Muslim world. The most obvious and notable change was the move to a hereditary line of rulers. After he died in 680, his son Yazid became the second Umayyad caliph, followed in 683 by his son Mu’awiya II. The caliphate remained in the Umayyad family until 750 when they were overthrown by the Abbasids, another Qurayshi family who inaugurated their own hereditary rule.

There were other changes beyond caliphal inheritance. The austere form of rulership seen during the era of the First Four was gone. The Umayyads ruled in a manner similar to Byzantine and Persian emperors. The remains of their palaces still dot the landscape of Greater Syria, with walls covered in frescoes and mosaics exhibiting levels of wealth and grandeur that were unseen by Muslims beforehand. Architectural exhibits of their power, notably the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, served as symbols of their dominion over formerly Roman lands. Building religious buildings in a Roman/Byzantine style, but covered in verses of the Qur’an and lacking iconographic imagery showed some continuity with past empires, but also the start of something new.

This shift away from the example of the First Four Caliphs was not uncontested, to be fair. The revolts of Husayn at Karbala in 680, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr in Mecca from 680 to 692, and various Amazigh rebellions in North Africa indicated some level of unease with Umayyad rule. But when the Umayyads were finally replaced in 750 by the Abbasid revolt, it wasn’t a turn away from the dynastic model, it was the enshrinement of it. The Abbasids consolidated dynastic monarchy by reproducing and expanding the ancient Persianate bureaucratic model in Baghdad, creating a court culture and administrative apparatus that anchored caliphal authority in palace and paperwork as much as in ritual. The caliph was no longer a first among equals. He was almost a mythical figure, rarely seen, sequestered in his massive palace and ruling through an expansive bureaucracy of viziers, bodyguards, administrators, and scholars. The example of the Rightly Guided Caliphs was long gone, not to be revived.

But why did this happen? Was it simply a deviation from the initial piety of the Prophet’s Companions and their followers? Surely there’s an element of that involved. But we cannot ignore the context of the 7th and 8th centuries. Muslims had just replaced two massive, ancient empires: the Roman and the Persian. There was a particular language of rulership that was accepted on the international stage that the burgeoning Muslim polities had to speak. Umar ibn al-Khattab, with his commanding personal presence, could walk right into Jerusalem with only one servant and a camel and be taken seriously as one of the most powerful men in the world. But a century later, a Umayyad or Abbasid caliph simply wouldn’t have the gravitas to do the same. If he wanted to be taken seriously as a world ruler, on par with the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, he had to play the part. His palace had to match that of his rivals in terms of extravagance and grandeur. His bureaucracy had to rival the efficiency and control of the old Persian dynasties.

An anecdote related regarding Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, often called the “fifth rightly guided caliph”, who ruled from 717 to 720 illustrates this. He was supposedly planning to remove the Umayyad Mosque’s lavish decorations, preferring instead an austere, simple building reminiscent of the Prophet’s mosque in Madinah, but decided against it after seeing the impact it had on Christians in Damascus, who were awed by its grandeur. Despite his personal piety and simplicity, he recognized that he had to speak the language of authority that was present in the 8th century. A new era of Muslim sovereignty had been inaugurated and would last for centuries.

The cultural and political synthesis of the “classical” caliphate of the Umayyads and Abbasids came to a destructive and complete end in 1258. The Mongol Empire, founded decades earlier by the warlord Chinggis Khan, reshaped much of the world. To Chinggis Khan and his successors, legitimacy was conferred not by royal lineage, religious authority, or architectural extravagance. It was a product of a complex system of justice as they understood it in their steppe Asian context. Chinggis Khan was legitimate, in the eyes of his followers, due to his subjugation of various Turkic tribes and the Chinese in accordance with their notions of revenge and justice. Coins minted by the Mongols in Arabic and Persian after their invasions into the Muslim world exhibit this. The word ‘adālah (justice) features prominently, showcasing the Khan not as some brutish, barbarian warlord, but as an arbiter and executor of a just political worldview.

When the Mongols conquered Baghdad, they executed the last Abbasid caliph, denouncing him for hoarding his wealth in his palace while neglecting the needs of his people. What replaced Abbasid rule was a Mongol khanate that understood itself as the legitimate authority over the entire world due to its right to divinely-mandated universal rulership and just nature. Over time, much of the Mongol Empire would convert to Islam, while still holding on to older aspects of its self image. Conversion by Berke Khan in the Golden Horde’s Russian territories or Ghazan Khan in Iran and Iraq didn’t mean they were going to bring back the Abbasid caliphate. That era was dead and over. There remained a line of Abbasids in Cairo under Mamluk authority who were almost entirely unrecognized outside of Egypt. But the authority and legitimacy of the Abbasid family no longer an important part of Muslim political theory. Instead, the new language of rulership was based on Turkic and Mongol notions of justice and supposed egalitarianism.

So when the Ottomans established themselves throughout the 14th and 15th centuries, their claim to legitimacy didn’t come from recognizing and honoring the Abbasid in Cairo, it came (at least partly) from positioning themselves as executors of justice. They were not Mongols themselves, but the political context changed and everyone had to recognize and adapt to it. Similarly, when the Safavids, Uzbeks, and Mughals came onto the scene in the 16th century, they also echoed this language of legitimacy and universal sovereignty. Inheritance of rulership was no longer dependent on Qurayshi lineage as it was during the Umayyad and Abbasid era. All four of these dynasties exhibited a Turkic dynastic elite, but there seemed to be very little objection to their legitimacy. The only holdout was the Mamluks in Egypt, who still upheld a traditional understanding of authority predicated on Abbasid caliphal rule, but their refusal to adapt to the new world (both in terms of political theory as well as technologically) meant their demise in the first decades of the 16th century at the hands of the innovative Ottomans. By the seventeenth century, this post-Mongol order had reached its own maturity just as a new intellectual and political world was beginning to take shape in Europe.

The most recent seismic change in political theory began in the quickly developing corners of Northern and Western Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. From the Renaissance and Reformation through the Scientific Revolution, Europe reoriented its view of history itself from cyclical repetition to linear progress. Unlike the traditional understandings of civilizational rise and fall, European philosophers and statesmen began to conceive of political theory as a continually expanding and developing field, with new theories rapidly replacing the old. Rejection of the past became a hallmark of modernity as a philosophical movement. It would take centuries before these notions would take hold in a practical manner in the aftermath of the American and French revolutions, but when they did, they inaugurated a new era of modernity.

As such, novel notions of authority developed, namely liberalism, communism, and fascism. The opening decades of the 20th century exhibited mass destruction on levels previously unseen in human history as Europe engaged in political and social engineering through warfare, designed to declare a victor among these three competing ideologies. Fascism was mostly defeated by 1945 and communism largely collapsed in the 1990s. Liberalism, of course, emerged victorious. Although today, even that order shows signs of strain, the new, recognized language of authority and legitimacy is that of liberal modernity. Notions such as popular sovereignty, self-determination, and the sanctity of international borders have replaced the universal sovereignty that dominated the late Middle Ages and early Modern era.

As part of this Western campaign of destruction, much of the Muslim world was thrown into chaos. Mughal India and the Ottoman Empire, two foundational pillars of the Muslim world, ceased to exist by the 1850s and 1920s, respectively. What rose in their place was a patchwork of nation-states, ostensibly based on the liberal precepts of Western Europe, but in reality caught in a place-between-two-places. They no longer reflect pre-modern Muslim understandings of social, political, and intellectual organization, nor do they properly represent the liberal tradition of the US, UK, France, and other bastions of liberalism.

Much like how scholars, statesmen, and bureaucrats had to fundamentally reshape the form of Muslim rulership in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions, the need of the hour is to rebuild Muslim authority and legitimacy in the context of modernity. Nostalgic pining for old empires and civilizations is beneficial to no one. The Ottoman Empire no longer exists, and attempts to revive it would be futile. The Umayyad/Abbasid notions of caliphal legitimacy have been gone for centuries. Even if one were to try to rebuild a universal caliphate along those lines, it would be ill-suited to dealing with the modern world of international law, Westphalian sovereignty, and the complex architecture of nation-states that now defines global politics. Any viable conception of Muslim authority today must therefore directly engage this modern framework rather than simply defy it, rearticulating a Muslim understanding of justice, Islamic legal theory, and moral order in a world whose political language has irrevocably changed.

Is it possible to re-imagine a fully Islamic political theory within the confines of modernity? That question itself is irrelevant. It’s necessary. Muslim history is replete with examples of grounded but creative-minded Muslim theorists who found new ways to incorporate the Islamic content within changing social and political contexts. We cannot recreate the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. But the framework that was established in that era, based on the ultimate sources of Islamic law and ethics was adaptable enough to work within the post-Roman imperial context of the Umayyad/Abbasid era as well as the post-Mongol Ottoman/Mughal era. It must work within the modern post-liberal era as well. That adaptation to changing contexts took decades if not centuries to arrive at a consensus. The hereditary model and its bureaucratic trappings only became widely institutionalized by the 9th century and a settled precedent established that would guide the next few hundred years of Muslim political theory. And it wasn’t until the 1500s that the post-Mongol model was firmly established in Istanbul and Delhi.

We’re about a century past after the massive rupture that brought modernity and liberalism onto the world stage. We’re now in the midst of the era of exploration of new forms of sovereignty that work in the 21st century. Whatever the future form of Muslim political theory, we can be confident that it will not be a simple recreation of past models. We are living through this era’s Muslim revolution. It is one that demands neither nostalgia nor mimicry, but the courage to think anew within the enduring framework of Islam itself.

The above is taken from this link>>>

https://rusafatoramla.substack.com/p/the-recurring-muslim-revolution