From Divine to Popular Sovereignty: The Civil Shift in Contemporary Islamic Political Thought

Abstract

For various religious and political reasons, the idea of divine sovereignty (ḥākimiyya) has found support in many Islamic movements and discourses between the 1940s and the 1980s throughout the Muslim world. Nonetheless, in the 1990s, the consolidation of contemporary nation-states, the appeal of liberal democracy, and human rights in the Muslim world, along with the failure of Islamism, paved the way for a turn towards popular sovereignty in Islamic political thought. The emergence of a post-Islamist age in the Arab world and Iran, especially in the aftermath of the Arab Spring (2011), has changed the perspectives of many Islamic intellectuals and jurists, who now place a higher emphasis on popular sovereignty, depoliticizing divine sovereignty. This article offers an intellectual history of the shift from divine to popular sovereignty in modern Islamic political ethics, as well as a discussion of the factors that led to this change. Few critical voices on sovereignty highlight the ethical aspects of sharia’s governance and challenge the popular sovereignty narrative as authoritarian.

1. Introduction

This article’s starting point is neither a hypothesis regarding the secularization of Islamic political thought in accordance with Western models nor the Muslim world’s transition from a religious to a civil society. It looks at Islamic concepts of sovereignty in the early 20th century, when most Muslim nations were colonized, and discusses the factors that led to the development of the notion of divine sovereignty in this particular context. In pre-modern times, Muslim groups and societies engaged in a variety of communal and nonreligious activities, such as political or social activism or membership in tribes or guilds. The literature on Islamic ethics demonstrates that, in addition to religious precepts, Muslims as subjects of a political realm were expected to fulfill certain obligations and virtues toward oneself, the community, the ruler, and the elites, where good management, justice, loyalty, and happiness are valued. Muslim polities were far from being religious. The Islamic caliphate, which has legitimacy rooted in Islamic law, was most of the time symbolic, while the sultanate or emirate was the main form of political power. The latter was also essentially based on the legitimacy of sheer power (ghalaba), rooted in military force and tribal alliances. Even so, neither the sovereignty of God nor sharia was questioned in either type of government, nor was it required for military dynasties to be religious in order to hold onto power. Tribal relationships and the army were the main source dynasties (formed around powerful or rich clans) to capture and hold onto power. However, this is not the topic of this paper, since pre-modern Islamic political thinking has its own problems, background, and evolution. Here, I focus on the development of notions of sovereignty in contemporary Islamic political theory over the past century or so. No claim is made here that Muslims had to wait until the 20th century to adopt a shift from a religious to a civil concept of political sovereignty.

What strikes intellectual historians of Islamic political thought, understood as ideas originating from Muslim scholars and intellectuals who engage with Muslim sources of authority (the Quran and Sunna in particular), is the broad influence of the theory of divine sovereignty during a particular time period, which inspired various movements, some of which seized power while others engaged in extreme forms of violence. Nowadays, the idea of divine sovereignty has lost favor, and this must also be understood from the perspective of intellectual history.

A critique of the theories of sovereignty (divine vs. popular) contends that it is meaningless to say that sovereignty belongs to God or the people when the people in charge are not “God” or the “People”, but rather actual elites, the majority of whom are acting in their own best interests, particularly in the so-called “Western” liberal democracies. This critical viewpoint relies on Carl Schmitt’s definition of political theology and on works of Irfan Ahmad, Hayrettin Yücesoy, Wael B. Hallaq, A. Azfar Moin, and Alan Strathern, among others. I will discuss this critical stance on sovereignty, which challenges the prevalent popular sovereignty paradigm, in the final section of this article.

Divine sovereignty, ḥākimiyya as political authority that provides state legitimacy, is a relatively new concept in Islamic political thought. It appeared in the 20th century to contradict state models based on popular or secular sovereignty and assumes conditions of modernity and state-nations. Divine sovereignty as a theological or legal concept in Islamic thought during the Middle Ages is entirely another matter to discuss. In pre-modern times, divine sovereignty ḥukm Allāh was employed, but in different ways and to denote God’s law or decisions. In mainstream Islamic thought, the prevailing belief was that human sovereignty in politics and divine sovereignty in theology and law were not mutually exclusive. Some radical Muslim groups, such as the Kharijites (dissidents), who flourished in the seventh and eighth centuries, and some extreme Shiite groups from the eighth and ninth centuries, who ceased to exist in later centuries, perceived divine sovereignty as directly related to political power, i.e., that God rules in effect and not humans or appointed certain people to rule. The Kharijites have explicitly declared that only God’s law is sovereign and that his will should be carried out without question and that humans should not have any political or legal authority except applying God’s will. The majority of Muslims rejected the Kharijites because, although they acknowledge divine supremacy in theology and law, they believe that the community has the right to choose its own political system and leader (al-Shamari 2024; March 2013).

Later traditionalist Sunni jurists like Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) emphasized the obligation for Muslims to rule according to Islamic law (al-ḥukm bi-mā anzala Allāh) as part of belief. This, however, does not mean that governance should be based on divine sovereignty but rather that no other law should take the place of Islamic law in Muslim societies. Ibn Taymiyya’s legal sovereignty was taken out of its context by contemporary Islamists and Salafists to mean political sovereignty beyond its meaning of legal sovereignty (Nasīra 2015). Radical Salafists vigorously propagated the idea known as tawḥīd al-ḥākimiyya (divine sovereignty as part of the unicity of God), influenced by both Ibn Taymiyya and the Muslim Brotherhood. According to them, a Muslim can only be regarded as a true believer if he accepts God’s word and the Prophet’s traditions as the sole sources of law and governmental authority (Lacroix 2011, p. 54). However, traditionalist-quietist Salafists, who control religious institutions and discourse in Saudi Arabia, fiercely disputed and countered this radical concept of belief, depoliticizing the idea of divine sovereignty by highlighting God’s universal sovereignty and the power to judge and rule (al-Madkhalī 2019). The notion of divine sovereignty as political authority has largely been associated with extreme Islamism since the 1990s, although it was a mainstream Islamist idea in earlier decades.

This article offers an intellectual history of the rise of the idea of divine sovereignty in Islamic thought and the transition to popular sovereignty in the last two decades. I will be examining Islamic authoritative discourses on sovereignty in various Islamist movements in relation to the courses of regional and global political changes, as well as how these changes influenced and molded conceptions of sovereignty in the Muslim world. Therefore, it is argued here that these discourses represent a lengthy progression in Islamic political thought in the 20^th century from God’s all-pervading authority to human liberty and sovereignty in governance, closely related to regional and global contexts in the Middle East and North Africa. I will first cover the development of the doctrine of divine sovereignty, then discuss critics of this theory, and subsequently explore the consolidation of the popular sovereignty theory in Islamic thought. Lastly, I will discuss the critical perspective on sovereignty as it relates to Islamic and Western political theories.

2. The Emergence of Divine Sovereignty as Political Authority

As a reference for state and government, divine sovereignty, ḥākimiyya is a contemporary concept that originated in a particular setting in the Muslim world, that of India in 1930s and the 1940s. The abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate, the world’s last caliphate, in 1924 by a decree of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey may be the first reason that should be taken into account here. Since its founding in 632, the caliphate has symbolically represented the religious legitimacy of government and the sovereignty of Islamic law. Most of the time, the caliphate was a symbol rather than an effective institution. Although the Ottoman Empire was a state that modernized its institutions and pursued practical policies, far from the ideal of the caliphate, traditionalists were upset by the fall of the caliphate. The caliphate’s collapse motivated many in the Muslim world to launch initiatives intended to revive the caliphate or start Islamist movements to fill the void and establish Islamic states (Nafi 2012; Zaman 2012).

Colonialism was another factor-shock that influenced Islamic political thought on sovereignty. The European colonial powers disrupted the development of Islamic societies and states and put an end to Muslim domination in India. Furthermore, the majority of Muslims viewed the modernization of the state and society as a violent endeavor that favored the colonial state. Many Muslims found Western political and intellectual models appealing, while others vowed to stay away from them completely in any post-independence government. The concept of divine sovereignty as the ultimate basis of political legitimacy was thus born in India as a result of the fall of the caliphate and the fight against colonialism and for a post-colonial state in which Islam is sovereign (Iqtidar 2020). The origins of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (founded in 1928) can also be explained by the same circumstances, those of the fall of the caliphate and anti-colonialism.

According to Ahmet Kuru, the violence that followed Western colonization and occupation of Muslim territories is what led to the rise of the divine sovereignty doctrine. Some Muslim intellectuals responded by reinterpreting Islam to emphasize violence as a means of retaliating against Western imperialism and subsequent authoritarian violence. Authoritarian governments in the Middle East have created terrorism, civil unrest, and wars. However, radical Islamism did not gain traction, and a number of Muslim intellectuals have highlighted peace as Islam’s main goal. For Kuru, one of the main reasons why Muslims resort to violence is Western colonialism. However, Western colonization is not a prerequisite or a sufficient factor in non-Western actors’ use of violence. In many Muslim societies, there are issues with authoritarianism in addition to a structural intellectual crisis (mostly caused by the prevalent traditionalism). He correctly notes that the majority of Muslim nations have remained authoritarian, regardless of whether they are run by secularists or Islamists (Kuru 2019, pp. 15–30).

In the late 1930s and 1940s, as debates about India’s independence from the British Empire and its partition into Muslim and Hindu states were taking place, many Indian religious scholars promoted the concept of divine sovereignty (against man sovereignty in law and government). Notably, in 1948, Indian-Pakistani Islamic scholar Syed Sulaiman Nadvi (1884–1953) made the case for Allah’s sovereignty by using several verses from the Quran that, in his opinion, show that Allah alone is the one who makes the rules and gives the orders of sharia (Nadvi 1948). Many Indian and Pakistani religious scholars and intellectuals supported the idea of divine sovereignty (Ahmed 1965; Zaman 2015). However, Abul A’la al-Maudūdī (1903–1979) was the most significant Muslim thinker to have theorized it, affecting Muslim politics in Pakistan, India, and beyond. Other Muslim intellectuals in the Middle East, particularly in Islamist and Salafist movements, widely adopted this idea.

Maudūdī provided systematic and clear formulations to prior discussions of divine sovereignty in Islamic political thought (March 2013; Hartung 2014). While earlier discourses were produced by religious scholars, Maudūdī promoted an Islamist conception of divine sovereignty, calling to establish a strong Islamic state to implement divine sovereignty. Thus, he founded the Jamaat-e-Islami movement in 1941, which was crucial to the development of political Islam (Zaman 2015, p. 416). Furthermore, Maudūdī had a significant impact on Sunni and Shii Islamist intellectuals and movements from the 1950s until the 1980s, as Islamism was gaining ground in many parts of the Muslim world (Iqtidar and Scharbrodt 2022, p. 277). Maudūdī was able to root the idea of divine sovereignty in Muslim theology while also contesting popular sovereignty, the contemporary state, and Western influence on the Muslim world, as many Muslim countries were opposing colonial and post-colonial Western policies (Iqtidar and Scharbrodt 2022, p. 277).

According to Maudūdī’s The Islamic Law and Constitution, which was first published in English in 1955, the sovereignty of God is the most fundamental and revolutionary political concept of the Qur’an. It demands that God be acknowledged as the sovereign in all areas of life, including moral, social, cultural, economic, and political. For him, human sovereignty is unattainable since people are too weak to take on this duty. In his view, divine sovereignty also meant that only God’s authority would be recognized and His commands would be followed, and no such law would be upheld since this entails disobedience to God. Furthermore, human beings can only claim the role of vicegerency on earth, which implies following God’s law, sharia, as the only legitimate law that. In an Islamic state, loyalties can only be expressed to Allah and his Prophet. While being an ideological state, the Islamic State is not an extraterritorial state and grants citizenship exclusively to people who reside on or migrate to its territory. The Islamic State’s government should be democratically elected and function through consensus among all members. As for the Islamic state’s goals, they consist of enjoining good, nurturing piety, establishing social justice, and punishing evil (Maudūdī 1960, pp. 177–213).

Sayyid Quṭb (1906–1966), a well-known Muslim Brotherhood ideologue, promoted and shaped the concept of divine sovereignty in a radical setting, that of violent conflict between Islamism and Nasser in Egypt. Quṭb gave the notion of ḥākimiyya a broad and incisive shape that will have a significant influence on Islamist movements from the 1950s to the present (especially within the jihadi Salafi milieus). Quṭb used the concept of divine sovereignty in order to de-legitimize the political claims and projects of Nasserism (a mixture of socialism, pan-Arabism, and dictatorship) in Egypt as well as other ideologies and systems that were in competition with Islamism, including nationalism, capitalism, socialism, communism, and democracy (Khatab 2006); all these ideologies are anti-Islamic (jāhiliyya) because they assert the authority of men, that is other than God’s authority. An authentically Islamic society can only be established through a Theocentric reconstruction of society that subjugates modernity under God’s law (Pasha 2013).

Quṭb envisioned divine sovereignty as binding Islamic authority asserted in the Meccan Quran, and by the “unique generation” of early Islam, when authority was founded on a connection of voluntary command and obedience (Faradj 2021). Moreover, he advocated for a national and international jihad against societies that reject divine authority, providing thus a justification for jihadi movements (El-Jaichi 2022). Quṭb, like Maudūdī, asserted divine authority over the universe and the legislation (Obalowu and binti Abdul Rahim 2021). As there are no clear boundaries between the political and theological spheres, few independent social spheres exist outside of God’s rule (Pasha 2019). Like Maudūdī, Quṭb perceived divine sovereignty as a reaction to preserve sharia and the Muslim tradition and contest the governing power of the contemporary state in colonial and post-colonial contexts (Al-Azami 2022).

Quṭb claimed that since sovereignty belongs to God alone, no one else has the right to judge or have authority. Regardless of whether the claimant is an individual, a class, a party, an organization, a community, or an international body that represents humanity, anyone who asserts any claim to sovereignty is, in fact, contesting God’s authority. When someone begins to derive laws from sources other than God’s law, claiming that the source of power and authority is an organization or entity other than God, they are also contesting God’s authority. However, Quṭb distinguishes between divine sovereignty and human governance. He argued that in the Islamic system, the ruler is chosen by the people, granting him the power to rule in conformity with God’s law. The sovereignty that enacts laws and grants the ruler authority does not originate in the nation or the community. God is the source of sovereignty. The source of power and its exercise should not be conflated, as the right to sovereignty does not belong to humans in any way. They should only carry out the laws that God has established. Anything He has not legislated is illegitimate. It is likewise unacceptable to bow to divine authority only in religious matters; one should also submit to divine sovereignty in political and legal issues, as divine sovereignty is preeminent in establishing the legitimacy of the legal system, government, and power (Quṭb 2004, v4, p. 1990).

Quṭb promoted the transition from acknowledging the sovereignty of God (ḥākimiyya) to establishing the rubūbiyya, or “dominion of God”. The concept of “dominion”, which refers to God’s omnipotence, power, and authority in all spheres of life, illustrates God’s supremacy as the absolute and universal entity whose power extends throughout the entire universe. As for the Western territorial nation-state model, it is pagan because it is tainted by the idea of Westphalian sovereignty, which substitutes the law of men who establish boundaries and rule over other men for the authority of God (Angiò 2017, pp. 190–91). Quṭb’s political theology of God’s sovereignty was shown to be similar to other Catholic and Protestant theologians with the same acritical perspective which uses political theology as a theoretically rigorous criticism of modernity (Stoica 2017). Quṭb’s concept of sovereignty is also a practical theology that focuses on what Muslims believe and do in light of God’s sovereignty. Muslims should be guided by God’s sovereignty in all areas of their lives, including politics, and it should be ingrained in their spirits. This indicates that God’s rules and ideals should be put into practice in a tangible way. Quṭb’s concept of sovereignty questions the dominant assumption in contemporary discourses that humans have a claim to sovereignty and to establish secular systems (Abdel Aziz Saad 2021). In addition to Sunni Islamist movements, Maudūdī’s concept of divine sovereignty influenced the development of Shii Islamism. Thus, in Iraq, Muḥammad Bāqir al-Ṣadr (1935–1980) employs the intellectual repertoire of Islamism to examine in pragmatic terms the criteria that define the state as Islamically legitimate, while Muḥammad Taqī al-Mudarrisī (b. 1945) utilizes ḥākimiyya to redefine the sovereignty of the state in Islamic terms, contending that the state must be headed by a just jurisconsult (al-faqīh al-‘ādil), who serves as the only representative of divine authority within the state (Scharbrodt 2022). In attributing the execution of “divine laws” to the Islamic state, al-Ṣadr was closer to Maudūdī and Quṭb who assigned this responsibility to an Islamic government and community, respectively.

Conversely, al-Mudarrisī joins Khomeini’s guardianship of the jurist (velāyat-e faqīh) in giving religious scholars the authority to represent divine sovereignty. For Khomeini, legislation in an Islamic government is exclusively the domain of God as the single legislator; the legislative assembly must be replaced by a basic planning body in order to carry out the Divine Law. Nonetheless, the guardian jurist is obligated by religion to fulfill duties including protecting the country, safeguarding the financial interests of Muslims, and enforcing Islamic law. Khomeini therefore highlighted the legitimacy of his proposed Islamic government’s divine source (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2014, p. 224; Adib-Moghaddam 2014, p. 16). Albeit Khomeini adopted a Maudūdian perspective on God the legislator, he did not emphasize the role of an elected, democratic, and cooperative Islamic government but that of the guardianship of the jurist much more in the Imamic tradition than in the institutional function of the modern state (Sabet 2014, p. 72).

For Khomeini, God is a nominal sovereign, and al-walī al-faqīh is a mediator between the sharī‘a and the nation, reflecting rather than establishing God’s sovereignty. In the Islamic government, God alone is sovereign, and the law is His order and decree while the responsibility of this system of governance is to make sure Islamic law is applied. All people and the ruling elite are subjects to Islamic law, since it is a divine edict. As for popular revolution, it is a component of divine sovereignty while also protecting the principles of a judicial system that aims to promote the common good by averting tyranny (Nachman 2017, pp. 94–95). Khomeini believed that the establishment of an Islamic state, which is a prerequisite for the survival of Islam as a way of life, required the personal leadership of a sovereign who would put the interests of the Islamic political order first. Khomeini’s insistence that the Islamic state, led by the guardian jurist, is empowered to suspend normally valid law if necessary, as the true constitution is protected by the guardian jurist, recalls Carl Schmitt’s claim in that the sovereign is authorized to suspend the normally valid legal order in the state of exception (Brännström 2022, pp. 84–85). Khomeini claimed to be the leader of the community and the hero of the people’s struggle arguing that he was acting as the sovereign on behalf of the people, not because he was sent by God or represented an aloof saint reflected in the moon. While he presented himself as the sovereign in Carl Schmitt’s terms since he is the one who decides on the exception, in the process, he associated himself directly with the people rather than acting as God’s “acknowledged representative on earth” (Gölz 2017, p. 243).

3. Divine Sovereignty Contested

We have so far shown that the notion of divine sovereignty in governance was a radical response to colonialism and authoritarian-led modernization. Although it encountered some success in Islamic thought, the majority of Muslim states and traditional Islamic scholars did not support it. The state in Pakistan itself resisted the grip of Maudūdī’s movement, Jamaat-e-Islami, which failed to shape Pakistan as an Islamic state. The majority of ruling regimes in Muslim states violently fought the Islamist movements, especially in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Algeria. As a result, jihadi movements, which are more violent and radicalized versions of Islamism, spread throughout the Muslim world, carrying out extremist Islamist agendas while also relying on the same militant ideology of Maudūdī and Quṭb. In the 1990s, in Muslim thought, the concept of ḥākimiyya was increasingly linked to extreme ideas of violence, jihadism, and excommunication. A self-critical awareness of the harmfulness of these extreme ideas became visible in Islamist movements. Furthermore, even Islamist movements found it unable to resist the appeal of liberal democracy, human rights, and freedom following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and many of them participated in elections and accepted the legitimacy of existing political systems in Indonesia, Malaysia, Yemen, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, Kuwait, and Egypt. Albeit critical voices emerged within Sunni and Shii Islamist milieus during the 1980s, Islamism only lost its steam in the 1990s. The Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), the Islamist violence in Algeria and Egypt, and the civil war between the mujahideen in Afghanistan (known as the Afghan Civil War (1989–1992)) and other conflicts have prompted a number of Islamic intellectuals and theologians to challenge and amend the Islamist theory of divine sovereignty.

Some intellectuals, like the Lebanese ‘Abd al-Ghanī ‘Imād, have argued that this theory has no foundations in Islamic scripture, and that it uses some medieval traditions and ideas out of their contexts; it is an invention by contemporary Islamist Sunni ideologues to silence opponents of Islamist movements and force them to obey and by some Shii clerics who aspired to exert public authority. Thus, Islamists or jurists misused divine sovereignty to gain more power (‘Imād 1997). Other contesting voices, but more moderating than critical, started to de-absolutize the concept of divine sovereignty in the middle of the 1980s and early 1990s, moving it from the sphere of governance to that of universal, religious, and ethical meaning. These discourses also granted Muslims the right to enact laws on most matters, especially if not explicitly covered by Islamic law in the Muslim scriptures, emphasizing the importance of Muslim consensus and consultation in political matters. They acknowledged the people’s political authority as long as it expresses loyalty to God, the Prophet, and Islamic law as general references of political authority (Ja‘far 1995; Faḍlallāh 1984). This era can be characterized as an attempt to critique any theocratic aspects of the doctrine of divine sovereignty and move it closer to democracy or religious democracy. However, it is too early to speak about the secularization of sovereignty or the existence of dual sovereignty (divine and popular).

Reformist Shii discourse in Iran, particularly in the 1990s, challenged the theory of divine sovereignty which justifies the jurist’s political authority. Most notably, Mohsen Kadivar a dissident religious scholar opposed granting jurists the divine political authority the Shii tradition ascribes to the imams, denying any Islamic justification from Shii sources to the jurist’s rule (Ghobadzadeh and Rahim 2015, p. 144). Other Iranian religious scholars such as Mehdi Bazargan and Mehdi Haeri-Yazdi rejected the historical validity of divine authority in the Shii tradition all at once, limiting the Prophet and Imams’ sacred status to religious matters and not politics. Therefore, neither modern jurists nor the Imams can claim any divine political authority. Furthermore, they called for the separation of state and religion, arguing that it would be harmful to religion to unify them and would lead to the exploitation of religion by the powerful (Ghobadzadeh and Akbar 2023, p. 196). Iranian reformists have inspired the Green Movement (2009) which called to popular sovereignty against the partisans of divine sovereignty led by the Revolutionary Guards (Jahanbegloo and Soroush 2010).

A chief critic of Khomeini’s political rule was Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri (1922–2009), one of his main disciples, a prominent leader of the Iranian Revolution and one of the highest-ranking clerics in Shii Islam, and at some point the expected successor to the revolution’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, before Montazeri became a dissident. Montazeri contested the claimed divine right of jurists to rule and believed that a democracy in which people vote to select their government had greater religious validity than Khomeini and his supporters’ claim that the governance of the jurist is divinely appointed. For him, a social contract should serve as the foundation for such popular legitimacy. However, because Montazeri favoured the authority of a council representing the people to choose the leader rather than a direct popular vote, his idea of a political system resembles a representative theocracy with certain aspects of a parliamentary system (Aziz 1996, pp. 281–83). During the 1979 discussions on the new constitution in Iran, some Islamist revolutionaries within Khomeini’s circles even expressed their support for the right to popular sovereignty, arguing that it is a universal right that determines a people’s social future and is given by God to people through the electoral process. Nonetheless, the majority of Khomeini’s supporters on the constitution committee removed the phrase “right to popular sovereignty” in the draft to avoid limiting Khomeini’s claimed divine authority (Matsunaga 2009, pp. 139–40).

In Egypt, the critical thinker Naṣr Ḥāmid Abū Zayd (1943–2010) used humanistic hermeneutics to challenge the three main concepts of ḥākimiyya: the idea of divine sovereignty, the associations between divine sovereignty, the Prophet, and the Quran, and the necessity of implementing Sharia. He promoted a reading of the Quran that aimed to depoliticize Islam, asserting that the state should be secular and impartial toward the religious beliefs of its people and that state law should not be based on religious precepts (Akbar and Saeed 2022). Similarly, ḥākimiyya is seen by the Egyptian reformist thinker Ḥasan Ḥanafī (1935–2021) as an aggressive slogan used by Islamist movements to undermine the legitimacy of the ruling regimes in the Muslim world. Since these regimes were monarchies or military regimes, they lacked both popular legitimacy and a comprehensive conception of power that addresses issues such as whose name these regimes rule under and who gave them permission to do so. The ḥākimiyya theory challenges these authoritarian regimes by citing an ideal legitimacy—that of God—that has a critical force and serves as a haven for many young people. However, Islamist organizations could not offer a tangible answer to the question of how divine sovereignty may truly come to materialize, rule, and create a state with a functioning economy and social and political content (Ḥanafī 1993, pp. 452–53).

4. The Era of Popular Sovereignty

In the 1990s, Islamist ideologies, in both the Sunni and Shii communities, were questioned and challenged, signaling a major civil shift in the Islamic perception of sovereignty. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks (2001) until the Arab Spring (2011), various events were significant insofar as they definitively put an end to the appeal of radical Islamism, whose violence in the Middle East and North Africa was viewed as nihilist. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and later in Syria and other Arab countries, made the turn toward liberal democracy and popular sovereignty irreversible in Islamic thought. Youth protested spontaneously during the Arab Spring, calling for social fairness, freedom, dignity, and change. The people’s will was overwhelming across the board of various political movements, including Islamist ones. The appeal of popular sovereignty was reinforced by earlier popular movements in Iran (2009), Indonesia (1998), and Algeria (1988). In each of these movements, the right and outcome of people’s freedom from oppression also contested the use of ideological or religious justifications to defend authoritarianism.

What is more, authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa was an important factor in the demise of the concept of divine sovereignty. The clergy’s authoritarian monopoly on all resources and the suppression of political freedom in Iran initiated a post-Islamist era among reformist intellectuals and youth movements. The army’s alliance with Islamists in Sudan and Pakistan led to doubt about the viability of Islamist governance in Sunni states. Furthermore, as the majority of authoritarian governments in the Middle East and North Africa have been instrumentalizing Islam in various ways to justify their policies, official Islam was viewed as religious authoritarianism and an establishment component. The Islamist doctrine of divine sovereignty was increasingly viewed as authoritarian and extreme. To endure in the post-Islamist era and the civil shift, Islamism itself had to adapt.

In the early 2000s, Muslim intellectuals began to actively promote an autonomous popular sovereignty in conformity with democracy and independently from divine sovereignty. In 2000, the Palestinian Islamic philosopher Raja Bahlul argued that God’s sovereignty ought to be understood as a normative concept rather than a factual one, and therefore it is unrelated to politics. According to him, that a free people can (and typically will) wield political power is a practical reality, accurately called “popular sovereignty”, and is unavoidable as it establishes the legitimacy of democracy (Bahlul 2000). Glenn E. Perry, an American political scientist, argued that democracy is compatible with Islam because it entails “popular control” rather than “popular sovereignty”. While Islam acknowledges the right of people to political judgments on matters of Islamic legal issues, it rejects people claiming to be God’s spokesmen to assert divine supremacy (Perry 2003). In both cases, the domain of the divine sovereignty is pushed out of politics in favor of political sovereignty.

In Tunisia, Rāshid al-Ghannūshī, a well-known Islamist thinker, proposed a complex theory of sovereignty in a democratic state that balances the popular and divine conceptions of sovereignty. For him, the primary justification for popular sovereignty lies in the theological doctrine of man’s vicegerency of God (istikhlāf), according to which God delegates responsibility on earth to man. He finds precedent for democratic institutions in the Qur’an and early Islamic practices of consultation (shūrā), popular ratification of rulers (bay‘a), communal consensus about religious practices and points of law (ijmā‘), and the collective scope of the injunction to “command the right and forbid the wrong”. Al-Ghannūshī promotes popular sovereignty not only in terms of control of rulers but also in the popular participation in determining what in the interpretation of Islamic law is compatible with the current context (March 2013, p. 309).

The well-known Sudanese Islamic thinker Muḥammad Abū l-Qāsim Ḥājj Ḥamad (1942–2004) presented an interesting theory of popular sovereignty (ḥākimiyya bashariyya) in his book al-Ḥākimiyya (Ḥājj Ḥamad 2010). Ḥājj Ḥamad supports an evolutionary viewpoint and interprets the Quran as an appeal to human sovereignty. He asserts that Islam was established as a religion and community without divine sovereignty (unlike Judaism) and without assisting divine intervention during its inception or rise and that the community relied on human agency to survive and prosper (Ḥājj Ḥamad 2010, p. 71). To avoid undermining human sovereignty, the Prophet Muḥammad did not establish a state, validate institutions as Islamic, recommend a particular type of government to be used, or choose the successor to lead the community after him. Political authority and rulership should be decided by the community itself (Ḥājj Ḥamad 2010, p. 91). Had the Prophet decided on any of these matters, he would have violated human freedom and sovereignty. For this reason, most Muslims agree that no clergy or government of jurists can be accepted in Islamic thought (Ḥājj Ḥamad 2010, p. 96). Human sovereignty should be dependable for establishing constitutional forms of governance and institutions that address a community’s shifting political, economic, and social problems, far away from all claims of divine sovereignty (Ḥājj Ḥamad 2010, p. 100). According to Ḥājj Ḥamad, the Quran highlights two general ethical norms to be adhered to in matters of governance: consultation between the members of a community and social peace, which necessitate human freedom (Ḥājj Ḥamad 2010, p. 102). Consequently, in our present time, Muslims should embrace human freedom and sovereignty, transcend ideology and theology, participate in the renewal of civilization, and approach the world and nature scientifically (Ḥājj Ḥamad 2010, p. 122).

More recently, the prominent Iraqi Sunni scholar who lived in the USA, Ṭāhā Jābir al-‘Alwānī (1935–2016), published his 2016 book al-Ḥākimiyya wa-l-haymana, which offers a similar Islamic theory regarding sovereignty. Al-‘Alwānī argues that the idea of sovereignty in religions has evolved. For him, the Quran promotes an ethical and popular sovereignty rather than divine sovereignty. In Quranic sovereignty, humans have a responsibility to read, understand, and apply the Quran, whereas in the theory of divine sovereignty, people are merely passive recipients of absolute authority. Historically, divine sovereignty was active in human history (the Hebrews), followed by the rule of the prophets or kings who ruled by divine decree. However, the Quran does not promote this type of sovereignty and instead insists on ethical teachings that people should read carefully and apply wisely. The Quran’s moral precepts acknowledge human diversity, flexibility, and the universality of human civilization. The Muslim community ought to live its religious and ethical teachings and converge with other communities on common grounds in a modern and democratic state while competing with other communities in an open societal space. By extension, all concepts such as caliphate, Islamic state, or any other political rule of religious nature attributed to a group or individual are out of date. Al-‘Alwānī thus advocates Quranic sovereignty as human sovereignty and ethical sovereignty designed to liberate the human mind from absolute power and eradicate all aspects of authoritarianism in Islamic political thought, which are brought about by fundamentalist and Islamist interpretations of sovereignty (Al-‘Alwānī 2016).

March contends that Islamic reformists like Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī (1926–2022) and Rāshid al-Ghannūshī articulate a political theology in which the world is moved by a harmony of divine and popular will, a dual sovereignty that holds that the people have absolute authority over their rulers. These reformists envisioned a relationship of harmony and representation of sovereignties whereby popular sovereignty is bound by a greater, divine sovereignty. However, they rejected the doctrine of just guardianship and pious representation by rulers and scholars and promoted a unique vision of democracy where a just and pious people govern themselves while also representing God’s instructions to humanity. The 2011 Arab revolutions were a unique opportunity in which popular sovereignty became a true intellectual revolution in contemporary Islamic thought (March 2019, pp. x–xi).

While mainstream Islamist movements have embraced the theory of popular sovereignty, especially since the Arab Spring, radical Islamists and Jihadi Salafists still support the idea of divine sovereignty, upholding a strict interpretation of divine authority derived from a literal interpretation of the Quran and prophetic traditions. They see no difference in the application of divine sovereignty between theology, law, and politics, and believe that God’s all-pervading authority is part of authentic belief (tawḥīd al-ḥākimiyya). Radical Salafis call to a utopian Muslim community rather than for nation-states. They continue to contend that an Islamic system of governance that applies Islamic law is the only legitimate one (Saikal 2008, pp. 76–77). The ultra-minority movements within the spectrum of Salafism continue to brand the slogan of divine sovereignty. In his 2019 book Ḍawābiṭ qaḍiyyat al-ḥākimiyya, the Egyptian Salafist Aḥmad Shams al-Dīn argues that adhering to contemporary laws is disbelief in Islam and that faith in divine authority is a component of religion, even though he forbids using violence to contest ruling regimes in the Muslim world (Shams al-Dīn 2019, p. 13). Despite that the concept of divine sovereignty has become fringe and dissident and is no longer able to mobilize the masses, many Salafists continue to promote it in publications and sermons, sometimes by downplaying its political connotations and highlighting its theological and legal dimensions.

The triumph of popular sovereignty in Islamic political thought cannot yet be declared. In some regions of the Islamic world, state ideologies actively promote the notion of metaphysical, unassailable “divine sovereignty.” Divine authority is maintained as a justification for elites and regimes in Iran and Afghanistan. Sectarianism, civil wars, overpopulation, unemployment, social tensions, and a lack of education and critical thinking skills may lead to radicalization in other Muslim societies (such as Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, or Pakistan), which uses the idea of unassailable “divine sovereignty” as justification. We must thus be sceptical about any claims of deterministic shifts in Islamic political thought from divine to popular sovereignty.

5. A Critique of Sovereignty

The idea of popular sovereignty has been contested by various Western thinkers since the early 20th century. Notably, Carl Schmitt contends that all important ideas of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological ideas owing their systematic structure as well as their historical development to theology as they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, and thus the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver and the legal exception (sovereignty is the authority to declare a state of exception) is comparable to the theological miracle (Schmitt 1985, p. 36). Similarly, some Muslim or Arab critical theorists are suspicious of the Western claims about popular sovereignty. For W. Hallaq, the sharia’s dominance meant that the rule of law was superior to its contemporary counterpart, the current Western state structure that has been combined with a claim to democratic legitimacy (or popular sovereignty). He argues that Muslims today would be negotiating a deal that is less favourable than the one they have negotiated for themselves over the centuries if they were to adopt the contemporary state structure of separation of powers. The state’s power and sovereignty only serve its own interests and perpetuation. In contrast, the sharia did not serve the ruler or any kind of political authority since it was not intended to do so. In this respect, it was not only profoundly democratic but also humane in ways that are incomprehensible to the current state and its legal system; it benefited the people, the masses, the impoverished, and the oppressed; the sharia gave the rule of law precedence above the state (Hallaq 2012, p. 72). Irfan Ahmad contends that there are numerous reasons why the archetypal modern state and the paradigmatic Islamic administration are “incompatible.” In contrast to the territorial nation of a modern state, the Islamic community (umma) is governed by Islamic law and lacks its own sovereignty since God is the only legislator, and sovereignty will lie with Him alone. He asserts that there is a clearer separation of powers in Islam since any political, social, or economic institution is ultimately subservient to sharia, which is the only body with the authority to enact laws, in contrast to the archetypal contemporary state, which is axiomatically predicated on power separations but practically interconnected. Sharia is not created by the ruler; rather, he applies it, is held accountable for it, and does not enjoy immunity under sharia, which is defined by its inherent plurality and flexibility (Ahmad 2015, p. 99).

Another critical view of Islamic sovereignty maintains that with some Muslim dynasties (especially the Safavid and the Mughal empires in Persia and India, respectively) to claim state sovereignty, spiritual legitimacy matters as much as political legitimacy. Thus, Azfar Moin argues that Sufism and holy saviors were the ways in which Muslim monarchs came to display their sovereignty and embrace their sacrality. Both the Mughals and the Safavids adopted a “saintly” and “messianic” form of sovereignty during their classical eras. Astrological calculations and mystical lore were used to support the idea that their sovereignty was “messianic” and “saintly.” This idea was then reflected in court rituals and attire, depicted in paintings, preserved in architecture, and institutionalized in cults of devotion and physical submission to the monarch as both king and saint (Moin 2012, pp. 16–19). Alan Strathern perceives in this theory a broader aspect of world history: the way the processes of religious authority and state-building have intertwined in a manner akin to a torque movement to create the institution of monarchy (Strathern 2014, p. 80).

In contrast, other critical voices downplayed the importance of the religious component in state sovereignty in Islamic history. Thus, Mohamad El-Merheb sustained that Islamic political theory in the Mamluk period emphasized the restraint and balance of power and gave the judiciary and professional administration more authority to ensure the smooth operation of the state. During this process, the caliphate’s institution was either entirely disregarded or, at most, considered superfluous (El-Merheb 2022, p. 10). The caliphate lost its charisma, although the latter was maintained in other societal sectors (Lohlker 2024). Hayrettin Yücesoy contends during the late Umayyad and early Abbasid intellectual milieus siyāsa was a specific method of governmentalizing sovereignty and was widely taught to serve as a craft of governance that required the application of knowledge and skills to the administration of peoples and affairs in order to produce social progress. Siyāsa opened a window on politics as the art of mitigating contingency and the technique of managing affairs to ensure a satisfactory result, rather than a theological question or a subset of religious jurisprudence. Thus, siyāsa competed with the transcendental normative language of imamate, which assumed an incompatibility between ruling and moral values. In later periods of Islamic history, the concept of siyāsa continued to enjoy widespread appeal, encouraging administrators and thinkers to approach politics in novel ways (Yücesoy 2023, p. 256).

These critical perspectives on Western popular sovereignty or state sovereignty in medieval Islam show the complex interactions between the secular and the sacred. In some respects, what was once considered sacred seems more secular and modern, while the religious can be disguised in the secular. This critical literature also demonstrates that just as there are several ways to practice religious sovereignty, there are different ways to be secular and exercise secular sovereignty. Repressive practices, rulers, and regimes were founded on the idealization of the caliphate, the imamtate, and the sharia, and for this reason critique is required to relativize these claims. Critique is equally needed to examine the absolute legitimacy of popular sovereignty as authoritarian ideologies or regimes, as well as elitism that abuses the reference to people’s authority in order to play “omnipotent roles” on earth, concealed as secular or popular sovereignty.

6. Conclusions

Extreme ideologies, colonialism, and the violent conflict against authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world led to the emergence of the idea of divine sovereignty and its popularity in the Muslim world. The concept of divine sovereignty was prevalent in Islamist organizations from the 1940s to the 1980s, claiming that political authority should be governed by God’s law and represented by an elite, a jurist, or an Islamic government. However, since the 1990s, divine sovereignty in politics has been contested by many Islamist ideologues, religious scholars of all sides, and critical Muslim intellectuals. Generally speaking, they have restricted divine sovereignty to sovereignty in creation and in matters of religious belief and practice. The 1990s saw the beginning of the civil shift in contemporary Islamic political thought from divine to popular sovereignty, which culminated in the Arab Spring in 2011. The youth revolutions in the Arab world changed the conception of political sovereignty in mainstream Islamism and Islamic thought. Currently, democracy is generally acknowledged, popular sovereignty is seen as the sole source of political legitimacy and authority, and the importance of citizens’ demands and their influence on politics and society is emphasized. Nonetheless, the notion of divine sovereignty as political authority is still advocated in the radical Salafist movements. A critical perspective on sovereignty emphasizes the ethical aspects of sharia’s governance while challenging the dominant popular sovereignty narrative as authoritarian.