The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought

Abstract In this review of Andrew March’s book, The Caliphate of Man, I shall focus on one central concept and one central claim to be found in the book: the concept of Islamic democracy, and the claim that al-Ghannūshī’s vision of popular sovereignty “reflects a genuine intellectual revolution in modern Islamic thought.” I suggest that the concept of Islamic democracy is logically possible only on the assumption of a purely procedural, value-neutral conception of democracy, and that the vision of the umma [the demos, populus] to be found in al-Ghannūshī is not such as to make the notion of popular sovereignty desirable by modern standards. I will suggest further that liberal Islamist thinkers stand to offer a superior view of Islamic democracy, one toward which al-Ghannūshī himself seems to be moving in his post-Revolutionary political practice.

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The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought. By Andrew F. March. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. 328p. $45.00 cloth.

Perspectives on Politics ◽

10.1017/s1537592720001024 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 594-596

Author(s):

Arash Davari

Keyword(s):

Harvard University ◽

Popular Sovereignty ◽

Islamic Thought

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Islamic Constitutionalism Before Sovereignty: Two Defenses of the Tunisian Constitution of 1861

American Journal of Islam and Society ◽

10.35632/ajis.v37i1-2.609 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 37 (1-2) ◽

pp. 1-40

Author(s):

Andrew March

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Public Interest ◽

Popular Sovereignty ◽

Political Life ◽

Present Moment ◽

Political Judgment ◽

Constituent Power ◽

The Public ◽

Islamic Thought ◽

Constitutional Thought

This article focuses on the Tunisian constitutional moment of 1857-1861. Its goal is to explore an important moment in Islamic modernity for the purposes of drawing a contrast with twentieth-century, post-caliphal Islamist thought. The primary themes visible in nineteenth-century Islamic constitutional thought are a “descending” conception of sovereign constituent power with a strong emphasis on the pre-political existence of a divine law that is both binding and guiding but not necessarily the exclusive source of lawmaking. The debates of the 1860s and Ottoman constitutionalism more generally do not lead directly to a non-sovereigntist political vision. But they are representative of a pre-colonial (and thus, to a certain extent, pre-apologetic) Islamic thought that centralizes the public interest, the varieties of political judgment, and the compatibility of distinct kinds of expertise with a desacralized centralized authority. This period may hold relevance for our present moment when twentieth-century ideals of both divine and popular sovereignty seem to no longer dominate Islamic (and Islamist) approaches to political life.

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