The idea of the universal caliphate or the caliphate of man is not only a theory of
the sovereignty of the Ummah as a body over its rulers and political institutions,
although it is that but also of the restriction of the Obama's authority to whatever God has delegated and commanded.
The sum of the Covenant of Vice Jahren C from the constitutional standpoint,
is the supremacy of God's law over any other authority, but through the consultative activities of the people.
The Covenant of Vice Jency can thus be summarised as the Shari'a of God and consultation of the people,
or text and consultation, reason and revelation, constraint and freedom.
This is the problem that remains to be untangled. How are all of these various materials woven together and what contradictions and
ambiguities are produced by this attempt to do justice to the divine sovereignty,
the rule of law, popular sovereignty of some kind, representation,
expertise and the residual authority of ordinary believers to speak and act as God's Cale's?
I believe the best way to do this is to proceed carefully to the distinctly divine
and distinctly popular elements of this theory of legitimacy and sovereignty.
For though divine and popular sovereignty are formed from the same relationship, their elements remain conceptually distinct and are often intention.
Welcome Timidly Centavo took the Oxford podcast on new books about the Middle East.
These are some of the books written by our members or books that our community are talking about.
My name is a Summer Azami and I teach contemporary Islamic studies. My guest today is Andrew Much, a scholar who is no stranger to Oxford.
He completed his detail at Ox's Department of Politics and International Relations as a martial scholar over a decade ago after graduating
undertook for 10 years in the political science department at Yale University and has taught Islamic law at Yale and NYU law schools.
His book, Islam and Liberal Citizenship The Search for an Overlapping Consensus, published by Oxford University Press in 2009,
is an exploration of Islamic juridical discourse on the right societies and obligations of Muslim minorities in liberal polities,
and won the 2009 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion from the American Academy of Religion under a second book.
The subject of today's podcast is The Face of Man Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Sold,
published by Harvard University Press in 2019, as we will see.
It examines the problem to define and popular sovereignty in modern Islamic sold through to the Arab uprisings.
Andrew, welcome to Book Talk. Thank you very much for having me.
I'm delighted to be here spiritually in Oxford and I'm very, very grateful for your interest in my book.
And thank you for joining us. I mean, this is one of the more positive aspects.
And we need to take so many positives, if we can, of the kind of crisis that we can actually host people from different parts of the world.
But it would be wonderful to have you in Oxford, but it's wonderful to have you been in it, so to speak, from Massachusetts.
So tell us something about the writing of your book. When did you start? What sources did you use and when did it take you in terms of travel?
Well, the origins of the book are around 2010, 2011.
I had finished my first book and I was interested in a number of different things in Islamic thought and Islamic law at that time,
some of which related to extensions of the themes that I had written in my first book.
So I was interested in how to explore in greater depth some of the harder
questions related to the encounter between liberal ethics and Islamic ethics.
Right. So some of the really hard questions related to the scope and the limits of religious freedom, freedom of expression,
use the core areas where liberal conceptions of autonomy or freedom of religion
clash with Islamic conceptions of a belief in a conception of the good,
the truth of a particular metaphysical tradition, and limits on the scope for human behaviour to do certain kinds of harms at the community
level to religious goods or to the the freedom for a religious community to thrive.
So I was interested in this. I was looking at certain modern and classical theories of the objectives of Islamic law or most of the city.
So I was poking around in these kinds of areas.
I had written a few papers exploring this on whether this particular Islamic legal theory of the McCrossin was a fruitful area for not resolving,
but structuring ways of thinking about how Islamic aims can and might not be
able to be advanced in non Islamic political communities in legal settings.
So then you had the Arab Spring and I was actually gonna be giving a paper in Tunisia in the wake of the Arab Spring.
So I was interested in the thought of Russia, of Alooshe, who I'd been action for a while,
who figured sort of had a kind of minor appearance in my first book.
But I was familiar with his 1993 treatise, Public Freedoms and the Islamic State.
So I opened this and I was going to say, what do a new Xis views on Islamic law, Islamic legal theory,
the application of Islamic law in a modernist say about the prospects for lawmaking in a future non authoritarian, democratic Tunisia.
So the broad question was, what is his conception of Sharia?
What is his conception of the balance between classical fefe and must lahar or consultation or something like this?
And as I worked my way through his book,
I realised these scenes absolutely figure and they end up becoming somewhat important for the arguments of the caliphate of man.
But what I realised is the real action is this theory of the universal caliphate or the octet is the left.
This is what appeared more than anything else in this book.
This is what he himself described as the pillar or the foundation of Islamic political philosophy.
The idea that the people, both individually and collectively, have been deputised as God's vice jahren on Earth.
So this kind of hit me over the head. It rose. That's where the action is.
And it's a really, really fruitful and complex area to look.
Now, obviously, it was not the first person to discover this. So part of it was to go back and realise what is the secondary literature on this.
What other kinds of questions does it open up? That was the kind of impulse that was sort of one of these moments where I said, that's it.
That's my next book. Right. The problem of sovereignty as it brings in everything that, of course, you're taught as a first year student,
you know that Islamism is this commitment to Hakimi or divine sovereignty.
But then here's this robust commitment to what they are calling popular sovereignty.
And so just a flurry of questions raised themselves. And I was kind of off to the races after that.
Okay, fantastic. So that gives a really useful sort of overview of where the book came from.
And of course, she is the only figure who gets to chapters himself, so to speak, rather than just the one which.
Yes, I want to put up and do the and some of the other figures that I say that even there was somebody these figures get not as much attention,
shall we say, as a machine. And I think the background that you've given,
the fact that he figured I would call him sort of having a presence on your Facebook, but that you happened to be in Tunisia.
And in a sense, you know, Tunisia is the only case within the Arab revolutions where there seems to have been something how the shaky
still sort of coming out of that that's going in the social direction that one would hope that it would go.
So thank you for that background. And if I can move on to my next question.
It's that your book takes us on this journey that attempts to trace the genealogy, as you highlighted,
of the important concept of sovereignty or popular sovereignty, more specifically in modern Islamic thought.
So what you've described in the title of your book is The Caliphate of Man.
And you you said this is kind of become the defining idea within contemporary Islamism.
In broad strokes, could you perhaps offer us an outline of the genealogy that you present to give us an idea of the overall lock him to.
Right. So I begin sort of in the present with an observation, right.
That I actually opened the book with use of a part of Dowi sermon in.
Ten Days After the Revolution or something like that.
And it's not a work of political theory, but you see these themes in which popular agency and popular virtue,
democratic political action, along with divine will or divine intent or the divine plan, are kind of fused together.
So I have this idea that the voice of the people is the voice of God.
And yet at the same time, you have this fundamental observation that it's not just any old people, right?
It's a virtuous people. It's a pious people. It's a religious people.
So this is the first sort of point of departure and point of comparison with lots of non Islamic democratic theory,
which says that begin with a people, whether it's an arbitrarily defined group that has been sort of set off geographically
or ethnically or because of some development of a national consciousness.
And then you ask, how can that people be free or self-governing, legitimately governed?
But you're really asking about how any people could be, whereas in the Islamic conception, the people already has a particular quality or attribute.
But more importantly, the people already has a certain will that has a certain defined objective for itself.
That's an important distinction because in a lot of Western Democratic theory,
the point of democracy is to discover the people's will or to discover which
popular will is legitimate or can be realised through law or coercive action.
That's the point of deliberation or procedure or whatever it is, whereas in Islam you be the will is already given in advance.
So that is itself a kind of complicated question, right?
How can you have a legitimate commitment to democracy where certain aspects of the people's essence identity in will are already given either theory?
So the people can't choose to be under the what it already is, which is the, um.
OK, so that's the beginning set of questions. So then historically there was a question of, well, where does this come from?
Right. What is the significance of this? How does this actually represent a kind of revolution over premodern Islamic thought?
So there's a number of themes, right? One is which premodern Islamic thought is kind of predicated on if you're talking about the mainstream Sunni
juridical tradition on a kind of condominium of authority between Suta on the one hand and on the other.
So some form or another, whether it's the Sultan or the Hudnut foot individually or Suta as an entire governing apparatus.
And the scholars collaborate in the governing of the community.
And, you know, you have a understanding of the traditional way that that is divided between the sultan.
Leaving many matters to the traditional Sharia court, right,
vs. having a wide latitude for governance through CSA courts or in other kinds of non-starter, emotive or non 50 modes of governance.
OK. These are outlined in Chapter two to this. Yeah. Interesting. Yes.
Yes. And if not, that's not meant to be a super original observation.
It's meant to be kind of schematically summarising things that are widely observed literature.
Although I've I want to stress that that's kind of the Sunni juridical story
about things if you actually read a lot of history of Ottoman political thought.
We know that in reality, Ottoman political thought in particular is much more influenced by Sufi conceptions and shows Gothika conceptions than right.
Centralise and prioritise the ethical character of the ruler.
Right. There are a lot more rulers centred, caliph centred, charismatic than the classical Sunni juridical model once.
Right? Right. Well, we'll leave that aside for now.
So one major theme is how does the traditional condominium of authority, the guardianship of the sultan or the caliph,
whatever the executive is called, and the scholars become devolved to some kind of popular political community.
And then the other story is how does a fairly.
Non utopian, realistic conception of politics in the Sunni juridical tradition become transformed to a much more ambitious,
much more utopian aspiration for politics and much of modern Sunni thought.
That's the kind of background. And then I moved through a number of thinkers to make just to add a point,
you actually nicely sort of illustrate this rosy, an idea taken from his political liberalism, ultra realistic utopia.
And when you're saying it's utopian, it takes people as they are to a certain extent as well.
Yeah, that's that's my idea. So sometimes, right. You're me saying that it's utopian, right.
And then the kind of popular folk sense of the word utopian. Right.
We use that to mean unrealistic pie. Sky. Right.
Right, right.
Which itself is an interesting observation, you know, a kind of very, very accessible history of this relates to perhaps Cold War liberalism.
Right. Right. Ice. I Eberlin.
The idea that utopianism persay is the problem because it goes against the grain of human nature requires too much coercion.
And so part of the Cold War liberal brief against totalitarianism was a brief against utopianism as such.
And then, of course, you have that kind of period after communism in which there's this assumption that
markets and liberal democracy can more or less provide for the needs of people.
And this is also a non utopian story. Big rights were not meant to be prescribing a particular final and for individuals that holds for everybody,
but rather creating the space for people to pursue different sorts of ends.
Nowhere is I, on the other hand, don't use utopian as a criticism.
So it's just a mode of thinking about politics. It's a mode of thinking about what is the best that we could hope for in ideal circumstances.
And then you add to that a certain kinds of feasibility or plausibility constraints that result in a kind of aspiration for a realistic utopia.
Right. Given the kinds of beings that we are, given the limits of our moral capacity,
the limits of our selflessness, with the limits of our ability to act on perfect moral virtue.
What then is the best that we could hope for? If we decide institutions in a certain way.
So that's what I mean by a certain kind of utopianism.
But what I mean, more specifically in the Islamic context and here I'm very, very open actually to being corrected on this.
But on my reading, a kind of developed Sunni juridical model of politics doesn't see the political sphere
as where human beings realise their good or their virtue or their path to salvation.
Now, arguably in early Islam, the emphasis on following the right caliph, following the right vehicle of salvation did see politics in this way again.
Arguably, some of these Sufi and philosopher inspired theories,
which the ruler is the font of virtue and salvation, and it kind of flows down or eminence down to the people.
Arguably, that also makes politics central to the realisation of our good and our salvation.
But so much of classical Sunni political fight is very, very realistic.
It's about removing the greatest harms of social life violence right now.
Sedition, hunger, crusaders, bandits, all of this.
And what's very minimal, I avoided using the word minimal on campus because I think it's minimal, but I think it's constrained.
And then also, if you look at somebody like Ibn Haldun, who, as we know, is widely influential later on an autumn in political thought,
it's not minimal, but it's a very constrained conception of what politics can bring.
And even where somebody like even Khaldoon will say the difference between rational royal authority,
mullock utterly right and the caliphate is that the caliphate brings a benefit in this world.
And the next the next rise. It really explain why is that the caliphate is bringing Mustafah in the next world.
It's kind of just absurd. Just to close out this show.
What do you think any government can do by way of bringing about justice or peace or the good functioning of economies and so forth?
That's all that the Khalifa model of governance can do.
So I thought that the Khalifa model of governance brings about some greater heaven on earth.
It just is in some way it provides benefit in the actual heaven.
So that's the first out. The second thought is what then becomes remarkable. And again, feel free to disagree.
How much in thinkers like MO Duty and put of in others the political world and the sense of bringing about Islamic law is a site.
For moral perfection, realising our good.
In addition to just removing injustice and trying to bring about basic rights, that's also part of what I mean by the utopian vision.
Politics becomes a site for moral perfection in ways that I don't think is the norm in premodern.
Certainly thought you know, I think I broadly, to be honest, I mean, and this will be somewhat impressionistic.
You know, I've not set out to answer this in my own research, but I broadly think that your intuitions are correct in this.
And you cite overmanaging and you have in your notes something which actually reinforces your point,
which is to say even Thamir tried to move away from this rule essent inefficient to a community centre division.
But the fact that Obama has a mutual friend of us, of course, says this is an illustration of the fact that that wasn't really the case.
I mean, to answer your second point, which is why is the caliphate so central?
Why is it that something doesn't really given response? He just says, you know, oh, it gives you salvation in the next life as well as in this world.
You're getting sort of political, you know, benefits and justice.
And my thoughts go back to as early in his decide this idea that I had where he makes a very stark statement,
which I'm not sure is necessarily representative,
how often he saw it, but saying that without the caliphate, nothing we do is, in a sense, legitimated eagle.
But in the literal sense, it's not right. You need the caliph to authorise judge judges on the condition of possibility for legality.
But it's not that. Therefore, you know that the site of moral development is elsewhere.
Right. It's Sufism. Or if you read someone, because Ali's book on the here and so many of the books are actually chapters in law.
Right.
I mean, it's about how do you take the minimal bar that he's interested in and raise that engagement with the hip to a point of essence of speak.
And my suspicion. And again, you know, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this as well.
And I think we're both, in a sense, exploring a question which is really profound and not necessarily straightforward.
My suspicion is that the conditions of modernity suddenly allow for and you look at people I
quoted and people like and I'll do the and who they're citing in a very often quote and Hadith,
it's the earliest period, the earliest history.
It allows for bypassing the classical sort of like crystallised form of what is and was and tries to go
back to certain ideals where actually politics was a space for very serious contestation about salvation.
Honest. So I do think that that does seem to be some of that happening there.
I think these are tendencies that are latent or made more latent, if that's a way to put it in the classical Sunni tradition.
But the ever present, because they're in the Torah, they're in the Koran, the Hadith.
So and, you know, as we think. I had a recent discussion with Humaira and chassis, you may know about this,
you know, through much of classical sunnism, hadiths almost seem a bit marginal.
You know, you think of ourselves here and the extent to which it's criticised in the modern period for having weak ideas.
But my remark as is what people blame on Hatzalah a little unfairly.
If you look at any books,
I think you can see they're not terribly interested in Hadith unless you like the hundreds who are the tiniest school anyway.
So, you know, I think this rediscovery know to refer to Ahmed Tremseh, who I sort of interviewed a couple of days ago actually on his book,
this rediscovery of the truth of these classics does dramatically reshape the way in which we see the possibilities of the tradition.
And that's what allows people like me to put them to bed with, in some respects, novelties in other respects.
You know, readings of things which are latent in the tradition.
Yeah, I don't want to say too much about that. I'll leave that specific comment about the centrality of the Hadith to experts.
I will say that when you read my studio, put it on the early period, it's not scholars.
It's not about particularly. It's about first of all, there's an emotional aspect.
It's motivating for action might be mythical. Again, a word that's often used in a negative kind of.
Right. Right. Not right. It's writerly myth as opposed to fact. But I think more that it's creating meaning it in many ways.
It's also it's simplifying things. Right.
It's meant to smooth out things, not explore it as a space of contestation, but a space of deriving certain kinds of lessons for action.
And I don't know, that's a good comparison or not. But I'll phrase it perhaps a little bit like the way that Machiavelli is going to
read Livi or perhaps the American founders want to read the classical tradition.
It's not as classicists or as scholars, they're trying to derive lessons and conclusions, and they're often involves smoothing out a lot of things.
Right. So lucky Avella wants to explore what are the conditions for liberty in a republic.
And he reads, you know, Livi in particular. And yet some of the most well-known lessons are the ways in which, like.
Popular violence is a good thing for popular riots and so forth, because it's the language of the war against the gun.
Now, that's not a scholarly observational show. It's an obviously pragmatic in a sense, it's a utilitarian reading.
Maybe it's an intervention in contemporary debates about how much we fear the poor and right.
Or these sorts of things going to lead to an expansion of liberty or not. Similarly for cooktop, you know, it's not a very sophisticated reading,
but it's a very sort of ingenious reading in a way, in my reading of cooked up on the early period.
What you get is only partial. It doesn't encapsulate everything. Sure.
It's sort of like saying if you get the politics right, you get everything else right.
I get the leadership right. Get the law right. Have righteous governance.
And then lo and behold. How infused everybody is with zeal and virtue and right ire to protect Islam in order to help their brother.
That's the kind of lesson that I think put that was tried to show is that the earliest the harbour.
They were so virtuous and so pious because the politics was right.
Anyway, that's my reading. Admittedly, it's not you know, it doesn't cover everything that he has to say about this period.
But for me, it's a very distinctive contribution and it's part of what answers the question, what is political about political Islam?
How are they giving a particular political reading of Islam?
It's not just that they're emphasising the importance of politics or emphasising divine sovereignty or engaging in fear.
If you don't implement Sharia, they have a theory of what politics does.
And that's what I found particularly interesting. And I mean, in a sense, I've got some questions that are lined up.
But I find much of your commentary so intriguing. It goes in so many interesting directions.
I want to perhaps contest this notion not necessarily contested, but the way in which the term scholarly work that the term scholarly is done.
In thinking about someone I quoted before saying, look,
this isn't a scholarly sort of blank piece in the same way that Machiavelli isn't engaged in a cataloguing of the various ways in which
someone like Livi is referring to ideas that are used by native peoples as a means of justifying liberty of some kind or and so on.
But rather he's trying to get something out of that text and for something quite practical, something quite social, something.
As you say, quite political.
And to a certain extent, I think a lot of Islamic scholars through history, you know, their motivations are going to be very different, too.
I mean, quite dramatically different to what a modern scholar would consider to be a scholarly engagement.
There are the great sort of encyclopaedias and the people are cataloguing things and
and also sort of maybe engaging in original reflections on my jarheads and so on.
In his Helen. But you think someone like, again, has any writing in here?
There's an urgency to the practicality of what he's writing about.
And you read something like get a doctor's notes and it's supposed to shock your system, so to speak.
And I think that spirit is carried forward by people like that in a very different way,
because for Hasani, the political round is most of these kind of solved it in some level.
He's also made his contribution to society in the way that Croner talks about that.
You know, yeah, they're just there to be the muscle power that keeps everything going.
But the Orlanda and the Shari'ah are basically as long as they're in power.
And this is how Noah Feldman also presents it, as long as they're in control.
That's all good. Right? But that's not the case with God.
And so do the and these people. Suddenly everything's been unseated. Suddenly everything's up for grabs in a scary way.
I think for these people. And that's the situation they're reacting to. And they're thinking, well, you know, what are we to do?
Our societies are basically becoming hyper secularised and, you know,
in our imagination and our values are being usurped and destroyed and people are being taken in by this sort of liberalism in the
form that existed at that time by the conception of the nation state as the true seat of sovereignty and and popular sovereignty.
Obviously, people like Madou, they were very exercised by those sorts of concepts as well as could have been his own way.
So I think there are interesting things going on and that's just a reflection.
I don't like to add something to that. I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on that.
If you think perhaps I know, do I think we're on the same page on that? So I wanted to sort of press time, too.
I mean, this is really a fascinating discussion, to be honest. And I have a lot of questions I'm going to go on to, in a sense,
because we're discussing we'll do the input, which I believe Chapter four and five in your book.
I'm going to actually circle back to Chapter two for a moment where I think in a sense,
you provide this compendious overview of what might be called the normative Piedmont's and conception of sovereignty.
Of course, you also highlight that this is, in a sense, the received normative premodern, certainly conception of sovereignty.
This is how Sundanese look back at their own tradition.
Today and read it in the payment tradition, so there are all sorts of other possibilities, as you've suggested.
So in subsequent chapters, you explore how modern Islamism radically reformulate this premodern conception in order to
generate the Islamist notion of popular sovereignty that underlies Islamic democratic theory.
And you in several instances, use the term invention to characterise this introduction of popular sovereignty.
I think that's another, yes. I was just having a breeze through my engines.
Come and tell me. But can he cites someone also speaks about the invention of popular sovereignty.
Edmund Morgan is the famous historian.
We talked about the invention of democracy, the popular sovereignty and human rights or the invention of the people in American Puritan thought.
You know, and I wonder if you can maybe give listeners a sense of just how radical a
transformation you consider this to be from the premodern to the modern conception.
Well, what I try to argue is that like many inventions, it's based on certain kinds of materials.
So when modern Islamic constitutional thinkers or democratic theorists talk about things like the
importance of debate or the idea of the left foot or the MMR as a contract or the idea of the people,
the OMA is actually the agency behind this or the idea of consultation shoura.
These are materials that exist in the premodern tradition for sure.
This is part of partially what a book is often tried to do, even time is to say them.
There's also a tradition in premodern. Well, premodern Islamic thought, right?
Wants to ground the important aspects of leadership and law and virtue and community as opposed to the caliphate.
So these materials are there and they're meaningful.
And of course, I think it's also fair to point out that there's both an apologetic motive to say we don't believe in the divine right of kings,
not authoritarian. We never believed in absolutism. And there's also somewhat of a sectarian motive, which is to say we're not Shia.
We never believed in divine designation. Right. We never believed that God chose the ruler.
For us, the ruler was always just somebody that was appointed by the community or again.
When you read Mounded and you see that one of the ways in which the ruler comes to authority is through your right,
it is tempting to translate as election, but.
Right. No selection or choice. Right. Right, right. It's within the semantic range of the time election.
Yes, that's right. Yes. So these materials are there.
It's just as we know historically, even in the most democratic moments, perhaps the election of man or something like this.
It was six people deliberating.
And it wasn't because they were representatives of the community, because they were the power brokers who might end up fighting amongst themselves.
So sure, as the election of the ruler was a mode of conflict resolution.
Not about empowering the OMA to choose its own rulers anyway.
So I'm certainly unaware of any serious reflection on the idea that the OMA is the source of political authority or has them right dissipate right.
Or governance to be legitimate. That's one way in which these democratic commitments rely on materials that are there, but they need something else.
The other thing that this trope of what's ments in the Koranic versus that talk about God appointing a caliph on earth,
that this is what God means is the entire amount.
And then it's a political designation. Right. That it's a transfer friends of God's political authority to the people at large.
That's a complete invention. And so one of the things that point. Can you say that once more?
Forgive me. So the trope of the universal caliphate. Right.
Right, right. The Obama is God's caliph. What I write was the caliphate of man.
That this rests on certain Koranic versus most famously.
Chapter two. Verse 30. Amongst many others. The idea that this unambiguously without discussion,
without the need to go through traditional to see it means that if the Ummah at large or the
people at large has been deputised by God as his deputy and that this is a political designation,
it's the transference of his authority to then control the political apparatus.
That's a complete invention. Right. So when I read the rights or compiled the articles that went into his book, he left or a member Earthman.
He has as an epigraph to 30. Doesn't need.
Doesn't need. Because the Omar chooses its caliph or.
It means that you have to appoint a caliph.
It really refers to the office of the Caliphate as occupied by a single individual with the classical shoes.
Male Muslim frien reason all of the different virtues and qualifications is right there right now.
You do have a tradition in which human beings are God.
Caliph, you have this in law literature, you have this Sufi literature,
you have right philosopher literature, but it's not really a collective political authorisation.
Right. Right. Right. About how we become morally perfect win.
Right. Or find ourselves morally again, whether that's understood the way that Sufis do or the philosophers do or suddenly,
more or less to show you can aspire to being God's deputy on earth at an individual level by becoming, you know, the best that you can be.
Sort of. Right. Right. Right. And certain kinds of theories. It's part of this tripartite theological anthropology.
Right. What is the human function following Aristotle's argument and the ethics.
Right. Interaction. Very simple yet. No, no, no, no, no. That our function is to be rattin, not our ethics, but.
Ah, but ok. The Aristotle. You get the argument from the air.
God right. The function. OK, and so Islamic ethicists do the same thing.
So what is our function as human beings to worship God to.
And Morrilton are right to symbolise or populate and didn't like the earth and to be gods caliph.
That's what it means to be human. But it's not. It doesn't mean that it's collectively have this political sovereignty anyway.
So the idea that becomes the central idea of Islamic political thought is rightly or wrongly a major revolution.
OK, so untraced at this point. I'm going to conclude the podcast for this.
If you are interested in listening to the full conversation, you you'll find it on YouTube.
Andres, thank you so much for covering a broad range of topics.
I've been speaking with author Andrew March about his book, The Caliphate of Man Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought.