I'd like to welcome you all to our final session for the term of the Oxford political seminar.
And we're delighted to have two very distinguished speakers from actually both from across the Atlantic.
One of them's been kind enough to drop in Oxford and spend a few years with us.
We have with us Mohamed Fadel and Lena Salima Mohammed will be going first, so I'll briefly introduce him and his lecture.
I'm Osama Azami. I'm a developmental lecturer at Synopsys College, and Faisal is really the brains behind this.
We're co-convenor for the political thought seminar facility is professor of history at this college and gives us great pleasure to host you all.
We want to remind you that this is going to be a seminar where the speakers speak for about 20 minutes each and we welcome people's questions.
Please type them up in the Q&A and we'll try to address them in the discussion that will make for the last half of the seminar.
So Mohamed Fadel is a full professor and former Canada researcher for the law
and economics of Islamic Law at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Law,
where he joined in January 2006. He has a Ph.D. and his Ph.D. was from the University of Chicago on the legal process in mediaeval Islamic law.
He's also practised as a lawyer in the city of New York and so admitted to the bar in New York,
but has been a prolific author on the law and at the intersection of Islamic law.
Also, of course, as we've discussed Islamic legal procedure, but also your engagements are quite wide ranging.
So you've also done political theory in the history of political theory.
And today you're here to speak about the protean sovereign of Sunni law.
So we're very much looking forward to that. Mohammed, if I could invite you to speak for 20 minutes.
Thank you. Thank you very much. I thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be here.
Feisal and I were classmates way back when in Chicago.
So it's great to see him, which I could be in person. Then, of course, I've known forever, so it's wonderful.
And just to clarify the record, Lena as a Jerusalemite, she's not a Native North American, so I just want to make that clear to everybody.
OK. Nina's also opposed to identity politics and doesn't believe that that should have been stated.
Let's take that, for the record, very clearly. Yeah, OK.
The protean sovereign of Sunni law, what, you know, sort of a strange title.
But I chose it because I wanted to frame what I consider to be really a central feature of the way
Sunni jurists write about the state and sovereignty and the idea of protean captures that because.
It's very difficult to capture sort of the locus of sovereignty in Sunni constitutional writing.
And I think this is very important idea to grasp not only the the ambiguity and legal writing,
but the reason why there's a principled reason why it's very hard to capture it in a in a clear term in Sunni law.
So I want to begin by just. Pointing out what that have translation of a lot of these alarmists is on the air, and this is not to pick on her,
but she translates the first chapter Theakston Imama, as on the appointment of the sovereign, the amount.
So I think this is a very common assumption amongst writers in the stomach political theory that, well, the Caliph is this is the sovereign.
And so we are just going to assume that and we will approach writings on public offices from that perspective.
Right. I think this is a very sort of casual analogy between the caliphate and the king and kingship,
European kingship or British kingship, which is completely unjustified.
Once one looks into the details of Islamic law, so as we're probably familiar in British doctrine, you have this very sort of strange metaphysical.
Theory of the Kings, two bodies and I don't know all the details of the the genealogy,
the theological genealogy of of this doctrine, but even as late as the 17th century,
it is fundamental to understanding the authority of the British crown,
and it's fundamental to very basic cases of English constitutional law that end up being very important in American constitutional law.
For example, Calvin's case right now, in sunny fact, there is not a problem of the caliphs two bodies.
And there's a reason for this, which I'm going to get into,
but the solution just means that we don't have a tangible personalised expression of sovereignty in Sunni jurisprudence.
That's what makes it protean because it shows up all over the place.
So if we look at early legal texts and here I'm talking mainly based on my knowledge of my early Maliki legal texts such as the water and the that.
When you come across all these different terms, you can come across Khalifa.
Imam Sultan Party, you, Hakim Amir, etc and all of these terms are used in connexion with the exercise of what we would call sovereign power.
And what I mean by sovereign power is the power to decide something finally and to give a conclusive resolution to something.
Right? And so Maliki and an early Lebanese legal authorities use these terms interchangeably willy nilly.
Right. In fact, Khalifa often times is the least political of them.
So if you do a quick search of Khalifa in the model one,
most of the occasions I believe are in prayer, where the prayer leader something happens to him.
He can't complete the prayer cycle, and so he appoints al-Khalifa to complete it.
Right? But nevertheless, 44 definitely has political resonances, but it's not.
It doesn't monopolise in any sort of sense, an idea of sovereignty.
So. I think the equivocal terminology or the variable terminal logical language used
to describe sovereignty is very nicely reflected in this one very short text,
right, where you get multiple terms for a very simple problem.
So Sanborn asks if no calcium in the modern one?
What's your review regarding the rulings of the governor, the governor of thought?
So he calls them first and when and what he's doing is hatoyama.
And then he calls them. And use the law right, which, you know, we might later call the practise map right?
The sort of the prayer leader and seconds. So then he asks, are they valid and effective to the same extent as the decisions of judges in Maliki?
So now we get the term cut off your plural of cards.
And so if Bill Cosby says yes, unless it is manifestly unless his decisions are manifestly unjust,
in which case the judge can repeal them and on what grounds does it not cost to reach this conclusion?
Again, it's it's very interesting for understanding the doctrine of implicit doctrine of sovereignty here.
He bases on analogy to arbitration. Malik was asked about two men who appointed a third to arbitrate between them, and then he did.
Malik said I believe the judge should enforce the arbitrators decision in their matter and not overturn it unless it was manifestly unjust.
So what we see here or what I would argue here is that sovereignty is expressed in a legal decision,
finds its origin in the decisions of individual people to delegate, authority to others to rule on their behalf, to make a judgement on their behalf.
Right now, this is not a purely positive, distinct allegation in the sense that it's a matter of whatever the ruler decides is proper because.
Exercise of sovereignty, as Malik concedes, it in this case is regulated by a norm,
so the arbitrator, the arbitrators legitimate sovereignty is a function of two things.
It's a function of the consent to his status as arbitrator and a function of his substantive decision not being manifestly unjust.
And so the same principle consent plus legality, right, regulates.
All these offices and regulates how all sovereignty is constructed and by implication,
sovereignty is exercised through this mechanism, and that's why you have multiple offices exercising sovereignty.
Hence the protein character of sovereignty. Right. And this comes across very explicitly and I think theorise very nicely in the work of Shehab
the karate that I translated the criteria for distinguishing legal decisions from opinions,
et cetera. And so he deals with this expressly in his answer to Question three,
where he says public offices exist across a spectrum of powers with two extremes in the middle.
The Office of the Caliph, which is the greater imam a.
That's the office with the greatest power arbitration, which comes into existence by an act of the to the students is the office with the least power.
And between these are many intermediate offices.
And he then gives 15 examples, and his point is all these different offices all exercised sovereignty in the sense that I talked about,
mainly having the authority to resolve disputes conclusively.
And you can sort of systematically identify sovereign power through this range of what's the scope of?
Sovereign power that each office has. So the imam and the of the Caliph has the greatest scope.
And that is reflected in the fact that he can do fatwas.
He can act as a judge. And then he can act in the public interest.
But what's crucial to understand in all these cases is that when the Caliph.
That's judicially.
He must actually act as a judge because the principle that Malik asserted and or him asserted is that when the wily the governor issues a ruling.
It's valid and enforceable, i.e. an exercise arbitrary as long as it's not manifestly unjust.
It corresponds to the substantive idea of law. So although in principle, the Caliph has all the powers of lesser offices.
In practise, his exercise of that power.
Transforms him into a judge when he acts judicially, transforms him into a mufti,
when he acts as a mufti, transforms into a witness when he acts as a witness.
ET cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So in all cases, there's never any sovereignty attached to his person, right?
So his body? He does not have a natural body that is of any significance to sovereignty.
Unlike the English king. So in that case, who is the sovereign right, where is the sovereign in suddenly thought?
And so my argument is that the sovereign is a non corporeal entity, namely the Muslim community.
Right. And so we see that expressly in this very interesting text of the Hanafi jurists who's maybe a century before Khadafi as Casani,
the Casani died at the end of the 12th century. And here he is discussing.
Why a judge does not lose jurisdiction when the appointing power.
I like the Caliph dies. Because one might think that the judge is the delegate of the caliphate.
And so he is a representative of the caliphate and normal principles of agency law state that when the principal dies,
the agent loses all authority because the principal is gone.
Now, from a legal perspective, this is just not the rule for the judge, even after the Caliph dies or the pope is deposed.
The judge's jurisdiction remains valid, and the reason, according to Alqasem,
is because the judge is not appointed is neither appointed pursuant to the personal authority of the Caliph,
nor does he act to further the jurisdiction, the personal jurisdiction of the Caliph, rather in both cases.
He's appointed pursuant to the authority of the Muslim community, and he acts for the Muslim community,
and the Muslim community does not die, as he says here explicitly.
They cannot excuse me, when will I see him by the mouth of Khalifa Bashir, the will air of the Muslim community persists after his death.
So what does that make? The Caliph makes the Caliph an agent.
But interestingly, he's not just any agent. He uses the term rasool, which in Hanafi fifth, is the lowest form of agent.
He's the ministerial agent, the agent that has absolutely no personal interest in the transaction at issue.
So there's no confusion from the perspective of the third party, whether he's dealing with the agent in his personal capacity or for the principal.
So it's very interesting that for Casani, the Caliph is so unimportant that it's just a ministerial function.
And in all cases, as he says.
It's always the Muslim community that is acting when a judges appointed, it's an action of the Muslim community when a judge is removed.
It's an action of the Muslim community. It's never an act of the Caliph.
Happy for that. It's just through by means of right, he's just a straw substitute.
Now, know one of the things I want to try to show that this idea is pervasive, it's not particular to Casani or Gadhafi or whatever.
And so here is an extract from a fifth century Maliki, a work of positive law, a top Sara the jurist and is an important tairawhiti jurist.
And he's talking about the idea of the rule of law as being obligatory in combat and helping in this.
This is a duty Casani, by the way, mentioned the same thing if you think about.
And so the ruler has a positive duty to establish a system of rule of law.
And of course, he can do this personally if he has the capacity right.
But again. It's qualified by having the capacity to actually establish an effective system of rule of law.
Practically speaking, that's impossible. So therefore, he has an obligation to delegate to others.
Power sufficiently to establish a rule of law.
And then finally, what's I think, what's again, what's interesting tying this back to where we started with arbitration?
What happens if he fails to do that or there's no ruler? Then he says, right,
it devolves on those persons having good judgement and good character and whosoever they agree is qualified to discharge that obligation.
They appoint him to the post. Right. So again, here there is this idea that.
Representing the Muslim community, as I would put it, is.
Potentially not a stable, it's not stable, located in any particular person.
It's only located in the person that is exercising the legal duty of fulfilling the legal obligation.
So what makes the rally a rally is that he establishes a rule of law.
Right? The Ali, who doesn't establish a rule of law, is not a one.
So again, you can say this that it's not. Sovereignty is not the right to obedience.
Obedience is what creates the sovereignty. So sovereignty is constituted through the act of obedience, not the other way around.
OK, so I will stop here. Thank you. Thank you so much.
That was intriguing. Fascinating as always and nice to read some Arabic on the screen.
We will come to those questions that viewers may have and please feel free to type
them up in the Q&A and we will address them in the final half of the broadcast.
I'd like to invite Lena at this point to give her presentation.
So Lena is I'm very happy to say of my colleague this year at St. Anthony's College and our colleague,
Professor Lena, and she's a scholar who specialises in critical theory in relation to law and history,
using interdisciplinary and critical methods to ask historically ethical and jurisprudential
questions of Islamic law and Jewish law in the late antique mediaeval and modern errors.
And the two of you are wonderful to have on the same panel,
especially because you are both historians with doctorates in that sort of area, but also legal scholars with shades.
And so I think this will make for a particularly illuminating conversation,
especially since your approaches, I'm sure, will be dramatically different.
And so I did want to highlight Nina's very important first book The Beginnings of Islamic Law Late Antique Islamic Legal Traditions,
which offers a historically grounded understanding of Islamic law.
She is also very prolific, and I've noticed you've been publishing quite a bit in the last year or year and a half.
So, you know, really sort of at the cutting edge of a number of different fields, and her publications are available on her academia page.
So I could go on Lena, but I'm going to at this point ask you to speak on your topic, which is reconsidering the political in pre-modern Islam.
So thanks for the invitation to participate in the series, I'm looking forward to the discussion.
Islamic political thought may be the most deeply politicised area of Islamic studies in the global north,
an inordinate amount of the scholarship revolves around asking the problematic question Can Muslims be politically modern?
This question motivates research that examines Islam and democracy, or Islam and human rights, or any number of other similar modern political forms.
Posing the question is incoherent because it is based on a centralisation of being Muslim and of being modern.
Consequently, attempting to answer this question is an intellectual trap.
I do not engage with pre-modern Islamic political thought with the objective of answering this false question or its corollaries.
Instead, I ask different questions and I would suggest, for instance,
the question How do Muslims in the modern era use the pre-modern Islamic tradition to articulate their politics?
Rejecting the conventional question also results in discarding conventional answers.
A primary conventional answer involves surveying the ideas of specific Muslims.
Recent scholarship constructs a canon of modern Muslim political thinkers, including with a lot of my duty and more recently,
I know this great men approach is a gross distortion because it misrepresents political thought as the product of certain famous men.
And not coincidentally, this approach reflects the misogyny in the field of Islamic studies.
Researchers who perpetuate the great men mythology misconstrue these prominent men as
representative of the Islamic traditions past or present in the present in an empirical sense.
These figures do not epitomise the entirety of the modern Muslim world or its political thought.
As for the past, these figures do not embody Islamic continuity.
Too many researchers view the claims of these specific men as facts rather than as interpretations.
In addition, much research separates theory from action, which is evident in how political theorists construct this canon of named men,
while political scientists study Islamist groups of largely unnamed men.
Both the question Can Muslims be politically modern?
And the purported answer this is how these famous men view moderate Muslim politics are unproductive.
To understand modern Islamic political thoughtfully, we need different questions and different research mystics.
pre-Modern Islamic political thought can illuminate both alternative questions and restricts.
So in my comments today, I will begin to address two interrelated issues.
First, how do we understand political thought in the pre-modern world? And second, how do we find political thought and pre-modern sources?
Before we can engage with these two questions, we must be clear on our baseline concept.
So I am using political broadly to mean matters of governance.
In considering these two issues, I'm building upon the theories and methods I've delineated in my previous scholarship.
I am not a political theorist, so I engage with pre-modern Islamic political thought through critical theory and Islamic law.
Critical theory, of course, intersects with political theory, and law is political,
so all of my scholarship previously has involved dimensions of Islamic political thought.
So I want to begin by exploring how pre-modern Muslims conceptualise political belonging in legal texts.
There is a consensus documented in late,
antique and mediaeval Islamic sources that all three adult and say Muslims are recognised as subject to the charity tax on their wealth.
pre-Modern Muslim jurists disagreed about the imposition of the charity tax on individuals without legal capacity,
such as minors and on individuals with questionable legal capacity and property rights, specifically slaves.
If the late antique Islamic taxation system was based on membership in the polity, then wealth was the key criterion for tax liability.
If the taxation system was based on belief, then intentionality to perform a ritual act was the key criterion for tax liability,
mostly an antique legal authorities obligated miners to pay the charity tax.
Since Muslim miners were not expected to fulfil ritual obligations because they lack intentionality,
most jurors viewed wealth as a prerequisite for the tax.
By comparison, mostly antique legal authorities did not require slaves to pay the charity tax.
Since Muslim slaves were expected to fulfil ritual obligations, most jurors viewed wealth and political status as prerequisites for the tax.
Simply put, many late antique legal authorities required miners, but not slaves,
to pay the charity tax because political belonging, rather than belief or intentionality, triggered the obligation to pay.
The legal reasoning underlining doctrinal rules about charity taxation reflect political thought.
Many pre-modern Muslim jurists viewed paying the charity tax as enacting Muslim citizenship.
I follow Elizabeth Cohen and recognising that citizenship is a gradient category and not a binary one.
Thus, there is a status in between citizens and non-citizens, which Cohen refers to as semi citizens,
because these exigencies was from the beginning, a means of taxing those members and pleasing members.
It corresponded to a political framework for defining citizenship.
And so my citizenship using the category of citizenship in late antique context is not anachronistic.
For those of May, maybe thinking it is citizenship like state is not a fixed category, but one that has historically specific meanings.
Consequently, late antique citizenship in a late antique state is distinct from modern citizenship in a modern nation state.
Moreover, citizenship is widely understood as a category that is applicable in pre-modern contexts.
So, for example, few people doubt the efficacy of the category of Roman citizenship.
The fact that Romans review commonly at citizens and Muslims as believers does not reflect
concrete differences between what it meant to be Roman or Muslim in late antiquity.
Instead, the tendency to characterise these groups differently reflects modern presumptions that are incongruent with the historical reality.
Simply put, in late antiquity, being Muslim was a form of citizenship that established political belonging.
Methodologically, my article taxing citizens social legal constructions of late antique Muslim identity demonstrates
how we can use a variety of pre-modern sources to reconstruct the political thought of jurists.
Late antique legal opinions surrounding the payment of the charity tax reveal how juries demarcated who is a Muslim,
which in a pretty secular world was a political identity. So if we were to tell a macro story about governance in the pre-modern Muslim world,
that story would narrate the growing power of the state and professionalisation of the state's
bureaucratic apparatus because the process of professionalisation was gradual and incremental.
The late antique period provides historical evidence for styles of governance that did not continue.
For instance, rulers during the late antique period played a larger role in interpreting and declaring Islamic law than rulers in successive periods.
Obviously, Muhammad passed judgements over the first Muslim community in both Mecca and Medina.
Likewise, the caliphs who succeeded him were not merely political leaders because they promulgated laws and shaped normative legal practises.
There aren't numerous legal opinions associated with each individual Caliph and Caliph.
Omar is even known to have dismissed judges for implementing substantive legal decisions that differed from his legal opinions.
Many were made, caliphs had some legal knowledge and were involved in the everyday practise of law.
So, for example, there's historical evidence that early on, Caliph held their own courts,
offered judges their legal opinions, tested judicial knowledge and dictated court procedural rules.
Notably, the relationship between and caliphs and American judges was not exclusively hierarchical.
So, for example, a modern judge ruled against the governor of Medina, No.
One. Thus, there was competition interaction and overlap between rulers, judges, jurists and other bureaucrats.
We need to recognise and understand this historical evidence because it corrects a prevalent romanticisation of pre-modern Islamic governance.
According to this idealistic projection, pre-modern Muslim jurists were entirely independent of the state.
This is simply is inaccurate. As I've explained elsewhere, states have been involved in the shaping of Islamic law from the beginning.
Despite the aspirations of pre-modern jurists, rulers endorsed legal schools,
appointed judges and have other broad scale influences on the shape and substance of Islamic law.
Of course, the modern nation state usurped the power of the jurists more extensively,
but it was not the first form of governance to compete with jurists.
Moreover, the romanticised narrative is a projection of European history and Eurocentric concepts that is,
many scholars in plot their narratives of Islamic history in imitation of a European history of church versus state conflict.
The church is represented as the an untranslated term that distorts the complex relationships amongst different types of scholars,
jurists, judges and other bureaucrats. This is another example of an untranslated term masking secular assumptions.
The phenomenon that I identified in my article decolonial translation There are many implications
for imposing a European model of church vs. state controversy in pre-modern Islamic history.
I'm only going to mention two here. First, much recent scholarship treat scholars like church clergy.
And as a result, the scholarship conflicts the Islamic tradition with the orthodoxy of a select group of scholars.
However, Muslim jurists and scholars are not the functional equivalent of clergy.
There was no church institution in pre-modern Islamic history, and scholars did not operate in a hierarchical structure.
Second, this Eurocentric misreading of Islamic history leads to the mistaken classification
of the pre-modern Islamic State as external to the Islamic tradition.
In reality, rulers and scholars were competing groups within the Islamic tradition.
So as we saw with the first historical example,
an obligatory state imposed tax that derives its legal validity from the Koran confuses modern legal categories.
The pre-modern Islamic charity tax does not correspond to the modern bifurcation between religion and the secular.
pre-Modern citizenship did not recognise a notion of religion.
As we saw with the second historical example, the competition interaction and overlap between rulers,
judges and jurists defy modern governance is centralisation.
Conventional scholarship focuses on the scholarly class in ways that I described as a secular translation of the Islamic tradition.
pre-Modern Islamic governance does not correspond to the secular bifurcation between church and state.
So when contemporary scholars research pre-modern Islamic political thought,
they frequently limit themselves to dimensions of the Islamic tradition that the contemporary scholar understands is political,
rather than to the dimensions of the tradition that pre-modern Muslims understood as political.
So this is not simply a matter of anachronism. pre-Modern political thought was not secular with these two brief historical examples.
I illustrated how secular political thought distorts pre-modern Islamic political thought.
It is important to keep in mind that how one understands pre-modern Islamic
political thought has direct implications for modern Islamic political thought.
Secular ideology constructs a problem space in which the secular, modern nation state is constantly demarcating a line between politics and religion.
This is not a line that can be drawn empirically.
It is a line that the modern nation state draws and moves in accordance with its particular material and ideological objectives.
So put differently, the modern nation state differentiates between two secular notions secular politics and religion,
because it serves its interests to do so. Secular ideology advocates of certain political doctrines.
First, secular ideology seeks to concentrate power in the institutions of the modern nation state,
and some of my previous scholarship have demonstrated both.
How secular ideology defines religion is the non secular and how this secular notion of religion models the pre-modern Islamic tradition.
One Secular ideology false to demarcate certain aspects of social life.
A separate and. It alters interrelated spheres such as ethics and politics.
Second, secular ideology asserts that law can only be positive law because the state seeks to maintain power through a unique vocal state law.
The secular notions of religion and positive law distort Islamic politics.
Now, in my experience, the historical theoretical arguments that underlie the critique of secularism cannot be explained in a short talk.
Understanding the critique necessitates extensive reading in the history of secularism and the genealogy of religion.
That is the modern history of secularism, because that's the key issue.
So rather than continuing to explain this critique of secular political thought,
I just want to suggest the readings identified on the slide and move on.
So when I began this talk,
I asserted that much recent scholarship is motivated by asking the problematic question Can Muslims engage in modern politics?
I want to return now to the question I posed as an alternative.
How do Muslims in the modern era use the pre-modern Islamic tradition to articulate their politics, as is common in similar contexts?
When contemporary individuals look to the pre-modern past, they see it through the lens of contemporary ideas and concerns.
Consequently, many prevalent assumptions about Islam's past are reflective of Islam's present.
This is not unique, of course, to Islam. Contemporary Islamists, though,
and the scholars who study them frequently rely on a set of false assumptions about pre-modern Islamic political thought,
and I presented two historical examples. Muslim belonging and the relationship between jurists and the ruler that defy conventional assumptions.
In addition, contemporary Muslims often make claims of authenticity or returning to the past.
That should be challenged because neither authenticity nor return are possible.
In many cases, instead of authenticity or return, we find hybridity in the specific case of modern Islamic political thought.
We find what I have called secular Islamization.
Secular Islamization is evident in how some Islamist groups adopt a modern secular notion of religion and imitate secular,
legal and political reasoning. I analogise this process to the placing of Islamic vocabulary in secular political sentences.
This is, of course, again not unique to the Islamic tradition. I hope that it is clear by now that what underlies the conventional question about the
possibility of Muslims engaging in modern politics is another ineffective question.
Can Muslims be secular? As I've demonstrated elsewhere, this question motivates much scholarship in Islamic studies today.
It is an analytically confused question because Islam and secularism are not mutually exclusive.
It is a misleading question because it directs attention towards a circular path enclosed
within secular ideology in order to reconsider the political in the Islamic tradition.
It must recognise that the political thought is neither trends historical nor transcultural.
Thank you. Fantastic, thank you very much.
Thank you, Mohammed. I think, you know, we really have two wonderfully rich papers which talk both to each other and in some ways against one another.
So we are open for questions. Members of the audience can write in their questions and the Q&A box of the chat box or raise their hands,
and also something I obviously will also ask questions.
And I just have a couple to begin with.
One. The one place where these two papers meet seems to be the claim,
a very interesting claim about the non-linear nature of authority, and this can go in so many different places.
So I just want to ask both of you, each of you, about that.
For Mohammed, the fact that there seems to be no real hierarchy in which appeals can be taken from one from,
you know, a subordinate authority to a superior one.
Do you think that suggests that sovereignty as you define it is fragmented because it is divided by the field that each authority encompasses?
You mentioned, for instance, how the Caliph can take on the role of authorities who are normally seen as subordinate to him,
and in this way his own authority gets to be divisible in feels like ways.
Is that one way in which you might think about what appears to be a fragmented form of sovereignty?
Perhaps another way of putting it is the Muslim community,
as the residual ground of the sovereignty is unable to manifest itself apart from in these varying authorities.
You also said something about the distinction between.
Insofar as justice or legitimacy is crucial to the acknowledgement of the sovereignty of any authority.
It seems to be more a kind of, if you will, ethical or even a philosophical principle rather than the law.
So three bits of questions, let's join together and then leader, if I might just ask you again,
this category of the non-linear nature, I think, is, you know, it's really, as I said, it can go in so many different places.
And I just wanted to ask whether without seeing it as being anarchistic in any way, though, it would be interesting if it were anarchistic.
You know how you might think about.
The anti hierarchical or the non-hierarchical nature of of authority and then in a sense, with your first example which had to do with property,
could you say something more about how property or ownership or wealth ends up configuring citizenship in a way that.
That has not really been taken into account as far as I know in the scholarship on Islamic politics.
I find that. Really, just a way of thinking,
because it might allow you to approach sort of European political theory and its fixation on property in a quite different way.
So, you know, your critical endeavour addresses not just the question of circularity which you rightly brought up,
but also that of ownership and property, which defined so much of early modern and modern political thought in Europe.
So sorry, rather shaggy dog questions, Muhammad. Perhaps you can begin.
Yeah. I mean, I think I wouldn't necessarily say non-linear.
That's not how I would describe it. What I would describe it as.
Shared sovereignty and sovereignty is shared throughout the community to all these different offices that these are coordinate offices,
each exercising a particular slice of sovereignty.
But that sovereignty is real in the sense that it doesn't depend for its vigour on the approval of the appointing authority.
Because the appointing authority is a sort of like the Caliph isn't appointing the judge in the way that I appoint somebody to build the deck for me.
This is the point of Casady, Casani is saying. Is acting as a messenger of the community to fulfil this function of discharging the rule of law.
And so that's a real sovereign function that now exists in the judge.
And so when the judge exercises that lawfully,
then that's that's just that that's a full act of sovereignty not dependent on the caliphs will in any sort of way.
Likewise, the kill off has personal capacity to adjudicate these disputes.
But that's not because he's superior. It's because he's taking on the trappings of being a judge.
In some sense, he's descending to the level of a judge when he wishes to do that.
And so I think what's I mean, I'm approaching this mainly from a perspective of a kind of liberal legal theorist here.
I know I like I have to get that to get Lina upset with me.
But my point is to try to say that in so many juridical thinking, the law constitutes sovereignty.
Sovereignty is not above the law the way some sort of crude Australians would view it.
So you have an unconstrained sovereign, the unconstrained commander. That's not the idea of Sunni sovereignty.
The idea of Sunni sovereignty is manifested through conformity with law.
Not. Being above it, that's sort of the the really essential point,
that's what allows for sovereignty to be shared across all these different offices and have a residual existence in the community members.
So for example, if the Noujaim,
who is a 16th century Egyptian hammer who has a very interesting epistle about what happens when when the governor dies and the sultan is done,
who has not sent a replacement yet? Who takes over?
Is it the commander of the garrison or is it the chief judge? And it goes back to again, this idea really gets to sort of the idea of, you know,
the exception, what happens when there's an exception to the regular constitutional order?
That's why you see the real sovereign right and the real sovereign arises.
You know, it's Lakshmi says, as James says is back in the community.
Although if the natural evolution is very clear, it's the judge.
It shouldn't go back to the the public to elect somebody new.
The judge should exercise sovereign powers until such time as the Sultan can send his inspection governor.
But my general approach is to look at the details of the rules of the law jurisdictional and procedural
to understand how sovereignty in a sense of final decision-making is normal will be constructed.
Thanks very much, Mohammed.
The issue of delegation here, because it seems to this endless everyone is a delegate and the sovereign cannot be manifested.
So anyway, turning to you, Lina, and then I noticed we have questions in the chat as well, and I'm sure Osama has some.
Yeah. Special thanks, I think that you picked up exactly on what I was thinking is where the overlap is between our two presentations,
which is this understanding of the pre-modern context is being one in which authority
or if you want to call it sovereignty is more horizontal and but also more shifting.
And so it's not a simple, linear vertical relationship between the sovereign and the states bureaucratic
apparatus that people would understand in the modern nation state framework. So I agree totally with them Hamlet's presentation on those points.
You didn't talk that much about liberal things today, so actually there wasn't a lot to disagree.
You didn't bring up Rawls for the first time in a long time. So so far, we've been great.
But on the second question, the citizenship issue.
So the parts of the things I discussed about citizenship is based on this article that I published a few years ago on taxing citizens.
And really, the first criterion is political status. It's not wealth.
Wealth only come. So I wouldn't use the concept of property and all of the modern concepts related to it because
property is only secondary to the issue as to whether or not you're liable to pay the tax.
And so the liability to pay the tax is a place where you can see how the jurors are and I believe, constructing political membership.
And the reason why this is significant is because it really changes the framework for how we understand non-Muslims in the Islamic Empire.
So it's not only about what it tells us about political belonging of Muslims,
but also what it says about the semi citizens, these non-Muslims and what their status is.
And the moment you stop sort of projecting these religious ideas that come from
modern secular notions and then rethink governance in terms of citizenship status,
then everything looks very different. But it also looks more historically contextual, which is the point of the Roman citizenship comparison,
because the poll tax is, as we know, was very common in the Roman Empire.
So it's not as if any of these policies that we see in the Islamic Empire vis-a-vis defining citizenship were somehow unique to the Islamic Empire.
And so that's why I emphasise thanks for the question.
Thanks very much, Osama. So I'm tempted to let the attendees go first, if that's all right.
I mean, I know that Ahmadinejad put his hand up Latika, and then we had to question, So, so shall we?
I don't know which one came first. Ahmed Silex hand was up earlier, and so I met.
If you want to make yourself visible and ask your question and I'll allow you to talk.
Hi, first, I would like to say thank you both, because it was wonderful programme event.
My name is Ahmet Gennych. I do jet skis in roasty,
intelligent apartment and I work on my dissertation currently on actually the title of my title of my dissertation is traces of sovereignty,
multiple multiple political layers of Islamic political thought.
Particularly, I focus on Al-Marayati al-Husseini and part of my question I have two questions actually one to Mohamed father, the other, as you know.
And my first question is that based on your presentation,
what I understood is that actually the sovereign power of any kind of ruler is grounded on the law, the Shariah and these Shariah.
When I look at my work and wani,
especially when it's very clear when he says that Islamic polity and Islamic community is possible and can survive when even there is no ruler,
there is no government, when even there is no Khalifa or emir or rally.
So Khomeini can survive.
And he said that the mujahideen, then the mufti and the scholars should take care of the rulership leadership in the community.
So from here and from what you have said, what I understand is that the foundation of Islamic political thought is the common ground.
Well, let's say epistemic and moral ground accepted and embraced by the community in another world.
It is the will and the consent of the community.
And their agreement on certain epistemic way of looking at the world is the foundation of Islamic political thought and Islamic sovereignty.
Would you agree with that or what we think about that?
Would you like me to go to the second can be quite concise with Nina's question just so that everyone gets a chance.
Yeah, sure. Just from afar, the what I read is that actually unlike secular politics,
especially as you emphasise the church versus state in Islamic tradition, religion which is metaphysical until logical assumptions.
Religion is a kind of mediator between politics, power and community and people.
So it's quite not opposite, but so different than the European historical experience.
Would you agree with this role of religion, like mediation between politics and political elites and people and community?
Thank you so much. Thank you very much for your question.
I'll go ahead just because he's directed his question first to me, so I thank you for your question.
I think what you said I largely agree with, I'm going to point out that a friend of mine, my daughter Majid,
wrote a very and just published a very interesting paper about uranium in the European Journal of Political Philosophy,
I believe, which talks about uranium and the exception in Islamic political thought.
And I think he uses the concept of the common sense sovereign as sort of arguing
his ultimate account for how Islam survives in the absence of an organised state.
That there's this idea of the sovereignty of the average person to understand the basic
requirements of all of the law and that it can survive through that common sense sovereign.
Now, I think this is actually a really important theme.
It's something I, you know, I've talked about in other occasions that you see in Khazali, although bizarrely, you know, he he's very protean himself.
But in this argument that he makes in the context of defending the [INAUDIBLE] against the claims of the Israelis,
he he resorts to this idea of a common sense law firm saying that, you know, the Israelis claim you need to have this impeccable imam.
In order to live a life pleasing to God and go, Karzai says, no, you don't.
All you need is to have, you know, a basic sense of moral uprightness, not perfection.
And then you can study the law and live reasonably by it.
You don't need an impeccable imam. You just sort of need sort of kind of what I call tongue in cheek, adequate amount of virtue.
You don't need to have a sort of a perfect or superhero super heroic amount of virtue.
Adequate virtue is more than enough and adequate virtue is present amongst any sort of normal community of human beings.
And so that has its own assumptions about human nature and about God and about what God demands of people.
And, you know, just to rock back, go back to my presentation. It's interesting that when Malik talks about the legitimacy of decisions of arbitrators,
rulers or whatever, he doesn't talk about them being correct in their decisions.
All he says is that their decision should not be manifestly unjust.
So it's the same kind of idea. You know, again, tongue in cheek, I talk about Sunni political thought as a republic of adequate virtue.
That's sort of the the desert gerada adequate virtue, not anything more,
but the belief that human beings are capable of achieving that level on their own, essentially in a post-traumatic world.
This reminds me of Patricia Khronos remark about cynicism, about being, you know,
let's just let's just do the best that we can kind of being the ethos of Sunni political thought, honest.
But I wanted to hand over to Lina, you had a question directed towards you.
You have question directed towards you in the Q&A, so please feel free to we'll get to that in just a moment as well.
OK, so thanks Ahmed, for your for your question. I wouldn't use the word religion to describe anything in pre-modern Islam.
I use the word tradition. So did Muslims, in the pre-modern context, think that the tradition was a way of mediating between community and politics?
Yes, absolutely. I don't think that that's a stretch of the imagination so that it's an easy answer, basically.
Do you want me to answer the next question? You mean Alex Hanley's question?
Okay, so and I also wanted to point out, I mean, a number of your interlocutors for both of you are in the call or the people.
I mean, in the sense of even Noujaim has mentioned some,
you use the question of religion that comes up with Alex is also something that Russia and best he's talked about.
He's in the Andrew much here, obviously sort of for sovereignty and in the modern period.
So I think there's.
I just want to welcome our colleagues and say that if you'd like to interject as well, I'm sure Lina and Mohammed will be more than happy here.
Lina, do you want me to read the question just so that you can respond to it?
Or would you like to read it? Well, I can read it. Please do so.
If religion is a problematic category for pre-modern history because it is a modern secular invention, what about politics?
Do you think there may be problems with talking about Islamic politics? So.
Timothy Fitzgerald very famously has written about this issue, and he rejects the category of politics for these reasons.
This is why, though I disagree with him about this, and this is why I gave a definition of politics as being matters of governance.
So I gave you a trans historical, trans cultural definition of politics,
not an essentialist one, but one that is that functions basically across time and place.
And I made a distinction between secular politics and politics.
Ridloff and what I said very specifically, is that it's secular politics that distorts understandings of pre-modern Islamic political thought.
So I don't have a problem with the category of politics itself.
Can I, if facially allow me to as well if I can just sort of pick up on the point that you've just made, Lina?
I mean, do you have any thoughts on using categories that are indigenous to a tradition like Dean and saying
that this is close enough to influence our understanding of how we should conceptualise religion?
Kind of what Russian Embassy has done in his work as something akin to what I'm trying to do in Detroit as well.
My article, decolonial translation, explains why that translation of Dean as religion is wrong,
and it didn't begin until the modern era, and the usage of the word was understood to mean tradition or law.
We can see this in translations of the Koran into Latin, into other European languages.
In the middle people era was the word religion was not used.
More importantly, the word religion. The concept of religion is a modern concept, and it's defined by secular ideology, which is a modern concept.
So I've explained this in many articles, so I don't really want to go into this issue again.
It's important for us to differentiate between concepts that are trans,
historical and trans cultural and concepts that are actually modern and Eurocentric.
And for me, having studied the history of secularism and the genealogy of religion,
I find it difficult to believe that anyone would take the word religion and think that that can somehow be trans, historical and trans cultural.
When there is an enormous amount of scholarship by very good scholars showing that the word religion, the concept of religion, not the word,
because there's a difference between terms and concepts, but that the concept of religion can somehow be found in pre-modern texts.
It cannot. But that's really not the point of today's discussion.
So I would just say read my decolonial translation article in my blog post on Europe centrism of secularism.
Can I just is I'm just going to gently disagree with with Lina, and I don't want I don't want this to go off the rails about this.
I don't know, but this is where we disagree. Look, I know we disagree with the female artist,
but I'm just going to just throw this out there for just for the benefit of others since this came up.
I think Jeffrey Stout has a very interesting series of lectures that he gave at a British university.
I think the Gifford lectures on natural religion.
This a series of lectures on natural religion where he certainly gives an alternative genealogy of the term religion,
and he makes a distinction between religion and faith.
And he identifies the idea of faith as being born in in that sort of.
As being a particularly Protestant Reformation idea, which he says is a very distinct idea from religion.
And he says religion, you find could go back to. Roman authors like Cicero, and that religion is just considered a virtue that, you know,
and even mediaeval writers prior to the Reformation recognised religion as a kind of civic virtue that is not particular to creed.
Right? It's the Protestant Reformation that introduces this new idea of faith,
which is sort of irrationally tied to conscious that has sort of the radical transformation of these things.
Now I want one one final point in the Islamic context because, you know,
I read I read Lena's essay very carefully to Hamdi and his definition of it in his encyclopaedia a it's allowed to follow in his definition of Dean.
One of the definitions he mentioned is it. So it's not just it's not just law, it's not just practise.
It's also subjective beliefs. But I don't want to go into all of this.
I never denied that. But that's not the point. The point is whether you can divide those into separate categories.
And it's the division that is modern and Eurocentric and a result of secularism didn't exist.
A secular ideology. Any case, I don't want to get to that.
Well, before you sort of moot, I'm going to direct the next question at you.
Okay. I come back to my own questions for both of you.
And if you have further questions, please feel free to jump in. So anonymous attendee in this case, same professor father mentioned.
I mentioned how pre-modern governance was suffering because of its ability to establish rule of law as opposed to vice versa.
Does he likened that to modern the modern state in that regard?
Postcolonial scholarship argues that the modern state typically establishes sovereignty by a monopoly of violence.
How is that contrasted or likened to pre-modern Islamic governance?
Well, you know, if you look at somebody like Mousavi and his description of the incidents to the contract of the caliphate,
he notes that having a monopoly over coercion more or less is a is a necessary incident of the contract.
Now, he doesn't use that phrase.
What he says is that in contracting the caliphate, we agree to divest ourselves of the ability of enforcing the law, right?
And so there is a distinct crime in Islamic law called IFTTT. Which more or less can be translated as vigilantism?
Right? So again, but it's complicated because in some cases,
jurist permits permit self-help if it can be done without a risk of violence where there is a
risk of violence and it's forbidden and it can be punished even if it's substantively correct.
So if you look at chapters on retaliation, the source,
at least the molecules are quite clear that you might have a lawful entitlement to exact vengeance on someone,
but you can't do it until the person is actually convicted and you get permission of the ruler.
Otherwise, you've committed a crime.
So there is this idea that the state has a particular claim to rightful use of coercion and that that's a necessary incident of sovereignty.
But that's not the whole of it, right? Because it's got to be used in a lawful way.
Right. And I mean, this would seem to make a fair amount of sense within the the logic of any kind of political enterprise or
state enterprise that you if once you sort of like distribute those final decision making opportunities,
you've distributed sovereignty to an extent that may begin to divide the identity of the state to a set?
I don't know if you would agree with that,
but it would seem that what we talk about is the monopoly of violence is something that is very much detectable within an Islamic law.
Well, I think what I would say in terms of dividing the and the identity of the state.
I think the whole point of Gadhafi's book is to show why that's not the case,
because when people are actually exercising genuine sovereign authority, that means everybody else has to recognise it, right?
And so when and this is at the highest level on the lowest level.
So when the tax collector collects taxes and that decision is viewed as a valid exercise of sovereign power,
then everybody else in the community has to recognise it and can't contested on the ground.
Well, I disagree with your interpretation of tax law, for example, right?
And so despite the fact that sovereignty is distributed because it is sovereign.
There's unity and universal recognition. At least according to Gadhafi.
That's the whole point of of of of giving it the legal authority of sovereignty because now everybody's compelled to recognise it as final.
Even if you disagree with it, that's what it means to have a sovereign authority.
Your decision is recognised as valid and binding on everybody else. Thank you.
So, first of all, if you would like to ask anything, please feel free. Yeah, no.
I, you know, I was just reminded of some of, you know,
a previous seminar in which leading you are very right made the argument that sovereignty was impersonal in pre-modern Islam,
which seems to align with what Muhammad has said. But. Right.
She also went further. You will recall to suggest that which I thought was very interesting, that one of the implications of this in personality.
Had to do with the fact that even the offices. That can be variously sovereign and mammoth, as mentioned,
the war may not be able to encompass the idea of it so that it is always possible for any individual
to lay claim to a sovereign act in the absence of the bulk of the action of the authorities concerned.
And so I wanted to ask both Mohammed and Lina actually what room they see existing for.
We don't have to use the term sovereignty.
We can use authority political authority outside the designated offices of the Imam Wali, etc. Caliph Sultan.
And this brings me back to my early, somewhat in jest in a way suggested of an anarchistic mode of politics.
It has to it is impossible to think about legitimate but not necessarily legal forms of either sovereignty or authority in this pre-modern world.
Go ahead. Mm hmm. You know, I think this is what actually makes this psychological thought very modern.
So Martin Loughlin in England, I can remember, I think he's in King's College London.
He's a political theorist through constitutional affairs.
He points out that it's an essential attribute of modern sovereignty, that it's always contestable.
That's what makes it modern because it's based on a principle of legitimacy that is always contestable.
And that is what gives Sunni political theory credible and stability because it's always possible to challenge it as being unlawfully exercised.
So a jurist that you know, I've read a lot.
When I was studying Maliki fifth in 18th century, Maliki named the last year who was a very prominent Sufi.
He is extremely anti Ottoman. I mean, it's kind of shocking how anti ottoman he is.
He he certainly in many of his many passages in his work, he says, you know,
these are the rules that apply if there is a vacuum shuddering, but there isn't a hackneyed sharia in Iraq and Egypt.
Right. And so this sort devolves. So this is the rule that applies, right?
And so, yeah, I think. The other commentator is absolutely right that there is always this potential for someone to claim sovereignty because,
as I said, the sovereign is immaterial. It's the Muslim community. That's an idea.
It's not embodied in any person. No person can claim to embody it.
Now, one thing that I would just want to clear clarify this is only one tradition.
This is the juridical tradition. The juridical tradition is impersonal, but at the same time, particularly after the Mongol invasion,
you have a completely different ideas of political legitimacy that are coming from Central Asia that are very personalised.
Right. And I think the Ottomans have a lot of sort of schizophrenia, and they're the tactics of modern legitimation they employ, right?
So Hussein Yilmaz, who's in the audience, was one of our speakers who, you know,
spoke precisely to this, you know, the Ottoman claiming of the caliphate and what it entailed.
But Lina? Yeah. So I think we do agree that political authority was something that was the object of competition interaction overlap,
that there were multiple groups, not only jurists, but other types of scholars who were competing for four forms of political authority.
I wouldn't. I mean, I always get uncomfortable when I hear centralisation.
So the claim that somehow modern sovereignty is contestable as if pre-modern sovereignty was not would for me be
problematic because I think that what we should always do is look comparatively and contextually and historically.
And so nothing that I've said today about the Islamic tradition is specific really to the Islamic tradition.
I mean, there are analogies or comparisons I can make to the Jewish tradition.
There are things that I could say that are similar about other traditions.
And the key issue is the ways in which the isolation of the Islamic tradition as the
contemporary liberal antithesis then imparts the narrative in a particular way.
So part of what I was pushing back against when I made the comments about the church versus state and allotment
of the narrative is that the role map the scholars have become like this kind of cemented church configuration,
and we hear it also with the ways in which we constantly hear the great men there,
like the popes, like we hear the names of these great male scholars constantly.
And actually, the picture in the pre-modern context is far more diffusive.
There's a lot more people competing,
and it isn't the case that it's now where the origin or others who are defining what political thought is for the entire society.
There's actually all of these jurists and all of these low level bureaucrats and all of these
other people who are participating in this process and they have certain claims and the killings,
of course, and they have certain claims of political authority that have to be recognised, I think.
If I can sort of briefly ask Lina yourself a question, but it ties in with something that wants, says Mohammed as well.
And to a certain extent, it ties in with, you know, the work of another of our colleagues.
Andrew marches on the sort of Zoom call, which is that you have, you know,
also the way in which contemporary Muslim to draw on that tradition in order to legitimise certain types of practises.
So. And this is where I struggle a little with sort of a critical theoretical approach or whether it's,
you know, deconstruction or structural ism and so on,
which is extremely useful for poking holes in the sort of like hegemonic narratives or mass narratives that we we are used to hearing and which I,
I, I appreciate, you know, your sort of desire to really take the sledgehammer to whenever possible.
But when it comes to the question of constructing an alternative to in the Middle East, for example, the context where there's, you know,
authoritarian rulers who draw on the Islamic tradition, also to construct their own sort of stories of legitimacy,
what sort of constructive stories are possible to like?
What is your thoughts on the way in which someone like Andrew much provides this great man history narrative and admittedly of the rise?
And you know, this is a question to Mohammad as well.
The invention, as Andrew puts it, of sovereignty, a sovereignty of the people as a modern idea, then legitimate democratic sort of practise,
which many of us would think is very important actually in the sort of in the Muslim world considering certain circumstances.
Although, I mean, taking into consideration the problems that are endemic to democracy as practised in the West,
which, you know, someone say colourfully describes as Western plutocracy rather than Western democracy.
Bearing that in mind,
what sort of constructive projects are possible and what do you think of this kind of narrative of the creation of a sovereignty of the people?
Is that something I actually hear resonances of in what Mohamed, you've said today?
OK, so first, I have to make a comment as a critical theorist,
that this kind of critique of critique is being only deconstructive is problematic when it's not actually based on specific examples.
So all of my work is both deconstructed and reconstructive.
The odd number of chapters of my book are deconstructed. The even number of chapters are reconstructed.
When I talked about the charity taxation, I gave you a deconstructive perspective on this category religion.
And I reconstructed the category of citizenship. When I talked about the macro history, I gave you a reconstructed macro history first,
and then I deconstructed and told you that the church versus state narrative was problematic.
So to begin with, I have to say I think that what happens a lot with audiences and a lot of readers, especially Islamic studies,
is that they become so uncomfortable by the deconstructed aspects that they become blind to all of the reconstruction I'm doing.
And so first, it's there's always reconstruction. That's part of it.
So it is there. And I on the specific issue of how you do the reconstruction when you're talking about modern political thought or modern,
in my case, legal thought, I've done that very explicitly in my article comparing Islamic international laws of war.
I mentioned that in the end when I talked about the category of secular Islamization. So I think that there are very clear ways of articulating,
but the kind of modern dynamics that you're talking about with the articulation of those modern dynamics has to be based,
from my perspective, on analytically rigorous concepts.
And so what I see in the scholarship on moderate Islamist politics is a lot of decentralisation,
a lot of conflation of orthodoxy with the Islamic tradition, a lot of inability to differentiate different concepts and categories.
So when contemporary actors draw upon the tradition, as I said in my talk, they are making interpretations of that history.
They're not necessarily narrating to you historical facts. There's a difference between what we,
as scholars do and what historical actors or historical agents claim they are doing or contemporary actors or agents are doing.
But we have to be critical in our assessment of what they claim to be doing.
So I don't want to I don't know Andrew's work on the invention of sovereignty of people well enough to offer a critique,
but I don't have any specific comments on that. All I'm saying is that for me, what I see over and over again is scholars of modern Islamic politics,
basing themselves on the shaky foundations of misunderstandings of pre-modern Islamic political thought.
And so what I pointed out is certain ways in which they make presumptions about a church state controversy.
They make presumptions about the applicability of the category of religion
that then has implications for how they're assessing modern Islamic thought. Thank you.
First of all, I think all acts of construction. Are Intel creative destruction?
Yes. And you don't even need to be a modern Muslim to see that, and if you look at the work of a 5th century jurist,
the way they read their forebears from three centuries earlier.
I would describe it as acts of creative destruction, right in the Schopenhauer instance, right?
You're you're transforming your material as you're as you're reproducing it.
So I don't worry so much about whether modern thinkers are distorting some kind of historical past.
I mean, I think that's inevitable in in what constructive work is all about, right?
Because you're always speaking to your own moment. And the question is, are you using as know from for the constructive perspective, are you?
Are you working creatively with your materials? Is it something that looks like?
Is it going to be something that at the end of the day, people are going to look and say,
Wow, this is this is a beautiful work of theory, for example, talking about theories.
Or is it like a Frankenstein or is just put together?
You also say think that modern Islamic law was the problem with it?
So it's an aesthetic criticism that it doesn't look like a a well ordered system of law.
That's so there's a kind of repulsion to it for somebody that has a juristic aesthetic, right?
And so a construction is successful when people sort of look at it and see it.
Oh, this is a this is an integrated whole. It seems to work together.
It's not really. It doesn't succeed because it's reflecting accurately the past.
It's succeeding because it transforms the past in a way that the readers find persuasive or the people who engage with it find it persuasive.
Right. And I think that's a that's a, you know, a critical thing for now is that as a Muslim intellectual, it's really important.
I mean, part of being colonised is that you are not entitled to actually engage in re appropriations of your past.
I mean, I'm an American. I'm in a Canadian understated loss school.
My colleagues who do Anglo-American law are perfectly entitled to talk about the common law as you know,
and go back for hundreds of years for finding rule of law, right like the Magna Carta.
I mean, we really believe this myth that our modern liberties come from the Magna Carta five, whatever.
Right? But why is it somehow outrageous when contemporary Muslim thinkers seek to appropriate their own tradition?
Why is that then sort of characterised as the most reactionary project on the planet that must be bombed out of existence?
I mean, literally. Right. And so there is, I think, a real politics to this right that there has to be space for legitimacy, Muslim Constructivism.
Right. I mean, criticise it in the way you would criticise anything else,
but it's just it's just it's kind of crazy when you think about the fact that people
really think you're going to solve terrorism by banning it in this time of year. Seriously, I mean, let's just think about that, right?
I mean, serious people actually believe this. Right.
And so if you re if you take in the time here seriously, you engage with them.
As a Muslim, you are actually taking the risk of being identified as an extremist and a terrorist.
And this is kind of insane. These reflect these sorts of constraints, of course, which we've been working under,
you know, in a very striking way for the last 22 years, 20 plus years.
But in some respects, I mean this, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to highlight that Nina does a lot of work in
decolonial theory that we live in the sort of like shadow of 500 years of colonialism.
And in many respects, everyone here is extremely privileged to have always been a, you know, esteemed,
globally recognised universities, but we're also complicit in that sort of process of colonisation.
I really sort of like I'm heartened by your complaint, Mohammed, that you know,
there needs to be sort of more of a space for thinking about these sorts of things without the security state sort of bearing down upon us.
I had sort of other questions and reflections, but I'm a bit conscious of time, we've got six minutes left.
I did want to ask if anyone has any final questions, please feel free to ask.
I didn't want to hear Gemini's the remainder of the discussion. So really up to you.
What we do next? No, I just think if there are no further questions, I mean, in a way, what do you know?
What's come up in the last few comments is the issue of context and whether it is the great man theory or,
you know, what can contemporary intellectuals actually constructively get from their past?
You know, these questions seem to circle around, if you will.
Quentin Skinner can claim of context being absolutely crucial for thinking about political thought.
And of course, in some ways, this by default renders everything that's non western European even legitimate.
It cannot be described as political thought, because the very often the the intellectual context is fragmented.
People are not reading the same things. There has been a gap. All of those things.
Now, as Mohammed suggests, whether or not actually even Western European political,
what can be understood realistically as being wedded to a context in the way that's going to suggest this is a separate question,
but I wonder whether. Context taken in that sentence might actually prove to be counterproductive.
You know, how might it be possible to think about political pot in a way that is not bounded?
Which is not to say that we don't a historic size or that we don't do what Lena very correctly says we should do,
which is make the distinctions between pre-modern and modern, past and future,
etc. as visible as we possibly can, but rather that even if we are thinking about, say,
either pre-modern or modern intellectual history or political thought without having to translate from one to the other,
the fact that we don't necessarily have a canary and type context of continuous or apparently continuous thinking,
it might pose a problem, but it might actually be an opportunity as well.
And I just wonder sometimes whether some approaches to thinking about great men and they are always men.
Sadly, as you know, voices projecting from a period or a past is in some way a kind of rearguard action of a refit retrofitting context.
In a minimal way around an individual, because it's not so available in a in a more general form anyway.
Just some thoughts lead. I don't know if you have any comment on that. I see there is a question on chat as well.
So there's I take your point completely, which is that there's always a certain amount of danger to contextualisation because where
does the contextualisation end and what contextualisation is included and what's excluded,
right? Because it's actually an act. It's not a passive sort of thing.
It's it's it's constructive in a very clear way when you define what a context is.
But I use contextualisation to mean historicism and in my case, specifically radical historicism as a way of understanding genealogy.
So as I think Faisal and I agree, religion has a colonial genealogy.
We know that the concept of religion was disseminated throughout the world through colonialism,
and so rejecting the category of religion is an anti-colonial move.
This is why decolonial theorists recognise religion like the categories of race,
ethnicity and gender were articulated in colonial contexts in particular ways.
But there is a question in the Q&A that I'm going to try to answer please.
That's OK. We come to the conclusion, Peter. Yeah.
So the question is basically what does that contemporary Western Academy specifically in terms of who works on Islamic legal theory?
What miss when it comes to critical legal critical theory? So I can answer this very simply, which is that scholars who work on Islamic theory,
legal theory or scholars who work on Islamic law basically don't have critical theory training.
So there is no critical theory in the study of Islamic law.
Today, they're there basically isn't anything so missing.
They miss everything. I mean, but that's you know, as you also saw in this discussion, if you're starting from a critical perspective,
then there's going, you're going to reach an impasse very quickly where you don't have a place to agree.
So if, for example, we can't agree that religion is a modern concept in that it's colonial, then the discussion stops at some point.
Thank you. Yeah, that is appropriate a time as any to actually close the discussion with Osama if you do us a favour.
Sure. I really am grateful to both of you for a at times rather spirited discussion and I think all the better for it.
And I look forward to you both sort of joining us in person at some point.
Well, I mean, in the case of, you know, we have the pleasure of having you for a few more years.
And I also wanted to just say that this is the last of this term's seminar series.
We're going to resume with another five seminars next term. These will be advertised, I hope, within the next couple of weeks.
So please keep your eyes open for that.
If anyone is interested in watching the RE recordings, please go to the YouTube channel for the Middle East Centre Oxford.
And if you'd like to be on the mailing list, obviously have a look at the St. Anthony's College website.
The events will be up.
You can register there, but you can also write to to myself, and I will sort of pass your email on if you'd like to be on the mailing list.
But thank you very much and thank you, Faisal, for really sort of bringing this together, suggesting this as an idea.
So is Faisal that he was the evil mastermind behind all of this and very much appreciated.
And thank you, everyone for your attendance and participation. Thank you all.
Very nice to see you, Mohammed Lina and I hope to meet soon. Yes.
Have a great day. Thank you. They kept alive.