Religion and the State - Middle East - The Shia-sunni Controversy, The Early Modern Islamic States, From Secularization To Islamic Revivalism
prophet authority message muslim
The relationship between religious and political domains in Islam is extraordinarily complex and is rooted in a rich conceptual and a long (although conflicting) institutional tradition. Koranic verses clearly endorse the prophet Muhammad's spiritual and temporal authority. Muslims agree that he was the sole transmitter of the divine message, the most qualified person to decide the meaning and application of that message, and the ultimate authority in applying that message. Several Koranic verses, for example 3:32, 3:132, 4:42, 4:80, and particularly 4:59, call Muslims to obey Muhammad and his appointees. The first Muslim commonwealth, the city-state of Yathrib, which was later called Madinat al-Nabi (the "City of the Prophet"), was established on the conceptual basis of this unified authority. The prophet led the Friday prayers, acted as a judge, was the supreme commander of the Muslim forces, and appointed governors and ambassadors. A sovereign exercising both temporal and spiritual authorities remained ideal to a number of Muslim medieval political theorists such as al-Farabi (d. 950), who at the same time recognized the difficulty of finding a legitimate contender for such a position.
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The majority of Muslims refer to the first four caliphs after Muhammad's death, including 'Ali (who was widely regarded as the fourth caliph), as the "Righteous" or "Rightly Guided" caliphs. While there is no question of their having wielded prophetic authority, prophethood having come to an end with the death of Muhammad, they nonetheless hold both religi…
The Mongol invasion and the fall of Baghdad (1258) put an effective end to the caliphal system. Religious authority was officially separated from and formally subjugated to the political authority. The underlying tension between religious and political authority has, however, remained a central problem of modern Islamic history. By the early modern period, the Ottoman state, which owed its legitim…
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Muslim world in the Middle East witnessed a general turn toward secularization. Ottoman reform movements in the nineteenth century (the Tanzimat and, later, that of the Young Turks) and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905–1911) were examples of attempts to duplicate European models of building modern states, with separation of r…
Abu Rabi', Ibrahim M. Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence in the Modern Arab World. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996. Al-Farabi, Abu Nasr. On the Perfect State. Translated by Richard Walzer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Algar, Hamid. Wahhabism: A Critical Essay. Oneonta, N.Y.: Islamic Publications International, 2002. Black, Anthony. The History of Islamic Political Thought: From…
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