Imagining the Islamic International Society

Rethinking International Societies

The World Imagined is a remarkable contribution to IR. Spruyt develops two sets of arguments. First, he redefines international society as going beyond what is commonly, though mistakenly, known as the Westphalian system. In the author’s account, collective beliefs play a key role in shaping political order in societies, including international societies. In expanding the category of international society, Spruyt rightly asserts that each society should be treated on its own terms rather than essentialising it simply as a way to make it a useful tool of comparison to European international society – a comparison often used to show deficiencies in non-European societies and the superiority of European societies. In addition to highlighting IR’s tendencies to ‘Otherise’ non-Europeans, Spruyt makes a case for the virtues of non-European international societies. For example, he reminds us that the heterogeneity of multi-ethnic empires allowed much more diversity, civility, and tolerance than did modern nation states’ tendencies toward homogenisation (p. 213). All in all, Spruyt’s work encourages IR scholars to explore different historical configurations to expand IR’s vocabulary for the international order.

Spruyt’s second argument delves into the encounter between European and non-European state systems and challenges the conventional narrative about the expansion of European international society. For Spruyt, this expansion was not a uniform or unidirectional process. Non-European polities creatively adapted the norms of European international society, but in the process, they often faced double standards and found themselves vulnerable to European imperialism. ¹ The nation-state system and Westphalian sovereignty of European international society gradually became the norm, and ultimately most polities would conform to this model. Still, learning about non-European societies is not merely a historical exercise. The norms of non-European international society are still relevant in contemporary international society and understanding these non-European international societies can expand IR’s conceptual repertoire.

To further elaborate on and support these two sets of arguments, Spruyt examines three pre-modern international societies: the Sinocentric East Asian order, the Islamic world stretching from North Africa and the Middle East to Mughal India, and the Southeast Asian Galactic order. If not exclusively, Confucian principles established the norms and principles of the East Asian tributary system with China as its dominant state. For Spruyt, what brought the Islamic world together was not a dominant state but rather shared beliefs and a common discourse grounded in Islamic teachings, particularly Shari’a, and Central Asian Turco-Mongolian state traditions. The Galactic order had neither a dominant state nor a dominant religion, but Hindu and Buddhist influences, intertwined with local beliefs, shaped the basis of a non-territorial logic of social and political order, which established a common framework and discourse for the legitimation of East Asian international society.

This is an ambitious and rich book. It convincingly provincialises the European experiment rather than taking as given its centrality, inevitability, or superiority in the evolution of modern international society, and it reclaims non-European actors as creators of international practices, norms, and societies and as creative adapters in their encounters with European international society. In examining non-European international societies, Spruyt brings numerous interdisciplinary and eclectic examples, from Chinese-Vietnamese relations to Safavid Art, and from a discussion of Shari’a and siyar to Hindu numerology. In doing so, he offers concepts, such as ecumene, multivocality, gravitational fields, heterarchical system, the mandala configuration, and Galactic Empire (pleasing the Star Wars nerds in some of us), in order to study political orders, configurations, and interactions beyond those established by nation states or traditional empires.

But like any ambitious work, Spruyt’s excludes as much as it includes. In the historical narratives for example, the role of religious and trade networks crisscrossing steppes and oceans as well as within and across international societies deserve more attention rather than being cast to the sidelines. ² In his discussion of Western/non-Western encounters, Spruyt neglects the role of race and racism; his references to modern international society provide nothing on the role of international organisations, international law, or human rights. While collective beliefs are central to the discussion, Spruyt does not offer much on how these ideas emerge, spread, and transform.

I do not mean to suggest his lengthy book should be any lengthier. I wondered, however, why Spruyt felt the need to provide the basics of Islam or Ottoman History. To me, this need points to a bigger problem in IR: the literature still lacks a baseline understanding of non-Western histories, religions, and ideas. Worse, the conventional understandings include so much confusion and prejudice against non-Western histories and beliefs that scholars like Spruyt need to dispel these first. For example, he discusses what jihad, Dar al-Islam, Dar al-Harb, and Shari’a are not before using them to dispute the conventional arguments for the incompatibility of Islamic empires with territoriality and sovereign equality. Worse still, any time Islam’s basics are presented in this way, prior to the analysis, it tends to cast Islam as so exotic that IR scholars always have to have this explained.

The World Imagined would have been an even better book had Spruyt used the key terms of his central argument consistently. For example, in some places the argument is that political systems are ‘based on’ (p. 5) or ‘create[d]’ by (p. 10) collective beliefs, but in other places the argument is diluted to that of collective beliefs that ‘inform,’ (p. 11) ‘influence,’ (p. 6) ‘play an integral role,’ (p. 9) or they are merely ‘relevant’ (p. 331) to political systems. The range from ‘create’ to ‘[be] relevant’ is too broad and thus limits the usefulness of the concept of collective beliefs as an analytical tool. The nature of the work and its emphasis on the ‘historical-interpretative’ (p. 6) and protean role of collective beliefs excuse some of this variation, but it would be useful to be consistent (or upfront) by developing a typology to describe this range, especially when the author makes a claim of showing ‘the causal significance of shared belief systems’ on political orders (p. 330).

Back to the 1990s

There’s something very 1990s IR about The World Imagined. First, it reads as a sequel to Spruyt’s first book, Sovereign State and Its Competitors, in which he masterfully offered a complex history of the rise of modern national states and questioned the conventional view of teleological historical evolution from the feudal system to the nation-state system. ³ In the post-feudal Middle Ages in Western Europe, sovereign states had many competitors, including city-states and urban leagues. Among its competitors, the sovereign state triumphed. Arguing against the explanation based on military power, Spruyt attributes sovereign state triumph to its double advantage: 1) its superior internal organisation in reducing domestic transaction costs with developments such as the standardisation of measures and 2) its ability to carry out its commitments with other states. These two advantages enabled sovereign states to more successfully adapt to the changing economic environment in comparison to other political forms such as city-states and city-leagues.

Similarly, the complex history traced in The World Imagined shows the idea of unidirectional historical evolution of European international society to be problematic. Yet unlike Sovereign State and Its Competitors, which highlighted the institutional and organisational factors in the success of the sovereign state, The World Imagined discusses the role of collective beliefs. Additionally, The World Imagined ignores the question of why Westphalian international society triumphed over the other international societies, leaving an important puzzle unanswered. Can the institutional logic for the success of the sovereign state in Western Europe be extended to explain the success of European expansion, or are ideational or military factors more important in the latter case?

In another instance of 1990s redux, The World Imagined corrects the English School’s argument about international society and its expansion in two ways. The English School scholars popularised the term ‘international society’ in the IR literature. ⁴ Yet they treated international society as a uniquely European innovation. In their account, building on Christian heritage, common history, and the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), European states developed a set of norms and rules, such as sovereignty, secularism, diplomacy, and international law, that allowed them to transform a system of states into a society of states. In the 19th and 20th centuries, non-Western states, sometimes through imitation but most often with coercion, accepted these standards of civilisation and joined the European international society, thus transforming it into a global international society. ⁵ Admittedly, this standard view ignores the nuances of the argument as well as many later contributions and corrections to the standard argument. Having said that, some early founders of the school were unapologetically Eurocentric, as evident when Hedley Bull and Adam Watson quipped, ‘it is not our perspective, but the historical record itself that can be called Eurocentric’. ⁶

The World Imagined offers a definitive rebuttal to Bull and Watson’s claim. Spruyt’s approach to international society refutes the claim that non-European peoples lacked an international society. Spruyt challenges the uniqueness of the European experience and the uniform and unidirectional expansion of international society. He demonstrates that non-European states had some of the same norms attributed to the European international society. He also shows the complexity of non-European political concepts and approaches by taking them on their own terms rather than caricaturising them as a useful tool to show the superiority of European norms. While admitting its problems however, Spruyt continues to refer to the Westphalian system and sovereignty, thus perpetuating a distinctive form of Eurocentrism in IR. ⁷

The third 1990s aspect of the literature that The World Imagined evokes is Huntington’s 1990s clash of civilisations thesis. Huntington argued that civilisational identities grounded in common history, culture, and religion would inform the post-Cold War international order and shape the confrontation between Western and non-Western civilisations. For Huntington, Confucian and Islamic norms and values are incompatible with the Western ones. Huntington predicted that as China asserts its power in the international system, states such as Korea and Vietnam that are part of Sinic civilisation, will join it in challenging the West. A Muslim challenge to the West will be fuelled not by military power, but by population growth underpinned by Islamic radicalisation and grievance.

While The World Imagined does not directly engage with the clash of civilisations thesis, the case selection, discussion, and explicit references to the fears of the rise of China and views about Islam’s incompatibility with modernity indicate a desire to dispel Huntington’s argument. Moreover, theoretically, the book’s emphasis on collective beliefs and the importance of religion harkens back to Huntington. Spruyt aims to reclaim collective identities at the civilisational level without falling into Huntington’s reductionism of Islamic or Confucian values. These values are relevant and important but also fluid and complex, intersecting with other values. The World Imagined seeks to normalise and, in places, elevate these values rather than Otherise them.

Shari’a, the Hagia Sophia, and the Islamic International Society

For Spruyt, the ‘Islamic world constituted an international society despite the absence of a clear hegemonic power’ comparable to the role China played in the East Asian international society (p. 10). In explaining what makes the Islamic world hang together as an international society, Spruyt points to the centrality of ‘Shari’a, Islamic law based on the Qur’an and the sayings and actions of Muhammad’ in undergirding a shared collective identity among Muslims (p. 172). He acknowledges the variation across time and space, but argues that, ‘with all its differences, and transitions, individuals in this international society understood each other through a lingua franca, a set of shared ideas, narratives, metaphors, imagined historical lineages, and of course religion’ (p. 175). Besides Shari’a, Spruyt also assigns a significant role to the Turco-Mongolian state traditions when examining the source of collective beliefs shaping the international society of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.

These are important insights, and I agree with many of them. When it comes to the Islamic international society, however, I want to present a word of caution on three issues so as to avoid perpetuating the use of Eurocentric sociology in reading non-European experiences to refute Eurocentric IR.

First, is the problem of demarcating and labelling, which raises questions about imposing the historical and spatial boundaries that might contravene the heterogeneity of international societies. For example, in conceptualising a vast geography stretching from the Ottoman Balkans to Mughal Bengal as Islamic international society, Spruyt elevates the role of Shari’a (spreading from the Arabian Peninsula) and Turco-Mongolian traditions (spreading from Central Asia). Yet this approach discounts the role of local influences, which go back centuries, probably millennia, earlier. Byzantine traditions had an enormous influence on the Ottomans, as did Indian traditions on the Mughals.

In particular, centrally located in Islamic society’s heartland, Persian influence, too, was deep and widespread. Examining the same cases of Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid experiences, Ahmet Kuru has explored how din wa dawla (the inseparability of religion and state) emerged as an Islamic idea. Kuru’s account shows that this idea was Persian in origin. It was Islamicised around the 12th century by leading jurists and political elites to facilitate the consolidation of a state-ulama alliance in the Muslim world. ⁸ Din wa dawla is now seen as quintessential to political legitimisation in Muslim societies by Western IR scholars as well as political Islamists.

The emergence, spread, and evolution of ideas as collective beliefs do not operate in isolation but in a complex fluid ideational environment. International societies co-evolve and continuously build on previous ones. Each collective belief system imposes itself on the other without totally replacing it. Each period’s ideational tendency highlights parts of an eclectic amalgamation while shadowing others. Westphalian, European, Chinese, or Islamic – naming an international society both clarifies and obscures aspects of these complexities, and necessarily biases our perspective towards a particular direction. When we label the Ottoman Empire an Islamic empire and include it in Shari’a-based Islamic international society, don’t we implicitly concede that it was not part of European international society?

The Hagia Sophia is a good metaphor to illustrate the problem of categorising eclectic structures. Emperor Constantine (r. 306-37) ordered the construction of the initial church, and the version that now stands was built during the time of Justinian (r. 527-65), on the ashes of the previous one destroyed in the Niko riots in 532. While it served as Christianity’s greatest church and proclaimed Christianity’s triumph, it also carried the influences of pagan and Persian architecture. ⁹ Initially modelled on pagan prototypes, the Christian icons of the Hagia Sophia became a battleground between Byzantine traditionalists and iconoclasts. ¹⁰ Later, Turks added minarets, plastered mosaics and further beautified the structure with Arabic calligraphy to convert it into a mosque. Even later in 1934, Atatürk, the founder of the secular republic, turned this eclectic wonder into a museum, signifying the leitmotif of the modern times. In its eclectic synthesis, the Hagia Sophia carries pagan, Persian, Christian, Islamic, and modern elements. Calling it a cathedral, mosque, or museum will deny the Hagia Sophia its history, meaning, and richness. If the zeitgeist claims the Hagia Sophia for Islam and calls it a mosque, does that stop the Hagia Sophia from being a marvel of Byzantine Christian architecture?

Moreover, demarcating and labelling an international society as Islamic is not only an analytical exercise; it has normative and political ramifications. ¹¹ This demarcation and labelling creates a normative category that legitimises an international society based on the questionable assumption that we can identify and know the norm/value in Islam that confers political legitimation. Conversely, it also delegitimises by excluding other international societies from the Islamic category because they lack that particular norm/value. For example, when we construct a Shari’a-centred international society and call it Islamic, we also say that the contemporary international society is not Islamic. Given the politically-loaded nature of the term Islamic, labelling an international society Islamic is a political act when Muslims themselves fiercely debate what is Islamic.

A good example for this is the debate on Islamic human rights. When we identify a Shari’a-based human rights declaration, such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation’s Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam as Islamic, we delegitimise the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as un-Islamic. Yet this issue has been hotly contested among Muslims. For some, the Cairo Declaration reflects conservative values and protects state interests and thus undermines the universal declaration, which many Muslims and human rights NGOs in Muslim communities see not only as compatible with the teachings of Islam but as upholding Islamic teachings better than the Cairo Declaration does.

A second issue I want to caution against is the foundationalist impulse to ground international societies. For Spruyt, Shari’a is the dominant element in the Islamic international society. Using Shari’a as shorthand for Islamic law suggests it is a suitable foundation for grounding Muslim collective beliefs in a comparison with the norms of European international society. But Shari’a is a complex, confusing, and politicised term. While the Cairo Declaration grounded human rights on Shari’a, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) adopted a resolution in 2019, which declared that the Sharia in general and the Cairo Declaration in particular are incompatible with human rights as set in the European Convention on Human Rights. ¹²

Even among Muslims, what Shari’a means is contested and politicised. The debate in the global Muslim community surrounding the Turkish government’s decision to (re)convert Hagia Sophia to a mosque illustrates this contestation and politicisation. The fact that it became a focus of discussion across Muslim geography shows the continued relevance of umma, the worldwide Muslim community, in a world of nation-states, and the continued relevance of Islamic references in political legitimation in the international society.

The debate unfolded and evolved over three months. I followed it in American Muslim communities, listservs, and social media. The broader question was what Islam actually says for the conversion of non-Muslim worship spaces into mosques. For example, the President of Islamic Societies of North America (ISNA) Sayyid M. Syeed quoted the Quran and hadith to argue ‘it is against Allah’s plan to demolish places of worship and convert them into something else’. Referring to the second Caliph Umar al Khattab’s protection of the Holy Sepulcher when Jerusalem fell to Muslim armies as a teaching that ‘Muslims are charged with the duty to protect the religious monuments of the defeated people with dignity’. ¹³

Some other American Muslim leaders such as Yasir Qadhi supported the decision and justified it in Shari’a. ¹⁴ One argument was that Mehmed the Conqueror made it a waqf (a foundation) in 1453 and Islamic Law prohibits changing a waqf property from what the initial endower intended. Some others drew on the Dar al-Harb and Dar al-Islam distinction to reject any comparisons between the Turkish government’s re-converting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque with Muslim religious freedom in the United States. Some relied on a fairly weak (da’if) hadith (saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammed), ‘Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will her leader be, and what a wonderful army will that army be!’ ¹⁵

The participants of the debate reasoned within an Islamic framework to speculate on what would be the righteous action to please God in a given context, or Shari’a as broadly understood. In this broad understanding Shari’a was the equivalent of what-Islam-says. Many participated in the debate with causal references to terms such as ahl al-kitab, dhimmis, and waqf in discussing the Islamic legitimacy of converting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

As the collective debate evolved with the implicit consensus on the centrality of Shari’a to discussing the issue, the nature of argumentation shifted. ¹⁶ References to the Islamic sources became complex and technical. Some participants asserted their authority through their mastery of medieval Arabic, their expertise in the intricacies of usul-ul fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), their ability to cite medieval jurists’ ijma (consensus), their command in assessing the strength of a hadith and detailing its isnad (chain of transmission), or in knowing the complexities of arguments based on maslaha (broader Muslim interest). In other words, the broader references to Islam changed into a narrow, legalistic form where those who had the expertise in medieval debates on fiqh were empowered. This debate certainly illustrates that Shari’a is relevant to contemporary Muslim political imagination. More importantly, this debate also illustrates that what Shari’a means is contentious among Muslims. When it is understood simply and solely as Islamic law, it empowers those Muslims with a strict jurisprudential approach to Islam to present themselves as the only legitimate interpreters of Islam.

Spruyt rightly observes complexities about the place of Shari’a: ‘The Islamic rulers thus recognised the supremacy of Shari’a law, but acted expediently in affairs of state . . . Rulers of these composite polities correspondingly used multiple means of legitimating their authority. Their justifications were multivocal’ (p. 212). Yet he takes Shari’a as Islamic Law and presents it as the default mode of Islamic legitimation. When we imagine Shari’a as Islamic law and present it as the core of the Islamic international society, we ignore the multifaceted nature of Shari’a and perpetuate a particular form of Islamic argumentation over other types of Islamic approaches. Centralising Shari’a in understanding Muslim experiences makes us deaf to other Muslim voices which do not make Shari’a-based arguments in a strict jurisprudential manner and elevates the views of the self-proclaimed Muslim orthodoxy as the Islamic perspective. And yet, there are some who construe Islamic international society not as Shari’a-based but as based on other forms of Islamic knowledge, such as Sufism. ¹⁷

A third point I want to highlight is that the polity-centrism of international societies may be ill-suited to understanding the experience of a religio-political community. International society is a state-centric construction. In expanding the definition of international society, Spruyt includes other types of polities, such as empires. Yet a tension exists between emphasising the communities’ collective beliefs, on the one hand, and international societies of state-like entities, on the other, when these two do not correspond. Should the concept of Islamic international society be built on Muslim-majority states, or its subset of Shari’a-upholding Muslim states-like entities, or should it be based on umma, the Muslim religio-political collectivity, which includes Muslims and excludes non-Muslims regardless of political boundaries? Spruyt’s Islamic international society includes the Muslim-minority Mughal Empire. But it excludes Muslim-majority Crimea when the later was annexed by Russia in 1783. This annexation occurred after the Ottoman Empire conceded Crimean Khanates’ independence in 1774 but asserted the Sultan’s religious authority over Muslims as Caliph with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca following the 1768-74 war with Russia. ¹⁸

Spruyt mentions but does not discuss the concept of umma, which, for some, is a central concept to imagining Muslim engagement in international relations. In this vein, Faiz Sheik argues that ‘articulating the umma on the international level could happen on a scale from “thick” conceptions, between individuals transcending the state, and “thin” conceptions, reliant on interaction between Muslim states, perhaps in a transnational organization’ ¹⁹ such as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – the body consisting of 57 member states, which claims to speak for all Muslims. ²⁰ A thick understanding of umma, which gives a meaningful agency to umma as Muslim solidarity, is not possible with a state or empire-centric view of international society and might require elements from the framework of world society and thus thinking outside of the state.

Conclusion

While I appreciated the cover image of that beautiful gold-coloured dome, the curvy Arabic calligraphy, ghostly angels, and the light rushing from the narrow windows, I wanted to make sure that it was indeed a photo of the inside of the Hagia Sophia’s dome. I went to the back cover. The photo credit read, ‘Henglein and Steets/Getty Images’. The Hagia Sophia was not identified. The modern language of copyrights elevated the name of the owner of the copyright and erased the structure’s perennial name that even the conquering Muslims who converted it into a mosque twice did not change and used the Turkish spelling, Ayasofya.

This erasure on the back cover bothered me a lot – I call Istanbul home. It reminded me that modern forces are at work: erasing the most exciting, complex, and Byzantine, in the name of clarity, law, and property. I thought of the incongruity of Muslims’ discussing intricacies of Shari’a in the legitimation of a political act and chasing symbolic triumphs while contemporary forces continuously make the world more legal, mundane, and boring.

The Hagia Sophia is a mosque once again, but if the magnificent building tells us anything, it is that uncertainty shrouds what the future holds for it. It might still be there – pleasing, inspiring, and challenging – when collective beliefs and imaginations give rise to new political orders and international societies. The history of international societies helps IR scholars think about international societies in the future, and The World Imagined provides an excellent starting point.