Reversing Schmitt: The sovereign as a guardian of rational pluralism and the peculiarity of the Islamic state of exception in al-Juwaynī’s dialectical theology

Abstract

This study presents an Islamic conception of sovereignty from mainstream Sunni theology by closely examining Ghiyāth al-umam fī iltyāth aẓ-ẓulam, the major political work of Abū al-Ma‘ālī al-Juwaynī (d. 478 AH/1085 CE), one of the key figures of the Ash‘arī school. Like Carl Schmitt, al-Juwaynī attempts to excavate the grounds of sovereign power by considering states of exception to political norms; however, al-Juwaynī’s position is the reverse of Schmitt’s. Al-Juwaynī argues that the state of exception, which defines the essence of sovereignty, is the absence of the sovereign power and that the ultimate task of the sovereign is to secure a rationally pluralistic community. Examining al-Juwaynī’s Islamic conception of miracle (mu‘jiza), the study argues that the epistemological foundation of his characterization of the function of the sovereign power is based on a uniquely dialectical critique of rational absolutism.

Keywords

al-Juwaynī exception Imāma Islam pluralism Schmitt sovereignty

Prelude

At the end of the first chapter of Political Theology, Schmitt (2005: 15) cites the following quote from Kierkegaard:

The exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general. Endless talk about the general becomes boring; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought about with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.

Schmitt intended this quote to serve as a critique of the modern theory of the liberal state, which claims to overcome arbitrariness and despotism through the regularity of universal rationality. However, by purporting to eliminate arbitrariness, Schmitt argued that the modern theory of the state attempts to circumvent the fundamental issue at the heart of any political theory: sovereignty. The sovereign power existentially manifests its capacity and legitimacy to rule by challenging rational norms; hence, Schmitt (2005: 5) famously wrote that the sovereign power is the “one who decides on the exception.” In turn, this state of exception has a deeply theological character inasmuch as it mirrors the way the miracle manages to interrupt the natural order of things. Schmitt’s characterization of ‘theology’ and ‘miracle’ follows an essentially biblical perspective that has permeated Western political philosophy since the late 16th and early 17th centuries.¹ According to this perspective, through the miracle the transcendent God prevails over the immanent world of material nature; the miracle is the place where the metaphysical/trans-historical God intervenes and overpowers the physical/historical context. This is the defining character of the concept and practice of sovereignty. Analogically, the sovereign power intervenes in the juridical order to judge history metaphysically; such intervention occurs in an absolutely arbitrary manner. This last point has led many critics of Schmitt to highlight the dictatorial implications of his analysis. The state of exception (die Ausnahme) is completely irreducible to any attempt that desires to explain away the arbitrariness embedded in the sovereign constitution of political judgment in terms of either a rational or a material teleology. Hence, to Schmitt, political theology as a concept and practice is the arbitrary decisionism associated with the state of exception; as such it is the originary moment of political judgment.

In this study, I put forward an Islamic response to Schmitt’s fatalistic characterization of sovereignty as inescapably dictatorial through a careful examination of Ghiyāth al-umam fī iltyāth aẓ-ẓulam (Redemption of the Nations), the major political work of one of the key figures of the Ash‘arī school, the mainstream representative of Sunni theology, Abū al-Ma‘ālī al-Juwaynī (d. 478 AH/1085 CE). In this work, al-Juwaynī develops a rather unique approach to the question of sovereignty (imāma), setting him apart from most Ash‘arī and Sunni thinkers.² Instead of merely discussing the role of the imām or the functional guardian,³ the conditions they have to fulfill, their obligatory tasks and the criteria for their selection, al-Juwaynī innovatively divides his book into three parts. The first part is devoted to these doctrinally typical questions of the legitimacy of the imām, but the second and third parts are innovative and atypical parts in comparison with standard Sunni works on legitimate rule (imāma). I demonstrate that in these parts, al-Juwaynī becomes interested in the essence of sovereignty and not only the conditions of the sovereign’s legitimacy. The second part is devoted to the criteria for selecting a substitute for the functional guardian when no one meets the conditions of an ideal guardian outlined in the first part. The third part is devoted to a series of four states of exception. The first state occurs when there are no mujtahidūn, scholars who are qualified to exercise independent judgments. The second state is when there are no transmitters of doctrinal legal schools (nāqilu al-madhāhib) (Al-Juwaynī, 2011).⁴ In the third state of exception there is an absence of scholars but the public are still aware of the principles (uṣūl) of Sharī‘a. The fourth and final state of exception occurs when the public, left by themselves, are no longer aware even of the principles of Sharī‘a.⁵ Al-Juwaynī peculiarly asserts that these four states of exception constitute the purpose for which he wrote the book (Al-Dīb, 1988).⁶ In the last section of the second part of the book, al-Juwaynī argues that these four states reveal the ultimate of purpose (al-gharaḍ al-a‘ẓam) of the book. He writes:

The discussion of the case when an age is devoid of scholars as it may be devoid of the proper functional guardians (a’imma) will be in the third part of the book which is the ultimate purpose of it. We clarify our thesis regarding this possibility with respect to different stages adducing relevant signs and evidence to eventually reveal an essence of the Sharī‘a that has not come across any mind before … (Al-Juwaynī, 2011: 469)

Al-Juwaynī claims that he will bring forth an aspect of Islamic law and its practice that has never been recognized before through the study of these four states of exception. But what is the connection between these states of exception and the avowed subject of the book, namely, the substance and the basis of legitimate sovereignty in the Muslim polity? Furthermore, why does al-Juwaynī consider the exceptional state of the absence of scholars more fundamental in revealing this aspect of Sharī‘a⁷ than the case of the absence of the functional guardian (imām)? Al-Juwaynī does not give a direct answer. This ambiguity is further complicated by al-Juwaynī’s assertion, in Section V of the first part of the book, exclusively devoted to the exposition of the duties, characteristics, and selection criterion of the functional guardian, that: “[t]he whole part on the nature and characteristics of functional guardianship (imāma) is not my purpose in this work” (Al-Juwaynī, 2011: 290). This study will put forward a possible explanation of this paradox. It will argue that the four states of exception discussed in the third part of the book provide the epistemological grounds for the role of the functional guardian and the proper course of action that should be taken in the absence of the functional guardian suggested by al-Juwaynī in the first and second parts of the book. Epistemological grounds refers here to the general principles and limits of reasoning underlying the production of the normative and prescriptive claims of Sharī‘a. In turn, these principles and limits determine the powers and the obligatory tasks of the imām. In conclusion, I will argue that the substance of sovereignty for al-Juwaynī consists in guarding the plurality of rational orientations that he considers characteristic of any body politic. This conception of the substance of sovereignty is the essence of Sharī‘a that al-Juwaynī contends that no one before him discovered. It constitutes the basis of his recasting of the Ash‘arī, Sunni conceptions of the characteristics, the basis of the legitimacy, and the role of the sovereign in the first part of the book. Al-Juwaynī thinks that these rational orientations reflect a definite set of ways in which humans, as rational agents, exercise their rationality. Therefore, exploring their characteristics and understanding the need to guard them, as the raison d’etre for sovereignty, should properly be in the exceptional state of the sovereign power’s absence. This is how the origin of the substance of sovereignty can be clarified.

In this sense, al-Juwaynī, like Schmitt, believes that the state of exception reveals the conceptual and practical essence of sovereignty. However, al-Juwaynī adopts a reverse description of Schmitt’s state of exception. Instead of representing exception as the ultimate expression of power that suspends any rational or epistemic claims or norms, al-Juwaynī uses states of exception to show how epistemic concerns delineate power’s scope and exercise. The purpose of the comparison between Schmitt and al-Juwaynī is twofold. On the one hand, the comparison sheds new light on al-Juwaynī’s Sunni defense of the rational basis of pluralism and the body politic. This new perspective is important given the growing interest in Schmitt as a key critic of liberalism and its epistemological foundations and the equally growing interest in investigating the rational basis of sovereignty and legal order in Islam. On the other hand, the attempt to interpret al-Juwaynī’s interest in exception vis-a-vis Schmitt’s is useful for articulating a possible Islamic contribution to the relationship between theology and political theory in general and the metaphysical claims of theology, especially the concept of miracle and political theory, in particular.

The first part of the article explores the roots of al-Juwaynī’s thought in Ash‘arī, Sunni epistemology, indicating that his conception of the states of exception serves a political argument and not merely an argument about legal minimalism, as Intisar Rabb argued (Cook et al., 2013). The second part of the article seeks to articulate the distinctive quality of al-Juwaynī’s state of exception and the concept of sovereignty it generates vis-a-vis Schmitt’s. I then turn to Bonnie Honig’s recent critique of Schmitt and her attempt to construct alternative concepts of exception and sovereignty. I show how al-Juwaynī’s states of exception also differ from hers and Schmitt’s. The article concludes by indicating the way in which its findings may contribute to advancing scholarship on Islam and the theory of the state in general, and the nature of rationality in the Islamic view of the body politic and the concept of sovereignty in particular.

Abū al-Ma‘ālī al-Juwaynī’s state of exception and the problem of sovereignty

Preliminary remarks: The early Ash‘arī school on reason, sense experience, and the dialectical critique of absolutism

The Ash‘arī school of dialectical theology (kalām), founded by Abū al-Ḥasan Alī ibn Ismā‘īl al-Ash‘arī (d. 324 AH/935 CE), has been by far the most influential theological school in the history of Sunnī Islam. Over a period that extends for more than a thousand years, legal scholars affiliated with the four main schools of Islamic law, Sufi Sheikhs, theologians, and even philosophical schools who subscribed to this school pervaded the Muslim intellectual traditions. While the Ash‘arī school underwent important transformations throughout its history, especially through its gradual acceptance of many philosophical arguments from Avicenna’s corpus, it continued to maintain a key intellectual position (Al-Shāfi‘ī, 2013). This stance consists in seeking an intermediate position between the radical rationalism represented by the Mu‘tazilī school and the traditionalist school of Ahl al-Ḥadīth founded by Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal (d. 240 AH/855 CE) (al-Ghazālī, 2012; Ibn Khaldūn, 2006). For instance, on the question of God’s attributes, the Mu‘tazilī school argued that God cannot rationally be conceived to be composite, hence any attribute predicated of Him is just a meaning through which we as humans understand His actions. By contrast, Ahl al-Ḥadīth argued that since in the tradition of the Prophet there is no attempt at interpreting the status of the relationship between the attributes and the essence of God then the attributes of God should be taken literally. This abstention from interpretation (tafwīḍ) led ahl al-Ḥadīth to endorse anthropomorphic positions (al-Ghazālī, 2012). Abū al-Ḥasan ‘Alī ibn Ismā‘īl al-Ash‘arī (d. 324 AH/936 CE), the founder of the Ash‘arī school, took a middle position,⁸ accepting the rational forcefulness of the Mu‘tazilī argument and hence refusing to accept that God’s attributes are added to or part of His essence. However, he refused to take the step further and deal with them as metaphorical meanings. According to the Ash‘arī school, God transcends the domain of rational knowledge and its categories which are bound to the limits of space-time experience and its finite objects. Therefore, it would be mere speculation to make any judgments about the relation between God and His attributes based on the categories of rational knowledge. Hence, al-Ash‘arī argued that the relation between God’s attributes and His essence are unlike any relation between a substance and its qualities (al-Ash‘arī, 1953).

But what are the foundations and tools al-Ash‘arī uses to critique rationalism and traditionalism? To respond to this question, I will briefly examine the following passage from al-Ash‘arī’s famous treatise, A Vindication of the Science of Theology (Risālat Istiḥsān al-Khawḍ fī ‘Īlm al-Kalām). The treatise is dedicated to a critique of the traditionalists who argue that kalām or dialectical theology is an innovation (bid‘a) that needs to be prohibited. Towards the end of the treatise, al-Ash‘arī (1953: 131) writes:

But even though there was no explicit instruction of the Apostle of God regarding each one of these questions, they [some traditionalist theologians] referred and likened each to something which had been determined explicitly by the Book of God, and the Sunna, and their own independent judgment (ijtihād). Such questions, then, which involved judgment on unprecedented secondary cases, they referred to those determinations of the Law which are derivative, and which are to be sought only along the line of revelation and apostolic tradition. But when new and specific questions pertaining to the basic dogmas⁹ arise, every intelligent Muslim ought to refer judgment on them to the sum of principles accepted on the grounds of reason, sense experience and intuition (badīha). For, judgment on legal questions which belong to the category of the traditional is to be based on reference to legal principles which likewise belong to the category of the traditional. And judgment on questions involving the data of reason and the senses should be a matter of referring every such instance to something within its own category, without confounding the rational with the traditional or the traditional with the rational.

In this passage, al-Ash‘arī makes two important critical points. Firstly, he draws a clear distinction between legal maxims and rules which should be referred to the tradition and questions related to the principles of religion (uṣūl al-dīn). But what are these principles? Uṣūl al-dīn, as Ibn Khaldūn (d. 808 AH/1406 CE) explains in the Prolegomena to his History, represent the system of metaphysics in Islam (Ibn Khaldūn, 2006: v. 3); this system constitutes the conditions of accepting the two sources of tradition (Qur’ān and Sunna). Secondly, al-Ash‘arī argues that if questions are raised in connection with these principles, they cannot be referred to any traditional source. If they were referred to traditional sources they would become circular since we would be asking the tradition to provide answers regarding the possibility of accepting this tradition in the first place. But what are the resources to which theologians should resort in order to answer a question about these principles? Al-Ash‘arī answers that there are three: reason, sense experience, and intuition (Ibn Fūrak, 1987).¹⁰ But how do these resources work together?

Almost all works of Ash‘arī theology begin with a chapter on the necessity of the use of rational consideration (naẓar). Al-Irshād, al-Juwaynī’s concise work on theology compared to the longer ash-Shāmil, starts with a similar section asserting that rational consideration should be the basis of faith. Al-Juwaynī, however, argues against the Mu‘tazilī argument that rational consideration is an obligation recognized by reason. For such an obligation is often recognized by particular empirical intuition (ḥads) or a practical problem that one considers and through which one realizes that rational consideration is obligatory. But if one is oblivious to such thoughts, al-Juwaynī argues, one would not be able to realize the obligatory nature of rational consideration. Hence, al-Juwaynī argues that rational consideration is obligatory not on the grounds of tradition or through necessary rational recognition but rather through capability (tamakkun) (al-Juwaynī, 2001). This means that anyone who is capable of rational consideration will realize that one has to utilize reason in order to inquire about truth and knowledge of the world. But what are the method and limits of the use of reason in al-Juwaynī’s thought in particular and in the Ash‘arī school in general? As far as method is concerned, al-Juwaynī and al-Ash‘arī both agree on the dialectical (jadalī) use of reason. According to al-Juwaynī and al-Ash‘arī, anyone can arrive at the idea of the sum of all perfections in the same manner that the Platonic interlocutor starts the Republic, for instance, by accepting the idea of justice; it is simply rationally intuitive. But after accepting the idea of God, the person initiates, again like the Platonic interlocutor, a dialectical (jadalī) conversation about this perfect being with other members of their community. The first source for any participant in this intra-communal dialectic is sense-experience. Now let us assume that this Ash‘arī interlocutor encounters a Mu‘tazilī interlocutor who argues the position outlined above: the argument that God cannot have attributes. The Ash‘arī interlocutor will, responding from the stand point of experiential data, counter-question: how can God be knowing and act upon perfect knowledge if He does not have this knowledge? A carpenter, for instance, must have knowledge of carpentry in order to be able to utilize and act upon this knowledge. The Ash‘arī interlocutor will thus use counter-examples from sense experience to limit the rational (burhānī) speculations of the Mu‘tazilī interlocutor. Therefore, from al-Juwaynī’s and al-Ash‘arī’s perspective, the Mu‘tazilī rational position is similar to what many phenomenologists, especially Husserl and Hieddegger, would consider a theoretical or reflective standpoint that masks the everyday (das Alltägliche) or the life-world (Lebenswelt) in Husserl’s language. In order to accept the Mu‘tazalī position, a person is required to follow the logic of speculative reasoning. This demonstrative (burhānī) type of reasoning follows a number of successively deductive steps that start with a given: there must be a first cause of the world. It ends in the unity of God and His indivisibility. Once all these steps are completed, the Mu‘tazilī interlocutor realizes that it is logically impossible to claim that there is an essence of God of which an attribute, say that of being All-Knowing, is predicated. For if this is the case, many complex questions would undo the logical progression leading to the idea of God in the first place. For example, would it imply that God’s essence was not complete and had only attained completeness/perfection after the addition of this attribute? Second, what cause acted on the essence of God leading to the acquisition of this attribute? Therefore, we must rationally grant that these attributes are meanings through which the essence of God is accessed by reason. So, when we say that God is All-Knowing we do not mean that God has knowledge but that he knows by virtue of being Perfect and since being All-Knowing is a perfection then His essence is mediated through it (Martin et al., 1997). Realizing that the ordinary human being in any society never follows this speculative rational path, al-Juwaynī and al-Ash‘arī argued that it would be violent and unrealistic to expect people to go through this. Nonetheless, the Ash‘arī theologians gave a rather puzzling response. They agreed with Mu‘tazalī theologians that God does not have the attribute of knowing as a separate quality predicated of a certain essence. But they refused to consider these attributes as mere metaphors. In my view this paradoxical answer is what represents a commitment on part of the Ash‘arī school to safeguard the pluralism of rational interpretations. The Ash‘arī interlocutor is rational, and so concedes to the forcefulness of the Mu’tazilī argument concerning the impossibility of predicating attributes of God. However, like a good pyrrhonist skeptic, the Ash‘arī interlocutor systematically employs everyday sense experience through counter examples that can refute or at least cast doubt on any claim of the speculative Mu‘tazilī that goes beyond rationally intuitive ideas. Underlying this interest in using sense data to curb absolutist rational claims are two considerations. On the one hand, al-Juwaynī and Ash‘arī thinkers recognize that there could be equally valid rational interpretations of the same concept, especially if such a concept is a metaphysical one. On the other hand, the Ash‘arī school recognizes empirically intuitive knowledge (badīhī) as a source of necessary knowledge; it would be counterintuitive to claim that a knower knows without having knowledge. Therefore, their ultimate conclusion, as I mentioned above, is that God has knowledge in a certain modality that is completely transcendent to human conception. As much as reason guides us to recognize the transcendence of God, sense-experience instructs us that any positive claim about God’s nature would be speculative. It is better to stick to a dialectical logic, which celebrates and welcomes reason, while insisting on limiting rational claims by empirical intuitions. While this position shares similarities with Kant’s transcendental argument in the Critique of Pure Reason that one should limit the legitimacy of knowledge claims to the boundaries of experience, it is in direct opposition to his assumption of the rational autonomy of the subject based on universal reason. The Ash‘arī dissatisfaction with rational speculation does not also lead to a dogmatic faith based on salto mortale like that called for by Heinrich Jacobi in his debate with Moses Mendelssohn in the course of the Pantheismusstreit. It is a position that invites the use of reason but stresses the importance of checking such use to safeguard against falling into absolutist idealism. But what political framework could accommodate such epistemological commitment? This sets the stage to consider al-Juwaynī’s position on sovereignty.

The role of the ‘functional guardian’ in Ghiyāth al-Umam: The defense of bounded rational pluralism

Al-Juwaynī divides his book into three major parts. In Part I he outlines the basis of legitimate sovereignty, starting by explaining the conditions of choosing the functional guardian (imām). He criticizes the Shiites for claiming that the imām is determined textually (naṣṣan) whether in the Qur’an or in the traditions of the prophet. He argues that the legitimate ruler should be determined by choice (ikhtiyār) by those who have knowledge, giving exact conditions for identifying those who have knowledge (al-Juwaynī, 2011). Al-Juwaynī then devotes a considerable portion of Part I to a discussion of the characteristics of an ideal functional guardian. The most salient of these is that they should fulfill the conditions of the exercise of independent legal judgment (ijtihād).¹¹ He stipulates this condition so that the functional guardian would be able to understand and engage with the independent scholars of the age independently. In turn, independent scholars, as Intisar Rabb rightly points out in explaining al-Juwaynī’s position, are capable of reaching ‘right answers’ in response to any question addressed to them not in terms of content but in terms of applying the proper methodology of legal reasoning (Cook et al., 2013). Independent scholars, as al-Juwaynī and most Muslim legal scholars maintain, can arrive at different positions with regards to the same problem in light of the methodologies employed by each of the four accepted schools of Islamic law in interpreting the four main principles of Islamic law (Hallaq, 2009; Ibn Khaldūn, 2006). This pluralistic framework allows for considerable sensitivity to individual differences and custom. In order for the functional guardian to secure this epistemic pluralism, they must be well versed in the epistemological foundations and hermeneutical principles of the different schools (Hallaq, 2009, 2013). The legitimacy of the functional guardian consists in being a chosen defender of rational pluralism in the body politic.

Subsequently, al-Juwaynī preliminarily defines the role of the functional guardian. He identifies two major roles for the imām: one concerned with religion and the other concerned with the worldly affairs of the people. Concerning religion, the task is twofold. The first concerns the principles of religion (uṣūl al-dīn) and the other concerns the branches of religion (furū‘ al-dīn). Regarding the former, the task of the imām consists in protecting the public from slipping into fallacious modes of thinking. In this connection, al-Juwaynī makes an interesting historical critique. He criticizes al-Ma’mūn (d. 218 AH/833 CE), the Abbasid Caliph, for what he considers to be a state of intellectual liquidity in his age. This is not because al-Juwaynī is against intellectual freedom but because he is opposed to the burdening of the public with absolutist intellectual assumptions that transgress the limits of common sense. As I have explained above, a good example of these intellectual assumptions would be the five rational principles Mu‘tazilī theologians stipulated that every Muslim should endorse. As far as the branches of religion are concerned, that is, the practices of religion delineated by Islamic law, al-Juwaynī argues that the functional guardian should only be concerned with the general logistical matters concerning the facilitation of these practices. Al-Juwaynī asserts that the functional guardian must not support one school of Islamic law against the other, quoting the tradition of Prophet Muhammad, “Difference among my nation is mercy” (al-Juwaynī, 2011). Hence, the role of the functional guardian is to secure a domain for every political subject to live according to the practical maxims resulting from the legitimate method of interpretation they are willing to adopt. The gist of al-Juwaynī’s argument in the first part comes down to the assertion that the functional guardian does not have absolute power and that their role consists in securing a public domain for political subjects of different rational orientations to function. Sovereign power consists neither in following a singular rational norm nor in deciding on the exception to such norm, as Schmitt would argue; rather, it consists in defending a finite multitude of possible rational norms.

Multiple states of exception and the essence of the functional guardian’s sovereignty

In Part II of Ghiyāth al-Umam, al-Juwaynī discusses the state of exception wherein there is no one who could possibly fulfill the role of the functional guardian in securing the conditions of a society of a proper Muslim pluralistic society. He argues that in such a case each political subject should follow the independent scholars of the school of law they endorse (al-Juwaynī, 2011). In Part III, al-Juwaynī turns to four consecutive states of exception. The first of these is the complete lack of independent scholars. After carefully outlining the conditions an independent scholar must fulfill, he turns to the protocols of following them. He poses an interesting question: if someone seeking a legal opinion follows a legal school whose leader, say for example, al-Shafi‘ī (d. 204 AH/820 CE), had given a legal opinion different from the one the independent scholar of the person’s age gives, what should this person do? Al-Juwaynī answers that this person should follow the opinion given to them by the independent scholar of their age since the latter is more aware of the historical situation and its variables (al-Juwaynī, 2011). But what if there are no independent scholars and the only scholars left are scholar-jurists who follow the doctrine of one of the four schools? Turning to the second state of exception, al-Juwaynī answers that in this case the member of the body politic should rely on the scholar-jurists. While resorting to an independent scholar would be much more effective since the latter are qualified to use methods of legal deduction and apply them to the historical context of the legal opinion seeker (al-mustaftī), al-Juwaynī asserts that the books of the expert scholars abound with cases that could be used as a basis for analogically judging any new case. Alternatively, the new case could be already included in a text from the Qur’ān or the tradition of the prophet on which the opinion of the founder scholar of the legal school is based. In either case, the scholar-jurist has sufficient references at hand to address any new case they may encounter (al-Juwaynī, 2011). Al-Juwaynī turns to the third level of exception, where there are not even scholar-jurists who follow a particular legal school and know its opinions by heart. In response to this case, al-Juwaynī argues that every Muslim subject has to have a sense of the ultimate purposes of the Sharī‘a along with a number of basic rules of legal deduction (al-Juwaynī, 2011). Here, al-Juwaynī refers to the formative period of Islam, explaining that the companions of the Prophet would always resort to the use of the rational dialectic and dialogue. Subsequently, al-Juwaynī devotes around 60 pages to a discussion of different examples of the dialectical use of the principles of Sharī‘a. In all of these examples, the Ash‘arī emphasis on dialectical rational consideration and its commitment to the critique of all forms of idealism becomes clear. For instance, he mentions the ruling that eating carrion is prohibited except in extreme cases in which one runs the risk of starvation. He then assumes the following case: what if an entire community is starving and the only food available is carrion? What would be the ruling in this case? Al-Juwaynī immediately replies that since the harm resulting from the loss of an entire community is more than that ensuing from the death of an entire individual then eating carrion in the former case must be allowed as it is in the latter. Finally, al-Juwaynī addresses the fourth state of exception wherein there is no recognition of even the principles of Islamic law. Al-Juwaynī responds by saying that under such circumstances, even if the people in this society believe in one God and in prophecy, they would be absolved of any legal obligation. They will just use their reason to arrive at the fact that there is a God, an all-perfect being, and try to preserve their existence by seeking benefit and avoiding harm.

Towards the end of Part III, al-Juwaynī (2011: 558) writes: “I have authored this book for a great purpose; I imagined the dissolution of Shari‘a and the demise of its bearers and the people’s turning away from it …” Al-Juwaynī’s discussion of these states of exception could be interpreted as an outline of the necessary (ḍarūrī) course of action in the worst of all cases. However, I would like to suggest a different interpretation. As mentioned above, al-Juwaynī insists that outlining the characteristics and role of the function guardian is not the main intention of his work; rather, this work aims to reveal an essence of Sharī‘a (al-Juwaynī, 2011). This very claim suggests that there is a relationship between the assumption of successive exceptional states of the absence of the guardian and then the interpreters of Sharī‘a and the core of the issue of sovereignty, the subject matter of the book. According to al-Juwaynī, the functional guardian is a guardian of a specific community (umma); this community is defined not territorially or nationalistically but through shared belief and the practice of Sharī‘a. Al-Juwaynī’s claim that the discussion of how these states of exception reveal an essence of Sharī‘a that has not been properly explored before him is inextricably related to the subject matter of the book, namely, sovereignty. But how is sovereignty related to these states of exception? The answer is that the states of exception reveal the epistemological grounds of sovereignty. I will show the harmony between these epistemological grounds and the Ash‘arī perspective on rational pluralism described above.

Here it is useful to make a preliminary contrast between al-Juwaynī and Schmitt in preparation for a fuller discussion of the relationship between sovereignty, rationality, and theology in both thinkers. In radical contrast with Schmitt, al-Juwaynī contends that the state of exception constitutive of sovereignty is not represented by irreducible arbitrariness at the heart of political judgment. For Schmitt, such arbitrariness is the essence of sovereignty. The theological nature of that sovereignty consists in its capacity to intervene arbitrarily in the order of the body politic, suspending the law in the state of emergency. Thus, the sovereign power is both inside and outside of the legal order (Agamben, 1998; Schmitt, 2005). Al-Juwaynī’s picture is the exact opposite. The state of exception occurs when the Muslim political subject is expected to constitute a political judgment in the complete absence of the functional guardian who protects the community of rational pluralism or even scholars who represent models for the exercise of reason. Perusing this ultimate state of exception, al-Juwaynī unveils a characteristic of Sharī‘a that he argues no one before him discovered. This essence is the pluralistically rational nature of interpreting the general schemes of Sharī‘a and inferring their relevance to specific historical contexts. According to this essence, the role of the functional guardian, which in turn is the essence of sovereignty, consists in safeguarding the social and intellectual conditions of such rational pluralism. This pluralism, unlike the claims of the modern state, does not expect the individual to follow a rigid rational framework represented by well-defined parameters of material or transcendent reasoning (as is the case in Hobbes and Kant respectively). Rather, every subject of this community, based on their own orientation, would choose a legal school whose system of interpretation fits them. The flexibility and comprehensiveness manifested in the efforts of the independent scholars within each school respond to the range of the possible uses of reason by the members of the body politic. The role of the functional guardian comes down to the securing of the necessary and sufficient conditions of this rationally pluralistic society. This does not mean that the imām is simply a libertarian ruler. Rather, the space of freedom accorded to the subjects of the Muslim state is limited by the rational/logical recognition of the idea of a necessary existent that is the sum of all universal perfections. The belief in these universals and the constant attempt by sub-communities to construct practical, ethical, and aesthetic maxims according to their own justifications constitutes the orientation of this community of rational subjects. Examining these universal parameters will allow us to better understand why al-Juwaynī depicts the state of exception as the inverse of that of Schmitt. Furthermore, it will show how this differs from the assumptions of rational autonomy made by many Kantian liberals.

Ash‘arī theology and al-Juwaynī’s functional guardian: A regressive legitimization

This section offers a regressive interpretation of the relationship between the states of exception al-Juwaynī outlines in Part III and the concept of sovereignty I have argued for in the previous section in terms of the protection and preservation of the pluralistically rational interpretation of Shari‘a. I will argue that the successive states of exception represent successive developmental phases of the pluralistic exercise of reason that demonstrate the essence of sovereignty in terms of the protection of such pluralism. Reversing the order of al-Juwaynī’s states of exceptions, I will show how they regressively serve to legitimize the exercise of sovereignty as a guardianship of rational pluralism. The first phase represented by the ultimate state of exception consists in the preliminary use of reason; in this state, political subjects dialectically arrive at the basic idea/principle that there is a necessary existent. This is the first stage of the use of reason according to Ash‘arī and Mu‘tazilī dialectical theology (al-Juwaynī, 2001). This being represents the sum of all possible universal schemes and values that could govern a specific society. The second level of the foundation of a rationally pluralistic body politic follows after the recognition that no rational or dogmatic assertion could be made about the nature of these universal schemes or their relation to the world. At this stage there is a demand for a framework that could mediate these universal schemes to the particularities of the human historical condition. It is a demand for a framework that could maintain a balance between total absolutism and total relativism; since neither rational speculation nor historically relative cultural claims are accepted by al-Juwaynī, he would welcome accepting revelation as resource. But such revelation cannot be a dogma or a comprehensive doctrine in the language of Rawls; it must be a frame for negotiating the transcendentally universal with the historically particular, giving birth to practical maxims (Hallaq, 2009). This is the state of exception that occurs when there are no scholars and when only the political subjects recognize the principles of Sharī‘a. But the political subjects of the society realize that there are different ways of negotiating the relations between universal schemes and the particular historical situation in order to arrive at practical maxims. For instance, how would justice be defined in each and every situation? How would compassion be determined in the same contest? How could both be reconciled? In this stage there is a need for scholars who can practically apply universal rules to particular incidents. This is the state of having scholar-jurists yet lacking independent scholars. As this process of applying universal schemes to particular situations and contexts continues, the need arises for having classes of individuals who have the capacity to come up with new interpretative schemata in each and every historical period that in turn represent different modalities of harmonizing the universal ideas with specific historical situations. In this stage, independent scholars emerge. These scholars by contrast to the scholar-jurists have the capacity to explore the epistemological grounds of the different methods of applying universal rules to particular situations. Hence, they furnish the theoretical basis required for the scholar-jurists to undertake their task. Finally, the need arises for having a protector of this body politic and this is the state when the need for the functional guardian emerges. The regressive construction of al-Juwaynī’s states of exception reveals a natural development of the exercise of reason through which the need for a sovereign who secures the conditions of a pluralistic body politic is recognized as necessary need. These developmental phases are neither sources of direct representation nor contracted leviathans in Hobbes’ sense. They are rather manifestations and catalysts for the expression of the different uses of reason.

Miracle, theology, and the state of exception: Al-Juwaynī’s Islamic versus Honig’s Jewish critiques of Schmitt’s sovereign

Al-Juwaynī and Schmitt: Inverse states of exception

In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt (2005: 20) writes:

All significant concepts of modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of state developed … The idea of the modern constitutional state triumphed together with deism, a theology and metaphysics that banished the miracle from the world. This theology and metaphysics rejected not only the transgression of the laws of nature through an exception brought about by direct intervention, as is found in the idea of the miracle but also the sovereign’s direct intervention in a valid legal order.

For Schmitt, the ‘theological’ act that survives from the pre-modern through the modern essentially consists in the ‘rupture’ resulting from the arbitrary intervention of the divine power that is both inside and outside of history. Hence, Schmitt notes that the modern sovereign, whose role the liberal state tries to mask through procedural legalism, is both inside and outside the constitutional order. But how does this compare to al-Juwaynī’s picture of the body politic?

As indicated above, the functional guardian of al-Juwaynī is not the counterpart of Schmitt’s sovereign power. The latter disrupts a regularized body politic that follows coherently formal laws that are presupposed to already exist. These formal laws can be either rational, positive ones like those of the Enlightenment liberal state or they can be a religious, juridical order that assumes a natural law from which a divine and a human law participate, following the Catholic picture in Aquinas’ politics (Aquinas, 1996). According to Aquinas, the sacred—the divine law—and the secular—the king’s law—complement each other to represent and sustain the regularity of the natural law. Without this assumption about the nature of the body politic, Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty would not hold. By contrast, al-Juwaynī argues that the essence of the functional guardian’s sovereignty consists in protecting the rational pluralism constitutive of the political community. In this sense, the functional guardian is always located inside the body politic. But the body politic is pluralistic; it does not rely on a strict frame of normative rationality. The functional guardian is thereby not Schmitt’s suspending agent; it is rather a catalyst facilitating an irreducible pluralism.

In this pluralistic community, every political subject is expected to use their dialectical reason to establish the central transcendent concept of metaphysics, God. Once a basic rational faith is achieved based on this simple rational exercise, the role of reason from this point onwards is mainly deconstructive, demonstrating that every rational argument can be equally refuted by another rational argument. All laws of nature are considered contingent or customary (‘adiyya); hence they are never considered inherently true. Moreover, all fatwas or legal opinions are historically conditioned as much as they represent the application of the general ruling (ḥukm) to the conditions of the age (‘aṣr). Accordingly, arguments and explanations that avoid absolutist positions, whether from an idealist or a materialist perspective, have more normative value than arguments requiring predetermined epistemological concessions. This epistemological commitment in a Muslim body politic is determined in terms of three factors. The first factor comprises the universal purposes set by Sharī‘a; these are defined by principles of theology, with the names of God representing universal schemes at its heart and public interests determining the practical implications of these values in context. The second factor comprises the variety of practical orientations. For Muslims, this variety is accommodated by the four schools of Islamic law as described above; however, non-Muslims are also fully granted the right to have their own practical orientation as along as the systems of interpretations they adopt respect the parameters of rational pluralism. The third factor is an aspect that was later added by al-Juwaynī’s student al-Ghazālī, namely aesthetic taste (dhawq) that is developed through self-discipline. The scholars (including theologians, muftis, and scholar-jurists) merely make explicit by way of systemization the same rationale and interpretative parameters latent in the multiple use of reason in different contexts. Hence, al-Juwaynī called the state of exception in which all levels of scholars are totally absent the key determinant of his exploration of the problem of sovereignty in Islam inasmuch as it reveals the basic form of the pluralistic exercise of reason whose guarding is the sovereign power’s main function. Since these individual orientations in the exercise of reason are numerous, harmonizing them according to the three aforementioned factors requires the intellectual effort of the theologians and the regulatory effort of the jurists. In the absence of these theologians and jurists, individuals are expected to have a bare minimum of intellectual and practical capacity to exercise reason. In such a case, resorting to reason becomes a must, and hence general rules that achieve a degree of regularity that de facto work to build the Muslim body politic. In other words, contrary to Schmitt’s assumption about it as a monotonous imposition on the existentially arbitrary exercise of power, the rational regularity, according to al-Juwaynī, is a constituent fundamental of the body politic that unfolds as the foundation of sovereignty.

Al-Juwaynī’s verus Bonnie Honig’s critique of Schmitt

In Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law and Democracy, Honig (2011) offers an alternative to Schmitt’s conception of the relationship between sovereignty and the state of exception. Honig critiques Schmitt’s Oedipal definition of sovereignty in terms of the state of exception “… in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power …” (Honig, 2011: 87), leading to a condition “… in which we or, rather, sovereign powers are neither subject to law nor free of it but rather both …” (Honig, 2011: 87), Honig offers an alternative conception of sovereignty that is also based on a state of exception. Honig’s alternative conception is an attempt to think of sovereignty:

… as a set of circuits, contingent arrays of diverse forces and powers that, like grains of sand that sometimes run smoothly and sometimes clump up, fall into place as they … produce (and are produced by) the declaration of a state of exception. (Honig, 2011: 88)

Honig turns to Rosenzweig’s conception of miracle to define a state of exception that could possibly furnish the grounds for the concept of sovereignty she seeks.

But what conception of miracle and hence exception does Rosenzweig offer? Honig identifies the uniqueness of Rosenzweig’s conception of miracle in terms of the difference between Christian and Jewish theological and philosophical perspectives in the Weimar intellectual scene. Both Schmitt and Rosenzweig were concerned about Enlightenment deism’s banishment of the miracle from the human world (Honig, 2011). But Schmitt, drawing on Christian theology, claimed that “… miracle on which the exception is modeled is an interruptive force that suspends the ordinary lawfulness of the world and thereby exhibits divine power and sovereignty” (Honig, 2011: 94). By contrast, Honig contends that for Rosenzweig “… it is precisely this construal of miracle as interruptive and illustrative of a naked sovereign power that is the problem that must be solved” (Honig, 2011: 94). Such a conception just affirms the claim of the deist rationalist. A more immanent notion of miracle should replace that radically transcendent notion of exception. A radical rupture should be sought. Only such alternative notion can respond to the criticism of the liberal, rational deist who masks the arbitrariness of political and legal decisions and judgments through formal procedures.

Honig turns to Eric Santner’s analysis of Rosenzweig’s distinction between sorcery and prophecy, magic, and miracle in Rosenzweig’s analysis of Moses’ situation at Meribah. Honig (2011: 99) writes, “Moses is barred from entry to the Promised Land because of this incident at Meribah. He will die in Moab, able to see the Promised Land from the mountaintop, but not able to enter the land.” But why is Moses so harshly punished? Honig, following Santner, argues that according to Rosenzweig, Moses acted in this incident as a sorcerer rather than a prophet. She writes (Honig, 2011: 100), “He used force not finesse, hands not speech. He slipped from prophet to magician, he performed the magic but not the miracle … But there is more …” Moses “stole God’s thunder—showing himself, hubristically to bring out the water with his rod rather than speaking and then witnessing, along with the Israelites, god’s work in a more self-effacing way” (Honig, 2011: 100). Hence Honig (2011: 102) concludes that Moses’ failure is not:

… because he disobeyed god … but because he did not see the people as they need to be seen, as the people to whom his land has been given—as free people capable of giving and receiving prophecy as bearers of mere and more life.

The miracle as an exception here is the irreducible diversity of the materiality of life. Difference and diversity is the characterizing essence of material instantiation, which, since Plato, distinguishes it from the sameness of rational thoughts or forms. Schmitt’s and Agamben’s conceptions of sovereignty with their roots in the Christian miracle of incarnation privilege the Platonic fascination with sameness that is only afforded by universal rational forms. According to Schmitt, the Enlightenment, liberal body politic is supposed to follow laws of reason, which represent the rational essence that defines the human autonomy of the members of this body. But political judgments and legal decisions evade all frames of formal regularity; there is essential arbitrariness at the heart of every political decision/judgment. Sovereignty ultimately represents this arbitrariness inasmuch as it has the capacity to suspend all laws and even the constitution and thus make possible the state of exception. Through the state of exception the sovereign power, according to Schmitt, demonstrates the inescapability of dictatorship. Dictatorship is not mere arbitrariness, though; it is the capacity of the universal defined by the sovereign power to frame the material reality of the historical context in the manner that evades any description by rational monotony. Accordingly, Honig (2011: 107) quotes William Conolly’s material critique of Agamben’s and Schmitt’s conceptions of sovereignty:

Politics and culture, however, do not possess as tight a logic as Agamben suggests. They are more littered, layered and complex than that. The dense materiality of culture ensures that it does not correspond neatly to any design, form, pattern of efficient causality or ironclad set of paradoxes.

Miracle, as understood by Rosenzweig, affords a concept of exception as an invitation for all aspirations and projections of the sovereign’s subjects. Honig (2011: 108) writes:

If the exception is like the Rosenzweigian miracle not the Schmittian one, then the miracle serves not as an imposition, not an exemplification of top-down sovereign power, not as a source of political unification and cohesion, not as a rupture in the normal order; or perhaps it is better to say, it risks being all these things but not only these: for it is also an invitation for which diverse members of the assemblage of sovereignty need to be differently prepared and rightly or well oriented. Or else, it will turn out to have been that the sovereign decision in any moment was not a miracle …

This concept of exception challenges the norm-exception dualism that is assumed by Schmitt and Agamben. It allows the “exception to be taken to the exception” as much as it invites the dense levels of material culture to act as sovereign. In other words, the Rosenzweig-inspired concept of exception has a radically democratic thrust that enables the subject of the sovereign to be sovereign. So, while both Schmitt and Rosenzweig would accept that the exception is the power of real life breaking though the crust of ordinariness, for Rosenzweig, the exception challenges the binary of the norm-exception, leading to a sustained state of exception. This is contrary to the momentary sense of exception of Schmitt, wherein the sovereign power divinely interrupts the norm to dispel the delusion of a rational-based regularity and establishes order by a universal that it arbitrarily imposes on historical materiality. The exception that founds sovereignty for Honig is a sustained state of exception that allows the immanent forces of the members of the body politic to re-define, re-shape, and steer sovereignty. But how can the different aspirations, the diverse desires for more-life crystallize in a general framework for sovereignty? Would it simply create another regulated ‘ordinariness’ that still awaits another rupture of exception? If this is the case, would not Schmitt (2005: 66) simply reply to Honig with his answer to Bakunin’s anarchism?

Every claim of a decision must be evil for the anarchist, because the right emerges by itself if the immanence of life is not disturbed by such claims. This radical antithesis forces him of course to decide against the decision; and this results in the odd paradox whereby Bakunin, the greatest anarchist of the nineteenth century, had to become in theory the theologian of the anti-theological and in practice the dictator of an anti-dictatorship.

How would al-Juwaynī’s Islamic concept of sovereignty compare and/or contrast with that of Honig’s? According to al-Juwaynī, and the preponderance of the Ash‘arī school, no assertive claims could be made about nature; this was their response to arguments based on necessary causation made by Peripatetic philosophers and some of the Mu‘tazilī theologians. Perhaps the most famous illustration of this position is al-Ghazālī’s example in the Incoherence of the Philosophers about fire and burnt cotton. The causal connection between fire and burnt cotton is simply contingent; this contingent connection is based on recurrent custom (‘āda muṭṭarida) (al-Ghazālī, 2000). In this vein, al-Āmidī makes the following argument: “if we assume that it is correct that many of the temporal events [in our world] accompany the movement of celestial stars and spheres, this does not imply the latter are causes and reasons necessitating them …” (al-Āmidī, 2010). From the Ash‘arī perspective there is no natural law; nature, as in modern quantum mechanics, is probabilistic. The miracle is just a rupture of the customary, of the already contingent. This attitude immediately takes away from the awe of the miracle. If the norm, if this is at all possible, is already contingent, its rupture or suspension does not entail an awesome intervention by the transcendent God into the immanent frame of power. In other words, the miracle that is brought by the transcendent power is not a violent intervention in the immanent order of the world. This view becomes very clear in al-Juwaynī’s explanation of the “respect in which the miracle indicates the truth of the prophecy of a prophet.” Al-Juwaynī asserts that the respect or the manner in which a miracle vindicates a prophet is like that in which a rational proof demonstrates a particular result. Rather, a miracle indicates the truth of prophecy inasmuch as it leads to assent (taṣdīq) to its claims. Al-Juwaynī (2001: 325) gives an interesting example to illustrate his point:

If a King summons his subjects … and one of his entourage stands: O People Gathered here, a great thing has happened to you … and I am God’s messenger to you and he entrusted me with you … So my king, if my claim is true change your custom … stand up and sit down. If the king does what this man asks him to do, then people would assent to him claim …

Al-Juwaynī then argues, against the possible response of Mu‘tazilī theologians, that in order for his argument to hold he has to assume that God has to be bound by the laws of reason. Hence, God is not completely omnipotent; he has to follow the rules of morality that we discover rationally. Al-Juwaynī (2001: 326) responds:

Every one who witnesses this scene would know that the king believes that this man is a prophet … And intuitively no one of the attendants would assume that a king would break his habits in front of his people in order to lure his subjects.

The logic of the miracle for al-Juwaynī and most of the Ash‘arī theologians evidently reflects the commitment to curb idealistically rational claims, as indicated above. The miracle does not prove prophecy by way of the awe it inspires inasmuch as it interrupts the norm. The miracle invites assent to the prophecy of the prophet. This is why al-Juwaynī argues that the main distinction between miracle and a work of magic does not lie in the objective nature of either. Also, the difference between them does not lie in the attitude of the prophet-sovereign, as was the case in Honig’s analysis of Rosenzweig. The difference between the work of magic and miracle lies in the context of each. The latter happens in a context of a challenge that the prophet poses to his people to demonstrate his prophecy.

But how does the concept of miracle fit with al-Juwaynī’s characterization of sovereignty and the states of exception I depicted in the previous section? The previous sections argued that al-Juwaynī deems the defense and preservation of rational pluralism the essence of the sovereignty of the functional guardian. This is the new aspect about the interpretation and practice of Sharī‘a he discovered through the assumption of the exceptional state of its absence. As I have shown, the assumption al-Juwaynī and the Ash‘arī theologians make is that humans capable of reasoning would use their reason and embark on a rational consideration (naẓar) that would lead them to a belief in a God or perfect being. Humans, as rational agents, would then continue to use their reason to make sense of the nature of this God. In addition, humans inasmuch as they continue to use their reason would also want to know the relation between this God and their lives. To put it differently, rational subjects would want to know how such a transcendent being could relate to the immanent structure—natural, social, and human—of their world. Through considering different counter arguments and the proper checking of rational claims by sense date, these subjects would grow skeptical about any dogma explaining such relationship, whether rational or traditional—hence, the attack of the Ash‘arī theologians against the rationalists and the traditionalists alike—and consider it unsatisfactory. These rational subjects would look for a doctrine that could put forward a way of relating the transcendent universals with historical context without falling into absolutist claims with exclusionary tendencies. For al-Juwaynī, this doctrine is Sharī‘a or God’s regulation of human behavior. Here the role of the miracle that vindicates Sharī‘a as a system that accommodates rational pluralism becomes decisive. According to al-Juwaynī, miracle does not bring forth a model for the triumph of the transcendent over the immanent through the intervention of the sovereign God as in the case of Schmitt’s theory. Similarly, it does not simply invite a revolt of the immanent force against the horizon of an indeterminate transcendence, as Honig characterizes Rosenzweig’s depiction of miracle and exception. The miracle, as a vindication of the rationally pluralistic system of Sharī‘a, is an interpretative frame that allows for multiple rational modes of relating the transcendent to the immanent without imposing one over the other. Hence it is always connected with the context in which humans use their reason, which in turn has a determinate spectrum. It is neither immanently relative nor transcendentally absolute.

Conclusion

Examination of al-Juwaynī’s Ghiyāth al-ummam revealed a Sunni perspective on sovereignty that draws on a special conception of exception and miracle. According to this perspective, the sovereignty of the functional guardian (imām) consists in protecting the pluralistic spectrum of rational hermeneutics in the society. In turn, the boundaries of this hermeneutical spectrum are defined by the attempt to understand the ways in which the idea of the necessary existent, as the sum of all perfections, can be rationally interpreted. This understanding of the essence of sovereignty constitutes the ultimate purpose of Shar‘īa to al-Juwaynī. The development of the use of reason from the basic level initially exercised by every rationally capable individual through the pluralistic society of scholars who represent the sophisticated array of the possible ways of the exercise of reason reveal the foundation of the body politic that the functional guardian’s main obligation is to protect. Al-Juwaynī assumed the successive states of exception to articulate this foundation and show how it legitimizes his conception of the essence of sovereignty.

This interpretation of al-Juwaynī’s conception of sovereignty offers an intermediate alternative to the idealism of classical liberalism—the Kantian version is a good example—and the arbitrariness of Schmitt’s dictatorship. Further, it does not lend itself to the hazard of collapsing into material relativism as Honig’s model does. Instead of insisting on a singular form of universal reason as a basis for moral and political judgment as Kant does, al-Juwaynī argues for multiple yet finite ways of exercising reason. The common basis shared among these different rationalities is the epistemic recognition of the modal distinction between the necessary existent (God) and the possible existents. This does not necessarily lead to a reconstruction of a medieval, naturalistic system of onto-theology. On the contrary, al-Juwaynī and most Ash‘arī thinkers were against such systematically demonstrative constructions of metaphysics and politics. The recognition of this modal distinction is just an epistemic basis that allows for multiple practical and theoretical dialectical logics of understanding of the relationship between the necessary and the possible. I would like to argue that this model of rational pluralism has a key advantage over the communicative model of Habermas’ transcendental pragmatics. In his influential article “Religion in the public sphere,” Habermas (2006) argues that advancements in science and technical reason should be the common basis of rational dialogues in a post-metaphysical rational society. Al-Juwaynī would counter-argue Habermas, contending that this is a rather demanding and unrealistic criterion just like the standards set for faith by his contemporary Mu’tazilī scholars. Recognizing the epistemic modal distinction between the necessary and the possible seems a more reasonable requirement for the public to fulfill. Finally, this rationally pluralistic body politic where sovereignty merely consists in safeguarding the conditions of its existence and free practice can hardly be deemed compatible with the modern Hobbesian sense of the Leviathan sovereign. Hence, this study partially supports, from its own perspective, Wael Hallaq’s claims in his recent work The Impossible State that the Sunni legal and political system cannot be fitted within the framework of the modern state. However, the study agrees with a growing literature on the rational nature of Islamic political judgment in particular and the importance of rational hermeneutics for the Islamic conception of the body politic in general. It just articulates its distinct nature in comparison to modern models of rational liberalism.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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