Coercion and Reason-giving

The Conclusive Argument from God (Hujjat Allah al-baligha), Wali Allah's best-known work, is a detailed explication of the argument that the sacred law (shari`a) is intended by God to promote the interests (masalih; singular: maslaha) of human beings and that those interests are discernible from the Islamic foundational texts, the Qur'an and especially the hadith.Footnote <sup>9</sup> Even as he expounds on hadith reports to demonstrate the rationale behind particular legal and other rulings that constitute the shari`a, Wali Allah frequently enters into quasi-sociological explanations of the working of human societies, their rise and decline; of how the prophets go about their work in founding or reforming religious communities; and of how the successors of those founding figures continue, develop, distort or, as the case may be, reform received practices, traditions and institutions.Footnote ¹⁰ The question of power and domination inevitably arises in many of these discussions.

In a chapter in the Conclusive Argument on “the need for a religion (din) that abrogates other religions”, Wali Allah describes the kind of things that a law-giving prophet does in establishing his religion among his people. As Wali Allah sees it, that religion is itself a reformed version of what had existed in that community earlier, with the prophetical figure serving to rid it of the corruption that had crept into it and making that reformed religion the template for those other communities that might subsequently be brought under the sway of the one that the prophet had founded or reformed.Footnote ¹¹ How does this prophetical figure make his religion dominant over other religions? Wali Allah responds:

Given that Wali Allah's signature concern in the Conclusive Argument is to show that God's rulings can be understood in terms of their rationale, he goes on to ask in this same chapter whether the prophetical figure under discussion ought to share the rationale of his actions with other people. Wali Allah has two different ideas on this question. So far as the ordinary people are concerned, “he should not intimate to them very much about the spirit behind the actions [that he has made binding upon them], nor give them a choice in matters of the law. He should keep the science of the sacred law's inner meanings, a science that is the source of the law's detailed rulings, a hidden science”.Footnote ¹³ The justification is that common people—as distinguished from the elite—are unable to properly understand the human interests that are at the heart of the divine legislation in question. If the purposes that truly underlie particular rulings are divulged to such people and they are told that those purposes are not necessarily what the outer forms of the law seemed to suggest, people could become excessively disputatious about those rulings and the reason why those rulings had been instituted in the first place would be lost.Footnote ¹⁴ Yet, and this is Wali Allah's second idea on this matter, coercive power only goes so far. If the prophetical law-giver's work is to be durable, it would need to be upheld by something more than the sword:

Though he refers to it as the “upright religion”, the tone of this remarkable passage makes it clear that the truth of the claims in question matters less than the rhetorical efficacy of those claims, their persuasiveness. Elsewhere in the same work, Wali Allah goes so far as to suggest that the ruler, even when he makes a mistake as regards a particular action, ought to convince his subjects that their interest (maslaha) is best served through the act in question, that is, through the very act that he knows to have been a mistake.Footnote ¹⁶ Equally clear is what Wali Allah envisages of a combination of coercion and persuasion. The point here is not merely that power is required to uphold religion; not many would have disputed that. It is rather—though Wali Allah does not put it in so stark a manner here—that power and persuasion are no less constitutive of religion than is a religion's substantive content.

The foregoing passage regarding demonstrative and rhetorical arguments relates to the work of a prophet and it is clear that it is the Prophet Muhammad of whom it speaks. The implications of the ideas adumbrated there extend, however, to the Prophet's successors as well, for his teachings about religion are understood as having been directed at the establishment, among other things, of a “universal caliphate” (al-khilafa al-`amma).Footnote <sup>17</sup> Wali Allah, as noted earlier, wrote two books, both in Persian, on the virtues of the Rashidun caliphs: Revealing [the Legitimacy of] Caliphal Rule (Izalat al-khafa `an khilafat al-khulafa) and The Coolness of the Eyes Regarding the Preferment of the Two Elders [Abu Bakr and `Umar] (Qurrat al-`aynayn fi tafdil al-shaykhayn). Both these books seek to refute Shi`i objections to the legitimacy of the first three caliphs—Abu Bakr, `Umar, and `Uthman—and to show that `Ali, though part of this distinguished company, was decidedly inferior, in terms of his overall standing, to his predecessors. Caliphal Rule does this by cataloguing the virtues of the four Rashidun in sequence, and the Coolness of the Eyes by focusing on the excellence of the first two caliphs and their superiority over everyone other than the Prophet himself.

A major theme of Caliphal Rule is how the prophetical mission of Muhammad was completed not by the time of his death but rather at the hands of his successors. Commenting on Q 9.33 (“It is He who has sent His Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth, to show that it is above all religions, however much the idolaters may hate this”), Wali Allah observes that earlier commentators of the Qur'an had had some difficulty in explaining this verse. For the Prophet's subduing isolated communities of Christians, Jews and Magians hardly amounted to the “domination over religions” (ghalaba bar adyan) of which the Qur'an speaks. “Total domination” (ghalaba-yi tamam), Wali Allah posits, “means that the very core of that religion is appropriated (bayza-yi an din mustabah gardad), its adherents so scattered that no one remains to call to it, and [as a consequence] that that religion loses all its glory”.Footnote ¹⁸ The Prophet's successes in his lifetime clearly did not meet any such definition of domination. God had promised his messengers likewise that “they shall be helped, and Our host—they are the victors” (Q 37.172-3).Footnote ¹⁹ Another passage, notable for using a cognate of the Arabic term from which the term caliphate is derived, reads:

Insomuch as these were God's promises, they had to be fulfilled. Yet they had not been adequately fulfilled by the time of the Prophet's death. Setting the stage this way, Wali Allah argues that it was God's will that His promises to His prophet be realised through the most exalted of his two companions, viz., the first two Rashidun caliphs, Abu Bakr and `Umar (hereafter usually referred to as the first Rashidun).

The first Rashidun were the “limbs” (jawarih; singular: jariha) through which the Prophet's mission was to be completed. Wali Allah is referring here, of course, to the extraordinary conquests that had taken place in less than two decades following the Prophet's death. By the time of the death of `Umar in 644, the Sasanian empire, which had once extended from Transoxiana to Mesopotamia, had been vanquished and destroyed at the hands of Arab troops and the Byzantine empire had lost its eastern provinces—Jordan, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt—to the Arabs. That success, the domination of Islam over other religions during their reign, was an extension of the Prophet's work, and their triumphs could be subsumed in those of the Prophet.Footnote <sup>21</sup> In a remarkable analogy that is meant to make the point that a similar pattern extends to other prophets, too, Wali Allah adduces the case of the Eucharist: just as Christ entered the bodies of his disciples in the form of the bread he had shared with them, so did the Prophet act through the limbs of his successors, whose victories are therefore really his.Footnote <sup>22</sup> This feature of being an extension of the prophetical mission, an instrument for the realisation of God's promises to the Prophet, is what distinguishes the Rashidun from all later caliphs: the former comprise the “exclusive” (khassa) as opposed to the universal or general (`amma) caliphate.Footnote ²³

If the era of the first Rashidun is an extension of the prophetical age, then the implication is obviously that those caliphs had continued the process of variously shaping the religion that Muhammad had instituted. The prophet-like qualities the Rashidun had possessed had allowed them to give form and substance to the religion. Such qualities include serving as religious guides of the people (murshid-i khala'iq). That is, the ability to provide authoritative religious guidance to people resided in their persons by virtue of their possessing certain God-given qualities, which is to say that such ability was not merely derivative of the Prophet's teachings. They were able as well to understand what God wanted them to do on their own rather than on anyone's instruction (az sirr-i tahqiq na az sirr-i taqlid). Indeed, Wali Allah makes the point that, in the Prophet's lifetime, God's will could sometimes find expression in a statement by Abu Bakr or `Umar even before God had revealed something to that effect to the Prophet.Footnote ²⁴ Put another way, before they became the limbs of the Prophet, they were already functioning as the instruments of God's will. As Wali Allah has it, though divine effulgence (fayd-i Ilahi) can find expression through any means that God chooses, “God's custom is that the [chosen] instrument of such effulgence is someone who is ready for it.”Footnote ²⁵ Conversely, one's religious standing vis-à-vis other claimants becomes known through specific actions—suggesting God's grace upon those performing them—rather than those actions being dependent upon that standing.

That religious standing depended upon readiness for action and upon action meant that mere virtue could not have been enough to make the Rashidun the instruments that they were for the realisation of what God had intended for the Prophet. That required political and military power—the sort of power that had enabled these caliphs to defeat and uproot mighty empires, to bring low the great religions associated with those empires, and thereby to pave the way for the establishment and flourishing of Islam. By making Islam the dominant religion, they had shown that Islam was the true religion. As Wali Allah puts it bluntly,

The same power that had helped demonstrate the truth of the religion had served as well, at the hands of the first Rashidun, to give that religion some of its content. Yet that contribution, some examples of which will be observed later, was not merely a matter of royal fiat. It came ultimately from the special religious, quasi-mystical and prophet-like attributes of the Rashidun. Such qualities enabled them, as they had the Prophet, to become the guides of people, to teach them and transform their lives. The key point remains, however, that those qualities would have been useless without the backing of coercive power, which is what allowed them to be put to effective use.

Power and Authority

There is more than a broadly Islamic triumphalism that is at stake in the correlation Wali Allah suggests between truth and power. He also has a clearly anti-Shi`i intent in positing this equation. The just quoted passage continues as follows:

Displaying a putative fairmindedness that would have persuaded no one among his Shi`i contemporaries, Wali Allah notes that `Ali was not lacking in any of the qualities of a righteous caliph. However, in failing as a caliph, he showed that he was not destined, unlike his predecessors, to serve as the instrument of God's will or as an extension of the prophetic era. Put another way, it is not that influential members of the community whom Muhammad had left behind prevented `Ali from being able to properly establish his rule. It is that God had never intended him to be able to do so. For no one could have prevented him from this if it had been God's will that he, too, should be the instrument of furthering the Prophet's mission.Footnote ²⁸

There are two related implications that Wali Allah draws from this analysis of `Ali's failed caliphate. First, that it cannot be held, as the Imami Shi`a have since their formative years, that while political power was illegitimately denied to their imams, they were nonetheless the loci of rightful authority. Nasir al-din Tusi (d. 1274) had put the Shi`i view as follows in his Akhlaq-i Nasiri, one of the most widely read works on ethics in the pre-modern eastern Islamic world:

Tusi had once been an Ismàili Shi`i and had been in the service of the Mongol conqueror Hülegü, who is best remembered for his termination of the `Abbasid caliphate and the sack of Baghdad in 1258; but he had later converted to Imami Shi`ism, the faith of his early years.Footnote <sup>30</sup> The fact that his enormously influential treatise was read across sectarian divides suggests that Sunnis, too, could have been influenced by the view that the true king—`Ali and his successors—was the one who deserved that position rather than one able, in fact, to establish his rule. A good deal of Wali Allah's argumentation in his sectarian polemics turns precisely on refuting that view. To him, there is no legitimate claim to political authority if one has failed to translate that claim into political power and effective rule.

Second, it is not just that actual power is needed to make authority legitimate. It is also that the resulting legitimacy is an expression of God's will and therefore of the religious merit that comes from acting in accordance with that will. Two examples Wali Allah gives to make this point are telling. The first is a hypothetical. Suppose, he says, that God had promised to reward in particular ways the person delivering the sermon on a certain Friday or had said that the person delivering it on that Friday was learned and virtuous. If two candidates for the honour of delivering that Friday sermon had disputed—even fought—with each other and one of them, having forcibly restrained the other, had ascended the pulpit to deliver it, the one succeeding in that struggle would be the person deserving of what God had promised.Footnote ³¹ Such struggles are not unheard of, with adherents of rival doctrinal orientations sometimes vying for control of particular mosques.Footnote ³² The unrest that had followed the decree of the emperor Bahadur Shah (r. 1707-12) in 1710 that `Ali, the first Shi`i imam, be referred to in Friday sermons as the “legatee” (wasi) of the Prophet is also worth mentioning here. In marked contrast with his father, the emperor Aurangzeb, Bahadur Shah had Shi`i leanings and this decree was their expression. In Ahmadabad, in western India, some people had warned the preacher not to repeat this characterisation of `Ali in his Friday sermon the following week. When the preacher did so anyway, the rioters pulled him down from the pulpit and stabbed and beat him to death.Footnote ³³ This incident was recorded in contemporary chronicles and Wali Allah may well have heard or read about it. Admittedly, this is not quite what Wali Allah posits in his hypothetical and, despite his noted anti-Shi`ism, he may not have condoned that grisly outcome; however, it would not be surprising if some of those familiar with his discussion had thought that he did condone such acts.Footnote ³⁴

It is worth speculating if Wali Allah's hypothetical is an allusion as well to something far more momentous, viz., the Mughal succession struggle that had led to the imprisonment of the emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58), the enthronement of Aurangzeb, and the death of two of Aurangzeb's brothers and the exile of a third. In 1657, Shah Jahan had fallen seriously ill, and though he would recover, his anticipated death had set in motion a struggle for the throne among his sons. Aurangzeb's decision, following his victory in that struggle, to imprison Shah Jahan was viewed with considerable misgiving in some circles. Even the shari`a judge of the military encampment (qadi-yi ordu) had refused to recite the sermon at the congregational prayers in Aurangzeb's name—a key marker of royal legitimacy—on grounds that Shah Jahan was still alive. A religious scholar, Shaykh `Abd al-Wahhab, who had sought earlier to convince the qadi to change his view, was soon appointed as the new qadi by Aurangzeb and would serve in that position for many years.Footnote ³⁵ In his correspondence with the imprisoned Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb, for his part, would remind the old emperor that “nothing can happen without God's will. Therefore, this great event [i.e., Aurangzeb's accession] is not due to any mortal's power or will. Why do you, though a wise man, consider another as the author of what is (really) God's doing?”Footnote ³⁶ Aurangzeb's claim is not far removed from Wali Allah's hypothetical: Aurangzeb had only ascended the throne because God had willed it and whether the old emperor was alive or dead was irrelevant; he might have added, with Wali Allah, that he had thereby become entitled to the reward God had promised to the one now occupying that position.

Wali Allah's second example relates to the canonisation of the Qur'an during the reign of `Uthman. A number of the companions of the Prophet had their own codices of the Qur'an, but, Wali Allah observes, the text of the Qur'an is what had come to be agreed upon as the `Uthmanic codex: the passages that did not get included in it are not covered by God's promise to preserve the Qur'an, for they are not the Qur'an. They would not have been left out if God had intended them, too, to comprise His scripture.Footnote ³⁷

A good deal of what Wali Allah has in mind in making these points is well-represented in medieval Sunni political thought. Since the time of the eleventh century Baghdad-based jurist al-Mawardi (d. 1058), many Sunni jurists had sought to legitimise those wielding political power irrespective of how they had come to power. Mawardi had leaned heavily on the idea that the caliph, the legitimate political authority, is presumed to have delegated some of his authority to the de facto ruler. In the following generations, other jurists came to hold that even the myth of delegated authority was unnecessary, that the wielder of effective power was legitimate by virtue, simply, of possessing such power. Wali Allah goes beyond such legitimation of the status quo, however. To him, it is not merely that effective political power is its own justification. It is also that such power is a mark of God's favor on the one who possesses it; it exhibits God's design, and it could not have been otherwise.

Conversely, as has been seen, the mere fact that one is qualified for a position does not make one the legitimate claimant to it. There is no legitimate claim without the power to back it or, to put it another way, the one holding a position with the backing of effective power is to be deemed its legitimate occupant rather than the one merely claiming it on grounds of qualification. The implication is not only that the descendants of `Ali, whom the Shi`a recognise as their imams, had no legitimate claim to the caliphate but also, against the likes of medieval Sunni jurists such as Mawardi, that a politically impotent caliph with all the entitlement but no power by his side was no ruler.Footnote ³⁸ Wali Allah does not explicitly make this last point—about the classical jurists’ dubious efforts to prop up politically irrelevant caliphs—but it fits well with the logic of his argument. The most important intellectual influence on Wali Allah in this regard appears to have been the fourteenth-century Damascene jurist and theologian Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328).

Ibn Taymiyya wrote in the age of the Mamluks, a non-hereditary sultanate ruled by strongmen who had risen from the ranks of Turkish slave soldiers (mamluks) and who would govern Syria and Egypt until the Ottoman conquest in the early sixteenth century. In the aftermath of the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, a Mamuk sultan, Baybars (r. 1260-77), had proclaimed a refugee from the `Abbasid family as the new caliph in Cairo. No one put much stock by the myth of a resuscitated caliphate, though it continued for as long as the Mamluk state itself lasted. Real power was held, of course, by the Mamluk sultans and Ibn Taymiyya's political thought, unlike, say, Mawardi's, is premised on a straightforward recognition of the implications of that fact.Footnote ³⁹

Like Wali Allah later, Ibn Taymiyya, too, wrote a polemical work against Shi`i beliefs and it is, inter alia, in that book—The Path of the Prophetical Example in Refutation of the Theology of the Shi`a and of the Adherents of Free Will—that he underlines the juxtaposition of legitimacy and power. Wali Allah does not quote Ibn Taymiyya in his books on the caliphate, though he does discuss him elsewhere in his writings and defends him staunchly against his detractors.Footnote ⁴⁰ Some of Wali Allah's teachers in the Hijaz were also deeply influenced by Ibn Taymiyya, and there is little reason to doubt Wali Allah's familiarity with Ibn Taymiyya's thought and writings.Footnote ⁴¹

In his Path, Ibn Taymiyya presents the standard view of “the leaders of Sunni opinion” (a'immat al-sunna) to be that

Commenting elsewhere in this book on the Shi`a's claim that their imams were more entitled to the headship of the community than others on account of their knowledge and piety, Ibn Taymiyya writes:

With his hypothetical example of an aspiring prayer leader who forcibly evicts the one already at the pulpit, Wali Allah goes farther than Ibn Taymiyya in not merely condoning the use of force but also in recognising religious merit for the one who actually comes to occupy the position in question. As will be seen, Wali Allah's political theory is firmly aligned with his mystical sensibilities, and these, too, are absent in Ibn Taymiyya's political thought. Nonetheless, Wali Allah does seem indebted to Ibn Taymiyya's stark recognition of the reality of power as the criterion for legitimacy—a coldblooded realism to which, despite his own unhappy relations with the Mamluks, Ibn Taymiyya had given a powerful expression.

Though Wali Allah's discussion in Coolness of the Eyes and Caliphal Rule is concerned only with the Rashidun caliphs, it is worth asking what the implications of his analysis, as briefly adumbrated in the foregoing, are for other Muslim rulers. Addressing this requires an understanding of what Wali Allah means by the “rightly-guided caliphate” (khilafat-i rashida). On the face of it, it means, of course, the era of Muhammad's first four successors, the Rashidun caliphs. On occasion, Wali Allah appears, however, to have a more expansive understanding of the rightly-guided caliphate than what had existed in the three decades following the Prophet's death. A key scriptural passage he adduces in this regard is Q 22.41: “Those who, when We establish them in the land, keep up the prayer, pay the prescribed alms, command what is right, and forbid what is wrong. God controls the outcome of all events”. The defining features of a “lawful caliphate” (khilafat-i shar`i) is that it joins being “established in the land” with the implementation of the religion. This combination, he says, is what a rightly-guided caliphate represents.Footnote ⁴⁴ A formulation of this kind is notable for suggesting, or for leaving open the possibility, of an extension of such a caliphate to righteous rulers of later times as well.Footnote ⁴⁵ Elsewhere, he states:

Yet if, in Wali Allah's formulation, the doors to the rightly-guided caliphate remain open to pious rulers of later times, those conventionally recognised by the Sunnis as the Rashidun are nonetheless set apart, sometimes with additional adjectives. Theirs is the “exclusive rightly-guided caliphate” (khilafat-i rashida-yi khassa),Footnote ⁴⁷ a temporally-bounded—three-decades long—succession or deputyship of prophethood (khilafat-i nubuwwa).Footnote ⁴⁸ The defining feature of this rightly-guided caliphate proper is its incumbents’ modelling themselves upon (tashabbuh) the Prophet without yet being prophets themselves. Part of their ability to so model themselves comes from their having been in the Prophet's company.Footnote ⁴⁹ It also comes, as noted, from the fact that God had given them a share in some of the attributes of the Prophet, for instance in their being able to occasionally anticipate what Muhammad would afterwards receive as revelation. Such people are also privy to the general principles governing good and evil or those underlying the social organisation, though it is left to the Prophet to elaborate upon those principles for the benefit of ordinary people.Footnote ⁵⁰ If nothing else, such attributes ensured that those caliphs would remain unmatched in their special attributes.

Those who are truly unmatched in their closeness to the Prophet are, of course, the first two Rashidun, Abu Bakr and `Umar. Wali Allah ends his Qurrat al-`aynayn with the arresting image of a torch whose light is reflected by mirrors installed in a dark room. The light and its reflections merge into one another to create a powerful effect, he observes in what sounds like a description evocative of the “glass palace” (shish mahall) in the Mughal forts of Agra and Lahore. In such a room, he says, it is impossible to distinguish the original source of the light from its reflections. Abu Bakr and `Umar are those reflections, whereas `Ali is like the moon that draws its light from the sun but remains clearly distinguishable from the sun.Footnote ⁵¹ The similarity between the qualities of the Prophet and those of the first Rashidun is unique in its comprehensiveness—except, of course, that the latter were not prophets.Footnote ⁵² Similarity in some specific respects is, for its part, nothing unusual, and this could be true not just of an `Ali but also of a saint, a scholar, a person of superior virtue or a king.Footnote ⁵³ The acknowledgment that a king, too, could find himself in this company is unrestricted by temporal proximity to the Prophet's age. Indeed, Wali Allah says, works of history tell us that the horoscope of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni (r. 998-1030), who had raided India multiple times from his base in what is today east-central Afghanistan, was identical with that of the Prophet in terms of planetary conjunctions, which is what had enabled Mahmud to have his successful career as a conqueror.Footnote ⁵⁴

In the end, Wali Allah appears only to have gestured towards the possibility that rightly-guided caliphs may exist well after the three-decade long era of the Rashidun, to which Sunni political and religious thought has tended to limit it. Not everyone else was quite so reticent, and Muhammad Isma`il (d. 1831), a grandson of Wali Allah, would unambiguously open the door for others to join the company of the Rashidun. In a book titled The Position of the Imam (Mansib-i imamat), Isma`il writes:

Isma`il lost his life in 1831, fighting the Sikhs alongside Sayyid Ahmad of Rae Bareli, a puritanical reformer who had sought to establish a polity on India's northwestern frontier. Sayyid Ahmad's followers had come to associate millenarian expectations with him, and it may well be that Isma`il expected him to be the next rightly-guided caliph.Footnote ⁵⁶ Even if that was the case, the number of people who could potentially join that select company was open-ended, and this is perhaps the most significant point about Isma`il's formulation. For in admitting people to that select rank, it opens to them the possibility of transforming the religious tradition in ways that those conventionally remembered as the Rashidun once did.

Fragmentation of Authority

In dilating on the virtues of `Umar, the second of the Rashidun caliphs, Wali Allah analogises that caliph's bosom to a house with many doors, with the most preeminent of people in their varied arenas seated at each door: the likes of the world conqueror Alexander (d. 323 BC) sit at one door; of the ancient Iranian king Anosharwan (r. 531-79), a paragon of justice and solicitude for his subjects, at another; of Abu Hanifa (d. 767) and Malik (d. 795), the founding fathers of two leading Sunni schools of law, at another; and of Sufi masters and sages such as `Abd al-Qadir Jilani (d. 1166), `Attar (d. 1220), and Rumi (d. 1273) at yet others. All those in need come to the respective door and get from there what they seek.Footnote <sup>57</sup> In part, this is an illustration of Wali Allah's point that `Umar was the embodiment of the knowledge and the wisdom that generations of later scholars would elaborate upon—the text on which the later legal tradition was in the nature of commentaries.Footnote ⁵⁸ But as he makes clear elsewhere, his point is also that authority was unified in the person of caliphs like Abu Bakr and `Umar: “everyone was agreed on a single way (madhhab) and gathered together on a single path (rah), which was the way and the view of the caliph”.Footnote <sup>59</sup> By the time of `Ali, that was no longer the case. And it was not only in a political sense that the community was split but also in matters relating to knowledge and of those claiming authority in its terms. Various companions of the Prophet and their successors got busy in various regional centers of the fast-expanding empire to narrate hadith, expound on the Qur'an, deliver fatwas, and so forth. Insomuch as the caliph was no longer recognised as the preeminent authority in all matters, there no longer was an agreed-upon way of resolving legal and other disagreement.Footnote ⁶⁰

Wali Allah's analysis puts us in mind of the contention of the German philosopher Carl Schmitt (d. 1985) that the will of the sovereign is what brings an end to otherwise interminable disagreements.Footnote ⁶¹ The sovereign, as Schmitt famously put it in his Political Theology, is “he who decides on the exception”.Footnote ⁶² Wali Allah provides many examples of the sovereign will of the first Rashidun, notably of `Umar, in Schmitt's sense of the term. `Umar had decided to outlaw the practice of mut`a or “temporary marriage”, whereby a man and a woman could enter into a sexual relationship for a fixed period and with a monetary compensation for the woman.Footnote <sup>63</sup> This practice continues to be accepted as legitimate among the Twelver Shi`a, whereas the Sunnis have long considered it simply to be prostitution. It is noteworthy, however, that this practice had been considered legitimate in the Prophet's own day, as Wali Allah notes, and it was not until the reign of `Umar that it had come to be outlawed.Footnote <sup>64</sup> `Umar's sovereign decision is what had set a new norm—and, Wali Allah says, a new consensus—in this instance.Footnote ⁶⁵ It was `Umar, too, who had decided that the highly fertile lands of lower Iraq would not be divided among the conquering Arabs—as the tribesmen from Arabia had expected them to—but rather preserved as state property from whose revenues future generations of Arab Muslims could continue to benefit.Footnote <sup>66</sup> But even apart from deciding on the exception, the first Rashidun's decisions had served to settle matters for good. As Wali Allah puts it, things not decided by `Umar's time would remain a matter of disagreement forever.Footnote ⁶⁷ To Wali Allah, this is precisely the sense in which `Ali was not a sovereign. The matter has nothing to do with inherent qualification or ability; it has everything to do with effectiveness. Indeed, `Ali was a particularly tragic figure from this vantage. Wali Allah recognises that `Ali was an exceptional individual. Yet he was never able to act upon those exceptional gifts; his commands were not accepted even by his own followers, let alone by the generality of other Muslims.Footnote <sup>68</sup> Paul Kahn's elucidation of Schmitt applies well to the case of `Ali, as Wali Allah understands him: “In the competitive world of power, abstract norms don't count for much…. Justice as an abstraction founds no state…. Every norm depends for its practical existence upon a decision. It must be taken up as the object of the will of some individual or group”.Footnote ⁶⁹

The point here is not, of course, that Wali Allah recognises only the first Rashidun as sovereigns. All those wielding effective political power—the power to implement one's will—were sovereigns. Their possession of power made it possible for them to end disagreement on particular matters. For those submitting to their power and authority, it also made it possible to live with their other disagreements. Tusi, the great ethicist of medieval times, had put it this way:

Wali Allah would have concurred with Tusi on this point. There were disagreements of a fundamental nature, however, that no one after the first Rashidun would be able to resolve. And they had become worse over time.

Yet, if this fragmentation represented a regression from the pristine unity under Abu Bakr and `Umar, there was hope even in fragmented times. After all, in a famous hadith, the Prophet had compared his companions to stars—“you would find guidance whichever among them you followed”.Footnote ⁷¹ It is in the gradual unfolding of this fragmented world that scholars, Sufis and others would find their vocations. And authoritative religious guides, even rightly-guided rulers, could exist in later times, too.

Even as Wali Allah quotes prophetical traditions about things going from bad to worse, he observes that every age has its share of people who would live in accordance with prophetical norms. Such virtuous people were not to be expected to all be alike: “each generation will have its own particular way of being close [to God]”.Footnote ⁷² Indeed, in what would otherwise seem to be the least favourable of those times, closest perhaps to Wali Allah's own age, things would take a new and positive turn: “the divine gaze [now] falls on those spiritual abilities (malakat-i nafs) that are acquired through various practices and forms of [divine] recollection and that become firmly established in the subtle roots (jadhar-i latifa) of the mind and the soul and the heart”.Footnote ⁷³ This, of course, is a reference to mystical authority, to which Wali Allah himself, like many others, was a claimant.

Centuries before Wali Allah, Muslim mystics had come to make a distinction between an outer and an inner caliphate.Footnote ⁷⁴ As WaliAllah explains it, the outer (zahiri) caliphate was concerned with the functions that Islamic political theory typically assigns to the caliph, and to the ruler more generally: the implementation of the law mandated by the shari`a, notably the punishments specifically mentioned in the Qur'an—the hudud; the defence of the state's borders; the prosecution of jihad; the collection and disbursement of taxes; the welfare of the orphans; the oversight of mosques and charitable foundations, and so forth.Footnote ⁷⁵ The inner (batini) caliphate—concerned with the teaching of the foundational texts and the sacred law and with the Qur'anic obligation of commanding right and forbidding wrong—is represented by the theologians, the preachers, the Sufis and others of that ilk.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Prophet himself had appointed some of his companions to such functions, Wali Allah says, without putting them in charge of the kind of functions that go with what he subsumes under the outer caliphate. The difference between the two kinds of caliphate, he says, is that the outer caliphate does not countenance multiple loci whereas the inner caliphate could be embodied in many people at the same time.Footnote ⁷⁷ Wali Allah, too, had been “clothed by God with the robes of the inner caliphate”.Footnote ⁷⁸

This was not just a Sufi way of thinking about the division of labour between the ruler and the holy man. Many Muslim rulers, too, had come to view things in a similar way, again long before Wali Allah's time. As Huseyin Yilmaz has shown with reference to the early Ottoman state, the sultans often spoke of Sufi saints as the true locus of authority and presented their own power and authority as derivative of theirs. This meant not only that the ruler sought to legitimise his power by affirming that it came with the saint's blessings but also that it was conceived of in spiritual and not just raw political and military terms.Footnote ⁷⁹ It should be noted that the distinction between the outer and the inner caliphate, as Wali Allah makes it, is not one between the political and the religious, for the implementation of the hudud and the prosecution of jihad are religious obligations, as are the others that he mentions in this regard. Rather, it is a distinction between the functions that require coercive power and those that do not. Put another way, this distinction is illustrative of the fragmentation of authority that Wali Allah sees as having come about after the time of the first Rashidun, and one that is clearly envisioned as continuing until the end of time. But insomuch as the outer and the inner caliphs can work together, it also helps mitigate some of the effects of that fragmentation.

Mystics are privy by definition to knowledge not given to ordinary people and, in occupying the position of the inner caliphate, Wali Allah could claim to know more than did lesser mystics. The Qur'an mentions “the highest council”—al-mala al-a`la—in the heavens whose deliberations are not open to outsiders. Satan and his agents try to eavesdrop but they are driven away (Q 37.8-9). Even the Prophet Muhammad is instructed by God to tell people that he did not know what the Highest Council had been disputing about on a particular, otherwise unspecified, occasion (Q 38.69). Unlike the Qur'an, Muslim mystics have tended to assume that the Prophet, too, had access to the Highest Council, which would seem to be necessary, after all, before they could claim their own access to it.

Wali Allah was privy as well to the Highest Council's deliberations,Footnote ⁸⁰ and it features prominently in his writings. It occupies in his cosmology an intermediary position between the “holy enclave” (hazirat al-quds), a more select group of which God and the most exalted angels are part, and the world. The Highest Council serves to communicate to the world, or to implement, the judgments that have been arrived at by the more select group; it also tries to shape the Holy Enclave's decisions, for instance, by interceding on behalf of particular people; and it helps tailor the commands received from the highest circles to the circumstances of particular communities at particular times.Footnote ⁸¹ A prophet, Wali Allah observes, is someone who has the requisite qualities that enable him to be the instrument—the “limb” (jariha)—of the Highest Council in the world,Footnote ⁸² much like the first Rashidun would be the limbs of the Prophet Muhammad after he had passed from the scene. On occasion, Wali Allah used the same term—jariha—for himself, too.Footnote ⁸³

To be attuned to the deliberations of the Highest Council is, at the very least, to know what is about to happen. For those with such privileged access, there may well be opportunities to modify the results of the Highest Council's deliberations; at a minimum, it could provide some advance warning to the relevant circles of people here on earth. Needless to say, the deliberations of the Highest Council, and of the angelic realms more broadly, are not limited to matters of the religious law or to otherworldly salvation but extend also to worldly matters in their fullness. This is what would have made Wali Allah, and mystics like him, so valuable to anyone who believed in the existence and accessibility of such knowledge. Wali Allah's letters to powerful men of his time make frequent reference to the heavenly deliberations on political and military affairs unfolding here on earth. As the Rohilla warlord Najib al-Dawla (d. 1770), allied with Ahmad Shah Abdali and known for his patronage of religious scholars, prepared for a military campaign against the Hindu Jats, Wali Allah wrote to him with these words of encouragement:

Muhammad Isma`il, Wali Allah's grandson, sheds some further light on the workings of the angelic hosts. Some angels, he says, are concerned with the affairs of the world as a whole, and these comprise the Highest Council. Others are concerned with the affairs of particular groups of people—the inhabitants of this land or the other, the victory of this army or that. The same is true of saintly figures on earth, who might be supporting rival causes and trying to influence the angelic assemblies in favour of their particular side.Footnote ⁸⁵ Needless, perhaps, to say, this is a candid recognition of the need for all parties—at the royal court, in the battlefield, among those competing over scarce goods—to have their holy persons, with the understanding that the most powerful of them would help bring success to their side. In this enchanted but fragmented world, the jockeying for influence and advantage that is an inescapable part of society and politics reaches all the way up into the heavens.

Power and Religious Change in an Enchanted World

There may appear to be a wide gulf between the world of a Sufi-scholar of the Qur'an and hadith, on the one hand, and that of realpolitik, court intrigue and armies ransacking fallen towns and cities, on the other. Wali Allah sought, however, to straddle this gulf. He was not alone in this respect, of course. Leaving aside the role that cynical self-interest may have had in such efforts, what is worth underscoring here is the point that political involvements did not have to come at the cost of a mystic's cosmology. To be sure, the age of the Rashidun remained inimitable and Wali Allah could lament that even the non-Rashidun Arab rulers had been superior to the subsequent non-Arab ones (`ajam). Indeed, the latter were little better than Magians, with the difference that they professed to be Muslims and had continued to perform their ritual prayers.Footnote <sup>86</sup> For their part, the jurists of those later times had reified mere products of legal reasoning into the invariant practice (sunna) of the Prophet, with their “knowledge amounting to derivation (takhrij) upon derivation, a branching out (tafri` [of rulings]) from other branches”.Footnote ⁸⁷ And yet, despite such rot, Wali Allah's world had continued to be a resolutely enchanted one. It was still possible for select individuals to receive communications from the Highest Council and, in turn, to influence its decisions. And particular sides in a political or military contest could still represent enough promise for the Highest Council to intervene on their behalf. Indeed, just as the first Rashidun had had many of the qualities of the Prophet Muhammad, it remained possible for later rulers to be rightly-guided. Further, though the later kings did not have even a hundredth of the divine favour that the early caliphs had enjoyed, “a sincerely-intentioned Muslim king helping bring about the prevalence of Islam was sure to have many good works inscribed in the ledger of his deeds”.Footnote ⁸⁸

If the ruler could inhabit the same enchanted world as did the mystic and benefitted from doing so, coercive power is obviously what distinguished the one from the other. Political effectiveness is also what distinguished one ruler from another, and here we return to Wali Allah's argument that `Ali's ineffectiveness as a ruler meant that—unlike the first Rashidun—he was not the chosen instrument of God's will, the “limb” through which the Prophet's mission would be completed. At times, as seen in the hypothetical example of a preacher forcibly evicting the one already at the pulpit, Wali Allah tends to confer legitimacy, even religious merit, upon whomsoever happened to rise to the top. However, his more fundamental concern was to argue that the idea of political legitimacy without coercive power was vacuous, a view that suited his anti-Shi`i goals very well.

So far as `Ali's authority was concerned, it was akin, Wali Allah thought, to sainthood (wilaya) whereas that of Abu Bakr and `Umar was closer to the model of prophethood itself. Wali Allah says this in evident mindfulness of the belief of many Sunni Sufis that their spiritual lineages went back to `Ali. Wali Allah's presenting `Ali in this way is disingenuous, however, for, in the same book in which he does so, he had already spent some time refuting the Sufi belief that `Ali stood at the foundation of their much vaunted spiritual genealogies. His point is nonetheless that the Prophet's core concerns vis-à-vis the Muslim community were encompassed by the outward and practical aspects of his persona—the dispensing of justice, the bringing together of people, the observable norms of the shari`a; they did not consist in such signature mystical experiences as losing oneself in the divine (fana) or the more enduring state following the return from that mystical experience (baqa). “The forms of knowledge transmitted [from the Prophet] are all to be followed from the perspective of what is apparent [rather than what is concealed]”, he says in the very last sentence of his Coolness of the Eyes, and while `Ali represented the concealed, the mystical, aspects of the Prophet's persona, Abu Bakr and `Umar embodied the apparent.Footnote ⁸⁹ Put another way, it is the first Rashidun who represented the proper way to live Islam, the Islam that related to law and practice, and what had been effective and powerful in history. This formulation is as good an illustration as any of how Wali Allah's view of power and authority converges with his understanding of Islam itself.

This brings me to a final question: how did Wali Allah envision growth and evolution in the religious tradition? There is no doubt that he did, not only because he expected the continuing, if sporadic, appearance of exceptional figures, but also because he was unusual among his Indian contemporaries in his critique of fellow jurists—as well as of other scholars and Sufis—and in some of his initiatives in the area of legal thought. While many others had long held that the most prudent course of action so far as the legal tradition was concerned was to firmly adhere to the rulings of the earlier masters (taqlid), Wali Allah is famous for his insistence on continuing juridical striving towards the derivation of new legal rulings (ijtihad) from the foundational Islamic texts. This was no empty rhetoric: others, too, might often agree that ijtihad was needed in particular circumstances and that undertaking it remained a theoretical possibility, but they tended to lament, in almost the same breath, that no one with the requisite qualifications was at hand. Wali Allah argued, for his part, that the qualifications for ijtihad were significantly less onerous than they had been made out to be,Footnote ⁹⁰ and he had sought thereby to give confidence and legitimacy to would-be mujtahids. Further, and unlike many fellow jurists who tended to be committed to operating within the parameters of their particular school of law, Wali Allah had taken a more permissive view of one's being able to combine the doctrines of more than one school (talfiq) in the interest of facilitating the practice of the faith.Footnote ⁹¹ Most importantly, perhaps, Wali Allah had devoted significant energy to demonstrating—in the Conclusive Argument and in other works—that God intended His law to promote human interests, that He had tailored the law to the norms and capacities of those obligated to live by it, and that it was not a religion's founding figures but their latter-day successors who had made the practice of religion an inordinate burden upon ordinary people.

Given Wali Allah's conviction that power and effectiveness were what mattered in the political realm and that Islam had needed the backing of power to thrive, the question is not simply about whether the jurists could find ingenious ways to keep the legal tradition relevant to changing times but also how political power related to legal change. Though he does not say so explicitly, it seems reasonable to extrapolate from his understanding of Islam and of power that the ruling authority is what helps authorise ongoing adaptation and change in the legal and, more broadly, the religious tradition. On Wali Allah's showing, the Rashidun did not merely implement the teachings of the Prophet; as the latter's limbs, they also shaped the new religion in particular ways even as they helped extend its sway. Insomuch as it was possible for later rulers to be rightly-guided, they, too, could be expected to continue not just implementing the norms of the faith and strengthening its presence in the world but also to assist with the tradition's growth as a tradition. Given the requisite ability, they might well do so in their own right, or they might do so in collaboration with the jurists and with other holders of the “inner” (batini) caliphate. Either way, some such role was hardly ruled out.

Muhammad Isma`il, Wali Allah's grandson, is again illuminating on the question of the ruler's legal authority. Speaking of the imam, by which, in this instance, he means any rightly-guided ruler, he writes:

This is obviously far-reaching authority, and the generality of Sunni theorists have been hesitant to accord it to the post-Rashidun caliphs. Isma`il, however, was not uncomfortable in doing so when a later ruler was in fact a rightly-guided ruler—and, as has been seen, he is explicit in allowing for that possibility. He was also a realist, however. In the same work, Mansib-i imamat, he speaks of a “just sultan” (sultan-i `adil), a type of ruler whose ways fall significantly short of the rightly-guided kind. What qualifies this ruler as “just” is the fact that he remains committed to the letter of the shari`a. What makes him very much inferior to the rightly-guided ruler, however, is his indulging in the sort of things for which people in power are known everywhere: love of glory, accumulating treasures, luxurious living and the gratification of bodily desires, and so forth. Even as he does all this, this type of ruler is able to find grounds for it in the shari`a. Insomuch as the sacred law leaves a good deal to the discretion of the ruler, it implicitly permits the ruler, Isma`il says, to act in self-serving ways without yet stepping outside the realm of formal legality.Footnote ⁹³

What Isma`il has in mind here, though he does not explicitly mention it, is what many jurists—Ibn Taymiyya among them—called siyasa shar`iyya, that is, governance in light of the broad principles of the shari`a but not necessarily in conformity with the precise letter of the sacred law. Part of such governance could take the form of ta`zir, which Isma`il does mention, viz., the ruler's juridically recognised authority to impose punishments on matters and in ways not explicitly provided for by the shari`a. To Ismàil, the ruler is within his rights to punish people guilty of the same infraction in quite different ways—or to not punish some of them at all. He could even kill someone whose execution was not required by the sacred law.Footnote ⁹⁴ His discretionary powers were broader, however, than the infliction or avoidance of punishments. He could decide to go to war with a Muslim foe and adopt a conciliatory stance towards a non-Muslim enemy. Except in matters of the spoils of war, which are regulated by specific shari`a norms, he was not bound by any considerations of equity in how he dispensed his treasure.Footnote <sup>95</sup> No one had any legal or religious grounds, Isma`il says, to dispute such conduct.Footnote ⁹⁶ A rightly-guided ruler, too, might act in a seemingly similar way, he acknowledges, but the difference is that the “just ruler” did it for worldly reasons, albeit under the cover of the shari`a, whereas the rightly-guided ruler would only do it for the sake of the faith and the community, not for any personal or worldly reasons.Footnote <sup>97</sup> Isma`il recognises that the actions of the “just ruler” were bad for the “spirit of the sacred law” (ruh-i shar`). If nothing else, they made it necessary for the scholars of that time to cling to select legal rulings in the interest of self-preservation and as a means of holding the ruler and his associates in some degree of check.Footnote <sup>98</sup> By this Isma`il seems to mean that the sacred law ceased in such circumstances to remain receptive to organic growth, being self-consciously turned by the scholars into a rigid system as a way of limiting a ruler's ability to manipulate it. This is what was bad for the shari`a and this is what injured its spirit. And yet, the actions of this “just ruler”—far better than other types of rulers—remained admissible in terms of the shari`a.Footnote ⁹⁹ Indeed, on matters not otherwise ruled on by the shari`a, what this ruler decrees “is the ruling of the shari`a”.Footnote ¹⁰⁰