How is the sovereignty of God to be achieved in an era of mass politics? This question haunted the leading thinkers of political Islam as the nation-state and popular sovereignty replaced the ancient pairing of king and priest. Andrew March’s The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought is an incisive examination of the intellectual feats of three major Islamists as they grappled with this problem: Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903–1979), who founded the Jama‘at-i Islami in British India and set the tone for Islamist politics in South Asia and beyond; Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), a radicalized ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who was tortured and executed by Gamal Abd al-Nasser; and Rashid al-Ghannushi of Tunisia (1941–), co-founder of the Ennahdha Party that led the drafting of Tunisia’s post-Arab Spring constitution in 2014. With secular liberalism in their crosshairs, these three men set out to define a perfectionist mass politics of Islam, an amalgam of divine and popular sovereignty that March aptly calls “high utopian Islamism” (75). This was “the caliphate of man” of March’s title, a rule of the pious masses animated by an “aspiration to deep legality” (222).

March begins on a hopeful note. He locates amid the Arab Spring a brief but forceful articulation of Islamist politics that was perfectionist yet inclusive (chapter 1). Space seemed to open, for a heady moment at least, not only for God and the people, but also for believers and others. This optimism frames March’s counterintuitive argument: the late twentieth-century idea of Islamic democracy and the evolution of moderate Muslim democratic parties in states such as Tunisia were made possible by the decades of oppositional and uncompromising writings on divine sovereignty by the likes of Mawdudi, Qutb, and Ghannushi. Even as they rejected Western liberal and secular norms, these thinkers developed a new Islamic political theology and constitutional theory according to which the caliphate belonged not to a Muslim ruler, elected or otherwise, but to the common Muslim believer.

March underscores the contemporary modernity of this notion (chapter 2), namely that sovereignty was the shared burden of the Muslim community (umma). The idea became thinkable only in the interwar era with the end of the Ottoman Empire and caliphate (chapter 3). However, foundational Islamist intellectuals of the time, such as Rashid Rida (1865–1935) did not take it up seriously. It was the French-trained Egyptian jurist and author of the civil law code adopted by new Arab states, ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri (1895–1971), who articulated the idea in passing.

Mawdudi, in British India and Pakistan, first properly conceptualized popular sovereignty as the foundation of an Islamic state (chapter 4). He had stumbled upon the idea while arguing for divine sovereignty. Worried that autocratic rulers would usurp God’s legislative powers, Mawdudi declared it the duty of every Muslim to rebel against the state if it transgressed divinely sanctioned law. It followed from there that the mantle of divine viceregency belonged to all Muslims rather than a single ruler. In practical terms, Mawdudi allowed for elections (but without parties), and he assigned the responsibility for interpreting divine law to religious scholars (but not to the ruler). In what he called theo-democracy, however, the ultimate oversight of the implementation of divine law lay with ordinary Muslims. Thus, Mawdudi envisioned a “republic of virtue” (108) where piety reigned supreme and total submission to divine law kept discord at bay.

Qutb, in Egypt, had been inspired by Mawdudi to declare all politics outside the ambit of divine sovereignty to be sheer infidelity and idolatry (chapter 5). Nevertheless, Qutb insisted that divine sovereignty was an achievable goal because Islam was a “natural religion” (118), a moral code perfectly attuned to human nature. He argued that divine law was not an onerous imposition on humanity but the path to a good life. In Qutb’s apologia, the shari‘a was the law that humanity would give itself if it simply realized that it would lead to perfect forms of equality, justice, and happiness. The earliest Muslims (salaf) had managed to set up such a perfect state with their commitment to uphold divine law. March argues that in Qutb’s view, early Islamic society was a political Eden from which later Muslims fell when they abandoned piety to pursue wealth and power.

Mawdudi and Qutb’s ideal of popular sovereignty was “both radically anti-democratic and radically populist” (151–52), a vision riddled with apologia, paradox, and aporia. Yet the caliphate of man had become an Islamist orthodoxy of sorts by the time Ghannushi crafted a compromise between political Islam and secular liberalism (chapter 6). Ghannushi was committed to democracy, human rights, public liberties, and the right to private property, but he rejected the Western framework that came with these political and social goods. He argued, not for liberal secular democracy, but for what March calls “Islamic democracy” (152), which issued forth from divine will and law, not human whim and hubris. Ghannushi repeated Mawdudi and Qutb’s arguments that God had given viceregency to his people, not to a ruler who was a mere servant of his pious subjects. He believed that Muslims would flourish in a republic of virtue and that Islam was the true fulfillment of democracy. If the basis for this belief appeared arbitrary and ad hoc, it was because, for Ghannushi, “the fusion of the divine and popular takes on a poetic character” (192).

Ultimately, this romantic vision of popular-divine sovereignty became a steppingstone to a fragile compromise with secular liberalism (chapter 7). Ghannushi shared with Mawdudi and Qutb a commitment to public moral vigilantism but was far less doctrinaire about it. When, under the leadership of his Ennahda Party, Tunisia’s National Constituent Assembly passed a new constitution, it left out all assertions of divine sovereignty. March offers the explanation that Ghannushi had come to accept radical pluralism as “ontological” (218), the same way the prophet of Islam had accepted the religious diversity of his first state in Medina. Ghannushi ostensibly meant that transforming everyone into a pious Islamist was a matter best left for God, who after all had also made Christians, Jews, pagans, and atheists; for the time being, the most one could do was become a Muslim democrat and learn to coexist among the infidel masses who were also God’s creatures.

March’s exposition of the evolution of the high ideological politics of twentieth-century Islamism is remarkably erudite, well researched, and deftly written. He succeeds in highlighting the latent—if difficult to realize—potential of high utopian Islamism to compromise with democratic norms and move beyond secular authoritarianism and atavistic Islamism. The issue I have with the book is March’s treatment of the political theory and political theology in “classical” Islam that he uses as a baseline for his arguments (chapter 2). To be fair, March is interested primarily in how twentieth-century Islamists received and repurposed a particular set of premodern Islamic writings that helped their cause (95, 126). Yet he ends up presenting this tradition as a historical as much as an ideological construct. In doing so, he follows the well-established view in Islamic studies that takes as paradigmatic the form of premodern Islam existing from ninth-century Baghdad to fourteenth-century Egypt. Regrettably, this consummately Arab (and Arabist) vision of Islam, with a teleology in the modern Middle East, skips over the experience of five centuries and ignores much of Asia, where a majority of the world’s Muslims came to reside.

What would we learn if we reintegrated this half a millennium and half a hemisphere of Islamic history and knowledge? I submit that we would discover several major political theologies that were already informed by an ontological acceptance of radical religious pluralism. This was because Islam in these regions was forged by the experience of large numbers of Muslims living with members of non-monotheist religious communities and, in some cases, even under pagan rulers. Indeed, the massive empires of the Mongols and the Mughals had not only implemented legal frameworks that enshrined protections for religious pluralism—which looks radical only from a scriptural-minded Christian, Jewish, and Muslim perspective—but had also led Muslim thinkers to generate political philosophies that rationalized this pluralism. Take, for instance, the proto-secular conception of politics in works such as Akhlaq-i Nasiri (Nasirean ethics) by Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274) or the framework of sulh-i kull (total peace) under the rule of the divinized insan-i kamil (perfect human) in Ain-i Akbari (Institutes of Akbar) by Abu al-Fazl ‘Allami (d. 1602). Tusi in Iran and Abu al-Fazl in India, powerful ministers of the Ilkhanid Hulegu Khan and the Mughal emperor Akbar respectively, lived among and learned from non-monotheistic religious communities, which they treated as political and religious equals of Muslim groups.

Why did these scholars, policies, and literatures not inform modern Muslim political cultures? Why was their place taken by the defensive and inward-looking writings of polemicists like Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350), activist scholars of Mamluk Egypt and Syria who were politically marginal in their lifetimes but are now widely cited by Islamists and Islamicists alike as giants of premodern Islam? Surely, the erasure and invention of tradition in the modern era is a problem of high ideological politics. If we do not take this into account, our understanding of Islam’s political theology will remain trapped in Eurocentric tropes, just as the political thought of Mawdudi, Qutb, and Ghannushi has stayed enmeshed in categories of liberal secularism.