Messianism as movement: revolutionary or otherwise

Messianism is the red thread that runs through the trilogy. It is intended as a historical manifestation and sociopolitical inflection of what we imperfectly call “religion” or “transcendence,” and, more pointedly, as a generative source of power. Arjomand’s investigations show how messianic ideas have not only fueled revolutionary movements but have also served processes of state formation and legitimation. Particularly salient in this regard is the role played by Sufism, the historical Islamic “mystical” mass movement, which impacted the Islamic ecumene as a double-edged force: embodying the revolutionary potential of messianism while also underwriting what Arjomand calls the “realized messianism” of powerful state formations. As we will see in some detail, this is Arjomand’s formula of choice that consecrates his adaptation of the Weberian idea of the routinization of charisma.

At the heart of Arjomand’s argument lies the insight that messianism, far from being a marginal or irrational phenomenon, is an inexhaustible source of revolutionary energy in the history of the Islamic ecumene and beyond. It appears wherever the conventional sociopolitical order collapses or is called into question. Indeed, the claim to messianic authority, Arjomand argues, is a move to reflect cosmic reality as a heteronomous ground of truth that legitimizes revolution as a religious obligation.

Messianism, in Arjomand’s framing, is a composite phenomenon. As shown at the beginning of Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution, its deepest roots lie in Second Temple Judaism—especially the apocalyptic imagination crystallized in the Book of Daniel and the sectarian ferment of the Qumran community. Further fed by Zoroastrian millenarianism and late antique Gnosticism, messianic mobilization became a structurally available repertoire in moments of profound social dislocation.

Drawing on this background, Arjomand presents a mildly—if pointedly revisionist—genealogy of Islamic messianism, arguing that Muhammad’s prophetic call was the original outcome of a longer-term eschatological tradition. The apocalyptic vision of the Qur’an, particularly in its early Meccan suras, is thus shown to resonate with the Danielic and Enochic legacies, transmitted through Jewish sectarians and Mazdakites active in Arabia during late Sasanian times, on the eve of Islam’s surge. While some of these inferences may seem misaligned with the most recent findings of research on the inception of Islam, which is experiencing unprecedented vitality, the sociological meaning evinced by Arjomand stands: the leitmotif of messianism is to topple iniquity and restore justice. In this view, all messianic characters, culminating in the Islamic figure of the Mahdi, are restorers of justice.

The sociological argument comes into sharp focus with the case of Prophet Muhammad’s leadership. Arjomand places him in a line of continuity with—but also, in terms of revolutionary effectiveness, above—the Danielic, Essene, and Enochic traditions. Unlike the failed or withdrawn communities of the Essenes or the early Christians, Muhammad succeeded in enacting his apocalyptic vision through a sociopolitical revolution that unified Arabia. In contrast to both sectarian failures and eschatological withdrawals, Muhammad’s movement successfully realized its messianic vision through what Arjomand calls a constitutive revolution. In doing so, it transitioned from charismatic proclamations to the founding of a religiopolitical community. And yet Muhammad’s revolution was a beginning rather than an end. As recently suggested by Hayrettin Yücesoy,Footnote ⁴ leaning on Agamben, in his review of Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution, it inaugurated the “time of the end” rather than the end of time or pure eschaton.

Islam’s unfolding in history would then result in a series of messianic upheavals and successive “realizations”—and, often, matching institutional constellations—of the messianic impetus. However, Muhammad’s messianic success generated a paradox: the routinization of charisma that inevitably followed the Prophet’s death dulled the memory of revolutionary momentum. Arjomand shows how mainstream Islamic historiography insulated the radicalism of the Qur’anic apocalypse within a progressively spiritualized sacred history, while the trope of the returning Mahdi, often understood as Muhammad redivivus—shared between the Sunni majority and the Shi‘i minority—preserved and nourished the revolutionary impulse.

Irreducible to a fixed doctrine, messianism unfolded a plasticity that made it a recurring template for sociopolitical transformations and the renewal of institutions and statehood in the Islamic ecumene. From the Maccabean revolt to Mukhtar’s rebellion and from Qumran to Kufa, messianism emerges as a fundamental religious encoding of political rupture and restitution. The Mahdist uprisings in early Islam, notably in the wake of the Second Civil War, are thus not anomalies but structurally intelligible reenactments of the same eschatological pattern. Messianism, in this view, is not the antithesis of statehood, but its generative matrix.

What distinguishes Arjomand’s approach is his refusal to isolate messianism from the longue durée of sociopolitical developments in the Islamic ecumene. The messianic momentum is not extinguished after Prophet Muhammad: it is transfigured, reactivated, and ultimately institutionalized in ever new forms. From the Qa’im, the end-of-time “riser” of the early Shi‘a, through the Fatimid Mahdi, to his Almohad counterpart and nemesis Ibn Tumart—who famously inspired Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the cycles of statehood—messianic charisma continued to both haunt and energize the political order. Ibn Tumart becomes for Arjomand [2022: 262–274], here classically following Ibn Khaldun, the prototype of a charismatic leadership effecting a paradigmatic institutionalization of revolutionary messianism into a fully-fledged, if premodern and precolonial, statehood.

In sum, messianism in Arjomand’s approach provides the grammar of revolt, the narrative of legitimation, and the temporal horizon within which Islamic polities define their origin, decline, and renewal. Its political ambivalence—capable of both inciting revolution and stabilizing empire—is precisely what makes it indispensable for any sociology of Islam that takes religious temporality seriously, intended as an “heterogeneous, elastic, relative, and reversible duration that bends, morphs, extends and shrinks to combine its beginning and end.”Footnote ⁵ Nevertheless, the sociological habitus of conceptualization, expertly embodied by Arjomand on the cusp of his lifework, is entirely set within the framework of the well-known (and frankly a little tired) Weberian mechanics of routinization of charisma, which—at least to this reviewer—seems inadequate to capture such structural ambivalences. We will return to this issue later to corroborate the suggestion that Arjomand’s argument, and the venture of Islam in general, can be taken to disprove rather than confirm—despite the author’s intentions—a Weberian reading of upheaval and routinization, charismatic eruption and its domestication in institutional forms. Arjomand’s narrative is indeed at its best when it abandons fixed schemes, to which it still seems to be bound, and plunges us into the crude realism of messianic politics, like the internecine struggles within revolutionary coalitions. Crises of authority, contested succession, revolutionary purges, and imperial overreach teach us how the revolutionary, constitutive, and integrative dimensions of messianism are manifestations of the same form of temporality—a way of imagining and enacting revolutionary change that plugs legitimacy into cosmic time. This is what makes Arjomand’s trilogy a remarkable contribution to historical-comparative sociology writ large.

The metamorphosis of messianism and the conundrum of statehood

If messianism supplies the symbolic grammar of rupture, in Arjomand’s account it is also the trigger of the process through which charisma is folded into a new institutional order. Across the trilogy, revolution works as a converter of religious legitimacy into sovereign authority. After Muhammad’s initially constitutive revolution, which unified Arabia via the transtribal commitment represented by Islam, Arjomand’s focus shifts to what he calls integrative revolutions. Here, mobilization from the periphery and contestations of the power privileges of the reigning political elites usher in the formation of new imperial centers.

The first great integrative revolution of this kind was the rise of the ‘Abbasid dawla. The term dawla is notoriously a quite problematic match with the “state.” Famously through its use by Ibn Khaldun, it means primarily a turn of good fortune and therefore denotes both the process of dynastic change and its final outcome. However, Arjomand recalibrates its meaning and turns it into a paradigmatic revolutionary turn—a dawla also in the sense, close to its etymology, of “rotation of power,” whose cosmic making he sees as going all the way back to the apocalyptic literature of Second Temple Judaism [2022: 24]. In other words, political legitimacy was made dependent on a divinely sanctioned turn in sovereignty manifesting as a cosmic overthrow of iniquity and disorder. The ‘Abbasid revolution, in this view, performed the integration of the previously excluded Iranian clients (mawali) who had started to provide key statecraft skills to the Caliphate at the latest stage of the Umayyad empire, which the ‘Abbasid revolution toppled. This revolution was fueled by a messianic theory of legitimacy rooted in the unique charisma of the Prophet’s household, in combination with the emergent motive of the Mahdi [2022: 25–30; 144–49]. Ibn Khaldun’s theory of turns in dawla and dynastic change supported by the tribal solidarity (‘asabiyya) of a conquering coalition of forces—embodying the emerging dawla—is invoked to explain how messianic movements originate on the periphery and succeed in capturing and reorganizing central authority.

Arjomand does not romanticize revolution but reconstructs it as a structural sequence: messianic liminality, far from representing an anti-structure, is the revolutionary structuring of the aspirations to power and recognition of hitherto subordinate counter-elites.Footnote ⁶ Via power struggles, not just waged against the older dawla but also consummated within the revolutionary coalitions, a new instituting process is set in motion, ultimately leading to a new cycle of instituted domination. The post-Prophetic era unfolds via a sequence of “civil wars” (Arabic sing. fitna), each expressing a crisis of charismatic succession. Revolutionary momentums were thus laboratories of institutional innovation, which Arjomand subsumes under the category of postrevolutionary constitutional politics [2022: 116–121]. He does so by drawing on the consolidated evidence that such revolutions, even more when moving toward early modernity, were prone to yield stable and prosperous, bureaucratic, and centralizing states, grounded in the cooptation of former opponents, the realization of messianic legitimacy, and the boosting of the power of a scribal-administrative elite [2022: 173–223].

The implications of this argument extend far beyond the foremost example of the ‘Abbasids. Comparable dynamics unfolded in the case of the Fatimid and Almohad revolutions—each an instance of apocalyptic charisma institutionalized as caliphal legitimacy. In each case, a messianic revolution produces a stable political order, but only through its eventual betrayal: eschatological promise gives way to patrimonial rule; revolutionary egalitarianism yields to bureaucratic hierarchy. This dialectic between movement and statehood (which Arjomand consistently frames by falling back on the Weberian categories of charisma and routinization) is the central analytical thread that ties the trilogy together.

In sum, revolution writ Islamic, in Arjomand’s view, is a sociopolitical or, more specifically, instituting processFootnote ⁷ that begins with messianic rupture, passes through conflictual experiments in legitimacy, and culminates in novel institutional configurations. This process is not uniquely Islamic but acquires specific forms within the Islamic ecumene, in which cosmopolitical ideas of legitimate sovereignty plug into the increasing self-understanding of a bureaucratic elite considering itself the essential hub of a functioning dawla. Arjomand’s trilogy seems to take this process for granted by continuous mentions of what he identifies as a fairly invariant pre-Islamic, Persian notion of kingship. This somewhat underrates the entirely new purchase that bureaucratic rationalization acquired in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests. Early-modern state formation, however, is substantially enriched by Arjomand’s analysis, which resonates with a plethora of significant monographs that have appeared over the past two decades on how Sufism, especially in its powerful Persianate forms, contributed to the instituting process. It did so via a sort of ideological complicity with time-honored notions of Persianate rulership, combined with an ambivalent, if ultimately productive, relationship with Mongol rule. The result was that in the post-Mongol ecumene Sufi masters increasingly postured as rulers and even Caliphs, while rulers eagerly appropriated their charisma of saintliness (walaya).

This theme is taken over in Arjomand’s second and third volumes. The red thread of messianism does not fade but persists as a recurrent modality of sociopolitical renewal across the Islamic ecumene, ever more anchored to the contended charisma of walaya. In Revolutions of the End of Time and Kings and Dervishes Arjomand traces a remarkable arc: from apocalyptic uprisings, through the commotions unleashed by the appearance of ever new Mahdis, to the post-messianic institutionalization marking a monarchic sublimation of mystical charisma. The framework remains largely consistent with a Weberian typology, in which charisma either peters out or is absorbed into institutional forms. Yet this very consistency is also where the limitations of the model begin to surface, to the extent it remained dependent on the Khaldunian condition of a vital ‘asabiyya in the revolutionary, state-building coalitions within which the nomadic component played a decisive role.

On one hand, Arjomand convincingly shows how the messianic imaginary shaped the formation of Islamic polities well into early modernity, with the rise to power of the Safavids in Iran—but also, and much earlier, with their Ottoman rivals. Within this mature institutionalization of statehood in the ecumene, working across the Sunni/Shi‘i divide, a more complex reading of Ibn Khaldun emerges, in which the two sides (revolution and statehood) of the cosmopolitical “turn of good fortune” (dawla) foreground the instituting role of Sufi-led walaya (velayat in Farsi). This is a focus that gradually gains ground, culminating in the last of the three volumes and helping recast Arjomand’s analysis in constructively dialogic terms vis-à-vis current approaches in the early modern history of Sufism and statehood.Footnote ⁸

On the other hand, and seen retrospectively in terms of the achievements of early modern statehood, the key Khaldunian example of a revolutionary dawla represented by Ibn Tumart’s Almohads did not hinge on messianism alone, but also on the ability to translate charismatic insight, ultimately rooted in walaya, into connective authority. His teachings and organizational strategies bridged tribal coalitions, aligned nomadic and urban orders, and produced a functional equilibrium between knowledge and power. In short, walaya—understood not only as sanctified leadership but also as a form of political intelligence—was the medium through which ‘asabiyya became statehood.Footnote ⁹ From the Almohads, through the Ottomans, to the Safavids, one can detect a long-drawn-out, and Sufi-mediated, instituting process. Any new dawla represented not a mere routinization of messianism, but a relational stabilization of power through layered forms of spiritual and administrative authority, from tribal ‘asabiyya to charismatic walaya, assisted by professional administrators. This process was less about the fading of charisma than its transmutation into a know-how of governance, one drawing on the simultaneously ethical and esthetical adab tradition of the bureaucrats-literati, which defined the habitus of navigating a world of difference, and its spinoff of siyasa, as the craft of governance. This knowledge/power complex reconfigured the tribal/urban nexus and embedded “religion” within the “civility” of the ecumene, including, if not mainly, its ruling class.

This counterpoint becomes particularly clear in the post-Mongol setting. For Arjomand, the Mongol irruption represents both the zenith of violence unmediated by messianism and the crucible of new state forms—particularly in the Il-Khanid, Timurid, and Safavid contexts. He reads the Mongol dynastic law, the yasa, as a template of absolute sovereignty, later Islamized through Persianate bureaucracy and Safavid messianism. In this context, walaya could provide the knowledge/power alchemy through which rulers, especially in the Ottoman and Safavid empires, secured legitimacy not just by “realizing” messianism but by appropriating the Sufi charisma of connection in the instituting process itself.

This allows for a rethinking of the cyclical model. Rather than revolution giving way to inevitable decline and dynastic collapse, as in the classical Khaldunian schema, the instituting runup to the early modern sovereignty of the great centralizing empires—between urban renewal and Sufi-bureaucratic symbiosis—suggests a countercyclical logic. Here walaya and adab-siyasa stabilize power by embedding it in a continuous, if smartly managed, instituting process. In this context, the Mahdi is not the necessary telos of messianism, but a flexible trope—sometimes eruptive, sometimes integrative—through which the dawla could be rendered continuous with the deeper structures of the Islamic ecumene [2023: 72–85]. What Arjomand terms “realized messianism” can thus be reinterpreted as a selective deployment of messianic language within a broader ecology of religious legitimacy, in which circuits of walaya and ‘asabiyya underpin rather than disrupt the longue durée of the instituting process. This view restores historical agency to the often overlooked practices of institutional mediation and communal cohesion, which Sufi actors—more than sectarian rebels—sustained across cycles of upheaval.

The temporality of the instituting process

In Revolutions of the End of Time Arjomand turns decisively toward the temporal frameworks that shape religiopolitical action in the Islamic ecumene. If Messianism and Sociopolitical Revolution traced the mobilizing power of apocalyptic imaginaries, and Kings and Dervishes explored the paradoxes of Sufi renunciation, the middle volume shows a more synthetic ambition: to understand how Islamic conceptions of eschatological time serve as both a horizon of revolution and a grammar of political legitimation. This is the type of analysis that allows for the role of political cosmology to emerge in Islamic theories of rulership. Arjomand examines how both cyclical and teleological understandings of history—drawn from both Persianate and Abrahamic sources—underpin a range of political projects, from the messianic revolutions of the early Islamic centuries to the Safavid theory of rulership. He shows how apocalyptic temporality is folded into dynastic ideology through astro-cosmopolitical titles such as sahib-qiran (“Lord of Conjunction”), and how “revolution” (inqilab, often used as a synonym of dawla) became a vernacularized political concept long before its modern secular resurgence.

This framing is persuasive insofar as it illuminates how time functions as both a destabilizing and a legitimating force in the history of the Islamic ecumene. However, this focus also reveals gaps in Arjomand’s model, which remains anchored in a grammar of rupture and return. Political time, in this account, oscillates between charismatic beginning and imperial routinization, between a dawn of justice and a sunset of sovereign consecration. What it cannot quite accommodate is the layered temporality of institutional sedimentation—the open-ended rhythms of sociopolitical life that characterize much of the history of the Islamic ecumene, especially in the post-Mongol period, when instituting and destituting processes were closely intertwined in the fabric of ‘umran. This is where a more sustained approach to the inherent ambivalence of the instituting process in the ecumene could offer a sympathetic extension, if not an alternative, to Arjomand’s approach.

For the intelligentsia of early modern Muslim empires, Ibn Khaldun’s cyclical theory of dawla was not a token of fatalistic repetition, but a diagnosis of vulnerability—one that invited attention to the countervailing forces of cohesion and renewal. In the longue durée of what Hodgson called the Middle Periods, separating the classical Caliphate from early modernity, Sufi-led networks, the estate of professional administrators, and urban waqf systems generated a form of political temporality that was neither strictly eschatological nor bureaucratically routinized, but structurally recursive: shaped by memory, discrete innovations, and the cultivation of bonds of interest-oriented partnership and value-oriented companionship.Footnote ¹⁰

In this light, we might rethink “revolution” not as a metaphysical turning of the wheel, but as a repositioning of legitimacy through which authority is re-sutured to the life of the ecumene. The Almohad, Safavid, and Ottoman trajectories were not merely “integrative revolutions,” as Arjomand would have it, but strategic reinvestments in a broader instituting arc that linked walaya, administrative knowledge, and civic praxis across generations. This is particularly evident in the imperial complexes of Ottoman Istanbul or the shrine-waqf assemblages of Timurid and Safavid cities, in which temporality is inscribed in architectural embroidery and monumental spatiality: a way of turning the messianic kairos into connective memory rather than consuming it pitilessly for the stabilization of a regime.Footnote ¹¹ Arjomand’s trilogy culminates in a sustained account of how messianic charisma re-enters political life through the long circuits of Sufi withdrawal, institutionalized futuwwa (an urban type of youth association often linked with Sufi organizations), and Persianate theories of kingship. In Kings and Dervishes, the analysis of the mystic’s paradoxical role in politics—whether as supporter, intercessor, or silent opponent—provides the crowning piece of this political sociology of Islam, while it also more consciously invests in the noted ambivalence of the instituting process, which the two previous volumes had downplayed.

As we observed, Arjomand tends to frame this question through the familiar Weberian dialectic of charisma and routinization, while occasionally bouncing back to a Hegelian grammar of civil society and intermediary institutions. His reading of the post-Mongol period and the emergence of Ottoman, Timurid, and Safavid models of statehood is still primarily one of comparative institutional formation—that is, how Islamic dynasties reproduced the stabilizing functions of European monarchy and administration—or failed to do so. While Arjomand’s approach is historically sensitive and backed by philological insights, its theoretical orientation remains locked within a Western genealogy of sovereignty and legitimacy.

Instead of relying on Eurocentric notions of institution, charisma, or the state—all of which are burdened by theopolitical or Hobbesian presuppositions—one could foreground tadbir, which finds occasional recognition in Arjomand’s oeuvre, as the engine of an open-ended instituting process. The notion of tadbir, emerging from Qur’anic cosmology, Aristotelian ethics, and Sufi epistemology, is tantamount to the art of management of complexity. It thus indicates a political rationality that is simultaneously spiritual and strategic. The way tadbir was cultivated as sociopolitical praxis over several centuries in the Islamic ecumene makes it much more than a technique for managing human affairs. It became the very paradigm of an instituting process dispensing with the type of incorporation that prevailed in European processes of state formation. Unlike the corporate model of statehood rooted in the Western tradition of persona ficta, the Islamic ecumene generated relational modalities of authority, deeply embedded in the interplay between walaya and what we might call the adab-siyasa-tadbir complex.Footnote ¹²

In this light, the Ottoman upgrade of the Khaldunian dawla Footnote ¹³ was not merely the formation of a bureaucratic elite shorn of tribal obligations. It was the conversion of the exemplar of the “saint-philosopher-king”Footnote ¹⁴ into a ruling methodology, where the figure of the vizier often incarnated the long trajectory of spiritual training, political craft, and administrative foresight. As shown by Kitab al-Siyasa fi-Tadbir al-Riyasa of Ibn al-‘Arabi, who became the patron saint of the Ottoman dawla via a variety of philosophical and apocryphal iterations, siyasa was not technocratic control, but a layered practice connecting the governance (indeed, the tadbir) of the city and the ecumene to the functioning of the human body, often, though not necessarily, passing through the household, in an Aristotelian fashion. And in contrast to the rigidly corporate Leviathan of Hobbes—as the inverted corpus mysticum of the Catholic Church—Islamic forms of statehood remained polyarchic, heteroglossic, and dynamically tethered to civic life.Footnote ¹⁵

This also recasts the question of temporality. Where Arjomand foregrounds eschatological kairos and messianic reiteration, one should still consider the temporal scansion of Ibn Khaldun’s ʿumran, which is the closest to an encompassing notion of “society” in the oeuvre of the Maghrebi scholar: cumulative, spiraling, and habitually sedimented through conduct, memory, and practical reason. The institutional ecology of the Islamic ecumene cannot be captured by cycles of rise and integration alone. Rather, it must be viewed through the decentered, malleable, and non-corporate organization of Sufi and urban confraternities, legal professions, and administrative training, each carrying a share of the instituting labor of a dawla.

The main legacy of Arjomand’s approach lies in how he reclaims the sociological dignity of sociopolitical thought and praxis in the Islamic ecumene, breaking with Orientalist deficit models and reintroducing messianism as a generative force of civilizational history. And yet Islamic statehood cannot be squeezed into the interplay of charisma and institution, nor into methodologically fitted “comparisons” with Western trajectories. It is a mode of life-instituting reason in its own right, one that repurposes Aristotelian categories through Qur’anic cosmology and Sufi practice, and in so doing offers not a deviation from modernity, but a modern, if precolonial, countermodel, grounded in relational rationality and associative legitimacy.Footnote ¹⁶

An eccentric coda or the last revolution? The closure of the messianic horizon

In a dramatic sociological gesture, Arjomand tops his trilogy [2023: 183–200] by returning to the Islamic Revolution of 1979, on which he wrote at the beginning of his career.Footnote ¹⁷ He read it as the latest metamorphosis of the modern myth of revolution—filtered, in this case, through a Shi‘i messianic lens. For Arjomand, the Iranian Revolution achieved something paradoxical: it reconciled the messianic imaginary with the modern revolutionary script. Both culmination and metamorphosis, the modern myth of revolution, born in the West and remolded into a Third Worldist variant, returns to the postcolonial Islamic ecumene.

Imported via Guevara and Fanon and blessed by Foucault in an famous series of articles in the Corriere della Sera, this dual inheritance is exemplified by the figure of ‘Ali Shari‘ati more than by Khomeini. The Iranian scholar offered an allegorical reading of the Mahdi as the harbinger of global justice and the Qur’anic subalterns, the mustad‘afun, as the Fanonian damnés de la terre. Here, political messianism became a revolutionary anthropology rather than a theology of deferral. And yet Khomeini’s messianic charisma, so Arjomand’s argument, was gradually routinized into the institutional form of velayat-e faqih, which forced the time-honored walaya into the armature of a post-Westphalian nation-state. The legacy of the Safavid revolution was metabolized into the constitutional architecture of the Islamic Republic, a hybrid form of statehood drawing simultaneously on centuries of Shi‘i jurisprudence and the modern centralizing state.

This final gesture lays bare the productive tensions inherent in Arjomand’s sociological framework. The Iranian Revolution is not just an eccentric or deviant historical bookend; it becomes the site on which all his conceptual threads—messianism, revolution, state formation—appear to resolve. Nevertheless, what this final chapter makes vividly clear is that even at its messianic climax, the Islamic Revolution was unable to transcend the Weberian cycle of charismatic rupture and institutional closure. Khomeini did not declare himself the Mahdi, but the messianic aura lingered—until it was absorbed, and perhaps neutralized, by the constitution. But the cost of this resolution is ultimately paid by collapsing the Islamic political imagination into a Hegelian-Weberian pit, in which charisma and crisis must always yield to constitutional closure and bureaucratic formalization. The result is a theology of institutionalization masquerading as an identitarian sociology, which at the same time radicalizes and normalizes the Islamic difference.

Here political and epistemic limitations overlay each other. If the Islamic Revolution succeeded in fusing messianic symbolism with Westphalian modernity, it did so by collapsing walaya into sovereignty and severing tadbir from the relational circuits that made it a cosmopolitical art of governance. What is sorely missing from the sinister, if not dystopian, narration of this outcome is the horizontal dimension of the instituting process—the everyday assemblage of authority, legitimacy, and foresight that sustained the ecumene across cycles of rupture. The velayat-e faqih as the signature of the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic appears to be not the culmination of Sufi political knowledge but its bureaucratic travesty, a juridical Leviathan cloaked in the language of spiritual guardianship.

The precolonial instituting process in the ecumene, despite, or perhaps precisely because of its intermittently messianic inflection, did not seek outright ruptures, nor did it fetishize sovereign closure. Rather than the final synthesis of messianism and modernity, 1979 might better be seen as the obfuscation of an imaginative horizon, a moment in which the prophetic temporality of revolution could no longer hold open the possibilities—or the imaginative impermanence—of ‘umran, relational justice, and heteroglossic permutations. In this sense, 1979 may best be understood not as the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, but as its postcolonial and post-Westphalian exhaustion: the point at which the political reason of the ecumene found itself squeezed into the iron cage of modern sovereignty, on which Islam is made to glitter as a golden lock.