Why do groups like ISIS and al-Qāʿida believe that democracy is a form of idolatry that must be eradicated by force of arms? The primary explanation lies in a 700-year-old theological concept that has shaped, and continues to shape, the thought and action of present-day radical salafīs.
Salafī Political Theology is an extended essay, in book form, that seeks to explain this topic by tracing a particular doctrine that is central to present-day radical salafism – a doctrine I refer to as ‘theonomy’ (theo, God + nomos, law). This doctrine stipulates that the institution of rule by God’s law is a sine qua non of the Islamic faith, and conversely, that democracy is, by definition, a form of polytheism or idolatry, as is any other form of government based on human legislation. The upshot of this doctrine is that existing forms of government in the Muslim world, as elsewhere, are polytheistic and therefore illegitimate, since (whether they function democratically or not) all embrace some form of written constitution and human legislative authority. This theonomy doctrine is a core belief of militant organizations such as al-Qāʿida and the Islamic State, and it furnishes them their primary casus belli for fighting against the governments of historically Muslim countries.
In the book I attempt to clarify everything about this doctrine, from its ultimate basis in the Abrahamic faiths, to its sources in Islamic intellectual history, and up to its meaning and significance today.
I should point out that this is not quite the same question as: why do radical salafīs fight and what for? I cannot guarantee that people’s stated reasons for fighting reflect their true motivations. But this we can say: the theonomy doctrine is not an ad hoc one – that is, it is not a mere surface ‘justification’ for acts undertaken for other reasons. It is a clearly-defined doctrine with demonstrable roots and precedents in the premodern salafī tradition. It is also shared to a large degree with other currents of contemporary salafism which have no interest in fighting to effect regime change. Thus, the book is devoted to explaining this intellectual and religious history. I identify the relevant features of the premodern salafī tradition, explain each on its own terms and in its original context, and then in the final chapter demonstrate how these concepts feed into modern theonomy.
In addition to this specific focus, the book goes a long way toward explaining what salafism is in general. While this is a major question that has been much debated in the field, in Salafī Political Theology I do not actually set out to explicitly address the question; the contours of the salafī school simply come into clearer focus when one traces various doctrinal and legal continuities between premodern and modern salafism.
The book’s central finding is the following: contemporary salafī theonomy is profoundly indebted to two emphases in the premodern salafī tradition. The first and most important is a doctrine formulated by the principal forefather of salafī theology, the Syrian polymath Taqī al-Dīn Aḥmad b. Taymiyya (d. 1328 C.E.). Ibn Taymiyya was already a controversial figure in his lifetime and was repeatedly imprisoned by Mamlūk rulers at the instigation of his more mainstream rivals. Ever since the late 1800s academic scholarship has taken note of his posthumous influence on various modern trends in Islamic thought, though I argue that the precise nature of this influence was often misconstrued, and certainly never sufficiently documented and proven.
I contend that a proper understanding of Ibn Taymiyya’s theological system shows it to be grounded in one central, revolutionary claim: that Islam is defined more as exclusive worship of one God than as conceptual monotheism, i.e., belief in only one God. I term this doctrine ‘monolatry’, which is a term I borrowed fromacademic study of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israelite religion.
In its original usage, monolatry usually refers to a reconstructed early, pre-monotheistic stage of Israelite faith in which other gods continued to be acknowledged as existing, whereas worship was restricted to only one. But my usage of the term in connection with Ibn Taymiyya is closer to the view of Yehoshua Amir, the scholar of Hellenistic Judaism, who argued that monolatry should be seen not just as a preliminary stage of Israelite religion, but rather was and remained the true core of Biblical faith. This is, more or less, Ibn Taymiyya’s view regarding Islam: Of course, one must hold the proper propositional attitudes on various questions of conceptual monotheism, such as God’s attributes, spatial versus ontological transcendence, etc. But all these are secondary to exclusive worship of God.
Ibn Taymiyya’s doctrine of monolatry was quite radical. He argued that the major schools of Islam in his day, including the ostensibly Sunnī ones, did not understand what Islam was. These arguments and polemics are usually abstruse – fascinating material for a scholar to work on, but abstruse. More historically significant were the implications of the doctrine for religious praxis. The definition of Islam along the axis of exclusivity of worship meant that widespread forms of Muslim devotion, such as rites practiced at saints’ tombs – what we can broadly label as the Muslim cult of saints – were condemned as polytheism, or more accurately, polylatry. Ibn Taymiyya held that this was precisely the form of polytlatry for which the Qurʾān condemned the unbelievers: The prophets were all sent to people who were basically monotheists, as they acknowledged Allāh’s exclusivity in matters of creation, provision, and so forth; their polytheism or polylatry consisted of appealing to other entities as intermediaries and intercessors with God, and the prophets were sent to forbid them this kind of worship.
If we now skip to the mid-18th century in the Arabian Peninsula, we find that Ibn Taymiyya’s monolatry doctrine was the heart and soul of the nascent Wahhābī movement, whose original goal and raison d’être was to eradicate the cult of saints that was widely practiced in Arabia at the time – by preaching, but also through the sword if need be. It was due to the monolatry doctrine that the early Wahhābīs viewed their ostensible coreligionists as polytheists who must be fought unless and until they return to Islam, i.e. the exclusive worship of Allāh. The first Saudi state was originally simply a byproduct of this anti-idolatry campaign. In this way, we encounter in the early Wahhābī movement a streamlined and militant variant of the monolatry doctrine, and a real-world precedent for modern radical salafī groups and organizations.
Those are the matters covered in Chapters One and Two of the book. The third chapter addresses another premodern salafī polemic that serves as a precedent for modern salafī theonomy, drawn here from the legal tradition rather than the theological one. In a nutshell, the salafī legal tradition should be considered Scripturalist or originalist, and the polemic I trace is against categorical adherence to one’s school of law even when it contradicts Scriptural evidence. The salafīs argue that such legal adherence is a form of polytheism (or rather polylatry), since obedience to law is a form of worship, and thus obedience to the legal determinations of a human individual, such as the founders of the four Sunnī schools of law, is worship of humans. I trace this polemic from the 11th century to the present – and it is still very much alive in its original form among salafīs today. But this precedent is also invoked in order to condemn modern parliamentary legislation, and by extension democracy and the modern nation-state, as a form of polytheism and worship of others apart from God.
This turn in application occurred primarily in the latter half of the 20th century, and for the most part took root in the salafī milieu more than among Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamists, who do not hold to such a rigorous theological condemnation of man-made law. It is particularly important among the salafī jihādīs and organizations that adhere to salafī jihādī doctrine, such as al-Qāʿida and ISIS. The emergence of the radical form of this theonomy doctrine can be traced in writings from the 1970s and 1980s, and likewise through a process of factional differentiation that we see in such contexts as the Sunnī revolt against the Baʿth regime in the early 1980s in Syria, and in the Algerian civil war in the early to mid-1990s.
The book concludes with a typological observation, namely, that the salafī jihādīs’ anti-democratic militancy is, typologically speaking, entirely distinct and even diametrically opposed to 20th-century fascism. In the latter we encounter a radicalization of human sovereign decisionism, as for example in Carl Schmitt’s famous state of exception: sovereignty is prior to the law, since it is the sovereign state that makes – or suspends – the law. In contrast, for salafī jihādīs the state is secondary and derivative. The basic imperative is to implement God’s law, which is immutable; the Islamic state is merely a means to doing so.
That, in a nutshell, is the salafī theonomic worldview. This is stated quite succinctly in a well-known treatise from the Egyptian Jihad organization in the early 1980s that laid the ground for the assassination of President Anwar al-Sādāt; contrary to popular belief, he was not (or not primarily) killed over the Camp David Accords, but rather for allegedly ruling by law other than God’s law. The treatise employs a principle from classical Islamic jurisprudence to express the proper relation between the state and the law: “Establishing Allāh’s rule on Earth is incumbent on the Muslims, turning to Allāh’s law in judgment is incumbent on the Muslims, thus that there be an Islamic state is incumbent on the Muslims, for whatever is a necessary condition for the fulfillment of an obligation is itself obligatory.” The state, then, is a means; the aim is the same one for the sake of which, according to Ibn Taymiyya and the Wahhābīs, the cosmos itself was created: To bring the world, including the human world, to exclusive worship of God alone. In modern salafī theonomy, this is interpreted primarily as exclusive obedience to God’s law and the avoidance of the modern form of polytheism that is the human legal autonomy of the sovereign nation-state and democracy.
Radical salafīs are only one group of actors in present-day conflicts in the Middle East and beyond. One ought to be equally serious in analysis of the others, who hold to different sets of ideas, or for whom doctrinal considerations stand further in the background, or perhaps do not figure in at all. My general feeling on the question of the value of intellectual history vs. social or political history is that one ought to examine matters on a case-by-case basis rather than offer a uniform answer. In the case of an explicitly doctrinal movement like the radical salafīs, the intellectual history is of paramount importance, and it is the salafīs themselves who tell us this. It may sound surprising or simplistic to insist that a number of present-day conflicts familiar to us all derive in part from a 14th-century doctrine, especially if we phrase things in that manner. What is really at stake though is a question we know from Kant, Hans Blumenberg, and others: whether the modern age has ushered in a legitimate form of immanent human autonomy, i.e., self-rule, or whether – as the salafīs claim – such a human autonomy remains impossible and undesirable, with the ‘secularism’ of the modern state a mere veneer for a very ancient form of polytheism.
