Book Review: The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, by Andrew F. March

DOI10.1177/00905917211011271
Published date01 December 2021
Date01 December 2021
AuthorUsaama al-Azami
Subject MatterBook Reviews
1062 Political Theory 49(6)
The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, by Andrew F.
March. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. 328 pp.
Reviewed by: Usaama al-Azami, Departmental Lecturer in Contemporary Islamic
Studies, Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, UK.
DOI: 10.1177/00905917211011271
Andrew March’s new book is a philosophically rigorous attempt to engage
some of the most important ideas that define the Sunni subtradition of con-
temporary Islamic political thought commonly referred to as “Islamism,” a
widely used label that is admittedly not without its problems. At the heart of
Islamism, March argues, is the “comprehensive reformulation of Islamic
political philosophy” that places human beings, qua God’s vicegerents, at the
centre of their political theology (xi). This Islamist conception of popular
sovereignty reflects an adaptation of the Qur’anic idea of man’s vicegerency
(khilāfa) on the basis of which Islamist theorists bestow a kind of political
agency upon every Muslim. Indeed, more than merely agency, such theorists
view it as the responsibility of every Muslim to contribute to bringing about
the realisation of God’s will in the modern public sphere. In this work, which
has been roughly a decade in the making, March’s copious footnotes reflect a
level of engagement with both premodern and modern Islamic political
thought that is remarkably extensive in both its breadth and depth. March has
read widely in writing this book, mining an extensive array of Arabic sources
spanning over a millennium of Islamic intellectual history. The extensive use
of the often neglected secondary literature by contemporary Arab scholars is
particularly impressive.
The book is divided into seven chapters, with the preface serving as an
introduction. Chapter 1 presents a brief outline of Islamist political thought
and the historical context in which it emerged. Chapter 2 presents the pre-
modern Sunni conception of Islamic political theology as it has been received
by the modern Sunni scholarly tradition. The remaining chapters focus on
four specific Muslim political theorists, a move March justifies by pointing
out that he is not engaged in an exhaustive exploration of modern Islamic
political theology. Rather, he is tracing the genealogy of the notion of sover-
eignty through the writings of certain particularly influential Islamic scholar-
activists. The scholars in question are undoubtedly influential and interesting,
though in some cases, perhaps another author would have chosen different
scholars. The four scholar-activists who garner the lion’s share of March’s
close analytical reading are Rashīd Riā (d. 1935; chapter 3), Abū al-Aʿ

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