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Chapter 2 of 410 min read
دعوى السيادة وإشكالاتها
In the twentieth century, a reading of khalifah emerged in Islamic thought that transformed a Quranic word describing temporal succession and delegated trusteeship into the cornerstone of an ambitious political theology. This reading — most systematically developed by Abu al-A'la Maududi in the Indian subcontinent and taken up by Sayyid Qutb in the Arab world — claims that khalifah establishes human beings as God's vicegerents on earth, charged with the implementation of divine sovereignty in human society. It became the theological foundation for significant political movements across the Muslim world. Understanding and evaluating this claim is essential to any careful reading of the Quranic doctrine of human status.
Abu al-A'la Maududi (1903–1979), founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami in 1941, developed his theory of khilafat al-ardh (vicegerency of the earth) as the theoretical centrepiece of his Islamic political philosophy. In works including The Political Theory of Islam, Islamic Way of Life, and his Quranic commentary Tafhim al-Quran, Maududi argued that the Quran's designation of human beings as khulafa' establishes a foundational political doctrine: humans are appointed by God to implement divine rule on earth.
In Maududi's framework, Allah is the only sovereign (hakim). Humans, as His khalifah, are His deputies, commissioned to implement His law in their domain. This means that legitimate political authority can only exist within the framework of divine law; all other forms of governance are, in principle, illegitimate usurpation of divine authority. The ideal Islamic polity is one where the Quran and Sunnah function as the supreme constitution, interpreted and implemented by those who know them — effectively, by Islamic scholars functioning in a governmental capacity.
Maududi's use of the term hakimiyyah (divine sovereignty) became the central vocabulary of this framework. He contrasted divine hakimiyyah with human hakimiyyah — the latter being the claim, present in democracy, secularism, and other modern political forms, that humans themselves are the ultimate source of political authority. Maududi described human hakimiyyah as shirk (associating partners with Allah) in the political domain, because it assigns to human beings the prerogative that belongs to Allah alone: the right to legislate and determine what is permitted and forbidden.
Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), the Egyptian writer and ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood who was executed by the Nasser regime, took Maududi's framework and gave it a sharper, more confrontational expression. In his commentary Fi Zilal al-Quran and his final theoretical work Ma'alim fi al-Tariq (Milestones), Qutb argued that contemporary Muslim societies — despite their nominal Islam — were living in a condition of jahiliyyah (pre-Islamic ignorance) because they had submitted to human law rather than divine law.
Qutb's use of jahiliyyah to describe contemporary Muslim societies was deliberately provocative. The term had previously been used to describe the pre-Islamic Arabian society before the Prophet's mission. Applying it to twentieth-century Muslim countries that had constitutions, parliaments, and Islamic institutions implied that they had reverted to the condition of ignorance — that submitting to any human legislative authority was equivalent to the paganism of pre-Islamic Arabia. The corollary was that true Islamic commitment required working to establish divine hakimiyyah — to overthrow human legislative authority and replace it with divine law.
Qutb explicitly connected his political theology to the khalifah concept: humans as God's vicegerents are charged with establishing divine sovereignty on earth. This is not merely a personal spiritual aspiration but a collective political obligation. The failure to pursue it is a failure of the khalifah mission. This framework provided theological legitimation for political activism, and in its more radical expressions, for confrontational opposition to existing Muslim governments.
The most fundamental critique of the sovereignty reading of khalifah is that it imports into the word a conceptual content that Arabic usage and classical tafsir do not support. As demonstrated in the preceding chapter, khalifah in the Quran primarily means successor in the temporal sense — one who comes after another. Where it carries a governmental meaning (as in the verse about Dawud), it describes a trust under conditions, not a grant of sovereign authority.
The concept of sovereignty (hakimiyyah in the political sense) is not embedded in the word khalifah. It is a concept that Maududi and Qutb read into khalifah based on their understanding of what the khalifah's role must entail. But this is a form of eisegesis — reading a meaning into the text rather than drawing it out. The classical mufassirun who were native speakers of Arabic and who had direct access to the early interpretive tradition did not read khalifah this way. Their primary concern was with the meaning of succession, not of sovereignty.
Maududi's and Qutb's reading is shaped by twentieth-century political categories — sovereignty, the state, legislation, constitutional law — that were not part of the conceptual vocabulary of the Quranic revelation or its first hearers. When Maududi says that khalifah means divine vicegerent with authority to implement God's law, he is using a modern political conception of what it means to implement law in a state. This conception was foreign to the world in which the Quran was revealed and in which it was first understood.
The Quran is insistent, across many verses, that mulk (dominion), hakimiyyah (sovereignty in the absolute sense), and rububiyyah (lordship) belong to Allah alone. Surah al-Mulk (67:1): "Blessed is He in whose hand is the dominion (mulk), and He is over all things competent." Surah Yusuf (12:40): "Legislation (hukm) belongs only to Allah. He has commanded that you worship only Him." Surah al-A'raf (7:54): "Unquestionably, His is the creation and the command."
These verses are categorical: the ultimate authority — in the sense of absolute sovereignty over creation — is Allah's alone. No creature shares it. This is not merely a theological statement; it is one of the defining features of tawhid (divine unity). To say that humans, as khalifah, share divine sovereignty is to create precisely the kind of association with divine attributes that the Quran warns against.
The sovereignty reading of khalifah creates a tension with these categorical declarations. If humans are God's vicegerents exercising His sovereignty, they are in some sense sharing His hakimiyyah — deriving from it a genuine political authority that originates in divinity. But this is precisely the kind of shared divine attribute that the Quran consistently denies to any creature. The khalifah concept, properly understood as trusteeship rather than shared sovereignty, avoids this problem: a trustee acts within limits defined by the trust-giver, does not possess the trust-giver's authority, and answers to the trust-giver for every decision. This is categorically different from sovereignty.
If humans are God's vicegerents with divine mandate to implement His authority on earth, a practical question immediately arises: which humans? The khalifah concept in the sovereignty reading is presented as a universal human designation — all humans are God's vicegerents. But if all humans share this designation equally, no specific human or group has a preferential claim to rule in God's name. If the designation is not equal but is specifically held by those who know and implement divine law, then the scholars or rulers who claim to interpret divine law for the community are the actual repositories of divine mandate — effectively, a theocratic claim.
The history of groups claiming divine mandate for political authority is precisely the history of religious tyranny. When rulers or movements claim that their governance is the implementation of divine sovereignty — that to oppose them is to oppose divine authority — the result is always the suppression of legitimate critique and dissent under the cover of theological obligation. The caliph who cannot be criticized because he implements divine law, the party that cannot be opposed because it pursues hakimiyyah — these are not hypothetical concerns. They describe actual patterns in the political history of Muslim societies influenced by the sovereignty reading of khalifah.
The Quran's own treatment of human authority is far more cautious. It requires shura (consultation), it holds rulers to account for justice, it provides grounds for legitimate dissent when rulers violate divine commands. But it does not provide theological cover for claiming divine mandate as the basis for unchecked political authority. The sovereignty reading of khalifah, by granting humans a divine mandate to rule, inadvertently provides this cover — and this is among its most dangerous practical implications.
The Quran's most consistent description of the proper human relationship to Allah is not through the concept of khalifah but through the concept of 'abd (servant) and 'ibadah (worship, service). Surah adh-Dhariyat (51:56): "And I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me." The purpose of human creation is 'ibadah — service to Allah. This is the Quran's primary statement about the meaning of human existence.
The 'abd and the khalifah (in the sovereignty sense) occupy fundamentally different relationships to authority. The 'abd serves; the sovereign commands. The 'abd's will is subordinate to the master's; the sovereign's will defines the rule. These are incompatible relational structures. If the Quran's primary designation for humans in their relationship to Allah is 'ibad (servants), then importing a sovereignty relationship into the secondary term khalifah creates a serious inconsistency within Quranic anthropology.
The better reading is one that harmonizes both designations: humans are servants of Allah ('ibad) who are entrusted with the care of the earth (khulafa' in the stewardship sense). Service and stewardship are compatible; service and sovereignty are not. The stewardship reading resolves the tension between the two Quranic themes; the sovereignty reading exacerbates it.
Perhaps the most serious practical problem with the sovereignty reading of khalifah is that it can function as a theological license for coercion. If establishing divine hakimiyyah on earth is a divine obligation — if the khalifah mission requires the implementation of God's law in the political order — then those who refuse to submit to divine law are not merely sinning; they are obstructing the divinely mandated order. This creates a framework in which compelling compliance with Islamic law becomes not just permissible but obligatory, and in which resistance to such compulsion becomes an act of opposition to divine authority.
This is not a hypothetical extrapolation. It is the explicit logic of the radical applications of the sovereignty reading. Qutb's framework, followed by his admirers in various revolutionary and jihadist movements, explicitly argued that establishment of divine hakimiyyah justifies force, because the existing order — with its human legislative authority — is a form of illegitimate rebellion against divine sovereignty that must be overturned. The theological grammar of this argument — khalifah mission, divine hakimiyyah, human jahiliyyah — is entirely derived from the sovereignty reading of the khalifah concept.
The Quran does not support this coercive logic. Its consistent approach to religious difference is guidance and argument, not compulsion. Surah al-Baqarah (2:256): "There is no compulsion in religion." Surah al-Ghashiyah (88:21-22): "So remind, for you are only a reminder. You are not over them a controller." Surah Yunus (10:99): "Had your Lord willed, those on earth would have all believed. Would you then compel people in order that they become believers?" These verses establish a framework for Islamic engagement with non-compliance that is fundamentally about guidance, reminder, and persuasion — not about implementation of divine sovereignty through political coercion.
None of this means that humans have no legitimate authority or that Islamic governance is impossible. The critique of the sovereignty reading does not imply anarchism or the denial of all political organization. Humans do have genuine authority in Islam — over their families, their communities, their polities — but this authority is derivative, conditional, and accountable. It flows from the divine permission and is bounded by divine commands. It is trusteeship, not sovereignty. The trustee has real power to manage what is entrusted to them, but they do not own it, they did not determine the terms of the trust, and they will answer for how they discharged it.
This is precisely the framework that the stewardship reading of khalifah provides — and it is this reading, as we shall see, that the Quran's broader treatment of human responsibility, divine justice, and accountability actually supports. The sovereignty reading, despite its rhetorical power and its appeal to those seeking a comprehensive Islamic political programme, is built on a conceptual foundation that the Quran itself does not provide.