Peace to those of Faith: Political Affiliation and Belonging in Classical Islamic Thought (original) (raw)

The Routledge Handbook of Citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa

This chapter examines some of the central concepts of human community and belonging and their implications in a number of classical legal and exegetical works. This is done by highlighting early and classical Islamic concepts that occupied a place comparable to ideas of nation and citizenship, understood as a specific form of political status and identity, or the "need to belong to a community," (as described in Heater 1990, 182), with an emphasis on the disciplines of Quranic exegesis and substantive law. I argue that, in several noteworthy texts in both of these scholarly domains, classical Muslim intellectuals continued to think of concepts pertaining to human association through the lens of tribe-like formations. For classical scholars, humans belonged to circles of kinship of various degrees of breadth and quality. As with tribal affiliation, the methods and boundaries of belonging were fluid and multi-layered. Affiliation did not occur in a strict institutional way, nor were there universal notions of identification in the writings of such scholars. Rather than an abstract nation, institutionalized within a political entity that individuals could join under certain conditions, acquiring a certain set of rights (as theorized, for example, in Heater 1990, 1-15), classical Muslim scholarship adopted a more pragmatic approach based on actual kinship and centered on the extent to which a person could be trusted as a peaceful or potentially harmful participant in a community.