2026 Theses Doctoral

The Problem of God’s Sovereignty in Classical Islamic Thought

Tazi Hemida, Doha

This dissertation is a study of the relation between earthly power and divine sovereignty in the context of premodern Islamic thought and in comparative perspective. It examines how the language of property is deployed to articulate this relation in Islamic theology and political jurisprudence from the fourth/tenth to the eighth/fourteenth century. It traces how the language of property is used in the theological and political fields to articulate the nature and extent of human and divine power. Ownership, when projected onto the theological field, stands for God’s sovereignty. This theological concept comes to frame political jurisprudence across the ‘Sunni fold’ by strictly excluding analogous claims to sovereignty on earth. From the Ashʿarite-Malikite Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī to the Ḥanbalite Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya, the figure of custodianship (amāna) is mobilized to restrain the political ruler. The unbounded power of the divine owner consigns the political ruler to the role of a bounded custodian, operating under the rule of law.

This dissertation also contrasts this premodern Sunni model with an early modern European example. It examines the opposing political implications of the concept of God’s sovereignty in the thought of the tenth-century Ashʿarite jurist and theologian Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī and the sixteenth-century French jurist Jean Bodin. By tracing Bodin’s reception of Ashʿarite theology, it examines the voluntarist philosophy of nature shared by Bāqillānī and Bodin. It then shows how they draw radically different conceptions of politics from this shared Ashʿarism. In Bodin’s case, God’s sovereignty is expressed in an absolutist theory of the state in which the sovereign owns power without conditions. In the case of Bāqillānī, the absolute nature of God’s sovereignty means that the ruler can be no more than a custodian of a temporary trust. Bāqillānī is a voluntarist and an occasionalist in his theology while being a constitutionalist in his politics. Against a widespread assumption in the field of political theology, this study demonstrates that the metaphysical and political concepts of a given epoch do not necessarily share a “systematic structure.” Theology, natural philosophy, and political thought are not necessarily bound by a logic of analogy.