The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought. By Andrew F. March. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 272. $45.00 (cloth). ISBN: 9780674987838.

Abstract

How is the sovereignty of God to be achieved in an era of mass politics? This question haunted the leading thinkers of political Islam as the nation-state and popular sovereignty replaced the ancient pairing of king and priest. Andrew March ’ s The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought is an incisive examination of the intellectual feats of three major Islamists as they grappled with this problem: Abul Ala Mawdudi (1903 – 1979), who founded the Jama ‘ at-i Islami in British India and set the tone for Islamist politics in South Asia and beyond; Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966), a radicalized ideologue of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt who was tortured and executed by Gamal Abd al-Nasser; and Rashid al-Ghannushi of Tunisia (1941 – ), co-founder of the Ennahdha Party that led the drafting of Tunisia ’ s post-Arab Spring constitution in 2014. With secular liberalism in their crosshairs, these three men set out to define a perfectionist mass politics of Islam, an amalgam of divine and popular sovereignty that March aptly calls “ high utopian Islamism ” (75). This was “ the caliphate of man ” of March ’ s title, a rule of the pious masses animated by an “ aspiration to deep legality ” (222). He locates brief but forceful articulation of Islamist politics that was perfectionist yet inclusive 1). Space seemed to open, for a heady moment at not for God and the people, but also for believers and others. March ’ s counterintuitive argument: the late twentieth-century of and the of democratic