Legitimacy in premodern Islam required moral authority, not military might

Evidence

If politics and the state, as modernity came to define them, produce their subjects in the form of national citizens, it was the Shariʿa and Sufism, together with the associated discourses I enumerated earlier, that performed the Muslim subject, producing a different concept of human—a human who was not given to a specifically political understanding of power. The Muslim subject, who was the subject, object, and predicate in the operation of the moral technologies of the self, understood legitimate power in terms of moral authority and virtue ethics, even when he or she did not rise up to the standards of the benchmark. But the benchmark was a constant reminder in life and in the art of living. A power that was not sanctioned by the concepts and philosophies of Shariʿa and Sufism—and their peripheral performative and discursive traditions—was not legitimate, and thus remained nonperformative, however mighty it was in military or material terms. It might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that virtue ethics, moral technologies of the self, piety, and simply a life guided by the positive freedom from material needs—as well as other varieties of such ethical considerations—were not exactly useful stuff for politics and political power. In such an environment, neither the national subject (the citizen) nor biopower could ever be conceivable. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 166 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The first Islamic civil war turned on the legitimacy of regicide; Premodern Islam had no concept of political sovereignty until colonial encounter; Islamic law refused limited liability to preserve personal moral accountability (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Pre-modern Muslim legitimacy rested on moral and spiritual authority, not raw power #corroborates (0.99) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 166