Pre-modern Muslim legitimacy rested on moral and spiritual authority, not raw power

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the key contrast between the modern political subject/citizen and the Shariʿa-Sufi performed subject — central framing vocabulary for the whole book.
• XREF: Speaks directly to the reader’s interest in morality and power structures — resonates with the Milgrom law-merchant material on how authority arises where state power is absent, and with Foucault’s biopower.