by Jared Rubin
We are forever making intercession for the emperors. We pray for them a long life, a secure rule, a safe home, brave armies, a faithful senate, an honest people, a quiet world, and everything for which a man and a Caesar may pray … we know that the great force which threatens the whole world, the end of the age itself with its menace of hideous sufferings, is delayed by the respite which the Roman Empire means for us … when we pray for its postponement we assist the continuance of Rome … I have a right to say, Caesar is more ours than yours, appointed he is by our God.11
This view of Christianity’s place vis-à-vis secular authority persisted well after Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire. Augustine advocated this view in his influential fifth-century book The City of God, which suggested that civil government was an independent body and that Christians must obey its laws. Likewise, Pope Gelasius I (r. 492–496) claimed in a letter to the emperor Anastasius that “two there are, august emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, the sacred authority of the priesthood and the royal power.”12
Christian fortunes turned when the Roman emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 312, which mandated tolerance and freedom for all Christians, restored to the Church all confiscated property, and recognized the Church as a corporate body.13 The freedoms awarded to Christians had an enormous impact on the fortunes of the Church, and the reign of Constantine is one of the most momentous in Christian history. In 321, Constantine recognized the Church as a valid property holder. Legally regarded as a corporation, each episcopal see was permitted by the Roman state to hold property, and it allowed individuals to bequeath property to the Church. Soon after, it became common for wealthy men and widows to leave one-third of their property to the Church, and landed property quickly became one of the Church’s primary sources of wealth. These edicts also had the important effect of lowering the cost of being Christian. It was no longer a social or economic disadvantage to be Christian; believer’s property rights were secure and there was no longer a risk of persecution. As a result, the Christian population grew dramatically during Constantine’s reign, particularly among the middle and upper classes, rising from 10 percent of the Roman population at the beginning of his reign to 56.5 percent by 350 CE.14
Yet, while Constantine and subsequent Christian rulers employed the Church as a legitimizing agent, there were three centuries of doctrine disassociating secular rule from religion that mitigated the Church’s capacity to legitimize. This is not to say Christianity could not legitimize political authority – it clearly did during the medieval period – but that Christian doctrine was not as conducive to legitimizing political authority as Islamic doctrine was. In other words, the “rules of the game” were different for Christian and Muslim rulers. Even after Christianity became the dominant religion of Europe, the benefit of religious legitimation was lower for Western European rulers than it was for Middle Eastern rulers. These doctrinal differences are clear in the Bible and the Qur’an as well as in the writings of early Christian and Islamic scholars. While some passages from the Bible do suggest that there is a religious basis for rule (Paul advocated in Romans 13:1 “there is no power but from God: and those that are, are ordained of God”), the separation of Christian religious and secular spheres is clear. On the other hand, there is not even a concept of separate spheres of the religious and secular in Islam. There is nothing in Christian doctrine like the Qur’anic and hadith passages explicitly encouraging Muslims to follow rulers who abide by Islamic dictates and rebel against those who do not. Historian Brian Tierney summarizes these differences eloquently (1988, p. 7, italics added):
Most often, as a society grows from primitive tribalism into an ordered civilization, a common religion permeates all its activities and helps to form all its characteristic institutions. The rise of medieval Islam provides a typical example. In such circumstances the creation of political institutions quite separate from the organization of the accepted religion seems hardly conceivable. Christianity, on the other hand, irrupted into an ancient civilization that already had its own established hierarchy of government and its own sophisticated tradition of political thought based on non-Christian concepts. In the early centuries, therefore, the Christian church had to develop its own structure of governing offices, sometimes parallel to but always apart from those of the secular hierarchy, and from the first there was always the possibility of a conflict of loyalties.
Employing the Framework: Religious Legitimation Over Time
The early histories of Islam and Christianity helped shape the propagating institutions of the Middle East and Western Europe. Due to unique historical circumstances, the institutionalized benefits of religious legitimation were greater in the Middle East because Islamic religious authorities had a greater capacity to legitimize political rule. Since the costs of religious legitimation were similar in the Middle East and Western Europe – costs included tax exemptions, following religious dictates, and financial support – it follows that the ratio of benefits to costs of religious legitimation were greater in the Middle East. One consequence is that Middle Eastern rulers employed the religious establishment to propagate their rule to a greater degree than Western European rulers.
The framework outlined in the previous chapter provides a deeper insight than this simple, static notion of religious legitimation being more important in the Middle East at any one point in time. Because the manner in which rulers receive legitimacy can feed back into the institutions that support the legitimizing arrangements, these differences also had dynamic, long-run consequences. In particular, recall the logic of Testable Prediction #3. Since rulers have little incentive to enforce laws contrary to religious dictates when religious authorities legitimize their rule, citizens have little incentive to transgress religious laws: they face a “double” cost of religious and temporal sanctions. This in turn gives even less incentive for political authorities to introduce laws and policies contrary to religious doctrine in the future. Over time, the institutional arrangement in which political rule is heavily legitimized by religion is never really challenged, and religious authorities are relatively secure from threats to their power. In other words, the institutions are self-reinforcing – over time, most players abide by the rules, thus strengthening the incentive for future generations to do so.
The legitimation regime is more likely to unravel when religious authorities are weak legitimizers. This is because rulers stand to lose less from promoting laws and policies contrary to the interests of religious authorities. This puts the religious authority in a no-win situation. They either ignore the fact that the citizens widely transgress their dictates or they update their doctrine, which undermines their hold on “eternal truths.” In either case, the religious authority’s ability to legitimize is weaker in the future. The more frequently such a process occurs, the less valuable religious legitimation becomes. Eventually, the benefits of religious legitimation do not exceed its rather modest costs, and rulers turn to other sources of propagation.
Figure 3.1 presents a stylized version of this logic. In the top half of the figure, the benefit/cost ratio of religious legitimacy begins at a high level and remains high over time. As the institutionalized benefits and costs of religious legitimacy change little over time, rulers continue to heavily propagate their rule through religious legitimacy (the dashed arrow feeding back into the second box from the left). A different sequence of events occurs in the lower half of the figure, where the benefit/cost ratio of religious legitimacy weakens over time. The change in the benefit/cost ratio feeds back into rulers propagating the rule even less via religious legitimacy, further decreasing the benefit/cost ratio. Ultimately the benefits of religious legitimacy will be so low relative to its costs that rulers will search for alternative means of propagation.
Figure 3.1 Diverging Costs and Benefits of Religious Legitimation Over Time
These insights shed light on the institutional histories of the Middle East and Western Europe.
The relative importance of political legitimation in early Islamic doctrine created an environment in which religious legitimation was valuable for rulers. This discouraged challenges to religious laws, in turn making religious propagation even stronger in the future. On the other hand, the relative paucity of early Christian doctrine that could legitimize rule placed Western Europe on a different path.
Islamic Legitimation after Muhammad
Muhammad was able to spread Islamic rule in the Arabian Peninsula because he had what Weber called “charismatic legitimacy.” That is, he had exceptional personality traits that encouraged people to follow him. His immediate successors could not depend on personality to legitimize their rule. This was problematic, because Muhammad died without a male heir to follow him, and the Qur’an does not formally deal with issues of succession. Periods of succession are precisely the time when legitimacy is the most important, since legitimacy bolsters an individual’s right to rule versus the claims of rivals who covet the ruler’s position.
Later generations of Muslims solved this problem by using religious clerics as legitimizing agents. Clerics had specialized knowledge of Islam and were independent of the ruler, so their word could bolster the perception of a ruler’s right to rule. But in the first few Islamic decades, such agents did not exist.15 It took time to establish a formal legal system based on Islamic precepts, and it took time to establish institutions for formally training religious scholars. Since there were no independent religious or legal classes to legitimize early Muslim rulers, disputes and civil wars over who was the legitimate ruler were common. Indeed, one of the most important religious schisms in the history of Western religion, the Sunni-Shi’a split, resulted from a dispute over who the appropriate ruler of Muslims was after Muhammad. Sunnis claimed the rightful successor was the most qualified one, whom they believed was Muhammad’s father-in-law Abu Bakr, while the Shi’as supported the successor they believed was the most spiritually qualified, Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali. Such legitimacy problems manifested themselves in the assassination of three of the First Four caliphs.
Because of these circumstances, the most legitimate rulers of the first Muslim community were Muhammad’s Companions – those who interacted with the Prophet. Companions held many of the important governing positions, and the first four Sunni caliphs following Muhammad were Companions. These rulers, known as the “Rightly Guided” Caliphs (632–661 CE), took on both a secular and religious role, using their ties to Muhammad to legitimize their rule.16 Their Sunni successors, the Umayyad Caliphate (661–750), attempted to propagate their rule in a similar manner by giving themselves the religiously charged title “Deputy of God” (khalifat Allah).17
Combining political and religious leadership into one position gave the early Islamic caliphs tremendous power, since they could claim religious authority and make judicial rulings at their discretion. Having discretion was important, since there are many aspects of Islamic law that are not conducive to ruling, such as laws on taxation, penal law, and the fixing of prices.18 Yet, this arrangement also presented a legitimacy problem for the caliphs. Legitimizing agents can only propagate authority when they can augment people’s belief in the ruler’s right to rule. A ruler cannot do this if he is the religious authority – in this case, he has no additional means of strengthening his subject’s beliefs.
The early caliphs also faced legitimacy problems in their rapidly expanding provinces. By the time of the Umayyads the Muslim Empire was the largest in world history, but most of the subjects were yet to convert to Islam. In order to establish law and order as well as loyalty to the empire, the caliphs sent “proto-kadis” to the provinces (the term kadi is roughly equivalent to “judge”). They were often illiterate and had no legal training, yet rulers still gave them administrative duties such as tax collecting, policing, and adjudicating disputes.19 The proto-kadis attempted to adjudicate based on Qur’anic teachings and the Sunna (exemplary actions of Muhammad),20 but they had little specialized religious knowledge and had less religious authority than the caliph did. They were therefore able to provide some level of stability to the provinces but were unable to serve as a source of religious legitimacy.
By the turn of the eighth century, the religious establishment consolidated its base outside the purview of the caliph. As generations after the Companions of Muhammad grew up within empires committed to Islamic ideology, religious study became a much more specialized pursuit. This fostered an environment where the corpus of Islamic law expanded rapidly. The first attempts at expanding Islamic law occurred in the early eighth century, when Sunna based on Muhammad’s “exemplary conduct” addressed problems not explicitly covered in the Qur’an. Legal decisions remained somewhat arbitrary, however, as many cases were outside the scope of the Sunna and were left up to subjective interpretation of the jurist as to what Muhammad’s exemplary conduct would have been. The adjudication of Islamic law became much less arbitrary over the following two centuries, as hadith became a dominant source of authority, second only to the Qur’an. Hadith attempted to document Sunna as historical fact, and legitimate hadiths could be traced, through transmissions, to one of the Companions of the Prophet.21 Compiling hadith was a time-consuming process, and since no individual could claim religious authority based on a relationship with Muhammad after the death of the Companions, those that compiled hadith had the best claim to authority. The most widely renowned scholars – those with extensive knowledge of the Qur’an and hadith – used independent reasoning (ijtihad) to mold Islamic law in response to new exigencies.22
The burgeoning religious establishment served the expanding empire’s legal needs, meaning that clerics regularly interacted with the public. This gave them local prestige: they were elites who could augment the beliefs of the local population with regard to what “right” actions were. Indeed, the top jurists were often more popular with locals than the caliph was. The wife of the early Abbasid caliph Harun (r. 786–809) noted, upon seeing a crowd gather for the arrival a distinguished jurist, that “true kingship lies in the scholar’s hands and hardly with Harun who gathers crowds around him by the force of police and palace guards.”23
The rise of the religious class altered the “rules of the game” played by Islamic leaders. With a powerful clerical establishment, it was feasible for religious authorities to legitimize political rule. These authorities served as an excellent source of legitimation: Islamic doctrine was highly consistent with legitimation of rule, religious authorities were independent of the ruler, and scholars were widely respected for their religious and legal knowledge. Wael Hallaq (2005, p. 182–3) nicely summarizes this relationship:
[T]he government was in dire need of legitimization, which it found in the circles of the legal profession. The legists served the rulers as an effective tool for reaching the masses, from whose rank they emerged and represented. It was one of the salient features of the pre-modern Islamic body politic … that it lacked control over the infrastructures of the civil populations it ruled. Jurists and judges emerged as the civil leaders who, though themselves products of the masses, found themselves … involved in the day-to-day running of their affairs. … [T]he judges were not only justices of the court, but the guardians and protectors of the disadvantaged, the supervisors of charitable trusts, the tax-collectors and the foremen of public works. They resolved disputes, both in the court and outside it, and established themselves as the intercessors between the populace and the rulers.
The rules of the game therefore stipulated that Islamic religious scholars could augment the beliefs of the citizenry regarding the ruler’s right to rule. This was especially true under the Abbasids (750–1258), who overthrew the Umayyads in 750 CE and came to power just as the clerical establishment was strengthening its independent hold on law and religious authority. In order to gain the support of the scholars, the Abbasid caliphs gave out highly lucrative posts to jurists: an average jurist’s salary was up to triple the salary of a skilled laborer.24 Ca
liphs also gave the scholars some say in state affairs: they always consulted the chief justice of the royal court before making major judicial appointments, and provincial governors sought the guidance of jurists when seeking to find new judges.25 In terms of the framework laid out in the previous chapter, the costs of religious legitimacy were minimal: rulers had to act in accordance with Islamic law, pay handsome salaries to top jurists, and cede minimal control over state affairs. But the potential benefits of religious legitimation were immense. The clerics conferred legitimacy by associating the ruler with Islamic piety – they mentioned the name of the legitimate ruler in each Friday sermon, supported obedience to the ruler in judicial rulings, accompanied caliphs on pilgrimages, and performed funeral prayers for distinguished caliphs.26
Clerics also encouraged rulers to follow Islamic dictates. For instance, the Abbasid caliph Harun consulted a leading jurist when he wanted to buy a slave girl from a man who did not wish to sell her. After a lengthy procedure, the jurist found a way for the caliph to buy the girl according to Islamic law.27 This procedure was avoidable – the caliph could have easily taken the girl by coercion – but such an action was illegitimate without clerical blessing. Top religious authorities (muftis) also gave advice via fatwas on whether different laws, policies, and behaviors were Islamic. These could range from the mundane – for instance, advice on whether to hold the Friday sermon for slaves – to important actions such as attacking rivals polities or undertaking major reforms.28 These actions legitimized rulers and their actions by confirming that rulers were abiding by Islamic doctrine and thus were worthy of following. Of course, sometimes acting in accordance with Islamic law meant doing something the caliph would otherwise prefer not to do, but the overall cost-benefit calculation usually weighed in favor of the caliph propagating his rule via religious legitimacy.
