138 No god but God
sovereign entities and members of a unified worldwide community.
Some have argued, a few of them violently, that the Caliphate should
be restored as the emblem of Muslim unity. These Muslims believe
that the ideals of Islam and nationalism are “diametrically opposed to
each other,” to quote Mawlana Mawdudi, founder of the Pakistani
sociopolitical movement Jama‘at-i Islami (the Islamic Association).
Consequently, Mawdudi and many others feel that the only legitimate
Islamic state would be a world-state “in which the chains of racial and
national prejudices would be dismantled.”
The twentieth century has witnessed a transformation of the his-
toric contest over the function of the Caliph and the nature of the
Ummah into a debate over the proper way to combine the religious
and social principles of Islam—as defined by Muhammad and devel-
oped by the Rightly Guided Ones—with modern ideals of constitu-
tionalism and democratic rights. And yet, this contemporary debate
remains deeply rooted in the same questions of religious and political
authority with which the Ummah grappled during the first few cen-
turies of Islam.
Thus, in 1934, the modernist reformer Ali Abd ar-Raziq
(1888–1966) argued in his book Islam and the Bases of Government for
the separation of religion and state in Egypt by drawing a clear dis-
tinction between the authority of the Prophet, which he believed was
solely limited to his religious function as Messenger of God, and the
purely secular function of the Caliphate, which was nothing more
than a civil institution that all Muslims felt free to question, oppose,
and even rise up against. Ar-Raziq claimed that the universality of
Islam could be based only on its religious and moral principles, which
have nothing to do with the political order of individual states.
Some years later, the Egyptian academic and activist Sayyid
Qutb (1906–1966) countered ar-Raziq’s argument by claiming that
Muhammad’s position in Medina encompassed both religious and
political authority, making Islam a unity whose “theological beliefs
[cannot be] divorced in nature or in objective from secular life.”
Therefore, the only legitimate Islamic state is that which addresses
both the material and the moral needs of its citizens.
In the 1970s, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini applied a dis-
tinctly Shi‘ite interpretation of Qutb’s argument to assume control