60 Islam and Modernity
hereditary chief of the Qadiri order and guardian of a major shrine, is tradition-
ally the naqib al-ashraf of the city to the present day (Batatu 1978: 207–23).
We see, then, that religion constituted and shaped material factors, which
peopled the social landscape with its institutions and personnel as well as eco-
nomic and political spaces and actors. We shall see how these interacted with
other political players in historical Muslim societies. But let us fi rst consider the
discursive and identity elements in politics.
Discursive and ideological components of religion in politics
Prior to the development of modern secular ideologies regarding political
systems (more below), the main ideational fi elds available for political legiti-
macy and for conducting political contests and struggles derived from religion,
in Europe as much as in the Middle East. The ruler was the ‘Defender of the
Faith’ or the amir al-muminin, Commander of the Believers, the champion of
enlarging the territory of Christianity/Islam and defending it against infi del
enemies. Contestation from rival sources for power, or emanating from protests
of the lower orders, was also couched in religious terms regarding piety, faith
and justice.
For example, having traced the pattern of urban movements in several Arab
cities in the nineteenth century, Burke concludes that riots did not consist of
aimless violence, but were indeed directed to particular targets, which were the
loci of their grievances: ‘The burden of the foregoing’, he states, ‘is that there
was indeed a popular ideology of social protest in the Middle Eastern societies
which centred upon the application of the sharia by a vigilant Muslim ruler’
(Edmund Burke 1989: 47–8). He goes on to enumerate the various economic
provisions of the sharia, whose application was demanded by the protesters,
including restriction on taxation and on debasement of the coinage and the
prohibition of usury.
There is no doubt that the demand for justice and for a just prince was at
the centre of popular protest. Notions of justice are inevitably religious and cus-
tomary (the two not always being distinct in the popular or even learned mind).
Indeed, even in inter-elite confl icts one party would denounce the other as trai-
tors or deviants from religious prescriptions (al-Jabarti n.d., vol. 1: 621–2). The
language of righteousness and justice was intimately tied to religion, although
this is not to say that there was a precise notion of the sharia or of what actu-
ally constituted legal and illegal taxes and coinages. From the earliest times
Muslim rulers had levied taxes and other dues dictated by administrative fi at
and not by religious notions, and the ulama and fuqaha were not, for the most
part, accustomed to raising legal objections. The exceptions were situations of
confl ict, disorder and crisis in which the weight of fi scal oppression, food prices
and plain pillage were regular features, and in which protests whether by ulama,