408 Abdessamad Belhaj
Ibn al-Qayyim on siyāsa sharʿiyya. On balance, he approached the sub-
ject from a different angle each time he dealt with it, leaving the reader
with many unanswered questions. However, one notes an evolution
(or rather an overlapping) in his treatment of siyāsa sharʿiyya. In the
first place, he adopted a kind of “juridical” perspective that empha-
sizes the coercive meaning of the term coupled with an attention to
“legal argumentation”^35 (legal evidence/proof). While one must agree
with Johansen that for certain Muslim jurists siyāsa meant exclusively
an equality of undefined criminal punishment (taʿzīr) it seems hard to
accept his statement that this meaning is a forerunner of a special form
of siyāsa sharʿiyya that includes siyāsa in the Sharia.^36 All the same, the
coercive aspect of siyāsa is only one dimension among others found in
the literature of siyāsa sharʿiyya. That being the case, the majority of
Muslim jurists did not consider the punitive competence of the state as
being the same as government’s management of the public order. Man-
uals of fiqh mention other state functions, depending on the juridical
question at stake, such as the financial function (in the chapter on alms-
giving, zakāt) or the defensive function (in the chapter on jihad). Simi-
larly, when dealing with issues of criminal punishment (in the chapter
of ḥudūd), the state appears, first and foremost, as a necessary coercive
agent. Therefore, siyāsa cannot be understood as an exclusively crimi-
nal punishment, aside from the juridical chapter of criminal punish-
ment. Still, in his recent writings, Johansen focused rather on certain
“politico-moralistic” aspects of siyāsa sharʿiyya.^37 With this intention,
he was more attentive to Ibn Taymiyya’s politico-social system, fram-
ing his ideas within the Mamluk context. With this in mind, I shall
now turn to the main legal and moral problems of siyāsa sharʿiyya as
discussed by Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim.
35 Johansen, Baber: Signs as Evidence. The Doctrine of Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328)
and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1351) on Proof, in: Islamic Law and Society 9
(2002), pp. 168–193. Ovamir Anjum has criticized Johansen’s approach to the
legacy of Ibn Taymiyya as being too legalistic: Anjum, Ovamir: Reason and
Politics in Medieval Islamic Thought. The Taymiyyan Moment, Madison 2008,
pp. 62–66.
36 Johansen, Baber: Contingency in a Sacred Law. Legal and Ethical Norms in the
Muslim Fiqh, Boston and Leiden 1999, p. 217.
37 Idem: A Perfect Law in an Imperfect Society. Ibn Taymiyya’s Concept of “Gov-
ernance in the Name of the Sacred Law”, in: Peri Bearman, Wolfhart Heinrichs
and Bernard G. Weiss (eds.): The Law Applied. Contextualizing the Islamic
Shari’a; a Volume in Honor of Frank E. Vogel, London and New York 2008,
pp. 259–294.
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