Authority without Territory

The Aga Khan Development Network and the Ismaili Imamate

Kenneth A. Loparo, Daryoush Mohammad Poor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137428790
• eBook ISBN: 9781137428806
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Politica mediorientale

Examining the connection between the concept of authority and the transformation of the Ismaili imamate, Authority without Territory is the first study of the imamate in contemporary times with a particular focus on Aga Khan, the 49th hereditary leader of Shi?a Imami Ismaili Muslims.

CHAPTER 1

Max Weber, Authority, and Leadership

The influence of Max Weber (1864–1920) on political and sociological analysts and theorists is an undeniable fact, and there is no dispute about his impact on twentieth-century European thought. Although his ideas have been heavily criticized and assessed, after over a century now, they still seem to dominate the field of social sciences, particularly in the area of the study of authority and leadership.

In the greater narrative of trying to respond to some specific events in the Muslim world, there is still a visibly Weberian approach to the understanding of Muslim societies and communities around the globe among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. This is particularly evident in the way modernity is understood among the Muslims.

The purpose of this work is to demonstrate that a transmutation or an epistemic shift has occurred in the Ismaili imamate through its institutionalization in the form of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) and its Community institutions, which I describe under the rubric of authority without territory. By adopting a Weberian framework, I also show that the methodological and conceptual tools of Weber and his model of ideal types are inapplicable for understanding the Muslim world.

The life work of Weber is his reinterpretation of the Christianization of Europe. Weber’s assessment of modernity, his belief in the uniqueness of the West, and his models for understanding authority and leadership have long persisted in social sciences, and they have also been widely used as methodological tools for research about the Muslim world.

The Muslim world of our time has been constantly confronted with the question of how it encounters modernity, democracy, civil society, human rights, and all that is historically assumed to be the achievement of the West. There is often a tendency in the Muslim world and among both its religious and secular intellectuals who try to respond to these questions to identify the concepts of modernity, democracy, human rights, and a host of other ideas with the Enlightenment period in Europe and consider these concepts to be inextricably a part and product of the European legacy of the Enlightenment (see Eickelman and Piscatori, 1996: 22–45 for a wide range of responses to this position)

As a consequence, often when dealing with issues such as democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech, it appears that the mentality of many religious or secular intellectuals who deal with the Muslim world is conditioned by the Enlightenment period making all their references to an ideal concept from that period. Any hint at a postcolonial or post-orientalist approach to refresh our understanding of such concepts vis-à-vis the Muslim world usually faces stiff resistance or vehement opposition.

To all of this one must add the Orientalist attitude which—as Edward Said describes it—“connotes the high-handed executive attitude of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century European colonialism” (Said, 2003: 2). This approach or style of thought is “based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’” (Said, 2003: 2). Said captures this Eurocentric attitude in scholarly work as follows:

To speak of Orientalism therefore is to speak mainly, although not exclusively, of a British and French cultural enterprise, a project whose dimensions take in such disparate realms as the imagination itself, the whole of India and the Levant, the Biblical texts and the Biblical lands, the spice trade, colonial armies and a long tradition of colonial administrators, a formidable scholarly corpus, innumerable Oriental “experts” and “hands,” an Oriental professorate, a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendor, cruelty, sensuality), many Eastern sects, philosophies, and wisdoms domesticated for local European use—the list can be extended more or less indefinitely. (Said, 2003: 4)

In the bigger picture of the Eurocentric academic (and popular) approaches to the West, Max Weber holds a unique place. To Max Weber, modernity equals the rise of capitalist markets, bureaucratic territorial states, the rule of law, and the disenchantment of the world, and Western development is characterized by increasing rationality, bureaucratization, and modernization. And, according to him, these are all peculiar to the West and could never be achieved in the Orient or by Oriental societies, which includes the Muslim world, mainly concentrated in areas that are now called the developing world and not quite long ago were called the “third world.”

This Eurocentric approach, which is quite palpable in Weber, based on his interpretation of the Christianization of Europe and the rise of capitalism as a result of Protestantism, is widely present in academic writings about the Muslim world. In his sociology of religion, Weber “attempted to understand the values which created secular modernity” (Turner, 1998). Therefore, his sociology of religion also greatly contributes to at least one of the interpretations of secularism, too: building the Western secular modernity upon the unique qualities of the West and the Protestant movement, although he is quite pessimistic of the future of this development too, when he considers it an “iron cage.”

In this book, I refer to the main positions of Max Weber vis-à-vis authority and the forms of leadership which accordingly follow it, drawing on his ideal types. At this point, this work is minimally a critique of Weber’s stance on modernity and then there is a transition to his theory of authority. Then, I adopt two ways to show that his model is inapplicable for dealing with issues of authority in the Muslim world. One way is to show that his methodological tool is just not comprehensive enough to be able to deal with the complexities of the Muslim world. The other approach would be simpler and, yet, more critical. I will assume that Weber’s model could, in fact, be applied to our case. Therefore, given the validity of his model, it should be a good “working hypothesis” to explain every phenomenon in the Muslim world. Then, as I proceed to examine a specific example, I demonstrate that the Weberian model fails to explain Muslim institutions of authority, and in particular the AKDN.

The AKDN and the institutions of the Ismaili imamate is the case study of this work. The Ismaili imamate, with all its institutions, is an antithesis to the methodological tool of Weber, and it represents a transmutation in authority which cannot be explained by any Weberian model; as such the Weberian ideal types are inapplicable and inadequate, despite its rich insights.

The earliest take on the inapplicability of Weber’s ideal types in the case of Shiʿism was done in the groundbreaking work of Hamid Dabashi, Authority in Islam (1989), where he argues that we must posit the possibility of the perpetuation of charisma, which he develops in detail in his work.

The key questions of this book revolve around the Weberian models of authority and leadership. Weber’s study of Islam, as part of his research on the sociology of religion, did not actually bear fruit, and it remained simply in the form of scattered comments in his monographs in law, religion, and economic organization (Huff, in Huff and Schluchter, 1999: 2). However, Weber’s comparative study of Islam has remained a driving framework for many scholars, engaging them to look at Islam from this perspective (and criticize the Weberian outlook too). The volume edited by Huff and Schluchter (1999) bears testimony to this influence.

Max Weber is also relevant in the context of this book, particularly in terms of his articulations of the ideal types of authority and leadership. As it was briefly mentioned in the Introduction, in the Ismaili Community, we have a strong sense of tradition giving weight to traditional authority as understood by the Shiʿi Nizārī Ismaili Muslims. The Ismaili Community has developed a legal-bureaucratic structure for its organizations and institutions, and even though traces of a legal background for it may exist in the past, at first glance, the institutions appear to be structured like bureaucratic corporations in the West, with its internal and external financial checks and balances and their recruitment policies. The third aspect of it is the existence of a sort of charismatic quality attributed to the Imam that is rooted in Ismaili doctrines and theology.

These aspects make the case of the Ismaili imamate a suitable candidate to be checked against Weberian ideal types. The raison d’être for Weber, however, extends beyond these elements. The Ismaili Community is also highly modernized, and even though one should speak with caution about its being modern, the economic status of the Ismaili Community is also another issue that may justify the use of Weber in this context. This being said, we must note that the highly successful economic and entrepreneurial enterprises of the Ismaili Community is mainly restricted to the Ismailis of East African origin—or Khojas—and the rest of the Community still lags behind in this respect.

The most important and particularly critical work written so far about Weber and Islam has been Hamid Dabashi’s work in which he gives a hermeneutical explication of the idea of charismatic authority.¹ Dabashi devotes a full chapter to articulating the idea of Muhammadan messengership (al-risāla al-Muḥammadiyya) (1989: 47–70; also, 2008: 70). Following Phillip Rieff’s work, Dabashi also traces the idea of charisma back to its Christian origin of gift of grace (1989: 36–53 and 101–16) to pave the way for an Islamic version of it, being acutely aware that charisma is a Christian concept and it is only through hermeneutics that he could bring in this comparative study (Dabashi, 1989: 33).

Here, I have tried to find parallels of charisma in the Ismaili doctrines as well drawing on original sources with their distinctively Ismaili dimension, examples of which are given in the Introduction. Other works regarding Weber’s ideas about Islam are published about a decade earlier (originally published in 1974, reprinted in 1998) by Bryan Turner, whose work is referenced here. However, Turner’s work does not touch upon the topics that are dealt with in this book, namely, authority and leadership in the context of the Muslim world today, and although he gives a very good overview of the Ismaili history in his work (Turner, 1998: 87–91), it comes to an abrupt termination when he speaks about the Mongol invasion and so assumes the Ismailis to be out of the picture for good. I carry on the disrupted scholarly work about Ismailis up to the present time. The edited volume of articles published a year later (Huff and Schluchter, 1999) is even poorer in terms of attention to the diversity of the Muslim world and only in passing refers to the Shiʿi Muslims.

Turner’s article about Islam and capitalism is one of the finest examples of a critique of Weber. Dabashi’s work, which was his PhD thesis supervised by Rieff, is far more developed in this sense. His work, however, remains focused on the early stages of Islam following the death of Muhammad, and he tries to use the methodological tools of Weber and his ideal types to explain the schisms following the death of the founder of Islam. Since the time of Dabashi, only a few people have written extensively about Weber and his interpretation and understanding of the Muslim world, but the few who have positively and approvingly used his methodology have almost consistently failed to point out that Weber’s model is practically inapplicable and does not prove helpful in solving our problems—with the exception of Dabashi, of course, who has sought to overcome Weber’s limitation by introducing Shiʿism as the perpetuation of charisma. What they have almost invariably done with the Weberian model is merely an explanation of what the situation is when viewed with a Weberian lens, but they usually fail to address a specific problem and try to suggest a solution.² In the case of Shiʿism, the charismatic leadership of the Imams knew no specific limitations—and as we will see in the case of the Ismailis, it works as a liberating factor, which can pave the way for even epistemic shifts, and as Dabashi has noted:

This theological necessity of the Imams is the foundation upon which their charismatic authority is sought to be institutionalized. The Qur’an and the Imams’ unique “knowledge” of interpreting it, after the death of Muhammad, became an integral part of one another and together constituted the sole source of authority (Dabashi, 1989:106)³.

The twentieth century has witnessed the rise and return of Islam and the Muslim world to the public consciousness, through extensive media coverage and representations, and to the academic circles beyond the hitherto established Orientalist approaches to Islam. One of the reasons I have chosen authority for this research is that, in one way or another, every acute problem of the Muslim world, particularly in terms of its politics and development, is closely related to the issue of authority. Authority being the center point of all the critical issues of the Muslim world is not something that has emerged recently or in modern times; it goes back to the very early days of Islam following the death of the Prophet Muḥammad and the dispute over his succession.

The dispute over succession is essentially a dispute over authority. Therefore, the problem of authority reveals itself right at the outset in the form of a dispute over succession, but for sure it took other forms at the later stages of the history of Muslim civilizations and societies. It is here that authority has become connected and interrelated with legitimacy, power, and leadership in Muslim history up until now. Hence, the burning issue remains to be that of authority, and Max Weber is the first and foremost thinker who has touched upon this matter in a defining manner.

Looking back at what Weber has written about Muslim societies and about authority, power, legitimacy, politics, religion, charisma, culture, and a variety of other themes with his insight and his theories, we may very well see many considerations missing, particularly as our knowledge of Muslim societies has hugely expanded, but not yet to the extent that we can confidently say that nuances and subtleties of the subject are now clearly recognized and understood.

We must note that as regards Weber’s sociology of authority, his model is a carefully and powerfully crafted one whereas his poor knowledge of Muslim societies—and his death before he could do some serious research about them—does not allow for the incorporation of a complementary element to his model.

A Methodological Point of Departure: Islamic or Muslim?

This brings me to an important note which must be made at the outset about certain terms which are consistently used throughout this book. In almost all cases, except where there are quotations or in cases where it is technically not possible to use a different term, I have referred to the Muslim world, Muslim societies, and Muslim civilizations (plural) instead of the Islamic world and the Islamic society and the Islamic civilization (singular). This is because when we talk about Islam, we are indeed talking about an array of interpretations of Islam that are the products of the history of Islam as a faith. As such, we do not deal with a faith that has a single legitimate and valid interpretation excluding all other interpretations, except the one claiming to have access to the absolute truth, as illegitimate or less valid.

From a methodological point of view and also as a normative measure, throughout this work, I will be referring to Muslims and Muslim societies to highlight the diversity of interpretations and the actual pluralism that exists in the Muslim world. Also, I have made reference to Muslim civilizations in the plural rather than what is customarily used in singular. This is because the variety of interpretations made by Muslims throughout history of the sacred text or of Islam itself has paved the way f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1 Max Weber, Authority, and Leadership
• 2 Imamate and the Question of Authority in the Muslim and Shiʿi Contexts
• 3 The Aga Khan: A Visionary Leader
• 4 The AKDN: An Overview of the Ismaili Imamate’s Institutional Endeavors
• 5 Hybrid Leadership and the Case of the Ismaili Imamate
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index