Religion inspired
the nation-state, but politics made the difference.
JAMES M. DORSEY;
APR 13 2023;
Think that
the modern nation-state originated with the emergence of the 17th-century
beginnings of the era of science and reason? Think again.
In a recently published book, political scientist
Anna Gryzmala-Busse traces the origins of the modern state to medieval
Ms. Gryzmala-Busse’s analysis is not simply
academic and historical.
It puts in a different light notions of Christian
religiosity and heritage in Central and Eastern Europe that have strained
relations in the European Union between Western European states and former
Communist countries like Hungary as well as secular Europe’s struggle to come
to grips with the religiosity of their Muslim minorities, nowhere more so than
in France.
Although Ms. Gryzmala-Busse’s focus is on
Christianity and
Ms. Gryzmala-Busse asserted that secular European
rulers needed to create institutions to collect taxes and have an institutional
base for fighting wars and negotiating peace on a fragmented continent.
To do so, monarchs adopted administrative policies
and approaches developed by a wealthy church that was
As a result, “the church was an essential source of
legal, administrative, and conciliar innovations… The church showed rulers how
to collect taxes more efficiently, request and answer a flood of petitions,
keep records and accounts, interpret the law, and hold counsels that could
provide valuable consent,” Ms. Gryzmala-Busse wrote.
“Concepts such as representation, binding consent,
and even majority rules relied on ecclesiastical precedents,” she said.
In short, “the medieval church was so influential
because it was armed with superior organizational reach, human capital, and
spiritual authority,” Ms. Gryzmala-Busse concluded.
Implicitly, Ms. Gryzmala-Busse acknowledged that
the Muslim world travelled down a different path when she noted that there were
no governance models in
Ms. Gryzmala-Busse was likely referring to Islam
scholar Ahmed Kuru’s ground-breaking analysis of what he called the state-ulema
alliance.
That alliance precluded an arrangement similar to
that between the church and rulers as portrayed by political scientist Jonathan
Laurence. This arrangement involved rulers successfully deploying what they had
learnt from clerics to curtail and sideline the church.
In his award-winning book, Mr. Laurence noted that
ultimately the church could no longer prevail and accepted temporal
jurisdiction over what became the tiny
“European nations strong-armed, expropriated,
violated, and humiliated the Catholic hierarchy,” forcing it to “relinquish its
1,000-year claim to political rule and focus instead on advocacy, global
spiritual influence, and its evangelizing mission,” Mr. Laurence wrote.
The political scientist argued further that
European efforts to undermine the Ottoman caliphate that was abolished in 1924
in the wake of the emergence of a modern Turkish state fueled theological
differences in the Sunni Muslim world.
While that may have been a contributing factor, Mr.
Kuru’s analysis suggested that the evolution of relations between the state and
religious scholars in the Sunni Muslim world would have prevented it from
adopting the European model irrespective of external attitudes towards the
caliphate. So did the absence in Islam of a central authority like the pope.
Mr. Kuru traced the modern-day state template in
many Muslim-majority countries to the 11th century. This is when Islamic
scholars who until then had, by and large, refused to surrender their
independence to the state were co-opted by Muslim rulers.
The transition coincided with the rise of the
military state legitimized by religious scholars who had little choice but to
join its employ. They helped the state develop Sunni Muslim orthodoxy based on
text rather than reason- or tradition-based interpretations of Islam.
It is an orthodoxy that prevails until today even
though various states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have
adopted far-reaching social change as part of economic reform efforts and as a
regime survival strategy.
The orthodoxy is reflected in reticence with few
exceptions to reform outdated religious legal tenets, particularly when it
comes to notions of the state.
In a bold move in February, Nahdlatul Ulama, the
world’s largest, Indonesia-based Muslim civil society movement argued that
Islamic jurisprudence needs to be updated to introduce the notion of the nation-state
and a United Nations that groups these states.
The movement contended that this would involve
abolishing the notion of the caliphate as a legal concept.
“It is neither feasible nor desirable to re-establish
a universal caliphate that would unite Muslims throughout the world in
opposition to non-Muslims…. Attempts to do so will inevitably be disastrous and
contrary to the purposes of Sharia (Islamic law): i.e., the protection of
religion, human life, sound reasoning, family, and property,” the group said in
a declaration on its centennial according to the Hijra calendar.
Nahdlatul Ulama’s reforms of Islamic jurisprudence
do not bind others in a Muslim world where religious authority is decentralised.
However, they lay down a marker that other Muslim
legal authorities will ultimately be unable to ignore in their bid to garner
recognition as proponents of a genuinely moderate Islam.
As a result, politics rather than morality or
spirituality will determine Nahdlatul Ulama’s impact beyond
The importance of politics is reinforced by the
implicit agreement between scholars Gryzmala-Busse , Laurence and Kuru that the
state has successfully subjugated religious power in
However, the difference is that in Europe the
church withdrew from politics and retreated to the spiritual realm while in the
Muslim world religious figures retain some clout with rulers wanting them to
legitmise their authoritarian or autocratic rule.
