Shadows in Heaven and Clouds on Earth: The Emergence of Social Life and Political Authority in the Early Modern Islamic Empires

Abstract

Whereas medieval Arabic accounts of the genesis of social life and emergence of political authority have received sustained scholarly interest, there has not yet been any systematic attempt to explore the reception of these ideas in the central and eastern Islamic empires during the Early Modern era. The central thrust of this article is to remedy this scholarly neglect and identify the main patterns that informed the evolution of theories about the origin of human society and political authority in a corpus of political writings from the Persian, Timurid, Ottoman, and Indo-Islamic traditions. The article demonstrates that the tension between a naturalistic understanding of social origins and the idea of the ruler as God’s representative on earth forms a dominant theme of the political literature produced in the central and eastern parts of the Islamic world. While all the writers canvassed herein appear committed to the divine origins of authority, the article argues that a careful scrutiny of their work...