Book Review: The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, by Andrew F. March

Andrew March’s new book is a philosophically rigorous attempt to engage some of the most important ideas that define the Sunni subtradition of contemporary Islamic political thought commonly referred to as “Islamism,” a widely used label that is admittedly not without its problems. At the heart of Islamism, March argues, is the “comprehensive reformulation of Islamic political philosophy” that places human beings, qua God’s vicegerents, at the centre of their political theology (xi). This Islamist conception of popular sovereignty reflects an adaptation of the Qur’anic idea of man’s vicegerency (khilāfa) on the basis of which Islamist theorists bestow a kind of political agency upon every Muslim. Indeed, more than merely agency, such theorists view it as the responsibility of every Muslim to contribute to bringing about the realisation of God’s will in the modern public sphere. In this work, which has been roughly a decade in the making, March’s copious footnotes reflect a level of engagement with both premodern and modern Islamic political thought that is remarkably extensive in both its breadth and depth. March has read widely in writing this book, mining an extensive array of Arabic sources spanning over a millennium of Islamic intellectual history. The extensive use of the often neglected secondary literature by contemporary Arab scholars is particularly impressive.