UC Santa Cruz

What did anticolonial Muslim thinkers contribute to the recasting of political ideas in the global twentieth century? Prevalent scholarship has largely overlooked this significant terrain of thought, which my dissertation seeks to recover and theorize. While anticolonial thinkers and political actors widely celebrated popular sovereignty as a basis for self-determination, many anticolonial Muslim thinkers remained ambivalent about it. Their ambivalence stemmed from a deeper conceptual dilemma about popular sovereignty and its particular relationship to the modern state: that when sovereignty is delegated to the state as the central institution for organizing social and political life, the state often takes on an abstract and autonomous form of its own that, in turn, may ultimately undermine rather than embody the sovereignty of the people.This dissertation shows how four anticolonial Muslim thinkers from South Asia reconstruct Islam’s divine sovereignty to disentangle sovereignty from the state’s exclusive claim and place it with individuals, making them genuinely sovereign. In doing so, it demonstrates how these Muslim thinkers imagine democratic and political visions that are local and collective, driven by everyday ethical practices in Islam. In such visions, the individual’s moral and political life is situated within the state but not solely determined by it; the individual’s social and political life may embrace certain claims of the nation without being subsumed into the ideological framework of nationalism. That is to say, the dissertation excavates how Muslim thinkers envision a nonstatist politics and call for Islamic ethics to be the principal constituent of politics and social life. To realize such a vision of ethical politics, it illustrates how anticolonial Muslim scholars advance incisive critiques of liberal individualism, the idea of a political community organized by the state, and the centrality of enlightenment rationality by deriving conceptual and historiographical resources from Islamic history and tradition of thought. More significantly, it shows how these scholars offer novel theories of the individual, community, and humanism, as well as alternative visions for transforming politics and social life after the removal of empire. These imaginaries engender participatory democratic possibilities set in the ethics of everyday life, thus envisaging a social and political order different from the hegemonic liberal order.