Islamic Political Anti-Theology: A Discursive Practice of Contingency Beyond Sovereign Politics

Contributing to the field of political theology from outside the European Christian tradition, this dissertation develops a description of the distinct logics that Islamic theology generates from its metaphysical assumptions. These logics in turn make possible a discourse of political anti-theology where politics operates through contingency rather than sovereignty. Political theology scholarship has excavated how modern politics derives from secularized Christian theological concepts—particularly transcendent sovereignty. This study demonstrates that Islamic theology's absolute insistence on divine transcendence (tawhid) produces something fundamentally different: a politics that renders sovereign authority conceptually impossible. I identify this discursive practice of political anti-theology through careful reading of the original texts of the earliest epistemological controversies in Islamic thought, and the epochal Islamic thinker of the eleventh-century CE, al-Ghazali's elaboration of their resolution. This rationality understands knowledge to emerge from the dialectical interaction between subjective perspectives and material circumstances rather than from transcendent objective principles. Politics that emerges from within this rationality is necessarily contingent and plural. This anti-theological politics manifested institutionally in premodern Islamic societies through systems like the madhhab legal culture (competing but mutually valid schools of law), and continues to appear in contemporary Islamic political discourse. Through sustained comparison with Western political theology—engaging particularly with Giorgio Agamben's archaeology of Western Christian political theology, I show how Islamic political anti-theology avoids recursively recreating sovereign authority. Ultimately, Islamic political anti-theology offers a historically attested conceptual resource for thinking politics beyond the transcendent authority that political theology scholarship struggles to think beyond.