Key words:
sacral kingship,
monarchy,
monotheism,
Elementary Form,
anthropology,
history,
caliphate

Professor, Ph.D.,
Central European University,
Budapest, Hungary.
Author of the books:
Ibn Khaldun in Modern
Scholarship (1981), An Essay in
Reinterpretation (1982), Arabic
Thought and Islamic Societies (1986),
Islam and Modernities (1993),
Muslim Kingship (2001).
E-mail: azizalazmeh0@yahoo.com

Abstract: In the first part of this text, the author attempts to demonstrate that sacral kingship might, in anthropological terms, be regarded an Elementary Form of socio-political life; not an autonomous elementary form, but one falling under the category of rulership. The reference to the anthropological notion of Elementary Forms renders virtually irrelevant the rigidity with which categorical distinctions are made between polytheistic and monotheistic kingship, as well as any civilisational divisions that might be imagined between Orient and Occident. The second part of the text provides an illustration of these presuppositions, the author taking several examples from the history of monarchy both in the Western World and in the Arab World.

"[die Kultur ist] recht ei­gent­lich die fromme und or­dnende, ich möchte sagen, begütigende Ein­be­ziehung des Unge­heueren in den Kultus der Götter."

Thomas Mann

"Eine politisch-religiöse Feier­lichkeit hat einen un­endlichen Reiz. Wir sehen die irdische Majestät vor Augen, um­geben von allen Sym­bolen ihrer Macht; aber in­dem sie sich vor der himm­lichen beugt, bringt sie uns die Gemeinschaft beider vor die Sinne. Denn auch der ein­zelne vermag seine Ver­wandt­schaft mit der Gott­heit nur dadurch zu be­täti­gen, dass er sich unterwirft und anbetet."

J. - W. von Goethe

I should like to state at the very beginning my conviction that sacral kingship, in its variety of forms and representations one of which is monotheistic kingship,

I do not alas have the opportunity here to discuss why sacral kingship should be such an Elementary Form, or why Hocart in his famous work was moved to assert that: "We have no right, in the present state of our knowledge, to assert that the worship of gods preceded that of kings … Perhaps there never were any gods without kings, or kings without gods"¹: This is a matter that would take us into a discussion of psychoanalytic, social-psychological, and anthropological theories that recall names such as Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Pierre Clastres, René Girard, Rudolf Otto, and many others. The lack of space here is particularly unfortunate for me, as I do so much wish to think through that most compelling tautology implied by Durkheim's (and, before him, Feuerbach's) conception of the sacred as an irreducible form of societal self-representation², as something not amenable to specific formulation apart from its relationship to its profane contrary, indeed as "a category of the sensibility" or "a veritably immediate datum of consciousness" ³. I will therefore have to rest content with asserting that sacral kingship was a constant motif in all royalist and imperial arrangements that spanned the entire œcumenical expanse of Eurasia from the very dawn of recorded history until modern times, a vast perspective in which the primitive republicanist image of Rome or of Athens seems aberrant, paltry and inconsequential, if indeed this image of republicanist purity, of the splendid childhood of rational political man, has any historical credibility or verisimilitude.

Before going any further with the comparative perspective, a few prefatory words on sacrality will nevertheless be in order. Sacrality, like kingship, expresses principally a relationship articulated in dominant transcendence; there is a striking degree of resemblance between epithets applied to Christ and those applied to Hellenistic and Roman emperors, such as epiphaneia and parousia, with reference to the solemn arrival of the emperor. Sacrality denotes irreducible removal, a structure of irreducible polarity and subordination, an hierarchical instance beyond hierarchy, a self-referential purity beyond purity and impurity as normally perceived, an irreducible potency (such as the logos) incommensurate with any gradations of power. Nevertheless, transcendent sacrality may and often does substantively disseminate lower beings, like kings, or may cast its potent shadow upon them; it is not, like Aristotles's supreme being, only a passive instance of self-reflection and self-

I will be more specific. To these diminishing degrees of mimetic capacity correspond greater degrees of pollution, of adulteration with materiality, with humanity increasingly more common and soiled. Yet this structure of continuous passage across degrees and ways of commensurability — from self-identity through to shadowy reflections, as I indicated — is nevertheless governed by an irreducible categorical distinction, indifferently distinguishing, in parallel, God from man and king from subject, and relating God and king together in a common distinction from the common run of humanity in such a way that Louis IX of France could state that "li rois ne tient de nului, fors de Dieu et de lui"⁵.

I am perhaps anticipating too much by this direct reference to St. Louis in the thirteenth century, for the complex history of the relationship between gods and kings is a very long one, and is yet remarkably constant. This is not a history that I might reasonably hope to sketch before you on this occasion. What I wish to suggest to you are some considerations on the constant motifs involved in enunciations about œcumenical sacral kingship, which connect deity and king by relations of emanation, analogy, genealogy, metonymy, figuration, and apostolate, all of these involving functional parity between king and god in their common functional capacity as demiurges of order, cosmic and human. In the mundane world, this parity realised by mimesis, by rhetorical or substantive participation in the common terms held by both of them: limitless energy, boundless majesty, and absolute virtue.

Let it be said at this stage that I have used the word "enunciations" quite deliberately, as the enunciations of kingship I have in mind, albeit largely discursive, are also iconographic, ceremonial, ritual, and magical, all of these equally performing the function of crystallising royal energy in tangible and transmissible forms, crystallising it in virtually immobile formal and formulaic moulds, most visible in iconography, that freeze out history, politics and society and render complete the impeccability of kingship, immune from pollution, and reflecting it in the verbal, iconographic, and ceremonial cultivation of the impeccable majesty attaching to the royal person.

Before I start reviewing some relevant historical material I should add the following caveats: I do not mean to imply that all enunciations about kingship are sacral, nor do I by any means wish to imply that all such enunciations rest by necessity upon the full realisation of the despotic potential latent to them. Not all impeccable sacred emperors in Baghdad and Constantinople enjoyed the limitless power or deployed the boundlessness energy attributed to them, and the heightened hallucinatory character of enunciations concerning the sublimity of the imperial office did not often tally with political realities: witness, for instance, the conjunction of vox dei and vox populi in the acclamation of Byzantine emperors by their assertive and demanding armies. Witness also the receipt by overpowering Muslim princes (such as the saljuqs and the Buyids) of their investiture with almost absolute rule in Baghdad in the course of humiliating ceremonials before Caliphs dependent upon their

And finally, the reference to the anthropological notion of Elementary Forms with which I opened my talk militate against, and indeed render virtually irrelevant, the habitual rigidity with which categorical distinctions are made between polytheistic and monotheistic kingship, and by extension renders generically connected Byzantine, Muslim and Latin enunciations on sacral kingship, beyond any civilisational divisions that might be imagined in terms of a totemic geography of Orient and Occident or of Islam, Orthodoxy, and the West.

***

In close connection with the contention I have just made about the illusory character of certain categorical distinctions, arising from institutional academic inertia no less than from ideological and political exigencies is the main thesis that I wish to propose: Far from being generically closed in any conceivable manner, monotheistic kingship in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and beyond, is but a constellation of specific inflections within the more general phenomenon or Elementary Form of sacral kingship, just as monotheism is a specific theological and cultic inflection within the more general Form of the theological, political and social manifestations of divinity. For it might very well be asked whether the contrast between monotheism and polytheism is at all relevant to notions of divinity in general, quite apart from its interest to dogmatic theology and the history of religions. It might, further, be maintained that the notion of polytheism itself appears as a polemical notion arising from monotheistic self-definition, and is of doubtful systematic and analytical value, just as it could be maintained that there is little historical force in the deistic notion, much elaborated in the nineteenth century, that polytheism is a degenerate form of an original monotheism, or of Hume's theory (later taken up by nineteenth century Muslim reformers such as Afghani and Muhammad `Abduh) that the history of religions is one of evolution from polytheism to monotheism⁶.

Be that as it may, it can be maintained that, in conceptual terms, transitions from sacral kingship of a polytheistic to one of a monotheistic profession of faith have generally been fairly smooth at the conceptual level, and required in general what we might characterise as adjustments in terms of rhetorical and sometimes institutional transferences. The christianisation of Germanic or Slavic polities are interesting cases. Of these one might almost randomly to select for consideration a relatively simple, local and clannish polity such as that of Anglo-Saxon England, we would observe a number of patterns supervening in the transition between pagan and Christian kingship which repeated developments in more complex and more central polities, most specifically that of the central areas of late Romanity.

Divine capacities were also transferred. God's charismatic energy, generically a supreme form of pure energy, passed on to humankind by way of the king's person — miht, craeft, maegan, corresponding to the xwarra of Irann gods and kings, often iconographically represented as a rayed nimbus or as a halo, and occasionally as a hand — was christianised as Grace, which is after all a manifestation of pure energy. To the heavenly monarchy of God corresponds the mundane dominion of the king who, like the christian God and like Woden and his subaltern associates before him, is the possessor, protector, governor and wielder, dispenser, and gift-giver, capacities altogether associated with the term frea, used equally for god and for king. Giftstol was the term used equally for altar and for throne. And while the Church destroyed the sacrificial king in a sacramental sense, they dubbed him Christus Domini, the Lord's Anointed.

More complex but conceptually analogous were developments in more central lands during Late Antiquity. The period witnessed a wholesale transferrence of the powers and prerogatives of the many pagan gods to the unique — but nevertheless triune — Christian God and later to his Muslim cognate Allah, and their subordination under His exclusive preserve in a universe where they became demons or jinn — there was never a denial of the existence of these invisible powers, as any reading of Origen, and after him of Eusebius, Augustine, and other the Church Fathers, or of the Koran, would make clear. The irreducibility of the sacred is tidied up in monotheism by the ingathering of divine functions and energies, hitherto dispersed, and their allocation to one deity, thereby rendering the irreducibility of divinity indivisible, like the indivisibility of royal power. This matter is betokened by the transfer of attributes, epithets and names of energy, majesty, protection, destruction, and kingship, from one theological universe to another, such as the Greek translations of the Old Testament, in which Adonai becomes kyrios, a term used for various deities as well as emperors, and Shaddai becomes Pantocrator, and El Elyon becomes theos hypsystos, a name and celestial attribute habitually applied to Zeus⁸. Similarly, Christ and, after him, Constantine, took over wholesale the discursive and some of the iconographikc attributes of Sol Invictus⁹. In an analogous continuity of reference to visible and invisible majesty in transcendence, this theos hypsystos just mentioned became, in the Koran, al-`Aliy, an exclusive epithet of Allah, as did al-`Aziz and many other terms derived from names of particular deities and from the attributes of Ba`l and El in Semitic religions, later being the occasion for philosophical theologies and theophoric names.

Quite apart from these rhetorical participations and cultic transferences, it must be stressed that late Roman religions had a pronounced henotheistic tendency that became, with time, fully-fledged monotheism under the combined impact of oecumenical empire, Stoic

It will have been noticed that much of the vocabulary thus used to enunciate kingship is philosophical, and I shall come to this matter presently. Yet there was a magical and mythological substructure to this philosophical elaboration, undertaken by figures such as Diotogenes, Stenidas, and Ecphantus, and in rather more abstract fashion by Themistius and Iamblichus, in terms of the late Neo-Platonic, late Stoic, and Neo-Pythagorean vocabularies which constituted the philosophical pillars of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds. There was a cultic infrastructure connected with the divine philosophical associations of royalty. Let it be remembered that Alexander sacrificed to Marduk in Babylon in his capacity as the last Achamaenean emperor and Apostle of the great deity, and in Egypt to his father Ra`. He was also, on his mother's side, descended from Poseidon and hence from Chronos himself, just as Julius Caesar, who set up for himself an empire-wide cult, hailed from the Iulii, descendants of Romulus, son of Mars: this was a divine connection so real that some legions of Augustus used missiles which bore the inscription "Divum Iulium", and defeated enemies were sacrificed at the altar of Divus Iulius. Not dissimilarly, the Egyptian Ptolemys were sons and daughters of Horus,

The cultic aspect is crucial: imperial cults — the aversion to which, as is well known, was the litmus-test for identifying Christians during the various Roman prosecutions — were instituted to render worshipful homage to the idea of universal empire personified by the emperor who, well into Byzantine times, sent a representation of himself or fully expected one to be made available by Roman governors or provincial citizens, a statue and later an icon, to the provinces in order to receive homage to his holy person, and by implication to the universal empire — an instance of civic religion according to Varros's well-known and analytically most serviceable distinction in Roman religions between the mythological, the physical, and the civic¹². There is a very complex history of this phenomenon, marked by episodic ebbs and flown, an effervescent variety of local forms and changes of taste for the divine among the emperors and the populace of Rome and the provinces, not the least significant of which was whether emperors regarded themselves as divine, after the Egyptian and the Seleucid fashion, or simply as sacred persons apostolically charged by divinity with the affairs of the world, after the manner generally — but not exclusively — prevalent among populations and states of the Near East. Whereas Diocletian, for instance, was dubbed dominus et deus, the Emperor Julian, harking back no matter how ambiguously to more classical ideas of res publica¹³, preferred to declare in his Epistle to the Alexandrians in 362 that the gods, and above all the great Serapis, had judged fit that he should rule the world¹⁴ — and that as a consequence Roman citizens must surrender to him the power that emerges from them. There is not here the implication, as with Julian's correspondent Themistius, that the emperor was of divine origin, and no suggestion, as with Eusebius, that Constantine was powered by the Holy Spirit. — interestingly enough, the part of Themistius' Second Epistle concerning the divine origin of the king is absent from the Arabic translation of this text by Ibn Zur`a (d. 1056)¹⁵. Julian preferred instead a rather more humble, mimetic role with respect to divinity; as shepherd and father to men, a mere icon of divinity¹⁶, all of these attributes of Christ — though he on other occasions saw himself as the incarnation of Helios¹⁷, an ambivalence reflecting the incomsummateness of a process as yet incomplete. And while earlier Pagan thinkers like Celsus had regarded the denial of divine multiplicity to be an act of sedition because it derogated local gods and, by extension, Romanity itself, later times saw emperors setting up particular oriental deities as patrons of themselves and of the empire: Mithras for Diocletian, Serapis and Mithras for Julian, and Sol Invictus, identified with a variety of other deities, for a number of others (including Constantine).

Yet beyond this variety, there were elements of unity of direction, a development at once combined and uneven, which characterises the majestic swell of Late Antiquity, an emergent unity which calls up interesting and important questions of periodisation, of delimiting in a complex way a trés longue durée of the sort proposed by Jacques Le Goff for the Middle Ages, which I cannot consider at present. Suffice it to say that Late Antiquity "decanted" — the expression is Le Goff's¹⁸ — the various legacies of Antiquity, Greek, Hellenistic, Roman, and Oriental, all of these most intimately and inseparably imbricated, and that, in so doing, tidied up the civilised world of the day in terms of the immanent trends, all in

We have available important studies of the conjunction between these three components, monotheism, absolutism, and universalism, most notably the older study of Erik Peterson¹⁹ and the recent work of Garth Fowden²⁰. Quite apart from any imputation of causality between monotheism and universalism, which Fowden²¹ has denied with reference to the restricted tribal polities of the Israelites, it is important to signal that the trend towards universalism, syncretistic or homogenising, is evident from the long history of attempts to set up universal empires — first by Cyrus, followed rather inconclusively by Alexander, on to the Romans following the pax augusti and continuing in claims to universality by the Byzantines and their tributaries and successors (copied in the West by ideas of the Holy Roman Empire and notions of translatio imperii), and reaching perhaps its most stupendous success under the Caliphate, which combined the geopolitical achievement of Cyrus with Constantine's dream of universal monotheism²².

Questions of causality apart, there can be little doubt that the crystallisation and the pervasive accentuation of divine kingship was closely allied to the universalist vocation of empire — what I have called the de-provincialisation of Rome — and that both were to a very large extent premised on a number of allied developments relative to the centralisation of provincial rule, the atrophy of civic structures and of evgeretism, and the ethnically and culturally homogenising policies of the empire, most saliently under the Antonines and the Severans. These processes ran parallel, and were always gradual: it is not often not often enough appreciated that Constantine was worshipped in his own lifetime, and addressed as theos in his new capital, or that in the fifth century Theodosius still set up flamines to his own cult in the provinces — the cult of the emperor was only brought to an official end under Valentinian²³ — and that overall polytheism and monotheism had boundaries that were altogether porous. Both were elaborated in terms of a subordanionist theology that subjected local deities to a supreme deity, such as Jupiter, Sol, Serapis, or Mithras, local deities being represented by Celsus, for instance, as satraps of the supreme deity²⁴. In all, the coherence of the political tradition built around the cult of emperors gradually gave away to a coherence emerging from confessional religions, in such a way that ritual coherence gave way gradually to a textual, scriptural coherence. We should not underestimate the great moment of subordinationism with respect to the Emperor's standing relative to Christ: that he is Christ's figure rather than his epiphany, or that he is the dynamis of the Holy Spirit, is a serious matter which requires close anthropological and historical consideration which I cannot initiate now.

The central figure in this development was of course Eusebius²⁵, Bishop of Caesarea and Constantine's political theologian, whose thinking on matters that follow was to exercise important influences in both east (on John Chrisostom, among others) and west (on St. Ambrose)²⁶. Building at once on early patristic, late-Neoplatonic subordinationist metaphysics (corresponding to Varro's "physical" religion), on Biblical exegesis and most particularly on Origen's reclamation of Romanity in the context of salvation history (this was later expressed by Augustine in the West²⁷, in his conception of Rome as the Second Babylon, thus forming the centrepiece of God's design to conquer the world through her, and transposed by his acolyte Orosius²⁸ into a veritable theology of history, in a line that continues on to John of Salisbury²⁹ and to Dante ³⁰), and finally on the willingness of the Church Fathers such as John Chrisostom "unblushingly"³¹ to place the emperor in the worldly role of God himself, once the empire ap

Cosmic and wordly monarchy as the contraries of divine and political polyarchy³⁴ corresponds entirely in this scheme. But this very scheme in its monotheistic inflection renders doctrinally very difficult the identification of imperial monarchy with divinity or the consubstantiality of kingship with divinity. The quasi-divinisation of Byzantine emperors was attenuated and ritualised³⁵, being converted into sanctity, and what remain of such divinisation are figures, eikones, figures no less real and absolutist for being virtual: figures of mimesis, of emanation, of typology, and of magical contiguity between emperor and cosmocrator. I have already stated that what remains was rhetorical participation; and if we exclude Neo-Platonic elaborations of the imperial office by Eusebius, most particularly in his Tricennial Orations (esp. part 1), in terms of emanation from the divine logos, we are left only with figuration in which that which is doctrinally and theologically unthinkable and inexpressible is enunciated: this is figuration which acquires reality by repetition rather than through the theological justification which is barred to it, a figuration whose force derives from the illocutionary energy acquired as language, highly formalised and allusive in instances such as this, is subjected to a diminution in propositional energy which is theologically beyond it.

I entirely agree with Gilbert Dagron's statement that, for Oriental Christians, sacerdotal royalty was neither an idea nor a theory, but rather a figure³⁶ : the emperor as the ritual figure of Christomimesis, whose sites were iconography, ceremonial, metaphor and political etiquette, which enunciated the rhetorical participation of Christ and of the emperor in the common terms of energy and majesty, yielding a field of magical contiguity and the transferrence within this field of efficacious grace from God to the emperor. This was expressed in the conferment upon the Basileus of the epithet hiereus by the Synod of Constantinople in 449 and the Council of Chalcedon in 451³⁷, and the application of the qualifier théos to all matters that pertained to the person of the emperor³⁸, including his icon, which is after all related to him in very much the same way as he related to God the Son, by figuration and magical participation³⁹. Thus the wide range of other qualifiers studied by Otto Treitinger⁴⁰: that the emperor is the like of God "in so far as this possible", that he is an emanation of the Trinity, the Trinity's elect, king in God and in Christ the eternal king. Thus also is the plastic extension of the emperor's mystical — indeed, mystagogic⁴¹ — personality, as frozen in ceremonial postures and mimetic tropes well studied by André Grabar⁴². And thus finally, by plausible magical exaggeration, was the divine unction received by the porphyrogennetoi while still in their mothers' wombs⁴³ : magical exaggeration, but also a typological variation on the theme of the Immaculate Conception; it must not be forgotten that the kings of France from Clovis onwards were anointed with holy oil contained

The imitation of Christ of which I have been speaking was not confined to mysteries, but extended to the very real ecumenical order whose lynch-pin was the Emperor, calling up, again typologically, the hierarchical order by means of which the cosmocrator orders the universe, just as ancient deities imposed order upon primordial chaos. The Emperor establishes and maintains taxiarchia, proper order, ritual and otherwise, in state, society, church and army⁴⁵. This order, as I have suggested, is located in the irreducible difference and generic disparity between God and man as between Emperor and his subjects, premised on a simple structure of subordination and superordination. It is as if subjects were enculturated by the presence of the king who, with his capacity for violence (and violence, as we learn from Augustine most especially, is a primary instrument for the imitation of Christ ⁴⁶) , alone remains within the realm of nature and outside the compass of culture which is guaranteed by his presence. Order is conceived after a Neo-Platonic fashion, in which hierarchy is presided over by an imperturable instance removed from it generically, in self-referential sacrality, energy in a state of pristine purity, beyond refrain or reciprocity yet regulative of all recall and reciprocity that create culture, marshalled by Christ and Emperor for the greater glory of God.

Last but not least, this charter for absolutism, often surreal and hallucinatory, was as I suggested wedded to a theology of history. Typology is not only a discursive device in which allegory moves along the axis of time, but also an intimation of magical participation, as with the icon, where the figure conjures up the presence of the type. It was not only deployed to figure Christ, but to figure also the dominion of Christ in the context of a salvation-historical scheme. In this scheme, imperial Romanity was the universal premise of salvation within historical time. Byzantine as well as western emperors figured not only the timelessness of Christ, but the pre-history and history of his dominions. They were inheritors not only of the pax augusti, but also of veterotestamental kings⁴⁷, just as the Crusaders too were to see themselves as the true Israelites⁴⁸, and as the Church was the legatee and indeed the typological re-enactment of Noah's arc — although, as is very well known, conditions differed between Orthodoxy and Latinity on this score. Constantine was a Second David and Augustus, and several later Byzantine emperors were called a Second Constantine — similarly, Constantine's new capital was a Second Rome, and a Third was later to be declared in Moscow.

Without going into the vexed question of so-called Caesaropapism, the net result of the differences to which I have just hinted between ecclesiastical arrangements of the Orthodox and Latin churches, was that the separation in the West of Church and state, which led to the creation of an impuissant theocracy, while in Orthodoxy the unity of church and empire led to the history of a somewhat less interesting "war of positions" ⁴⁹. The continuous assertion of the transcendent status of the emperor was perhaps most acutely expressed when, after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the Sultan received the monk Gennadius in audience and granted him the insignia of the patriarchal office, including his staff and pectoral cross⁵⁰ — while the Sultan, though styling himself Caesar of the Romans, was not in a position to have himself anointed by the patriarch, and would not have wished to have arrogated to himself the sacerdotal aspect of the Basileus (which was achieved by at least one Crusader king of Constantinople), he was still the instance in political control of the Orthodox

So far, I have said precious little about Islam, and I propose to continue from where I left off with regard to this particular historical experience of monotheistic kingship. I have already said that the Muslim Caliphal regime had consummated the universalist trends of Late Antiquity and was the culmination of its tendential orientation. I have also said that, apart from the historical discussion, I am dwelling upon the enunciative form of what I have repeatedly described as an Elementary Form. Comparatism should be no means be confined to a genetic perspective, although I am nevertheless insisting that there is no crucial generic differentiation between Muslim kingship and forms of sacral kingship that preceded it.

The great Franz Cumont once stated that, at the turn of the fourth century, under the Roman Emperor Galerius whose Irannising predilections in matters of state were well-known, "ancient Caesarism founded on the will of the people seemed about to be transformed into a sort of Caliphate"⁵⁴. For all its rhetorical flourish, this is a statement of tremendous suggestiveness: it suggests that, polemics aside, a certain conceptual continuum relates the Caliphate as a form of sacral kingship to trends immanent in Late Antiquity which it, in its own way, completed. This is entirely borne out by history, for it is indeed a fact that the regime of the classical caliphate recapitulated and accentuated these trends, forming itself as a specific inflection within them.

What was Islam, after all, but a recovery for monotheism of the last remaining reservation of ancient paganism, this being the Arabian peninsula, and most particularly its western part, from whence the ruling dynasties of the Islamic empire originated? Close scrutiny of the emergence of Islam will show that it recapitulated in the new linguistic medium of Arabic, now become a a language of a universal high culture, the historical processes I have been describing whereby henotheism, subordinationist theology, and polytheism gave way to a universalist monotheism correlative with empire. And let it not be supposed that, for all its importance, it was the Koran that gave rise to the Muslim empires of the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad: not only because the Koran is by no means the sum-total of the Muslim canon, and because for generating a concept of a polity it is but stony ground, but also because the Koran related to Muslim polities in much the same highly complex way as the Old and New Testaments related to Christian polities: as a quarry of quotations, examples, and exegetical occasions for the elaboration of concepts of public order that do not emerge from the texts, and when they do so, they do so only partially and to a large extent symbolically and genealogically (I use the latter term with reference to Pierre Bourdieu). The Koran was edited during a period which we might call palaeo-Islamic — a period which, I submit, lasted well into the eighth century, giving Muslim monarchs the leeway to toy with traditions in place, sometimes with ingenious playfulness, at a time when they

Very much in the way we saw Orthodox polities displace matters of enunciating that which is doctrinally inadmissible for monotheism to the realm of hyperbole, we find that the relentlessly hubristic enunciations on the Caliphate find their proper place in the historical analogies and typologies that we find in historical works, in Belles-Lettres, Fürstenspiegel, panaegeric poetry, administrative manuals, epistolary and testamentary literature, coins, and official documents, and certain theological and philosophical works, no less than in the non-discursive media of ceremonial, architecture, courtly etiquette, emblematic, and caliphal biographies.

In all, kingship, by which is meant absolutism on analogy with the exclusive singularity of God in the cosmos and the indivisibility of His sovereignty, is construed as the form of artificial sociality. In this, the monarch-Caliph imposes culture, that is to say, order, upon humans, and maintains this cultural order by resort to instruments of nature, by the constant use of force and vigilance; for mankind is congenitally recidivist, always hankering after the war of all against all. This is generally premised on a pessimistic anthropology, perhaps most eloquently expressed in the statement by the last Umayyad caliphal secretary Yahya b. `Abd al-Hamîd al-Katib in the middle of the eighth century, that "evil inheres in men as fire inheres in a flint-stone". Kingship — and prophecy — are the corrective. Like God, kings and prophets stand at the apex of a hierarchy of the Neo-Platonic type, of which they form no part, with respect to which they are transcendent, and with which they stand in no reciprocity, for without absolute monarchy only chaos is conceivable. This theme of the Caliph as the demiurge of sociality — of culture — was particularly accentuated in Muslim discourses. The Caliph's transcendence figures as an energy yielding a force which acts, by the violent means of nature, upon human nature in order to produce culture, but yet remains beyond this culture as a reserve of untrammelled nature ever producing and maintaining culture: The Caliph is the untameable tamer and the savage domesticator, continuously exercising the corrective primal violence with which chaos was subdued in primeval times, rather more in the mood of the Enuma Elish than that of Greek myths of creation. . This is reflected in the caprice of the Caliph and the precariousness of life around him — a caprice and a precariousness which repeat the transcendentally narcissistic amorality of the supreme Koranic and Old Testamental deity.

The Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad, after the earliest period of their rule, enhanced the illocutionary power of this description by their absence, for they virtually never appeared in public, and remained instead in the fastness of their palaces, from whence they radiated the invisible sacredness and terrible energy of majesty, and within which they instituted palatine ceremonial of consummate elaborateness, splendour and solemnity, visually as grandiloquent as any ceremonial seen in Connstantinople, and on occasion in deliberate competition with it — let us not forget the transplantation of many palatine and even bourgeois conventions and manners of dress and sumptuousness from Baghdad to Byzantium. The caliphal presence was often qualified as muqaddas, sacred, and called the Second Ka`ba; the Caliph's face, rarely seen except by his private entourage, was very often qualified as luminous, in line with

The Caliph's palatine compounds were often treated as safe havens for lives and treasures in times of trouble, and Caliph's tombs in Baghdad were often venerated. Other magical and typological motifs abounded plentifully, for the caliphate was also the custodian of holy relics: the chosen ceremonial colour of the `Abbasid Caliphs, black, supposedly the Prophet's, was the colour ceremonially worn by all public officials, and figured the Caliphate against the grain on their skin, with the difference that certain tissues were reserved for the Caliphs, as was red footwear. When Ibn Fadlan visited the Bulgars at the Volga Bend in the middle of the ninth century to forge an alliance against the Khazars, the Bulgar chief prostrated himself before the black cloak sent him from Baghdad, as did Saladin in Cairo more than three centuries later — just as they would, according to custom, have prostrated themselves before the Caliph's person, and just as Byzantines would have performed proskynesis before the imperial person and his icon. When in audience, the Caliphs from an uncertain and fairly late date would wear the Prophet Muhammad's Cloak (recently worn by Mullah Omar in Afghanistan — how it might have got to Central Asia I have no way of telling), and had beside them Muhammad's staff and before them the Koranic codex of `Uthman, the third Caliph in succession to Muhammad — the Prophet's standard only surfaced in the sixteenth century, having been bought by the Ottomans in a Damascus market, and was for the first time displayed during a military campaign in Hungary. Ground on which Caliphs sat was hallowed, and letters received from them were boiled and the revolting liquid drunk, as it brought the drinker the Caliph's baraka, the benign Fortuna he commanded which, unlike the Roman fortuna augusti, had no cultic structure. Indeed, the pleasure and justice of the Caliph caused prosperity and plenty, by magical means quite apart from socio-economic considerations.

The Caliphate is therefore an almost primordial office, inscribing itself in a universal history of typology, and this is where political theory and historical theology meet. Adam was, according to the Koran, God's first Caliph (khalîfa) on earth — his vicar, apostle, viceregent, legatee, and successor, if such could be conceived; he was, in sum, his figure. The Baghdad Caliphs like those before them were God's Caliphs as well as Caliphs of Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets who inaugurated the last, universal phase in the history of the world. This history was regarded by Muslims generally as a vast typological drama in which Muhammad recapitulates all previous prophecies and polities and restores them to the original and pristine condition of that primordial religion which is Islam (echoes here of a tradition identified with Origen and Eusebius, but also with Late Antique notions of a Perennial Philosophy).

It is in one particular consequence of this double capacity that the distinctiveness of this Muslim inflection of monotheistic kingship lies: Caliphs were, first of all, instances of mimesis of the divine in their constitutive and preservative capacities and figures thereof, in the indivisible nature of their sovereignty. They are Caliphs of Muhammad in that they figure, in time, both his universalist historical enterprise and his election, which allows for the transmission of charisma through a dynastic line related to him by blood. Muslim Kingship in its Caliphal form represents God therefore at once directly and through the historical mediation of the Muhammadan fact — a fact both of historical theology and of dynastic genealogy. Unlike Byzantium, this is an election — and I remind you here of the in vitro unction of porphyrogennetoi — which does not involve the insinuation of the Holy Spirit into the bodies of unsuspecting empresses, although the mythological register takes a

Last but not least — and this, as a totalising historical tendency, is the crux of the distinctiveness that I should like to convey to you, though in many disparate and unarticulated details many of its elements bear comparison with Byzantine kingship — the Caliphs were Muhammad's Caliphs in that they invigilated the application of his new dispensation, his sharî`a, which incidentally renders all thought of kings as lex animata inconceivable (except among the Fatimids). Muhammad is a universal historical figure not only because he completed the great universal cycle of prophecy, but because in so doing he at once absorbed and elevated prophetic history to its Adamic and Abrahamic beginnings.

I have said that the distinctiveness of the Caliphate within the possible structures of monotheistic kingship resided in the concomitance of both a direct and timeless relationship to God, and a relationship historically mediated through Muhammad, and that with respect to the latter, the Caliph was the guardian in his own time of Muhammad's dispensation. It was this last tendency that was accentuated with time, and most particularly with the extinction of the `Abbadids after seven hundred years of continuous rule of varying power and extent, with the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and the execution of the last Caliph. This nomocratic trend had existed for a long time among pietistic and legalistic circles which were resistant the sacral pretensions of the Caliphate.

Along with the rise of these circles into prominence as the Muslim priesthood — and I use the term `priesthood" advisedly, in a sociological and not in a sacramental sense, although Muslim priests are of course also involved in practices of magical healing and mediation between individual and God and indeed of a logocratic sacramentalism, the Word of God being to them the only authentic sacrament — this priesthood acquired a strong institutional consistency from around the twelfth century, when the central lands of Islam were overcome with secular kingship, with so-called sultanism, which granted considerable independence in matters of doctrine, including doctrines of legal order, to this priestly corporation, to this "sodality' in the Weberian sense of the term. One very important result was that the three components of classical Muslim enunciations of kingship diverged: while these had previously been sited as contiguous discourses in the same courtly milieu, they now took over different institutional sites, with the Sultans being given many of the worldly prerogatives of the Caliphate, and several of their metaphorical connections with divinity as well, in a form that was highly attenuated in comparison with what had been the Caliphs': they were shadows of God and preserving energies, but not in general sacred presences. The prerogative of figuring the Prophet and his nomocratic dispensation, on the other hand, fell upon the priestly corporation, in conjunction with which the cult of the Prophet itself was royalised from the twelfth century onwards. With the displacement of Caliphal charisma to the priestly corporation and its endowment with the legalistic form of the sharî`a, came also the displacement of this royalist charisma exclusively to the equally absent figure of the Prophet, wherein resided henceforth the Elementary Form of sacral kingship. And whereas previously the Caliphate was a technical legal distinction within the larger concept of kingship, kingship — sultanism — was now

What I outlined just now corresponds more or less to the picture commonly held of Muslim public order and of its Levitical legalism. But this, as I hope to have shown, was a development that required several centuries in order to detach itself from the heritage of Late Antique kingship, and, in the same movement, from sacral kingship itself, now transformed into a heathenish veneration of sheer sultanic power. It is this end-result which is probably most present to minds of readers today. Yet in all cases, a profound continuity persisted, and I can do no better than quote the great philosopher, theologian and astronomer Nasir al-Din Tusi, advisor to Hülegü during the siege and sack of Baghdad in 1258, speaking of the person who directs the affairs of the world with divine support: "Such a person", he said, in the terminology of the Ancients, was called Absolute King [al-mata` al-mutlaq: autokrator] ... the Moderns refer to him as the imam ....Plato calls him Regulator of the World [al-mudabbir: oikonomos/hegemon"]⁵⁶.

Notes:

¹ A. M. Hocart, Kingship, Oxford, 1927, p. 7

² E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, London, 1915, pp 423-4 and passim

³ R. Caillois, L'Homme et le sacré, Paris, 1950, p. 18

⁴ M. Eliade, The Myth of Eternal Return, New York, 1955, p. 34

⁵ J. Le Goff, Saint Louis, Paris, Gallimard, 1996, p. 74

⁶ G. Ahn, " `Monotheismus' - `Polytheismus'. Grenzen und Möglichkeiten einer Klassifikation von Gottesvorstellungen ", in Mesopotamica-Ugaritica-Biblica. Festschrift fµr Kurt Bergerhof, ed. Manfried Dietrich & Oswald Lorentz, Neukirchen-Vluyn, Verlag Butzon & Bercker Kevelaer, 1993, pp. 1-24 (Veröffentlichungen zur Kultur und Geschichte des Alten Orients und des Alten Testaments, Bd. 232), passim

⁷ For the following, see W. A. Chaney, The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1970, pp. 9, 42, 46-7, 50, ff, 77, 251

⁸ H. A. Wolfson, Philo, Cambridge, Mass., 1948,vol. 1, pp. 12-13

⁹ Martin Wallraff, Christus versus Sol. Sonnenverehrung und Christentum in der Spätantike, Mµnster, Aschendorfsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 2001 (Jahrbuch fµr Antike und Christentum, Ergänzungzband 32)

¹⁰ J. Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 212 ff.

¹¹ G. F. Chesnut, The First Christian Historians: Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Evagrius, Paris, Editions Beauchesne, 1977 (Théologie Historique, vol. 46), pp. 134 ff., 144, 150

¹³ F. Dvornik, Early Christian and Byzantine Political Philosophy. Origins and Background, 2 vols. Washington D.C., Dumbenton Oaks, Centre on Byzantine Trustees on Harvard University, 1966, pp. 73 ff.

¹⁴ Works of the Emperor Julian, 3 vols., tr. Wilmer Cave Wright, London and New York: Heinemann and Macmillan , 1913 (Loeb Classical Library), vol. 3, p. 63

¹⁵ J. Croissant, "Un nouveau Discours de Thémistius", Serta Leondiensa (Bibliothèque de la Faculté de Philosophie et des Lettres, Université de Liège, XLIV, 1930), p. 10

¹⁶ A. Cameron, The Later Roman Empire, pp. 131 ff.

¹⁷ W. J. Malley, Hellenism and Christianity. The Conflict between Hellenic and Christian Wisdom in the Contra Galileos of Julian the Apostate and the Contra Julianum of St. Cyril of Alexandria, Roma, Università Gregoriana, 1978 (Analecta Gregoriana, vol. 210. Series Facultatis Theologiae, Sectio B., n. 68), pp. 76 ff., 203

¹⁸ J. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, Chicago, 1984, p. 12

¹⁹ Der Monotheismus als politiches Problem, Leipzig, 1935

²⁰ Empire to Commonwealth, Princeton, 1993

²¹ ibid., p. 71

²² One scholar only has noted similarities between Byzantine and Muslim notions relative to this and some related questions: A. Vasiliev, "Medieval Ideas of the End of the World: West and East", in Byzantion, XVI/2 (1942-43), pp. 462-502; See in general G. Podskalsky, Die Byzantinische Reichsideologie: Die Periodisierung der Weltgeschichte in den vier Grossreichen und dem tausendjährigen Friedensreiche, Munich, 1972

²³ See for instance: G. Bowersock, `Polytheism and Monotheism in Arabia and the Three Palestines', in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 1997, 4 ff; Cameron, Later Roman Empire, 124 ff.

²⁴ Among others: H. Chadwick, "Introduction" to Origen, Contra Celsum, Cambridge, 1953, xvii ff. ; Fowden, Empire to Commonwealth, 51

²⁵ Among others: T. D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius, Cambridge, Mass., 1981, passim; Peterson, Monotheismus, pp. 66 ff.

²⁶ Peterson, Monotheismus, pp. 82 ff.

²⁷ St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, xviii:221

²⁸ Adv. Haer., iii:8, vii:1, and passim

²⁹ Polycraticus, v:1

³⁰ De Monarchia, i: 9 f., ii: 4 ff.

³¹ A. Cameron, Later Roman Empire, p. 137

³² Chesnut, The First Christian Historians, p. 133

³³ All material pertaining to Muslim discourses are derived from A. Al-Azmeh, Muslim Kingship, London, 1997

³⁴ Cf. Eusebius, in H. A. Drake, In Praise of Constantine: A Historical Study and New Translation of Eusebius' Tricennial Orations (University of California Publications: Classical Studies, vol. 15), Berkeley & LA, University of California Press, p. 87

³⁵ G. Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, Paris, 1996, p. 150

³⁶ Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, p. 184

³⁷ A. W. Ziegler, "Die byzantinische Religionspolitik und der sog. Cäsaropapismus", in: E. Koschmieder (ed.), Festgabe fµr Paul Diels, Mµnchen 1953, 81-97, pp. 93-4

³⁸ Ahlweiler, L'ideologie politique de l'empire byzantin, Paris, 1975, p. 141

³⁹ Among others, St. John of Damascus, On the Divine Images. Three Apologies against Those who attack the Divine Images, tr. David Anderson, Crestwood, N. Y., St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1980, passim

⁴⁰ Die oströmische Kaiser- und Reichsidee nach ihre Gestaltung im höfischen Zeremoniell, Jena, 1938; 2nd ed., Darmstadt: Hermann Gentner Verlag, 1956, passim

⁴¹ ibid., p. 128

⁴² L'empereur dans l'art byzantin, Paris, 1936

⁴⁴ J. Le Goff, "Introduction", to M. Bloch, Les rois thaumaturgiques, Paris, 1983, p. xvii; idem., "Aspects religieux et sacrés de la monarchie française du Xe au XIIIe siècle", in A. Boureau & C.-S. Ingerflom (eds.), La royauté sacrée dans le monde chrétien, Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciènces Sociales, 1992, p. 20

⁴⁵ Ahlweiler, L'ideologie politique, pp. 136 f.

⁴⁶ K. F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in the West, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982, pp. 82-93

⁴⁷ Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, pp. 21 ff. and passim ; Le Goff, Saint Louis, pp. 388 ff.; J. M. Burns in idem (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 136 f.

⁴⁸ Among others, Le Goff, Saint Louis, p. 170

⁴⁹Dagron, Empereur et prêtre, pp. 312 ff.

⁵⁰ S. Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, Cambridge, 1990. pp. 155 ff.

⁵¹ M. Boureau, "Un obstacle à la sacralité royale en Occident. Le principe hiérarchique", in Boureau & Ingerflom (eds.), La royauté sacré, pp. 29 ff.

⁵²I. S. Robinson, "Church and Papacy", in Burns (ed.), Cambridge History of medieval political thought, p. 296

⁵³ E. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, Princeton, 1957, p. 193; Le Goff, "Introduction" to Bloch, Rois, p. xxii

⁵⁴ F. Cumont, The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism , Authorized translation [1911], New York, Dover Publications, 1956, p. 141

⁵⁵ B. F. Flood, The Great Mosque of Damascus. Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture, Leiden, Brill, 2001(Islamic History and Civilization, Studies and Texts, vol 33), passim

⁵⁶ The Nasirean Ethics, tr. G. E. Wickens, London, 1964 p. 192