Social Contract Theory in Islamic Sources?

Abstract

This issue of Comparative Islamic Studies contains four articles that perfectly illus-trate the journal's aims: to show how theoretically grounded analysis of Islam contributes to the general study of religions; and how 'comparative' may mean comparison both between Islam and other religions, and between disciplines. Three of the articles focus on the topic of " Islam and Social Contract " , which touches also on political philosophy, while the fourth article, described further below, focuses on the discipline of Religious studies and the concept of religion. In CIS the topic of " Islam and Social Contract " was introduced already in the previous issue (10.1) by Joost Jongerden's and Michael Knapp's study of the social contract in the Kurdish district Rojava, Syria. The idea of exploring the topic in some depth, however, derives from a panel I convened at the European Association for the Study of Religions (EASR) Annual Conference 2014. Here we worked with Encyclopaedia Britannica's online defini-tion of social contract as " an actual or hypothetical compact, or agreement, between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each " (EB). The entry tells us that while social contract theories trace back to the ancient Sophists, they gained currency with the Enlightenment and thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Islam is not men-tioned. Yet both the standard Biography (sīra) of the Prophet Muḥammad in Ibn Hishām's (d. c. 215/830) edition and al-Ṭabarī's universal history (d. 310/923) Taʾrīkh al-rusul waʾl-mulūk employ Qurʾanic concepts in contexts showing they refer to forms of contract and contractual ethics, including contracts between the ruled and their rulers (bayʿa) (Mårtensson 2009, 2011, 2016; cf. Marsham 2009 on bayʿa). An obvious Qur'anic case is the terms mīthāq (app. Covenant of trust) and ʿahd (contract), which are explicitly contractual. They sometimes appear together with the term kitāb (scripture, writing), suggesting a referen-tial connection between contract and written terms, as in Q. 7:168–172 (al-Aʿrāf): (168) We divided the nations into fiefs in the land, some of who worked for the