Continuity and Change in Islamic Religious Authority
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Published:
Sep 1, 2023
Keywords:
Religious authority, continuity and change, foundational past, connection, obedient
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Abstract
This article aims to elaborate on the debate surrounding continuity and change in Islamic religious authority. The discussion begins by establishing a framework for understanding the analytical definition of authority before delving into the dimensions that experience continuity and change. Arendt defines authority as a relationship, signifying a connection to a specific discursive tradition, knowledge, and history. Additionally, it involves a relationship with others who may recognize, accept, or contest this connection. Building upon Arendt’s definition, the article deconstructs the nature of this relationship, emphasizing three constitutive elements: the notion of a past, the connection to the foundational past, and the ability to convey and enhance that model. This includes the augmentation of the foundational past and the ability to elicit obedience without resorting to coercion. What sets authority apart is its unique capacity to foster obedience through a relationship, free from coercion. To identify the constituents of authority, the article explores the question of continuity and change in a more productive manner by focusing on each of its three constitutive elements.
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Alatas, Ismail Fajrie. “Continuity and Change in Islamic Religious Authority”. Islamica: Jurnal Studi Keislaman 18, no. 1 (September 1, 2023): 115-133. Accessed February 20, 2026. https://islamica.uinsa.ac.id/index.php/islamica/article/view/1096.
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References
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Karrar, Ali Salih. The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan. London: Hurst, 1992.
Katz, Jonathan G. Dreams, Sufism, and Sainthood: The Visionary Career of Muḥammad al-Zawāwī. Leiden: Brill, 1996. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004378926
Khan, Naveeda. Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822395256
Knysh, Alexander D. Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77j8m
Machiavelli, Nicollò. The Prince, translated and edited by Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell (eds.). Sufism and the “Modern” in Islam. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755607983
Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine and Alexandre Papas (eds.). Family Portraits with Saints: Hagiography, Sanctity, and Family in the Muslim World. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2014.
McGregor, Richard J.A. Sanctity and Mysticism in Medieval Egypt: The Wafa Sufi Order and the Legacy of Ibn ‘Arabi. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, ed. Edward Alexander. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999.
Mittermaier, Amira. Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520947856
Ohlander, Erik S. “Al-Junayd al-Baghdādī: Chief of the Sect.” In Routledge Handbook on Sufism, Lloyd Ridgeon. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315175348-4
Reichmuth, Stefan. The World of Murtad}ā al-Zabīdī (1732-91): Life, Networks and Writings. Oxford: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2009.
Ricci, Ronit. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226710907.001.0001
Rudnyckyj, Daromir. Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1355/cs33-1j
Salem, Feryal. The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunnī Scholasticism: ʿAbdallāh b. al-Mubārak and the Formation of Sunnī Identity in the Second Islamic Century. Leiden: Brill, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004314481
Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822386186
Seesemann, Rüdiger. The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195384321.001.0001
Sevea, Teren. Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108569781
Sirriyeh, Elizabeth. Dreams & Visions in the World of Islam: A History of Muslim Dreaming and Foreknowing. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755623655
Taneja, Anand V. Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Thum, Rian. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674736238
Weismann, Itzchak. Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus. Leiden: Brill, 2001. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047400615
Wymann-Landgraf, Umar F. Abd-Allah. Mālik and Medina: Islamic Legal Reasoning in the Formative Period. Leiden: Brill, 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004247888_003
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.
Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. Muslim Communities of Grace: The Sufi Brotherhoods in Islamic Religious Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Alatas, Ismail Fajrie. “Dreaming Saints: Exploratory Authority and Islamic Praxes of History in Central Java.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2020), 80-83. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13177
Alatas, Ismail Fajrie. “S{ūfī Lineages and Families.” In Handbook of Sufi Studies Volume I: Sufi Institutionsi, ed. Alexandre Papas. Leiden: Brill, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004392601_022
Alatas, Ismail Fajrie. What is Religious Authority? Cultivating Islamic Communities in Indonesia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691204314.001.0001
Amin, Shahid. Conquest and Community: The Afterlife of Warrior Saint Ghazi Miyan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226372747.001.0001
Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin, [1968] 2006.
Asad, Talal. “Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 42, No. 1 (2015), 181. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/683002
Asad, Talal. Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7312/asad18968
Bashir, Shahzad. “On Islamic Time: Rethinking Chronology in the Historiography of Muslim Societies.” History and Theory, Vol. 53, No. 4 (2014), 521. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10729
Bazzaz, Sahar. Forgotten Saints: History, Power, and Politics in the Making of Modern Morocco. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Bonner, Michael. Jihad in Islamic History: Doctrines and Practice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.
Bradley, Francis R. Forging Islamic Power and Place: The Legacy of Shaykh Dāʾūd bin ‘Abd Allāh al-Fat}ānī in Mecca and Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.21313/hawaii/9780824851613.001.0001
Brown, Jonathan A. C. Misquoting Muhammad: The Challenge and Choices of Interpreting the Prophet’s Legacy. Oxford: Oneworld, 2014.
Brown, Jonathan A. C. The Canonization of al-Bukhārī and Muslim: The Formation and Function of the Sunnī Ḥadīth Canon. Leiden: Brill, 2007. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004158399.i-431
Carr, E.H. What is History? Second Edition, ed. R.W. Davies. London: Penguin, 1990.
Chih, Rachidah. Sufism in Ottoman Egypt: Circulation, Renewal and Authority in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. London: Taylor & Francis, 2019. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429027352
Cornell, Vincent J. Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.
Davidson, Garrett A. Carrying on the Tradition: A Social and Intellectual History of Hadith Transmission across a Thousand Years. Leiden: Brill, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004386938
DeWeese, Devin. “Khojagani Origins and the Critique of Sufism: The Rhetoric of Communal Uniqueness in the Manaqib of Khoja ‘Ali ‘Azizan Ramitani.” In Islamic Mysticism Contested: Thirteen Centuries of Controversies and Polemics, eds. Frederick de Jong and Berndt Radtke. Leiden: Brill, 1999. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004452725_028
Donner, Fred M. Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998.
El Shamsy, Ahmed. The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139649711
Ernst, Carl W. “Situating Sufism and Yoga.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2005), 20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1356186304004675
Evans-Pritchard, E.E. The Sanusi of Cyrenaica. Oxford: Clarendon, 1949.
Faizer, Rizwi (ed.). The Life of Muḥammad: Al-Wāqidī’s Kitāb al-Maghāzī. London: Routledge, 2011.
Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4 (1982), 782-84. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/448181
Green, Nile. Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975165
Green, Nile. Sufism: A Global History. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Ho, Engseng. “Custom and Conversion in Malabar: Zayn al-Din al-Malibari’s Gift of the Mujahidin: Some Accounts of the Portuguese.” In Islam in South Asia in Practice, ed. Barbara D. Metcalf. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Ho, Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400831388-042
Hoesterey, James. Rebranding Islam: Piety, Prosperity, and a Self-Help Guru. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016.
Humphrey, Caroline. “Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia.” In The Ethnography of Moralities, ed. Signe Howell. London: Routledge, 1997.
Karrar, Ali Salih. The Sufi Brotherhoods in the Sudan. London: Hurst, 1992.
Katz, Jonathan G. Dreams, Sufism, and Sainthood: The Visionary Career of Muḥammad al-Zawāwī. Leiden: Brill, 1996. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004378926
Khan, Naveeda. Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822395256
Knysh, Alexander D. Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvc77j8m
Machiavelli, Nicollò. The Prince, translated and edited by Peter Bondanella. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Martin van Bruinessen and Julia Day Howell (eds.). Sufism and the “Modern” in Islam. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755607983
Mayeur-Jaouen, Catherine and Alexandre Papas (eds.). Family Portraits with Saints: Hagiography, Sanctity, and Family in the Muslim World. Berlin: Klaus Schwarz, 2014.
McGregor, Richard J.A. Sanctity and Mysticism in Medieval Egypt: The Wafa Sufi Order and the Legacy of Ibn ‘Arabi. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012.
Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, ed. Edward Alexander. Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1999.
Mittermaier, Amira. Dreams that Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520947856
Ohlander, Erik S. “Al-Junayd al-Baghdādī: Chief of the Sect.” In Routledge Handbook on Sufism, Lloyd Ridgeon. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315175348-4
Reichmuth, Stefan. The World of Murtad}ā al-Zabīdī (1732-91): Life, Networks and Writings. Oxford: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2009.
Ricci, Ronit. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226710907.001.0001
Rudnyckyj, Daromir. Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1355/cs33-1j
Salem, Feryal. The Emergence of Early Sufi Piety and Sunnī Scholasticism: ʿAbdallāh b. al-Mubārak and the Formation of Sunnī Identity in the Second Islamic Century. Leiden: Brill, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004314481
Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822386186
Seesemann, Rüdiger. The Divine Flood: Ibrahim Niasse and the Roots of a Twentieth-Century Sufi Revival. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195384321.001.0001
Sevea, Teren. Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108569781
Sirriyeh, Elizabeth. Dreams & Visions in the World of Islam: A History of Muslim Dreaming and Foreknowing. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5040/9780755623655
Taneja, Anand V. Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018.
Thum, Rian. The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674736238
Weismann, Itzchak. Taste of Modernity: Sufism, Salafiyya, and Arabism in Late Ottoman Damascus. Leiden: Brill, 2001. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047400615
Wymann-Landgraf, Umar F. Abd-Allah. Mālik and Medina: Islamic Legal Reasoning in the Formative Period. Leiden: Brill, 2013. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004247888_003
Žižek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999.