"Islam is in principle egalitarian, and has always had problems with power"
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Islam gets cast, especially in Western political talk, as a monolith built for obedience: caliphate as destiny, hierarchy as theology. Mary Douglas flips that script with a single, bracing claim: the tradition’s default setting is egalitarian, and its recurring drama is what happens when real power tries to settle in.
Douglas, an anthropologist of institutions and purity codes, hears “egalitarian” not as a feel-good compliment but as a structural tension. In Islam, there’s no priestly caste with sacramental monopoly, no church bureaucracy that can effortlessly sanctify a permanent ruling class. The idealized community of believers is meant to stand shoulder to shoulder; authority is argued for, not magically inherited. That creates a productive instability: power must constantly justify itself in the language of piety, law, and communal consent, because it can’t simply claim metaphysical entitlement.
The second clause is the bite. “Has always had problems with power” is Douglas’s cool way of naming an old, repeating pattern: rulers reach for religious legitimacy, scholars guard legal-moral boundaries, reformers accuse elites of corruption, and ordinary believers keep a sharp eye out for hypocrisy. The “problem” isn’t that Islam is uniquely turbulent; it’s that its moral architecture makes domination rhetorically expensive. You can seize a throne, but you can’t easily claim you deserve it.
Read in context, the line is also a rebuke to simplistic civilizational narratives. Douglas suggests that political authoritarianism in Muslim societies isn’t a straightforward expression of doctrine; it’s often a workaround, a contested compromise with a religion that keeps insisting, inconveniently, on equality before God.
Douglas, an anthropologist of institutions and purity codes, hears “egalitarian” not as a feel-good compliment but as a structural tension. In Islam, there’s no priestly caste with sacramental monopoly, no church bureaucracy that can effortlessly sanctify a permanent ruling class. The idealized community of believers is meant to stand shoulder to shoulder; authority is argued for, not magically inherited. That creates a productive instability: power must constantly justify itself in the language of piety, law, and communal consent, because it can’t simply claim metaphysical entitlement.
The second clause is the bite. “Has always had problems with power” is Douglas’s cool way of naming an old, repeating pattern: rulers reach for religious legitimacy, scholars guard legal-moral boundaries, reformers accuse elites of corruption, and ordinary believers keep a sharp eye out for hypocrisy. The “problem” isn’t that Islam is uniquely turbulent; it’s that its moral architecture makes domination rhetorically expensive. You can seize a throne, but you can’t easily claim you deserve it.
Read in context, the line is also a rebuke to simplistic civilizational narratives. Douglas suggests that political authoritarianism in Muslim societies isn’t a straightforward expression of doctrine; it’s often a workaround, a contested compromise with a religion that keeps insisting, inconveniently, on equality before God.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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