Sovereignty of the Ethical: Decentering Colonial Modernity and Islamic Reconfiguration of Order in South Asia.

Nafis Haider, Jawaharlal Nehru University

The paper explores how Muslim intellectuals reconceptualised 'Hakmiyat' (Political Sovereignty) in the aftermath of political dispossession of Muslims in colonial India. Through a critical discourse analysis of fatwas, poetry, political tracts, and speeches by three Muslim philosophers—namely Maulana Hussain Ahmad Madani, Muhammad Iqbal, and Ashraf Ali Thanwi, the paper suggest that Muslim intellectual thought engaged with Islam as a hermeneutical meaning making process to engage with the colonial modernity. Drawing on the Islamic concepts of 'Akhlaq' (moral discipline), 'Ummah' (moral-transnational community), and 'Tawhid' (ethical unity), Muslim intellectuals in colonial India displaced sovereignty from the idea of State to the moral formation of communities. This articulated an alternative model of moral and ethical authority rooted in Islamic rationality. Madani argued for a composite nationalism in 'Dar-ul-amaan' that legitimised ethical co-existence under non-muslim rule; Iqbal on the contrary critiqued territorial sovereignty and emphasised for spiritual-democratic renewal based on the transnational idea of Ummah. For Thanwi, ethical order can be consolidated only through discipline, reform and in everyday practice rather than political mobilization. The paper argues that while colonial governance did achieve relative administrative stability, it produced ethical disorder and fragmented norms of authority and unity. Islamic political thought recaliberated itself in the new political setting, producing a new conception of ‘sovereignty of the ethical’ which exists outside formal political authority. The paper challenges Eurocentric underpinnings of modernity that equate political order exclusively with the modern state by situating the debate within the convergence, divergence, and connections between Western modernity and Islam, and showing how Islamic tradition produced alternate imagination to the question of sovereignty under conditions of colonial rupture. Keywords: Sovereignty; Tawhid; Akhlaq; Ummah; Decolonial epistemology; South Asia

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 Presented in Session 131. Islamic Political Thought, Sovereignty, and Alternative Modernities