In this source, sovereignty is a central concept, redefined as God’s exclusive prerogative in legislation, permitting, and prohibiting, not as a direct delegation of authority to a religious human power. Shahrur uses it to distinguish the fixed divine sphere from the changing human sphere, and to deconstruct the Islamists’ use of it in building despotism and takfir.
- Divine prohibition is limited and human law is a changing regulatory domain
- The tradition conflated governance and sovereignty
- Divine sovereignty is a stage of direct hegemony
- Polar sovereignty divides the world into Islam and jāhiliyya
- Sovereignty in Hajj Hamd’s thought has gradual stages
- Sovereignty belongs to God means that prohibition is confined to revelation and humans are barred from adding new prohibitions
- Sovereignty belongs to God alone
- Sovereignty is a modern political concept
- The historical conflation of religion and power produced despotism and extremism
- Religion is a sphere of freedom and values, and the civil state and human ijtihad are the alternative to sovereign despotism
- The message, abrogation, and the gradation of sovereignty transfer legislation to human ijtihad
- Rituals lie outside political coercion, and freedom is the condition of worship and jihad
- Mawdudi formulates a confrontational binary
- Hajj Hamd تجاوزs the confrontational binary
- Qutb turns sovereignty into a takfiri ideology
- The three stages of sovereignty
Cross-book concept: See Sovereignty for the unifying thread across the books.