ABSTRACT
Islamic political systems, before the advent of European imperialism, could almost uniformly be classified as varieties of military authoritarianism, commonly with the strict alternative of autocracy under a strong monarch and praetorianism or tribal supremacy under a weak one. The Muslim dynasties of the day were military and tribal in origin, as were most Muslim states, large and small. Islam itself had emerged from a tribal society, so that the tribal influence became durably imbedded in the Islamic religious political system. Violent succession was the corollary of the refusal to honor the reigning monarch’s choice of a political heir. Violence could be invoked only with the support of the army, which meant the support of army commanders. The struggles for succession were mostly settled by civil war and by coup d’etat, with the outcome generally as closely related to the structure of the military command as to the prevailing political environment.
