ABSTRACT
Islam has known all forms of domination, except the bureaucratic one, which is the legal and rational type of authority that the Occident has employed. One should add modern, because bureaucracy is a much older phenomenon and its historical origins are universal. In principle, political authority assumes a political community and more precisely an administrative mechanism. But authority may actually exist without such an administrative apparatus, which is true of Arab patriarchalism. The charismatic authority of the prophetic kind is distinguished by the fact that it is extraordinary. The charisma is extraordinary when the leader pulls his authority from the attributes of a magician or a warrior. Patrimonial authority emerged after the caliph was created as a monarch of tribal origin who divides the grace with others.
