ABSTRACT
All political rule, regardless of its respective foundation, appears to be subject to a tension between a temporally and spatially invariant normative expectation and numerous variant realities throughout time and space. Muslim societies are no exception to this. In order to better comprehend the specifics of Muslim political rule, however, one would have to look for the normative expectation, that is, what makes political rule legitimate in pre- and early modern Muslim societies? Integrally related to this, and indispensable in order to better understand how these societies dealt with the tension between normativeness and facticity, is the question of how legitimate political rule has been made. I will argue in this chapter that both questions are strongly related to the role Muslim religious scholars played in court, as it was the interaction of rulers with the ʿulamāʾ of various provenances 2 that provided at least one way of defining and reaffirming the legitimacy of political rule.
