Ninth-Century Muslim Anarchists *

The people with whom this paper is concerned were anarchists in the simple sense of believers in an-archy, ‘no government’. They were not secularists, individualists, communists, social reformers, revolutionaries or terrorists, merely thinkers who held that Muslim society could function without what we would call the state. Their view is, however, of great interest from the point of view of early Islamic political thought and the history of anarchism alike. Since they are largely unknown even to Islamicists and have yet to be discovered by historians of anarchism, I am grateful for the opportunity to present them to a wider public here. ¹