The changing traditions of Islamic public administration: observing processes of collision, absorption and adaptation

ABSTRACT

The development of the concept of Islamic Public Administration (IPA) requires consideration of its portability across spatial and temporal contexts as well as secular-religious divides. The content of IPA has shifted over time, and debate over its meanings and key attributes has been a consistent feature of the history of Muslim societies. This means a hard-edged IPA concept constituted by immutable structural features to enable valid and reliable observation over time is likely to be defeated. This article argues instead for a thematic IPA framework that is relatively underspecified to allow for context sensitivity and facilitates the analysis of enduring historical dilemmas of Islamic governance. Such a framework helps show how IPA differs from other public administration traditions; specifically, its self-conscious reinvention by appeals to Islamic theology, law and ethics; and its grounding in values that are not commensurable with secular, liberal “public” values.

KEYWORDS:

• non-Western public administration
• Islamic Public Administration
• reform
• Islamic revival
• traditions

The idea of using Islam – its theology, values and legal principles – to organise a system of public administration has been an ambition of governments in Muslim societies throughout history. However, the degree to which Islamic traditions have in practice guided public administration is moot and strongly contested. The fact that Ireland scores highest on a recent index of Islamicity gives an initial clue of the important difference between Islamic ideals and Muslim governing structures (Askari & Mohammadkhan, 2017). The content of public administration in different Muslim-ruled societies has shifted continually in the 1,400 years of the Islamic world as different leaders have wrestled with the enduring dilemmas of reconciling Islamic thought and practice with the exigencies of governing in different periods.

Public administration is a relative laggard in the development of non-Western scholarship compared to other parts of the social sciences and humanities such as sociology, anthropology, history, comparative literature and cultural studies. In these fields, Islam features widely as a paradigm case of a non-Western phenomenon and a key point of reference in the development of postcolonial studies (Alatas, 1977; Said, 1978). Such approaches vary along an imaginary spectrum from minimalist attempts to extend the empirical scope of existing fields to new territorial, cultural and organisational contexts through to maximalist projects, drawing inspiration from postcolonial studies that see the entire corpus of social sciences and humanities as requiring radical reimagining to overcome orientalist legacies and tendencies.

Within the emerging field of non-Western public administration, a small but dedicated group of scholars are building the nascent field of research on Islamic Public Administration (IPA) somewhere towards the middle of this range: understanding Islam in public administration terms is seen as an essential component of a process of decentring the “Western” in the broader field of public administration (Drechsler & Chafik, 2022). This analytical strategy requires sensitivity to concept formation: assessments of the portability of established public administration knowledge to Islamic contexts across time and space and consideration of the generality of concepts around IPA as a precursor to the successful conduct of research.

IPA is a creative combination of two existing concepts in public administration: religion (Onagaro & Tantardini, 2023a, 2023b) and tradition (Peters, 2021). Each of these constituent elements has an established pattern of thought where, individually, they are defined reasonably clearly and employed relatively consistently. However, when they are synthesised, these characteristics are not necessarily inherited by IPA as a novel conceptual compound. This article presents analysis of the meaning and reference of IPA as a concept and, in so doing, facilitate its investigation as an instance of public administration. Specifically, it advances the argument that for the concept of IPA to be useful it must avoid pretensions to empirical precision and instead should tend towards under-specification to facilitate context sensitivity in its application across time and space. IPA is not a unitary phenomenon with a fixed, immutable structure but rather constituted by patterns and themes, including the perennial dilemma of maintaining an Islamic identity through periods of reform across the extensive temporal and spatial reach of the IPA tradition.

The first part reviews the current state of research on IPA; how it is defined and applied to different periods of Islamic history. Part two investigates IPA in terms of core themes that allow its application as a label across time and space. The third part of the article seeks to elaborate the processes of contemporary IPA change: the collision, absorption and adaptation that characterise the IPA tradition and contemporary projects of Islamic revival in different contexts. The article’s conclusion summarises the claim that defining IPA more generally is helpful for empirical research, specifically in revealing that IPA is different to other public administration traditions, because of its self-conscious reinvention over long stretches of time, to the point of questioning how usefully it sits within the existing main typologies; and that Islamic values are not commensurable with secular, liberal “public” values widely studied in public administration. At this relatively early stage of the IPA research field, raising problems of concept travelling and stretching will improve the foundations of this important non-Western public administration research programme (Ongaro, 2021).

Overview of IPA field

Definitions

Drechsler (2013, 2014, 2015a, 2015b, 2017) proposes IPA as a concept to cover the institutional structures, organisations and relationships capable of holding together different pre-existing systems of thinking and action: “Islam” and “administration”. In an alternative formulation, from Drechsler and Chafik (2022, p. 53), IPA is “how theoretical Islamic principles of public administration play out in practice”.

For Drechsler, as well as Painter and Peters (2010) and Peters (2021), IPA is a tradition. Although the concept of a public administration tradition remains uneven in its empirical application and underdeveloped analytically, it is still advanced as useful in puncturing Anglosphere pretensions and acting as a corrective to Western biases in public administration scholarship (Ongaro, 2021; Pollitt, 2015). Drechsler (2015a) argues that a public administration tradition is usefully stated as a broad paradigm for distinguishing a Western from non-Western public administration. It is within this latter category that Drechsler locates IPA as an important tradition to investigate as a counterweight to well-established understandings of the administrative state. In the typology of traditions, organised by families of countries, in Painter and Peters (2010), Islamic is number nine (of nine) but these authors acknowledge the lack of sustained scholarship on this tradition relative to the other eight in public administration. In Peters (2021, p. 214), quoted approvingly by Drechsler and Chafik (2022, p. 65), traditions of public administration are like DNA; implying that the reproduction and inheritance of administrative habits, practices and institutions are observable, figuratively genetic and that traditions can be traced empirically over time.

As a counterpoint, this article argues that IPA does not fit this pattern; rather it is constituted by a set of beliefs and commitment to theology and values of the Islamic faith rather than empirical administrative practices reproduced in an unbroken link over time. IPA has proved capable of reinterpretation, reinvention and reclamation over time including long periods of latency where IPA ideas were overlaid or wholly displaced by other administrative traditions.

Painter and Peters (2010) suggest the notion of hybridisation for the analysis of combinations of disparate elements at the intersection of public administration traditions. In practice, IPA is inevitably concatenated with colonial administrative legacies, influences from global public management, processes of contemporary Islamic revival as well as appeals to the rich tradition of Islamic thought on public administration as well as the ideals of the Madinian polity. Pollitt (2015) helpfully suggests that combining elements from different traditions, theoretically and practically, is a promising future line of investigations emerging from his appeal for recognition and conversations between Western and non-Western public administration.

Whilst IPA can be imposed analytically by scholarly spectators on observed processes of public administration practice over time, it is also immanent in the system under scrutiny. Religious authority and leadership are essential to IPA and how Islamic values are used to support future public administration reform strategies with reference to common beliefs, shared ethics and sacred texts. The IPA tradition is made and remade through purposeful and self-conscious action in the present as reformers combine and recombine different institutional legacies. The key challenge for research on IPA, in Asia and elsewhere, is to gain traction on IPA as a case of self-conscious reinvention and reclamation by agents. IPA is never pure, unalloyed and observed consistently over time but rather always involves elements of other traditions as well as being implicated in broader social process of Islamic revival. Further, IPA is not something that belongs exclusively to families of countries as in the Painter and Peters (2010) typology but rather is an attribute of sectors in both Muslim majority and minority contexts.

IPA is different in kind to the other public administration traditions in the main typologies in that the act of interpretation – working out what it is the Islamic thing to do – is integral. In counterpoint to the idea of public administration traditions as habits and practices that are reproduced over time, IPA is grounded in a commitment to the Islamic faith, understood and expressed differently in a variety of historical contexts and used to select elements from history to inform decision-making in the present towards future-orientated goals. In such terms, IPA does not have an essential internal structure that is independent of agents within it; instead it has been reinvented and remade throughout Islamic history and this includes negotiation of the properties which give the concept its Islamic identity that endures even as the substantive content changes.

Historical patterns of IPA

In any non-Western field in the social sciences and humanities, how legacies of the past are curated and structured as a historical narrative are a central object of study. The conventional Eurocentric periodisation of history typically starts with Ancient Greece, followed by the Roman Empire, then declines into the Middle Ages followed by progress catalysed in the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment form which emanated the Industrial Revolution, leading, eventually, to the contemporary world. For example, Gladden (1972a, 1972b) provides a sweeping historical account of public administration using this periodisation in which the role of Islam is marginalised and considered only insofar as it impacts on the development of public administration in Europe.

Scholarship has long noted the need for a distinct Islamic historical periodisation and different influential frameworks have been developed for that purpose (Demirci, 2016; Goitean, 1968; Hodgson, 1974; Streusand, 2010). However, there is no settled consensus and debates continue as contemporary projects of Islamic revival are undertaken and different periods of Islamic history are foregrounded, revaluated and given fresh narratives.

This article proposes a four-part periodisation of IPA based on adapting the frameworks of Demirci (2016) and Finer (1997): (i) Madinian polity and age of conquests, 610–750 CE; (ii) Classical age of Islam, 750–1258 CE; (iii) Age of empires, 1258–1800 CE; (iv) Western colonisation, decline and revival, 1800 CE onwards. For the purposes of scrutinising changing Islamic governance practices, this set of temporal brackets has several advantages: it divides the development of the caliphate system of governing into an initial absorption phase (i) and a much more sophisticated refinement phase (ii); it allows for the developments in non-Arab IPA to be investigated (iii); and it concatenates Western colonisation, Ottoman decline and contemporary state formation (iv), to frame scrutiny of projects of Islamic revival and reclamation in public administration over the last fifty years or so.

In many accounts of period (i), importance is placed on the emigration (hijrah) of the Prophet and his followers when they fled persecution in Makkah to Medina to build a model Islamic polity – often known as the Madinian polity – with its own constitution and features of public administration (Abdul Aziz, 2015; Arjomand, 2009; Khaldun, 2015). Whilst the constitution is relevant to the context of the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century, it has provided inspiration at different points of Islamic history, if not detailed instruction, for thinking about IPA in general, and the relationship of Islam to the development of an administrative state specifically.

Islam spread rapidly and widely in period (i) – to modern Spain (al-Andalus) and the northern Indian subcontinent (Sind) – through military conquest, trade, pilgrimage and missionaries. As Arab Muslim elites sought to control these territories, they developed a new Islamic political-administrative structure: the caliphate. The Umayyad caliphate governed using the inherited administrative structures from the parts of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires that had been conquered but the caliphate became more sophisticated as a form of public administration through successive administrative reforms in the Abbasid era in period (ii), the Classical Age of Islam. The key element in the caliphate, compared to previous Arab governing structures and contemporaneous structures in Middle Ages Europe, was the Islamic element and its enduring tension with the other drivers of state development.

As Finer (1997) describes how, by the middle of the Abbasid dynasty, the caliphate had become an imperial governing system, highly decentralised, so that various sultanates and emirates developed within it whose governors exercised plenipotentiary powers. Although a loose confederation with no significant central security power (Crone & Hinds, 1986), the caliphate system facilitated the creation of a common cultural area, a flourishing Arab-Islamic civilisation and the further development of thinking about IPA as the authority of Islamic law was extended (Gellner, 1981; Malkawi & Sonn, 2011).

Islam qua religion presents a comprehensive vision for social order with a set of divine rules that cover all aspects of life. This left the role of political rulers and public administrators moot. It is in the Abbasid caliphate that an answer to a perennial dilemma in IPA was first institutionalised: a bifurcation of authority between faith leaders and political leaders. There is no organised church in Islam and religious leaders – the class of Islamic scholars (ulemma) – functioned in period (ii) to support Muslim subjects in the empire to understand better what Islam required. The ulemma were never a class, caste or college with a formal constitutional or institutional position in the caliphate. While the ulemma held the potential power to legitimate or delegitimise the caliph, they were often divided and did not consistently constrain the caliph (Afsaruddin, 2011).

The title of caliph (successor in Arabic) was contested strongly in period (i) after the death of the Prophet, indeed it forms the basis of the Sunni–Shia divide and was usually allocated in periods (i) and (ii) according to a hereditary principle. Altthough succession was designated by a caliph ahead of his death it had to be approved, or at least tacitly endorsed, by the powerful governors of the empire. As the governing system of the empire developed in sophistication, the influence of caliph waned as the formal political authority – variously vested in a sultan, emir or vizier – grew. The institution of caliph has, though, endured through Islamic history and, despite periods without any recognised caliph, has been employed variously as a titular device to claim legitimate religious authority without ever being fully institutionalised, still less constitutionalised, as a form of state authority in IPA.

The third period of Islamic history is the age of gunpowder empires, a term coined in Hodgson (1974) to refer to three Muslim empires the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Empire and the Mughal Empire, whose control of the latest military and industrial technology was indicated by their use of gunpowder (Streusand, 2010). These three empires were among the most stable and powerful political entities in the world between the fifteenth and late seventeenth centuries CE, and are seen in accounts of Islamic history as highpoints of economic development, art and culture with a public administration system that was increasingly sophisticated, centralised and, in contemporary terms, recognisably bureaucratic (Streusand, 2010).

Of the three empires, public administration scholarship on the Ottomans is most developed, with writers seeing its gradual disintegration from the late seventeenth century onwards, accelerating after Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria around 1800, as paving the way in period (iv) for the state system of the contemporary Middle East in the twentieth century. In his Economy and Society (Weber, 1922 [1978]) and The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber, 1905 [2014]), Max Weber set out the groundwork for the comparative method, but particularly on the comparison of institutional differences between European and non-European countries. He studied the Ottoman empire as part of his comparative investigation of differences in authority relations as well as in world views. His concepts of patrimonialism and sultanism are early versions of IPA scholarship in Europe and have been employed influentially to investigate the nature and roots of Islamic bureaucratic institutions in the Ottoman period. His core argument is that Islam and Islamic laws failed to create the conditions for a modern bureaucratic state. This has left Muslim societies prone to authoritarian political institutions or tending to sultanic-type governing arrangements; a discourse that lives on in contemporary debates about the compatibility of Islam and democracy. Contemporary historians have challenged Weber’s thesis and instead have stressed the important place of public sector reforms in the nineteenth century Ottoman empire, arguing that the series of bureaucratic reforms (tanzimat) – often built on close links with Germany – served to set the foundations of a modern bureaucratic state upon which the modern Turkish republic was built (Lewis, 1966; Piscatori, 1986; Yapp, 1987).

Weber is also importantly relevant to period (iv) of the historical schema put forward in the article. As a foundational contributor to the sociology of religion, his work on secularisation in the early twentieth century is influential in Western public administration scholarship, paying little attention to organised religion. The revival of Islam in the past fifty years and its enduring vitality in public life in many Muslim societies would appear primae facie as a challenge to empirical claims about secularisation. For example, Islamic revivalism in Asia is evidenced by the emergence of Islamic republics – at different points – in Iran, Sudan and Afghanistan, the growth of Islamic social movements that function as influential political and social actors within existing governing systems in the Malay world of Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, southern Thailand and Muslim Mindanao in the Philippines and the contentious politics of participation by Islamic political parties in democratic processes, including providing prime ministers, cabinet officers, speakers of national assemblies and parliamentarians in many Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Bangladesh (Esposito, 1983; Gellner, 1981; Isaacson & Rubenstein, 2002; van Bruinessen, 2002).

For Gellner (1981) the contemporary history of Islamic revival starts with the collapse of the Ottoman empire, and the deposing of the last Caliph in 1924. Without a caliphate as a reference point, those movements seeking to advance an IPA had to shift in the twentieth century to accommodate the emergence of new, colonial states in the Middle East and Asia. These involved nation-building projects which have often been associated with the loss of a strong sense of an Islamic identity and the marginalisation of Islam in public affairs over an extended period (Esposito, 1983). In the contemporary Islamic revival, religion is organised as something that has a clear public sphere, contrary to the secular view of religion as exclusively a matter of private piety (Esposito, 1983; Esposito & Azzam, 2000).

Themes and patterns in IPA

This section contributes to the conceptual development of IPA by identifying its key themes and patterns: changing claims to Islamic religious authority; transmission, revival and reclamation; the Islamic state; and the Islamic moral economy.

Claims to Islamic religious authority

In current accounts of IPA, there is relatively little about Islam or engagement with Islamic traditions of thinking about government. For example, the impact of the major eleventh century Persian scholar, Nizam al-Mulk, and his Book of Government or Rules for Kings (Siyasatnama) (Al-Mulk, 2001) on Persian models of public administration is relatively neglected, as is his influence on the creation of nizamiyyah schools as prototype public administration academies within the Safavid caliphate in period (iii) (Bowen & Bosworth, 1995). Instead, IPA scholarship is focused more strongly on empirical observations of public administration structures in the Ottoman empire and their legacy in Europe (Drechsler, 2014); or, more recently, in the former Barbary states on the edge of that empire in which indigenous, unambiguously non-Western public administration structures have endured and remain functional (Chafik & Drechsler, 2022).

Drawing on Esposito (2016), we can state four principal components in varying claims to Islamic authority in IPA:

1. The theological component, as the principal motivating impulse that spurred early Muslim action.

2. The juristic component, which defines the contours and limits of those theological motivating impulses, when made manifest in the form of human action.

3. The Qur’anic values, such as equity, benevolence, and compassion, that calibrate the juristic prescriptions demarcating the scope of Muslim action.

4. The cultural component that expresses the distinctive traditions, customs and styles or habits of a society, what makes “them” who “they” are and moulds the social arena within which any variety of IPA operates.

Each of these components holds at the level of individual, family, community and state. The concept of self-governance (ihsan) is a central theme to Islamic thinking at all levels. Islam is an all-embracing framework with essential personal requirements, but is also necessarily something that informs public affairs. Islam must be part of politics and public administration but as a spiritual impulse, first and foremost, not an intellectual process. Thinking and reason comes after the testament of faith. This puts the spiritual development of Muslims and their society at the heart of IPA rather than laws or administrative regulations observed over time.

The challenge remains of how to study manifestations and reclamations of Islamic authority in the rich and deep IPA tradition. As Painter and Peters (2010) note, teasing out a specifically Islamic dimension to public administration over time is difficult because of the effects of colonialism. Yet much of the discussions of contemporary IPA centres on the reassertion of the collective transnational community of all Muslims (ummah) as a political identity, counterpoised to national identities connected to state borders from the colonial era, which is an important feature of the contemporary Islamic reclamation projects globally, for example in parts of Southeast Asia (van Bruinessen, 2013). The relevant concern in Asia is the salient demand by Islamic movements for a reinvention of public administration to be self-consciously Islamic. This is almost always controversial. For example, the claims of Islamic republics in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan to be Islamic are controversial immediately in a way that claims to belong to an American, Soviet or Confucian public administration tradition are not.

The demand for Islam to return to a true or original path – often stated with reference to the components above – has been important in many revival movements in the history of Islamic thought (Black, 2011). For example, it was a central plank in the history of Islamic modernism from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, which was influential in anti-colonial movements in Indonesia as well as thinking about the role of religion in post-independence Malaysia (Brown, 2007; Federspiel, 2002). More recently, the export of Saudi Arabia’s state Islam (wahhabism) and its contemporary counter-reactions in parts of southeast Asia has highlighted live and influential debates about Islam’s position in society and its public governance (Dorsey, 2022; Hasan, 2022; Mandaville, 2022). Wahhabism is used in English, often very broadly, to refer to any political or social movement that employs literal interpretations of the sacred texts and acts on interpretations of Islam that focus on ritual correctness rather than contextual meaning. More accurately, wahhabism refers to religious belief and practice within Saudi Arabia, based on the eighteenth-century scholar, Ibn Wahhab. His teachings are generally seen as a highly conservative and intolerant interpretation of Islam which were exported to different parts of southeast Asia, through Saudi foreign policy backed by petrodollars, for several decades after 1980.

Transmission, revival and reclamation

Contemporary Islamic revivals have often drawn inspiration, and even direct guidance, from the traditions of Islamic governance in periods (i) and (ii). The premodern and medieval eras of Islamic civilisation produced voluminous scholarship, in Arabic, that informed public governance and had practical purchase on collective action in different caliphates through both Islamic law (fiqh) and the influential judgements by recognised religious scholars (fatwas) that require, permit or forbid forms of collective action (Mustafa, 2023). In many contemporary revivals of Islam, importance is placed on the emigration (hijrah) of the Prophet and his followers when they fled persecution in Makkah to Medina to build a model Islamic polity – often known as the Madinian polity – with prototype state-like features (Abdul Aziz, 2015; Arjomand, 2009).

The revival of commitment to the goals of an Islamic society (maqasid al-shari’ah) in different parts of the Islamic world, such as southeast Asia, is evidence of the active reclamation and reinterpretation of Islamic ideas, institutions and practices from pre-modern eras. The maqasid was codified in the twelfth century by two renowned scholars, al-Juwayni and his student al-Ghazali (Al-Ghazali, 2016; Black, 2011; Brown, 2009). It has been used by ulemma, the class of Islamic religious scholars, in several contemporary Asian contexts to influence debate about public administration. For example, the Indonesia Ulema Council (Majelis Ulama Indonesia) has offered multiple fatwas, often controversially, that function as a guide to public action in improving access to health care, strengthening social care provision for older citizens and raising animal welfare standards (Hosen, 2004; Sirry, 2013).

Fatwas have been indispensable as a policy instrument in IPA. Although critics argue that in much of Islamic revivalism in southeast Asia there is an absence of a coherent governing programme, and instead a tendency to posturing or symbolic gestures (Ibrahim, 2014), fatwas do hold the important potential to guide progressive approaches to Islamic governance in different policy contexts (Abdul Aziz, 2015). In elementary form, they are initiated by individual Muslims (mustafti) asking for guidance on Islamic law in specific circumstances in their life. The act of asking for a fatwa (istifta) is rendered in Modern Standard Arabic as a questionnaire, a ballot, or a plebiscite. This contemporary language is a clue that fatwas are consultative, bottom-up and non-binding in nature and, in their basic type reflect everyday concerns of individual Muslims and their communities.

Following the death of the Prophet, the dilemma of how to clarify and seek guidance on Islamic rules was solved by the establishment of legal precedents from the Prophet’s time (sunnah) and mechanisms for transmitting knowledge and authority over time via a report of a statement, action, or tacit approval (hadith). Within the scholarly class in Islam, a special category (mufti) was created as the authoritative institutional memory of Islam to answer the requests for guidance from individual mustafti by issuing fatwas. For IPA, over several centuries, these fatwas became increasingly formalised, public, and codified into volumes of something approaching a body of law that extends to matters beyond the everyday personal dilemmas of the faithful to broader questions of the structure and organisation of government (Masud et al., 1996).

The position of official state mufti dates from the nineteenth century and developments in the administration within the Ottoman empire as well as territories on its borders, such as Egypt and Russia. In many Muslim-majority states, state muftis offer “official” Islam in the public sphere by producing fatwas that serve as an instrument of public policy to encourage behavioural change (Skovgaard-Petersen, 2015). These fatwas remain non-binding legal opinion; only in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are mufti fatwas enforceable in court (Skovgaard-Petersen, 2015). Instead, such fatwas function as a “soft” law form of public policy to educate and encourage collective behaviours that advance goals of the state.

The position of state mufti manifests an enduring tension in IPA: how to be a mufti who commands religious authority with the Muslim faithful and serve the instrumental policy interests of the state power in a fixed territory. This was observed during the Arab uprisings from December 2010 to mid-2012 and has rumbled on in their aftermath in the civil wars in Syria and Yemen. The state muftis of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria all expressed support for secular regimes against the popular uprisings and claimed Islamic authority in encouraging resistance to the protests, an opinion which provoked a backlash of denunciation by other members of the ulemma both within their countries and overseas (Warren, 2021).

The Islamic state

Rearticulating and reinterpreting texts that are 1400 years old, or seminal scholarship from the Abbasid caliphate that is 900 years old, in terms of contemporary needs and issues is not straightforward. Questions of religious authority dominate who determines, and how they determine, what Islam says on public administration questions and, in turn, how these inform public administration structures and practices. These are relevant when thinking about extending the IPA concept beyond the description of Islamic civil society organisations (Peters, 2021) to the question of how Islam may inform or guide the role of the state in IPA.

There are cognate compound concepts to IPA such as Islamic socialism; Islamic Marxism; Islamic economics, finance and banking; and Islamic welfare state. There is an evident risk that any of these may lead to conceptual confusion, emerging as abstract, syncretic notions imposed on Islamic societies from elsewhere and that do not serve usefully normative or analytical functions in a Muslim context. Although the large countries of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan are self-proclaimed Islamic republics, there is still an ongoing debate within contemporary Islamic political thought about what makes a state Islamic and indeed even if the notion is inherently contradictory. There are three salient issues related to these debates that are relevant to the core attributes of the concept of IPA.

The first is that fiqh and fatwas are the institutional means through which human agency interprets and turns the objective of the maqasid into practice. In contemporary language, they are both transnational institutions. Borders and boundaries are not a central feature of either as they are in the Western idea of sovereign states and territorial borders of systems of public administration. The development of modern states, with borders containing national territorially based political communities, came well after growth of advanced Islamic civilisations and their distinctive Islamicate governing structures with the different caliphates (Hodgson, 1974).

The institution of mufti is important in the administration of Islam as a public religion. As noted above, they are a governing innovation from the Ottoman era and, while there is nothing in the Qur’an or any hadith to refer to them, almost all countries with sizeable Muslim populations have muftis, a council of muftis and a Grand Mufti. There are a variety of relationships observed with the state, differences in the public functions the ulemma undertake and variation in the way Islamic religious authority is accredited. Their official capacity to sort out legally which of the multitude of interpretations of what the Prophet said, did or approved of apply in cases of public administration within their state, as announced by fatwas.

Second is the central concern for IPA of how to meet the objectives of the maqasid through an administrative state and how to make those state structures permissible within Islam (halal). Prior to 1924, Muslim societies had been managed collectively through different periods of caliphates and empires. In public administration terms, these are early examples of strongly decentralised, multi-level governance architectures (Black, 2011; Yapp, 1987). After 1924, political Islam has been implicated in both state-resisting and state-building social movements without resolution of the core conceptual challenge of defining an Islamic state. This was complicated by creation of new states – such as Iraq, Syria and Jordan – from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, that were designed to serve Western imperial interests, particularly those of France and Britain. Even though these states were created when Arab nationalism was already a factor in the Middle East, the states were created without much respect for the ideas of Arab nationalism and ambitions for the unification of the Arab speaking peoples.

A combination of the military defeats of Arab states in wars with Israel with economic malaise, underdevelopment, rapid urbanisation and population growth created the conditions – both materially and intellectually – for a revival of Islamic politics. Islamic political movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt, have often targeted colonial states by focussing on issues of social rights from Islamic perspectives, advancing policy agendas that oppose the marginalisation of religion in public affairs, oppose a state monopoly over education and advocate for tighter regulation of the mass media (Rosefsky Wickham, 2013). In addition, the position of Muslim communities in non-Muslim states prompts questions of the scope of IPA and the state’s role in influencing the social, economic and political conditions facing these communities (Drechsler, 2017).

The third issue is the inspiration for Islamic revivalist thinking about the state is the prototype Madinian Polity developed in the decade after hijrah, period (i) above, when the Prophet and his followers moved to Medina and where the Qur’anic verses with a civilisational tone were revealed. This is where economics, trade, finance, contracts, courts, law, crime, as well as government, war and international relations are covered in the Qur’an. In his biography of Muhammad, Lings (1983) describes an autonomous polity with institutional features such as demarcated areas of territorial control, established leadership, a system of government, a legal system, defence policy and methods of dispute resolution. The constitution of Medina, developed after the death of Muhammad in 622 CE, remains for many contemporary scholars an Islamic inspiration for legitimate and recognised political authority that functions as a state and therefore states should not be dismissed as un-Islamic (haram) (Arjomand, 2009).

The idea of the Madinian polity is influential as a source material for the enormous production of hadiths about matters of Islamic collective action. The actions of others, individually or collectively, were approved by the Prophet in Medina, and this is the inspiration for many of the contemporary reinventions of Islamic governance. There is a whole sophisticated methodology to checking the veracity and legitimacy of the hadith that report the sunnah.

The hadiths from the Madinian polity period are less legalistic in character than other aspects of Islam and contain non-devotional collective aims. These aims, and accompanying obligations, are derived from theology rather than liberal political theory. This is an important attribute of IPA in driving processes of public administration rather than the needs or rights of citizens or some other conception of human welfare. As scholarship about the state in IPA develops, it is likely that the interaction of different forms of religious and secular institutions over time will be scrutinised as an explanatory factor in the emergence of different forms of IPA. The role of sacred authority in managing inter-institutional relationships is critical. Amidst well-known public administration debates about collaboration or coordination, integration or functional differentiation in IPA, it is the religious considerations that are superior to the secular.

Administering the Islamic moral economy

Islamic moral economy (IME) is a contemporary term in English and used to diagnose crises and failures in contemporary capitalism and provokes debates about varieties of political economy within Islam (Jan & Asutay, 2019; Tripp, 2006). The concept seeks to describe, analyse and prescribe how Muslims should respond to capitalism as well as inspire alternative solutions to the problem of scarcity (Auda, 2008; Esposito & Delong-Bas, 2018; Jan & Asutay, 2019).

Although IME shares characteristics with recent ethical models of responsible business in stressing community and society, the concept has a much longer lineage rooted in traditions of Islamic thought from the first two periods of Islamic history discussed above. In the centuries after the Prophet and the Rashidun, various forms of maqasid al-shari’ah were developed as the superordinate goals of Islamic society from the Qur’an and the Sunnah and these continue to inspire, inform and guide regulation of contemporary economic activity in the Islamic world, involving sectors with substantial international trade such as food (al-Ghazali, 2016; Alatas, 2006; Auda, 2008).

There were forms of policy transfer of economic development models from the Islamic world to the West from the late medieval through to the Renaissance period and even into the Enlightenment. Crucially, the values, structures and practices of contemporary Islamic moral economy have a strong Islamic foundation of knowledge from the Islamic Classical Age, period (ii), that was later built upon by Western authors, including Enlightenment scholars who directly used Islamic work in their studies, such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) (Böwering, 2013; Fleet et al., 2007). There is scholarhsip on this transmission of knowledge in the various “mirrors of princes” textbooks produced by viziers, such as Nizam al-Mulk, Ibn Zafar, Ibn Arabi and Al-Ghazali, on the values and use of the economy to advance moral and religious development and in the many responsibilities and obligations those in economic organisations have to the rest of society.

The regulatory process of halalisation, particularly in parts of Asia where the level of non-governmental development aid from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been significant, is an element in IPA (Dorsey, 2022). Halalisation is more demanding that passive regulatory compliance with the maqasid and has become the driver prominent standard in financial services and many consumer goods markets (Iqbal & Lewis, 2009; Mohieldin, 2012; World Bank, 2017). To be halal, the requirement is for a clear Islamic identity to be expressed in the reformulation of Western ideas and concepts. How this happens is moot but, as part of the revival of Islam, one influential line of thinking argues for the need to go back to Madinian Polity and the maqasid to reconnect with the Prophetic tradition. These have served as a form of meta-regulation in the booming global Islamic economy and are an element in what IPA may be in regulatory terms. Islam is always the higher order; the spiritual underpinning with politics and administration as the means (Esposito, 2016).

Processes of IPA change

Collision, absorption and adaptation

In the processes of IPA change in different periods, there were inevitably institutional voids where Islamic scriptures, laws or fatwas do not provide comprehensive or relevant guidance to IPA. As Muslim societies became more complex and diverse through rapid economic development, such voids tended to be more common. This may make the application of IPA as an empirical label less than straightforward; where there is a lack of clear and unambiguous Islamic rules and norms observed in policymaking and its implementation, useful case studies to perform functions in IPA-inspired research designs may be difficult to find.

The contemporary re-emergence of a transnational Islamic identity built on the recovered notion of a transnational ummah, alongside the fragmentation of old colonial structures in many Muslim contexts, offer multiple points for agency to reinvent IPA traditions. This may also splinter traditional religious authority structures and render the attribution of something as IPA problematic (Bunt, 2018; Rozehnal, 2022). Agents may borrow, adapt, and convert to produce new combinations or hybridisation of public administration traditions (Painter & Peters, 2010).

Critical to the empirical application of IPA as a category label is that Islam, which offers a universal conception of things, leaves open the question of political leadership. This has allowed Islam to function as a religion within very different political or administrative systems. Furthermore, different political and administrative cultures may be Islamic. The relationship between Islam and public administration is therefore about how an Islamic belief system locates itself in a specific political, social and economic context.

IPA is complex and, as we seek to apply it empirically, it quickly escapes easy summation as a monolithic thing that is somehow against “Western” modes of governing, still less binary frameworks such as “secularism versus theocracy”. The IPA frameworks need to be able to address the deeply rooted religious and associated cultural values prevalent in a wide variety of matters of public governance.

This is important in terms of considering IPA as something being reinvented in the global era. If scholarship steps beyond just identifying traditions and facilitating comparison with various “Western” public administration traditions to questions of how traditions are invented and are able to reproduce and survive then the relationships between informal and formal institutions is germane. The edited volumes by Pal and Tok (2018) and Pal et al. (2016) represent important contributions in pushing the concept of IPA into questions of contemporary administrative practice and policymaking. Work has begun to raise practical questions of how to observe combinations of different PA traditions in the context of either a Muslim state or Muslim organisations within a non-Muslim state. In a separate but complementary literature, there is a suite of work on Muslim NGOs – as part of third sector studies (see, for example, Brown & Pierce, 2013) – that aligns with Peters (2021) statement of the role of non-state actors as a distinguishing feature of IPA.

Any application of IPA across time and space confronts religious pluralities and their intersection with secular values and administrative traditions in the public sphere. Rapid economic transformation has produced simultaneously: a cosmopolitan global citizenship; a resurgent nationalism; fluid, multiplying religious identities and practice; alongside forms of religious fundamentalism in Islam. Amid such change, the institutions of public administration, at both regional and national scales, are often struggling to sustain legitimacy, using the criteria in Ongaro (2021). Similarly, traditional religious authority is in flux, with many believers finding new religious leadership and guidance online (Bunt, 2018; Rozehnal, 2022).

There is no simple binary of religious versus secular values in the study of public administration, but rather hybridity and mixes are observed in practice. Importantly for public administration scholarship, it is moot whether Islamic values are the same thing as the secular values used in western public administration. Whilst they may concern similar things and often have equivalent implications for practice, they have different historical roots and religious values encompass spiritual dimensions in a way that secular values do not. There is an absence of public administration knowledge about the possibility for trade-offs between religious and secular values as in conventional policy analysis or the possibilities of cycling or institutional separation or balancing. There may be a potential impasse between the secular and religious in public administration in a series of elementary questions about the nature of the state regarding legitimacy, authority, law, statecraft and accountability.

Debates about deliberation (ijtihad) over values are important in the Islamic tradition. These always begin with the Qur’an and the Sunnah as the sources of any social objectives and the human mind is the tool to understand the divine requirements. For something to be Islamic, the pattern of text is considered first and then thinking. In Islamic tradition of thought, science is based on theology and not the other way around.

This means that, in Islamic thought, values are revealed by the divine rather than something generated by human agency participating in deliberation about interests and progress. From Arabic, Islamic values are better translated as revelation or oracle (wahy) rather than values (qim). Revelation comes from above, something that stands apart, is received and inspires action. This is a different perspective on public value as used consistently in public administration (Bryson et al., 2014).

Following Black (2011), the following Islamic values are obviously relevant to public administration: compassion; equity; justice; trust, including obligations to God and God’s other servants (amanah); patience; and generosity. Of these, probably only amanah is exclusively Islamic and the others would not seem to obviously contradict Western PA. The distinctive in Islam is that the three in the list are obligatory (wajib); on every individual (fard al-ayn), such as prayer, or on the entire community (fard al-kifayah), such as burying the dead. In the latter case, if some members perform the act, the obligation on the rest of the community is removed.

The key challenge for the concept of IPA to have practical purchase on understanding and guiding practical administrative action is the transition from the individual level, where Islamic teachings are relatively clear and unambiguous to the public administration level where they are less clear. Any collective action needs to express or implement an Islamic value. These are Islamic parameters on public administration and, whilst they do not like function as constitutions defining big or small government, they set a space for negotiating the cultural context of IPA.

Conclusion

This article has presented an argument for further work to develop a set of relevant, clear and useful themes around IPA to frame research as a precursor to the successful conduct of empirical research in IPA. The argument has been sustained by offering contributions to the definition of IPA as a tradition, its periodisation as well distinctive Islamic identity and history of self-conscious reinvention by Muslim leaders. At this early stage of the development of the field of IPA, it is important that the Islamic parts are engaged with and attempts to shoehorn IPA into existing schemes in public administration scholarship are avoided. This article argues for a thematic IPA framework that is relatively underspecified to allow for context sensitivity and facilitates the analysis of enduring historical dilemmas of Islamic governance and processes of IPA change.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the journal’s co-editor, James Perry, and an anonymous reviewer for their insightful and helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adrian Kay

Adrian Kay is an established scholar with an international research profile in the study of public policy and administration. Currently based at Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, he has held full professorial positions in Australia, Asia, and the UK. His work is comparative, historical and institutionalist, and includes a strong recent interest in Islam and its role in public administration. Adrian’s research has attracted competitive research council funding in several countries.