Lecture
Sunni constitutional theory in light of an early hadith about obedience
- Date
- Wednesday 12 November 2025
- Time
- Explanation
- The lecture is followed by a reception
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 0.05
Abstract
Secondary scholarship usually characterizes Sunnism as politically quietist, but this is an oversimplification. A largely overlooked hadith report that circulated already in the first Islamic century indicates that early Sunnis saw acquiescence to political authority as conditional. According to versions of this report, Muḥammad declared that “there is no obedience when it would entail disobedience to God.” My presentation traces the spread of the report and the principle it embodies among Muslim scholars and highlights its absorption into Umayyad and Abbasid political rhetoric.
Biography
Ahmed El Shamsy (PhD Harvard, 2009) is professor of Islamic thought at the University of Chicago. He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. He has published two books, The Canonization of Islamic Law: A Social and Intellectual History (2013) and Rediscovering the Islamic Classics: How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition (2020). He is now writing a book about the emergence and early history of Sunni Islam.