Political inheritance in Islamic political thought

A study in the political religion trend and the jurisprudential trend

Abstract

The concept of political inheritance is one of the modern concepts that address an old and very sensitive issue, which is the issue of power and how to assume it, which has provoked a lot of reaction among thinkers and philosophers since ancient times, and one of the most controversial issue in Islamic thought since the death of Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, and Muslims were divided around it and then on other sub-issues on two main sects, namely: Shiite sect and Sunni sect.      

Each of them has its arguments and chains of support in the issue of political inheritance, as the Shiite thought approved political inheritance, on the basis that it is stipulated in the two sources of Islamic legislation, and made it the monopoly of the infallible imams of the descendants of Ali Ibn Abi Talib and then in his son Hussein and ended up with them to new theories moving away from the political inheritance stipulated as they believe to the public and private guardianship of the jurist, which relied in essence on the choice of the guardian jurist conditional on waiting for the appearance of the adsent imam.

 As for Sunni jurisprudence, which denied the existence of the text of political inheritance in the Quran and the Sunnah of the prophet and cornered on the issue of Shura and the choice of the solution and the contract, but supported all forms of political inheritance since the era of Muswiya bin Abi Sufyan, founder of the Umayyad state through the Abbasid state, on the basis of the condition of the Quraysh, which he quikly abandoned in favor of political inheritance from outside the Quraysh in particular and the Arabs in general, by inventing the condition of mastery and dominance by supporting the Ayyubid state, the Qttoman Empire and others.

After these experiences, Islamic political thought meests its Snni and Shiite wings in today’s world at the present time by choosing only the wail al-faqih or the ruling caliph, so that Islamic thought carries a wide heritage and with different arguments for forms of political inheritance that support everyone who adheres to the inheritance of power.