The article examines the relationship between political power and philosophical production in the medieval Maghreb, taking the Almohad legacy as its guiding thread. Challenging historiographical approaches that minimize the role of philosophy in the late medieval Islamic context or reduce it to Ashʿarism, it argues for close attention to the specifically Maghrebi conditions of the production and reception of knowledge. Through the figure of al-Abilī and his decisive influence on Ibn Khaldūn, the article brings to light the persistence of an Almohad heritage favorable to the rational sciences well after the fall of the Empire. This legacy endured within certain Atlas principalities, in learned centers such as Fez, and in the institutional and cultic memory associated with Ibn Tūmart, particularly at Tinmel. Up to the Marinid period, philosophy thus remained in the Maghreb a structuring element of learned culture, closely tied to political ambitions and to the quest for a renewed proximity between knowledge and power.
Abstract: This article explores the relationship between shari’a and political power, as conceptualized in the early development of political thought within the Islamic intellectual tradition. Focusing on Ibn al-Muqaffa‘, a pivotal figure in this intellectual landscape, the article delves into his well-known treatise, The Epistle on the Elite, and seeks to grasp the reasons of its unique yet contentious role in the evolution of Islamic political thought. By offering a novel interpretation of this work, the article seeks to illuminate how Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ comes up with an original articulation between the ancient paradigm of imperial monarchy and the notion of divine legislation within a monotheistic framework. According to the author, such an articulation should be considered the starting point for the historical development of Islamic political reason.
Philosophy in the premodern Islamic context confronted the theologico-political problem at an early stage, understood as the tension between divine sovereignty and human sovereignty. This article seeks to elucidate its coherence through three questions correlated with the poles of metaphysics: sovereignty (God), prophecy and providence (the world), and salvation (the soul). In al‑Fārābī, and even more clearly in Avicenna, political philosophy establishes the rational necessity of prophecy: only a law of divine origin can durably order human wills and orient the city toward felicity. While a more secular approach to the political developed, in the premodern Islamic context, within the tradition of the mirrors for princes, the political, in the Greco-Arabic philosophical tradition (falsafa), is understood as a soteriological mediation, a condition for the salvation of souls.
