The Struggle for Authority and Legitimacy in Movements

By Yasir Qadhi

This is an extract from the lecture: Why Muslims Divide – The psychology of why the people closest to you are the hardest to tolerate

A reality that transcends sectarianism is the competition for authority and legitimacy. This has been commented on and observed by many sociologists, including one of the most famous religious sociologists, Max Weber. If you know anything about the sociology of religion, you know Max Weber.

Max Weber writes that the competition for religious authority is a struggle for legitimacy, i.e. to be legitimate you must have an affiliation to a person, or a movement or a group. Those movements or groups have markers of purity, status symbols. What makes them different?

Whether the term is traditionalism and orthodoxy, whether it is the Salaf, whatever it might be, there is a mark of purity. There is a legitimacy that comes by attaching yourself to a group, an icon, a person. You are cleansed of any type of heresy by forming an attachment with this iconic figure that is revered amongst the people of your movement. The more you attach yourself to that icon, that movement, the more you establish your authority and your legitimacy in that group.

This is true for all movements. The more you want to rise in a movement, you first and foremost have to validate your attachment to that movement. You validate it by basically acquiescing to that movement’s icons, by basically showing that you have completely absorbed and you agree with that particular ideology. If you dare disagree at an early stage, you are kicked out. If you reach a very high stage, you might be given the right to slightly modify the group and that’s how changes occur within movements.

You have to spend decades validating subservience and acquiescence, because that is your mark of legitimacy. You will not rise up in their ranks until you show your legitimacy, and you show you have authority by attaching yourself to the ideas, the icons, the people, the methodology of a particular strand. This happens in all movements.

Look at the MAGA phenomenon. How do you rise up in his ranks? You can’t be vulgar here. But you do things. You show acquiescence. The more you do so, what happens? Doors open up.

Believe it or not, the same applies in all movements. Even when the people are dead, they’re always inheritors who think they control the keys to that guy’s legacy. Always. This is the reality. If you wish to have that legitimacy, then you have to have the attachment to whatever that person was famous for.

So within a religion, therefore, what are classical theologians famous for? They’re famous for their interpretations of Islam. So if you want authority and legitimacy, you will have to show your subservience to their interpretation. Of course, what I say is that by following what they say literally and not the spirit, you are not showing loyalty. I firmly believe Ibn Tamiyah would not speak like the Ibn Tamiyah of the 7th century if he lived in our times. I believe this of Ghazali as well. I believe this of Tahawi as well. I believe this of any giant. That’s my belief. My interlocutors do not agree with me by and large. They might say they do, but in reality they don’t because their rhetoric doesn’t change.

I don’t even think Ibn Tamiyah would be as obsessed with the attributes of Allah if he lived amongst us as he was 7 centuries ago. I don’t blame him for his time and frame of mind.

The followers of these movements, if you want authority in that movement, in that strand, you have to show fierce loyalty, ignoring the context of the time and place. This is why sectarianism really is so bad, because you are forced to resurrect the past in the present.

You are forced to go back to a different time and place in order to establish your legitimacy, in order to show you are a faithful icon.

Being part of a sect or firqa is basically having a membership card. How do you pay your dues on the membership card? How do you validate that membership card? You have to constantly say and do something that will show that you are part of the gymnasium, you’re part of the fitness club, you’re part of that, that particular firqa. As one of them says, “Orthodoxy functions as a marker of group membership.” That’s your card of group membership. You need to do that in order to be a part of that group. Then in order to maintain that, you have to rise up in their ranks to become even more rigid in that orthodoxy.

So the bottom line, these are five psychological and sociological phenomenon, each one of which is slightly different, and yet they’re all converging on the same reality, which is sectarianism, as we understand it, is actually a part of a larger trend. That trend is that when people form enough of a critical mass, you can observe that as they divide, the more passionate they are about what they divide over, even if its trivial, the more they will be threatened by that division.

Hence the level of the level of dissociation they’re going to have from people that are relatively close to them is actually inversely proportional to how close they are. The closer they are, the more they’re going to distance themselves from them.

All of this goes back to the reality of establishing your boundaries, the narcissism of small differences, the concept of social identity theory, the cognitive dissonance amplification, and the competition for authority and legitimacy. When it comes to religion in particular, there is a factor that makes it the most problematic and that is you think God is on your side, whereas others would not say this.