Authority and Wilāya in the Prism of al-akīm al-Tirmidhī's Liberal Ethic

In Sufi nomenclature, wilāya connotes not only the power to protect others who enter into a special pact of allegiance, but also the spiritual jurisdiction that a walī Allāh is bequeathed by God to exercise over a particular area of the earth. Given the juridical and theological framework at play in the use of this term, the question remains as to how closely the term wilāya in its Sufi context is connected to the semantic field of terms we use in English like authority and power. This paper seeks to ground Sufi wilāya within that semantic field of philosophical discourse that juxtaposes authority with power. To this extent, the paper will use the work of Alexandre Kojève (d. 1968) in his La notion de l'autorité ("The Concept of Authority"), which expounds upon four ideal types of authority and uses the "authority problem"as a foil for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's (d. 1831) master-slave dialectic. The paper demonstrates that al-akīm al-Tirmidhī (d. 298/910) is not only the first Muslim scholar to address the notion of wilāya in a discursive sense, but that he also framed wilāya as a mode of authority that touches upon most of the pure authority types laid out by Kojève. This establishes a strong theoretical correspondence between al-HCombining dot belowakim al-Tirmidhī's presentation of wilāya and the philosophical notion of authority proposed by Kojève. Such a correlation is highly significant for the study of Sufism in the early period because it establishes Islamic sainthood squarely within the legal and theological discourse of Islamic scholarship that sees wilāya as a basic mode of social and political contract. This paper also demonstrates how topics seemingly extraneous to wilāya as dealt with by al-HCombining dot belowakim al-Tirmidhī, such as ikma, are in fact important constituents of a larger theory of wilāya as a type of Islamicate authority within Sufi discourse. This paper extends the work of Vincent Cornell and Aiyub Palmer in their work on Islamic sainthood by highlighting how wilāya, as a central aspect of Sufism, gives rise to social institutions and is not merely an indication of the spiritual connection with God that an aspirant attains through travel upon the Sufi path.