The Mohammunist Manifest—Monopoly Rule By Elites
Under both Islamic and communist systems, a small cadre of elites controls all doctrine and policy, creating artificial unity and suppressing competition.
Milli Sands | August 7, 2026
Islamic political systems and Marxist-Leninist communism both concentrate the authority to define correct doctrine, law, and policy in a closed directing elite. Ordinary members, let alone outsiders, lack standing to challenge the core claims. The result is an interpretive monopoly converting a comprehensive worldview into enforceable political control. This is not a secondary feature; it is a practical mechanism that secures ideological unity and suppresses competing claims to legitimacy.
In 833, the Abbasid caliph al-Ma’mun ordered his judges and scholars to affirm that the Quran was created rather than eternal. The position came from the Mu’tazila, a rationalist theological school the caliph favored, which held that an eternal, uncreated Quran would stand as a second eternal being alongside God, violating His absolute oneness; traditionalists held instead that the Quran was God’s own uncreated, inseparable speech. Those who refused faced dismissal, imprisonment, or the lash; al-Ma’mun’s successor, the caliph al-Mu’tasim, had the traditionalist jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal flogged for holding out.
The inquisition (the Mihna) ran for fifteen years before al-Mu’tasim’s own son, the caliph al-Mutawakkil, ended it in 848 and restored the doctrine ibn Hanbal had defended. The lesson: a caliph could jail a scholar; he could not manufacture consensus. That failure shows where interpretive authority in Islamic political theory actually sits—not with the state as such, but with the class competent to establish consensus (ijma’).
Quran 4:59 commands: “O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you.” Classical jurists elaborated this into a doctrine of rightful leadership in which the caliph, or, absent a single caliph, the body of qualified scholars (ulema), holds competence to interpret and enforce the Sharia. Independent judgment departing from established consensus risks classification as innovation (bid’ah) or, in more serious cases, as deviation that threatens the community. The scholars are the living guardians of the correct line.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/the-mohammunist-manifest-monopoly-rule-by-elites/#google_vignette
