Rule of Nature: Authority, Law, and Freedom in Shibli Shumayyil (1886-1917)

In the modern Western canon, first-order debates about political authority are often narrated through the re-founding question – not merely who should rule, but why, if at all, coercive rule and authority are justified. Meanwhile, in Arabic political traditions, there is a rich vocabulary of a second-order question: evaluating right and just rule. Even though the nineteenth-century Arab world renewed its political lexicon through constitutionalism, state-building, and reform under Western pressure, most Arab Enlightenment thinkers still largely confined themselves to the traditional debates about better governance, rather than interrogating the justificatory grounds of authority itself. Against this backdrop, I propose that we should consider Shibli Shumayyil (1860–1917), one of the central figures of the Arab Enlightenment, as a first-order, radically diagnostic theorist of authority: one who digs into the roots of social life to reconstruct how “rule” and “authority” consolidate as concepts and practices, and how they can both authorize freedom and manufacture its corrosion. This paper examines the political thought of Shumayyil through the prism of the triangular relationship between authority, law, and freedom. On the one hand, Shumayyil is commonly read through his classic reformist writings, texts that align him with the broader constitutionalist zeitgeist. In this register, he often presupposes the legitimacy of authority; at times, he even adopts a “mirrors-for-princes” mode that can praise existing, including absolutist rulers, whom he compares to the "brain" of the social body, as vehicles of reform. However, I show that alongside this reformism, Shumayyil also articulates a far more radical political philosophy that destabilizes the very foundations of law and authority. This illuminates not only where legitimate authority ends and authoritarian domination begins, but how the very exercise of authority through law may be structurally entangled with tyranny, rather than merely corrupted into it. In stark contrast to his reformist works, his radical writings trace a Rousseauian genealogy of law and authority as pathology: an ancient injustice rooted in a perverse mutual reinforcement between despotic power and civic submission under conditions of ignorance. This pathology may even compel individuals to realize their freedom through criminal acts. Yet because Shumayyil’s reformist and radical registers often overlap in time, the paper reads the duality as methodological. It concludes by treating the link between legality and tyrannical authority as contingent yet persistently recurrent, rather than necessary. Precisely because the relation is genealogical-historical and contingent, it is breakable. Here, Shumayyil’s commitment to perfectibility becomes decisive: instead of returning to a pre-political harmony, freedom can be re-secured by reassigning authority to the people. In this sense, Shumayyil a radical investigator and a reformist policymaker. Seen this way, intercultural contact in the Nahda between "Occident" and "Orient" does not simply supply constitutional and institutional “solutions”; it provokes a distinctive first-order skepticism about authority’s justificatory foundations, while keeping an open horizon of repairing institutions rather than abolishing them.