Ulama
Islam's scholarly class, who hold religious authority without a priesthood or a church, and whose independence from rulers has been the central question of Muslim politics.
The ulama are the scholars of Islamic law and religious sciences, and understanding them is the difference between following Muslim politics and guessing at it. The singular is alim, one who knows. They are not clergy in the Christian sense: there is no ordination, no sacrament only they can perform, no church, no pope, and in Sunni Islam no formal hierarchy at all. Their authority rests entirely on recognized mastery of the sources, and it has been the most persistent check on Muslim rulers for fourteen centuries.
Authority without a church
An alim became one by studying with a recognized scholar and receiving an ijaza, a license to transmit a given text or to issue legal opinions. Scholarly lineage functioned as accreditation, and reputation was the currency. A jurist in Cairo could carry weight in Delhi because other scholars said his training was sound.
The class filled specific offices. The qadi was a judge appointed by the state, applying Islamic law in court. The mufti issued fatwas, non-binding legal opinions given in response to questions. The mudarris taught in the madrasa. The imam of a mosque led prayer, which is a role rather than a rank. Institutions like al-Azhar in Cairo and later the seminaries of Najaf and Qom became the centers where reputations were made.
The crucial structural fact is money. Madrasas, mosques, hospitals, and the scholars attached to them were funded by waqf, perpetual charitable endowments of land or property that could not be sold or seized and that produced income indefinitely. That gave the ulama a revenue stream a ruler did not control, and it is the material basis of everything that follows.
The uneasy partnership with power
The relationship between scholars and rulers was a standing negotiation. Rulers needed the ulama, because only religious scholars could certify that a government was legitimate, that a war was lawful, that a tax was permissible. The ulama needed rulers, because law without enforcement is advice.
So the mainstream Sunni position hardened around a bargain: even an unjust ruler is preferable to civil war, and scholars should counsel rather than rebel. That is often read as quietism, and it sometimes was. But it also gave the ulama a veto that mattered. Scholars refused state appointments to keep their independence. Abu Hanifa and Ahmad ibn Hanbal were both imprisoned for defying caliphs. When a ruler pushed too far, the withdrawal of scholarly endorsement could dissolve his legitimacy in front of his own subjects.
Different states solved the problem differently. The Ottomans absorbed the scholars into the state, building a career ladder topped by the shaykh al-Islam, a salaried official who could issue a fatwa deposing a sultan and sometimes did. Safavid Iran imported Shia scholars to legitimize a new confessional state and eventually found them harder to control. Shia scholarship developed something Sunni Islam lacks: an explicit hierarchy of seniority, culminating in the marja al-taqlid, the source of emulation whose rulings his followers are expected to observe.
What the modern state did to them
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries broke the old arrangement. Modernizing states nationalized waqf endowments, which removed the ulama's independent income. They built state school systems and state courts, which took away the scholars' monopoly on education and law. Legal codes were imported from Europe, confining Islamic law largely to family matters. In a single lifetime a class that had trained the judges, taught the young, and administered charity became salaried employees of ministries of religious affairs.
The reaction to that displacement is much of modern Islamic politics. Movements like the Muslim Brotherhood were founded by people outside the scholarly class, and the most influential radical ideologues of the twentieth century were laymen: an engineer, a teacher, a literary critic. Their argument was that the official ulama had been bought. Ordinary believers, meanwhile, increasingly took religious guidance from television preachers and now from social media, where traditional credentials count for nothing.
Iran ran the opposite experiment. Khomeini's doctrine of velayat-e faqih argued that in the absence of the hidden Imam, senior clerics should not merely advise the state but be the state, and in 1979 they took it. Most of the senior Shia clergy, including the leading marja in Najaf, never accepted the doctrine.
So the live question in the Muslim world is not whether the ulama have power. It is who counts as one. When a government wants a ruling, it goes to a state-appointed scholar. When a militant group wants one, it finds its own. Authority that was never centralized has fragmented further, and there is no institution with the standing to settle a dispute between the two.