Where the Forest Became Law: Walāya, Landnahme, and the Political Theology of Khan Jahan Ali’s Khalīfatābād
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66871/ihj.v1i1.014Keywords:
Khan Jahan Ali, Khalifatabad, Walāya, Carl Schmitt, Bengal Frontier, Political Theology, Sufism and Sovereignty, Ibn ʿArabī, Threshold SovereigntyAbstract
This article argues that the founding of Khalīfatābād (c. 1459) by the Turkic Sufi-soldier Khan Jahan Ali instantiates a mode of sovereignty—threshold sovereignty—unaccommodated by the European decisionist tradition, while requiring that Islamic sainthood be read as an operative political concept rather than an inward station alone. Carl Schmitt’s Landnahme, the pre-juridical appropriation from which law originates, and Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics of walāya, in which the saint actualises undetermined possibility through participation in the Nafas al-Raḥmān, are shown to name a single act from two unrelated idioms: the conversion of ungoverned forest into ordered territory without a prior norm to suspend. Examination of the surviving jagir record, the toponym “Abode of the Caliphate,” and the open hypostyle hall of the Sixty-Dome Mosque and its tank network locates this act in the material and documentary record rather than in doctrine alone. The article thus intervenes on three fronts: historically, by reading Khan Jahan’s jagir and his posthumous walāya as a single founding rather than as sequential legitimations; philosophically, by exposing the limits of Schmitt’s own decisionist sovereign, who can only suspend a law already in place; and within Sufi studies, by establishing walāya as a world-founding office legible in toponymy and architecture, not merely in hagiography. The result is a political theology of the frontier in which bricks, water, and a name do the work of political theory before any treatise is written.
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