The Strategic Formation of Charismatic Authority: A Secular-Political Reading of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad

This article examines the figures of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad independently of theological truth claims, comparing them in terms of charismatic authority, textual legitimation, core cadre formation, boundary drawing, military mobilisation, and institutionalisation. Its purpose is neither to deny nor to affirm the religious significance of these figures, but to show which mechanisms of power become visible when sacred and semi-historical narratives are read through a secular-political lens. Sun Tzu’s understanding of strategy, Machiavelli’s analysis of founding violence and political opportunity, the Darwinian metaphor of selection, and Weber’s theory of charismatic authority are used here as an explanatory framework. The article analyses the passage from slavery to peoplehood in the Mosaic narrative, from apocalyptic expectation to the institutional Church in the Jesus movement, and from tribal opposition to a state-forming ummah in the case of Muhammad. It argues that all three cases display recurring relations among charismatic beginnings, textual stabilisation, loyalty networks, coercive capacity, and institutional reproduction. At the same time, it stresses that this pattern is not symmetrical at the level of historical evidence: Moses is accessible largely through textual and traditional materials, Jesus through fragmentary historical evidence, and Muhammad through a denser body of early historical material. The article therefore presents its comparisons as secular-political interpretations rather than as claims of exact historical equivalence.