Abstract
Muslim societies in all of their social, structural and cultural variety are, as Donald E. Smith points out, ‘organic’ societies characterised by organic religious systems. In these societies, religion tends to permeate all institutions rather than to be differentiated and/or autonomous.1 The vast body of literature produced since the departure of the colonialists from the Muslim lands suggests, however, either the implicit existence of the dichotomy or at least the feasibility and advisability of radical separation between the spiritual and temporal realms. The seriousness of the issue, evidenced by an outpouring of studies, calls for an examination of the dynamics of the relationship between Islam and politics in order to determine what has changed and what has remained unchanged. This entails, first, an understanding of the meaning and nature of politics from the Western perspective to facilitate a comparison.
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Notes
Donald Eugene Smith, Religion and Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 59.
Donald Eugene Smith, Religion and Political Development (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 59.
E.E. Schattschneider, Two Hundred Million Americans in Search of a Government (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), p. 8.
Bernard Crick, In Defence of Politics (London: Pelican Books, 1964), p. 16.
Aristotle , The Ethics, tr. J.A.K. Thomson (England: Penguin Books, 1953), p. 44.
See Ernest Barker, The Politics of Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 154–6.
Julius Gould and William L. Kolb (eds), A Dictionary of Social Science (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 4.
William T. Bluhm, Theories of the Political System (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), p. 4.
Robert A. Dahl, Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 6.
David Easton, The Political System (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), p. 134.
Alan C. Isaak, Scope and Methods of Political Science: An Introduction to the Methodology of Political Inquiry (Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press, 1975), p. 21.
See Harold Lasswell, Politics: Who Gets What, When, How (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1958).
Alan Bullock and Oliver Stallybrass (eds), The Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 490.
See Bertrand de Jouvenal, Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, tr. J.F. Huntington (London: Hutchinson, 1948).
Hamid Enayat, Modern Islamic Political Thought (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 2.
Abul A’lā Mawdūdī, Towards Understanding Islam, tr. Khurshid Ahmad (London: The Islamic Foundation, 1980), p. 88.
Ibn Qutaybah, ‘Uyūn al-Akhbār, Vol. I in Bernard Lewis (ed.), Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (London: The Macmillan Press, Ltd., 1976), Vol. I, p. 184.
G.H. Jansen, Militant Islam (London: Pan Books, 1979), p. 17.
Sir Muhammad Iqbāl, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1971), p. 154.
See Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in A World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), Vol. I.
For a discussion of the transformation of the ideal caliphate into the dynastic rule see Mawdūdī, Khilāfat wa Mulūkiyat (Lahore: Idārah Tarjumān al-Qur’ān, 1975).
S.D.B. Goitein, Studies in Islamic Religious and Political Institutions (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1968), pp. 205–6.
Manfred Halpern, The Politics and Social Change in the Middle East and North Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 11.
W.C. Smith, On Understanding Islam: Selected Studies (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), p. 202.
E.I.J. Rosenthal, Political Thought in Medieval Islam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 181.
J.J. Saunders, A History of Medieval Islam (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 171.
See Jamil M. Abū Naṣr, A History of the Maghreb (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 92–103;
C.E. Bosworth, The Islamic Dynasties (Edinburgh: The University Press, 1967), pp. 28–31.
The three-fold classification of Muslim thinkers is suggested by A. K. S. Lambton, ‘Islamic Political Thought’ in Joseph Schacht with C.E. Bosworth (eds), The Legacy of Islam (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 404–24.
H.A.R. Gibb, ‘Constitutional Organization’ in Majid Khadduri and H.J. Liebesney (eds), Law in the Middle East: Origin and Development of Islamic Law (Washington D.C.: The Middle East Institute, 1956), pp. 12–13.
Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, tr. F. Rosenthal, ed. N.J. Dawood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 155.
Khurshīd Aḥmad, ‘The Nature of Islamic Resurgence’, in John L. Esposito (ed.), Voices of Resurgent Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 219–20. Tajdīd means renewal, an effort to regenerate the authentic Islamic spirit, to return to the fundamental principles of Islam as found in the Qur’ān and the Sunnah.
The acculturationist category includes the modernists, the secularists and Westernisers. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Contemporary Islam and the Challenges of History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 7–11.
W.C. Smith, Islam in Modern History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 60.
See Seyyed Hossein Naṣr, Ideals and Realities of Islam (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).
E.I.J. Rosenthal, Islam in the Modern National State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 89.
‘Alī ‘Abd al-Rāziq, al-Islām wa Uṣūl al-Ḥukm (Beirut: al-Ḥayāt Library, 1966), p. 83.
Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 208.
Fazlur Rahman, ‘Roots of Islamic Neo-fundamentalism’, in Phillip H. Stoddard, David C. Cuthell and Margaret W. Sullivan (eds), Change and the Muslim World (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1981), p. 35.
Muhammad Iqbāl, ‘Presidential Address’, in S.A. Vahid (ed.), Thoughts and Reflections of Iqbal (Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1964), p. 167.
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© 1996 Abdul Rashid Moten
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Moten, A.R. (1996). Politics in Islam. In: Political Science: An Islamic Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377578_2
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