Rethinking Islamic Politics: God, Enlightenment and the Modern State (original) (raw)

This work is a call to reform modern Islamic political thought. As a moral-legal project premised on love of the Divine, Islamism undermines itself via its own authoritarian logic. I argue that a prime cause for the disappointments of modern Islamism is its failure to understand the concept, genealogy and implications of the modern state. Specifically, the simultaneous under-theorisation and assimilation of the modern state renders Islamic political philosophy inauthentic to the intellectual history of Muslim societies, and foreign to the spiritual message of the Quran. This thesis is therefore a study of the idea of the state, the meaning of law, and the production of normativity in these contexts. I will argue that the dominating impulse of modern Islamism is rooted in a complicity with an Enlightenment modernity. I argue only in understanding the ethic of premodern Islamic governance, which functioned on a core understanding of the human soul, can the moral project of Islamic politics be redeemed –an urgent task in a modernity premised solely on the material, the economic, the political and the instrumental.