More speciWcally, the West’s self-deWned maturity congealed in contrast to
both the distant past of the ancient Greeks and the more immediate past of
the European Middle Ages in which ‘‘a Great Chain of Being’’ issuing from
God was said to hold sway. Inasmuch as this maturation was facilitated by the
scientiWc method, the advance of which was assumed to at once presuppose
and demonstrate the illegitimacy of metaphysical sources of knowledge about
the natural and social worlds, the universalization of this culturally and
historically speciWc experience as modernityas suchposed a serious concep-
tual challenge to Muslims living and working in political communities where
membership was deWned primarily by religion. With the arrival of European
military forces on Muslim territory, the challenge became quite immediate
and concrete. The sense of threat from the outside arguably transformed or
lent a new edge to debates which had occupied Muslim thinkers in prior
centuries, but posed one set of questions rather sharply: to what degree could
Islam be considered modern, using what or whose deWnition, and with what
cost, both to the revealed truths that sustain the religion and theummabuilt
upon it, and to Islamic ‘‘authenticity,’’ the substance of which is articulated
mostWercely at moments of greatest threat?
Even within these clearly speciWed terms, what travels under the rubric of
modern and contemporary Islamic political thought is quite complex and
variegated, as the section on ‘‘Pluralizing Islam’’ at the end of this chapter
shows. Given the striking variety of ways Muslim theorists 4 have contended
with common constraints, then, modern and contemporary Islamic political
thought may be said to be characterized by disunity amidst commonality.
The following discussion is meant to sketch, in necessarily broad brush
strokes, both some sense of these constraints and the texture of a few of the
important and inXuential responses. Here import and inXuence are measured
not by the extent to which these thinkers or streams of thought speak to
Euro-American concerns or pass canonical muster but rather their continu-
ing purchase on contemporary debates among Muslim political theorists
(even or especially when it is the very legitimacy of such purchase that is at
issue) and, in some instances, on Muslim political practice.
4 This must of necessity sidestep the reasonable but unwieldy question of what it is, precisely, that
makes a theorist ‘‘Muslim,’’ and the even more explosive issue of the criteria by which someone is
adjudged a ‘‘real Muslim’’ and who is authorized to determine and enforce such criteria. For the sole
purposes of this chapter, such matters must be determined inductively rather than deductively: these
are theorists who self-identify as Muslims (although religion may not be the exclusive or even primary
vector of identity for each thinker in all circumstances) and whose scholarly practices involve serious
engagement with the Islamic textual sources.
modern and contemporary islamic political theory 299