ABSTRACT
It is often suggested that contemporary attempts at ‘Islamic revival’ are seeking to retrieve and to reinstall a type of religious state that had existed at some point in the history of Muslim societies. Implicit in this suggestion is the view that Islam has a specific theory on politics and the State, and that the Islamic revivalists are attempting to implement anew this existing theory of the State. The impression that such a theory exists is usually reinforced by the fact that the contemporary Islamists repeatedly invoke the religious and the juridic texts, as well as certain historical precedents of ‘Islamic government’, in their attempt to prove the ‘obligatoriness’ of an Islamic State. It is therefore necessary for any work on the contemporary discourse of ‘political Islam’ to delve to some extent into the juridic text and into historical precedence in order to trace some of the origins of the Islamists’ argument. I should hasten at this point, however, to warn the reader that I am not setting out here to offer a potted history of the Muslim State or a concise review of the history of Islamic thought. Readers unfamiliar with this material would do better to refer first to some of the more systematic treatments available in some of the books which are mentioned in this chapter (e.g. Rosenthal, Watt, Lambton, etc.) 1 Rather, the purpose of this chapter is to deal with some of the concepts and the precedents which would shed light on our subsequent treatment of the subject of political Islam. It is therefore highly eclectic and interpretive, as well as structurally rather complex, since it deals with several loosely related themes rather than with one integrated thesis. For these reasons, it would perhaps be convenient to highlight in advance some of the main pursuits of this chapter.
