ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a series of issues that the changes to the political landscape have raised for Muslim contexts and discusses responses that have been – and those that yet might be. The colonial state often took the organic tradition of Islamic laws resting in the hands of the ulama and either supplanted it with the imposition of colonial law or sought to codify it into state law. Sami Zubaida refers to this process as the etatization of the law, which was begun by the Ottomans in the nineteenth century. Din and dunya link the spiritual and the material; the link asserts a place for a religiously inspired ethics in public life, and for religion in the 'world'. In his examination of the prospects for democracy in the Muslim world, Noah Feldman notes the trend mentioned in the empirical studies namely that many contemporary Muslims find the combination of Islamic ideal and democratic values appealing.
