ABSTRACT
For nearly a century, Islamic political theorists have been trying to argue that not only is Islam compatible with modernity and democracy, but indeed the advent of Islam was the essential beginning of modern enlightenment. Muslim political theorists are a rare commodity but, nevertheless, a few of them who did exist and wrote have tried to demonstrate the antecedents of modern polities within Islamic experience. However, much of their contribution has remained out of the mainstream of Islamic discourse and Muslim conceptions of Islamic scholarship. The political concepts that pervade Muslim discourses today have mostly been crafted by Islamists like Maulana Maududi and Sayyid Qutb, who were Islamic political theorists in some sense, but their approach was too ideological and polemical (Khan 2001a). Nevertheless, while there are rich sources of Islamic thought on democracy, an Islamic democratic theory has yet to emerge.
