ABSTRACT
A comparative approach to the Muslim world is the best antidote to this faulty but persistent notion that Muslims exist in a historical vacuum that makes their politics immune from the political, social, and economic forces of modernity. This chapter uses a comparative approach to illustrate three processes that have shaped contemporary Muslim politics. First, a brief discussion of how four Muslim nation-states – Turkey, Egypt, Indonesia, and Tunisia – tailored a modern national identity and polity to provide a comparative framework that puts the exceptionally problematic status of Pakistan’s entanglement with Islamic laws in general, and blasphemy statutes in particular, in greater relief. Second, by focusing on the ethical content of Islamic jurisprudence I provide an account of how Muslim scholars are wrestling with the fundamental challenge of rescuing sharia from both the suffocating embrace of Islamic states and from the brutalities perpetrated by groups such as ISIS in the name of sharia. Third, I argue that preserving democracy and observing democratic outcomes, even when the victors are supposedly anti-democratic Islamists, provides the best path forward for accommodating Islam in public lives of Muslims.
