ABSTRACT
Hegemonic, orientalist frames of capture and understanding present Islamic models of restructuring social and cultural life as pathologies of alterity or as failures on the part of those living in the Islamic cultural zones (ICZs) to fully absorb modernity and its cognitive attributes. This chapter interprets some contemporary political struggles in such zones against the backdrop of Islamic conceptions of justice as a commentary on the global political economy, focusing particularly on the ethico-political assumptions of 'disciplinary neoliberalism'. It aims to reinterpret Islamic ethics, encoded in cultural or religious idiom, as both a critique of, and an alternative to, the hegemonic settlement under globalizing conditions. The chapter draws out the implications of the Islamic critique and alternative for reimagining global leadership. It explores an Islamic critique of the present global political constellation as a moral discourse with the potential to offer lineaments of future political alternatives to the world order.
