Explores the many facets of Arab political thought from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Leading scholars discuss ideology and hotly contested post-structuralist theory.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between a search for totalizing doctrines--nationalist, Marxist, and religious--and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence Arab states, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, and failed development. They were also responding to successive defeats by Israel, humiliation, and injustice. The first book to take stock of these critical responses, this volume illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers, and it connects Arab debates on cultural malaise, identity, and authenticity to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa, revealing the shared struggles of different regions and various Arab concerns.

This book provides a significant and unique contribution to the emerging literature of comparative political thought. Michaelle L. Browers offers compelling evidence, with extensive analysis and references, that a rigorous debate is taking place in Arabic concerning the value of democracy and civil society. Exploring the globalization of ideas of democracy and civil society, Browers addresses the question of what occurs when concepts cross the boundaries of cultures or languages. She analyzes the historical concept of democracy in Arab and Islamic political thought, the transformations that have occurred over the past several decades resulting from Arab forays into an international discussion of civil society and what these transformations tell us about the status of ideological and conceptual debates in the region. The book’s value, however, lies in its main premise: despite the dearth of actual democratic practices in the Arab world, intellectual elites of the region have vigorously debated reform concepts for decades. Browers emphasizes that current conflicts involving the Middle East are less about Islam against the west and its secular allies in the region and more about diverse sectors of Arab society grappling with how to reform overreaching and unjust states. Browers shows that the seeds of democratic reform in the region were well planted prior to the war on Iraq and the Greater Middle East Initiative.

This book offers an intellectual history of one of the leading Shi’i thinkers and religious leaders of the 20th-century in Lebanon, Shaykh Muhammad Mahdi Shams al-Din. The author examines his role as the foremost figure of Shi’i intellectual life, a key associate of Musa al-Sadr, and president of the Islamic Shi‘i Supreme Council of Lebanon, having maintained the independence of this institution until his death from the domination of Shi‘i political parties. The core of the book consists of three interrelated main themes that constitute the major threads of Shams al-Din’s intellectual legacy: a discussion of Islamic government involving a critique of Khomeini’s theory of wilāyat al-faqīh, the role of Islam within civil government, and the necessity for political integration of the Shi‘a in their Arab nation-states to protect them from policies that raise doubts over their political allegiance to their respective countries. The project will appeal to scholars, students, academics, and researchers in Middle Eastern politics and history.

A political theorist teases out the century-old ideological transformation at the heart of contemporary discourse in Muslim nations undergoing political change. The Arab Spring precipitated a crisis in political Islam. In Egypt Islamists have been crushed. In Turkey they have descended into authoritarianism. In Tunisia they govern but without the label of “political Islam.” Andrew March explores how, before this crisis, Islamists developed a unique theory of popular sovereignty, one that promised to determine the future of democracy in the Middle East. This began with the claim of divine sovereignty, the demand to restore the sharīʿa in modern societies. But prominent theorists of political Islam also advanced another principle, the Quranic notion that God’s authority on earth rests not with sultans or with scholars’ interpretation of written law but with the entirety of the Muslim people, the umma. Drawing on this argument, utopian theorists such as Abū’l-Aʿlā Mawdūdī and Sayyid Quṭb released into the intellectual bloodstream the doctrine of the caliphate of man: while God is sovereign, He has appointed the multitude of believers as His vicegerent. The Caliphate of Man argues that the doctrine of the universal human caliphate underpins a specific democratic theory, a kind of Islamic republic of virtue in which the people have authority over the government and religious leaders. But is this an ideal regime destined to survive only as theory?