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This introductory chapter begins with a historical perspective of the Islamic world. Islam has grown consistently throughout history, expanding into new neighboring territories without ever retreating (except on the margins, as in Sicily and Spain, where it was expelled by force). It began in the seventh century as a small community in Mecca and Medina in the Arabian Peninsula, led by its messenger the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632), who was eventually to unite all the Arab tribes under the banner of Islam. Within the first two centuries of its existence, Islam came into global prominence through its conquests of the Middle East, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the Iranian lands, Central Asia, and the Indus valley. In 2014, the year 1435 of the Muslim calendar, the Islamic world was estimated to account for a population of approximately a billion and a half, representing about one-fifth of humanity. The remainder of the chapter discusses the evolution of Islamic political thought; foundations of Islamic political thought; and Islamic political thought in the early Middle Ages (750–1055), high Middle Ages (1055–1258), late Middle Ages (1258–1500), early modern period (1500–1800), and later modern period (from 1800 to the present).

In terms of political thought, as in so many other respects, Muslims today could be said to be bilingual. On the one hand, they speak the global political language of Western derivation marked by key concepts such as democracy, freedom, human rights, and gender equality. On the other hand, they still have their traditional political idiom, formed over 1,400 years of Islamic history and marked by concepts such as prophecy, imamate, and commanding right and forbidding wrong. The Islamic tradition is alien to most Western readers. This chapter attempts to familiarize them with it to make it easier for them to follow the other entries in this volume. The single most important difference between contemporary Western political thinking and the Islamic tradition is that contemporary thought focuses on freedom and rights whereas the Islamic tradition focuses on authority and duties. This separates contemporary political thought from that of all premodern societies, not just that of the Islamic world.

This chapter analyzes the concept of government in Islamic political thought. The question of who rules, or the qualities of the head of the Islamic government, has been critical in Islamic history. The first political conflict between the members of the early Muslim community took place immediately after the death of the Prophet (632) over the issue of ṭukm, or rule. The disagreement was not over the necessity of the establishment and continuation of political authority after the death of the Prophet but instead over who should succeed the Prophet as ruler of the Muslim community. Early Muslims also believed in the necessity of establishing one government under a single leader. The remainder of the chapter discusses the constitutional theory of government, principles of government, necessity of government, institutions and structures of government, legislative and judicial functions of government, and modern formulations of government.

Pluralism and tolerance are considered constitutive elements of good governance, especially liberal democracy as it developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For this reason they are widely debated among modern Muslims, including Islamists of various persuasions. This chapter focuses largely on modern debates. Pluralism and tolerance are clearly related and both cover a broad semantic field. They concern relations within the Muslim community, as well as between Muslims and non-Muslims, and are closely tied to understandings of freedom, liberty, and citizenship. However, there is a difference of emphasis between the two: Pluralism is discussed mostly with regard to the Muslim community, or umma, especially concerning the plurality of political views and interests and their institutionalization within civil society and a multiparty system. Discussions of tolerance, on the other hand, tend to focus on relations between Muslims and non-Muslims—more specifically Christians and Jews as the prime representatives of the People of the Book (ahl al-kitāb)—within a Muslim polity, or within an Islamic state.

This chapter analyzes the terms, revival and reform, which are widely disseminated across a range of genres in Muslim literature. They are found in commentaries of prophetic traditions, political discourses, debates about shari'a, and the integrity of learning and scholarship. Often these key words are rhetorically invoked in exhortations of moral awakening in order to advance a Muslim social and political gospel. Over time, these terms have been used together to represent a concept that links newness and creativity (renewal/revival) to wholeness and integrity (iṣlaṭ, reform). Whether the “renewal and reform” is aimed at the collective or the individual or both, the discourse of revival and reform addresses stability and change, the mutable and immutable in Muslim thought. In this larger semantic framework, two things loom large: political theology and the integrity of the learned tradition.

This chapter discusses the shari'a, the sacred law of Islam. Law is an essential feature of revealed religion in both the Qur'an and Islamic thought in general, and the term shari'a is used with reference not only to Islam but also to Judaism and Christianity, because all three are conceived as having a divinely given law. According to later jurists, 500 verses of the Qur'an, treat legal subjects, including matters relating to prayer, fasting, alms, pilgrimage, permitted food, marriage, divorce, inheritance, slavery, and trade. This represents roughly one-thirteenth of the sacred text. The chapter covers the law in the books; the source of the law; the two institutions that contributed to making the law central to Islamic societies and creating continuity over space and time: the madhhab, or the legal school and the madrasa, or college of law; legal education and careers; caliphs; judges and muftis; the impact of modernity; and political Islam.

This chapter discusses the origins and development of political authority in the Islamic world. From the laylat al-qadr, the “night of power” in which the Qur'an symbolically “came down” from God, to the death of the Prophet, Muslim affairs were governed by the special authority of that prophetic-revelatory event, and it remains the primary paradigm of political authority in Islam. Muhammad was a religious, political, and military leader who founded a new form of community, an umma, that was both spiritual and worldly in nature. The development of this new community, which defined itself in terms of faith rather than national or tribal boundaries, marked a transition from polytheism to monotheism, and was ultimately shaped by both Arab tribal bonds and Persian monarchic systems.

This chapter discusses the origin, definitions, and issues associated with the term Islamism. It argues that an understanding or explanation of Islamism requires attending not only to the multiple and various ways Islamist thinkers reinterpret Islam but also to the specific conditions and cultures in which they are embedded and the partisans and audiences they seek to address. These conditions and contexts determine the extent to which an Islamist framework resonates with Muslims who live in a wide range of cultural contexts and geographic locations. Such resonances are, in turn, facilitated by a concatenation of forces that mark this particular moment in history. These include the ways in which contemporary global inequalities compound the legacy of European colonialism to reproduce a sense of Muslim powerlessness relative to the West; ongoing Euro-American political and financial support of corrupt autocrats, many of whom preside over nation-states stitched together by Western fiat; and the persistence of authoritarian regimes eager to control domestic unrest by catalyzing “Muslim rage” toward external targets.

This chapter argues that the relation between modernity and Islam cannot be reduced to an analysis of deficits to be measured by Islam's alleged insufficient capacity to supersede its rooting in tradition or in a set of combined traditions; by Islam's dependencies on Western hegemonic patterns of modernity; or by alleged Islamic idiosyncrasies reflected by distorted outcomes of a dependent modernization. It discusses how Western observers failed to see the cumulative trend among Muslim reformers consisting of rejecting the view of either “Islam” or “modernity” conceived as comprehensive entities, as Western scholars were used to seeing them. The idea that Islam is internally plural and that modernity is a process not entrenched in a singular culture seemed alien to most Western observers, while it gradually became a main avenue of reasoning for key Muslim thinkers.

This chapter considers the complex relationship between gender and Islamic political thought through a few snapshots: the Qur'an, female contemporaries of Muhammad, medieval Islamic scholarship, and modern Muslim women. Several women are mentioned in the Qur'an, some of whom demonstrate a strong independent spirit. They are held responsible for their own salvation, apart from their husbands or male relatives. The independent personalities of women who appear in the Qur'an are reflected in the stories of early Muslim women as recorded in Islamic history. Muhammad's wives played key political roles during the lifetime of Muhammad and the early generations of Islam. In the modern period, “Muslim women” as an abstract, essentialized entity has become a measuring stick for “progress” as well as an embodiment of “authentic” Islamic values.

This chapter discusses the origin and development of the term ‘ulama.’ The Arabic term ‘ulamā’ refers to Muslim scholars specializing in the Islamic religious sciences. A number of other terms are often used to characterize the particular focus of a scholar's work, among them muṭaddith (concerned with the study of the hadith reports attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), mufassir (an exegete of the Qur'an), and faqīh and mufti (a scholar of Islamic law and a jurisconsult, respectively). The term “‘ulama’” is often understood to encompass these somewhat narrower categories. The boundaries between “religious” and “secular” learning were less clearly delineated in premodern Islam than they have been in the modern world. Those recognized as ‘ulama’ sometimes made significant contributions to fields of knowledge lying well beyond the aforementioned areas.

This chapter discusses the historical origin and development, religious scholarship, political elements, and legacy of the Qur'an. The Qur'an, the holy book of Islam, is the most recent of the major sacred scriptures to have appeared in human history. It includes the prophetic proclamations of Muhammad (570–632) in Arabic, collected after his death in definitive written form and meticulously transmitted through the centuries. More than a billion Muslims around the globe consider the Qur'an to be the eternal word of God, who “sent down” the scripture as his final divine revelation and commissioned Muhammad to be the last prophet to proclaim his divine will for all of humanity to follow.

This chapter analyzes the concept of jihad. Literally meaning “struggle,” jihad may be associated with almost any activity by which Muslims attempt to bring personal and social life into a pattern of conformity with the guidance of God. Nevertheless, early in the development of Islam, jihad came to be associated particularly with fighting or making war “in the path of God.” It is argued that Muslim thinking about war bears a strong resemblance to that developed by Christians, Jews, and other groups. This does not minimize the objectionable nature of certain judgments, such as al-Qaeda's doctrine of total war. But the question of war is present for every historic and contemporary group, and the attempt to regulate it, to see war as a tool that is sometimes appropriate for attaining or defending justice, is difficult.

This chapter discusses the political, historical, and institutional aspects of the caliphate. The term “caliphate” is most commonly restricted to five periods or dynasties: the Rightly Guided Caliphate (632–61), the Umayyad caliphate (661–750), the Abbasid caliphate (750–1258 and 1261–1517), the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171), and the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba (928–1031). Throughout the centuries, however, various other rulers have made claims to the caliphate or adopted the caliphal titulature—that is, one or more titles usually associated with caliphs. The first four successors of the Prophet Muhammad are usually called the Rightly Guided Caliphs. But those Muslims who do not accept the legitimacy of some of these rulers refrain from applying this expression to them.

This chapter analyzes the concept of religious knowledge. Knowledge informs us about the reality of existence, providing guidance for decision making. In Islam, such knowledge, based in scripture (Qur'an and sunna), exists to generate a moral order pleasing to God. Loss of such knowledge is a sign of the end times, ignorance being the cause of moral disarray. Knowledge is thus not simply a source of prestige for scholars but truth from God to guide society to prosperity in both this world and the next. Embodied in a corpus of laws known as shari'a, this knowledge is overseen by religious scholars with jurisprudential expertise to apply God's will with wisdom to life's situations. The chapter discusses the scope of religious knowledge, the religious value of secular reality, the political demands of religious knowledge, politics of religious diversity, religious knowledge and the modern state, and religious knowledge as guidance for society.

This chapter deals with the life and career of Muhammad. In Muslim belief, the religion of Islam is based on divine revelation and represents a divinely willed and established institution. In the perspective of history, the origins of Islam can be traced back to the prophetic career of Muhammad, its historical founder in the first third of the seventh century. Born around 570 in Mecca, a town in a rocky valley of the Hijaz—the northwestern quarter of the Arabian Peninsula—Muhammad began his prophetic proclamations circa 610. He appeared not as a mystic or visionary but as a prophet with the mission to convert the Quraysh, his fellow Arab tribesmen who had settled there. The discussions cover Muhammad's life from ca. 570 to 610; Muhammad's career in Mecca from ca. 610 to 622 and in Medina from 622 to 632; and Muhammad as a political leader.

This chapter analyzes both Muslim minorities under non-Muslim rule and non-Muslim minorities under Muslim rule. The issue of minorities in the Islamic world is complex. The minorities are not restricted to Jews and Christians, some minorities belong to religious communities that existed before the emergence of Islam (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists). Others were related to Islam when they came into being but developed into distinct religions (Yazidis, Nusayris, Druzes, Babis, and Baha'is). Another group considers itself Muslim but has been placed beyond the pale of Islam by the Muslim mainstream (Ahmadis). It is important to note that whatever tolerance was practiced in most historical periods in relation to the Jews, the Christians, the Zoroastrians, and even the non-Arab polytheists were not accorded to adherents of religions that came into being after the emergence of Islam.

This chapter examines potentialities, i.e. the doctrinal aspects in Islamic political thought that could legitimate, promote, or subvert the emergence of a constitutional practice in Muslim cultures. These doctrinal potentialities exist in a dormant state until they are co-opted and directed by systematic thought supported by cumulative social practices. The discussions focus on doctrinal potentialities or concepts constructed by the interpretive activity of Muslim scholars (primarily jurists). It covers the notion of constitutionalism and majoritarian democracy; the main concepts of Islamic political thought; justice as a core constitutional value; the instrumentalities of government in Islamic thought; the possibility of individual rights; and constitutionalism and Sharīʻah.