Editorial 

The feature articles in this issue of MISS constitute a foray into two 
different, but related, topics: political authority, as discussed by Tamara 
Sonn in “Political Authority in Classical Islamic Thought,” and by Salim 
Mansur in “Constitutionalism and Ethnic Conflict: The Case of Pakistan,” 
and the interrelationships among God, humanity, and the universe, as 
found in Yusuf Waghid‘s “In Search of a Boundless Ocean and New 
Skies: Human Creativity is a Matter of A‘mdl, Jihad, and Ijtihad,” and 
Masudul Alam Choudhury’s ‘Toward Islamic Political Economy at the 
Turn of the Century.” 

In her article, Tamara Sonn analyzes the source of political authority 
in the ideal Islamic state. Breaking up Islamic political authority between 
the executive and the legislative-judicial branches, Sonn reveals how the 
legislative-judicial branch, that is, the branch that ensured that the entire 
government was functioning according to the laws of God, was dominant 
in classical Islamic political theory. Unlike Christianity, where theology 
was the source of politics, Islamic legal thought constituted the source of 
political ideas, so much so that “the identity of a community as Islamic or 
not lies not in the behavior of the leader but in whether or not Islamic law 
prevails.” Far from espousing a theocracy, concludes SOM, the ideal 
Islamic state is governed as a “nomocracy.” 

In a similar vein, Salim Mansur‘s article is a critical examination of the 
relationship between constitutionalism and ethnic conflict, with a focus on 
Pakistan. Mansur challenges the analytical scheme that identifies devel- 
oped societies with mature institutions of legitimate order that provide for 
political stability, continuity of political authority, and established rules for 
conflict settlement as well as, conversely, identifies developing societies 
with the weakness or absence of such institutions. Instead, he argues that 
constitutional norms, designs, and processes need not be separated from 
issues of institution building and that “the idea of constitutionalism needs 
to be integrated into the study of developing societies in order to discover 
how it contributes to a conciliatory process of political participation and 
pluralism in a society that might be potentially open to fragmentation along 
ethnic lines.” 

The other two feature articles found in this issue address the complex 
question of the relationship among God, humanity, and the universe. Yusuf 



Waghid seeks to answer the question of whether or not human beings have 
the capacity for creative activity. Drawing heavily from the Qur’an, Waghid 
shows that, despite the distinction that exists between the creativity of God 
and that of the human being, a link does exist between the creativity of 
both. “Considering the fact that creativity constitutes God‘s guidance, ‘cre- 
ative activity’ (in order to understand God‘s guidance) cannot be precluded 
from human pmctices.” 

Starting from the same premise of the God-Humanity-Universe inter- 
relationship as Waghid, Choudhury proposes a theoretical framework of 
Islamic political economy, for “Islamic political economy is one such area 
whose theory and pmctice must be subsumed within this same unique 
methodology of the unifying (tm@di) epistemology.” In the review essay 
“The Philosophical Foundations of Islamic Political Economy,” Muham- 
mad A. Muqtedar Khan sets out with a similar task as Choudhury in refo- 
cusing the issues of political economy on Islam. Both authors, to borrow 
from Khan, attempt “to understand those philosophical foundations, princi- 
ples, and instruments of Islam that are the defining characteristics of 
Islamic political economy.” 

Finally, we present Mehdi Aminrazavi’s “Medieval philosophical 
Discourse and Muslim-christian Dialogue” as a reflection article. Amin- 
razavi contributes to the debate of Islam and the West by examining the 
readiness of Muslims to have a meaningful dialogue with the West. He 
argues that “the necessary condition for a meaningful dialogue between 
traditional Islam and the secular West does not exist and, therefore, that 
any attempt to do so at this time either will not succeed or will become a 
superficial survey of what we have in common, such as the Ten 
Commandments.” 

We close this issue with a varied selection of book reviews, confer- 
ence reports, and abstracts of doctoral theses. 

Hibba Abugideiri