Islam and the Theory of Statecraft
Mehrzad Boroujerdi (ed.)

Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013. 465 pages.

Everyone seems to be interested in Islamic political thought these days, no
doubt as a result of the rise and fall of Islamisms/post-Islamisms and other
contemporary configurations of Islam and politics. And then there are the

Book Reviews 99



claimants for a new caliphate. However, most concerns with political thought
– with the exception of the large Princeton Encyclopaedia edited by Patricia
Crone and Gerhard Bowering – tend to focus their attention on either the early
and classical debates on the imamate (e.g., Crone), classical philosophy and
the “Arabic context” for Platonopolis (e.g., Nelly Lahoud), or the medieval
akhlāq literature (e.g., Linda Darling and Muzaffar Alam), or even modern
permutations (far too many examples to mention). It is a rare work indeed
that tries to bring a range of perspectives in a diachronic analysis over space,
time, and political theologies into a single volume. The success and achieve-
ment of Boroujerdi’s volume is to do precisely that and to collate contributions
from some of the most acute and incisive scholars writing on issues relating
to Islam and politics in contemporary, metropolitan academia. 

Roughly half of the contributions consider the pre-modern period, includ-
ing the significance of the Greek and Persian inheritances; the remainder deal
with issues related to Islamisms, contemporary political thought, cosmopoli-
tanisms, and working around ideas of state and common good/order. However,
most of the contributors deliberately try to engage in a thematic approach that
draws upon medieval precedents and works through their modern implications
(or even vice versa). It would be interesting to speculate about how some of
them would respond to and engage with two recent works published around
the same time: Wael Hallaq’s deconstruction of Islamist demands for an Is-
lamic state and the categorical rejection that such an entity ever existed, and
Abdullahi an-Na‘im’s insistence that Muslims ascribe to and strive for a sec-
ular political framework that is best for rendering their moral obligations de-
manded by their faith. 

One would also like to see how these arguments fit with wide-ranging at-
tempts by Muslims and others to accommodate a Rawlsian form of liberalism
and a search for an overlapping consensus that somehow domesticates and
“normalizes” Muslim political thought in terms of categories that political
theorists would find familiar and that also de-exoticizes Islam (e.g.,  Andrew
March). Boroujerdi’s introduction is primarily a summary of the chapters; one
would have liked to see him engage in precisely these other interventions.

Asma Afsaruddin’s chapter is typical of her scholarly style of a careful ge-
nealogy of a concept – in this case the public good (maṣlaḥah) – and how it
developed from the early period alongside the theory of the caliphate through
to modern times and its role in contemporary law-making. Perhaps the one as-
pect of her analysis that is lacking is a recognition of the centrality of maṣlaḥah-
based reasoning to the increasing dominance of the discourse around the
purposive goals of the Sharia (maqāṣid al-Sharī‘ah) that animates much of
contemporary Muslim public ethics in Sunni and Shi‘i contexts. 

100 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 32:1



The next few chapters focus on the Perso-Muslim context without engaging
in a rather facile distinction between “Islamic” and “Muslim” political thought
that is reminiscent of the distinction between the “Islamic” and the “Islamicate.”
Said Amir Arjomand, Javad Tabatabai, Louise Marlow, and even Muzaffar
Alam suggest the futility of the separation. Alireza Shomali and Boroujerdi’s
own contribution is a brief study and a complete translation of Sa‘di’s treatise
on Advice to Kings, which one could imagine being used profitably in the class-
room. However, I do wonder about the use of “secular reasoning” to define the
discourse of justice, and I am not sure how useful the comparison with Hobbes
is on social contract – at the very least, it smacks of prolepsis. 

Arjomand’s contribution is a typically wide ranging and iconoclastic de-
fence of the need to read statecraft in classical texts as a carefully formulated
blend of the Indo-Persian Sasanian tradition with the desire to find claques in
the scriptural traditions, thus making it difficult and even foolish to attempt to
separate out the intrinsic and extrinsic elements of the Islamic political tradition.
Tabatabai is similarly interested in de-centering Arab Islam and stressing the
important of the Persian theory of kingship – or what I think more accurately
should be called the Turco-Mongol-Persian theory of sovereignty – that dom-
inated pre-modern Islamic political thought focusing upon kingship. Perhaps
the oblivion of the Persian – not to speak of the Turco-Mongol – is partly the
historiographical legacy of the modern anxiety in an age of Arab nationalism
about the ‘ajam and in an age of recidivism about the need to recapture the
pristine golden age of “Arab Islam” and hence occlude the preceding centuries
of scholarly tradition. 

Marlow’s contribution is a thick descriptive study of a rather unknown
work of advice literature that perpetuates her position, which is widely held,
that such Fürstenspiegel works tend to illuminate issues around political
norms at court and society far more than previously thought both in Europe
and in Asia. The section’s final chapter is Alam’s study of the Mughal cos-
mopolis and the importance of considering akhlāq literature as both statecraft
and making sense of the cosmopolitan and multi-confessional nature of the
Mughal period. To his contribution, one needs to supplement the theory of
Azfar Moin who, in his The Millennial Sovereign (Columbia University Press:
2014), argues for a theory of sacral kingship that sits above confession as cen-
tral to notions of authority in the Safavid and Mughal contexts. 

With Peter Gran’s interesting consideration of Tahtawi’s journal and
whether it is travelogue or advice literature, we move into the modern period.
To an extent, any work of travel literature is – as one finds even in utopian lit-
erature – a mirror held up to the society in which it is disseminated. One even
thinks of Gulliver’s Travels as Swift’s political satire of Hannoverian England.

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As such, Tahtawi’s work is also a key moment in the rise of Muslim mod-
ernism. Charles Butterworth’s chapter, which follows, makes a rather signif-
icant intervention in our reception of Ali Abd al-Raziq, often considered to be
the secular manifesto of the modern Islamic world. He argues, in fact, that it
is a work steeped in the Islamic learned traditions. If anything, he faults him
for not referring back to the most prominent model of political thought in
Islam, which he sees as the Farabian account of Platonopolis. It is somewhat
of a lacuna that there are no further contributions on this strand – and one
would also then have to deal with the modern critique levelled by Muhammad
Khatami and Javad Tabatabai that if Platonopolis constitutes the primary mode
of political thought in Islam, then this discourse has been dead for over a mil-
lennium – an exaggeration that is partly meant to show up the significance of
its revival by Khomeini. 

Bruce K. Rutherford follows up with a discussion of thinkers close to the
Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and their defence of constitutionalism that sits
alongside other more illiberal positions. In fact, there is clearly a need for a
serious and more wide-ranging study of how ulema in the modern period have
defended constitutionalism and what it means – most studies focus on the
Iranian constitutionalist movement and particular instances. But we need a
richer and broader picture that explains, for example, how one might locate
the MB’s positions alongside the argument made by Abdul Aziz Sachedina
and Juan Cole (to take one case) of Sayyid Sistani’s espousal of constitution-
alism in contemporary Iraq (and perhaps even Rashid al-Khayyun’s study in
Arabic of constitutionalism generally in the shrine city of Najaf). 

Şerif Mardin’s chapter draws upon Kuran to take us into the realm of po-
litical economy and the constraints to political corporate development. Roxanne
L. Euben’s study on cosmopolitanism continues the tack of “provincializing
Europe” noticed by Chakrabarty, Bhabha, and others, that rejects the hege-
monic model of European metropolitan cosmopolitanism to finds cosmoples
in many parts of the world as a natural expression to understand others and in-
corporate them into one’s world. In this sense, cosmopolitanism is a natural
aspect of Muslim (and other) societies that has been forgotten through self-ori-
entalised notions of one’s own past. Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s own
works, along with many others such as Fischer, shows the significance of travel
literature in developing these notions of pre-modern cosmopolitan selfhood. 

Şerif Mardin’s chapter draws upon Timur Kuran to take us into the realm
of political economy and the constraints to political corporate development.
Roxanne Euben’s study on cosmopolitanism continues the tack of “provincial-
izing Europe” noticed by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi K. Bhabha, and others,
that rejects the hegemonic model of European metropolitan cosmopolitanism

102 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 32:1



to finds cosmoples in many parts of the world as a natural expression to un-
derstand others and incorporate them into one’s world. In this sense, cosmopoli-
tanism is a natural aspect of Muslim (and other) societies that has been forgotten
through self-orientalised notions of one’s own past. Alam and Subrahmanyam’s
own works, along with many others such as Michael Fischer, shows the sig-
nificance of travel literature in developing these notions of pre-modern cos-
mopolitan selfhood. 

The final (and longest) chapter is Aziz Al-Azmeh’s deconstruction of the
sui generis nature of the study of Islam in his critical appraisal of Anthony
Black and Patricia Crone’s works on Islamic political thought. In particular
he faults them for three positions of normativity: the privileging of the Arab
over the non-Arab (and certainly most of the contributions in this volume
demonstrates the facile nature of such an assumption), the focus on authority
and legitimacy (“idealism”) and not the simple rule of law and need for public
order that animates much Islamic political thinking (e.g., on the law of rebel-
lion), and the assumption that Islamic political thought (and indeed sacred
history) needs to be legitimated through recourse to early precedent scriptural
or otherwise. It raises key issues – and particularly the need for a careful his-
torical and diachronic understanding that points to weaknesses in the field of
Islamic studies. And it is entirely consistent with his oeuvre, especially Islams
and Modernities (Verso: 1996, 2009), that argues not for relativism, as often
assumed, but for a somewhat old-fashioned French enlightenment desire to
historicize religion. 

There is little doubt now that there is a consensual position of most histo-
rians to study Islam as a feature of late antiquity. But if we focus too much on
historical processes and structures, one wonders what happens to ideas. Can
ideas and thought never be the dynamic of history? While many of us who do
textual work have an inherent bias toward the authors who write the texts that
we study, it still is important for us to pay attention to their actual writings and
consider their contexts and influence. The anxiety over origins, the modern de-
sire and obsession to refer back to transcendental foundations, as well as the
concern for authority and legitimacy cannot be merely set aside, for they still
require explanation. Overall, this fascinating and engaging volume can and
must be read profitably if we want a more nuanced and sensible conversation
about the nature of Islam and politics in our contemporary world. 

Sajjad Rizvi
Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History

Head of Department, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies 
University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom

Book Reviews 103