id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ajiss-3085	Khan, Tabinda Mahfooz	Challenges with Studying Islamist Groups in American Political Science	2023.0	30	.pdf	application/pdf	12035	384	43	119 While Euben and Zaman consulted a wide range of texts by Mawdudi that span his entire career and lifetime, the text chosen for inclusion in their edited reader of Islamic political thought is Mawdudi’s “The Islamic Law”, which is a theoretical justification rather than a commentary on the specific features of institutional design.21 Classes on Islamic polit- ical thought are a welcome addition to the north American political science curriculum, to be sure, but given the general preoccupation of political theory with texts rather than arguments during the course of political struggle, only studying seminal Islamist texts by Mawdudi and Qutb could lead people to draw dangerous conclusions about Islamist participation in democracy.22 I will briefly explain how Mawdudi’s ideas changed, in reaction to his political environment and to debates with the ulama and others, in order to illustrate how a focus on texts (as opposed to action, or to texts-interpreted-during-action) can be misleading. Many such critiques of Rawlsian liberalism, however, were structured as a defense of religion in public deliberation rather than as a considered analysis of how religious debates actually worked in Muslim politics (Nathan Brown’s Arguing Islam is a welcome exception to this trend).17 A notable dissenting work in political theory is Lucas Swaine’s The Liberal Conscience, in which he argues that the only plausible way to per- suade theocrats—that is, groups that regard the enforcement of religious law as obligatory—of the merits of liberal institutions is to construct an argument based on the freedom of conscience.18 Swaine argues that lib- erals, to be true to the liberal principle of non-coercion, must formulate arguments in favor of liberal political institutions that theocrats could accept from the perspective of their own moral framework.	cache/ajiss-3085.pdf	txt/ajiss-3085.txt