Global Political Islam

Peter Mandaville. Global Political Islam. London & New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xv +388. Paperback. ISBN 10: 0-415-32607-9 and 13: 978-0-415-32607-0. No price given. Peter Mandaville, an academic at George Mason University, USA, has been working on "the reconstruction of the Muslim world as a consequence of Globalization." His new book Global Political Islam is a comprehensive survey of the various movements in different regions of the world for the social and political revival of Islam during the twentieth century. With a view to determine the nature of his work, the author specifically defines what he means by 'Political Islam.' According to him, Islamism or Political Islam "refers to forms of political theory and practice that have as their goal the establishment of an Islamic political order in the sense of a state whose governmental principles, institutions and legal system derive directly from the shari'ah" (p. 57). Manadaville organizes the results of his research in ten chapters. The first three chapters deal with the key themes and concepts in the history of Islam pertaining to political thought and order, from 622 CE to mid twentieth century. The next five chapters include detailed case studies on almost all the major events, ideas and personalities of the movement for the revival of political Islam in different Muslim countries. The last two chapters provide an overview of the major findings of the survey and identify new actors in the intellectual field of Islamic revival. The author thus takes his readers beyond Hasan al-Banna (d. 1368/1949), Sayyid Abu 'l-A'la Mawdudi (d. 1399/1979) and Sayyid Qutb (d. 1386/1966) not only to Muhammad al-Sha'rawi, Yusuf al- Qaradawi, 'Amr Khalid and Abdolkarim Saroush, but also to thinkers who have developed highly innovative and pluralistic interpretations of Islam in recent years. The survey does not cover the entire Muslim population, but is confined to only those individuals, organizations and groups who are contributing or have contributed in recent past to Islamic revival or have participated in the movements that fall within the defined orbit of 'Political Islam.' The author begins with the premise that to understand Muslim politics in the contemporary world, "it is particularly important to understand accurately the significance of Prophet Muhammad in the Islamic tradition" (p. 25). According to him, "Muhammad is wholly human" (p. 25) and this provides the main deviation of Islam from other major religions of the world. With this basic premise in the background, Mandaville arrives at the following key themes and concepts in the history of 'Political Islam:' *'Muslim politics in the sense of debate and contestation between multiple interpretations of religion' begins with the death of the Prophet (11/632); * Tribal influences began to encroach on Muslim politics beginning with the reign of 'Uthm*n (24.35/644.656); * Effective political power was concentrated in the hands of a relatively small Arab autocratic elite despite the dispersion of Islam to a large part of the civilized world; * Muslim social classes and institutions that today constitute the eMuslim political societyf and which survived till the abolition of caliphate in Turkey in 1924, initially emerged under the Abbasids in the eighth/fourteenth century and have survived since then; and * The Islamic political thought was plunged into a crisis with the abolition of the caliphate. This crisis produced a number of thinkers and activists such as Jam+l al- Din al-Afghani (1255-1316/1839-1898), Mu+ammad 'Abduh (1265-1323/ 1849-1905) and Mu+ammad Rashid Rida (1282-1354/1865-1935) who explored how Muslims should respond to the new challenges of Western imperialism, secularism and modernism. The most effective responses, however, came from Hasan al-Banna of Egypt and Sayyid Abu 'l-A'la Mawdudi of Pakistan, followed by Sayyid Qutb of Egypt. …