Major themes in the Arabic political literature of Islamic revivalism, 1970–1985: The Islamic system of government(al‐nizam al‐islami), shūrademocracy and the implementation of the Sharica as opposed to secularism (cilmaniyya)

Abstract

The analysis of the political literature of Islamic revivalism belongs to the pertinent issues of Muslim‐Christian dialogue. This article is an inquiry into the major themes of this literature published in Arabic. The historical context of the writings of political Islam is the failure of the secular nation‐state in the world of Islam to cope with the processes of modernization and development. The political Islamic response to this failure is the revival of the dream of reconstructing the Islamic state along the model of Medina on the eve of the rise of Islam. The analysis of the intellectual reconstruction of the early Islamic state as an expression of divine order, which ought to replace the secular state, reveals that this construction is imbued with projections of modern times into the Islamic past. Thus the alleged Islamic government of nizam islami/Islamic system as a modern issue is an outgrowth of political Islam. In this sense, the notion that Islam is a din wa‐dawla/ divine order of the state c...