��� magine that the senior religious authorities, the most experienced Sharia court judges, and the most prominent Islamist politicians, dissidents, and modernizing reformers from Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Algeria are gathered in a conference hall with the intention of defining an Islamic state. Their assignment is to write a universal constitution for Muslim societies, creating a governance model by which all Muslims would live, in the Islamic state to which they profess to aspire. The constitution is to be specific, laying out details as to form of government, choice of leader and succession, economic structure, courts and judiciary, and the role of the state—if any—in family and personal status matters. It is to specify whether the zakat is to be collected by the state or left to volunteer contributions, and whether the imams of mosques are to be employees of the state. It is to spell out who is to have the authority to say whether traditional practices in some Muslim communities such as honor killings, female genital mutilation, and death for apostasy are required, permitted, or prohibited, and how such rulings are to be enforced. The delegates have no deadline, but are to stay in conference until they reach consensus on a document that will put an end to centuries of disputation about the proper way for Muslims to conduct their affairs. In truth, they are unlikely ever to emerge because the probability that such a consensus could be achieved is close to zero. Nearly 14 centuries after the death of the Prophet Muhammad and decades after the end of colonialism, the world’s Muslims have failed to achieve what the scholar Fazlur Rahman called “a conscious vision of an Islamic sociopolitical order.” 1 The tortured quest for constitutional consensus in Iraq demonstrated anew the difficulties Muslims face in defining the terms of their governance, and it is still too early to predict whether that country’s people—mostly