The Religious Other: A Biblical Understanding of Islam, the Qur’an and Muhammad

Abstract

contexts and conditions that are still ‘experimenting’ with modern conceptions of the state. Moreover, the state in Muslim contexts does not only incorporate religion, albeit in different ways depending on the country, but also represents socio-ethnic and tribal alliances (playing the role of judge, maintaining order against dissidence, assuring the loyalty of the army, redistributing resources, etc.). This dimension is absent from the perspectives reviewed here. And thus, for as long as we discard the ethnic-tribal dimension of political power (focusing only on its relations to religious authority), understanding the role of the state in Muslim contexts is incomplete. For both Sunnis and Shiʿism, legitimate political and religious authority is expected to be supreme only if the religious-political guide also claims a Qurayshite or Hashemite genealogy. This book stimulates discussions that will be of interest to historians of Islamic political thought. The findings reported here shed new light on the possibility of rethinking the idea of the state’s sovereignty in Muslim contexts. In addition, the chapters in this volume make several contributions to the current literature on political dilemmas in Islamic ethics, especially with regard to secularization, the limits of democracy and liberalism, and the place of religion in Muslims societies.