1 (October 2002): 4-37), which containedĪ statistical analysis of the link between Islam and democracy was heavily cited. In political science, Steven Fish’s article, “IslamĪnd Authoritarianism” (World Politics 55, no. Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005) was a seminal work that shifted The division of labor between political theory and comparative politics, and the lack of conversation that results from it, makes it difficult-if not impossible-to fairly represent or analyze contemporary Islamist groups in American political science.ġ For instance, Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Moreover, whereas political theorists, such as Lucas Swaine, have demonstrated the futility of applying liberal assumptions to theocrats, comparativists continue to predominantly rely on liberal categories and frameworks, which produces a distorted view of Islamists. I argue that the reliance of political theorists on seminal Islamist texts, rather than on the interpretations of texts during legal and political processes, limits their ability to represent the evolution of pragmatic Islamist theory in countries such as Pakistan. In the first section, I analyze the impact of the text-based approach of political theory in the second, of the liberal frameworks of comparative politics and in the third, a promising new development: the interdisciplinary field of Islamic legal studies, which has the potential to bridge the division between political science, law, and area studies approaches to the study of Muslim societies. In this paper, I will explain why the lack of debate between political theory and comparative politics has led to an inadequate understanding of the politics of traditional Islamic scholars and Islamists in American political science.
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