Everyone seems to be interested in Islamic political thought these days, no
doubt as a result of the rise and fall of Islamisms/post-Islamisms and other
contemporary configurations of Islam and politics. And then there are the claimants for a new caliphate. However, most concerns with political thought
– with the exception of the large Princeton Encyclopaedia edited by Patricia
Crone and Gerhard Bowering – tend to focus their attention on either the early
and classical debates on the imamate (e.g., Crone), classical philosophy and
the “Arabic context” for Platonopolis (e.g., Nelly Lahoud), or the medieval
akhlāq literature (e.g., Linda Darling and Muzaffar Alam), or even modern
permutations (far too many examples to mention).
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences