Abstract: | This article considers the future of Muslim political thought in the context of growing de-Islamization and the dominance of Western institutions. The ‘fundamentalist’ theory of the Islamic state—total mobilization of Muslim societies under a universal state—is criticized as religiously an immanentist heresy, and politically a totalitarian nightmare. Proposed here is a way out of the moral and intellectual crisis in Islamic political thought through the principle of Shura—meaning that Muslims must evolve their own form of representative government. |