Meijer, Roel --- "The political, politics, and political citizenship in modern Islam" [2018] ELECD 420; in Butenschøn, A. Nils; Meijer, Roel (eds), "The Middle East in Transition" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018) 179

Book Title: The Middle East in Transition

Editor(s): Butenschøn, A. Nils; Meijer, Roel

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN: 9781788111126

Section: Chapter 8

Section Title: The political, politics, and political citizenship in modern Islam

Author(s): Meijer, Roel

Number of pages: 24

Abstract/Description:

The chapter deals with the opinions Islamic thinkers have developed on the relationship between politics, the political, and citizenship since the end of the Ottoman Empire. The assumption is that political citizenship can only be founded on the recognition of politics as an independent field and the political as a ‘void’. The chapter shows that in most Islamic political thinking politics has been completely absorbed by religion. It is only during the last thirty years with revival of Islamic modernism that politics has been recognised as a field that must be open in order not to end in a totalitarian state. Partly this is the result of the rise of Islamic political parties, partly the result of the development of notions such as the ‘purposes of the sharia’ (maqasid al-shari‘a). With the recognition of the political as the ‘radically undetermined’ also recognition of the citizen and equal citizenship came about.