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The Sovereign, the Good, and Society in Islamic Thought

Module description

How did Muslim thinkers over history conceive of the relationship between the individual and society, between the personal and the public, between the political and the ethical? In this module, we will analyse the historical development of political thought in Islam, with a focus on the notions of the common as well as the transcendent good, the idea of the moral sphere and its public manifestation, and the very notion of moral and public order and the provision of justice in society. We shall take the historical story all the way to present debates in Islamic political theology and discussions of justice, sovereignty and the good in the contemporary Muslim world. We draw on readings in Islamic political thought and philosophy, sociology and anthropology of the Muslim world, as well as history, ethics, Sufism, and Islamic jurisprudence.

Module aims - intentions of the module

The aim of the module is to introduce students to a range of historical and normative arguments and discourses about the nature of political thought, of the good, of the ethical and of the just, starting from the early reception of Platonic ethics and politics all the way through to contemporary Islamic debates in the aftermath of the ‘Arab spring’ and the uprisings since 2011. Alongside the study of texts, we will also consider different modalities of discourse in material culture, the sonosphere, and the arts of the articulation of ideas on sovereignty, justice, and the good in Muslim societies. We will also draw upon the perspectives of practitioners. By the end of the module, the students will have a good grasp of normative and theoretical elements of the tradition as well as their historical manifestations and some empirical grasp of attitudes and debates in the contemporary world.

Intended Learning Outcomes (ILOs)

ILO: Module-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 1. demonstrate knowledge and understanding of some of the most important methodological and interpretive models in relevant areas of Islamic political thought
• 2. drawing upon some of the major texts and seminal thinkers (in translation) demonstrate knowledge and understanding in at least two key areas of Islamic political thought

ILO: Discipline-specific skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 3. demonstrate knowledge and understanding of fundamental issues, approaches and challenges in several related historical areas of Islamic thought and a general understanding of their underlying historical and social contexts
• 4. demonstrate the ability to relate the study of Islamic political thought to wider debates in the study of (comparative) political thought

ILO: Personal and key skills

On successfully completing the module you will be able to...

• 5. demonstrate writing and oral presentation skills, group work and ability to synthesize large areas of unfamiliar reading, subjects and a selection of interpretive and methodological approaches

Syllabus plan

The intention is to cover the following topics week by week:

• Some Definitions: Political Thought, Political Theology, Political Philosophy in Global Context
• Platonopolis: the Pursuit of the Virtuous Society
• Aristotelian Public Ethics and the Making of the Islamic Ethical Tradition
• Religious Philosophies and Philosophical Religions
• The circle of justice and the akhlÃ?�q tradition
• Mirrors for princes and statecraft
• Sufi Public Ethics
• Whose Sovereignty? Whose Justice?
• Individuals and Communities
• Squaring Divine Sovereignty between Liberals and Traditionalists
• Intersectionality, Decolonial Islamic Studies and the Pursuit of the Good

Learning activities and teaching methods (given in hours of study time)

Details of learning activities and teaching methods

Formative assessment

Summative assessment (% of credit)

Details of summative assessment

Details of re-assessment (where required by referral or deferral)

Indicative learning resources - Basic reading

• Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998
• Husain Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012
• Mehrdad Boroujerdi (ed), Mirror for the Muslim Prince, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013
• Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005
• Patricia Crone and Gerhard Böwering (eds), Princeton Encyclopaedia of Islamic Political Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013
• Yoav Di-Capua, No Exit: Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre & Decolonization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018
• Wael Hallaq, The Impossible State: Islam, Politics, and Modernity’s Moral Predicament, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012
• Wael Hallaq, Reforming Modernity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2019
• Murad Idris, ‘Islam, Rawls, and the Limits of Late Twentieth Century Liberal Philosophy’, Modern Intellectual History 18 (2020): 1–14
• Humeira Iqtidar, ‘Redefining “tradition” in political thought’, European Journal of Political Theory 15.4 (2016): 424–44
• Nelly Lahoud, Political Thought in Islam, London: Routledge, 2013
• Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, London: Duckworth, 1981
• Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005
• Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016
• Andrew March, Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011
• Andrew March, The Caliphate of Man: Popular Sovereignty in Modern Islamic Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019
• Dominic O’Meara, Platonopolis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003
• Noah Salomon, For the Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016

Indicative learning resources - Web based and electronic resources

• Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy https://plato.stanford.edu
• The Immanent Frame https://tif.ssrc.org

Key words search

Islam, global political thought, political theology, Plato, Islamism, F���r���b���«, political philosophy