Out of 50 Muslim-majority countries around the world, only six are electoral democracies. This problem has multiple material and ideational causes. This essay focuses on one ideational factor: the dominant method of Islamic law. The essay explains how this method became dominant after the eleventh century and why it causes the incompatibility between sharia (Islamic law) and democracy. The essa…
In a attemp to understand better the failure of Islamism to exercise any significant impact on the trajectory of Indonesian politics through the twentieth century, this article examines the development of Indonesian Islamist throught in the early twentieth century and compares it to the growth of secularist nationalist thinking. Islamist thinking was slow to arrive at a consciousness of Indones…