Islam

Why is Islam, which is a religious faith and a local culture, placed as an entry in an encyclopedia for political science? This discipline is not supposed to deal with religion and culture but instead with the polity and government. The subject matter is a religious faith that assembles nearly 1.6 billion people of humankind as an umma (community) that consists of a great variety of local Islamic cultures. These are, however, related to one another in terms of shared values and worldview. On these grounds, there is a resemblance that unites all Muslims to one civilization. Cultural diversity exists in Islam within the unity of one Islamic civilization. In view of this cultural diversity, there is no monolith named Islam.

The answer to the question concerning the legitimacy of this entry is that Islamic civilization matters [Page 1349]to politics since the great changes in the world around the end of the previous century, particularly with respect to decolonization and globalization. Islam at the beginning of the 21st century is a major factor in politics on two political levels. First, on the state level, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) unites 57 states with an Islamic majority population. Second, there are Islamic non-state actors (e.g., Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood) that engage on all levels of politics.

The politicization of the religion of Islam is connected with the claim that Islam is not only a faith but also a constructed system of government. The idea of an Islamic state is based on sharia law, believed to be the constitution legislated by Allah for a divine order. This political interpretation of Islam makes from this religion an ideology of Islamism that leads to inner conflicts within Islamic civilization. The political theorist John Brenkman characterizes this issue as a “civil war” within Islam (e.g., the fight between the secular Kemalists and Islamists in Turkey). The spillover of this process to world politics assumes a geopolitical dimension with the related effects on world politics.

The politicization of Islam suggests a more complex relation between religion and politics on all three levels: local, regional, and international/global. The major issue is a return of Islam to politics that indicates the failure of the secularization process in contemporary Islamic civilization. This failure is, among other things, related to the crisis of the secular nation-state as a crisis of development.