Abdessamad Belhaj

This book, Islam and the Arab Revolutions: The Ulama between Democracy and Autocracy, by Usaama al-Azami, provides examples from prominent religious thinkers from Egypt, the U.S., and the rest of the Arab world. The focus is especially on al-Azhar and its opponents, who have been acrimoniously arguing over the legitimacy of the revolutions. The author, Usaama al-Azami, is an Associate Faculty Member at the University of Oxford, who specializes in Islamic intellectual history Islamic political philosophy, law, and ethics.

Western political philosophy still shies away from including the Muslim world in its scope. Some political philosophers simply disregard Islam because it is not Western (a fate it shares with other traditions in Asia and elsewhere). Other scholars, more sophisticated, maintain that the vocabulary and the problems of Muslim political thought are specific, and thus, Western political philosophy cannot make sense of them. In a globalized world, this essentialist paradigm fails to withstand criticism. In his book, Joshua Mitchell proves Arabia, and other Muslim areas, to be understandable from the perspective of modern Western political philosophy. In particular, the author, perceptively, describes the transformations generated by modernity in the United States and the Arab countries. After the doubts cast by the failure of the Arab spring to promote democracy in Arabia, this book revives the discussion and hope about the prospects of democratization in the Middle East.