March, Andrew. "Political Islam: Theory". Annual Review of Political Science, Vol.18 (2015): 103-123.

March, Andrew. "Political Islam: Theory". Annual Review of Political Science, Vol.18 (2015): 103-123.

• Political Islam is a diverse set of beliefs, policies, and ideologies concerned with giving Islam an authoritative role in politics. Most forms of political Islam are generally right-wing, but the movement largely transcends the left-right dichotomy (104)
• Modern political Islam began with Hasan al-Banna's foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Ismailia, Egypt, in 1928. The broader intellectual trends it builds on, however, were set during the 19th Century by thinkers focused on the decline of the Muslim world and how to return to Islamic values, like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and al-Khidr Husayn (104).
• Islamists differ on a number of different issues. The primary points of disagreement are over the legitimacy of using violence, traditionalism and religious innovation, and their relationship with the nation-state (104-105).
• Islamists disagree on the necessity of basing their political beliefs on traditional forms of scholarship. In particular, these arguments center on the need for theorists to be classically trained in the Quran. Examples of more traditionalist Islamisms are the ruling imams of Iran and Salafi movements that put great emphasis on proper scholarship Less traditionalist Islamists are not necessarily more liberal on other issues, as many of the most socially and economically conservative Islamists were autodidacts who rejected traditional institutions of Quranic learning (104).
• Even the most radically conservative Islamist movements are divided over the legitimacy of violence to take political power. Salafism contains groups that engage in competitive politics, those who cloister themselves away from society entirely, and those who attempt to violently overthrow governments. Disagreements over the use of violence also follow disagreements over the morality of working inside of corrupt and un-Islamic governments and institutions (104).
• The force of Islamism has been recognized by a number of states, including Malaysia, Morocco, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan, and parts of the ideology are used by these states to secure legitimacy. This further complicates divisions within political Islam over the validity of nation-states versus the global umma of Muslim faithful (105, 117).
• Both Islamists and secular observers often claim that political Islam exists because Islam is a particularly political religion, stemming from Mohammed's own political leadership and the importance of sharia law in the faith. This view has led a number of academics to claim that Islamism thus arises out of an alienation with the secular state because secularism is fundamentally incongruous with Islam (105-106).
• One perspective on this issue is that secularism as an ideal arose in the specific historical conditions of 18th Century Europe and should not be considered a universal ideal. This view questions both the applicability of secularism to Islam and the desirability of secularism in the first place (106).
• The author counters the argument that Islam has specific characteristics that make it more necessarily political than other religions by noting that this fact does not prevent the content of those political learning from differing nor developing over time (106).
• Many scholars see Islamism as primarily a reaction to modernization, with some forms of Islamism representing the total rejection of modernity. A unique feature of current Islamism, however, is that the most hardline elements tend to embrace 'high Islam' rooted in scripture and traditional scholarship, whereas Islamic revival movements in previous centuries tended to involve the resurgence of 'low Islam', traditional folk practices without scriptural basis (106).
• Political Islam cannot help but be a modern ideology, however, because everyone lives in the modern world and, to be politically viable, Islamism must respond to the problems of modernity. The desire to Islamize economic activity or state structures is an outgrowth of modern pressures, and would not have occurred in the pre-modern period (107).
• Political Islam occurs in response to the failure of modernist ideologies, like liberalism, nationalism, and socialism. The 1979 revolution in Iran can be analyzed in this context (107).
• This view, however, fails to recognize that Islamism often blends with other ideological traditions, particularly nationalism (107).
• The alienation generated by modern society generates a need for community and organic values, fulfilled by Islamism through its ideology of global religious unity and moral order (108). 
• This lends legitimacy to the connections drawn between Islamism and fascism, as both fulfill a need for collective purpose and societal order among deeply alienated populations. Both ideologies also seek to 'restore' genuine culture and mobilize, mobilize people on a non-class basis, and engage in a deeply conservative revolutionary agenda (108).
• Al Qaeda is often used to demonstrate the modernity of political Islam, as it accepts, and does not seek to reverse, the destruction of traditional societies through globalization. Instead, it envisions an Islamic version of globalization, where all societies are united under their particular form of Islam (109).
• This view is faulty because it implies that humans can reach a perfected form of global Islamic society. Al Qaeda and other similar groups remain deeply skeptical of human potential for societal transformation and focus primarily on overthrowing the secular regimes rather than constructing a new society (109).
• The author contends that the main failing of political Islam has been its repeated suggestion of sharia law as a solution to all societal ills, an obsession that makes the ideology myopic to other pressing societal issues in need of solution. Other scholars have suggested that the desire of Islamists to make secular state institutions more Muslim is itself a failing, because it fails to recognize that some aspects of a modern state may be fundamentally flawed or un-Islamic (107).
• Some have argued that Islamism's focus on political action makes it 'un-Islamic' because it advances political beliefs not necessarily based around the fulfillment of the 5 pillars and a just life. Moreover, the tropes of Islamism, such as the umma have little basis in Islamic tradition, and are imagined inventions of modern Islamists (108).
• This critique should be viewed in the context of the domination of the secular state, which maintains a large amount of power to decree the legitimacy of rival societal movements. In this case, political Islam is often branded as 'un-Islamic' because it challenges the power of the secular state in a way that private worship does not (112).
• Sayyid Qutb was one of the most important Islamists prior to his execution by the Egyptian government in 1966. His ideology focused on the world as a space of pagan ignorance that needed to be returned to the legitimate sovereignty of God (109).
• Unlike many Islamist, Sayyid Qutb had a positive view of human nature and asserted that sharia was the ideal system of laws because it brought out the natural goodness of mankind. Its application would thus fix the broken social relations of modern society and consequently solve all societal problems (110).
• Secularism does not just involve the separation of religion and politics, but the remaking of both by demanding that religious beliefs and logic are not present in politics and that religion no longer inspires political action (110).
• Islamism can thus be seen as a reaction to secularism, because the idea that religious activity could be forced entirely into the private sphere did not exist prior to the introduction of secular states; therefore, secularism drew the battle lines that inspired Islamism's demands for the influence of Islam on all sphere of social and political life (111).
• One of the main arguments put forward in favor of secularism is that it limits the violence created by religious conflicts. As the turmoil in many Muslim societies shows, however, violence not only continues despite secularism but can actually be triggered by the process of secularization (111-112).
• Most modern Islamist groups have sought to create an Islamic state where religious and secular authority are combined. Despite the fact that state structures were forcibly created in the Islamic world by either local elites or colonial regimes, Islamists generally accept the idea of state structure uncritically (112).
• Both Islamists and secular liberals have raised doubts about the compatibility of Islamism and the state structure, in particular over the point of sharia law. These points are also theological, as they address the compatibility of secular law and divine law (112-113).
• Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na'im, an American theologian, argues that Islam and sharia law are only compatible with a modern state if American-style secularism is adopted, whereby religion deeply influences politics but religious law is not directly applied. Dr. An-Na'im contends that true piety only comes from the exercise of free will and, therefore, cannot be forced by the state, that any version of sharia law will be an imperfect human variation and thus illegitimate, and that attempts to do so risk an un-Islamic totalitarian state (113).
• Some Islamist scholars contend that the secular state serves only the interest of secular authority through violence and, therefore, cannot simultaneously serve secular and religious authorities. These scholars take a traditionalist approach that argues that perfect government under sharia law can only exist under the same institutional conditions as early Muslim societies, and therefore, an Islamic state is impossible because true Islam existed before the advent of state structures. Seeing the abolition of states as impossible, these scholars believe that Islam can now only govern personal salvation, not politics (114-115).
• This view is based on a flawed and idealized notion of pre-modern Islamic societies. Not only were they not perfect, but they actually created new institutions and codified forms of sharia law to assist in governance that did not exist in Mohammed's time (115).
• This perspective also ignores the fact that devout Muslims can disagree on ethics and doctrine. Instead, it assumes that the singular true way of practicing Islam can be known by ordinary humans (116).
• Source mine of democracy and political Islam on page 116.
• Many scholars that even Islamist movements without democratic beliefs or strength in electoral politics still contribute to democratization because they constitute a powerful societal force to counter the state (117).
• Some argue that any democratic government in the Middle East would be Islamist because a truly democratic government should reflect the sympathies and beliefs of the population. Western demands for liberal and secular governments in the region are thus anti-democratic (117).
• The compatibility of Islamism and democracy was never really tested in the Arab Spring due to the collapse of most democratic movements there (116). Any democratic potential that might have existed has been crushed and the only politically successful movements are those practicing violence rather than electoral politics (118).