Mirror for the Muslim Prince

Abstract

Everyone seems to be interested in Islamic political thought these days, no doubt as a result of the rise and fall of Islamisms/post-Islamisms and other contemporary configurations of Islam and politics. And then there are the claimants for a new caliphate. However, most concerns with political thought – with the exception of the large Princeton Encyclopaedia edited by Patricia Crone and Gerhard Bowering – tend to focus their attention on either the early and classical debates on the imamate (e.g., Crone), classical philosophy and the “Arabic context” for Platonopolis (e.g., Nelly Lahoud), or the medieval akhlāq literature (e.g., Linda Darling and Muzaffar Alam), or even modern permutations (far too many examples to mention). It is a rare work indeed that tries to bring a range of perspectives in a diachronic analysis over space, time, and political theologies into a single volume. The success and achievement of Boroujerdi’s volume is to do precisely that and to collate contributions from some of the most acute and incisive scholars writing on issues relating to Islam and politics in contemporary, metropolitan academia ...