Editorial

Abstract

The feature articles in this issue of MISS constitute a foray into two different, but related, topics: political authority, as discussed by Tamara Sonn in “Political Authority in Classical Islamic Thought,” and by Salim Mansur in “Constitutionalism and Ethnic Conflict: The Case of Pakistan,” and the interrelationships among God, humanity, and the universe, as found in Yusuf Waghid‘s “In Search of a Boundless Ocean and New Skies: Human Creativity is a Matter of A‘mdl, Jihad, and Ijtihad,” and Masudul Alam Choudhury’s ‘Toward Islamic Political Economy at the Turn of the Century.” In her article, Tamara Sonn analyzes the source of political authority in the ideal Islamic state. Breaking up Islamic political authority between the executive and the legislative-judicial branches, Sonn reveals how the legislative-judicial branch, that is, the branch that ensured that the entire government was functioning according to the laws of God, was dominant in classical Islamic political theory. Unlike Christianity, where theology was the source of politics, Islamic legal thought constituted the source of political ideas, so much so that “the identity of a community as Islamic or not lies not in the behavior of the leader but in whether or not Islamic law prevails.” Far from espousing a theocracy, concludes SOM, the ideal Islamic state is governed as a “nomocracy.” In a similar vein, Salim Mansur‘s article is a critical examination of the relationship between constitutionalism and ethnic conflict, with a focus on Pakistan. Mansur challenges the analytical scheme that identifies developed societies with mature institutions of legitimate order that provide for political stability, continuity of political authority, and established rules for conflict settlement as well as, conversely, identifies developing societies with the weakness or absence of such institutions. Instead, he argues that constitutional norms, designs, and processes need not be separated from issues of institution building and that “the idea of constitutionalism needs to be integrated into the study of developing societies in order to discover how it contributes to a conciliatory process of political participation and pluralism in a society that might be potentially open to fragmentation along ethnic lines.” The other two feature articles found in this issue address the complex question of the relationship among God, humanity, and the universe. Yusuf ...