The Problem of Empiricism in Comparative Political Research by Muslims

Abstract

The Islamic critique of the dominant Euro-American paradigm in the study of politics has so far focused on the subfields of political philosophy, as in the articles of Abul-Fadl, of public administration, and of international relation. Little attention has been paid by Muslim social scientists to compamtive politics, by which is meant the investigation of the internal political institutions and processes of countries. As the name of the subfield implies, it is also intended to promote the comparison of political systems and processes across national and cultural boundaries in search of some useful generalizations about which structural arrangements are the most likely to promote whatever values, including Islamic ideals, the analyst may employ as hisher criteria for evaluation. True, there have been various books like Ahmad’s which explicate the Islamic political ideal as exemplified in the practice of the Prophet and the four rightly-guided caliphs. as well as books translating the Arabic terminology of Islam into its modern equivalents, such as M . Ahmed‘s Islamic Political System in the Modem Age, but these give little guidance to a political scientist wishing to conduct research into the empirical reality of present-day Muslim-ruled polities other than to condemn their deviation from the ideal Qur’anic model. For instance, must a contemporary Muslim political scientist reflexively castigate Pakistan for holding “free and fair elections” to its legislative bodies and praise the late president Zia ul-Haq for instituting an appointive majlis al shura to perform legislative functions simply because Western observers tend to disapprove of this on the gmunds that an appointive legislature does not meet the modern conception of democratic representation? It shall be the endeavor of this paper to undertake a critique of the concepts and value assumptions of the existing literature in the academic field of comparative politics in the hope of revealing the built-in European (”Judeo- Christian” or “secular-humanist”) biases and then to suggest an agenda of issues on which Muslim and non-Muslim scholars might agree. Among the unarticulated biases of Western comparative politics are: 1) secularism; 2) materialism; 3) analysis which distinguishes subcategories but often fails to integrate them in a “holistic” manner; 4) unilinear development according to a European historical model; 5) liberal individualism which values freedom and democracy over order and community; 6) quantification instead of qualitative methods; 7) egalitarianism; 8) empiricism; and 9) pragmatism. Among the few sympathetic American studies of existing Muslim political practices which avoid these biases have been Clark’s on the zakah system in Pakistan,’ Vogel’s dissertation on the Saudi judicial system, Kennedy’s study of the hudud ordinances in Pakistan, Sutcliffe's study on the compatibility of Islamic values with economic development in Jordan, and Wright’s analysis of the Shahbano Begum case which dealt with the maintenance of Muslim divorcees in India. Two Arab doctoral students have written such doctoral ...