The cold war between communism and the West is long over, but many feel that a new kind of conflict-between Islam and the West-has emerged to take its place. The old threats of nuclear conflict have been replaced by an ideological and cultural struggle between two protagonists whose failure to understand each other seems constantly to worsen. The tension between Islam and the West is nothing new, because the two sides have been at odds with each other for 1,200 years or more. What is new is the scale of the dispute and its potential reach in terms of the number of people whose lives are affected, the instability threatened, and the costs involved.
Islam has long been a factor in global politics, but mainstream Western political science has failed until recently to give much thought to its broader political significance. This began to change with the Islamic resurgence that followed the 1979 Iranian revolution, and then changed dramatically following the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The political aspects of Islam, along with its role in international relations, have since been the subject of new debate, although just what is meant by “political Islam” is still contested, and support for the idea that we should understand Islamic countries as members of a distinct political system type has been slow to follow. Why after all, should we create a separate political category for countries that are joined mainly by a common religion?
The answer is that Islam is more than a religion, and to ignore the complex interplay between Islamic law, social rules, and politics in counties throughout North Africa, the Middle East, and south Asia is to handicap the study of comparative politics. Western liberal democracy supports a separation of religion and state, it is true, but unlike any other major monotheistic religion except perhaps Judaism, Islam provides theories of government and the state and a comprehensive body of law. Just because the West supports a separation of religion and state, it does not follow that this should apply to all cultures. Indeed, critics charge that Western assumptions about Islam have been influenced by Orientalism, or the “Western style of dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” a view that some hold is still true of the West.
The 25 countries included in this category are those where the majority of the population is Muslim, and where Islam plays a critical role in politics, law, and society, either because Islamism is the defining ideology of Government, or because Islamism is the major opposition force. Excluded from this category are to other kinds of states: those that are predominantly Muslim but also secular, such as Albania, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Turkey, as India, Nigeria, and Sudan. Islamic states are mainly still quite young, and the role played by Islam in their politics is still being formed. Islamic states have four major defining qualities: